Group Politics in UN Multilateralism (Diplomatic Studies, 16) 9004384391, 9789004384392

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Group Politics in UN Multilateralism

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Diplomatic Studies Series Editor Jan Melissen (Leiden University, Clingendael Institute and University of Antwerp)

volume 16

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/dist

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Group Politics in UN Multilateralism Edited by

Karen E. Smith and Katie Verlin Laatikainen

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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Originally published, in part, as Volume 12, Nos. 2–3 (2017) of Brill’s journal The Hague Journal of Diplomacy. Cover illustration: UN Headquarters in New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Laatikainen, Katie Verlin, 1965- editor. | Smith, Karen Elizabeth, editor. |  Brill Academic Publishers. Title: Group politics in UN multilateralism / edited by  Katie Laatikainen and Karen Smith. Other titles: Group politics in United Nations multilateralism | Diplomatic studies. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill | Nijhoff, 2020. |  Series: Diplomatic Studies, 1872-8863 ; volume 16 | “Originally published,  in part, as Volume 12, No. 2–3 (2017) of Brill’s journal The Hague Journal of  Diplomacy”—T.p. verso. Identifiers: LCCN 2020002585 (print) | LCCN 2020002586 (ebook) |  ISBN 9789004384392 (Hardback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004384446 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: United Nations. Classification: LCC JZ4984.5 .G76 2020 (print) | LCC JZ4984.5 (ebook) |  DDC 341.23—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002585 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002586

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1872-8863 ISBN 978-90-04-38439-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-38444-6 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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Contents Acknowledgments vii Abbreviations viii List of Figures and Tables  xi Notes on Contributors xii

Part 1 Introduction to Group Politics 1

Introduction: Group Politics in UN Multilateralism 3 Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith

2

Group Politics at the UN: Conceptual Considerations 20 Katie Verlin Laatikainen

Part 2 Regional and Political Groups in UN Diplomacy 3

The European Union 45 Karen E. Smith

4

Latin American Cooperation at the United Nations: Exploring the Role of GRULAC, CARICOM and ALBA 60 Andrea Ribeiro Hoffmann

5

The African Union in the United Nations 76 Nandi Makubalo, Madeleine O. Hosli and Michaël Lantmeeters

6

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League 97 Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués

7

ASEAN as an Actor in the United Nations: How Cohesive Is It? 115 Jürgen Rüland

8

The Alliance of Small Island States at the UN: the Promise and Pitfalls of Single-Issue Groups in Multilateral Negotiations 135 Katie Verlin Laatikainen - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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Contents

Part 3 Group Politics in UN Multilateral Diplomacy 9

Gender Equality and Sexual Orientation Discrimination 159 Karen E. Smith

10

Group Dynamics and Interplay in UN Disarmament Forums 177 Megan Dee

11

Negotiating the Responsibility to Protect in the UN System 196 Alex Bellamy

12

Discussing Global Health and Access to Medicines in the UN System: the Case of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) 219 Andrea Ribeiro Hoffmann and Jana Tabak

13

Negotiating the Sustainable Development Goals 241 Mary Farrell

14

Group Interaction in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 267 Lisanne Groen

15

Group Politics and the Question of Palestinian Recognition in the UN System 285 Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués

16

Conclusion: “The Only Sin at the UN Is Being Isolated” 305 Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith Index 323

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Acknowledgments This book was a long time in the making. A small group of contributors began collaborating on groups in the UN a decade ago, and we presented papers at several BISA and UACES academic conferences. We added contributors as we went along, and in 2017 published some of the papers in a special issue of the Hague Journal of Diplomacy. We are grateful to the contributors to the special issue and this book, for their keen engagement in the project and their timely submissions of work. We would also like to thank Thomas Weiss, who encouraged us to pursue the project, and Sam Daws, who acted as discussant on several conference panels and provided us with valuable suggestions. Insightful reviewers for the Hague Journal of Diplomacy and for Brill further helped us to refine and strengthen our arguments, as have the journal editors, Jan Melissen and Paul Sharp. We also thank Ioannis Vrailas, Deputy Head of the EU Delegation to the UN, who provided a commentary for the special issue of the Hague Journal of Diplomacy. The editors are grateful to Isabella Andrade for her assistance in completing the index. Finally, all of the contributors to this book would like to thank the hundreds of diplomats we have interviewed as part of the research project and who have helped us to understand the practices of group politics at the UN.

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Abbreviations AI AILAC ALBA AMISOM AOSIS ASEAN APSA AU AUPSC BASIC BRICs CACM CAN CARICOM CD CELAC CfRN COMESA COMIFAC COP CRC CSS DA DPPA DPO DPRK ECCAS ECOSOC ECOWAS EEAS EIG EIT EPA EU G20 G-77

Agreement Index Independent Association of Latin America and the Caribbean Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America African Union Mission in Somalia Alliance of Small Islands States Association of Southeast Asian Nations African Union Peace and Security Architecture African Union African Union Peace and Security Council Brazil, South Africa, India and China Brazil, Russia, India and China Central American Common Market Andean Community Caribbean Community Cartagena Dialogue Community of Latin American and Caribbean states Coalition for Rainforest Nations Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa Central African Forestry Commission Conference of Parties Caricom Reparations Commission Health Council Durban Alliance Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Department of Peacekeeping Operations Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Economic Community of Central African States Economic and Social Committee Economic Community of West African States European External Action Service Environmental Integrity Group Economies in Transition Economic Partnership Agreement European Union Group of 20 states Group of 77 (developing countries)

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Abbreviations GAUMU Technical Group on Universal Access to Medicines GHG Green House Gas GRULAC Group of Latin American and Caribbean states HAC High Ambition Coalition HRC Human Rights Council ICDRA International Conference of Drug Regulatory Authorities ING Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee ISAGS South American Institute of Government in Health ISIL Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant JCM Joint-support Coordination Mechanism LAC Latin American and Caribbean LAS League of Arab States LDC Least Developed Countries LMDC Like-Minded Developing Countries MDGs Millennium Development Goals MERCOSUR Southern Common Market NAM Non-Aligned Movement OAS Organization of American States OAU Organization of African Unity OIC Organisation of Islamic Cooperation ONUC United Nations Operation in the Congo OP Optional Protocol OWG Open Working Group PA Paris Agreement PAHO Pan American Health Organization P5 Permanent Five (members of the UN Security Council) R2P Responsibility to Protect SADC Southern African Development Community SDGs Sustainable Development Goals SICA Central American Integration System SIDS Small Island Developing States TRIPS Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement UK United Kingdom UN United Nations UNAMID United Nations-African Union Hybrid Operation in Darfur UNOAU United Nations Office to the African Union UNASUR Union of South American Nations UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and Development UNGA United Nations General Assembly

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x UNFCCC UNSC UPEACE US WEOG WHO WTO

Abbreviations United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change United Nations Security Council University for Peace United States Western Europe and Others Group World Health Organization World Trade Organization

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Figures and Tables Figures 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 10.1 13.1 14.1 14.2

Evolution of Voting Cohesion, AU, BRICS and EU 84 AU voting cohesion across issue areas 85 AU voting cohesion with absence across issue areas 85 Evolution of UNGA voting cohesion 87 Years served as non-permanent members on the UNSC 88 Troop contributing countries, overview of regional groups 90 Cross-alignment of major political groups within the NPT: 2010–present 192 Negotiation timeline for the SDGs 258 Groups in negotiations on the PA (2011–15) 274 Position of key groups’ and US’ objectives on mitigation in the negotiations on the PA 275

Tables 2.1 2.2 5.1 5.2 7.1 7.2 8.1 8.2 8.3 9.1 12.1 12.2 13.1 15.1

Typology of groups politically active at the United Nations 23 Applying informal group functions to UN group diplomacy 39 Keywords for Issue Area Classification 81 African Union Voting Cohesion in the UNGA, 2003–2017 (58th–72th sessions) 83 Staffing Pattern of ASEAN Representative Missions at the UN in New York 121 Voting of ASEAN Member States in the UNGA (2013/2014–2017/2018) 127 Chairship of AOSIS 138 AOSIS statements at the UN standing bodies 140 Participants in the 2014 SIDS Conference (Samoa) Preparatory Process 145 The contested resolutions at the HRC 164 WHO Resolutions where UNASUR Presented Common Positions 230 UNASUR’s Common Positions at WHO: Committees and Topics 231 Groups involved in the SDG negotiations 252 Sponsorship and votes on the Palestinian membership in UNESCO (2011) and non-member state status in UNGA (2012) 292

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Notes on Contributors Alex J. Bellamy is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is also Non-Resident Senior Adviser at the International Peace Institute in New York City and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Megan Dee is a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Stirling, UK. Her research addresses the politics and performance of actors at work within international organizations, with special interest in the EU and United Nations. She has published extensively on EU performance in multilateral nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament forums and takes a particular interest in group dynamics within nuclear politics. Prior to joining Politics at Stirling Megan undertook a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Warwick, and has a PhD in Politics from the University of Glasgow. Mary Farrell is Professor of International Relations in the School of Law, Criminology and Government at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom. Her research interests include UN politics and policy-making, multilateralism and the global order, global governance, European Union external relations, comparative regionalism and Africa in the international system. Her recent publications include: ‘Europe-Africa Relations over Time: History, Geo-Politics and New Political Challenges’, in Knud Erik Jorgensen, Åsne Kalland Aarstad, Edith Drieskens, Katie Laatikainen and Ben Tonra (eds.), The Sage Handbook of European Foreign Policy (London: SAGE, 2014); and (with Stefan Gänzle) ‘Coherence of International Regimes: The Role of the European Union and the Provision of Global Public Goods’, Background Paper for European Development Report 2013 (Brussels: European Commission, 2013). Lisanne Groen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Open University of the Netherlands in Heerlen on climate change adaptation policy. Before joining the Open University in July 2019, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for European Studies of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Brussels, Belgium, and at the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability in Tokyo, Japan, on international climate change policy, including low-carbon

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Notes on Contributors

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technology transfer. She obtained a PhD in political science in October 2016 from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel on the European Union’s performance as a negotiator in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity. Her thesis was awarded the UACES Best PhD Thesis Prize in 2017. Andrea Ribeiro Hoffmann is Professor of International Relations at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC) in Brazil. She has a PhD from the University of Tübingen and has been a Visiting Scholar at the London School of Economics, University of Erfurt and the Free University of Berlin. She has published in the areas of comparative regionalism, Latin American regionalism, inter-regionalism, legitimacy and democracy at the global level, including ‘Democratic Theory Questions Informal Global Governance’ with Monica Herz, International Studies Review, 2019; and ‘Negotiating normative premises in democracy promotion: Venezuela and the Inter-American Democratic Charter’, Democratization, 2019. Madeleine O. Hosli is a full professor of Political Science/International Relations at Leiden Uni­ versity. She is embedded into Leiden University’s Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs (FGGA) in The Hague. Her predominant research interests are in international organization, European integration and international political economy. She holds a Jean Monnet Chair Ad Personam and has published extensively on European integration, relations between the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN) and reform of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués is Associate Professor at Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals and member of the Observatory of European Foreign Policy (both in Spain). She holds a PhD in International Relations from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). She is principal investigator for the national project VISIONS (Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities), and also participates in EU-funded EUN-NET (Jean Monnet Network), NORTIA (Jean Monnet Network) and Global India (Marie Sklodowska-Curie European Training Network). Her research interests focus on the EU’s foreign and security policy, neighbouring countries, multilateralism and the United Nations. She has published extensively, with publications appearing in Security Dialogue, International Affairs, Cooperation and Conflict, among others.

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Notes on Contributors

Katie Verlin Laatikainen is Professor of Political Science and Director of International Studies at Adelphi University, New York. Her research focuses on the intersection of EU and UN multilateralism, and her published work in this area includes The Sage Handbook on European Foreign Policy (Sage 2015) co-edited with K.E. Jørgensen, A.K. Aarstad, E. Drieskens, and B. Tonra; The Routledge Handbook on the Euro­ pean Union and International Institutions: Performance, Policy and Power (Routledge, 2014) co-edited with K.E. Jørgensen; and The European Union at the United Nations: Intersecting Multilateralisms (Palgrave 2006) co-edited with Karen E. Smith. She is co-author (with Donald J. Puchala and Roger A. Coate) of United Nations Politics: International Organization in a Divided World (Pearson: 2007; reissued by Routledge 2015). Michaël Lantmeeters is a recent Master’s graduate in International Relations from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, where he focused on international economics, East Asia, and global theory and history. Before attending SAIS, Michaël obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Political Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He also attended the University of Copenhagen in Denmark for a semester as an Erasmus student and has conducted a research internship at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies in Bruges. Nandi Makubalo has an educational background predominately in African development studies and conflict resolution. Her research interests include the United Nations and the African Union, poverty alleviation and development and, peace and conflict resolution. In 2019, she undertook an internship at the United Nations University institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS), where she conducted research on the United Nations and the African Union’s coordination on peace missions. Jürgen Rüland is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Among his more recent book publications are ASEAN as an Actor in International Fora, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (with Paruedee Nguitragool); The Indonesian Way: ASEAN, Europeanization, and Foreign Policy Debates in a New Democracy, Stanford:

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Stanford University Press; and Religious Actors and Conflict Transformation in Southeast Asia: Indonesia and the Philippines, London: Routledge 2019 (with Christian von Lübke and Marcel Baumann). Karen E. Smith is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has written extensively on EU foreign policy, EU-UN relations, and EU human rights policy. Her most recent books are European Union Foreign Policy in a Changing World, 3rd edition (Polity, 2014); Genocide and the Europeans (Cambridge University Press, 2010); and, co-edited with Katie Verlin Laatikainen, The European Union at the United Nations: Intersecting Multilateralisms (Palgrave, 2006). Jana Tabak is an Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Her research is on international relations with an emphasis on international security, focusing on topics including international politics, international organizations, UN issues, international security, conflict resolution and childhood. Among her latest publications are: The Child and the World: Child-Soldiers and the Claim for Progress (University of Georgia Press 2020) and ‘Responsibility to Protect the Future: Children on the Move and the Politics of Becoming’, Global Responsibility to Protect, vol. 10, 2018, pp. 121–144.

