The Binding Triad System for Global Decision-Making

The world needs a way to make up its mind!

The world can, at last, meet global needs neglected during the long years of the Cold War. Sanity must prevail, at last, over gross planetary mismanagement.

UNCONSCIONABLE EXPENDITURES are being made on military forces, both on conventional arms spreading like a plague around the world and on efforts by various countries to build nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

OUR GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT is being mindlessly ravaged, from outer space to the depths of the seas — as well as right in our own backyards.

ELEMENTARY HUMAN RIGHTS — to food, shelter, health care, education, freedom of expression, and, indeed, survival — are widely threatened.

Unexercised sovereignty: a key problem

The world has tried to deal with its crises under an obsolete international political system based on full sovereignty of almost 200 nation-states, with no assignment of authority to their collective entity. Global problems can be dealt with effectively only by a global organization. Present efforts to cope with planetary issues through multilateral treaties among states are simply too fragmentary and unreliable to get the job done.

The world organization that should be handling all these questions is the United Nations. Two limitations in the U.N. Charter prevent the system from working out solutions to questions of war and peace, the environment, human rights and economic justice.

In the U.N. General Assembly, small states have a voting strength vastly disproportionate to their populations and political/economic/military strength. (Monaco and Vanuatu have the same vote as the U.S. and China.) Moreover, Assembly decisions are only recommendations which can be flouted with impunity.

In the Security Council, no action can be taken without the approval of all five permanent members of the Security Council — the U.S., Russia, Britain, France and China. Since this degree of cooperation is difficult to achieve, the veto and its threat has all too often crippled the Security Council. Besides, the Security Council does not have the authority to engage itself on some major global problems, such as the environment and economic development.

Enter the Binding Triad

With only one amendment to the United Nations Charter, the Binding Triad System could endow the U.N. General Assembly with the option to make binding decisions on a specific range of international issues. The Binding Triad is, in essense, a weighted voting system which would make General Assembly decision-making acceptable to the world’s diverse array of nations — large and small, rich and poor.

It is not widely understood that the United Nations already has three of the four critical elements essential to a system of effective, democratic global governance, albeit in incipient form. It has an Executive Department, namely, the Secretariat, headed by an able Secretary-General. It has a nascent judicial arm: the International Court of Justice. And it has the beginnings of an enforcement agency: its growing peacekeeping units serving in various areas around the world. What the U.N. doesn’t have is a legislative body, which is what the Binding Triad system would create.

How the Binding Triad would work

By an amendment to Article 13 of the United Nations Charter, the Binding Triad system could be introduced into the global decision-making process. This amendment would enable the General Assembly to make binding decisions by resolutions which receive concurrent majority votes based on three factors:

(1) one-nation-one-vote (the same as now),

(2) population,

(3) contributions to the U.N. budget.

The General Assembly could also continue to adopt non-binding recommendations by majority vote based solely on one-vote-per-nation, as at present.

The rationale of the Binding Triad concept is this:

The one-nation-one-vote system is deeply rooted in diplomatic tradition, and this voting leg gives the smaller countries an important voice in global decisions.

The population leg introduces a strong element of democracy into U.N. decision-making.

The leg based on contributions to the U.N. budget, roughly based on GNP, allows the more important donor counties to have increased influence on decisions involving projects for which they will have to pay most of the bills.

Under the Binding Triad proposal, a binding global law could be adopted by the General Assembly provided it had the support of most of the world’s nations, nations representing most of the world’s population, and nations representing most of the political/economic/military influence in international affairs.

A constitutional debate on the United Nations Charter is already under way as the U.N. moves from its 50th anniversary in 1995 into the 21st century. So far, the discussion is centering on the expansion of the Security Council, but this seems to be leading to a wider consideration of basic restructuring of the United Nations.

