UNambitious - Village Magazine

November/December 2020 45

RELAND WILL take a seat on the UN Security

Council for the term / on  January. This

is the fulﬁlment of a key strateic oal of Irish

forein policy. However, havin secured that

seat on the Security Council, what will we do

with it? If the record of our last term on the Security

Council in / is anythin to o by, the answer

will be disappointinly little.Our feeble performance

then was despite a hihly professional and eective

team representin us in New York but larely due to

a deliberate choice to set modest ambitions: a tactic

that shows every sin of bein repeated aain in

January. The traedy is that Ireland is capable of so

much more.

There are two reasons to be pessimistic that we

will deliver this time around.

The ﬁrst is the excessivestrain likely to be placed

on the organisational capacity of the Department of

Foreign Aairs and Trade (DFA). The Department`s

budget could well face deep cuts as a consequence

of the current Covid-19 recession, a recession which

could be made worse by a hard Brexit in the new year.

Any cuts to the DFA`s budget will occur precisely at a

time when it is trying to meet the additional demands

for resources for our Security Council term. Moreover,

Ireland’s Security Council agenda will have to com

pete for funding with other budgetary priorities such

as meeting our international development aid com

mitments and the planned expansion of the number

of missions around the world. The plan to open 26

new diplomatic missions has only reached the half

way mark and the if the department is to meet its tar

gets under the Global Ireland strategic plan, funding

UNambitious

By John-Vivian

Cooke

Ireland will again exercise its place on the

Security Council to promote consensus

rather than vision and values

International politics should be understood

as a vital process for small states to assert

themselves as sovereign entities as well as

a forum for already formed states to achieve

policy goals.

will need to be found for the remaining 12 missions.

Even if the department ﬁnds a way to balance its

budget, there will be other pressures on its institu

tional resources. There are absolute limits to the

time that any minister, in general, can dedicate to

any speciﬁc policy issue and Brexit will be the topic

that will preoccupy the Minister for Foreign Aairs.

This preoccupation is set to be replicated through

out our diplomatic structures with the consequence

that expertise and experience that, in normal circum

stances, would be available to support the UN team,

will be diverted to manage Brexit. No matter the

quality of our diplomatic representation at the UN,

the ability to set policy priorities and give direction

on diplomatic strategy can only come from the legiti

mate and formal authority of the elected minister.

Second, even in ideal domestic circumstances,

the structure of international relations imposes in

trinsic limitations on Ireland`s ability to determine

outcomes at the UN. The distinction between the

elected members of the Security Council and the

ﬁve permanent members (P5) institutionalises the

privileged position that the P5 members are granted

under theUN charter in their role as Great Powers.

Notwithstanding the notional sovereign equality of

states in the charter, and under international law

generally, the blunt truth of international relations is

that the P5 do act dierently and they are treated dif

ferently from other, lesser, states. Great Powers are

qualitatively dierent from all other states by virtue

of the resources they possess: elements of power

that simply are not available to even medium-size

states. The quintessential qualiﬁcation for Great

Power status is the ability to project military power,

Should be focus on gend, not imge or consensus

OPINION

46 November/December 2020

both conventional and nuclear. The measure

of a state`s power is proportionate to the mag

nitude of its forces; the distance they can be

projected; and the duration for which they can

be deployed. This power, in turn, rests on the

ﬁscal and economic resources of the state.

But to acknowledge the dierence among

states is not to condone or excuse it. The fact

that the US ¨doth bestride the narrow world

like a Colossus and we petty men walk under

his huge legs¨ does not mean that we must

¨peep about to ﬁnd ourselves dishonour

ablegraves”. But, if we are to accomplishhon-

ourableends, we must set ourselves far more

ambitious goals while still retaining an unsen

timental understanding of how world politics

operates.

There can be no mistaking that the

distribution of power creates a dier

ence of kind rather than a dierence

in degree between the permanent and

elected members of the Security Council.

Some analysts describe the P5 as having

a systemic role in constituting interna

tional norms and institutions while small

states such as Ireland are ¨System Inef

fectual¨. Yet the temptation is for elected

members to see themselves as merely

mini versions of the Great Powers and to

develop strategies that compensate for

their lack of power. The Norwegian Minister

for Foreign Aairs, Ine Marie Eriksen Soreide,

succumbed to exactly that temptation in her

comment that: ¨(N)o-one can take care of Nor

wegian interests like Norway can. To uphold

and strengthen the multilateral system and

rules-based order, that`s a core foreign policy

interest for Norway”. Instead we should adopt

a new sui generis understanding of how small

states such as Ireland operate in international

politics.

