The Future of African Representation in Multinational Organizations
History, like foreign policy, is often written by the victors. The outcome of the decades of world war beginning in the early 20th century that did not truly end until the late 1980s has been a world order forged through blood and steel that has since been driven and dominated by those countries that held and fought over power over 70 years ago. Those left on top: The United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, and (debatably) China, have held the wheel of the great engine of policymaking ever since. One could look at this international order and see a decent representation of most of the major continents on Earth: The Americas, Europe, and Asia. Obviously missing from this international picture, however, is Africa.
The international order that had existed in the hundreds of years prior to the actions towards independence that were just beginning to be taken by the time of the end of the Second World War was designed deliberately to exploit the African continent. The trans-Atlantic slave trade is an example, through which millions upon millions of innocent African people exported as livestock and put into abhorrent conditions of chattel slavery predominantly in America while Europe and the United States got rich from the profit of their labor. The exploitative colonial rule that was established during the “Scramble for Africa” of the late 19th Century was just as exploitative and inhumane, and the legacies of colonial oppression are still being felt across the continent.
As such, African people don’t see these decades of oppression as truly being in the past. Foreign Affairs cites the “CFA Franc, a relic of the colonial past that still gives France tremendous sway over the economies of 14 West African countries,” as a “daily reminder of this historical subjugation.” They have been left behind in humanitarian efforts, like the failure of the United Nations to act during the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s while being forced to bear the aftereffects of great-power intervention that has led to the rise of various extremist movements, like the Islamic State and Al Shabab, that undermine the stability of domestic politics in numerous African countries.
This pattern of injustice calls for a change in the power and representation of African nations in important multinational organizations. Take the United Nations Security Council, for example. The International Peace Institute cites that most Security Council meetings concern African security issues, yet no African nation is represented among the permanent 5 members. “It is a travesty of justice,” writes Tim Murithi, “that African countries can only participate in deliberations and negotiations about their own futures on such unequal terms.”
What must be done to overcome this systematic lack of representation of the continent in which 1.2 billion people live is a dramatic change in the United Nations charter. If a charter review council can be secured, then African nations can work together to change the system that exists in the Security Council in order to access more power for the determination of African futures.