Reforming UN Decision-Making Procedures

Promoting a Deliberative System for Global Peace and Security

Martin Daniel Niemetz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138823327
• eBook ISBN: 9781317575238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The institutional procedures for the UN's decision-making on issues of global peace and security, first and foremost the Security Council (SC), were conceived with the objective of enabling a swift but internationally coordinated response to irregular situations of crises. Today, however, the UN is constantly involved in situations of conflict and has expanded its range of activities.

This book offers a concrete and practically applicable answer to the question of how to reform the UN and increase the legitimacy of the UN's decision-making procedures on issues of global peace and security. In order to provide this answer, it connects the minutia of institutional design with the abstract principals of democratic theory in a systematic and reproducible method, thereby enabling a clear normative evaluation of even the smallest technical detail of reform. This evaluation demonstrates that there is a range of feasible proposals for reform that could improve the SC's accountability both to the General Assembly and to the general public, that could increase the opportunities for effective input from the UN membership and NGOs.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the United Nations, International Organizations and regional governance.

Part I
Framework

1
Promoting a deliberative system

The Desirability Score

Introduction

How can one evaluate the potential of reform proposals to increase the legitimacy of the United Nations’ decision-making? In this chapter, I will lay out my Habermasian approach to conceptualizing the UN’s decision-making procedures on issues of global peace and security as a deliberative system. The promotion of such a system is both normatively desirable and empirically feasible. The fundamental argument is that, rather than considering the Security Council (SC) in isolation, a comprehensive evaluation of the potential of reform proposals to increase the democratic legitimacy of the UN’s governance of issues of international peace and security must be based on its conceptualization in terms of a deliberative system. On the basis of this argument, I will elaborate a procedure to determine the “Desirability Score” of individual reform proposals.

The chapter will begin with a discussion of the public sphere and democracy, continue with an explanation of how deliberative synergy can create deliberative systems that increase the democratic legitimacy of a decision-making process, proceed to a conceptualization of the UN as a deliberative system and, finally, determine how to evaluate the potential of proposals for institutional reform to promote the UN as a deliberative system of decision-making.

The public sphere and democratic legitimacy

According to Jürgen Habermas, every society is based on the construction of communicative coherence in the lifeworld, which is the domain of informal and unmarketized life. The unregulated everyday communication with family and friends ensures a repository of meaning and understanding that serves as the glue of society. The default modus of communication in the lifeworld is a consensus-oriented coordination of collective action, i.e., communicative action. The latter is based on discourse, the rational give and take of reasons, which is, in general, the only alternative to coercion in bridging a breakdown of consensus between members of a society. As with the syntactics of a language, the practice of discourse requires the implicit and often unconscious acknowledgment of certain rules of discourse. Just as much as it is impossible to effectively communicate linguistically without adherence to a system of syntax, it is impossible to successfully engage in discourse without adherence to its pragmatic presuppositions.

Habermas identifies the following pragmatic presuppositions for discourse: First, there are logical rules, such as the principles of non-contradiction and consistency that structure discourse. Second, there are procedural rules including the requirement for truthfulness and accountability, i.e., the readiness to justify one’s assertions by providing adequate reasons. Finally, there are the rules that guarantee the exclusion of coercion from the process of deliberation: everyone has to be allowed to freely participate in the discourse by asking questions, by introducing assertions as well as by expressing attitudes, desires and needs.¹ The aim of reaching a completely uncoerced consensus is an idealization of empirical processes that are usually only approximations to this ideal.

I shall return to the full range of pragmatic presuppositions further below. At this point, the focus must be on the third set of presuppositions that immunize discourse against coercion. In this regard, the question of equal participation takes on special significance in the context of international organizations. As mentioned above, societal consensus must be rooted in communicative action; the behavior of individuals has to be coordinated by the discursive creation and affirmation of norms. In the traditional case of decision-making within the political framework of the state, the objective of norm-setting is the coordination of the social interaction of the state’s citizens, which is why only said citizens need to be afforded the opportunity to participate in the discourses that shape the decision-making within the state. It is only they who have to be safeguarded against coercion: since outsiders will not be affected by the decisions being made, there is, logically, no danger that they might be coerced. Consequently, Habermas’ discourse principle states that “only those action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could agree as participants in rational discourse.”²

The case is, of course, not as straightforward with respect to the decision-making of international organizations. Most international organizations are limited legally in the reach of their governance: the International Criminal Court, for instance, has no jurisdiction over citizens of the United States and other non-state parties to the Rome Statute (that is, unless they commit crimes within the territory of a state party), and its decisions, therefore, can only legally affect a defined population. In the case of the UN’s decision-making procedures on global peace and security, the situation is different. Since the decisions of the Security Council are binding upon all the Member States of the UN and since, at present, there is virtually no internationally acknowledged state outside the UN framework, its decisions are imperative to all of humanity. Consequently, when dealing with such an international organization whose decisions potentially affect all of humanity, the question must be how to determine whether all of humanity could agree to these decisions as participants in rational discourse.

In order to answer this question, it is necessary to first review Habermas’ conception of the public sphere and its role in modern societies. The public sphere is a communicatively constructed and reproduced social space in which societal problems are identified, analyzed and discussed. It is the space in which people communicate with each other on matters of public concern, be it directly or via media such as newspapers or the Internet. As it grows out of the lifeworld, the public sphere is characterized by communicative action unrestrained by the imperatives of monetary and administrative systems. Although there is an implicit aim to reach common judgment, the public sphere is not the locus of definitive decision-making. Its main purpose, instead, is to remain constantly flexible and open to any input from the lifeworld that it filters through a process of public reasoning.

