Erdogan Revived 'The World Is Bigger Than Five' And Called For A Security Council Without Permanent Members

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 2 Of 15

Image Source: @RTErdogan

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan returned to the UN General Assembly with the slogan that has defined his speeches for more than a decade, and a proposal that goes further than most calls for Security Council reform.

"We must acknowledge that a system in which the will of more than 190 countries is subject to the whim of just five countries is not a fair system, and it is not capable of fully inspiring or establishing trust either," Erdoğan said on the opening day of the General Debate of the 81st session, Tuesday, September 22. "The world is bigger than five."

Erdoğan turned the phrase into a slogan in his first General Assembly speech as president in 2014 and has returned to it repeatedly since. This year he paired it with a call, according to reports of the speech, to abolish the veto held by the five permanent members, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, and to replace permanent membership with a Council whose members are elected by the General Assembly. He also called for greater powers for the Assembly itself.

His case rested on the UN's record over the past year. "The United Nations, established 81 years ago to maintain international peace and security, is no longer able to fulfil this mission," he said. "Or more precisely, it has been rendered unable to do so."

He described the past 12 months as "one of the bloodiest periods of the last 30 years, marked by more than 60 conflicts and wars from Gaza to Ukraine and Russia, from Myanmar to Darfur, from Iran to Lebanon." People in Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan and other crisis zones who had placed their hopes in the UN, he said, had been deeply disappointed, and the injustices endured by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank "deeply offend the conscience of humanity".

International law, he said, must apply equally to strong and weak countries, warning that a system in which impunity becomes the norm is destined to decay.

Türkiye occupies an unusual place in the debate over a multipolar world. It is a NATO member, yet its critique of the permanent five is closer in tone to that of many Global South governments than to that of its Western allies. It has also built security ties beyond the alliance. In the same week, Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the Assembly that a Makkah Joint Defence Agreement between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye was aimed at strengthening stability and not directed against any country.

The speech drew a sharp response. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used his own address later in the week to target Erdoğan, prompting Ankara to accuse him of making baseless accusations from the UN podium.

Erdoğan's proposal faces steep odds. Under the UN Charter, any amendment changing the Council's composition or the veto must be ratified by all five permanent members. Its significance lies instead in how widely the underlying complaint is now shared. During the same debate, Spain, Finland and Malaysia also called for the veto to end.

The national statements delivered at this year's UN General Assembly left little doubt about how far the ground has shifted. Opening the debate, Secretary-General António Guterres told world leaders that "we are clearly moving towards a multipolar world" and that the movement is irreversible, though he warned it could take the shape of fragmentation and transactionalism rather than a networked order rooted in international law. The backdrop was hard to miss: a US-Israeli war with Iran nearly seven months old, the US capture of Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro in January, and a US President who used the same podium to say he was weighing a deal with Tehran against "annihilating" it. Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said the World Trade Organization was on life support and condemned the use of tariffs as "a weapon of coercion and blackmail", while India's S. Jaishankar declared that the post-1945 order is giving way to new realities. Türkiye's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Spain's Pedro Sánchez, from very different vantage points, both called for an end to the veto held by the Security Council's five permanent members. Russia's Sergey Lavrov went further, telling the Assembly that "the dictatorship of a single hegemon has run amok" and that a fairer, multipolar order was emerging. What remains unsettled is not whether power is spreading, but whether the institutions built in 1945 can adjust fast enough to hold it together.