The renovated hall of the General Assembly has more seats than the UN member states, however that is not an alarm for Serbia. At the moment there are 50 candidates worldwide, willing to become a part of the family of states.

Surplus of 11 seats projected in the renovated hall of the General Assembly of the United Nations, in comparison to the actual number of members of the organization, obviously hints that world organization is ready for new members. That is not wondering, say ones who are more familiar with the UN’s way of operation, since the practice of fragmentation of states is not fading, whereas reconstruction of the hall is carried out once in 30 or 40 years…Whether one of its benches is meant for self-declared state of Kosovo, is hard to predict, since the queue in front of the UN door is quite a long one.

Nikola Jovanovic, the Program Director of the Center for International Cooperation and Sustainable Development and former adviser to Vuk Jeremic, at the time when he was the President of the UN General Assembly, says that fragmentation of states throughout the world is expanding as of nineties and that such practice is more likely to continue, as opposed to creation of new federations.

“Such trend is present in Europe and many other unstable parts of the world. Thus, it is not excluded that UN membership will increase in next 10 years,” says Jovanovic.

It doesn’t mean that project managers at East River have had Kosovo in mind, when they made 11 ‘reserved seats’, since according to Jovanovic, only a couple of days ago there was a possibility that Scotland would receive one of those seats, and referendum in Catalonia will follow soon. Similar aspirations exist in eastern Asia, Pacific islands…

Vladislav Jovanovic, former Serbian Ambassador to the UN, also says that there are at least 50 candidates for becoming states in the world and that Serbia should not ‘switch the alarm on’ due to construction solutions in the UN headquarters, having Kosovo in mind.

As of 1990 onwards the UN has become bigger for 30 member states. The last one was South Sudan in 2011.