U.N. Security Council Permanent Membership: A New Proposal for a Twenty-First Century Council

The permanent membership of the U.N. Security Council has been static since its creation - the victorious Allied Powers from the Second World War (U.S., Britain, France, Russia) plus China. The Chinese and Russian seats have changed governments, but no new states have been added to the Council, which is unrepresentative of the world today ethnically, religiously, geographically, or along any other categorical line. This paper proposes altering the make-up of the Security Council's permanent membership by adding major states from Latin America, Asia and Africa, as well as Germany and Japan in a scheme of seat rotation that would assure meaningful membership and representative capacity when coupled with a new form of veto power known as the procedural veto.