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Part 1 Introduction to Group Politics

∵

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Group Politics in UN Multilateralism Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith Since the end of the Cold War, more and more players are influencing multilateral processes and agreements. The role of ‘rising powers’, such as Brazil, India and China, at a time of US multilateral ambivalence (and more recently, rejectionism), has attracted considerable attention, but little has been written about the role of groupings in multilateral processes, and in particular the extent to which regional or political groups are functioning as cohesive blocs at the United Nations (UN). Although a growing number of scholars and commentators have focused on the role of the European Union (EU) in the UN, hardly any have studied the role of other groups or studied the interaction between the EU and other groups, and the similarities and differences among them. This book fills that knowledge gap, by systematically studying group politics at the UN. Just as groups such as political parties are understood to decisively shape domestic political processes, this study shows how regional and political groups are integral to UN multilateral diplomacy and international cooperation. The explicitly political perspective in this project is surprisingly novel. It provides a new way to look at UN multilateralism: that is, what diplomats do in the UN is engage in politics, and politics is embedded in the social dynamic of groups. States are privileged actors in UN multilateralism, but very few states ‘act individually’ in UN diplomacy. UN multilateralism ensures that national interests are often embedded in group dynamics, but such political and regional groups are not simply about playing a numbers game. Groups in UN multilateralism are a rational way to build consensus, but they are also repositories of identity and ideas. Focusing on group politics reveals the social-political nature of UN multilateralism. The book draws on research undertaken by scholars in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia since 2011. Phase one involved an intensive investigation of a variety of consequential groups in UN politics. Phase two examined how the groups influence outcomes, norms and values by examining particular political debates in a variety of UN settings. Some of the papers emerging from the second phase were published as a special issue of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy (vol. 12, nos. 2–3, 2017). This book brings together the articles that were published in the special issue and additional chapters

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004384446_002

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from other parts of the research project. The articles have been reprinted as chapters 2, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13, with only some minor editorial changes and updates. This introductory chapter sets out the rationale for the book. It begins by reviewing the literature on groups at the UN, demonstrating that while increasing attention has been paid to the role of the EU and other regional organizations at the UN, the literature on other groups is limited or rather dated. It then goes on to illustrate why we should study the role of regional and political groups at the UN. The conceptual framework used by authors in their chapters is outlined: the set of questions each author addresses, and the factors that they consider when seeking to explain the influence of regional and political groups in particular negotiations and issue-areas. The rationale for choosing the range of groups and topics covered in this book is also provided. 1

The Literature on Groups

Our focus here is primarily on the principal organs of the UN system in which ‘multilateral politics’ — that is, the politics of intergovernmental negotiations — take place: the General Assembly; the Human Rights Council; conferences such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conferences; and assemblies of specialized agencies such as the World Health Assembly. Our aim is to illuminate group politics in part of the larger UN system, so as to stimulate further research into the dynamics of group politics in multilateralism more generally. By regional groups, we mean the five ‘official’ UN regional groups: the African Group; the Asia-Pacific Group; the Eastern European Group; the Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC); and the Western European and Other Group (WEOG).1 These are the groups from which states are elected to limited membership bodies such as the UN Security Council and the Human Rights Council, so as to ensure ‘equitable geographic distribution’, which has become an important organizing principle at the UN even if not required by the UN Charter.2 1  Sam Daws has written one of the few explorations of UN regional groups: Sam Daws, ‘The Origins and Development of UN Electoral Groups’, in Ramesh Thakur (ed.), What Is Equitable Geographical Representation in the Twenty-first Century (Tokyo: United Nations University, 1999). 2   The 2016 selection of former Portuguese Prime Minister António Guterres as UN Secretary-General seems to counter this principle, as many argued it was the ‘turn’ of a candidate from the East European Group to hold the post. The East European Group is the only regional group that has not had a national serve as UN Secretary-General. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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By political groups, we mean both formal regional or more widely-based organizations (such as the European Union, the Non-Aligned Movement and the G-77), and less formal groups (for instance, UN-based coalitions such as JUSCANZ,3 or the various ‘Friends of’ initiatives in the UN setting). Thus the project does not explore whether groups of like-minded countries can be identified according to whether they vote in a similar way on resolutions. The groups explored all self-identify as such: most importantly, countries speak and act on behalf of the group.4 Some political groups may have their genesis outside the UN context (the EU, for example), while others have grown up wholly within the UN environment (such as the G-77). While some of the regional groups (particularly the Asia-Pacific Group and the East European Group) exist solely for the purposes of electing their members to UN bodies, others (such as the Africa Group) appear to function politically, with statements and initiatives taken in the name of the group. ‘Group politics’ describes the interactions and debates among these groups, and is more accurate than the oft-used ‘bloc politics’, which is too redolent of Cold War politics and implies that groups are quite rigid in terms of membership, discipline and positions. As will be shown in this book, group discipline varies widely, the composition of groups can be quite fluid, and group positions can be open to change through negotiation. In the last couple of decades, the EU has attracted most of the attention focused on the role of groups at the UN. Interest has coincided with the development of the EU’s ‘external dimension’. How has integration within the EU affected its engagement with multilateralism externally? To what extent does cooperation among the EU member states in Europe filter through to cooperation in international organizations? The EU’s explicit, repeated declarations that it wishes to see a stronger UN and to contribute to ‘effective multilateralism’, along with its active engagement and support for multilateral negotiations and institutions (such as on climate change and international criminal tribunals), have sparked a substantial body of research.5 3  The JUSCANZ grouping is a consultative body to the UN Human Rights Council and some other UN bodies. It includes Australia, Canada, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland and the United States, with its name derived from an acronym of the founding members. 4  See Simon Hug and Richard Lukás, ‘Preferences or Blocs? Voting in the United Nations Human Rights Council’, Review of International Organizations, vol. 9, no. 1 (2014); and Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués, ‘The Fifteen and the Accession States in the UN General Assembly: What Future for European Foreign Policy in the Coming Together of the “Old” and the “New” Europe?’, European Foreign Affairs Review, vol. 9, no. 1 (2004), pp. 67–92. 5  On the EU’s role at the UN, see, for example, Edith Drieskens, ‘Towards a Systematic Analysis of the EU as an Actor in the UN System’, Journal of International Organizations - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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The literature on other groups, however, is less voluminous. Much work is quite dated, having been produced in the 1960s and 1970s in the midst of decolonization and the growing role of newly independent countries at the UN. The development of voting blocs at the UN, such as the G-77, attracted attention starting in the 1960s, but studies tended to be quantitative and focused on voting behaviour.6 More recently, the role of groups of developing countries in international trade and environmental negotiations has been studied.7 Only a few recent works examine group activity in a wider range of areas.8 Attention Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (2010), pp. 105–108; Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith (eds), The European Union at the United Nations: Intersecting Multilateralisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006); Paul Luif, EU Cohesion in the UN General Assembly, Occasional Paper no. 49 (Paris: European Union Institute for Security Studies, 2003); Diana Panke, ‘The European Union in the United Nations: An Effective External Actor?’, Journal of European Public Policy, vol. 21, no. 7 (2014), pp. 1050–1066. On the EU’s role in other international institutions, see, among other works, Spyros Blavoukos and Dimitris Bourantonis (eds), The EU Presence in International Organizations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010); Knud Erik Jørgensen and Katie Laatikainen (eds), Routledge Handbook on the European Union and International Institutions: Performance, Policy, Power (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); Robert Kissack, Pursuing Effective Multilateralism: The European Union, International Organizations and the Politics of Decision Making (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010); Amandine Orsini (ed.), The European Union with(in) International Organizations (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); and Bart Van Vooren, Steven Blockmans and Jan Wouters (eds), The EU’s Role in Global Governance: The Legal Dimension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 6  See, for example, Hayward Alker and Bruce Russett, World Politics in the General Assembly (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965); Bruce Russett, ‘Discovering Voting Groups in the United Nations’, American Political Science Review, vol. 60, no. 2 (June 1966); and J.E. Vincent, ‘An Analysis of Caucusing Group Activity at the United Nations’, Journal of Peace Research, no. 2 (1970). 7  See, for example, Richard A. Higgott and Andrew Fenton Cooper, ‘Middle Power Leadership and Coalition-Building: Australia, the Cairns Group, and the Uruguay Round of Trade Negotiations’, International Organization, vol. 44, no. 4 (1990); Peter Drahos, ‘When the Weak Bargain with the Strong: Negotiations in the World Trade Organization’, International Negotiation, vol. 8, no. 1 (2003); John Odell, Negotiating Trade: Developing Countries in the WTO and NAFTA (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); J.P. Singh, ‘Weak Powers and Globalism: The Impact of Plurality on Weak-Strong Negotiations in the International Economy’, International Negotiation, vol. 5, no. 3 (2000); and Pamela S. Chasek, ‘Margins of Power: Coalition Building and Coalition Maintenance of the South Pacific Island States and the Alliance of Small Island States’, Review of European Community and International Environmental Law, vol. 14, no. 2 (2005), pp. 125–137. 8  A recent exception to this is the special issue of Third World Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3 (2016), on ‘The UN and the Global South, 1945 and 2015: Past as Prelude?’, edited by Thomas Weiss and Pallavi Roy. See also Thomas G. Weiss, ‘Moving Beyond North–South Theatre’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 2 (2009); Isaac Njoh Endeley, Bloc Politics at the United Nations: The African Group (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009); Jürgen Rüland, ‘ASEAN as an Actor in the United Nations: Role Concepts, Rhetoric and Cohesion’, Asia-Pacific Business

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to single-issue groups is even scarcer,9 and the role of ‘informal groups’, such as the ‘Friends of the Responsibility to Protect’, has attracted virtually no attention in the scholarly literature.10 2

The Costs and Benefits of Groups: the View from the Ground

An initial question is addressed first: why do states use groups? There are benefits but also costs to working with groups, and states must thus grapple with the tensions between the imperatives of collective action and the discomfort thus produced. While rationalist cost-benefit calculations are important in prompting the formation and/or use of groups, the role of identity is also clearly of importance, and states tend to work in groups of like-minded states. The advantages for states of working through groups are numerous. First, groups are considered crucial in winning the ‘numbers game’ at the UN. Where decisions are taken by a majority (when a vote is called), what counts ultimately is the ability to muster the necessary votes. As Diana Panke notes, ‘the more members a group has, the more yes-buttons their members can push and the greater the chances that organization will be successful in the UNGA [UN General Assembly]’.11 States therefore either actively seek to use groups to achieve those votes (and satisfy their preferences), or tolerate their membership in a group because no one wants to be on the losing side. This is important because approval of positions and policies by states in the UN is a source of legitimacy. As Inis Claude has noted, the UN is a site of ‘collective legitimization’:   Review (2019 forthcoming); Paruedee Nguitragool and Jürgen Rüland, ASEAN as an Actor in International Fora. Reality, Potential and Constraints (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Diana Panke, ‘Regional Power Revisited: How to Explain Differences in Coherency and Success of Regional Organizations in the United Nations General Assembly’, International Negotiation, vol. 18, no. 2 (2013); and Diana Panke, Stefan Lang and Andke Wiedemann. Regional Actors in Multilateral Negotiations: Active and Successful?. London: ECPR Press/Romann & Littlefield (2018). 9  See, for example, the work on the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), including Carola Betzold, Paula Castro and Florian Weiler, ‘AOSIS in UNFCCC Negotiations: From Unity to Fragmentation?’, Climate Policy, vol. 12, no. 5 (2012); Chasek, ‘Margins of Power); and Kevin Jaschik, ‘Small States and International Politics: Climate Change, the Maldives, and Tuvalu’, International Politics, vol. 51, no. 2 (2014). 10  Exceptions include J. Prantl, The UN Security Council and Informal Groups of States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Teresa Whitfield, Friends Indeed? The United Nations, Groups of Friends and the Resolution of Conflict (Washington, DC: US Institute for Peace, 2007); and Teresa Whitfield, Working with Groups of Friends (Washington, DC: US Institute for Peace, 2010). 11  Panke, ‘Regional Power Revisited’, p. 287.

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state representatives ‘are keenly conscious of the need for approval by as large and impressive a body of other states as may be possible, for multilateral endorsement of their positions’.12 Being a member of a group can make this easier to achieve. Second, being in a group helps to magnify the influence and voice of individual members of that group, and to make it more likely that their preferences can be achieved. This is similar to what Roy Ginsberg called the ‘politics of scale’ in the EU context: states recognize that they can exercise more influence if they act collectively.13 For small, relatively poor and/or marginalized states in the international system (or for those whose perceptions and/or identity are such), this is extremely important.14 Even with the rise of other powers in the international system, where else but in institutions run on majoritarian principles, such as the UN, can ‘the West’ (that is, the rich and powerful states) be resisted so successfully? For example, the Council of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Foreign Ministers urges more coordination and unified voting at the UN, and recalls that the OIC is a voting bloc of 57 states, which could both advance the OIC’s objectives and values, and successfully oppose measures that run counter to them.15 Third, through groups, each state has access to more information than they otherwise would: within all groups, members share information about what they know of other states’ or groups’ positions and preferences. There are also economies of scale in dealing with groups in negotiations: for example, sponsors of resolutions may need only to convince group leaders to back the resolution, rather than needing to convince all of the states in the group. Fourth, group membership enables states to avoid isolation — for those countries that are not great or ‘emerging’ powers. Smaller states that are ‘in between’ (that is, not included in, or on the margins, of major groups such as the EU or GRULAC) find it challenging to operate when group politics are strong. States fear being ostracized by the group, and therefore isolated, with all the disadvantages that may bring, including loss of opportunities to exchange and gather information, a necessarily ‘quieter’ voice in debates, and so on. 12  I nis L. Claude Jr, ‘Collective Legitimization as a Political Function of the United Nations’, International Organization, vol. 20, no. 3 (1966), p. 370. 13   Roy Ginsberg, ‘Conceptualizing the EU as an International Actor: Narrowing the Theoretical Capability-Expectations Gap’, Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 37, no. 3 (1999). 14  Jacqueline A. Braveboy-Wagner, Institutions of the Global South (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009). 15  Organization of the Islamic Conference, Resolution no. 41/37-POL, Council meeting in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, from 18–20 May 2010.

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All of these reasons help to explain why states work within regional, political and informal groups. However, there are also disadvantages of groups. First, in order to reach agreement within groups, compromises have to be made by individual group members. In the case of groups where consensus is necessary, a group position could represent the lowest common denominator of all the individual preferences, and therefore is disappointing to most other group members. In addition, it may not be possible to reach any agreement at all within the group, and the need to coordinate views within groups may also mean that, on fast-moving issues, states prefer to work nationally or in other groups in order to ensure that their policy priorities and preferences are met. This may introduce fluidity to the practice of using groups. It should also be kept in mind that states are members of the UN — and other multilateral institutions — in their own right, and may feel no need to be bound by a group position: each state is free to express preferences that exceed those of the group, for example. In groups with consensus decision-making processes (such as the EU, Nordic Group, Arab Group and GRULAC), this is rare, because the state could simply block ‘unacceptable’ group positions, but in groups with a majoritarian decision-making system, this is often seen. This helps to explain why voting cohesion in the larger political and regional groups — the OIC, African Group and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) — is relatively low.16 Second, the loss of visibility and manoeuvrability is another disadvantage for states working in groups. Moderates in groups have to work hard to establish links with other states from other groups, and to resist pressure against ‘defection’ from within their group. Being a ‘middle power’ in this context is challenging, but there is still some flexibility in ‘group politics’. Third, a further disadvantage of group positions is that they tend to be ‘rigid’ — that is, any agreement that has been (perhaps laboriously) negotiated among group members is difficult to change, without returning to the process of intra-group negotiation. This is particularly true of the most unified and well-resourced group, the EU. Although it could be argued that a rigid EU position limits the ‘win-set’ that is possible in any negotiation, and therefore increases the EU’s bargaining leverage,17 this can also backfire, as a strong EU position that is presented as non-negotiable can spark resistance. Negotiations between groups are difficult if group positions are essentially non-negotiable, but this can lead states to work outside groups if the costs of sticking to rigid positions outweigh the potential benefits. 16  That is, lower voting cohesion is not just because those groups have more members, as argued in Panke, ‘Regional Power Revisited’. 17  See, for example, Panke, ‘The European Union in the United Nations’, p. 1053.

