POLICY PAPER: REFORMING THE UNITED NATIONS

The Background

The main problem that the functioning of international law faces is that all state actors have the same legal status without being subject to the power of a superordinate entity. Grounded in the principle of territorial sovereignty, every nation has an independent legal standing, which is not only desirable to ensure the minimum effective functioning of societies but also desirable in the sense of the devletist school. Here, it is held that only by outlining and defending national sovereignty, a nation can shape policies in accordance with its societal core. Foreign interference does cause disruptions in the organic development of societies due to the inevitable mismatch of cultural norms. However, as politics becomes a more interrelated realm with the congruent increase of transnational issues, international cooperation will also have to be solidly integrated into statecraft. In fact, the devletist school acknowledges that from the third stage of international relations, nations will have to behave more cooperatively than unilaterally.

In the context of the United Nations, this cooperation has always been difficult and ineffective. Its institutional design cannot accommodate effective international policymaking at best. When assessing the United Nations in terms of its goals, namely maintaining peace, protecting human rights and foster sustainable development, it even fails to achieve those goals. Rather, it protects interests of more powerful nations and legitimises the breach of those very goals by those powerful nations. From the founding days of this institution, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the United Nations has expanded but not adapted to the changing political landscape. In this policy paper, an action plan is proposed to reform the United Nations.

The Goal

Ideally, and also as initially intended, the United Nations creates, through legal structures, economic incentives and political measures, a political framework to ensure the international compliance with minimum standards and the development of a culture of political best practises.

The Problem

As laid out in chapter XIII of the political treatise Devlet, cultures are to be seen in abstract terms as the genuine character of societies. Culture, defined as “a set of social interactions within an ethnic group”, leads to the emergence of unique societal properties from which normative frameworks are derived. By drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations agreed on the minimum standard of normative values all societies share or at least perceive to be acceptable rules. That being so, this part of the outlined goal is achieved and needs to be respected. However, the problem of compliance with this framework, as well as other less authoritative guidelines, remains a major flaw in the functioning of the United Nations. The reason for this situation is that, although there is universal agreement on the minimum standards of normative values, there is all the more disagreement on the individual national goals and interests. Solely because nations are mandated by their respective peoples to represent their interests and further them in the best possible ways, it does not follow that the political leadership of a nation is always informed about what those best ways are – let alone the interests in the first place. We can identify three factors that cause this goal displacement: (i) systemic causes, (ii) strategic causes, (iii) diplomatic causes.

Systemic Causes

Under systemic causes for goal displacement, we summarise all structural factors that push the political system towards policymaking away from its cultural core. Such misalignment with the cultural core can, for instance, arise from democratic systems that are based on political parties. Here, many different parties limited their representative functions on specific sub-groups of the society, alienating all other relevant groups. Assuming that there is one uniform aggregate societal culture, the exitance of more than the representation of the interest of this culture means that political parties are inherently unable to represent the society of a nation. Similarly, authoritarian systems, such as oligarchies or monarchies, tend to represent individual interests rather than societal or group interests. In both cases, the political system is not pursuing the objective interest of its nation. This goal displacement often leads to conflict in the international realm. Democratic systems carry their ideological party struggle to the international plane, paving the way for foreign intervention to support the domestic cause or to further it elsewhere. In systems that enrich individuals, cooperative measures often emerge at the expense of the nation as personal interest are served directly and without controlling mechanisms.

Strategic Causes

Political systems are mostly oriented towards power maximisation or wealth maximisation. The detailed background is laid out in the first two chapters of Devlet. Within such a constellation, the strategic orientation of states is relational, meaning that the measurement of success within the framework of those goals inevitable amounts to an equal amount of disadvantage of other actors. More power for one nation does have the consequence of less power of others. The same holds true for wealth. Here, we see the most striking problem at the international level. The setup is from a strategic perspective already grounded on destructive competition. Even constructed cooperation is to be regarded as opportunistic, unsustainable and temporary. In an institutional setting, like the United Nations, this is not only clear to all actors involved but also the main source of distrust and lack of willingness to cooperate for the common good. The Game Theory neatly illustrates the underlying flaws of these strategic premises.

Diplomatic Causes

Following from the above, international state behaviour is characterised by inherently harmful motives. Diplomatic efforts do aim to strengthen the own nation’s position towards other nations in terms of power and wealth at all levels. Most dangerously, however, is the dimension of public diplomacy. Here, states aim at the altering of public opinions abroad, and by doing so, there is a direct interference with the cultural core of other societies. Being the core source of political, societal and human potential, such diplomatic efforts do cause long-term effects that can sometimes be irreversible, leading other societies into decline.

Considering the three factors above, it becomes clear that the structure of the goals of the individual states hampers the effective functioning of the United Nations. Although there is agreement on fundamental ideas in form of some normative frameworks, the existence of negatively competitive goals naturally limits the potential of constructive cooperation through the persistence of mistrust. Members of the United Nations are in a constant state of leniency towards defection in the sense of the framework brought forward by the Game Theory.

The Solution

After having examined the problem in detail, we can identify the main cause of ineffectiveness of the United Nations: persistence of mistrust. Using this finding as the starting point, we would need to reform the institutional setup in a form that fosters trust. Luckily, trust can be structurally created through transparency. Transparency, in turn, can be achieved in a situation where interests do no longer conflict. The only structural political setting known to man, though yet to be tested in practise, is to base politics on the devletist thought. This means that all nations would need to overcome the archaic goals of striving for power and wealth and rather adopt the perception that genuine knowledge production is the ultimate goal of policymaking. Of course, this is a very difficult goal to achieve without centuries of work.

Staying with the United Nations, this institution can reframe its goals and policy agenda according to the devletist principles and focus efforts on guiding and advising nations of devletist governance. By doing so, the institution can initiate a long-term development plan towards improved policymaking nationally. Within the institution itself, the Security Council needs either to be expanded to create a more heterogenous circle of powerful nations, including powers like Türkiye, Brazil, India, Egypt, South Africa and Japan, or it needs to be abolished altogether. Latter is more preferable to break the idea of power as being a viable metric in normative politics in the first place. Rather, all measures should be adopted in the General Assembly. Also, there should be fixed military commitments by all nations to the forces of the United Nations without the option to compensate physical participation with monetary means. The forces of the United Nations should also receive more operational powers in terms of lower barriers to being dispatched and fighting. By flattening out the hierarchies within this institution, more powerful nations are subject to greater pressure and have less room to diplomatically protect their interests internationally. By granting the military more operational powers and diversifying the troop composition, nations do increase their stake in military operations, which then puts them under closer public scrutiny of their own societies. The reason for that is that states will have to be more careful to create situations in which United Nations troops are sent involving the own soldiers. This leads to the final and most important institutional change. To further increase the stake of the respective societies in the United States, representatives of the member states must be elected nationally and subject to minimum criteria set out by the United Nations itself. By doing so, public awareness and scrutiny increases, giving less room to states to bypass their societies in the international realm. It also creates a, though very indirect, way of exercising a say on transnational matters.

The Conclusion

Following the above, the United Nations needs to adapt to the current political landscape and also follow its principle of development. Within the persistent environment of distrust and conflicting interests, nations must move towards more aligned goals and interests, which are embodied in the devletist idea. As this is a long-term effort and subject to the proactive guidance of the United Nations, no immediate effects can be expected here. However, by abolishing the Security Council, granting the United Nations forces more operational power and making representatives subject to national public approval by the populations in the member states, the grave power hierarchy within this international body can be overcome.