When powerful countries violate international law with little clear consequence, debate over the core principles behind those laws can seem remote at best or irrelevant at worst. On Friday, Russia unilaterally vetoed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution denouncing its invasion of Ukraine that 81 of the United Nations’ 193 members had co-sponsored. Observers may understandably have interpreted this as another sign of the body’s pointlessness.
Yet two debates at the Security Council this week demonstrated the existential stakes of these debates for smaller countries as they navigate international politics. Even when it can’t stop violations by its veto-wielding permanent members — China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States — the Security Council remains a critical venue for smaller countries to affirm and argue directly for the U.N. Charter’s core principles of sovereign nonintervention and the equal self-determination of peoples.
A tale of two emergency meetings
On Wednesday night, people tuning in to the Security Council’s emergency meeting on Ukraine watched a surreal scene unfold: Ambassadors read pre-written statements calling for diplomacy to forestall a Russian invasion. By a fluke of the calendar, Russia’s ambassador presided over the orderly meeting. By specific plan, Russian state television broadcast Vladimir Putin making what amounted to a declaration of war during the session, initiating the exact invasion that U.N. ambassadors were still speaking of in hypothetical terms.
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It was a powerful illustration of the United Nations’ limitations: The fully paralyzed diplomatic body could not respond to a flagrant violation of its charter by one of its permanent members. For some analysts, the meeting signaled “further evidence of the declining stature of the world body.”
But just two nights previously, during Monday’s emergency meeting, the Security Council listened to Kenya’s ambassador, Martin Kimani, deliver an electrifying statement that resonated with audiences far beyond the usual U.N. observers. Kimani warned the council about the dangers of plunging back into an old, imperial world of domination, and against rulers who redrew maps by force while striving for ethnically homogenous states.
Kimani decried Russia’s recognition of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions as independent states. He warned against the devastating global consequences that would follow any Russian invasion: “The charter of the United Nations continues to wilt under the relentless assault of the powerful … including members of this Security Council, breaching international law with little regard. Multilateralism lies on its deathbed tonight. It has been assaulted today as it has been by other powerful states in the recent past,” he said.
Kimani’s statement mirrored those from other Security Council nonpermanent members, including Albania, Ghana and Ireland, whose ambassadors all argued that violating Ukraine’s territorial integrity is a grave violation of international law and of Russia’s commitments under the U.N. Charter to settle disputes by peaceful means.
Small member states can debate big rules at the Security Council
If Wednesday’s meeting revealed the hard limits of the Security Council’s power in the world, then Monday’s meeting encapsulated its role as a forum for real debate over the value and meaning of international legal rules — rules that are life or death for many U.N. member states.
The Security Council upholds and calcifies the great-power politics of the mid-20th century, enabling the victors of World War II to shape international peace and security to their preferences. By design, the council cannot act when its powerful five permanent members (the P5) are divided. It can coordinate international responses to crises where the P5’s own interests are not primarily at stake, but it flails when the P5 are divided or when the P5 themselves undertake aggressive actions.
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But the U.N. Charter also meaningfully underwrites and animates a post-colonial order organized by the sovereign equality of states, and states’ inviolable rights to territorial integrity and political independence. Security Council meetings are a vital opportunity for smaller countries to affirm and advance this vision of international order, even when great powers seek to overturn it. As Tanisha Fazal argued here at TMC this week, countries used to die regularly until the norm against territorial conquest, embodied in the U.N. Charter, changed how countries tried to control one another.
Decolonization unfolded alongside these changing norms. As Adom Getachew has argued, decolonization was “a wholesale transformation of the colonized and a reconstitution of the international order.” The United Nations’ founding principles are also deeply indebted to anti-colonial nationalists who were “keenly aware that national independence in a hierarchical world order was a precarious achievement.”
Today’s Security Council is not just the victorious World War II alliance cast in amber. It’s also a rotating group of 10 nonpermanent members that have no veto power but help set the agenda, shape debate, and draft and vote on binding resolutions, and that advocate for a charter that outlaws aggressive war while serving as a compact for the protection of sovereign statehood for its membership. For these members, the council is a key venue to reassert the sovereign equality of states and member states’ rights to territorial integrity — especially in the face of P5 militarism.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed why debating international rules still matters
The P5 have invoked sovereign equality and territorial integrity as a shield against their own rights violations. Politics among the P5 can also shape their fidelity to these norms, as China’s abstention from voting on Friday’s resolution denouncing Russia reveals. For smaller countries raising these principles at the Security Council, sovereign inviolability is not just political cover but a basic condition of their existence. It serves as a pillar of a post-imperial global order that must persist for these countries to survive. As Kimani noted, multilateral arrangements constitute part of a “recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.”
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These countries are deeply invested in a system of international politics that centers rules about sovereign nonintervention, territorial integrity and the peaceful settlement of disputes. Ignoring politics at the Security Council when great-power conflict emerges is understandable, but the United Nations is not just a theater for the P5, and the U.N. Charter’s core principles remain central concerns for other member states. Whatever the ambitions of its powerful permanent members, the Security Council is also a place where other countries can argue against a world of imperial domination, in which they might be subsumed.
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Anjali Dayal (@anjalikdayal) is an assistant professor of international politics at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center Campus and the author of “Incredible Commitments: How UN Peacekeeping Failures Shape Peace Processes” (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