Exercising Sovereignty

Once the Binding Triad takes effect in the General Assembly, the United Nations will be able to engage in its mandate to protect the peoples of the world from the scourge of war and, by specific legislative actions, make our world more fit for human habitation. Each nation will continue to exercise maximum sovereignty over its domestic affairs but, just as nations apportion sovereignty among their cities, counties, and provinces for practical purposes, the Binding Triad system will delegate a portion of each nation’s sovereignty to the management of its global needs. International law making is essential to prescribing and circumscribing the responsibilities of the Secretary-General, functions of U.N. peacekeepers, rulings of the World Court, environmental and developmental advancement, and defense of human rights.

What might a global legislature do?

Here are a few tentative ideas:

Establish a standing U.N. peacekeeping force, individually recruited and owing its first loyalty to the world organization, with its own U.N. Training Academy.

Develop comprehensive and balanced solutions to various regional conflicts in such places as the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Establish a U.N. Verification Agency, which could supply information to U.N. enforcement agencies on such matters as arms control and disarmament, global environmental regulations, human rights, and economic development.

Establish a U.N. Anti-narcotics and Terrorism Network.

Set up a United nations Bank and Treasury, perhaps with its own global currency, and a system to collect independent revenues.

Create an operational schedule for the reduction of national military forces worldwide, as the force of law gradually replaces the law of force.

Who is the realist?

Skeptics may say that the Binding Triad is a pipe dream, that nations will never agree to share a portion of their sovereignty. But that is precisely what they do every time they sign a treaty.

The big powers, and we include among them not only the permanent members of the Security Council — the U.S., Russia, Britain, France, and China — but also Japan and Germany, are becoming receptive to the “Triad half” of the Binding Triad, since they are unhappy with the arrangement that gives the many small powers control of the Assembly, whose one major power under the U.N. Charter is control of the budget. But the big powers are uneasy at the prospect of giving the Assembly the authority to make binding decisions.

The system is vital!

Thus, if the Binding Triad system is to be achieved, the big and small countries will have to engage in a political trade-off not unlike the one struck in 1787 at the U.S. Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where a small state like Delaware got the same representation in the Senate as a big state like Pennsylvania, while the two states had much different voting strengths based on population in the House of Representatives. In this way, the historic lesson was learned that the decision-making system is critical to the success of any political organization, from the family to the world level. The Binding Triad system would achieve a comparable adjustment in the division of decision-making between national governments and the world organization.

The Binding Triad Complex

A Proposed U.N. General Assembly Resolution

THE BINDING TRIAD COMPLEX

(This draft resolution for the U.N. General Assembly is presented for discussion by Richard Hudson, Executive Director of the Center for War/Peace Studies, after receiving comments from the CW/PS Board of Directors and others. Its purpose is to transform the world organization, without amending the U.N. Charter, into a body able to do the following:

(1)   Make decisions reflecting world realities, based on perceived justice and international law,

(2)   Establish an independent revenue-raising base for the U.N., and

(3)   Create structures able to develop solutions to global problems and institutions able to maintain them.)

Draft Resolution Establishing the Binding Triad Complex

The General Assembly, of the United Nations,

Observing that,

• The global community is in a state of chaos unparalleled in the history of humankind,
• The animosities based on nationalism, ethnicity, religion, gender, and economic disparities, given the Weapons of Mass Destruction in the hands of many states and a growing number of other entities, threaten to ignite a conflagration that could terminate the effort to build a human society worthy of its potential,
• The clear road toward a world of sanity is for the many disparate groups of society, including governments, intergovernmental organizations, NGOs, academics, the media, and ordinary citizens, to coalesce into a movement in some fashion in order to bring this new order into existence.

Therefore, commits the General Assembly as a Committee of the Whole to establish such working groups as are necessary to achieve a decision-making system based primarily on cooperation between the U.N. Security Council, the General Assembly, and the Economic and Social Council, but also on other international bodies, in order to make possible realization of the original goals of the United Nations Charter.

