A lot of people like to say the Security Council (“SC”) is just a foreign affairs tool and leave it at that. While they aren’t necessarily wrong (the SC is dominated by foreign affairs (“FA”) afterall, and even the objectively best resolutions will fail if the FA environment hates them), what the SC ultimately cares about is made up of what its voters care about. And, for something that’s just an “FA tool”, a lot of people really seem to care about the merit of the proposals at hand as well.
So I just wanted to discuss a dumb little model I use to visualize how this process works. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but maybe a little fun?
THE MODEL
So the first part of the model is pretty simple. Pretend you’re looking at someone through one of those cameras you can slap like a dozen lenses onto. Everyone knows that the lenses you put on or off the camera will alter how the person looks while you’re staring at them through the camera. Some lenses will make things crystal clear or colored differently, other lenses will screw up the image in a way no one likes.
Now the key thing here is to imagine that the person you’re taking photos of is really a Security Council resolution. And to imagine that you have two distinct lenses - depending on the characteristics of those lenses, they can really alter your perception of the person/resolution. With the lens X on your camera, maybe you’ll think the person’s photo is gonna turn out amazing. But if the lenses are Y, then the person’s photo is really gonna suck.
That’s the basics of the analogy!
But what are the lenses? Well - as I was saying, there are two lenses in which people tend to view SC resolutions. The more basic one (like say, the one you’d put on the camera first) is the quality/merit lens. The second one that tends to alter the entire picture as seen through the first lens is the political/opinion lens.
The quality lens is the first basal view most people tend to view a Security Council Commend/Condem (“C/C”) through. It’s basically the simple questions of: does this person actually merit the resolution and is this resolution well-written? This lens ignores what the reader feels about the nominee or nominee’s region/community and/or ignores the reader’s political motivations. Instead it’s simply asking if the reader, based on the text itself and their own opinion on what is always considered meritable or not, would say if the nominee deserves the C/C. In other words: if the reader was so and so “neutral” about the nominee, how would they rate the resolution based on the resolution’s writing and claims alone?
The opinion lens is the second camera lens that alters the first. Think of it as the second camera lens you place onto your camera in front of the first. Depending on the opinion of the nominee or region said nominee is a part of, the reader’s perception of the quality of the resolution is often altered to either be amplified or nullified. This is especially common when one has personal grievances against the nominee/their region or is highly friendly with the nominee/their region - the reader in such cases may treat the resolution more harshly or give it more grace, respectively. The same can often be said on the political level i.e. regions and/or influential gameplayers pulling strings - friendly regions sometimes view the resolution with more leniency, while enemy regions may view the resolution with more strictness.
Now, this is not to say that everyone views things this way. Some people only care about the resolution’s quality (thus never utilizing the second “opinion” camera lens), others really only care about C/Cing their friends and/or using the SC as a political tool (you can view this as using both lenses but the “opinion” lens really distorting the view of the final product, or the person in question skipping using the first “quality” lens altogether i.e. they don’t care about quality at all). Some people who use both lenses really are just using the political lens but pretending to care about the resolution’s quality just to appear more civilized. Some people may also simply view SC C/C things from a political view first, and then care about quality if the resolution is politically feasible (i.e. putting the opinion lens on BEFORE the quality lens). Also in reality, for certain situations, people may alter what filters they use or switch their order around (like someone who uses the opinion + quality lens on gameplayers may be neutral on Rpers and thus use only the quality lens).
But I think this model helps to explain why the statements “the SC cares about merit” and “the SC is a foreign policy tool” can both be true at the same time - many (but not all) people care about true merit when they have no interfering opinion unrelated to the resolution’s quality. Others only care about the SC as a political tool, but they also don’t really want to be passing slop either (afterall, is it really a great FA achievement if you pass a resolution intending to honor a friend/ally, when said resolution sucks on all objective measures of quality?).
What lens is used and the order they’re used varies per person per context - but the ultimate fact is that both quality and opinion play a role in how an SC C/C is decided at vote, because overall the net view of the proposal is affected by both quality AND opinion in the SC’s voter pool. You can pass a great resolution so long as everyone is neutral to the nominee/region, and to pass a sloppy ass resolution requires pretty much extensively difficult FA maneuvering.
To put it short - quality DOES matter in the SC. So the implicit claim of the “SC is just a foreign policy tool” camp, that of quality being unimportant, is hopefully shown by this model to be false.