Is the United Nations a DAO in disguise?

People usually talk about DAOs as principally new ways to organize, which is certainly true in technical implementation. But in practical terms, DAOs exist all around us in one way or another. We recently explored how various chat groups are de facto DAOs. But what about a massive organization that everybody knows? Is the United Nations itself a DAO? Considering it may be about to undergo a major test of its structure (more on that below), the UN is a great example to explore.

Membership

In essence, every country in the world is a member of the United Nations (with a few political exceptions, of course). As far as the international community, an organization doesn’t get much more distributed or inclusive than that.

Membership is generally lifetime (again with some exceptions, ahem, Taiwan) and is based on the general international recognition of a country (a sort of soulbound NFT). There is a hard-coded rule of absolute equality among members, with the caveat of the Security Council about which more below.

SubDAOs

The UN has many working groups and committees as well as UN-affiliated agencies such as UNICEF and UNESCO. The former are staffed with experts to study issues in depth and make recommendations to the broader UN. The latter are tasked with executing on specific goals of the UN, based on passed resolutions.

Proposals and Voting

Any member nation can submit a proposal for a resolution. The voting in the General Assembly has a number of rules but no country has the power of veto. Majority rule decides. Of course, any resolutions of the General Assembly are merely recommendations and do not have enforcement power. Hence, the Security Council.

The UN Security Council

The 15-member Security Council of the UN acts as a sort of validator group within the DAO. Its decisions are binding and require 9 “yes” votes out of 15. Plus, any of the 5 permanent members can veto a proposal, which the USSR/Russia, China, and the US in particular have frequently done.

As such, the SC has a disproportionate amount of power given to those members who are considered crucial to the survival of the UN (US, China, France, UK, and Russia). The rotation of the non-permanent members makes it more democratic. Yet the veto power does create a very centralized roadblock to the effectiveness of the SC.

The SC reform initiative

According to the Washington Post, the Biden administration is planning an overhaul of the UN Security Council. This would include adding around 6 more permanent members with the goal of giving more representation to countries from Africa and Latin America. Crucially, these new members will not have veto power.

Where the UN comes up short

It’s clear that this veto power is the real power in the UN. It’s also clear that the UN is dominated by the world’s strongest nations, especially the United States and China, as well as various interest blocks (the Arab/Muslim block, BRIC, capitalist vs. communist blocks, etc.). Despite its intention of being the venue for all the world’s nations to peacefully resolve their disputes and create a better world, the UN ended up being only as effective as the interests of its most powerful members allow it to be. Can it be improved? Can it truly become a DAO?

DAOfying the UN

First and foremost, it should be acknowledged that the United Nations can never truly be a DAO when one person represents as many as one billion people. In that way, the UN will never be truly representative. So if it is to work as a DAO, it should be a DAO of DAOs, with each nation having its own DAO to convey the actual will of the people on every issue in a timely manner to the person representing their nation’s DAO.

That being said, the UN could have democratic voting that has enforcement power, including power of the treasury. With the highly-charged political atmosphere in the UN, it would help to have strong, trusted, and transparently proven to be expert subDAO groups advising, suggesting, or validating the proposals in their areas of expertise.

Removing the Security Council Bottleneck

Speaking of validators, the immutable veto power of the 5 original permanent members of the SC will never allow the UN to be decentralized nor autonomous. How can any true democracy happen when only 5 members out of 193 get the power to block any action? Especially when any one of those 5 can do so unilaterally. Solutions could include switching to a a veto by the majority of the 5 permanent members, by requiring the veto to include a majority (or even a supermajority) of the other SC members in addition to the vetoing permanent member, or getting rid of permanent members entirely (opting instead for a rotation, perhaps, where maybe 3 of those 5 would always be a part of a 2-year membership term in the “veto” power chairs and 2 of the non-permanent members of the SC would join them in wielding the veto power).

Granted that superpowers do not want to subject themselves to the will of weaker countries. One possible solution may be to weigh the voting power differently for different members based on their importance to the DAOs continued existence, interest or expertise in a given vote, or other factors. There are no easy solutions here, yet plenty of food for thought.

Putting resolutions on the blockchain

Ask the average person on the street about UN resolutions — could they name even one? The UN General Assembly, especially, meets, discusses, proposes, and accepts resolutions that promptly go onto a dusty shelf. Perhaps, putting them on the blockchain and having an easy system of getting notified about the ones on issues you care about will bring greater awareness to UN resolutions. And with that, maybe those resolutions will have enough outside pressure to be more actionable than mere recommendations.

What’s in it for the 193 me’s?

More than anything, members need to be incentivized to participate in everyone else’s benefit, not merely for their own or that of their block. Nor should the quid pro quo mentality remain — it’s a fatal flaw for any DAO wannabe. Whether through transparency, everybody-wins scenarios, stick-and-carrot mechanism, something else, or a combination thereof, the members of the United Nations should feel incentivized to govern wisely, fairly, and for the good of the DAO. And if they won’t, well maybe the DAO-centric future doesn’t even need the UN, especially when more and more of the 8 billion global citizens will form direct governing links via DAOs and outside of national identities.

Stay tuned!

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