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Fourth, group politics has had a profound impact on politics and outcomes at the UN. Group politics can create ‘polarization’, with groups opposing each other as though in a ‘theatre’18 rather than engaging in debates on the actual substance of the issue at hand. The perceived negative effects of group politics have prompted some diplomats to try to change how they work through and with groups. As seen in several of the chapters, there have been attempts to engage in more cross-regional coalition-building, with some success. The space for flexibility with a diplomatic system dominated by groups has been expanding. Many such attempts are led by the ‘moderates’ or ‘bridge-builders’ in the groups (countries such as Austria, Botswana, Jordan and Turkey), but there have also been attempts to build conservative cross-regional coalitions (such as in the ‘Friends of the Family’ and the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDC) groups). The negative effects of group politics have thus made possible a more flexible dynamic, as states can defect from groups (they are not, after all, forced to work within groups). However, it is important to bear in mind that groups persist even with defections. Indeed, group positions may still be staked out in debates despite the defection of one or more members. The persistence of political groups despite defection is precisely what makes them critical features of UN multilateralism, and points to a constructivist angle for understanding how groups may shape, rather than reflect, the interest and identities of group participants. 3

The Social Dynamic of Groups in UN Multilateralism

Groups can also be understood constitutively — that is, diplomatic activity reflects the practice of working in groups, and political groups constitute multilateral politics at the UN.19 However, are diplomats merely pursuing their countries’ national interest, and finding groups an efficacious approach to maximizing national interests? The vast agenda of the United Nations — after all, there is nothing that is not on the agenda — touches on so many issues that most states will not have an interest in every topic addressed. Moreover, many smaller delegations lack the human resources to develop concrete positions 18  Weiss, ‘Moving Beyond North-South Theatre’. 19   On practices in international relations, see Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, ‘International Practices’, International Theory, vol. 3, no. 1 (2011), pp. 1–36; on practice in international organizations, see Vincent Pouliot, ‘The Practice of Permanent Representation at International Organizations’, in Ole Jacob Sending, Vincent Pouliot and Iver B. Neumann (eds), Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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even on issues of direct concern. Working in groups has a rational appeal, as illustrated above. But do such groups reflect existing interests, or do they shape the interests of participants, as when a state has no clear national interest in the issue at hand? Or, most likely, do they do both? Constructivism is a broad approach that takes seriously normative and identity factors that shape the behaviour of purposive actors. While the administrative structures of the UN seek to ensure geographic distribution and hence provide a context for regionalism, the largely inactive Eastern European Group shows how this prescribed or institutional regionalism does not necessarily have to reflect common identities or interests. Nor are politically relevant groups limited to regional groupings. The political groups that are active in the UN reflect not only common interests but also frequently a shared identity. These groups provide a framework or point of reference for defining issues that arise within the multilateral context. While shared interests may prompt the creation of a political group — for example, NAM or the G-77 — once such a community is created (or ‘imagined’ in Benedict Anderson’s terminology), it takes on a powerful life of its own.20 Groups are important in UN multilateralism because they influence identity politics as well as contestation over norms. In UN multilateralism, member states clearly have prerogatives, and the default is thus a rational calculation of the costs and benefits to the individual interest of working within groups as indicated above. Yet the multilateral context, unlike a bilateral context, often involves issues in which there is no defined national interest or ‘red lines’ emanating from the national capital. In such instances, shared identity or affinities, rather than interest, can dictate state behaviour. And yet, Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink (following David Laitin) remind us that such communal identities are socially constructed, even as ‘actors may make rational choices about how to construct their identities. […] They appear as natural to members of groups even as individuals engage in projects of identity construction’.21 In the UN context, politics for member states often involves navigating and mediating national interest and these group affinities. As Ole Jacob Sending, Vincent Pouliot and Iver B. Neumann suggest, ‘a particular political order or institutional arrangement anchored in sovereignty does not regulate the behaviour of pre-constituted political actors. Rather, sovereignty is produced and reproduced (and transformed) through 20  B  enedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 21  Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘Taking Stock: The Constructivist Research Program in International Relations and Comparative Politics’, Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 4 (2001), p. 441.

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changing diplomatic practices’.22 It may well be that national interests in the multilateral context are sometimes learned by diplomats through the practice of group politics in UN multilateralism itself rather than endogenously generated and then pursued through group interaction. Constructivism is also concerned with norms, and here again groups play an important role. Membership in the UN may be a signifier or validation of sovereignty — indeed member states have ‘permanent missions’ – but UN multilateral diplomacy is also centrally preoccupied in defining, and contesting, what is collectively held and shared by members of the international community.23 In the contestation of norms, Antje Weiner has identified a norm validation process that identifies this social dynamic. In addition to formal and cultural validation of norms, she highlights ‘social validation’ which ‘is generated by habit, and as such depends on a social group environment … [and] this practice is generated through iterated social interaction in stable groups or communities’.24 Perhaps uniquely, diplomacy in UN multilateralism is inextricably linked with contestation over universal norms and values, as well as the pursuit of national interests. Thus a normative approach to groups in UN multilateralism emphasizes collective legitimization, which is understood not merely as a function of amassing a preponderance of votes, but an illustration of collectively held norms, values and principles which habitually are crafted through group dynamics. Understanding the central role of groups in the UN’s multilateral processes also involves understanding how groups may shape the identities and interests of group participants. 4

Our Framework

Our starting point is an understanding of the United Nations as a political context in which global challenges are debated and addressed. The UN, particularly bodies such as the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council, is frequently described as ‘politicized’, indicating that ‘countries use UN bodies to achieve political objectives’.25 It is reasonable to expect there to be ‘politics’ at the UN, if politics can be understood as the attempt to influence others and to achieve particular goals. 22  Sending, Pouliot and Neumann, Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics, p. 17. 23  Antje Wiener. Contestation and Constitution of Norms in Global International Relations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 24  Wiener, Contestation, 43–46. 25  Rosa Freedman, Failing to Protect: The UN and the Politicization of Human Rights (London: Hurst & Co., 2014), p. 20.

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Regional and political groups have further been blamed for ‘entrenching positions’ and contributing to ‘politicization’ on human rights, among other issues.26 Thomas Weiss has decried the ‘antics’ between the industrialized North and global South — often organized in groups — as ‘dramatic and largely symbolic and theatrical confrontations, rather than a search for meaningful partners’.27 But there is evidently more than theatre going on, and it is reasonable to expect states to act in groups if doing so will help them to further their goals and exercise influence. In the first part of this book, Katie Verlin Laatikainen’s conceptual chapter argues that emerging theories of diplomatic practice provide a meso-level approach that allows the pervasive practice of group diplomacy to be observed and analysed more concretely. Her contribution conceptualizes group dynamics and links group politics in UN multilateralism to insights emerging from practice theory. The second part of the book covers a variety of regional and political groups, representing countries from across the globe. We look at several long-standing groups such as the African Union or the European Union. We also, however, cover groups of more recent vintage, such as the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). For the most part, the groups discussed are consequential across a number of UN settings, but some, such as the Association of South-East Asian States (ASEAN), act only to a limited degree in UN politics. Some of the groups covered here have a very broad agenda and a variety of interests (for example, the EU and NAM) while others have more limited agendas or are single-issue groups, such as the Group of Arab States and AOSIS. Each chapter in this part addresses several common research questions to explore political groups in multilateral processes, namely: 1. Group composition and functioning: How do regional and political groups form? How do the groups function? Who exercises leadership? How are the various interests and values of group members reconciled (or not)? 2. Participants’ perceptions: How do group participants understand their position in the group, and the group’s role in the multilateral politics of the UN? 3. Key issues/agendas: what policies or positions are the primary concerns of the group, and how does the group promote those issues/interests? The chapters in the third part of the book examine how and why regional, formal and informal political groups influence outcomes and/or norms, by studying particular political debates in a variety of UN settings. The analyses involve 26  Freedman, Failing to Protect, pp. 22–23. 27  Weiss, ‘Moving Beyond North-South Theatre’, p. 273.

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debates in the ritualized diplomacy of the annual UN General Assembly sessions, where recurrent negotiations on resolutions are distinct from conference diplomacy, as well as multilateral negotiations such as the review conferences of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The cases examined moreover reflect different decision-making processes, from majoritarian voting to conference negotiations where consensus is the norm. The chapters also examine a diversity of outcomes of UN multilateral processes, from negotiations over treaty obligations to resolutions with normative legitimacy. In all instances, the emphasis is on the way in which different groups — regional, political or informal — function.28 The impact of group politics will be assessed in the following issues: – Gender Equality and Sexual Orientation Discrimination – Non-proliferation and Disarmament – Responsibility to Protect – Global Health and Access to Medicines – Sustainable Development Goals – Climate Change – the question of Palestinian recognition The chapters address the following questions: 1. How do the groups interact with each other? Tackling this question entails exploring how groups become involved in negotiations or debates. Are they involved because the issue is of interest to group members? Are they involved as an exercise of self-promotion, perhaps because doing so allows them to resist other groups or states in general? To what extent, how and why do interests (national or collective) or identity shape group interaction? 2. To what extent, how and why do group politics lead to debates that facilitate collective action, or have contributed to diplomatic theatrics and games that do not lead to any action at all? To what extent do groups contribute to effective consensus-building? Or to what extent do they inhibit meaningful conversations and, at best, lead to lowest common denominator outcomes in the negotiations? Here we build on two of the forms of interaction distinguished by Anatol Rapoport: games; and debates.29 Debates have the objective of generating closure by changing minds and getting others to see the issues as one sees them. Debates proceed to a conclusion that enables collective action to occur. True debates are a healthy and desirable exercise and effective group politics can 28  See Courtney B. Smith, Politics and Process at the United Nations: The Global Dance (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), chapter 3. 29  Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games and Debates (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1960). - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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lead to legitimacy in collective action. In games, actors plan and execute strategies aimed at ‘winning’, without any outcome or consequence resulting from the competition. The contest is the outcome; process rather than product is what counts. To what extent are group politics at the UN a dramatic game, in which a ‘win’ at the UN serves interests in other contexts, often domestic ones? To what extent do groups provide a means to play such games better? 3. How do single-issue, informal groups influence formal political and regional groups in the variety of UN settings considered here? Do single-issue and other informal groups emerge from existing groups? Or are they formed in opposition to existing groups? Are they created primarily to engage in norm entrepreneurialism? Do they try to undermine the cohesiveness of existing groups in negotiations? Or does the possibility to ‘defect’ enable the perpetuation of long-standing groups with broader agendas? 4. Why do political and regional groups have influence in UN politics? To what extent do material resources (for example, the wealth of the group and/or its members) and social resources (for example, the perceived legitimacy of the group’s positions, or the perceived unity of the group) contribute to a group’s influence? ‘Influence’ is here understood to be: – Goal achievement. Do groups achieve the goals they had in terms of outcomes (such as passing a resolution, or increased support for their positions)? This is a classic way of understanding influence, and is also a classic way of measuring the ‘performance’ of a group.30 – Presence. Are groups able to establish their relevance in debates by credibly presenting group positions (demonstrating the coherence of the group)? Presence, here, is not just understood as ensuring visibility of the group, but as ensuring the relevance of the group in the particular debate because the group’s position is substantive and pertinent. – Resonance. Are groups able to affect debates and outcomes, by presenting ideas that are taken up by others? Factors affecting a group’s influence include: – The UN context/rules of the game. Regional groups have particular privileges in the UN system, and thus might be better able to exercise influence. Whether a group itself has observer status may affect its influence; those with observer status may be ‘heard’ more loudly than those without.

30  See Knud Erik Jørgensen, Sebastian Oberthür and Jamal Shahin, ‘Introduction: Assessing the EU’s Performance in International Institutions. Conceptual Framework and Core Findings’, Journal of European Integration, vol. 33, no. 6 (2011). See also Panke, ‘Regional Power Revisited’. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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– Group coherence/unity. This also reflects a classic understanding of what leads to influence: speaking with one voice. – Material resources. The wealth of the group and its members may lead to success, if those resources are used to coerce or induce other countries to support it. – Group size. The larger the group, the more votes it ‘controls’, the more influence it could have. But group size may have a negative impact on group coherence, as with more veto points, group positions become harder to achieve. – Social resources. A group may be successful if its positions are considered to be legitimate — that is, the positions are approved because they resonate with pre-existing norms. Those pre-existing norms may be universal (or nearly so) — that is, widely accepted and rarely contested. Or they may be more particular norms, which are accepted only by some sections of the ‘international community’ and are contested by others. Influencing debates thus forms part of a general process of norm creation and diffusion, with groups acting as ‘norm entrepreneurs’ to try to establish wider acceptance of the norm. – Relevance (or salience). Some groups may be active across a panopoly of UN issues, and approach the status of a ‘standing group’ in the negotiating process. These groups may have a broad portfolio of issues and agendas, and so the relevance of issues varies. Single-issue groups, on the other hand, focus rather intently on a single issue and the salience of that issue is much higher. Does salience impact the influence of a group, or marginalize it? Contributors to this book are informed by both rationalist (cost-benefit) and constructivist approaches. They thus assess explanations and factors that are rooted in an understanding of group action as based in a weighing of costs and benefits, and of group influence as based on material resources. They also focus on the creation of meaning, norms and values in social contexts and how they shape interactions. 5 Conclusion Collectively, the case studies of specific groups and debates reveal the impact of group dynamics on the politics of multilateralism at the UN. The concluding chapter reflects on the case studies in more depth, but here we briefly highlight three key conclusions that arise from this project. First, groups — informal and formal, long-standing and issue-specific — are significant features of multilateral diplomacy across the UN landscape. Second, while political ‘games’ are not entirely absent in the interactions between these groups, ‘debates’ are nonetheless a predominant feature of multilateral group politics. States use - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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groups to put forward principled positions in an attempt to influence a wider audience and thus legitimize desired outcomes. Third, groups are not static; it seems that existing political groups are ‘made to be broken’ as new groups emerge in multilateral processes. While regional and larger political groups have existed for decades, they often do not represent the like-minded on particular issues. Smaller group affiliations emerge because they are preferable to larger ones even if it means duplication and redundancies. At any given moment, UN multilateralism is shaped by long-standing group dynamics as well as shifting, ad-hoc groupings. Understanding the interplay of group dynamics is key for both practitioners as well as scholars of UN multilateralism. Bibliography Adler, Emanuel and Vincent Pouliot. ‘International Practices’, International Theory, vol. 3, no. 1 (2011), pp. 1–36. Alker, Hayward and Bruce Russett. World Politics in the General Assembly. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965. Anderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Betzold, Carola, Paula Castro and Florian Weiler. ‘AOSIS in UNFCCC Negotiations: From Unity to Fragmentation?’, Climate Policy, vol. 12, no. 5 (2012). Blavoukos, Spyros and Dimitris Bourantonis (eds). The EU Presence in International Organizations. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. Braveboy-Wagner, Jacqueline A. Institutions of the Global South. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. Chasek, Pamela S. ‘Margins of Power: Coalition Building and Coalition Maintenance of the South Pacific Island States and the Alliance of Small Island States’, Review of European Community and International Environmental Law, vol. 14, no. 2 (2005), pp. 125–137. Claude, Inis L., Jr. ‘Collective Legitimization as a Political Function of the United Nations’, International Organization, vol. 20, no. 3 (1966). Daws, Sam. ‘The Origins and Development of UN Electoral Groups’. In Ramesh Thakur (ed.), What Is Equitable Geographical Representation in the Twenty-first Century. Tokyo: United Nations University, 1999. Drahos, Peter. ‘When the Weak Bargain with the Strong: Negotiations in the World Trade Organization’, International Negotiation, vol. 8, no. 1 (2003). Drieskens, Edith. ‘Towards a Systematic Analysis of the EU as an Actor in the UN System’, Journal of International Organizations Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (2010). Endeley, Isaac Njoh. Bloc Politics at the United Nations: The African Group. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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Panke, Diana. ‘The European Union in the United Nations: An Effective External Actor?’. Journal of European Public Policy, vol. 21, no. 7 (2014), pp. 1050–1066. Panke, Diana, Stefan Lang and Andke Wiedemann. Regional Actors in Multilateral Negotiations: Active and Successful? London: ECPR Press/Romann & Littlefield, 2018. Pouliot, Vincent. ‘The Practice of Permanent Representation at International Organizations’, in Ole Jacob Sending, Vincent Pouliot and Iver B. Neumann (eds), Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Prantl, Jochen. The UN Security Council and Informal Groups of States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Rapoport, Anatol. Fights, Games and Debates. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1960. Rüland, Jürgen. ‘ASEAN as an Actor in the United Nations: Role Concepts, Rhetoric and Cohesion’, Asia-Pacific Business Review (2019 forthcoming). Russett, Bruce. ‘Discovering Voting Groups in the United Nations’, American Political Science Review, vol. 60, no. 2 (1966). Sending, Ole Jacob, Vincent Pouliot and Iver B. Neumann (eds). Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Singh, J.P. ‘Weak Powers and Globalism: The Impact of Plurality on Weak-Strong Negotiations in the International Economy’, International Negotiation, vol. 5, no. 3 (2000). Smith, Courtney B. Politics and Process at the United Nations: The Global Dance. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006. Van Vooren, Bart, Steven Blockmans and Jan Wouters (eds). The EU’s Role in Global Governance: The Legal Dimension. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Vincent, J.E. ‘An Analysis of Caucusing Group Activity at the United Nations’, Journal of Peace Research, no. 2 (1970). Weiss, Thomas and Pallavi Roy, eds. ‘The UN and the Global South, 1945 and 2015: Past as Prelude?’. Special Issue of Third World Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3 (2016). Weiss, Thomas G. ‘Moving Beyond North–South Theatre’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 2 (2009). Whitfield, Teresa. Friends Indeed? The United Nations, Groups of Friends and the Resolution of Conflict. Washington, DC: US Institute for Peace, 2007. Whitfield, Teresa. Working with Groups of Friends. Washington, DC: US Institute for Peace, 2010. Wiener, Antje. Contestation and Constitution of Norms in Global International Relations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

