UN needs democratic reform

As more than 100 world leaders start making ritual speeches at the annual UN General Assembly (UNGA) session, strong voices are being raised for the world body's reform.
Understandably, its ordinary members would like to see democratisation of the world body with a greater decision making role for the General Assembly, while the big five - US, Britain, France, Russia and China - which occupy a privileged position in the 12-member UN Security Council as permanent veto-wielding powers, want perpetuation of the exclusionist idea.
They are amenable to the expansion of their elite club, but only a little bit to let in a selected few such as India, Japan, Germany, and Brazil. While these aspirants to a special status within the UN are supporting one another's bid for permanent membership of the UNSC, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has also offered his backing to India's candidature.
He told Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, during the latter's stopover in London on Monday en route to the UNGA session, "India is a country of 1.2 billion people. For India not to be represented on the Security Council is, I think, something that is not in tune with the modern times in which we live."
Blair seems to be pushing an argument on the basis of the democratic principle, ie, India deserves to have a greater say in the affairs of the UN's most effective decision making institution, because it represents a little over one-sixth of humanity. But then there are several countries which happen to be more populous than Britain, and, therefore, going by Blair's rationale for giving India a permanent seat in the UNSC, his own country does not deserve to be there. Obviously, what he said was nothing more than mindless rhetoric, concealing his real motives.
The other argument used for expansion of the permanent UNSC membership, is economic progress, which is why countries such as Japan, Germany, and even Brazil and India feel confident that sooner or later they would get to join the world's high and mighty and exercise a special right to protect and promote their own or their friends' interests through the use of veto.
The UN was established in 1945 in the aftermath of the Second World War by the leaders of the victorious nations. No wonder, they gave themselves both the permanent membership and the power to veto the majority opinion.
They also decided that the resolutions passed by the UNSC are to be enforceable while those adopted by the UNGA (presently 191-member strong) have little practical value. Only the Security Council enjoys the right to enforce its decisions, with its five permanent members individually having the additional power to veto the will of the entire world.
The US has been routinely using that power to Israel's advantage. If only the UN's institutional working had been organised along the democratic principle, which accords respect to the will of the majority, Israel could not have gone on to repeatedly commit aggression against its neighbours and to perpetuate occupation of the Palestinian territories as blatantly as it has.
The UN's failure to respect the majority opinion has only allowed the Arab-Israeli conflict to linger on for so long, creating a general sense of being wronged among the Muslim peoples, a feeling that is, in fact, at the root of the ongoing war between the US-led western nations and Muslim militants.
Written soon after the Second World War, the UN Charter proclaimed, as its main objective, the resolution of international conflicts through peaceful means. Fifty-nine years on, it has little to show as its achievement on that score. True, during the recent hour of crisis, veto powers France, Russia and China did oppose the US design for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but had the Bush administration been less arrogant and insistent on its dream of exclusive global mastery the interests of these countries could also have been easily reconciled with that of the US, in which case they would have supported rather than opposed the war. War and peace in this nuclear age, is too serious a business to be left to a handful of nations, and the UN badly needs democratic reform. Pakistan has proposed expansion of the UNSC to a 20-member body, with no permanent membership or veto power for any new member.
That sounds better than what India and some others are asking for. The UN can become a truly democratic world body only if it gives due weightage to the majority rather than minority opinion. The UNGA must not remain a mere talk shop for the bulk of the world population's representatives while a few privileged nations exercise effective control over the decision making process. What the world needs is a democratic, not a despotic UN.