UN General Assembly
1997

ineffective or inefficient Security Council. But no one has yet made a convincing argument that a Security Council of, say, 26 members, as has been proposed by the Non- Aligned Movement, would be any less efficient or effective than a Security Council of 21. This is of course assuming that effectiveness and efficiency are not narrowly defined as merely making it more difficult for 11 any of the current permanent members and their allies to ensure that nobody can prevent them from having their own way. In any case, can we really decide on the effectiveness and efficiency of an expanded Security Council before we know what the powers of the new permanent members are going to be? This leads us into a tautological situation. We cannot know how an expanded Security Council consisting of an expanded number of permanent members will operate because, as I argued a moment ago, the definition of what constitutes a new permanent member cannot be separated from the question of the veto. And the current permanent