The case for the reform of the UN

The two proposals reveal that reform debates are marked by a deeper theoretical divergence over whether global legitimacy hinges on balancing power or modernising institutions

- Seifudein Adem

Imbalance: The call for the United Nations Security Council reform is not just as an adjustment of seats and vetoes.

(Photo: United Nations)

The competing proposals for reforming the United Nations — and especially its Security Council — today have largely centred on questions of power redistribution and institutional design.

Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, recently published an article on this matter in Foreign Affairs magazine, as did Kishore Mahbubani, a senior Singaporean diplomat.

The two proposals reveal that reform debates are marked by a deeper theoretical divergence over whether global legitimacy hinges on balancing power or modernising institutions. But there is a missing agenda — despite continuing efforts by scholars such as Professor Amitav Acharya — namely, the issue of civilisational imbalance.

Exactly half a century ago, Professor Ali Mazrui also framed the need for reforming the UN in explicitly civilisational terms. He did this in an elaborate form in his book The World Federation of Cultures, published in 1976. Let me briefly but critically compare the ideas of Stubb and Mahbubani with Mazrui's.

Stubb puts UN reform within what he calls an emerging triangular distribution of power among the Global West (consisting of roughly 50 states), the Global East (25 states) and the Global South (125 states). For him, the Security Council's crisis is symptomatic of a broader systemic transition from Western predominance to contested multipolarity.

Reform through expanded continental representation (with two additional permanent members from Africa, two from Asia and one from Latin America) - would ensure greater legitimacy.