Continuing on the ‘Concert of Democracies’ theme. I don’t usually agree with Jonah Goldberg but he has written an article on the UN that had me nodding. I frequently fall into my default setting of optimism, hope and idealism and forget that the problems with the UN are structural AND congenital. The handicaps for the UN were inserted at its inception. Here is a snippet of an article by Goldberg in the LA Times:
The Security Council isn’t a democratic entity; it’s based on brute force. Russia and China were made part of the permanent five members when they were totalitarian dictatorships. They have seats because they are powerful, not because they are decent or wise or democratic. And the same is true for us. Our seat was bought with might, not right.
I think part of the confusion stems from a category error. We tend to anthropomorphize countries, talking about them as if they were people. U.N. members vote for stuff, so people think it’s somehow democratic in more than a procedural way. But that’s not true. There’s nothing in the U.N. Charter — at least nothing that has any binding power — that says a government has to be democratic or even care for the welfare of its people. When the ambassador from North Korea claims to speak for his people at the U.N., it has no more moral legitimacy than a serial killer speaking for the victims he has locked in his basement.
