UN was put into place for peacekeeping efforts and yet there r 5 major countries having veto power.
I don’t understand its use, isn’t a proper voting over issues a better way to go about problems than this ?
Does this veto system actually help in peacekeeping efforts positively ?
In: Other
The security council and the veto powers of its permanent members was established because otherwise the USA and USSR would not have participated in the UN in a meaningful way. France, China, and the UK’s presence on the council is mostly to obscure the fact that it exists for the Americans and Soviets to say “No” as much as they want.
I would guess it because some countries have nuclear weapons, and very different ideologies. So it’s a “we won’t start WW3” thing.
The short answer is that those nations wouldn’t have joined the UN if they weren’t given a permanent ability to veto UN security resolutions. And if the UN was created without the US or the USSR then the UN would have been effectively irrelevant, similar to the League of Nations which failed to prevent WW2.
Because those countries where the only ones that mattered after ww2, and without their participation there would not have been a UN.
You have to keep in mind that the United Nations is literally the Allies from WW2. The permanent Security Council members are the former leaders of the Allies in a sense. The United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union (whose seat was later inherited by the Russian Federation) should make enough sense, the Republic of China (whose seat was later inherited by the People’s Republic of China) was the nominal government of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War and represented the main fighting force against Japan in the Asian mainland, and France (whose seat was later inherited by France) also got despite capitulating early in the war because of the continued fighting by Free France in opposition to the Vichy regime.
There are “wheels within wheels” at the UN. Most of the important decision making is done within the Security Council and the Security Council has five Permanent Members. The very simple reason those five are the ultimate leaders is that they’re the ones who won World War 2 and created the UN. The UN is nice in that it offers a forum to diplomatically address various issues before they escalate to out of control levels
Pretty much none of us are members of the Greatest Generation anymore so it seems odd to our Cold War sensibilities for it to be Russia and China sitting alongside the US and Great Britain with France managing to continue cruising along just by virtue of being a cool guy who invented Democracy and everything but that’s how it is and it would take lots and lots of lesser Member Nations to sway the (uneasy) status quo we have established.
The 5 permanent veto holding members were the great allied powers at the end of ww2. The seat for China was transferred to the communists, and the soviet seat was sort of transferred to Russia (though the Russian government replaced and renamed the soviet government as opposed to the PRC/ROC which were and are separate entities).
They get a veto partially because they were the greatest powers in the world, but also because up until about 2000 any of the 4 (not China) could cause chaos against any of the others if they wanted to. The growing power gap between the US and Europe due to decolonization and population growth does mean that the UK and France are sort of the odd ones out, but they are still globally more influential than anyone not on the list. Now any of the 5 could cause chaos for anyone else.
By chaos what I mean is essentially that if the US say, decided to invade Mexico or Iran or something and the British or French didn’t like that. They could supply the attacked power with advanced weapons, they could cause European sanctions on us officials, deny the US use of a number of bases etc
As to why: because great powers will not be dictated to by small ones. One country one vote does not reflect that China has a about twice the labour force of the US and EU combined, and none of them are going to be told what they can or can’t do by some small Caribbean island or other small states.
You could of course envision a world where veto power is distributed differently. It will be tough to argue India should not have that power by the end of the century when they have twice the population of China and an economy probably twice that of anyone else, assuming it gets there. Nigeria, Brazil, some sort of Muslim representation, all have some merits.
Most of the 5 security members pay the majority of the UN costs. The USA is not only saddled with the UN in our country but we pay by far the most to the UN. We should have the sole veto power over everything.
the goal of the UN isnt to enforce rules on world powers. its to let them have a place to talk.
but at the end of the day they still want to make their own choices.
It’s an acknowledgement of an unpleasant reality: Those five countries represent most of the enforcement power of the UN. If any one doesn’t want to do something, the UN will almost certainly be unable to do anything about it.
Latest Answers