Among the actions to be taken toward these ends are the following:

(1) Establishment in the General Assembly of a decision-making system founded on a requirement for three simultaneous majorities in order to approve binding resolutions. These majorities shall be based on three factors: first, one-nation, one vote (the same as now); second, population; third, contributions to the regular U.N. budget (a rough measure of GNP). This arrangement shall be rooted in Article 21 of the U.N. Charter, which states:

The General Assembly shall adopt its own rules of procedure. It shall elect its President for each session.

A Decision-Making Working Group (DMWG) shall be established by the General Assembly to develop guidelines for application of the three “legs” of the Binding Triad system for Global Decision-Making. Among the matters to be determined by the DMWG will be the size of majorities required for passage on the second and third legs, and possible percentage limitations on populations and the contributions to U.N. budget(s). The first leg of the Binding Triad vote will remain as it currently stands in the U.N. Charter, in Article 18, which states:

1. Each member of the General Assembly shall have one vote.

2. Decisions of the General Assembly on important questions shall be made by a two-thirds majority of the members present and voting. These questions shall include: recommendations with respect to the maintenance of international peace and security, the election of the non-permanent members of the Security Council, the election of the members of the Economic and Social Council, the election of members of the Trusteeship Council in accordance with paragraph 1(c) of Article 86, the admission of new Members to the United Nations, the suspension of the rights and privileges of membership, the expulsion of Members, questions relating to the operation of the trusteeship system, and budgetary questions.

3. Decisions on other questions, including the determination of additional categories of questions to be decided by a two-thirds majority, shall be made by a majority of the members present and voting.

Non-binding General Assembly decisions will be able to be approved in the same manner as at present, without majorities on the second and third legs of the BT. The DMWG shall recommend to the General Assembly the questions requiring use of the Binding Triad.

(2) Development of a closer working relationship between the Security Council and the General Assembly. The framers of the U.N. Charter clearly had in mind a higher level of cooperation between the two bodies than has eventuated, evidently for the reason that the Assembly’s non-binding resolutions adopted by a greatly expanded membership are not viewed with sufficient sympathy by the divergent interests of the power structure of the Security Council. (See Chapters IV and V of the U.N. Charter, which delineate the rules governing the operation of the Security Council and General Assembly.) In order to foster synergy between the Council and the Assembly, the Assembly will seek to join with the Council to create a Council-Assembly Working Group (CAWG) to advance the Organization’s capability of coping with issues of global security.

(3) Creation of considerably greater revenues to carry out the diverse social aims proclaimed in the U.N. Charter. Spurred by the glaring shortfall of funds available for improvements in the lives of those on Planet Earth, a growing number of people and groups have been developing proposals for various forms of global taxes for the purpose of human betterment. These small taxes, it is noted, would have a beneficial impact amounting to a great multiple of their total on the overall condition of Homo sapiens. To take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity, the Assembly establishes the U.N. Financial Working Group (UNFWG) to examine these various plans and the means of implementing them as soon as possible. The UNFWG shall include members of the Economic and Social Council. (The General Assembly has the implicit authority to levy taxes in the first paragraph of Article 17 of the U.N. Charter, which states that the Assembly “shall consider and approve the budget of the Organization.”

(4) Help for Failing States, which are a heavy burden not only on themselves, but also on their neighbors and, indeed, the rest of the world as well. As our shrinking planet undergoes a rapid transition from a haphazard jigsaw of sovereign nation states to – who knows what – it is our solemn responsibility to do our best to assure that those in trouble get a helping hand. With that in mind, the Assembly establishes the Helping Hand Working Group (HHWG) to aid our members in difficulty to improve their lot.

To conclude our presentation of the case for four new panels critical to tellurian travails, let us note that they are integral – all four are mutually supportive. We declare that if the Assembly will adopt this resolution – and act on it in a serious manner – it can go down in history as a major milestone demonstrating human sanity.