Expanding the membership of the UN Security Council isn’t necessarily a stupid idea, per se. It depends on what your objectives are. Coming from Vladimir Putin, for example, it would make a lot of sense. Coming from a country that didn’t already have a permanent seat  on it, it might also be logical. But doing it for the reasons that Labour and progressive foreign policy people want to do it, is an idea so self-defeating; so utterly ill thought-through, that each member of the audience at last Monday’s meeting of the UN General Assembly may have lost a couple of IQ points simply for having been exposed to it. 

In his short statement, the UK’s ambassador to the UNGA Archie Young didn’t set out exactly why the UK wants to increase the membership of the UNSC generally, and the permanent membership to include Brazil, India, Japan and Germany. But based on the Foreign Secretary’s articulation of Labour’s foreign policy of “Progressive Realism”, and other recent foreign policy announcements, we can have a guess at what Labour think they’re trying to do. It’s just not clear why they think it will have those outcomes, rather than the almost diametrically opposed outcomes that everybody else can see they will have. 

Firstly, they believe that having more countries from what they term as “the Global South” represented in the world’s decision-making bodies, will be likely to increase support for their own favoured progressive agenda in such fora. Secondly, they hope that being seen to yield power to the world’s poorer countries will curry favour with those states, thus boosting the UK’s “soft power” on the world stage. Let us take these fundamental misconceptions in turn.

It will not increase support for a progressive agenda at a global level — it will do the opposite

Most of these countries — in Africa, Latin America, South Asia and the Pacific Islands — oppose much of that progressive agenda. It can’t be stated any more bluntly than that. It’s not uniform, and there are lots of exceptions on specific policies, but by and large, those progressive global policies originated in the industrialised countries of Western Europe and North America, and it’s those countries that support them in international bodies. It’s absolutely correct to say those industrialised countries enjoy a disproportionate and possibly outdated influence in international organisations; that’s the way those countries set those organisations up. But wealthy western nations are a small minority of the UN’s 193 member states. If you expand the membership of key decision-making bodies substantially beyond those countries, you will dilute support within them for western liberal pet projects, and ultimately create a majority opposed to them. It will not increase support for a progressive agenda at a global level — it will do the opposite. 

Take, for example, the issue of Female Genital Mutilation, on which the UK has taken a lead in trying to stamp the practice out internationally. All of the developed Western countries are unambiguously opposed to it, as they have no such tradition. However, among many African and Muslim countries, things are more complicated. Some of those countries oppose western efforts to eradicate FGM outright, and others pay lip service. Even if the leaders and diplomats of such countries are willing to toe the western line in public, they do so having to make a bargain with a substantial element of their own population who regard it as a customary obligation. 

On that specific issue of course, it is essential to include the countries where the practice goes on in the discussion, as those are the countries that need to be influenced. But if you now need to gain more of those countries’ approval for critical decisions on international security, against opposition and counter-lobbying from Russia and China at the UNSC, then suddenly the power dynamic changes. Those countries are going to be less amenable to Western pressure on their traditional customs, and critically, their peoples are going to want to see their leaders taking a more assertive stance against what they regard as cultural imperialism. 

On climate issues, again totemic to Labour and the FCDO, the issue for most of the developing world is straightforwardly one of financial gain. In fact, this is the case for many Western development goals, across issues as diverse as tackling poaching of endangered species, to boosting girls’ access to education and strengthening women’s rights. Support from the world’s poorer countries is available, for a price. And in some cases for specific political concessions.  

Many of Labour’s plans on climate involve handing out money to elites in poorer countries, but once again, increasing those countries’ representation on the UNSC simply increases those countries’ leverage to demand further payment, and further concessions, in return for votes and support. The current government may be happy with that, but it jeopardises support for those policies from less badly governed countries (including, hopefully, ourselves at some future date). It certainly doesn’t make those policy goals more diplomatically attainable.  

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made the divergence between Western liberal sensibilities and the reality of developing world opinion more obvious than ever. Many African governments have been at best lukewarm in their support for western-led diplomatic efforts to bolster Ukraine at the UN, and others overtly hostile. The position of Ukraine as a newly independent country defending its sovereignty from a former imperial overlord cuts no ice in many of these countries, due to the absence of any obvious racial difference between Russians and Ukrainians.  

Furthermore, the spectacle of a non-Western country acting decisively, against the wishes of the United States and its allies, is bluntly impressive in a way that Western elites fail to perceive. Many of these countries, and particularly their leaders, feel themselves to be unreasonably put-upon by a global establishment led by hectoring Westerners, and seeing those Westerners get one in the eye from a country still powerful enough to take matters into its own hands is something that they can enjoy. 

This ability of Russia to impress, and to inspire a degree of envy in developing world leaders who admire its independence of action and decision is important. Because it is in fact an example of the “soft power” that the UK’s foreign policy establishment is convinced it can win by conceding and backing down on every single issue of national interest.  

And it does really exist; in this regard, the “soft power” that Putin won by invading Ukraine makes African and South Asian leaders willing to overlook supposed points of principle about independence, sovereignty and colonialism. It exists because Vladimir Putin is seen to have something that these leaders (and to great extent their people) admire and want for themselves; genuine self-determination in defiance of the “international order” imposed by the US and its allies.  

Does the Progressive Realist School of international relations believe that the same people who were impressed by a display of murderous rapacity in contravention of all international law, will be similarly influenced by a country giving away its remaining powers out of a sense of guilt and embarrassment? Under their own justifications, Western countries yielding to the formerly colonised nations of the emerging world is nothing more than a belated recognition that their time has come and gone.  

Why on earth would the leaders of poorer countries be convinced to do anything that isn’t obviously in their own immediate interests in order to become more like a country like that? It’s the kind of gesture that you take to the bank, and then forget about. As with Britain’s concession of the Indian Ocean Territories to Mauritius, it will be remembered only when the next country eyeing up some bit of UK territory seeks a similar concession. It is not going to have countries failing over themselves to impose sustainable waste disposal targets or industrial emissions caps on themselves, or whatever else the Progressive Realists might hope to do with their soft power. 

… there is a good chance that Washington, under new management, will save us from our own diplomatic naivety 

Mercifully, it seems very unlikely that the incoming Trump administration will let the Security Council expansion elements of the “Pact for the Future” get through. Beyond the expansion of the non-permanent membership, the UK’s proposals for the four new permanent seats are going to be met with a great deal of scepticism. Brazil is an unreliable member of the Western alliance, and Germany isn’t a great deal better. Japan is a far more reliable ally, but in terms of meeting the justification of representing the changed world of the 21st century, it seems odd to be adding two new former colonial powers with stagnating shares of the global economy to a grouping that already has Britain and France. Adding India at this stage is simply a gift to Putin, and to whatever extent it will antagonise China, the two emerging giants are happy enough to make common cause in opposing the West whenever it suits them. 

So as with the Chagos Islands giveaway, there is a good chance that Washington, under new management, will save us from our own diplomatic naivety — in which case, it’ll be a soft power double-whammy for the Progressive Realists. Not only will the UK have stated publicly that we think we’re no longer fit for the degree of international influence we still have, we will also have been visibly overruled by what is supposedly our closest ally.