The competing proposals for reforming the United Nations — and especially its Security Council — today have largely centred on questions of power redistribution and institutional design.
Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, recently published an article on this matter in Foreign Affairs magazine, as did Kishore Mahbubani, a senior Singaporean diplomat.
The two proposals reveal that reform debates are marked by a deeper theoretical divergence over whether global legitimacy hinges on balancing power or modernising institutions. But there is a missing agenda — despite continuing efforts by scholars such as Professor Amitav Acharya — namely, the issue of civilisational imbalance.
Exactly half a century ago, Professor Ali Mazrui also framed the need for reforming the UN in explicitly civilisational terms. He did this in an elaborate form in his book The World Federation of Cultures, published in 1976. Let me briefly but critically compare the ideas of Stubb and Mahbubani with Mazrui’s.
Stubb puts UN reform within what he calls an emerging triangular distribution of power among the Global West (consisting of roughly 50 states), the Global East (25 states) and the Global South (125 states). For him, the Security Council’s crisis is symptomatic of a broader systemic transition from Western predominance to contested multipolarity.
Reform — through expanded continental representation (with two additional permanent members from Africa, two from Asia and one from Latin America) — would ensure greater legitimacy.
In addition, he proposed the elimination of the veto and stricter Charter enforcement, including suspension of permanent members that violate it. For Stubb, the problem is geopolitical disequilibrium: the UN must reflect the evolving configuration of macro-blocs to stabilise competition.
Mahbubani’s intervention is more institutional. His “7–7–7” formula seeks to realign representation with 21st-century demographic and economic realities by expanding permanent membership to include major regional powers while creating semi-permanent and rotating tiers.
Mahbubani’s reformed security council would have the following additional permanent members: Brazil, China, the European Union (in place of France and Germany), India and Nigeria. Unlike Stubb, Mahbubani does not conceptualise global politics as triangular rivalry.
Instead, he sees the rising powers as merely seeking recognition within the system rather than its transformation. Reform, therefore, entails recalibrating representation while retaining the state-centric and legal architecture of multilateralism. From Mahbubani’s point of view, the problem is institutional obsolescence.
Mazrui’s position diverges from that of Stubb and Mahbubani at a more foundational level. Mazrui would begin by reminding us that the United Nations represents states but not civilisations. The Security Council’s imbalance is not merely a matter of who wields power but of which cultures are privileged. As he put it: “The UN was formed primarily by the victors of WWII.
Those victors belonged to one and a half civilisations (— the half being the Asian part of the former Soviet Union.) They made themselves permanent members of the UN’s powerful Security Council.
They did make one concession to another civilisation by also making pre-Communist China a permanent member.”
For Mazrui, UN reform must address the issue of civilisational voice alongside state representation. His proposal was fundamentally about decentring Western dominance without dismantling global order. By recalibrating representation around languages, regions and nation states, Mazrui believed we could create a more culturally plural United Nations — one reflecting the economic, demographic and civilisational realities of today. For Mazrui, the problem is Western cultural hegemony embedded in global institutions.
For illustrative purposes, let me use Mazrui’s linguistic framework of five world languages: English, French, Russian, Arabic and Chinese. English and French qualify as established world languages, given their global diffusion, large number of speakers and adoption across multiple regions and states. Russian, Chinese and Arabic, by contrast, are languages that, in Mazrui’s view, merit elevation to world status because of their geopolitical weight, demographic significance and civilisational depth.
The inclusion of Russian is partly justified by the realities of power and technological achievement, as well as its wide use across Eurasia.
Chinese presents an even stronger case, not only because of the sheer number of native speakers but also because of China’s historical contributions to world civilisation and its emergence as a superpower.
Arabic, while less globally widespread, is elevated by its unique position as a bridge between Asia and Africa and its central role in the historical development of world culture — especially through the spread of universal religions such as Islam.
Mazrui’s linguistic ordering is also explicitly corrective. The exclusion — or demotion — of Spanish, despite its large number of speakers, is not because of empirical deficiency but because of normative intent: the need to counterbalance Eurocentrism in global cultural arrangements.
Since English and French already represent Western Europe, adding another Western European language would reinforce existing civilisational dominance rather than pluralise it.
A world language, according to Mazrui, is one that is adopted by at least 10 countries as the main language of business, that has a minimum of 500 million fluent speakers and is spread beyond its continent in a major way.
In addition to world languages, Ali Mazrui’s linguistic framework includes regional languages and communal languages. In Mazrui’s new world order, every child would be required to learn three languages: a world language (for example, English or French), a regional language (for example, German or Swahili) and either a national language (for example, Swedish, Persian or Amharic) or a subnational language (for example, Gujarati or Luganda).
Situating Mazrui within UN reform debates clarifies both his distinctiveness and his limitations. Compared with Stubb, Mazrui shifts the focus from systemic balance to cultural legitimacy. Stubb’s triangular framework acknowledges macro-cultural blocs (West, East and South) but treats them strategically rather than normatively.
According to Mazrui, legitimacy in a post-Western order requires recognition of non-Western civilisational traditions as constitutive actors, not just as geopolitical camps.
The contrast between Mahbubani and Mazrui is sharper. Mahbubani’s reform redistributes authority among major states while leaving its state-centric orientation intact. His approach does indeed make the security council more representative in terms of geography, demography and economic influence. But it ignores the cultural grammar of multilateralism.
Mazrui would question the very assumption that states alone are adequate units of representation. In doing so, Mazrui exposes a Eurocentric blind spot in the mainstream reform proposals.
At the same time, Mazrui’s approach entails practical and theoretical complexities. Civilisations are neither territorially fixed nor politically unified; linguistic communities do not map neatly onto coherent strategic interests.
By introducing civilisation as a unit of representation, Mazrui also risks essentialising cultural categories and underestimating intra-civilisational diversity.
Stubb and Mahbubani avoid this problem by remaining within a state-centric framework but at the expense of largely leaving the issue of civilisational hierarchy unaddressed.
The comparative insight from this analysis is twofold. First, Security Council reform debates operate on different normative levels: structural equilibrium (Stubb), institutional fairness (Mahbubani) and civilisational pluralism (Mazrui). Second, each level captures a dimension of legitimacy that the others neglect.
Power redistribution without institutional redesign and cultural recalibration may remain shallow. Civilisational recognition without feasible institutional mechanisms could be challenging to implement.
Within this triad, Mazrui stands as the most conceptually radical voice.
He extends the reform debate beyond who governs and how, to the more fundamental question of whose civilisation counts. In doing so, he reframes Security Council reform not just as an adjustment of seats and vetoes but as part of a broader struggle over the cultural foundations of global order.
In short, Mazrui argued that the stability of global order depends on how successfully the balance between the increasing similarity among people (homogenisation) and growing concentration of power in one civilisation (hegemonisation) is managed.
When that balance is excessively distorted, the equilibrium between peace and violence could shift towards conflict. In this sense, war and peace at the global level become not just strategic outcomes but reflections of deeper civilisational misalignments.
A flawed reconciliation between homogenisation and hegemonisation could therefore strain the social fabric of world order to the point of rupture.
Seifudein Adem is a visiting professor, Institute for Advanced Research and Education, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan.
The two proposals reveal that reform debates are marked by a deeper theoretical divergence over whether global legitimacy hinges on balancing power or modernising institutions.