{"id":24801,"date":"2026-06-18T11:51:27","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T11:51:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/06\/18\/beyond-great-powers-the-role-of-small-states-in-the-security-council-european-leadership-network\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T11:51:27","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T11:51:27","slug":"beyond-great-powers-the-role-of-small-states-in-the-security-council-european-leadership-network","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/06\/18\/beyond-great-powers-the-role-of-small-states-in-the-security-council-european-leadership-network\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond great powers: the role of small states in the Security Council – European Leadership Network"},"content":{"rendered":"

Voting for the five non-permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council took place on 3 June, with the successful candidates set to begin their two-year terms on 1 January 2027. While the African and Latin American-Caribbean seats were uncontested, Kyrgyzstan defeated the Philippines after several rounds of voting, winning 141 votes to 49. It will be Kyrgyzstan’s first term on the Council.
For the two seats allocated to the Western European and Others Group (WEOG), Austria, Portugal, and Germany competed for election. Austria and Portugal secured the seats in the first round, leaving Germany empty-handed. German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul described the outcome<\/a> as a \u201creal disappointment\u201d and a \u201cbitter defeat\u201d.
The result is a reminder that influence within the UN is not always correlated with size. Austria and Portugal, each with populations of around 10 million people, secured Security Council seats ahead of Germany \u2013 the most populous country in Europe and one of the world’s largest economies.
What will the elected members be facing when joining the Council? Their terms will unfold against a backdrop of intense regional conflict, a continuing debate over the role of multilateralism, the downsizing of peacekeeping missions, and arguments over UN reform.
Further, what influence can small countries bring to the table? What impact can they have on the five permanent members and veto-holders?
The first demonstration of the power of small states was shown during the drafting of the UN Charter in 1945 when two women delegates, Bertha Lutz of Brazil and Minerva Bernardino of the Dominican Republic<\/a>, fought \u2013 and succeeded \u2013 to include Article VIII on the equal rights of women.
Let us not forget that the majority of UN member states are small. They have organised by creating cross-regional groups such as the Forum of Small States<\/a> (FOSS), which brings together more than 100 countries from all regions of the world, and the official grouping of Small Island Developing States<\/a> (SIDS). This has helped amplify their views and create pressure points on critical issues, such as climate change and economic issues, thereby reshaping the global agenda.
While there is no universally accepted definition of a small state, countries with populations below ten million<\/a> are often regarded as small. Small states tend to define themselves by their limited military, economic, and diplomatic weight relative to major powers.
Can the voices of small states be heard in the Security Council? In a 2008 speech<\/a> on the role of small states at the United Nations, former New Zealand ambassador Colin Keating argued that smaller countries possess important comparative advantages in multilateral diplomacy. Such states, he said, have greater ease of internal consultation, much greater openness and flexibility, and fewer bureaucratic silos, all leading to credibility and nimbleness. He argued for a team approach among the 10 elected, non-permanent members of the Security Council, known collectively as the E-10, by building a network that was a huge element of leverage for small states in the Council.
Not all elected members are small states, and not all small states serve on the Council. The E-10 includes countries of very different sizes and capabilities, yet it is often through this body that small states have been able to amplify their influence. Acting collectively, elected members have challenged established working methods, pushed back against the concentration of power among the permanent members, and demonstrated that influence in the Council is not determined solely by military or economic weight.
Since then, the arguments in favour of small-state activism have become even stronger. In the words of Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong<\/a>: “Without a rules-based order that treats countries equally, the risks for small states increase exponentially. We face the danger of descending into a world where power dictates justice \u2013 a world governed by the law of the jungle, where might makes right. Such a scenario would undermine the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence, which are the lifelines for small states to safeguard our interest”.
The E-10 have clearly enhanced their collective identity within the Council in recent years. They have drafted resolutions and challenged the penholder system which is a consequential working method \u2013 albeit informal \u2013 to lead negotiations and shape responses to crisis situations. The penholder<\/a> leads on a specific subject, and this role had been traditionally assumed by one of the P3 states: France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This meant that they negotiated a draft resolution and then submitted the draft to the E-10, often with the warning that the P5 had already agreed on the text which should therefore not be amended.
