The UN General Assembly yesterday elected Germany, India, South Africa, Columbia, and Portugal to two-year rotating seats on the 15 member UN Security Council. (Canada was the only country that was a candidate but lost, leading to quite the domestic blame game). With Brazil and Nigeria already on the Council, this is an unusually powerful set of non-permanent members, which may make life harder for the Obama administration. Research has shown that the votes of non-permanent members can often be bought with U.S. foreign aid or favorable IMF loans. This may be a bit harder when five of the non-permanent members view themselves as emerging powers with aspirations to become permanent members themselves. Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to argue that the main diplomatic job of the US embassy in small states like Mali should be to pressure governments into voting with the U.S. The same is not true with Nigeria, Brazil, et al.
This new composition opens up further opportunities for the world’s middle powers to assert themselves on the global stage. The “classic” (1990s) UN Security Council negotiation went something like this: the U.S. would negotiate with France and the UK (the P-3) and perhaps some friendly non-permanent members on a compromise. They would then take this to Russia and China and persuade them not to veto the compromise, often using quid-pro-quos, like the stationing of peacekeeping troops in Georgia or favorable World Bank loans for China. The non-permanent members would essentially be presented with a fait-accompli and some goodies to sweeten the deal.
This model already broke down when China no longer needed World Bank loans and started to assert itself more. But now the non-permanent members are playing the field too. During the last term, Turkey and Brazil developed their own initiative on Iran rather than passively await what the permanent members would come up with. We can expect more of the same. This is, of course, a trend that happens not only in the Security Council but also in the international financial institutions where the world’s middle powers are underrepresented relative to their wealth and size.
It is one of the main challenges for current U.S.diplomacy to figure out a way to accommodate these middle powers. However, in some sense they threaten European diplomatic power more directly. After all, the Europeans are the ones who are overrepresented in powerful positions on the IFIs and the Security Council. It will be fascinating to see how the Germans deal with this. They have their own aspirations for permanent Council membership and they could decide that it make sense to work with India and Brazil. The French will have some major decisions to make as their institutional prerogatives are threatened. Don’t expect this issue to go away for the next few years.