There is almost universal agreement that the U.N. Security Council has become increasingly unrepresentative over the past 59 years. Its five perma- nent members are a self-appointed oligarchy who wrote their own exalted status into the U.N. Charter. International stratification is never rigid, and states are upwardly and downwardly mobile. A static permanent membership of the UNSC undermines the logic of the status and diminishes the authority of the organization.
The reform is held hostage to a curious oddity. While there is consensus on the need for reform, the agreement breaks down as soon as any one particular formula or package is proposed. One major explanation for this is that "representation" can have many different meanings:
It could mean representing the interests of one's constituents, as members of popularly elected legislatures in Japan, the United States, India and Britain do. Australia and New Zealand, for example, when elected to the UNSC, could act more as representatives of Asia-Pacific than of "Western Europe" to which they are attached in the U.N. system of groupings. (The full group is known as "Western Europe and Others," which consist of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and, for some purposes, the United States.)