What about the League of Democracies?

The UN was an organization founded over 60 years ago by the biggest victors of the last major World War. While throughout the Cold War it was able to serve as a relatively functional method of assuring world peace (mainly through the group’s split along Communist and Western lines), the end of the Soviet Union has exposed weaknesses in the current system. Though China and the United States remain globally relevant (and the inclusion of the People’s Republic of China only came about during the 1970’s), Russia, Great Britain, and France no longer hold the power they used to. It is likely time to either expand the services of the UN or go an entirely different route by supporting the League of Democracies championed by John McCain. Would either idea be worth it?

Expanding the UN’s Permanent Security council seems like the more obvious idea. After all, the UN is still a very much functional organization, but it lacks some important voices. Most notably, no major country from South or Central America (Brazil, Argentina, or Mexico), Africa, and several other countries such as Germany, Japan and India are excluded. Some of these current exclusions are bizarre given global realities. Germany is one of the world’s strongest economies and a critical member of Europe. Japan is 2nd in the world in terms of GDP. South and Central America having no representatives excludes somewhere on the scale of 400 million people in the world. Africa, despite being one of the continents in which the UN must complete many of its most pressing functions, has no voice. Expansion would be the obvious solution were it not for regional complaints about potential members (notably Brazil, Germany, India, Japan and an African country) and the reservations of the current permanent members. One possible compromise would be to make permanent members without veto powers, an idea that would likely garner hostility by potential permanent Security Council members. The most likely and viable solution would be to make new permanent members have half of a veto, thereby ensuring that if two countries united their interests, then a veto would be assured. This would also allow countries to be later upgraded to a full veto pending evaluation.

The League of Democracies seems like the sounder idea. After all, democratic countries would tend to be more likely to see eye to eye on issues and be more willing to tackle problems of global human rights and relief efforts. Yet simply being democracies doesn’t make countries more likely to work together: many democracies opposed the Iraq War. Further, what constitutes a democracy would be hard to define: technically, almost every country in the world runs in a democratic format.

Ultimately, the best solution would be to simply reform the UN. A new League of Democracies would be difficult, if not impossible, to formulate, and would only be seen as a group of like minded individuals setting up another talking-shop. After all, if an organization wants to address problems (for example, democratic regimes wanting to end the Sudanese genocide), not including groups critical to the solution (like the government of Sudan) would lead to almost certain failure.