One of the saddest sights during the current international crisis has been the right-wing British media following their US counterparts down the 'let's abolish the UN route', seemingly oblivious to the fact that the US will have a veto (legal, practical or whatever) in any new international body that replaces the UN whilst the UK almost certainly won't.
Now it is of course not necessarily the case that there a) needs to be a new body, b) that anysuch new body will need every country in the world as a member and b) any such body will require veto power. I'm not going to argue the case for such a body, but I think world history has shown it helpful, as for membership, if you don't make it universal then you need to decide on criteria, and the difficulties of this tend to take you back to universal membership. On the veto, if the body is to have any power a veto is clearly necessary, otherwise the US won't join.
Which countries deserve a veto?
An important criteria must surely be population. This would go China (1.3bn), India (1bn), the US (.3bn), Indonesia (.2bn), Brazil (.17bn), Russia (.14bn), Pakistan (.14bn), Bangladesh (.13bn), Nigeria (.13bn), Japan (.13bn) in that order.
Economic strength is another. This depends on how you measure it. Fixing the US at $12tr, in PPP terms you have the US ($12tr), China ($7tr), Japan ($4tr), India ($2.7tr), Germany ($2.5tr), France ($1.8tr), the UK ($1.8tr), Italy ($1.7tr), Russia ($1.5tr), Brazil ($1.5tr) and Canada ($1.1tr). In real money terms it's a little different, US ($12tr), Japan ($4.7tr), Germany ($2.6tr), the UK ($1.9tr), France ($1.9tr), Italy ($1.6tr), China ($1.5tr), Canada ($0.9tr), Spain ($0.9tr), Mexico ($0.7tr).
Military spending is another one. This is for 2001, 2003 figures would have the US up in the high $300bns.US 281.4bn, Russia 43.9bn, France 40bn, Japan 38.5bn, UK 37bn, Germany 32bn, China 27bn, Saudi Arabia 27bn, Italy 25bn, Brazil 14bn.
And so on. Ability and willingness to use military force might matter more than military spending, but is hard to measure and is rather self-reinforcing, the UK and France both use military power more than other countries because they are permanent members of the UN security council.
posted by Matthew @ 4/15/2003 02:42:00 PM
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