I assume most of you know about the European Union treaty. And I assume most of you know some day Europe may unite into one country. So I will spend little or no time trying explain or prove that. My question is a purely hypothetical one…
Image the present time, a vote in the United Nations assembly. “Resolved: Torture should be allowed under certain circumstances.” On one side of the aisle are liberal democracies: the United States, Canada, and all the various European countries: Britain, France, the Netherlands, etc. On the other side of the aisle are totalitarian and dictatorship countries: Saudi Arabia, Iran and various dictatorial African as well as some South American countries. The vote is a close one. But the Democracies has just enough votes to prevail. The evil measure is defeated.
Now image some umpteen years later. Europe has united into one country. And the same vote comes up: “Resolved: Torture should be allowed under certain circumstances.” Saudi Arabia, Iran and the various dictatorships vote Yes, Absolutely. And the various European countries… Wait a minute! There is only one European nation now. So the dictatorships are in the majority and the immoral, anti-human rights vote prevails!
This sounds terrible to me. But is it really a possibility? If not, someone please tell me what I am missing here (including whether or not Europe will indeed unite one day, if this applies).
Not likely. Europe will not unite into one country in the foreseeable future. To say it will never happen is taking it too far, but likely not in the next 50 - 100 years. At that point the UN probably will look different (if it still exists), and more nations will have moved into the democratic column.
Firstly I don’t think that Europe will ever unite into a single country.
Over the last 50 years, we have seen more agreement from an initial small one (over iron + coal, I believe) to a common currency in many European countries.
However no two countries have merged (unless you count the reunification of Germany), several new countries have formed (breakup of Yugoslavia), and there are no signs that the public are impressed by the politicians.
What would be the common language?
Where would the capital be?
Secondly democracy is not a complete defence against torture.
The US currently fly suspects to other countries for their torturing, while Britain used torture in Northern Ireland a while back. :rolleyes:
The tendency in recent years is for existing countries to split up, rather than to merge. Even those countries most committed to Europeanism have made no serious effort to merge politically. The nations of Europe are too different to make a viable single country. Democracy makes it even less likely that this will happen. People, if allowed to vote on it, prefer to run their own affairs rather than be ruled by foreigners in some distant capital.
sdguy kind of mentioned this in a backwards, totally missing the whole point kind of way, but UN membership is basically apportioned by treaty, not by a list of entry criteria.
So even if Europe did merge into a superstate, which I think will probably happen sometime after Starfleet Command unites Earth under one banner, each country would still have their membership. In fact, four nations of the original membership of the UN were NOT independent states when they joined: India, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Philippines.
In that respect, the UN is kind of like the World Cup: England and Scotland get to play different teams, even though they are really part of the United Kingdom.
Wiki has a good article on the details of how the UN has treated the various changes in its membership as member countries have broken up or unified. Sometimes one country continues as a sucessor (e.g. - Russia replaced the USSR), but sometimes there is no successor and the new countries have to apply for membership (e.g. - Czech Republic and Slovakia).
Nothing would happen, but that’s because the five permanent members of the Security Council - the U.S., U.K., France, Russia, and China (Taiwan until 1971) - have veto power.
The General Assembly, which is what the OP is referring to, only makes non-binding resolutions.
Only the Security Council can enact resolutions which the member states are committed to under the United Nations Charter. A majority of the rotating 15-member Security Council can block any resolution, but so can any one of the five permanent members.
A bit of history: The UN voted to help South Korea during the Korean “Police Action” only because Russia was boycotting the UN at the time.
Assuming that the U.S. has a properly anti-torture administration by that time, it would exercise its veto over any resolution allowing torture by U.N. forces.
And that’s the other part of where the OP goes wrong. The U.N. cannot change national laws to allow torture under any circumstances. All it could do would be sanction torture by troops or nations as part of an official U.N. action.
I’m afraid that the whole OP is based is a total misunderstanding of the U.N. and its powers, and so is all the discussion that followed.
Since the majority of countries in the world are some form of dictatorship or another, the UN was set up from the beginning not to have any sort of power of the internal policies of it’s member nations.
The liberal democracies would never allow the various communist and fascist and kleptocratic dictatorships any say over their internal policies, and neither would the dictatorships allow any interference in their iron fisted repression. So the UN is not an incipient world government, but rather a talking shop where various countries can meet and hash out deals…not because they are friendly with each other, but precisely because they are deadly enemies. If the countries were friendly with each other the UN would be irrelevant.