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Chapter 2

Group Politics at the UN: Conceptual Considerations Katie Verlin Laatikainen 1 Introduction Groups are everywhere in United Nations (UN) negotiations, both in conference diplomacy and in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) and other deliberative bodies.* At the 2015 Paris meeting of the Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a ‘high ambition coalition’ brought together the European Union (EU) and the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), which met secretly for six months in advance of the Paris climate talks and managed to push for a binding agreement to limit warming to less than two degrees Celsius.1 Yet in 2010, many of the same states were at loggerheads over the EU’s effort to gain enhanced observer status in the UN General Assembly. The EU’s effort to upgrade its observer status after the Lisbon Treaty met stiff resistance on the part of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the African Group, which managed to pass a deferral motion against the EU’s resolution.2 After a year of intensive diplomatic outreach, the EU prevailed in passing a resolution enhancing the ability of the European Union, now represented by the new EU Delegation rather than EU member states, to be active in the UNGA. Groups are also present in the work of the Security Council, from the Contact Groups that are active in mediation to the Accountability, Coherence and Transparency (ACT) Group, a cross-regional *  Material published as part of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy’s Special Issue: ‘The Multilateral Politics of UN Diplomacy’, Volume 12, Number 2, 2017, edited by Katie Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith. See http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/1871 191x/12/2-3. 1  Karl Mathiesen and Fiona Harvey, ‘Climate Coalition Breaks Cover in Paris to Push for Binding and Ambitious Deal’, The Guardian (8 December 2015); and David Victor, ‘Why Paris Worked: A Different Approach to Climate Diplomacy’, Yale Environment 360, available online at http:// e360.yale.edu/feature/why_paris_worked_a_different_approach_to_climate_diplomacy/ 2940/. 2  See Katie Verlin Laatikainen, ‘The EU Delegation in New York: A Debut of High Political Drama’, in David Spence and Jozef Bátora (eds.), The European External Action Service: European Diplomacy Post-Westphalia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004384446_003

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group of 27 small and mid-sized countries working to improve the working methods of the UN Security Council, particularly focusing on veto-restraint on mass atrocities.3 As these short examples show, not all groups that are politically active in the UN operate in the same way. The EU and its member states are legally obliged to act in concert when there is a common position, while the ACT Group comes together in that configuration only on that particular issue. Sometimes groups can build a broad coalition to foster consensus, while at other times they demarcate divisions. Groups may operate differently in different UN bodies; conference negotiations unfold differently than the annual sessions of the General Assembly. The contributions to the special issue of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy and this volume provide different cases across the UN landscape where group interactions have shaped political outcomes. This chapter approaches groups from a conceptual and theoretical perspective. The first section provides a typology of different kinds of groups that are politically consequential. The second section examines the main conceptual and theoretical approaches to the UN in order to demonstrate how group interactions are largely excluded from analysis. Theories of global governance and multilateralism tend to operate at the systemic level of analysis, while theories of negotiation and coalitions reflect assumptions of agency. Both of these levels of analysis obscure the operation of groups in the UN’s multilateral processes. The final section of the article suggests that emerging theories of diplomatic practice provide a meso-level approach that allows the pervasive practice of group diplomacy to be observed and analysed more concretely. 2

What Are the Groups in UN Multilateralism?

There are broadly three categories of groups in UN political processes: electoral groups that assure equitable geographic distribution in election to limitedmembership bodies; regional organizations, which have an existence outside of the UN itself; and explicitly political groups that may or may not be defined in geographic terms. These political groups may include broad, institutionalized, cross-regional political groups such as the Group of 77 or the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, as well as less-institutionalized single-issue groups such as the Alliance of Small Island States or various friends’ groups.4 3  Center for UN Reform, fACT Sheet (June 2015). 4  Teresa Whitfield, Working with Groups of Friends (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2010).

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In one of the very few studies of informal groups in the UN’s negotiating context, Helen Leigh-Phippard notes that these groups — regional or interestbased, standing or ad hoc — coalesce differently across the multilateral landscape: ‘The precise configuration of coalitions operating at any given conference will depend on the issues under consideration. And while coalitions are more usually composed of either developed or developing states, they can in some circumstances embrace both’.5 It is important to highlight that these groups are composed of member state delegations for the most part with full standing in diplomatic processes. There has been remarkable growth in the scope of participants in multilateral conferences and in UN negotiations and deliberations: non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international civil society, which is often termed the ‘third UN’,6 are increasingly making the UN’s multilateral processes far more public and transparent affairs, alongside the experts and scientists who have long been engaged in UN negotiations and activities.7 While these groups are increasingly present in multilateral processes, their place at the negotiating tables is far more circumscribed than those of member states with full decision-making prerogatives who channel their deliberations among other like-minded member states. 2.1 Regional Electoral Groups The UN has had a regional orientation in its internal arrangements from the start, although regionalism in the UN’s internal processes has been based upon the evolution of ‘practices’. The Charter insists upon ‘equitable geographic distribution’ in the selection of states to limited membership bodies (such as the UN Security Council), without any guidance in how to assure such equitable

5  Helen Leigh-Phippard, ‘The Influence of Informal Groups in Multilateral Diplomacy’, in Jan Melissen (ed.), Innovation in Diplomatic Practice (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); and on the role of informal groups in the UN Security Council and the evolving practice of contact groups, see Jochen Prantl, The Security Council and Informal Groups of States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 6  Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis and Richard Jolly, ‘The “Third” United Nations’, Global Governance, vol. 15, no. 1 (2009), pp. 123–142. 7   Marcel Hanegraaff, ‘Interest Groups at Transnational Negotiation Conferences: Goals, Strategies, Interactions and Influence’, Global Governance, vol. 21, no. 4 (October–December 2015), pp. 599–620; Jonas Tallberg et al., The Opening Up of International Organizations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Emanuel Adler and Peter M. Haas, ‘Conclusion: Epistemic Communities, World Order, and the Creation of a Reflective Research Program’, International Organization, vol. 46, no. 1 (1992), pp. 367–390; and Mai’a K. Davis Cross, ‘Rethinking Epistemic Communities Twenty Years Later’, Review of International Studies, vol. 39, no. 1 (2013), pp. 137–160. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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Group Politics at the UN Table 2.1

Typology of groups politically active at the United Nations

Group type

Basic function/ Relation to UN

Examples

Regional Groups (Electoral)

To assure geographic distribution of seats in the limited membership UN bodies

– – – –

Regional/ International Organizations

To cooperate inter-organizationally; ROs have autonomous existence outside of the UN; Relations with UN may be shaped by Chapter VIII of the UN Charter; ROs have varying levels of institutionalization

– European Union (EU) – African Union (AU) – Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) – Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – Union of South American Nations (UNASUR)

Regional and Cross-Regional Political Groups

To pursue collective interests in UN deliberations; Largely function within UN multilateralism; Multiple areas of collective agreement

– – – –

Single-Issue Political Groups

Small groups of states from different geographic regions that share a strong common position in negotiations; Often working with nongovernmental organizations and experts; Contact groups for mediation efforts

– Friends of R2P (responsibility to protect) – Cairns Group (agriculture) – Alliance of Small Island States (climate change) – New Agenda Coalition (disarmament) – Accountability, Coherence and Transparency (ACT) Group (veto restraint)

African Group Asia–Pacific Group Eastern European Group Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC) – Western European and Other Group (WEOG)

Group of 77 and China The Nordic Group Non-Aligned Movement JUSCANZ (Japan, United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand)

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geographic distribution.8 Yet even this principle is not straightforward, and Sam Daws describes how politicized the process of equitable geographic distribution was and remains.9 The current arrangement for the five so-called UN regional groups — that is, the African Group, Asia–Pacific Group, Eastern European Group, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC) and the Western European and Other Group (WEOG) — emerged to elect members to limited-body organs of the UN (see Table 2.1).10 The organization and practices of these regional groups are not codified and are managed internally. The African Group has a very transparent and well-functioning system of rotation and presents an agreed-upon list of candidates to the UNGA for approval, while candidatures from GRULAC and WEOG are often contested.11 Although they are institutionalized and of varying efficiency, these electoral regional groups raise important questions about their wider role in the UN.12 The UN Charter’s principle of equitable geographic distribution intends for even the smallest member states to have the opportunity to serve in key roles and offices through a system of regional rotation, but there are variations in electoral group size (for example, the African Group includes 54 members, while the East European Group has 23 members) that do not correspond to relative population size or any objective criterion for regional rotation. Indeed, Ramesh Thakur questions the meaning of region in the case of equitable geographic distribution and representation in the UN: What is a region? Asia is a geographical construct developed by Europeans to differentiate the European ‘self’ from the Asian ‘other’. […] While region can be defined with reference to geography, the sense of ‘regionalism’ is 8  Article 23(1) indicates that non-permanent membership of the UN Security Council should be based on the principle of ‘equitable geographic distribution’. 9  Sam Daws, ‘The Origins and Development of the UN Electoral Groups’, in Ramesh C. Thakur (ed.), What Is Geographic Representation in the Twenty-First Century? Report of the International Peace Academy and United Nations University (New York: United Nations University Press, 1999). 10  These five electoral groups were established by UNGA Resolution 1991, paragraph 3, in 1963. 11  UN critic Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick surprisingly praises the effectiveness of the African Group in the electoral process; see Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, ‘The United Nations as a Political System: A Practicing Political Scientist’s Insights into UN Politics’, World Affairs, vol. 170, no. 2 (2007), pp. 97–102. 12  Terence O’Brien, ‘Electoral Group Reconfiguration and Present Day Realities’, in Ramesh C. Thakur (ed.), What is Geographic Representation in the Twenty-First Century: Report of the International Peace Academy and United Nations University (New York: United Nations University Press, 1999).

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based more on common sentiment. […] Perhaps the world community needs to address the question of the unit of UN membership. Should regional organizations be given membership in their own right, instead of states, or not at all?13 Thakur raises an interesting point that highlights the tension between membership based on national sovereignty and the organization of politics based upon consolidating national interests through groups. While the UN has evolved over the years to incorporate other sorts of actors (although not other kinds of members), this question about the proper role for groups and the representation of interests lies at the heart of the debate over EU status in the UN. These electoral groups based upon geographic distribution serve the function of organizing participation (that is, the distribution of seats in non-­universal organs) in the administration of international institutions, but it should not be presumed that regional groups necessarily operate politically in the UN’s substantive work.14 Regional or electoral groups are functionally distinct from the political or caucusing groups (or blocs). Some electoral groups have been politically active in the diplomatic process (the African Group, for example),15 while others merely fulfil their electoral function (the Eastern European Group). We are interested in electoral groups insofar as they play an active role in the political processes of UN multilateralism. 2.2 Regional Organizations Regional organizations have an existence outside the UN context, with their own constitutional and legal foundations. The legal basis for the relationship between regional organizations and the United Nations is found in Chapter VIII of the UN Charter, but those provisions are heavily influenced by the need to ensure that regional organizations act under the authority of the UN in areas of peace and security. There have been several resolutions, declarations and reports under different Secretaries-General to rationalize relations between the UN and regional organizations, particularly in peace operations, as well as to craft joint approaches to new and emerging challenges.16 On other sorts of regionalism, or political groups more generally, the UN Charter is silent. 13  Ramesh Thakur, ‘Introduction: UN Electoral Groupings Reform’, in Thakur (ed.), What Is Geographic Representation in the Twenty-First Century?, pp. 3–4. 14  On this point, see Daws, ‘The Origins and Development of the UN Electoral Groups’, p. 16. 15  Kirkpatrick, ‘The United Nations as a Political System’, pp. 97–102. 16  Landmark UN reports such as An Agenda for Peace (1992), The Brahimi Report (2000) and In Larger Freedom (2005) have sought to improve coordination between the UN and

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Here again, practice has overtaken Charter provisions. Some regional organizations, such as the African Union (AU) and the EU, prioritize partnership with the UN and regularly interact with the UN Secretariat to strengthen the partnership between their organizations.17 Some observers have noted an increased regionalization of negotiations within international institutions and place regional actors at the centre of this activity.18 Regional organizations have revealed a propensity to be active in and not simply a partner to the UN.19 Of course, a key question in regime or institutional overlap (or nesting) is whether the organizations reinforce or undermine one another.20 While interinstitutional questions are critical for analysing multilateralism more generally, attention in this article is fixed on the diplomatic processes within UN multilateral negotiations. Thus, Diana Panke, Stefan Lang and Anke Wiedemann’s conclusion is important: not all regional organizations are equally active within the UN.21 They find that regional organizations such as the EU, the Gulf regional organizations with a special emphasis on peace operations. Since 2011 and the passage of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1977, regional organizations have been called upon to support compliance with Resolution 1540 to prevent the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and their means of delivery, and to establish appropriate domestic controls over related materials to prevent their illicit trafficking. 17  African Union, Framework for a Renewed UN-AU Partnership on Africa’s Integration and Development Agendas (PAIDA), EX.CL/913(XXVII) (Johannesburg, South Africa: African Union, 2015); and European Union, Saving and Improving Lives: Partnership between the United Nations and the European Union in 2013 (Brussels: United Nations Office in Brussels, 2013). 18  Andrej Krickovic, ‘All Politics is Regional: Emerging Powers and the Regionalization of Global Governance’, Global Governance, vol. 21, no. 5 (October–December 2015), pp. 557–577; and Diana Panke ‘Regional Power Revisited: How to Explain Differences in Coherency and Success of Regional Organizations in the United Nations General Assembly’, International Negotiation, vol. 18, no. 2 (2013), pp. 265–291. 19  Knud Erik Jørgensen and Ramses A. Wessel, ‘The Position of the European Union in (Other) International Organizations: Confronting Legal and Political Approaches’, in Panos Koutrakos (ed.), European Foreign Policy: Legal and Political Perspectives (New York: Edward Elgar, 2011), pp. 261–286; and Thomas Gehring, Institutional Interaction in Global Environmental Governance: Synergy and Conflict among International and EU Policies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 20  Karen J. Alter and Sophie Meunier, ‘Nested and Overlapping Regimes in the Transatlantic Banana Trade Dispute’, Journal of European Public Policy, vol. 13, no. 3 (2006) pp. 362–382; and Beth A. Simmons and Lisa L. Martin, ‘International Organizations and Institutions’, in Walter Carlnaes et al. (eds.), Handbook of International Relations (New York: Sage, 2002), pp. 192–211. 21  Diana Panke, Stefan Lang and Anke Wiedemann. ‘Regional Actors in the United Nations: Exploring the Regionalization of International Negotiations’, Global Affairs, vol. 1, nos. 4–5 (2015), pp. 431–440.

