Willing to serve: Empire, status, and Canadian campaigns for the United Nations Security Council (1946–1947)
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702020980764 |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| Author | Caroline Dunton |
| Subject Matter | Scholarly Essay |
Scholarly Essay
International Journal
Willing to serve: Empire,
2020, Vol. 75(4) 529–547
! The Author(s) 2020
status, and Canadian
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DOI: 10.1177/0020702020980764
campaigns for the United
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Nations Security Council
(1946–1947)
Caroline Dunton
School of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
Abstract
The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is a place where states can seek inter-
national status by campaigning for its elected seats. I understand status as membership
in a club and examine both the nature of the hierarchies of status and the responsibil-
ities associated with that membership. To do this, I examine Canada’s first two cam-
paigns to the Security Council in 1946 and 1947 in the context of the origins of the UN.
I make a twofold argument. First, I argue that the hierarchy of the UNSC in the late
1940s was an imperial one, within which states campaigned for seats by articulating
their relationships to these imperial formations. Second, I argue that the process of
campaigning is also a process of claiming to take on the responsibilities of the UNSC’s
mandate.
Keywords
Status, United Nations Security Council, responsibility, empire, Canada
Corresponding author:
Caroline Dunton, School of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ottawa, 120 University
Place, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5, Canada.
Email: caroline.dunton@uottawa.ca
530
International Journal 75(4)
A campaign for a seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) often
leads to a domestic media frenzy. During Canada’s 2020 campaign, partisans and
pundits dismissed the UNSC as unimportant and inconsequential, labelling the
campaign as vain or silly. Yet, as Vincent Pouliot writes, “nowhere else do state
delegates debate as explicitly on the international pecking order and the princi-
ples by which a privileged few should be granted special status and powers.”1 On
the surface, the two-tiered membership of the UNSC—a permanent five (P5) plus
elected members—might seem the most obvious place to think about status.
However, the divide between permanent and elected is only the tip of the iceberg.
Status is a puzzling concept in International Relations (IR), both because it is
very broad and because its theoretical definitions do not necessarily line up with
colloquial understandings, which tend to align with IR’s understanding of
“reputation.” My goal is to begin stitching across some of the holes in IR’s
conceptual fabric by examining the origins of the UNSC, in order to understand
how competitions for elected seats, and in turn, status competitions, came to be
within the Council. I address the nature of status hierarchies and the goal of
status-seeking within the UNSC via elected members—focusing on Canada, in
particular.
Status depends on hierarchies, explicit or implied. I begin with the nature of the
UNSC hierarchy, questioning the common description of hierarchy as a binary of
“great powers versus others.” Next, I ask the question, “for what?” Membership in
an exclusive club and the nature of that membership has been treated as an end
point rather than status having deeper purpose. Consequently, I make a twofold
argument in this paper on the nature of status. First, I argue that the Security
Council’s implicit and explicit hierarchy, through which status is sought, was
established as an imperial one, as evidenced by early campaigns to join the
Council. Second, I argue that to seek status within this hierarchy is to indicate a
willingness to take on the responsibilities of the club. In a setting as central to
international politics as the UNSC, campaigning to join the club means justifying
the ability to take on (at least rhetorically) the responsibilities of the club’s
mandate.
I build these arguments by examining Canada’s campaigns for a seat on the
Security Council in 1946 and 1947, when six elected seats were selected from forty-
six non-P5 member states. Canada was also an active member in the founding of
the UN. It straddled both the Commonwealth of the declining British Empire and
the sphere of influence of American power. It also championed the ideas of small
and middle power countries and was both a former colony and, while reluctant to
admit it, an active colonizer of Indigenous territory during a transitional moment
for international order. Most importantly, Canada articulated an early vision of
how status should be distributed in international organizations—the functional
principal—and used this in its own status-seeking through the pursuit of a
1.
Vincent Pouliot, International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilateral Diplomacy
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 82.
