Coffee Club vs G4: Security Council Reform Shows Regionals Rivalries
Max Pollack
The United Nations (UN) is a complex organization with many areas that various members have proposed reforms to fix. However, no one part of the organization has received as much attention or hate as the Security Council (UNSC). The security council is made up of 15 UN member states, with five permanent members and ten members elected for two-year terms. The countries with permanent membership are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These collectively are known as the P5 and each have veto power over many UN resolutions and powers. These five nations were selected as permanent members because they were the primary victors of World War II. The fact that these five countries have more power in the UN than any other countries has drawn criticism with some people calling for the permanent status to be removed or others pointing out that the P5 have abused their power. The P5 do have other privileges that are not afforded to other countries in the UN such as being the only nations allowed to have nuclear weapons. But by far, the largest push for reform of the UNSC is expanding the number of permanent seats.
The most serious push for Security Council membership has come from four countries; Brazil, Germany, India, and Japan (or the G4 for short). They all have agreed to support each other’s membership bids along with a push to expand the security council from 15 to 25 including 6 new permanent seats. Their stated goal is to increase the power that the global south has and give regional voices more prominence. The P5 and the G4 are all members in the G20 conference so all of the countries talked about are powerful on the world stage, both economically and politically. Each G4 country has support from at least one P5 nation, however, the main opposition to G4 permanent membership does not come from the P5. There is a group formally named Uniting for Consensus (nicknamed the Coffee Club) that works together to try and stop the G4 for various goals. The main countries behind the Coffee Club are Italy, Pakistan, South Korea, Mexico, and Argentina. Other Coffee Club members support a different plan of reform because the status quo benefits them. Canada, for example, does not want its closest allies’ power to be diluted by adding more permanent members.
Germany has the largest economy in the European Union. Since reunification, German political power has expanded greatly in the region. China and Russia oppose another NATO member having a permanent seat because a majority of the current permanent seats are made up of NATO members already. The US, UK, and France support Germany for the same reason. Many of the smaller European countries feel that Germany gets too much from the EU and international system as it is. Larger nations like Italy do not want Germany to get a favored position when negotiating with non-EU nations such as Russia, the United States, or now the United Kingdom. Namibia also opposes German membership over colonial crimes against humanity/genocide that German soldiers committed against the Namibian people.
India is the second-largest country in the world by population and a huge center for world manufacturing. They are also a nuclear armed power. UNSC permanent membership for them would let them bring up cases such as Chinese aggression and give a permanent voice to over 1.3 billion people. No P5 member opposes Indian membership. However, India is vehemently opposed by Pakistan. The Indian-Pakistani conflict has been raging since Partition and is way too long and complex to get into here. Pakistan is also nuclear armed and elevating India would be seen by Pakistan as showing favoritism and giving India a better bargaining position over Kashmir. The United Nations does not want to make that situation worse and risk nuclear conflict which makes Indian permanent membership unlikely.
Japan has one of the most advanced technological economies in the world. They are also opposed to nuclear weapons because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and would use their voice to oppose nuclear weapons. Japan is opposed by China mainly because of China’s conflict over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands and South Korea because they are technological and economic rivals. South Korea and Japan are both allies and large trading partners of the United States but still compete for regional power. There is also a deeper, more cultural reason that China and South Korea oppose Japanese membership – they have never apologized for the war crimes during the Second World War. Japan and South Korea have feuded for the past 75 years because Japan refuses to make amends for ‘comfort women’ and China is still demanding an apology over the many crimes against humanity during Japanese occupation including the tragic Rape of Nanking. Germany has apologized and has attempted to amend for the Holocaust while Japan has been criticized for stopping short. There have been apologies in the past, but as recently as 2015 Japan was still not fully apologizing. It is debatable which is holding up Japanese membership more, although I would argue it is the dispute over the Senkaku Islands. Geopolitics is usually more important than national pride.
Brazil is an economic powerhouse in South America and an up-and-coming economic force in the world. It is the second-largest democracy in the western hemisphere. Brazilian permanent membership in the Security Council would be good representation for South America and some of the interests of the Global South. The primary opponents of Brazil are other South American/Latin American nations, mostly Mexico and Argentina. Both of these are regional economic and political rivals. But again, there are deeper cultural reasons. Brazil has always been different in Latin American politics. Brazil was the one colony belonging to the Portuguese while the rest of Latin America were Spanish. This colonial divide still reverberates today.
The P5 members were in a great spot when they gave themselves veto power in the United Nations because they had just won a world war and formed the United Nations. They were in such a position, and using it to try to further peace, that there was no real opposition. In today’s world, no one country has the moral standing enough to influence themselves into a permanent seat. Modern geopolitics are in a state where disrupting the status quo in any direction will upset one nation or another. There has been no real action on Security Council reform by either group in around a decade. These movements formed just after the end of the cold war, when the international order was so shaken that more changes would not have been out of the question. Now, the new status quo has set in enough and the Security Council has bigger issues to worry about, reform and ‘fairness in the UNSC’ has taken a backburner position in world politics. The United Nations has many issues demanding reform, from the Security Council to the Taiwanese membership question to racism, but the world community should remember that the UN’s true purpose is to avoid a nuclear world war – a mission that has so far proven to be successful.