Ultimately, it is from the public sphere that political institutions gain their legitimacy: the more open the decision-making procedures of these institutions are to the input of the public sphere, the more legitimate they are. This input must be ensured through the institution’s proactive engagement with the arguments put forward in the public sphere and with decision-making that is rationally coherent with these debates, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, through a process of decision-making that is transparent to the public, so that the latter can check the institution’s decision for consistency with the respective discourse in the public sphere. It is the public sphere that affords every potentially affected person the opportunity to engage in the discourses that – via public institutions – produce the laws that govern society.

With regard to the concept of the public sphere in the specific context of international organizations, I agree with Hauke Brunkhorst’s case for the existence of a rudimentary global public sphere that is comprehensive in the sense that it includes multitudes of spheres within itself and addresses virtually all of humanity as an audience as well as attempting to be open to input from all of humanity.³ For both legal and social reasons, however, today’s global public sphere must definitely be categorized as weak. Even though Brunkhorst argues that there is “a strong global public in the making,” he also points out that the legal prerequisites for a strong public sphere are far from being fulfilled. Opinion formation within the global public sphere has virtually no direct legal linkages to the decision-making procedures of institutions such as the UN Security Council.⁴ Although some of the social prerequisites – “a diverse network of public debates, publications, advertising, television talk-shows, teach-ins, political demonstrations, protest movements, associations, political parties, unions, cooperative public administration and the like”⁵ – exist on the global level and justify the argument for a weak public sphere, cumulatively they do not live up to the requirements of strong public spheres as they exist in the domestic societies of constitutional states.

More importantly, the global public sphere is weak in the sense that access to it, although worldwide, is partial rather than universal. This fact is very tellingly visualized by a map created by Facebook of the global interconnections of its users⁶: Whereas there are glowing connections between most of the world’s urban centers, two black spots catch the eye. One of them is China, where Facebook is confronted with political obstacles, and the other is Central Africa, where access to the Internet is sparse. There are still immense political and technological/economic obstacles preventing the global public sphere from being truly inclusive in principle.

The weakness of the global public sphere brings with it the problem that the legitimacy that it could bestow on institutional decision-making procedures whose outcomes affect all of humanity is still very limited, especially when compared to the legitimacy that strong domestic public spheres – reproduced by a plethora of fora for inclusive public debate, rooted in constitutionally guaranteed rights, and with institutionalized linkages to authoritative decision-making – bestow upon the respective states. Habermas points out furthermore that

[t]oday any conceptualization of a juridification of world politics must take as its starting point individuals and states as the two categories of founding subjects of a world constitution. The (as we would like to assume) legitimate constitutional states qualify as founding members already in virtue of their current role in guaranteeing the political self-determination of their citizens. In addition to the potential world citizens, the states represent possible sources of legitimation because patriotic citizens (in the best sense of “patriotic”) have an interest in preserving and improving the respective national forms of life with which they identify and for which they feel themselves responsible – in a self-critical way that also extends to their own national history.⁷

At the same time, Habermas acknowledges that at present only a limited number of states qualify as “legitimate constitutional states,” which means that the legitimacy that international organizations can indirectly derive from strong domestic public spheres via the state is also inherently limited. Consequentially, when conceptualizing the legitimacy of international organizations whose decision-making potentially affects all of humanity, one is left with two partial but inadequate streams of legitimacy. On the one hand, such an organization can derive legitimacy from a weak global public sphere; on the other hand, it can derive legitimacy from a limited number of strong domestic public spheres via the respective states.

This means that in the present context of global politics, these organizations cannot rely exclusively on one or the other source of legitimacy, but instead they must process the input of both in their decision-making. But how can the input from these two sources be combined and reconciled with each other? Since global referenda are infeasible in the near future,⁸ it is impossible to assign numeric values to the input received from the global public sphere, which means that it cannot be weighted quantitatively against the input received via the states. In fact, weighing the input of different states against each other is itself already a somewhat arbitrary exercise.

The best solution for a process of decision-making that in principle is equally open to the input both from states and from the weak global public sphere, without categorically favoring one over the other, is a deliberative screening. Rather than focusing entirely on the nature of the source, the input received needs to be evaluated on its own merits, and instead of assigning fixed percentages to various sources of input, deliberation enables a case-by-case screening of arguments and options in the procedure of decision-making. This means that an international organization’s capability to tap and combine both sources of legitimacy is dependent on the deliberative quality of its decision-making procedures.

This emphasis on deliberation does not equal a disregard of aggregative procedures and authoritative decision-making. Anthony McGrew offers the criticism that

there is significant silence about how intractable conflicts of interests or values can be resolved deliberatively without recourse to some authoritatively imposed solution. Therefore, deliberative democracy may be of marginal value in dealing with many of the most pressing global distributional or security issues – from debt relief to humanitarian intervention – which figure on the world political agenda.⁹

It is, of course, essential for international organizations to arrive at legally binding decisions at the pace that is required by the rapid development of events in global politics.

This critique assumes, however, that theorists of deliberative democracy contend that political debates always have to be resolved by a wide consensus. But what Habermas and others are really saying is simply that political debate is, in principle, only possible under the assumption that consensus is an achievable option.¹⁰ If all the parties to a dispute knew from the st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I Framework
• PART II Evaluation
• Conclusion
• References
• Index