Who Gave Europe the Right to Decide Who Sits at the UN Security Council ?

The debate over reforming the United Nations Security Council is legitimate. The five permanent members were established in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the structure of the Council reflects a balance of power that is now more than 80 years old. The permanent members are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, each with veto power. The question of whether that arrangement still reflects the contemporary world is entirely reasonable. What becomes much more troubling is the idea that individual European governments can begin treating the permanent status of another major power as something they can simply revoke.

Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski has repeatedly pushed for changes to the international system and has been outspoken about Russia's role in it. His wider argument raises an important question about the legitimacy and composition of the Security Council, but the historical record needs to be understood properly. The original 1945 UN Charter named the Republic of China and the Soviet Union among the permanent members. In 1971, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 2758 by a vote of 76 to 35, with 17 abstentions, recognizing the People's Republic of China as the representative of China at the United Nations and restoring its rights, including its permanent Security Council seat.

The Russian case is different. When the Soviet Union dissolved, the Russian Federation did not go through the normal process of applying for UN membership as a completely new state. Instead, President Boris Yeltsin informed the Secretary-General on December 24, 1991 that Russia was continuing the Soviet Union's membership in the Security Council and other UN organs, with the support of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The UN itself currently recognizes the Russian Federation as a permanent member.

Therefore, legitimate legal and historical questions surround the Soviet-to-Russian transition, and Ukraine and others have raised them formally. But there is an enormous difference between debating the historical legitimacy of the arrangement and assuming that Poland, the European Union, or another bloc has the authority to remove Russia from the Council simply. The UN Charter does not give Poland that power. Nor does it give the European Union such a unilateral power.

And this is where the debate becomes much bigger than Russia.

If the argument is that permanent membership should be reconsidered because the world has changed, then the same principle should be applied consistently. Why should Britain retain a permanent seat? Why France? Why the United States? Why should India, Africa, Latin America or other major regions remain underrepresented in a structure designed in 1945? The UN itself is already discussing reform, including expansion of permanent and non-permanent membership. Current proposals and debates are increasingly concerned with making the institution more representative of today's international system.

The dangerous direction is not necessarily the discussion about reform itself. It is the growing habit of treating international institutions as instruments through which powerful blocs can punish their geopolitical opponents. If Russia can be declared illegitimate because its political conduct is unacceptable to European governments, what prevents another country from eventually making the same argument against Britain, France, America or China?

Sikorski is right about one thing in the broadest sense: the international system is overdue for serious discussion. But serious reform should mean reform of the rules, not simply rearranging the seats according to which governments are currently popular with the Western political establishment.

The United Nations cannot become more legitimate by replacing one form of great-power privilege with another. If the Security Council is going to change, the argument should be about representation, law and the balance of the international system. It should not become another battlefield in which governments decide which countries are legitimate enough to belong.