Dunton
531
UNSC seat. With this focus on Canada’s 1946 and 1947 campaigns, I demonstrate
how these early campaigns were crucial for articulating relationships to post-war
imperial formations and positions on the UNSC’s distribution of status, power,
and responsibility. I first explore the concepts of status and empire, and then
discuss the campaigns themselves.
Understanding status
Contemporary discussions of status have focused on its conceptual proximity to
legitimacy, recognition, hierarchy, and identity, where status is a structural phe-
nomenon related to filling a place within a hierarchy (and being recognized as
such).2 Loosely, the mainstream status literature posits that states pursue status
for various rewards, privileges, or rights, or because it matters for identity. Some
scholars of status understand it as a ranking of states on attributes (such as wealth
or military power).3 Others see it as not simply a ranking; they are more concerned
with the features of status as membership in a club, where states recognize one
another as members and peers.4 Status can have overlap in terms of club mem-
bership and relative ranking within that club,5 especially in terms of how they seek
it, but as Paul Beaumont writes, “the rules that constitute these two types of status-
seeking [ranking versus membership] produce very different relationships between
actors.”6
For both groups, the existence of a hierarchy is implied, though not identically.
For the former, where the focus is on ranking, two types of scholarship have
emerged—in the traditions of IR’s realism and in an adaptation of social psychol-
ogy to IR. The realist strand of status research has typically focused on the status
competitions of great powers and the aspirations of rising powers, the role of
polarity in relation to status, and the role of status as a cause of conflict or war.7
Social psychology adaptations have scaled up theories about why individuals
desire status in order to theorize about state behaviour.8 In these cases, states have
social interactions that matter, but the end goal is still ranking-based. Some have
2.
Iver B. Neumann and Benjamin de Carvalho, eds., Small States and Status Seeking: Norway’s Quest
for International Standing (London; New York: Routledge, 2015).
3.
T.V. Paul, Deborah Welch Larson, and William Curtis Wohlforth, eds., “Introduction,” in Status in
World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 7.
4.
Marina G. Duque, “Recognizing international status: A relational approach,” International Studies
Quarterly 62, no. 3 (1 September 2018): 577. A similar club membership definition is also noted in
Paul, Larson, and Wohlforth, “Introduction,” 7.
5.
Paul, Larson, and Wohlforth, “Introduction,” 7.
6.
Paul Beaumont, “The grammar of status competition: international hierarchies as domestic
practice,” (Ph.D. diss, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, 2020), 16.
7.
For example: Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983); William C. Wohlforth, “Unipolarity status competition, and great power war,” World
Politics 61, no. 1 (January 2009): 28–57; and Allan Dafoe, Jonathan Renshon, and Paul Huth,
“Reputation and status as motives for war,” Annual Review of Political Science 17, no. 1 (2014):
371–393.
8.
Jonathan Renshon, Fighting for Status: Hierarchy and Conflict in World Politics (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2017).
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International Journal 75(4)
drawn on social identity theory, examining how “intergroup status dynamics influ-
ence individual attitudes and behavior to derive a taxonomy of strategies by which
states can seek status . . .”9 Larson and Shevchenko suggest that states seek status
by adopting norms, institutions, behaviours, practices, or values of members of the
club they want to join, calling it “social mobility.” They also suggest that states will
engage in tactics to seek favourable positions on new ranking systems, re-evaluate
negative traits as positive, or identify new criteria in order to rank more highly.
Lastly, they may try to compete with higher-ranked states on areas that make the
higher-ranked state stand out.10 Ward refers to both social psychological theory-
types as following a logic of emulation, wherein states make an “effort to improve
the group’s status by acquiring symbolically significant resources that are consen-
sually valued and thought necessary for the achievement of higher status.”11
Status, at least in these two ranking approaches, often treats great power hege-
mony as the central hierarchy in question. They take this international structure,
driven by great powers, as the natural order of modern international politics,
limiting both how status and its underlying hierarchy can be conceptualized....
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