The Fixers" met on Monday and discussed: How should the United Nations be reformed to make it a more effective force for good in the world?The four-Rotarian team of Fixers sure picked a difficult topic. Some of us had done research; but some relied on the seat of their pants. No one came up with any realistic ‘solution’ to the perceived ineffectiveness of the UN. But we had fun on the way to nowhere.
We saw lots of problems that the UN faced: Underfunding, a bloated bureaucracy, and geopolitical rivalries were acknowledged – mostly in the absence of evidence. But focussing on the Security Council and its existing power of veto vested in five countries Russia, USA, China, France and UK gave us scope to speculate and fantasise. Arguably, the power of veto enabled any of these five countries to prevent any really useful actions. Why would any of these countries ever give up their power of veto? What if – somehow – the concept of a veto was abolished, and all these five countries thereby felt emasculated at the same time?
We observed the current composition of the Security Council: – the five permanent members (with the veto powers) plus 10 countries chosen via a formula to get some semblance of global representation. What if this group of 10 were enlarged? What if, perversely, we gave more countries a form of veto – say a group of five, together, could cast a veto?
Trying to dig ourselves out of the trough of gloom, we agreed that the UN had done good stuff, and that its existence is a good thing. We reminded ourselves of Churchill’s much modified epithet “Democracy is a very bad form of government, but it’s the best we have yet found.” And we reckoned that sort of logic could be applied to the UN.
And a final, exceedingly modest suggestion: “The UN should do more to let the people of the world know what it does”. And, to repeat, we had fun.