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Cooperation Council and CARICOM present more joint statements than the Shanghai Cooperation Council or UNASUR, for instance. 2.3 Political Groups There are a variety of political groups or blocs that range from ‘single-issue’ groups like the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and the New Agenda Coalition (a non-geographically organized group that is active on issues of nuclear disarmament) to long-standing cross-regional groupings such as the Group of 77 and the OIC, which have a broader range of issues that unite members. Some have UN Observer status and have permanent staff, while others do not. These political groups or blocs are not mandated or constrained by UN rules and resolutions as are the electoral groups; unlike regional organizations, these political groups often emerge from and remain embedded in the UN’s multilateral processes. What is most notable about informal political groups in multilateral processes is their fluidity. Groups can emerge and evolve. The SIDS group, which was active in climate negotiations in the 2000s, has morphed into the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) with different constituent parts, including the Pacific Island States and the Caribbean States. The Middle East electoral group coalesced into the Arab League, which continues to have a political function but no longer a formal, electoral one in the UN. On the other hand, some political groups are long-standing and continue to function even as the original conditions that prompted emergence fade. For example, the Non-Aligned Movement remains active on issues such as the Western Sahara even after the Cold War divisions that prompted its creation have long faded. Membership of groups also changes. Sweden was an early and active member of the New Agenda Coalition, which is active on disarmament issues, but has since withdrawn and is active now in other groups on disarmament issues. 3

The Missing Group Politics of UN Multilateralism

Extensive group interaction in conference and General Assembly negotiations create patterns in diplomatic interaction at the UN, and those patterns suggest an organization of multilateral diplomacy that scholars have not yet fully analysed. Observers of the UN make frequent reference to these groups,22 but 22  On the African Group, see Isaac Njoh Endeley, Bloc Politics at the United Nations: The African Group (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009); on the Nordic Group, see Katie Verlin Laatikainen, ‘Norden’s Eclipse: The Impact of the European Union’s Common

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there has been very little systematic study or conceptual analysis of groups or how they interact in multilateral processes.23 Scholars of UN multilateralism tend to fall back too easily on either national interests as explaining outcomes and therefore ignore groups and blocs, or when they do acknowledge the importance of blocs, they assume that all groups function in the same way or have the same approach to UN diplomacy. The EU case shows rather dramatically that its cohesion is the result of treaty obligations on the part of EU member states; the same cannot be said for the African Group or CARICOM. The United Nations — particularly the UN General Assembly — has a particular context that is political, but it is not a political marketplace where states are atomistic, egoistic actors. Groups are the key to understanding political outcomes at the UN, but political groups — how they emerge, how they operate and how they influence outcomes — remain poorly understood. If groups are so clearly central to UN multilateralism, why is so little research undertaken to understand their role and influence? Scholarship on UN multilateralism falls broadly into two categories at either end of the spectrum of levels of analysis. Studies of the UN are often embedded in scholarship on multilateralism as an institutional form and processes of global governance, both of which are concerned with systemic questions of order in international relations. At the opposite end, multilateral negotiations are frequently analysed from an actor’s perspective, focusing on bargaining strategies that optimize the outcomes of individual actors, usually states. The political role of groups in UN diplomacy is often overlooked at both levels, because group dynamics do not easily fit into the core assumptions that drive theorization at either level of analysis. Both scholarly approaches — the question of multilateral order Foreign and Security Policy on the Nordic Group in the United Nations’, Cooperation and Conflict, vol. 38, no. 4 (2003), pp. 409–441; on the G-77, see Thomas G. Weiss, ‘Moving Beyond North-South Theatre’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 2, (2009); and Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner, Institutions of the Global South (London: Routledge, 2010). 23  See Leigh-Phippard, ‘The Influence of Informal Groups in Multilateral Diplomacy’ for a descriptive account. Early analyses focused on voting cohesion among blocs. See Thomas Hovet, Bloc Politics in the United Nations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Hayward Alker and Bruce Russett, World Politics in the General Assembly (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965); Bruce Russett, ‘Discovering Voting Groups in the United Nations’, American Political Science Review, vol. 60, no. 2 (June 1966), pp. 327–339; and Jack E. Vincent, ‘An Analysis of Caucusing Group Activity at the United Nations’, Journal of Peace Research, no. 2 (1970), pp. 133–150. Kissack notes the deficiencies of relying on voting cohesion, which can arise without coordination; see Robert E. Kissack, European Union Member State Coordination in the United Nations Systems: Towards a Methodology for Analysis, Working Paper no. 1 (London: European Foreign Policy Unit, London School of Economics, 2007).

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and game-theoretic approaches to negotiation — are also very far removed from the day-to-day work of diplomacy at the UN. Group dynamics, which are very clear to the diplomats engaged in diplomacy at the UNGA and at UN conferences, are largely ignored by theories and concepts of multilateralism and global governance, which focus instead on systemic outcomes and order, as well as negotiations and bargaining literature that focus on the atomistic preferences and behaviours of actors. 3.1 Global Governance and Multilateralism: an Aversion to Politics Multilateralism is a thriving area of study that draws on a diverse set of conceptual and theoretical frameworks. Legal approaches to multilateralism examine outputs of multilateral diplomacy as well as the standing of international legal norms, which is central to international law.24 Scholars of international law have increasingly focused on questions that highlight the role of institutions in shaping behaviour, including compliance.25 Because ‘global governance refers to governance aimed at dealing with transsovereign, (potentially) global problems and at producing global public goods’, Andreas Kruck and Volker Rittberger argue that ‘a multilateral world order reliant on rules-based interstate policy coordination lies at the heart of many scholarly notions of global governance today’.26 This structural preoccupation with order in the absence of authoritative government is a central theme in studies of global governance. But the politics of how the international community gets to that outcome in which rules-based inter-state policy coordination occurs is rarely the central focus of global governance scholarship. Multilateralism as an institutional form has been the subject of intense academic scrutiny in the two and a half decades since the end of the Cold War. Almost 30 years ago, Robert Keohane introduced a distinction between 24  See, for example, Gabriella Blum, ‘Bilateralism, Multilateralism, and the Architecture of International Law’, Harvard International Law Journal, vol. 49, no. 2 (2008), pp. 323–379; and Bart Van Vooren, Steven Blockmans and Jan Wouters (eds.), The EU’s Role in Global Governance: The Legal Dimension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 25   Anne-Marie Slaughter, Andrew S. Tulumello and Stephan Wood, ‘International Law and International Relations Theory: A New Generation of Interdisciplinary Scholarship’, American Journal of International Law, vol. 92, no. 3 (July 1998), pp. 367–397; and Harold Hongju Koh, ‘Why Do Nations Obey International Law?’, Yale Faculty Scholarship Series, Paper no. 2101 (1997), pp. 2599–2659, available online at http://digitalcommons.law.yale .edu/fss_papers/2101. 26  Andreas Kruck and Volker Rittberger. ‘Multilateralism Today and its Contribution to Global Governance’, in James P. Muldoon et al. (eds.), The New Dynamics of Multilateralism: Diplomacy, International Organizations and Global Governance (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2010), pp. 44–47.

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multilateralism as an international institution and corporeal international organizations such as the UN.27 For John Ruggie, multilateralism is ‘a generic institutional’ form that can take many concrete shapes.28 The many institutional forms of multilateralism have come into focus, particularly the so-called ‘minilateral’ formulations of the G-x systems.29 In addition to the varying numerical forms of multilateralism, scholars such as Luk Van Langenhove focus on the emergence of multilateralism that includes non-state actors in what he terms ‘multilateralism 2.0’.30 The rich varieties of multilateralism — from the UN, EU and ASEAN varieties to the more informal G-x formulations — are all manifestations of multi­ lateralism, according to Ruggie. He admonishes: [I]t is important not to confuse the very meaning of multilateralism with any one particular institutional expression of it, be it an international order, regime, or organization. Each can be, but need not be, multilateral in form. In addition, the multilateral form should not be equated with universal geographical scope; the attributes of multilateralism characterize relations within specific collectivities that may and often do fall short of the whole universe of nations.31 The ‘multilateral system’ is the universe of multilateral organizations, international law and multilateral principles, norms and politics. However, the study of multilateralism has been shaped by the search for these general ordering principles that Ruggie identified as being central to multilateralism, so that the varieties of multilateralism — and the politics behind them — have become obscured. Michael Barnett, for instance, shows how the broadening concept of 27  Robert O. Keohane, ‘Multilateralism: An Agenda for Research’, International Journal, vol. 45, no. 4 (autumn 1990), pp. 731–764. 28   John G. Ruggie, ‘Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution’, International Organization, vol. 46, no. 3 (1992), p. 567. 29  John J. Kirton, G20 Governance for a Globalized World (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013); Risto Penttilä, Multilateralism Light: The Rise of Informal International Governance (London: Centre for European Reform, 2009), available online at http://www.cer.org.uk/pdf/ penttila_essay_july09. pdf; Peter Debaere, EU Coordination in International Institutions: Policy and Process in Gx Forums (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); and Juha Jokela, ‘Europe’s Declining Role in the G20: What Role for the EU in the Club of the Most Important Powers?’, FIIA Briefing Paper, no. 96 (Helsinki: Finish Institute of International Affairs, 2011). 30  Luk Van Langenhove, ‘The Transformation of Multilateralism Mode 1.0 to Mode 2.0.’, Global Policy, vol. 1, no. 3 (2010), pp. 263–270. 31  Ruggie, ‘Multilateralism’, p. 574.

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security has influenced multilateral security organizations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the UN Security Council, a normative development that he calls ‘humanized multilateralism’, in comparison to earlier, state-centric conceptualizations of security that might be found in the UN Charter.32 Whether the focus is on the institutional forms of multilateralism or its ordering norms and principles, the underlying premise of scholarship on multilateralism and global governance is the existence of a broader international order that constrains anarchical relations. In the words of several observers, multilateralism is ‘an existential reality’,33 ‘multilateralism is no longer a choice. It is a matter of necessity and of fact’,34 and ‘we are all multilateralists now’.35 The study of multilateralism in all its diversity is an attempt to unpack the structural mechanisms — either organizational forms and/or shared norms — that condition the interests, preferences and even participation of actors. The fact that multilateralism focuses our attention on institutional and normative orders is not surprising, but it does shift attention away from politics towards shared rules and norms about which there appear to be consensus. Most scholars of global governance or multilateralism seem to have an aversion to politics. Robert Cox is among a handful of (largely Gramscian) ­scholars focusing on multilateralism and global governance who emphasizes how multilateralism and global governance are inextricably tied to the politics of world order.36 But while Cox is keenly interested in the power and politics that support or subvert world order, his analysis remains firmly entrenched in a structural approach. The politics of multilateralism, particularly in the UN context, are viewed derisively by many scholars of multilateralism, when they are considered at all. According to Pierre de Senarclens, UN multilateralism allows diplomats: 32  Michael Barnett, ‘Is Multilateralism Bad for Humanitarianism?’, in Dimitris Bourantonis, Kostas Ifantis and Panayotis Tsakonas (eds.), Multilateralism and Security Institutions in an Era of Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 139–141. 33  Aurthur Stein, ‘Incentive Compatibility and Global Governance: Existential Multilateralism, a Weakly Confederal World and Hegemony’, in Alan S. Alexandroff (ed.), Can the World Be Governed? Possibilities for Effective Multilateralism (Waterloo, CA: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), p. 50. 34  Shepard Forman, ‘Multilateralism as a Matter of Fact: US Leadership and the Management of the International Public Sector’, in Stewart Patrick and Shepard Forman (eds.), Multilateralism and US Foreign Policy: Ambivalent Engagement (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002), p. 439. 35  Richard Haass, ‘The Case for Messy Multilateralism’, Financial Times (5 January 2010), p. 5. 36  Robert W. Cox, ‘Multilateralism and World Order’, in Robert W. Cox and T.J. Sinclair (eds.), Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 494–523.

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[…] an opportunity to deliberate, interact on a personal level, ritualize through complicated procedures and ceremonials the manifestation of their state sovereignty, maintain through rhetoric and propaganda their own national authority and their international legitimacy, find ways and means to play out their conflict on a symbolic level, and also to benefit occasionally from the program resources allocated by the system.37 While de Senarclens is most certainly correct that the UN context provides member-state diplomats with a privileged position to parade their national prerogatives, the findings of the special issue of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy are that — in the context of UN multilateral diplomacy — such an emphasis on national proclivities is quite often constrained by or channeled through multilateral group interaction. 3.2 Bargaining and Problem-Solving in International Negotiations At the other end of the spectrum of levels of analysis, UN diplomats are involved in a dizzying array of negotiations over resolutions, treaties and other sorts of agreements. At this level, the politics of who gets what and when are front and centre. Christer Jönsson notes that international negotiation is a thriving sub-field of international relations that is studied from a variety of disciplines, from diplomatic history to economics and to sociology and social psychology.38 While bilateral negotiations form the basis for most negotiation theory, additional parties increase complexity.39 Bargaining has been dominated by gametheoretic approaches, including efforts to model coalition and small group behaviour and the dynamics of the multilateral negotiation phases.40 Terrence Hopmann identifies two approaches in international negotiations — namely,

37  Pierre de Senarclens, ‘The UN as a Social and Economic Regulator’, in Pierre de Senarclens and Ali Kazancigil (eds.), Regulatory Globalization: Critical Approaches to Global Governance (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 12–13. 38  Christer Jönsson, ‘Diplomacy, Bargaining and Negotiation’, in Walter Carlsnaes et al. (eds.), Handbook of International Relations (London: Sage, 2002), pp. 212–234. 39  Larry Crumb and I. William Zartman, ‘Multilateral Negotiation and the Management of Complexity’, International Negotiation, vol. 8, no. 1 (2003), pp. 1–5. 40  See a variety of efforts, including Christopher Dupont, ‘Negotiation as Coalition Building’, International Negotiation, vol. 1, no. 1 (1996), pp. 47–64; Arturo Gomes, ‘Multilateral Negotiations and the Formation of Coalitions’, Journal of Mathematical Economics, vol. 59 (2015), pp. 77–91; and Fritz van Merode, Anna Nieboer, Hans Maarse and Harm Lieverdink, ‘Analyzing the Dynamics in Multilateral Negotiations’, Social Networks, vol. 26, no. 2 (2004), pp. 141–154.

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bargaining and problem-solving.41 Bargaining, in particular, focuses on international negotiations from a game-theoretic actor perspective, which often assumes that actors have preferences and that they bargain to maximize utility in a rational calculus. Problem-solving approaches capture the more deliberative multilateralism of UN processes. One area of the negotiation literature that has focused on the dynamics of multilateralism in a productive way has been the work focusing on coalitions. Fen Osler Hampson and Michael Hart argue that multilateral negotiations involve coalition-building, coalition-bridging and coalition-breaking, and cross-cutting coalitions may be as important as reinforcing ones.42 While there has been some analysis of coalitions in international trade and environmental negotiations43 and analysis of leadership in multilateral negotiations,44 Christer Jönsson concludes that ‘multi­lateral negotiation is an area of theoretical underdevelopment but of growing scholarly concern’.45 While sophisticated models may show how preferences shift or how coalitions influence bargaining, the assumption of instrumentality is difficult to shake, even in studies of coalitions in multilateral negotiations. Although they employ a model of arguing as a mode of communication where the power of reason (rather than material bargaining power/leverage) prevails, Cornelia Ulbert and Thomas Risse find that ‘multilateral diplomatic negotiations constitute “hard cases” for arguing, since deliberation as such is not the purpose of such talks but to accomplish certain goals including the maximization of

41  P. Terrence Hopmann, ‘Bargaining and Problem Solving: Two Perspectives on International Negotiation’, in Charles A. Crocker, Fen O. Hampson and Pamela Aall (eds.), Turbulent Peace: The Challenges of Managing International Conflict (Washington, DC: US Institute for Peace, 2001), pp. 445–468. 42  Fen Osler Hampson with Michael Hart, Multilateral Negotiations: Lessons from Arms Control, Trade and Environment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 43  See Peter Drahos, ‘When the Weak Bargain with the Strong: Negotiations in the World Trade Organization’, International Negotiation, vol. 8, no. 1 (2003); John Odell, Negotiating Trade: Developing Countries in the WTO and NAFTA (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); J.P. Singh, ‘Weak Powers and Globalism: The Impact of Plurality on Weak– Strong Negotiations in the International Economy’, International Negotiation, vol. 5, no. 3 (2000); Pamela S. Chasek, ‘Margins of Power: Coalition Building and Coalition Maintenance of the South Pacific Island States and the Alliance of Small Island States’, Review of European Community and International Environmental Law, vol. 14, no. 2 (August 2005). 44   For example, Oran Young, ‘Political Leadership and Regime Formation: On the Development of Institutions in International Society’, International Organization, vol. 45, no. 3 (1991), pp. 281–308. 45  Jönsson, ‘Diplomacy, Bargaining and Negotiation’, p. 223.

