“The United Nations is passing through the gravest crisis of its existence!” This is how UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been describing the situation of the controversial organization in the past two years.

Last year’s divisions over the liberation of Iraq and the scandal over UN involvement in the oil-for-food racket in partnership with Saddam Hussein, are only part of the crisis.

Annan, now in his second and final term as secretary-general, may well have been speaking only for the record. And there is no indication that he has any new ideas with regard to dealing with the crisis. Nevertheless, there is growing consensus that the UN, unless subjected to through reform, is unlikely to recover its former status as an instrument of international will.

Reforming the UN is high on the agenda of the forthcoming G-8 summit of major industrial powers, due to beheld in Britain next May. Two reform projects are expected to be debated at the summit in the hope that a compromise would be reached.

One set of proposals could be described as “minimalist”. It consists of relatively modest proposals for change, especially in the composition of the Security Council.

Both Japan and Germany support the “minimalist” project that envisages their becoming permanent members of the council with veto powers.

Japan is the second major contributor to the UN budget, after the United States. Germany is the third contributor. Together the three nations account for almost two-thirds of the UN budget.

As constituted at present, the Security Council is lopsided. Of its five veto-holding members three, Britain, France and Russia are European powers. Asia is represented by a single power: China. The whole of the American continent has the US as its representative. As for Africa and Australia, neither has a veto-holding member.

To make matters more complicated, the rotating members of the Security Council always include two other European states. This means that Europe, which accounts for just 10 percent of the world’s population, always has a quarter of the Security Council seats, including three veto-holding powers. Adding a veto-holding Germany to this mix will be a further extension of Europe’s influence in the council.

One alternative is to take away the veto from both Britain and France and allow the European Union to have a permanent veto-wielding seat on the Security Council. France and Britain, however, oppose such a move, for different reasons.

France sees its veto in the Security Council as its last claim to the position of a major power. Losing it would reduce France to the level of a medium-size power in a corner of Europe. Britain’s reasons for opposing the idea of a single EU seat are rooted in fears of a pan-European superstate swallowing the remaining vestiges of British national sovereignty.

Germany is also opposed to a single EU veto because it wants to build a national power profile for itself. During the Cold War West Germany had to act as a political midget hidden inside an economic giant. With the Soviet threat no longer there, reunited Germany is determined to project its own global ambitions. A resurgent Germany could become a halfway house between France’s systematic anti-Americanism and Britain’s unquestioning support for the US. If Germany wins a seat, Italy is certain to want one for itself. Italy, especially under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, is determined to seek a big-power role both inside and outside the European Union.

Japan’s position resembles that of Germany. Japan is anxious to develop a foreign policy whose weight is commensurate with its position as the world’s second major economic power. Bringing Japan into the council with a veto will strengthen Asian representation. But it will also force India to seek a similar position. India would argue that it is of the same size as China in terms of population while also fast catching up in terms of economic performance. More importantly, India is a well-established democracy while China is not.

Giving India a permanent seat is bound to provoke a sharp reaction from Pakistan and Bangladesh. The two nations, although cool toward each other, will almost certainly seek a veto-holding permanent seat for the Muslim states that account for a quarter of the total UN membership but are hardly represented in the Security Council.

Such maneuvers are unlikely to go unnoticed by African nations that account for 28 percent of the UN membership. They may well seek a permanent veto-holding seat for the recently created African Union.

The Latin American states, for their part, will certainly not be content with the US as the sole representative of the Western Hemisphere. Brazil, Latin America’s biggest power in terms of population and economic clout, will demand a seat as will its traditional rival Argentina. One option would be to allocate two veto-holding seats to the Organization of American States, of which one will remain with the United States while the other goes to one of the Latin nations on a rotating basis.

All this would mean expanding the membership of the Security Council to at least 30 of which almost a dozen will be veto-holding. And that could be a recipe for indecision. The diplomatic fight over the Iraq war last year showed that the Security Council, even in its present composition, is easily paralyzed by a threat of veto.

The “maximalist” reform project goes further. It envisages amendments to the charter of the UN to spell out and increase the members’ right of self-defense.

With President George W. Bush’s re-election the US is almost certain to throw its weight behind a maximalist reform project. This could, in effect create a system of two-tier membership in which nondemocratic members will not be able to exercise the same rights and powers as the democratic ones. This would require changes in the workings of the General Assembly, for example, by making key decisions binding only with a two-third majority.

Some of the more radical thinkers close to the Bush administration go further by demanding the dissolution of the UN as an organization that, created after World War II and mostly shaped during the Cold War, has lost much of its relevance. Over the past decades a number of other organizations have assumed aspects of the role initially envisaged for the UN. These include such well-established bodies as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Atlantic Council. In recent years, the G-8, which started as the G-7, has also assumed aspects of the UN’s role. For its part the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is also encroaching on the UN’s peacekeeping duties.

Gen. De Gaulle derided the UN by calling it “the gadget”. President Bush who regards the UN as a talking shop in which medium and small powers can cause mischief in a dangerous world echoes the sentiment.

Nevertheless, the possibility of the UN being subjected to radical reform, let alone abolished as some Bushists hope, is remote. Bureaucracies have a natural way of surviving the vicissitudes of history. And the UN, the biggest international bureaucracy and arguably the most corrupt in history, is no exception.