For making its case, however, Taiwan can go beyond the arguments that it is presenting for eligibility to gain U.N. membership by citing the examples of India, Ukraine and Belarus.
A land of 23 million people, a vibrant and liberal democracy, the 18th-largest economy in the world and a major trading partner of many countries, including China--these are all Taiwanese attributes that the majority of U.N. members should be envious of. Then again, the fact also remains that the Republic of China, which Taiwan is officially known, withdrew from the United Nations in 1971 to give way to the communist People's Republic of China. This was the excuse that the U.N. secretary-general cited while rejecting the Taiwanese application.
President Chen Shui-bian points out that this time, the application was in the name of "Taiwan," not of "the Republic of China," and that the rejection is wrong since Resolution 2758 did not mention anything about Taiwan: the word "Taiwan" simply does not appear in it. The idea here is that the vast majority of Taiwanese people--77 percent in a recent poll--want to join the world body. For all practical purposes, these people are managing their lives independent of Communist China and eager to break away from the international isolation that has been imposed on them for decades by China. This is a reasonable argument, indeed.
Going by Article 4 of the U.N. Charter, there are five requisite conditions for an applicant to become a U.N. member--being a "state," believing in peace, accepting obligations of the U.N. Charter, being able to carry out these obligations and willing to do so. Of these, China argues that Taiwan does not fulfill the first condition of being a state as "it is a part of China."
Nevertheless, it could be argued that Taiwan is effectively a state since the Chinese writ does not run at all in the island. Furthermore, it is also a fact that there are examples of India, Belarus and Ukraine becoming U.N. members even when they did not have sovereignty.
India was a founding member of the United Nations in 1945, two years before it became independent from Great Britain. It was a member of the League of Nations as well. The justification cited for its gaining membership in these two world organizations, even though it was still under the British rule, was that it contributed greatly in money and material during the two world wars and strengthened the causes of peace and development.
In fact, as a founding member, the then non-sovereign India (thus not a "state" at all) participated in the drafting of the U.N. Charter. So much so that when the British government nominated three Indians to participate in the charter-making exercise at San Francisco in 1945, almost all the Indian nationalists--including Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, then imprisoned for fighting for India's freedom--criticized the nominees for not representing the Indian people.
As in regards to Belarus and Ukraine, which were at the time part of the Soviet Union, then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt had to make an important concession to Soviet leader Josef Stalin's request that these two be admitted, thus increasing the Soviet Union's seats in the United Nations to three. Roosevelt wanted the Soviet Union's participation in the United Nations at any cost. He held the view that there could not be any viable United Nations to provide leadership in the postwar international system if there was no unanimity among the five victorious nations: the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and the Republic of China. His view was perhaps correct, given the pathetic failure of the League of Nations in preventing war because of the non-participation of the countries that had the real capability to fight against the aggressors.
Incidentally, Stalin originally requested seats for all 16 Soviet Socialist Republics, but Roosevelt turned down this request, and the compromise was to allow only Ukraine and Belarus into the United Nations. The United States had also countered Stalin's proposal with the request to allow all 50 American states to become members of the United Nations, a suggestion that encouraged Stalin to agree to the compromise.
If the above examples are any lesson, China should welcome Taiwan to become a U.N. member, since in the event of bringing this so-called "renegade province" into the world body, it will create a basis for greater cross-strait communication. And as long as the Taiwanese continue to maintain their effective independence, the world body should not practice apartheid against them. Either way, Taiwan's case is weighty.
--Prakash Nanda is a consulting editor of Journal of Peace Studies in New Delhi, India.
Copyright 2007 by Prakash Nanda
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