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interest of the negotiating partners’.46 This intensive focus on instrumentality or utility may be reasonable when applied to cases of the multilateral negotiations over climate change or non-proliferation treaties that are hallmarks of the multilateral negotiation literature, but they capture only a portion of what constitutes UN multilateralism. The annual meetings of the UNGA and the Human Rights Council involve intensive diplomatic negotiation and debate, but towards what end? What is it that diplomats hope to accomplish in UNGA negotiations? International consensus on addressing issues of common concern seems an obvious response, but the vague ‘consensus’ that results from UNGA negotiations is rarely a foundation for effective multilateral policy formulation, let alone robust problem-solving. Are diplomats merely pursuing their countries’ national interest? The vast agenda of the United Nations General Assembly touches on so many issues that most states will not have an interest in every topic addressed; many smaller states, in particular, do not have the human resources to develop concrete positions, even on issues of direct concern. The UN in New York is not an authoritative body where binding legislation emanates (excepting the Security Council’s use of Chapter VII), or where treaties are negotiated, nor is it usually an arena for the pursuit of naked national interest. Multilateral negotiations do occur in a deliberative fashion at the UN, and they are channelled through groups in a social dynamic that the multilateral negotiation literature has not fully grasped. 4

The Diplomatic Practice of Group Politics in UN Multilateralism

The pervasive practice of group politics at the UN is obscured by both the theories of multilateralism that are focused on structural and normative orders and the theories of bargaining and negotiation that often assume the instrumental rationality of atomistic actors. Recent theorizing in diplomatic studies, however, rests on a meso-level of analysis that enables a social conceptualization of group dynamics in UN multilateralism. Jan Melissen captures this meso-level of analysis when he observes that a key distinguishing feature of diplomatic studies: […] is its focus on relationships between international actors rather than their internal characteristics and objectives, or the context in which they operate. […] Alien to mainstream IR and too vague for methodological 46  Cornelia Ulbert and Thomas Risse, ‘Deliberately Changing the Discourse: What Does Make Arguing Effective?’, Acta Politica, vol. 40 (2005), pp. 351–367.

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purists, such a relationalist perspective is fundamental to the practice of diplomacy and for students of diplomacy.47 Geoffrey Wiseman suggests that diplomatic studies can generally be distinguished from such fields as international organizations and global governance by virtue of the priority it accords the practice (procedures, tactics, means) of IR and diplomacy as distinct from the theory (substance, strategy, ends).48 This coheres with the argument of Ole Jacob Sending, Vincent Pouliot and Iver Neumann: […] from a relational perspective, it does not make sense to say that an institution — such as international law or multilateralism or sovereignty — structures or secures a certain order. It is the continual use or performance of the material and symbolic resources that are recognized as being vested in these institutions that helps produce and reproduce certain orders.49 As Wiseman notes, a key challenge for practice-based theorizing is that such practices ‘become so deeply internalized over the years that many scholars no longer appreciated their regulative, evaluative, constitutive, and practical effects’.50 Excavating and elucidating these international practices transcends the unit of analysis dilemmas that are associated with studying UN multilateralism from either a global governance or negotiation perspective.51 Practice is a form of action, which ‘differs from preferences or beliefs, which it expresses, and from discourse or institutions, which it instantiates’.52 Emanuel Adler and 47  Jan Melissen, ‘Diplomatic Studies in the Right Season’, International Studies Review, vol. 13, no. 4 (2011), p. 724. 48  Geoffrey Wiseman, ‘Norms and Diplomacy: The Diplomatic Underpinnings of Multi­ lateralism’, in J.P. Muldoon et al. (eds.), The New Dynamics of Multilateralism: Diplomacy, International Organizations and Global Governance (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2011), p. 6. 49  Ole Jacob Sending, Vincent Pouliot and Iver Neumann, ‘Introduction’, in O.J. Sending, V. Pouliot and I.B. Neumann (eds.), Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 7. 50  Geoffrey Wiseman. ‘Bringing Theory Back In: Time for Theory to Catch Up with Practice’, International Studies Review, vol. 13, no. 4 (2011), p. 712. 51  Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, ‘International Practices’, International Theory, vol. 3, no. 1 (2011). 52  Adler and Pouliot, ‘International Practices’, p. 6.

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Vincent Pouliot also note that practice tends to reflect patterns of regularity over time, and that social recognition is a fundamental aspect of practice. Indeed, the practice of group politics in UN multilateralism transcends the problem of level of analysis, because the practice is both individual (agential) and structural.53 In his analysis of the practice of permanent representation in international organizations, Vincent Pouliot finds that ‘the multiparty structure of permanent representation generates a rather peculiar diplomacy of groups’.54 Yet the practice of group diplomacy (as distinct from coalition) remains underdeveloped. 4.1 The Practice of Political Groups in UN Diplomacy The attributes of UN multilateralism identified by Geoff Berridge — that is, universal membership based on equality, majoritarian voting, and essentially public debates55 — have prompted some scholars to use the term ‘­parliamentary diplomacy’ to describe the nature of politics at the UN.56 Multilateral diplomacy in the UN context is organized in ways that are somewhat similar to parliamentary politics, where different parties function to aggregate interests and facilitate communication.57 Yet in respect to group politics, to characterize UN politics as parliamentary diplomacy obscures as much as it elucidates. As H.G. Nichols asks, ‘Where are the parties? Where are the whips, where are the usual channels? […] Where is the discipline?’58 Political groups in the UN do not function exactly like parties, but they do shape negotiations in regular patterns. Parliamentary parties exist not only to pass legislation, but to ensure the continued participation of party members in parliamentary seats through electoral processes. In multilateral processes, electoral and negotiation group 53  Adler and Pouliot, ‘International Practices’, p. 16. 54   Vincent Pouliot. ‘The Practice of Permanent Representation at International Organizations’, in Sending, Pouliot and Neumann (eds.), Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics, p. 95. 55  G.R. Berridge, Diplomacy: Theory and Practice (London: Palgrave, 3rd edition 2005). Berridge argues that there may be a diplomatic deficiency in the emergence of multilateral bodies with universal membership. He argues that ‘universal membership may well be anti-diplomatic, gratuitously worsening relations between states that in an earlier era would either have had little contact at all or would have contact only on issues where both had a direct interest’ (p. 164). 56  See Frans W. Weisglas and Gonnie de Boer, ‘Parliamentary Diplomacy’, The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, vol. 2, no. 1 (2007), pp. 93–99. 57  See Courtney B. Smith, Politics and Process at the United Nations: The Global Dance (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), especially chapter 3. 58  H.G. Nichols, The United Nations as a Political Institution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 5th edition 1975), p. 104.

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memberships are often distinct (see Table 2.1 above). Decisions about how and when to participate in group negotiations are not well understood, even by participants. As Nichols argues, UN political groups — unlike parliamentary political parties — do not exercise consistent discipline over members, because member states have permanent membership once they are admitted to the UN.59 Furthermore, the decision of a particular delegation at the UN to participate in group or bloc negotiations is entirely voluntary. Each delegation has the possibility to decide not to align with a particular political group (although they are assigned to the regional groups for electoral purposes to other UN bodies), or to decide to work within a different political group on different issues (although the EU requires solidarity among all members if a common position has been agreed). Parliamentary politics cannot be understood without understanding the role of parties, even though parties are rarely mentioned in national constitutions; similarly, UN politics cannot be understood without understanding the critical role of groups in diplomatic processes. However, conceptualizing UN politics as parliamentary distorts the understanding of the role of groups in the political process, because the practice is far less institutionalized than it is for parties, given the permanent representation of UN member states.60 The deliberative nature of UN multilateralism, particularly in the standing committees of the UNGA and other political arenas, reflects a practice of politicized diplomacy. While negotiation theory may capture the interest-driven behaviour in specific conferences that are devoted to regulatory international agreements (for instance, on the Non-Proliferation Treaty or the UNFCCC), diplomacy in the quasi-legislative bodies of the UN is shaped by contestation over the essentially normative output of the deliberations. Diplomats argue over words in non-binding resolutions because they are engaged in politics.61 Alan Henrikson observes that one plausible future that results from this new diplomacy is that there is ‘more and more, an approximation and even assimilation of “international relations” to the model of domestic American politics’.62 While Henrikson was focusing on the need to ‘lobby’ when engaging in bilateral diplomatic relations with the United States — that for diplomatic counterparts, the US State Department as the typical diplomatic interlocutor no

59  Nichols, The United Nations as a Political Institution, p. 105. 60  Pouliot, ‘The Practice of Permanent Representation’, pp. 96–98. 61  Ulbert and Risse, ‘Deliberately Changing the Discourse’. 62  Alan K. Henrikson, ‘Diplomacy’s Possible Futures’, Hague Journal of Diplomacy, vol. 1, no. 1 (2006), p. 21.

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longer suffices — his point about the domestication of diplomacy bears fruit in the multilateral context more broadly. So how can we begin to approach the role of informal groups in a more systematic and conceptual way than has been the case so far? The role of informal groups is as under studied in other political contexts as it is in multilateralism. One exception has been Alan Feillen’s framework to examine the role of informal groups in legislative institutions, as opposed to parties or institutional structures.63 Feillen defines informal groups as ‘an identifiable, self-conscious, relatively stable unit of interacting members whose relationships are not officially prescribed by statutes and rules’.64 He provides some preliminary hypotheses that can be adapted to study the practice of group politics in the UN context, as demonstrated in Table 2.2.65 What becomes immediately apparent when assessing these hypotheses is that informal groups have to be approached with a very particular methodology. While it is important to examine official proceedings and to analyse voting behaviour and other observable indicators that are available, the informal nature of groups means that they do not often leave an empirical footprint. Diplomats, as scholars of diplomatic practice note, take the practice of group consultations for granted. Thus, any analysis of groups necessarily entails observation of the practice or interviewing participants. It is only through such interrogation that the impact of these diplomatic practices can be assessed. Jan Melissen is correct that such an approach may too vague for methodological purists,66 but purity is too high a price if we lose a critically important insight on UN multilateralism. 5

Conclusion: a Plea for Political Perspective on UN Multilateralism

Group dynamics in UN diplomacy reminds us that what diplomats do in practice in the UN’s multilateral environment is often less about pursuing the national interest than about engaging in politics, despite their sovereign diplomatic prerogatives. The UN’s multilateral context is a miasma of the current 63  Alan Feillen, ‘The Function of Informal Groups in Legislative Institutions’, Journal of Politics, vol. 24, no. 1 (1962), pp. 72–91. Very little scholarly work has been produced about the role of informal groups since Feillen’s piece. Most work on groups examines the role of outsider interest groups rather than informal groups of decision-makers in the political process. This is similar to the focus on NGOs in multilateral processes. 64  Feillen, ‘The Function of Informal Groups in Legislative Institutions’, p. 76. 65  Feillen, ‘The Function of Informal Groups in Legislative Institutions’, pp. 89–90. 66  Melissen, ‘Diplomatic Studies in the Right Season’, p. 724.

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Group Politics at the UN Table 2.2 Applying informal group functions to UN group diplomacy

Feillen’s Hypotheses on Informal Group Functions in Legislative Processes

Application to Political Groups in UN Multilateral Diplomacy

Groups perform manifest and latent functions (and dysfunctions) for the members and institutions; and bloc behaviour is related to political strategy and goal attainment.

In the UN context, groups aggregate votes and provide a means of information-gathering, brokering interests, and organizing participation in relation to goal attainment

Informal groups are the principle socializing agencies in such legislatures; and members learn role expectations and institutional norms within informal groups.

While representation is permanent, diplomats come and go from the missions in New York; groups help diplomats find their way through the demanding agendas and technical nature of negotiations.

Informal groups may provide ‘cover’ for behaviour that is judged to be deviant from institutional norms.

In the UN context, some member states use groups to advance national agendas in a way that can cause damage to the group.a

Decisions/positions of legislators depend on informal group memberships.

In the UN context, not all member states have a national interest at stake in every negotiation, and yet as Berridge notes, states in universal membership bodies are expected to deliberate whether they have an interest or not.b

Informal groups structure otherwise loose institutional environments; politics in such environments occurs within and between these groups and their channels — for example, negotiation, compromise and the formation of coalitions.

While the UN privileges member states, the multilateral context for diplomacy means that politics at the UN are channelled through a variety of groups — from regional organizations to single-issue, cross-national coalitions.

a Venezuela has often pursued an anti-US agenda in its group affiliations, and ultimately formed its own group for that purpose (ALBA). b Berridge, Diplomacy, p. 164. Source: Author.

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world diplomatic system, where at least three types of diplomacy — public, multilateral and polylateral — are conducted simultaneously.67 It is an inherently political diplomacy. Politicized diplomacy acknowledges the political institutional context of UN diplomacy, which differs from treaty negotiations, where interests dictate process and goal attainment focuses political energies. Performance in such negotiations is measured by how much of a participant’s objectives were attained in the final agreement. In the deliberative processes at the UN, however, the assumptions of goal attainment are rocky at best. Sponsors of a resolution may have a goal, and opponents may object to certain provisions and lobby against them, but a great number of those involved in negotiations may not have strong feelings one way or another. The fact that 80 per cent of UNGA resolutions are passed by consensus is a stark illustration of this. The impossibility of imagining an international treaty being adopted by acclamation points to the very different political contexts of UNGA multilateralism and of international negotiations that result in binding treaties. Outcomes of these politicized deliberations do not result in policies that are implemented, but in ‘frameworks for action’ and ‘correct’ understandings of an issue. Policy governance often occurs elsewhere in the UN system. Diplomacy in the UN’s deliberative bodies is fundamentally political, where members are engaged in positioning — among one another, for leadership, and for ideas. Multilateral debates are used not only to pursue national interests, but often to pursue broader ideological or normative agendas. The intersection of all of these forces and the practice of group politics is anathema to many. Geoffrey Wiseman depicts Harold Nicholson, an early scholar of diplomatic studies, as a staunch critic of the multilateral method or conference diplomacy — ‘the American method’ — precisely because it politicized what should be discreet and confidential.68 Indeed, Inis Claude observed that ‘Voting is a concept alien to the traditional system for the management of international relations’.69 Despite this aversion to politics by diplomatic and UN scholars, Wiseman observes that: ‘Multilateral diplomatic practices (for example, voting, parliamentary style speech-making, speaking

67  Public diplomacy is generally the effort to influence not foreign governments but foreign societies or publics; multilateral diplomacy is the practice of coordinating policy by three or more states (Keohane) according to general principles (Ruggie); polylateral diplomacy involves the broader engagement of civil society in multilateral diplomatic processes. See Wiseman, ‘Bringing Theory Back In’, p. 712. 68  Wiseman, ‘Norms and Diplomacy’, pp. 7–8. 69  Inis Claude Jr., Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization (New York: Random House, 3rd edition, 1965), p. 111.

