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The New World Order and the General Assembly: Bloc Realignment at the UN in the Post-Cold War World*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Steven K. Holloway  and
Rodney Tomlinson
Steven K. Holloway
Affiliation:
St. Francis Xavier University
Rodney Tomlinson
Affiliation:
United States Naval Academy
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Abstract

The demise of the Cold War and greater cooperation among the Security Council's permanent members have created a situation frequently characterized as a New World Order at the United Nations. This study examines whether that characterization can also be applied to the politics of the UN General Assembly. Using descriptive analysis of roll-call votes, the authors find that recent sessions, and in particular the 46th session, witnessed the end of a fairly stable decade of voting blocs in the General Assembly. An indicator of vote changing is developed which documents the rapid movement of the former Warsaw Pact members and Baltic states towards more western European positions. Hierarchical cluster and multidimensional scaling analyses are employed to identify the emerging voting alliances. The results suggest that the accommodation has not been as widespread in the General Assembly and that our longstanding conceptualizations of east/west/north/south polarizations are in need of revision.

Résumé

La fin de la guerre froide et la coopération accrue entre les membres permanents du Conseil de Sécurité ont créé une nouvelle situation, souvent caracté'risée comme le Nouvel Ordre Mondial aux Nations Unies. Cette étude a pour objectif de voir si cette caractérisation peut aussi étre appliquée aux politiques de l'Assemblée générale des Nations Unies. Utilisant une analyse descriptive des votes à l'Assembleé ge'ne'rale, les auteurs concluent qu'au cours des dernieres sessions, et tout spécialement la 46e, on a assisté à la fin d'une décennie de relative stabilité en ce qui a trait aux coalitions de pays/votes à l'Assemblée. Un indicateur des changements dans l'orientation des votes est utilisé, démontrant tout spécialement le retoumement rapide des ci-devant membres du pacte de Varsovie et des pays Baltes vers des positions pro-occidentales. Des techniques statistiques raffineés sont utilisées pour identifier les nouvelles coalitions. Nos résultats montrent que les compromis entre les pays n'ont pas été si fréquents et généralisés à l'Assemblée, et que les grilles d'analyse mettant l'accent sur la polarisation nord/ sud ou est/ouest doivent fair e l'objet d'une révision profonde.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , June 1995 , pp. 227 - 254
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1995

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References

1. United Nations General Assembly, Provisional Verbatim Record, A/46/PV.56, 42.

2 The name does not change to “Russian Republic” until the records of the 47th session.

3 UNGA, Provisional Verbatim Record, A/46/PV.55, 27.

4 Ibid., A/46/PV.65, 3.

5 Ibid., A/46/PV.65,4.

6 Ibid.,A/46/PV.55,21.

7 Ibid., A/46/PV.55, 29–30.

8 Ibid., A/46/PV.56,44–45.

9 Rochester, J. Martin, Waiting for the Millennium: The UN and the Future of World Order (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993)Google Scholar, 6.

10 Krasner, Stephen, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

11 Ruggie, John G., ed., Multilateralism Matters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

12 Keohane, Robert, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1984Google Scholar.

13 As used by Ruggie and others, “multilateralism” refers to a form of cooperation among nations, potentially universal in scope and guided by general norms of conduct (such as nondiscrimination in the GAIT). These researchers do use the phrase “minilateralist” but refer to a “leadership” subgroup which solves the problem of cooperation among large numbers. Competing multilateral subgroups and their impact on global multilateralism is still not sufficiently explained.

14 Kegley, Charles W. and Hook, Steven W., “U.S. Foreign Aid and U.N. Voting: Did Reagan's Linkage Strategy Buy Deference or Defiance? ” International Studies Quarterly 35 (1991), 295–312CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Goldstein, Judith and Keohane, Robert, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

16 Robert H.Jackson, “The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization: Normative Change in International Relations,” in Goldstein and Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy, 111-38.

17 As is done in Holloway, Steven, “Forty Years of United Nations General Assembly Voting, ” this Journal 23 (1990), 279–96; and Jackson, Richard, The Non-Aligned, the UN, and the Superpowers (New York:Praeger, 1983)Google Scholar.

