Make the Global South great again UNSC on the verge of reform?

For the second time in the last month, UN Secretary-General António Guterres spoke of the need to reform the Security Council, the largest international structure. In late April, speaking at the UN General Assembly, he announced the initiative. On May 21, speaking at a press conference in Hiroshima, Japan, where the G7 meeting was held, Guterres said that the UN Security Council and the Bretton Woods Agreement were appropriate to the post-World War II period and that today they need an update.

A caveat, perhaps, is that the secretary-general was referring to the Bretton Woods financial system, most likely to its informal legacies, such as the dollar's reserve currency status and the regulatory role of organisations such as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). That is, global financial institutions are set up to serve this very system. Although in the strict sense of the word (if we talk, for example, about binding national currencies to the US dollar), the Bretton Woods system ceased to exist back in 1976.

"The global financial architecture had become obsolete, dysfunctional, and unfair... In the face of the economic turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the military operation in Ukraine, it has failed to fulfil its basic function as a global social safety net," Guterres said.

It is indeed true. In the recent past, we have witnessed the inaction of the world's financial institutions in preventing so-called vaccine chauvinism when they were powerless to help developing countries address the issue of vaccination against COVID-19. It should be recalled that in 2020, at the initiative of the Azerbaijani chairmanship of the Non-Aligned Movement, led by President Ilham Aliyev, both the UN General Assembly and the UN Human Rights Council adopted resolutions on the equitable distribution of vaccines.

As for the reform of the UNSC, President Ilham Aliyev, as well as his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have repeatedly expressed the need for such an update with the inclusion of countries representing the Islamic world (such as Türkiye or Pakistan) as well as the Non-Aligned Movement in the Council on a permanent basis. As the head of state noted, "The UN Security Council is reminiscent of the past and does not reflect today's reality".

When the leaders of various states propose reform of the Security Council, it is primarily a matter of granting new countries permanent membership status, the main advantage of which is the right of veto. In other words, developing countries, or as they now call it, the countries of the global South, are unwilling to entrust their fate to the five powers that are permanent members of the Security Council - the United States, UK, France, Russia and China. This ratio has long failed to reflect the real state of affairs in the world. The UN Security Council, established at the end of the Second World War, had fixed a strict polarisation of the world into supporters of the capitalist and socialist camps and allowed non-aligned countries to join one of the blocs to a greater or lesser extent. The collapse of the Soviet Union, rejection of the socialist path of development by its successor Russia, China's course of economic convergence with the West, and, as a result, the collapse of the socialist bloc at first, turned the UN Security Council into a mere formality against the background of the US hegemony (remember the intervention of the US-British coalition in Iraq in 2003, though the UN opposed such operation), and then, after growth of Russia and China, especially in the recent decade, into a platform for clashes of great powers.

For almost three decades now, the countries of the global South have been deprived of a mechanism for guaranteed geopolitical security. The situation became even more acute when Britain and the US agreed to consider admitting Germany and Japan as permanent members of the Security Council. That fact in itself demonstrates the inconsistency of the current composition of the organisation: If the countries that were victorious in World War II are ready to admit representatives of the defeated Axis to the almost global Security Council, it means that they themselves acknowledge the archaic and, if you like, worn-out logic of World War II in our days. Speaking of that war: the inclusion of France in the UN Security Council, even at that time, was in no way due to the military and political weight of that country, but to the desire of the victorious countries to create a kind of balance of power. France, as is well known, was not only not a triumphant country in the Second World War but in fact surrendered without resistance to Nazi Germany.

The initiative to transform the Security Council is supported by a number of states from different continents. Increasing pressure on the UN brings the prospect of reform closer and here is where the fun part begins. Having exhausted the opportunities to oppose a truly necessary reformist breakdown (which members of the Security Council have been doing so far), pushed, in addition, by the economic and military strengthening of a number of countries of the global South, the G5 seems to have decided to start playing for favourites.

For example, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently stated that the UN Security Council should be expanded at the expense of representatives from Asia, Africa and Latin America rather than from the West. US President Joe Biden spoke earlier about the need to include representatives of African, Latin American, and Caribbean countries (I wonder why the US President forgot Asia?). Russia is even ready to support India, Brazil, and one representative from Africa as new permanent members of the Security Council. Last December, British Foreign Secretary James Cleverley said that Britain wanted to work with Brazil, India, Japan, and Germany as permanent members of the Council. As we can see, if the adoption process moves forward, the competition is expected to be fierce. And all this against a backdrop of increasing voices about stripping Russia of its permanent Security Council status.

Meanwhile, there is no consensus on the list of candidates among the countries of the South themselves. Moreover, competing blocs are forming. In particular, quite a few countries do not want India and Brazil as permanent members. The reason is that these countries do not represent defenders of the interests of the global South, but rather new candidates for superpower status, new agents of the imperialist agenda.

Given the lack of consensus among the prospective candidates, it is possible that the G5 will end up saying, "You should agree among yourselves first, and then come back to us. We have done all we can". And then they will continue, for better or for worse, to resolve issues in the usual format.

It has to be said that the prospects for a speedy reorganisation of the UNSC are still very unclear - the contradictions between the five countries and the candidate countries are too great. On the other hand, the legal mechanism for reform is not entirely clear. In this context, it seems that the countries of the global South should consolidate in parallel platforms, such as the aforementioned Non-Aligned Movement, in order to develop a consensus to determine the optimal list of candidates representing the whole spectrum of countries with an anti-imperialist agenda.