This dominance of the penholder role \u2013 in essence limiting the contributions of the elected members \u2013 led the E-10 to challenge the system and reinforce their collective identity. They called for a more equitable distribution of responsibilities and asserted themselves by reaching out to states beyond the Council to promote burden-sharing and a more inclusive approach.
The growing activism of elected members reflects a broader debate about the ability of states that are neither great powers nor permanent Council members to shape international affairs.
\t\t\t\t\t <\/svg> \t\t \t\tThe growing activism of elected members reflects a broader debate about the ability of states that are neither great powers nor permanent Council members to shape international affairs. \t\t\t\t\t <\/svg> \t\t \t\t Angela Kane<\/span> \t\t
The debate over the role of smaller and medium-sized states gained further traction earlier this year when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney highlighted the role of middle powers<\/a> at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He argued that, in an era of renewed geopolitical rivalry, countries that are neither great powers nor superpowers must work together to uphold international norms and build strategic coalitions around shared interests.
While his remarks focused on middle powers rather than small states, they reflected a similar belief: that influence in international affairs increasingly depends on coalition-building rather than size alone.
He called for broad and strategic engagement, shaping the world by building coalitions that work, issue by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together. In some cases, he said, \u201cthis will be the vast majority of nations\u201d.
\u201cWhat it’s doing is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture, on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities\u201d, Carney added.
The speech didn\u2019t indicate how his idea could work in practice but Carney\u2019s subsequent address to the Australian Parliament<\/a> on 5 March provided examples detailing how it could be developed further.
Yet the concept of a middle power suffers from the difficulty of lacking a precise definition. Is it defined by size, economic or political power, population, or by a shared commitment to a rules-based international order?
One would think that the small states had a similar crisis of identification \u2013 but they simply self-identified as small, without further introspection.
There has not been much thinking about which countries could fit in a \u201cmiddle powers coalition\u201d. We do have precedents, however, of other groupings not limited to size. \u201cCoalitions of the Willing\u201d are such examples, where like-minded countries can undertake joint action outside formal institutions like the UN or NATO. The most recent example of this was the formation in 2025 of the Coalition of the Willing to help Ukraine. It is now comprised of 35 members including European and Commonwealth nations, plus Norway and T\u00fcrkiye.
Other initiatives are groupings of \u201clike-minded countries\u201d, and this is where small states play an outsized role. This has been demonstrated in the field of disarmament and non-proliferation where three small states stand out: Austria, Ireland, and New Zealand.
All three are firmly committed to military neutrality and strongly support the abolition of nuclear weapons. Their advocacy was instrumental in the effort to negotiate the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons<\/a> (TPNW), which concluded in 2017. They have also jointly supported efforts to negotiate a ban on lethal autonomous weapons and have worked to bring the issue of explosive weapons in populated areas to the attention of the international community. More recently, they were instrumental<\/a> in securing a UN General Assembly resolution in 2024 to study the broad impacts of nuclear war.
While I do not wish to imply that they were solely responsible for these outcomes, their initiative, coalition-building, and ability to forge consensus were instrumental in driving the agenda forward. By persuading other countries to join their efforts, they demonstrated how small states can exercise influence far beyond their size.
This demonstrates that small states can play an important role in international affairs. They can influence developments, shape decisions, and exercise agency. Above all, they are willing to be active in global affairs and are not afraid to challenge the status quo<\/em>.
The European Leadership Network itself as an institution holds no formal policy positions. The opinions articulated above represent the views of the authors rather than the European Leadership Network or its members. The ELN aims to encourage debates that will help develop Europe\u2019s capacity to address the pressing foreign, defence, and security policy challenges of our time, to further its charitable purposes.<\/i>
Image credit: dpa Picture-Alliance<\/span><\/a>
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Voting for the five non-permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council took place on 3 June, with the successful candidates set to begin their two-year terms on 1 January 2027. While the African and Latin American-Caribbean seats were uncontested, Kyrgyzstan defeated the Philippines after several rounds of voting, winning 141 votes to 49. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24801\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}