The established perspective on interna

tional relations treats all states as unitary ac-

tors that exercise various forms of power in

pursuit of their national interests.

This puts small states in the same category

as Great Powers and predicts that the foreign

policy of small states will be oriented to in

creasing their autonomy. In practice, the op-

posite occurs: small states seek to limit the

autonomy of the Great Powers by enmeshing

them in the constraints of international norms

and regimes.

Simon Coveney acknowledged as much

when he said ¨(T)he basis for our campaign to

be on the Security Council was to be vocal on

these key issues around adherence to interna

tional law standards that apply through inter-

national structures and systems that protect

small and weaker states as well keep domi

nant and powerful states in check”. Indeed,

the current ‘Global Island Ireland’ strategy pa

per makes the point that ¨the European Union

and United Nations in amplifying Ireland’s

voice and extending its inﬂuence¨ rather than

limiting Ireland’s international autonomy.

So it is more instructive to re-conceptu

alise Ireland`s policies in entirely dierent

terms. Where the US is an actor on the inter

national stage, Ireland aims to be a presence.

Where the US deploys its power, Ireland seeks

to exercise its inﬂuence. Where the US pur

sues its national interests, Ireland needs to

assert its values.

Presence

For small states like Ireland, participation

in international organisations is the way to

arm our essential statehood. International

politics should be understood as a vital pro

cess for small states to assert themselves as

sovereign entities as well as a forum for al

ready formed states to achieve policy goals.

Understanding this gives sense to the state

ment in Ireland`s campaign brochure in the

recent Security Council election that ¨Ireland

is a small nation which believes that we have

a responsibility to actively engage with the UN

and which sees our UN membership as a dec

laration of our global citizenship.¨

Our distinguished record in UN peacekeep

ing is important in maintaining the sense of

Ireland’s active engagement with the UN but

this also demands that the DFA must strength

en its institutional capacity, and underpins the

necessity to continue expanding the number

of our embassies as planned. Our presence on

theinternationalstage can also be felt by the

extent of our access and representation, for

example in our ability to provide capablead

ministrators to ﬁll executive positions within

internationalorganisations.

The International Agenda

A seat on the Security Council creates an

opportunity for elected members to raise and

debate issues and topics that the P5 neglect or

wilfully ignore. Samantha Power, former Am

bassador of the United States to the UN, ad-

vises that the most eective elected members

of the Security Council are those that ¨take the

pen¨ and set the agenda in line with their pri

orities. This is exactly what Germany did dur-

ing its term in 2018/9, when it tabled a

number of resolutions on the global cli

mate crisis which had been ignored up

to then. Ireland has its own historic ex

ample in the diligent and patient work of

Frank Aiken: starting in 1958, Aiken used

his presence in the General Assembly of

the UN to establish the principle of nucle

ar non-proliferation. He kept this issue

on the UN`s agenda with such frequency

that votes in support of the proposednon

proliferation regime became known as

the ¨Irish resolutions¨. Although the

details and structure of the treaty were

hammered out by the nuclear powers, Irish di

plomacy had laid the groundwork for the 1968

Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Consensus

Developing from the agenda-setting role,

Ireland should seek to persuade other states

and to build coalitions around new consen

suses. This is implicit in the DFA`s Statement

of Strategy 2017 which acknowledges that ¨(O)

ur ability to shape the world according to our

values is deﬁned by our membership of the Eu

ropean Union, our participation in the United

Nations, and our partnerships withlike mind

edcountries and other actors”. Our campaign

for the Security Council seat was premised on

our abilities as consensus-builders; which we

outlined to the General Assembly in a speech

in 2018: ¨(W)e Irish are by nature bridge-build

ers. We listen to all sides and work to build col-

lective solutions to our global challenges…to

forge consensus and common purpose”. The

Taoiseach repeated the point when he said

that we ¨must use our position on the Security

Council over the next two years to inﬂuence UN

policy and champion the principles of conﬂict

resolution and conﬂict prevention that under

pin our foreign policy positions.¨ The salient

point missing from this statement is the re

quirement to build a consensus around a spe-

ciﬁc desired objective.

Irish policy makers demonstrate a nuanced

understanding of these points and yet do

not seek to take full advantage of the oppor

It is impossible to

reconcile this reﬂexive

alignment of Irish policy

with EU positions with the

defence of contradictory

interests of small states

elsewhere in the world.

Drem tem, 2001