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directly to publics) are now taken for granted’.70 The reality of group politics in UN multilateral diplomacy is often observed but is left unanalysed because of this aversion to politics in the study of multilateral diplomacy at the UN. A focus on group politics — which are often divisive — when the international community seeks solutions to collective problems may seem to be a sideshow at best and exasperating at worst, but ignoring politics does not make politics disappear. Jan Melissen hits the nail on the head: The predominant focus in diplomatic studies on diplomacy as an institution, as well as on processes, change and innovation in diplomatic modes, has been to the detriment of exploring the power–diplomacy nexus. […] The issue of power — fundamental to all questions in political science — should not be omitted from the equation.71 A political perspective need not lead to cynicism.72 Politics can be the wellspring of social change, which is exponentially more difficult in a setting as diverse and challenging as the United Nations. Adam Watson has argued that the United Nations is a distinctive omnilateral institution, and omnilateral institutions are notable because they focus on the collective responsibility of participants, not simply their prerogatives.73 A clear question that emerges from a consideration of the practice of group politics is whether they contribute to, or detract from, the realization of collective responsibility among members. It may be that groups introduce a divisive element that makes it impossible to conceptualize, let alone to realize, collective responsibility. Thomas Weiss has made this argument.74 Harold Nicholson was wary of multilateral diplomacy for introducing sordid parliamentary politics into diplomacy, which he believed should be quiet and discreet. However, it may also be that in an omnilateral context, groups are ‘made to be broken’.75 Although the UN is a universal organization that is premised upon the idea of collective responsibility, it is perhaps unrealistic to assume 70  Wiseman, ‘Norms and Diplomacy’, p. 14 (italics added). 71  Melissen, ‘Diplomatic Studies in the Right Season’, p. 725. 72  For an original analysis of how parties and partisanship serve to regulate rivalries and make effective pluralist politics possible, see Nancy L. Rosenblum, On the Side of Angels: An Appreciation for Parties and Partisanship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 73  Adam Watson, Diplomacy: The Dialogue Between States (London: Routledge, 1982), p. 146. 74  Weiss, ‘Moving Beyond North–South Theatre’. 75  This is the argument in some coalition literature; see Hampson with Hart, Multilateral Negotiations.

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that a diplomat whose credentials are permanently to represent one’s national interest in multilateral settings should naturally think in terms of or assume collective responsibility. Part of the practice of UN diplomacy is the socialization of actors; groups socialize diplomats into broader communities of identity and affinity. Groups are not what Robert Keohane was referring to when discussing global governance and democratic accountability,76 but rather what Alan Henrikson describes as ‘a system of representation of points of view as well as an expression of persons. I refer not to the points of view of individual countries as “countries” or to the points of view of clusters of countries as “regions” in the voting group sense, but rather to their situational point of view’.77 In this way, group politics in the practice of UN diplomacy may serve to broaden affinities beyond the national interest, to strengthen legitimacy claims and to promote a concept of collective responsibility. Any diplomat may invoke the collective in negotiations; groups embody them. The notion of the international community may be a myth, but it is a socially useful concept. The focus of the special issue of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy and this volume is an innovative effort to heed Geoffrey Wiseman’s exhortation that ‘we need to learn a lot more about mutual socialization in multilateral settings’.78 76  Robert O. Keohane, ‘Global Governance and Democratic Accountability’, in David Held and Mathias K. Archibugi (eds), The Taming Globalization: Frontiers of Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). 77  Henrikson, ‘Diplomacy’s Possible Futures’, p. 15. 78  Wiseman, ‘Norms and Diplomacy’, p. 15.

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Part 2 Regional and Political Groups in UN Diplomacy

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Chapter 3

The European Union Karen E. Smith In late November 2018, the German Finance Minister suggested that the European Union take over France’s permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. His suggestion was immediately dismissed by the French Ambassador to the United States as legally and politically impossible.1 However, this was not the first airing of the idea of an EU permanent seat on the Security Council replacing at least one of the two seats occupied by France and the United Kingdom (UK).2 The European Parliament has repeatedly referred to an EU seat on the Security Council as the ‘long-term goal of the EU’.3 The UK took the threat to its Security Council seat so seriously that it insisted on a clear statement that the 2009 Lisbon Treaty’s provisions on foreign policy will not affect a member state’s membership of the Security Council.4 The debate on a possible EU seat on the Security Council encapsulates many of the key elements of the EU as a political group in the United Nations: on the one hand it is seen as powerful and united enough to merit the ultimate badge of honour, a permanent Security Council seat, and on the other hand, the member states are not united enough to agree to push for an EU seat. This chapter delves into these contradictions. It addresses the volume’s key questions concerning firstly, the composition and function of the EU at the UN; secondly, the EU member states’ understanding of the EU’s role at the UN; and thirdly the promotion of EU interests at the UN. ‘The UN’ here consists of the main organs, the General Assembly (and its committees and subsidiary organ, the Human Rights Council) and the Security Council, rather 1  France24, ‘Germany Calls for France to Give its UN Security Council Seat to EU’, France24 online, 28 November 2018. 2  Christopher Hill, ‘The European Powers in the UN Security Council: Differing Interests, Differing Arenas’, in The European Union at the United Nations: Intersecting Multilateralisms, eds Katie Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 3  See European Parliament, ‘The EU as a Global Actor: its role in multilateral organisations’, Resolution of 11 May 2011, P7_TA(2011)0229; European Parliament, ‘The Role of the EU within the UN — how to achieve better foreign policy goals’, Resolution of 24 November 2015, P8_TA(2015)0403. 4  Official Journal of the European Union, ‘Declarations Annexed to the Final Act of the Intergovernmental Conference which Adopted the Treaty of Lisbon’, OJ C326/336, 26 October 2012, Declaration 14.

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than the myriad specialized agencies and funds that are part of the wider ‘UN family’. The sources on which this chapter is based include secondary literature and EU documents, but also interviews that I conducted between 2003 and 2016 with over 30 diplomats involved in EU-UN relations (mostly with respect to human rights issues) from EU member states and EU institutions. 1

Group Composition and Functioning

The European Union is widely seen as one of the most powerful political groups operating at the UN. Originally founded as the European Economic Community in 1958, the European Union grew from six member states to 28 in 2018, just under 15 percent of the UN’s total membership. Since the UK left the EU, the 27 remaining member states comprise just over 14 percent of the UN’s membership. EU member states are members of other groups active at the UN, though their EU membership tends to take precedence. They are also spread across three of the five regional groups: 15 (16, with the UK) are in the Western Europe and Others Group; 11 are in the Eastern European Group; and one (Cyprus) is in the Asia-Pacific Group. The regional groups are important for elections to UN bodies, but EU member states rarely coordinate on elections — and indeed for elections to the Security Council they compete openly against each other. Since the 1950s, the EU’s remit and powers have expanded considerably, to include not just economic integration measures but also cooperation on foreign, security and defence policy. While many of the EU’s decisions on economic or social matters are decided by a form of qualified majority voting, in the field of foreign, security and defence policy, unanimity is almost always required. Since the beginning of foreign policy cooperation in the early 1970s, the member states have agreed to try to coordinate their positions in international organisations. Coordinated action within international organisations is seen as an expression of EU international actorness, but also as a necessity to protect and promote EU interests. The commitment to coordinate has hardened over the decades. The 1993 Maastricht Treaty (article J.2) intoned that ‘Member States shall coordinate their action in international organizations and at international conferences’ and that ‘They shall uphold the common positions in those forums’ (emphasis added). The Lisbon Treaty repeated this language, and considerably strengthened the mechanisms for coordinating and representing common positions in international organisations. However, reaching

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agreement on the common positions in the first place can still be challenging, given that this requires unanimity. Leaving aside the UN Security Council for now, the arrangements for EU coordination within the UN are quite centralized. Before the Lisbon Treaty entered into effect in November 2009, EU coordination meetings were chaired by the presidency of the Council of the EU, which rotated every six months among all the EU member states. While EU-sponsored resolutions and statements were drafted in working groups in Brussels, they were refined in coordination meetings in New York or Geneva; coordination meetings also dealt with the EU’s responses to other states’ initiatives and proposals in the UN. In UN bodies including the General Assembly (and its committees), the presidency made statements and presented resolutions on behalf of the EU. The European Community delegation to the UN in New York or Geneva participated in coordination meetings but did not speak on behalf of the EU unless an issue fell within its area of competence.5 Decision-making in coordination meetings was based on consensus, which meant that they tended to be very long, leaving little time to engage in ‘outreach’ with third countries and convince them to support EU positions.6 The Lisbon Treaty created new Brussels-based institutions in foreign and security policy-making, essentially replacing the presidency’s role with the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy or representatives of the new European External Action Service (EEAS). The European Community delegations became EU delegations, managed by the EEAS. In Brussels, the Foreign Affairs Council, committees and working groups are usually chaired by either the High Representative or EEAS representatives. In New York and Geneva, officials in the EU delegation chair coordination meetings. Outreach is now organised by the EU delegation and involves both EU delegation officials and EU member state diplomats acting on behalf of the EU delegation.7 The number of coordination meetings is staggering: over 800 meetings were held at the EU delegation to the UN in New York in the first 9 months of 2018 alone.8 5  Mary Farrell, ‘EU Representation and Coordination within the United Nations’, in The European Union at the United Nations: Intersecting Multilateralisms, eds Katie Laatikainen and Karen E Smith (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 6  Karen E. Smith, ‘Speaking with One Voice? European Union Coordination on Human Rights Issues at the United Nations’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 44, no. 1 (2006). 7  Katie Verlin Laatikainen, ‘Multilateral Leadership at the UN after the Lisbon Treaty’, European Foreign Affairs Review, 15, no. 4 (2010). 8  European Union, ‘Fact Sheet: The European Union at the United Nations’, 2018.

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The EU’s decision-making rules both enable and constrain the reaching of common positions: ‘The EU tends to be most cohesive when it has exclusive competences (such as the common commercial policy) and notably less cohesive when it comes to foreign or security policies which are predominantly intergovernmental’.9 EU cohesion can also be high on issues where there is a mix of exclusive and national competences, such as development policy and climate change, and where unanimity is not usually required for decision-making. On issues considered to fall within the framework of the Common Foreign and Security Policy, cohesion can be more difficult, but not impossible As Diana Panke has argued, the extent to which national diplomats have autonomy in the process matters: In general, the fewer instructions Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFAs) send and the more flexibility national diplomats with instructions have, the easier it is to develop a common EU position during coordination meetings…. The more highly politicized a policy is, the more likely it is that many or even all EU member states develop national positions and that the instructions for the national diplomats in New York entail a greater number of red lines.10 Areas that are perennially difficult for the EU member states to reach a consensus on include decolonization matters, where former colonial powers such as France and the UK diverge from other EU member states, and nuclear disarmament, where the EU’s two nuclear powers (France and the UK) clash with other member states, including those that are neutral.11 On other foreign policy issues, such as UN peacekeeping missions, the EU member states may

9  Simon Duke, ‘Form and Substance in the EU’s Multilateral Diplomacy’, in Routledge Handbook on the European Union and International Institutions: Performance, Policy, Power, eds Knud Erik Jörgensen and Katie Verlin Laatikainen (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), p. 17. 10  Diana Panke, ‘Speaking with One Voice: Easier Said than Done? The EU in the UNGA’, in The EU in UN Politics: Actors, Processes and Performances, eds Spyros Blavoukos and Dimitrios Bourantonis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 28–9. 11  Megan Dee, ‘The EU in UN Disarmament Forums’, in The EU in UN Politics: Actors, Processes and Performances, eds Spyros Blavoukos and Dimitrios Bourantonis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Ioannis Galarioti and Maria Gianniou, ‘Evidence from the EU Presence at UNGA: In Pursuit of Effective Performance’, in The EU in UN Politics: Actors, Processes and Performances, eds Spyros Blavoukos and Dimitrios Bourantonis, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

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start with different preferences but usually come to a consensus position by the time the Security Council authorises missions.12 The EU delegation has a clear self-interest in trying to keep the member states negotiating until a consensus is reached: the rationale for its existence is in fact to foster EU unity.13 But EU member states too desire EU unity though they may not always be prepared to make the compromises necessary to achieve it.14 Despite the challenges of intergovernmental decision-making, the extent of EU voting cohesion in the General Assembly is striking: EU member states vote the same way in 80 percent or more of recorded votes.15 The EU has also been the most consistently united group in General Assembly voting, at least from 1999 to 2010.16 More recently, however, EU unity has become more difficult to reach, with splits over human rights issues and a General Assembly vote on Jerusalem as Israel’s capital,17 and defection from a previous agreement to back the Global Compact on Migration.18 In September 2018, the European Commission proposed adopting qualified majority voting in three areas of foreign policy-making, one of which was decisions on UN positions on human rights expressed in multilateral fora. This proposal was prompted in particular by member states either blocking agreement on EU statements to be delivered in UN human rights bodies (the Human Rights Council, the General Assembly’s Third Committee) or ‘watering down’ the EU’s annual priorities on human rights in UN fora.19 The prospects for the Commission’s proposal at the time of writing were unclear, but vividly illustrate the challenges posed by the requirement that all EU member states agree on the common positions to be presented in the UN. 12  M  adeleine O. Hosli, Joren Selleslaghs and Bob van deMortel, ‘The European Union in the United Nations: Coordination on Peacekeeping Missions’, in The EU in UN Politics: Actors, Processes and Performances, eds Spyros Blavoukos and Dimitrios Bourantonis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 13  Interviews in London, 11 June 2014; New York, 15 July 2014; Brussels, 11 May 2016. 14  Interviews in New York, 4 February 2004; 17 February 2004. 15  Xi Jin and Madeleine O. Hosli, ‘Pre- and Post-Lisbon: European Union Voting in the United Nations General Assembly’, West European Politics, 36, no. 6 (2013). 16  Diana Panke, ‘Regional Power Revisited: How to Explain Differences in Coherency and Success of Regional Organizations in the United Nations General Assembly’, International Negotiation, 18, no. 2 (2013), figure 1. 17  Richard Gowan, ‘Separation Anxiety: European Influence at the UN after Brexit’, European Council of Foreign Relations Policy Brief, 2018. 18  Michael Peel, ‘European States Reject Divisive UN Compact on Migration’, The Financial Times, 3 December 2018. 19  European Commission, ‘A stronger global actor: a more efficient decision-making for EU Common Foreign and Security Policy’, COM (2018) 647 final, 12 September 2018, pp. 5–6.

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After the Lisbon Treaty entered into force in 2009, controversy erupted regarding who would present the EU’s positions in the UN: the EU delegation or the EU presidency.20 Within the EU there was some resistance — above all from the UK — to the EU delegation speaking on behalf of the member states.21 At the UN, Caribbean states in particular voiced disquiet that the Europeans were asking for special treatment. In May 2011, the General Assembly granted the EU enhanced observer status, but also allowed other groups to apply for such a status. This status allows the EU delegation the right to speak in debates, sponsor draft resolutions on behalf of the member states, submit amendments and reply to other delegations, but not to vote or co-sponsor draft resolutions.22 The controversy over enhanced observer status has slowed or perhaps halted attempts to request such a special status in other UN bodies (such as the Human Rights Council). For now the representation of EU positions varies across the UN system. The Security Council is a case apart, not only because it is the most powerful organ of the UN. It is also a forum in which group politics are largely absent. France and the UK have always carefully guarded their independence and room for manoeuvre as permanent members of the Security Council — to the dismay of other EU member states. They have consented to Treaty provisions that require them to keep other member states and the High Representative ‘fully informed’ of Security Council discussions, and will defend EU positions and interests on the Security Council. Furthermore, where there is an EU common position, they are to invite the High Representative to present it to the Security Council (article 34, consolidated version of the Treaty of the European 20  Spyros Blavoukos and Dimitris Bourantonis, ‘The Politics of UNGA Resolution 65/276: A Tale of the EU Performance in the UNGA’, in The EU in UN Politics: Actors, Processes and Performances, eds Spyros Blavoukos and Dimitrios Bourantonis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Fernando Andresen Guimaraes, ‘Speak Up! Getting the EU a Voice at the UN General Assembly’, in The European Union as a Diplomatic Actor, eds Joachim Koops and Gjovalin Macaj (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2014); Katie Verlin Laatikainen, ‘The EU Delegation in New York: A Debut in High Political Drama’, in The European External Action Service: European Diplomacy Post-Westphalia, eds David Spence and Jozef Bátora (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 21  The issue was resolved in October 2011, when the Council agreed that the statements would specify whether they were ‘on behalf of the European Union’, ‘on behalf of the European Union and its member states’, or ‘on behalf of the member states’. Council of the European Union, ‘EU statements in multilateral organisations: General Arrangements’, document no. 15901/11, 24 October 2011. 22  United Nations General Assembly. ‘Participation of the European Union in the work of the United Nations’, Resolution 65/276, 10 May 2011.