18 Ball, Margaret, “Bloc Voting in the General Assembly, ” International Organization 5 (1951), 3–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hovet, Thomas, Africa in the United Nations(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Alker, Hayward and Russet, Bruce, World Politics in the General Assembly (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Russet, Bruce, “Discovering Voting Groups in the United Nations,” American Political Science Review 60 (1966), 327–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Newcombe, Hanna et al., “United Nations Voting Patterns, ” International Organization 24 (1970), 100–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Powers, Richard, “United Nations Voting Alignments: A New Equilibrium, ” Western Political Quarterly 33 (1980) 167–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Holloway, “Forty Years of United Nations General Assembly Voting.”

19 Powers, “United Nations Voting Alignments.”

20 Holloway, “Forty Years of United Nations General Assembly Voting.”

21 Marin-Bosch, Miguel, “How Nations Vote in the UN,” International Organization 41 (1987), 705–24Google Scholar.

22 The figures for 1985 are not the same: Marfn-Bosch has a total of 356 resolutions as opposed to 259 found here. There is not enough detail in the 1987 study to explain exactly how the totals were calculated.

23 The story of the budget reconciliation itself demonstrates continuing conflict between the US and the south. In the 1980s, a combination of the Reagan administration's hostility, Gramm-Rudman deficit-cutting plans (1985) and Congressional interest in UN reform in the Kassebaum-Solomon Amendment, led to the US withholding 50 per cent of its annual assessment obligations to the UN budget as a tactic to pressure budgetary reforms. By 1987, some reforms and staff cuts had been undertaken, and new budget procedures were planned but ultimately rejected by the Third World majority due to the US's failure to restore funding in acknowledgement of changes. Under Bush, “budgetary constraint” (“No New Taxes”) had taken on a life of its own and the US continued to default on its obligations. Many UNGA members who had negotiated with the US in good faith felt betrayed. As Rochester (Waiting for the Millennium, 77) puts it, in the Bush administration, “hostility had been replaced With indifference.”

24 Jeanne Kirkpatrick was well known for demanding votes to place “Western” and US opposition “on the record”.

25 The Decolonization Committee now focuses on the many remaining non-selfgoverning territories in the Caribbean and Pacific, such as US and British Virgin Islands, New Caledonia, Bermuda, Guam and so on. Resolutions are passed with the US, UK, France and various western governments voting negatively or abstaining.

26 All resolutions voted in the UNGA are adopted usually by wide majorities.

27 Two possible nonmetric solutions are dismissed: use only Yes and No votes, or calculate a percentage agreement score for every dyad. Both lose important information. The latter requires a lot of additional calculation. The former is easily implemented by recoding Abstains as missing, but thus increases the missing case problem. Another possible scaling involving standardized ranks can be found in Alker and Russet, World Politics in the General Assembly, 30. The authors intend to explore the use of such a method in future research.

28 For a general discussion of MDS see Holloway, “Forty Years of United Nations General Assembly Voting”; and Kruskal, Joseph and Wish, Myron, Multidimensional Scaling (London: Sage, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 All three figures were produced using the SPSS Alscal procedure with input of the symmetrical proximities matrix, and producing an Euclidean, interval level, dissimilarity solution. This procedure iterates until the improvement in Young's S-stress statistic is less than .001. The Kruskal stress statistic and r squared values suggest that the problem of a local minimum has been avoided.

30 Holloway, “Forty Years of United Nations General Assembly Voting”.

31 Kruskal and Wish, Multidimensional Scaling. Dimensionality (the number thereof) is an issue as in factor analysis. However, an elbow test of stress scores for 2 to 5 dimensions shows that adding dimensions does not greatly improve the solution. Finally, the two-dimension solution chosen is much easier to comprehend visually.

32 We have also seen that the concept of multilateralism itself pays insufficient attention to submultilateral groups such as multilateral but competitive blocs or alliances, as found in the UNGA. Of course, regional cooperation, as opposed to global cooperation, has long been an issue at the UN.