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Following the UN link, I find a curious diatribe for a Libertarian website (am not being "more-pure", just curious). It claims the UN isn't democratic enough. Democracy? What kind of statists run this place? ;-) But this snippet interested me:
"An alternative to the UN comprised of democratic countries (who have to ask to join, and who can be expelled by the others simply for not being democratic) would be a great improvement." I agree that the UN is indeed hardly a model of democracy, for many reasons. A product of WWII, the Allies made sure they controlled it (ie the Security Council). Their veto power is especially unjustified. The General Assembly (189 countries) seems more democratic, but it is only an assembly of states, not people. As Strawman says, some of these states are not democratic in themselves. But the greater problem is that it is one state-one vote. Conceivably, the 95 smallest countries could vote for a resolution that the 94 biggest vote against, and the small states would win while representing only 4% of the global population. So to be truly democratic, you need a World Assembly directly elected from the people in proportion to population. And instead of kicking out non-democratic countries, which would be very destabilising, every country agrees to UN supervision of delegation elections or their vote in the Assembly is reduced to one, regardless of how many delegates they would normally get. (Thanks to Ernest Bevin and Peter Singer for those ideas) In the end, a more democratic UN or equivalent would be an improvement, but it would not serve the interests of the current powers that be, and would likely increase aid.
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