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Union). But as the examples cited at the beginning of this chapter illustrate, neither France nor the UK will entertain the notion that they should be replaced by the EU on the Security Council. The number of EU member states serving on the Security Council varies from year to year, as states are elected as non-permanent members from the five regional groups. In some years, as many as five (one-third) of the fifteen Security Council members have been EU member states. In 2018, this was the case, with three non-permanent seats occupied by the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden. Some coordination among EU member states serving on the Security Council can take place, but this functions sporadically.23 Furthermore, it is not always the case that the EU member states on the Security Council vote together; infamously in 2011 the UK and France supported military action against Libya while Germany abstained in the vote. In addition, the EU member states have long been divided over Security Council reform, with Germany and Italy at loggerheads over the prospect of a permanent seat for Germany.24 Leadership at the UN generally is dispersed among EU actors (the EU delegation, the member states). Although the EU delegation may speak on behalf of the EU, the impetus for EU action usually comes from the member states, deciding to work within the EU and ‘uploading’ their preferences to the EU level. That said, much of the debate in the General Assembly every year actually centres on ‘repeat resolutions’, resolutions that are run every year or every other year with only minor language changes. Panke notes that nearly half of the resolutions debated in the General Assembly are repeat resolutions, and that running a resolution is costly: it requires diplomatic capital and the risks of losing a resolution may be high.25 Much of the daily work of the EU delegation centres on drafting statements and drafting slightly new versions of repeat resolutions.

23  Spyros Blavoukos and Dimitris Bourantonis, ‘The EU’s Performance in the UN Security Council’, Journal of European Integration, 33, no. 6 (2011); Edith Drieskens, ‘Beyond Chapter VIII: Limits and Opportunities for Regional Representation at the UN Security Council’, International Organizations Law Review, 7, no. 1 (2010); Daniele Marchesi, ‘The EU Common Foreign and Security Policy in the UN Security Council: between representation and coordination’ European Foreign Affairs Review, 15, no. 1 (2010). 24  Hill, ‘The European Powers in the UN Security Council’. 25  Diana Panke, ‘The UNGA — a Talking Shop? Exploring Rationales for the Repetition of Resolutions in Subsequent Negotiations’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 27, no. 3 (2014): 443.

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Participants’ Perceptions

The EU is an important forum through which EU member states conduct their diplomacy at the UN, though it co-exists with national diplomacy conducted outside the framework of the EU, and in other groups, including the Nordic Group, the International Organisation of the Francophonie, and ad hoc cross-regional groupings. The extent to which EU member states work through the EU varies: in some issue areas such as human rights or environmental policy, the EU is more significant; in other issues areas, such as nuclear non-proliferation, it is one of many groupings through which EU member states operate (see chapter 10). Over time, the same member state may also shift the focus of its diplomacy. In the Human Rights Council since 2011, EU member states have conducted more of their diplomacy outside the EU than before, often in ad hoc cross-regional groupings. Even a member state like the UK, which had conducted almost all of its human rights diplomacy at the UN through the EU, and had not sponsored resolutions on a national basis for decades, has more recently been working with other UN states on topics such as modern slavery and human rights in Syria.26 Such extra-EU, cross-regional diplomacy is occurring because of the difficulties EU member states perceive of acting within the EU (the challenges of achieving consensus) but also because they wish to avoid sparking the kind of opposition to the EU that can arise from other regional groups.27 Undoubtedly, therefore, the EU is seen by its member states as a powerful group, and they have supported the continual strengthening of the procedures and institutions that foster and enable coordination in the UN. Perceptions of the benefits of participation in EU coordination at the UN are widely shared. Coordination meetings provide all of the member states (but particularly those with smaller delegations to the UN) with more information and expertise than they could gather on their own.28 Because the EU has policies and positions on virtually all of the issues on the UN’s vast agenda, each member state does not have to have a national position on them all. And perhaps most importantly, EU membership allows each member state to have a more effective voice in the UN, even when they are speaking on a national basis as they are known to be a member of the EU and their views as such are sought.29 This 26  Interviews in London 10 December 2003; New York 2 February 2004; Geneva, 11 June 2014. 27  Karen E. Smith, ‘EU member states at the UN: A case of Europeanisation arrested?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 55, no. 3 (2017). 28  Interviews in New York, 4 February 2004, 9 February 2004 and 17 February 2004. 29  Interviews in New York 16 July 2014.

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does not necessarily mean that EU member states will prevail in UN debates and votes (as they constitute a small minority of the total UN membership), but the EU — as a well-organised, often unified, and powerful group outside of the UN — is listened to. Its positions attract the support of a number of ‘like-minded’ countries, including those that want to join the EU (such as Montenegro or Ukraine).30 There is thus certainly evidence to support the hypotheses presented in the introduction: EU member states value the fact that the EU helps to ‘aggregate votes’, and provides a means of ‘information gathering, brokering interests, and organizing participation in relation to goal attainment in negotiations.’ It also helps ‘diplomats find their way through the demanding agendas and technical nature of negotiations.’ Further, the EU coordination process has a socialising effect, and participants identify themselves with the EU. New EU member states have aligned themselves with EU positions relatively smoothly. Ten Central and East European countries converged almost completely with the EU majority position shortly before they joined in 2004 and 2007.31 There were still problematic areas, and they also successfully ‘uploaded’ some of their own national interests to the EU level, but their convergence illustrates the socialisation effect of EU membership. There are, however, drawbacks to EU membership within the context of the UN, even though the EU does not preclude member states from conducting diplomacy outside the EU framework. EU coordination meetings can be timeconsuming, and tie up diplomats for hours every day. Multiple coordination meetings (in different issue areas) can be held simultaneously, straining the capacities of member states with small missions to the UN. Coordination meetings can also be frustrating, and can result in lowest-common-denominator outcomes that please few participants. More importantly, the fact that the EU is seen to be such a powerful group at the UN has negative connotations too. Once an EU common position has been agreed, it is effectively ‘fixed’, as reopening the negotiations to revise the position would be exhausting; as a result,

30  There is a formal process by which certain third countries (most non-EU European countries) can align themselves with EU declarations and EU sponsored-resolutions in the UN. At the start of its statement, the EU will list the countries that align themselves with it. Not all countries do so every time, but many do so frequently. 31  Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués, ‘Returned to Europe? The Central and East European Member States at the Heart of the European Union’, in The European Union at the United Nations: Intersecting Multilateralisms, eds Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

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the EU is seen as an inflexible negotiator.32 The EU can spark resistance and opposition from other groups (such as the Africa Group or the Non-Aligned Movement) and states. This in turn means that EU member states can find it difficult to establish a visible role outside of the EU framework, and, in the words of one EU member state diplomat, can prevent them from being a ‘middle power’ or ‘bridge builder’.33 3

EU Interests at the UN

In EU discourse, there has long been a strong rhetorical commitment to the UN. The 2003 European Security Strategy proclaimed ‘effective multilateralism’ as one of the EU’s strategic objectives, and that ‘strengthening the United Nations, equipping it to fulfil its responsibilities and to act effectively, is a European priority’.34 The 2016 EU Global Strategy indicated that the EU ‘will strive for a strong UN as the bedrock of the multilateral rules-based order’.35 This commitment is also apparent in the annual conclusions of the EU Council of Ministers on priorities for the UN General Assembly, which have been produced yearly for over twenty years. In the 2018 conclusions, the word ‘support’ is used twenty-four times in the eight-page document: amongst other things, the EU supports the UN Secretary-General’s reform agenda, the UN’s efforts to promote the 2030 agenda (Sustainable Development Goals), the efforts to improve the performance of UN peacekeeping, the effective functioning of the Human Rights Council, actions by the Security Council to strengthen the climate-security nexus, and the work of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.36 The language is typical of the documents setting out EU priorities at the UN.37 It is also clear that the EU tries to cover the gamut of topics discussed at the UN. 32  Interviews in Geneva, 26 May 2014 and 28 May 2014. 33  Interview in New York, 16 July 2014. 34  European Council, ‘A Secure Europe in a Better World: European Security Strategy’, Brussels, 12 December 2003, p. 9. 35  European Union, ‘Shared Vision, Common Action: A Stronger Europe. A Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy’, 2016, p. 39. 36  Council of the European Union, ‘EU priorities at the United Nations and the 73rd United Nations General Assembly (September 2018–September 2019)’, document no. 10056/18, 25 June 2018. 37  See, for example, Council of the European Union., ‘EU priorities at the United Nations and the Seventieth United Nations General Assembly (September 2015–September 2016)’, document no. 10158/15, 22 June 2015.

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Two striking observations can be made about the EU’s declared goals for the UN. First, the EU’s priorities consist almost entirely of what Arnold Wolfers termed ‘milieu goals’. Milieu goals aim to shape the environment in which the EU operates. ‘Possession goals’, in contrast, further national interests.38 The EU emphasises its commitment to fostering multilateralism, a rules-based order and a more effective UN. Granted, an entity like the EU can really only exercise influence in the context of a rules-based order (as it has few ‘hard power’ resources of the kind privileged in an order based more on ‘might’), so the EU and its member states have a clear stake in the multilateral game. Second, the strategic documents of the EU tend not to provide details of the concrete support that the EU will offer. How exactly, for example, will the EU support the International Criminal Court: with more funding? There are indications of details in other documents. For example, in September 2018 the EU and UN agreed a set of priorities for 2019–21 in cooperation on peace operations and crisis management.39 These include strengthening cooperation in the field, deepening cooperation with the African Union, and cooperation on training and capacity building. But how the EU will encourage EU member states to contribute to UN peace operations is not clear. This is symptomatic of the declaratory nature of the EU’s strategic documents: lofty goals but concrete plans for implementing them tend to seep out gradually (if at all). For the most part, the EU pursues its myriad ‘priorities’ through partnership with the UN (as on peace operations), declarations (hundreds every year40) and the sponsoring of resolutions. As discussed above, the intergovernmental nature of EU decision-making means that it is difficult for an individual member state to ‘capture’ the process and ram through a national agenda (as can happen in other groups at the UN). This can slow the EU down, but it also means that the collective views of the EU are seen as representative of the entire EU membership — which gives it a particular power in the context of the UN. The laborious process of building an internal EU consensus means that there is little to no defection from EU positions once they are presented to the UN and when issues are voted on, reinforcing external perceptions of EU unity. 38  Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962): 73–6. 39  European Union and United Nations, ‘Joint Press Statement: Reinforcing the EU-UN Strategic Partnership on Peace Operations and Crisis Management: Priorities 2019–2021’, 2018. 40  In the second half of 2017 alone, the EU made over 140 statements in UN fora in New York. List of statements available here: http://www.eeas.europa.eu/archives/delegations/ eu-un/2017-second-semester/index.html.

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4 Conclusions The European Union is one of the most influential groups in UN multilateralism, despite often being outvoted in the General Assembly — because it can influence debates and (sometimes) even win votes, but also because it is cohesive, well-organised and ubiquitous. The EU is strongly committed to UN multilateralism. Diplomats from EU member states see their EU membership as mostly advantageous: its membership enables them to have more influence at the UN. But they also note the drawbacks, including the fact that the EU can spark outright opposition. There are however several challenges looming, which may undermine the EU’s unity and influence at the UN. The growth of nationalist and illiberal tendencies in several EU member state governments strains the EU’s capacity to reach consensus. The EU focuses on the sort of milieu goals that are increasingly disparaged not only by the ‘usual suspects’ — authoritarian governments — but even formerly like-minded powers such as the United States. In this context, Brexit will add to the strain,41 as it will weaken the EU at the UN, certainly as it is perceived by other UN members. Bibliography Blavoukos, Spyros and Dimitris Bourantonis. ‘The EU’s Performance in the UN Security Council’. Journal of European Integration, 33, no. 6 (2011): 731–42. Blavoukos, Spyros and Dimitris Bourantonis. ‘The Politics of UNGA Resolution 65/276: A Tale of the EU Performance in the UNGA’. In The EU in UN Politics: Actors, Processes and Performances, eds Spyros Blavoukos and Dimitrios Bourantonis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Council of the European Union. ‘EU statements in multilateral organisations: General Arrangements’, document no. 15901/11, 24 October 2011. Council of the European Union. ‘EU priorities at the United Nations and the Seventieth United Nations General Assembly (September 2015–September 2016)’, document no. 10158/15, 22 June 2015. Council of the European Union. ‘EU priorities at the United Nations and the 73rd United Nations General Assembly (September 2018–September 2019)’, document no. 10056/18, 25 June 2018.

41  Gowan, ‘Separation Anxiety’.

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Dee, Megan. ‘The EU in UN Disarmament Forums’. In The EU in UN Politics: Actors, Processes and Performances, eds Spyros Blavoukos and Dimitrios Bourantonis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Drieskens, Edith. ‘Beyond Chapter VIII: Limits and Opportunities for Regional Representation at the UN Security Council’, International Organizations Law Review, 7, no. 1 (2010): 149–69. Duke, Simon. ‘Form and Substance in the EU’s Multilateral Diplomacy’. In Routledge Handbook on the European Union and International Institutions: Performance, Policy, Power, eds Knud Erik Jörgensen and Katie Verlin Laatikainen (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). European Commission. ‘A stronger global actor: a more efficient decision-making for EU Common Foreign and Security Policy’, COM (2018) 647 final, 12 September 2018. European Council. ‘A Secure Europe in a Better World: European Security Strategy’, Brussels, 12 December 2003. European Parliament. ‘The EU as a Global Actor: its role in multilateral organisations’, Resolution of 11 May 2011, P7_TA(2011)0229. European Parliament. ‘The Role of the EU within the UN — how to achieve better foreign policy goals’, Resolution of 24 November 2015, P8_TA(2015)0403. European Union. ‘Shared Vision, Common Action: A Stronger Europe. A Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy’, 2016: http://europa. eu/globalstrategy/sites/globalstrategy/files/eugs_review_web.pdf. European Union. ‘Fact Sheet: The European Union at the United Nations’, 2018 https://cdn1-eeas.fpfis.tech.ec.europa.eu/cdn/farfuture/7DThRUL-N59FxdF0WpT gaQXs643_uyGc4pbHSYZRxH4/mtime:1537529053/sites/eeas/files/unga_71_eu-un -20-09-2018.pdf. European Union and United Nations. ‘Joint Press Statement: Reinforcing the EU-UN Strategic Partnership on Peace Operations and Crisis Management: Priorities 2019– 2021’, 2018: https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/reinforcing-un-eu-strategic-partnership -peace-operations-and-crisis-management-priorities-2019-2021. Farrell, Mary. ‘EU Representation and Coordination within the United Nations’. In The European Union at the United Nations: Intersecting Multilateralisms, eds Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). France24. ‘Germany Calls for France to Give its UN Security Council Seat to EU’, France24 online, 28 November 2018; https://www.france24.com/en/20181128-paris -france-german-proposal-un-eu-macron-merkel-security-council-nations. Galarioti, Ioannis and Maria Gianniou. ‘Evidence from the EU Presence at UNGA: In Pursuit of Effective Performance’. In The EU in UN Politics: Actors, Processes and Performances, eds Spyros Blavoukos and Dimitrios Bourantonis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

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Gowan, Richard. ‘Separation Anxiety: European Influence at the UN after Brexit’. European Council of Foreign Relations Policy Brief, 2018: https://www.ecfr.eu/ publications/summary/separation_anxiety_european_influence_at_the_un_after_ brexit. Guimaraes, Fernando Andresen. ‘Speak Up! Getting the EU a Voice at the UN General Assembly’. In The European Union as a Diplomatic Actor, eds Joachim Koops and Gjovalin Macaj (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2014). Hill, Christopher. ‘The European Powers in the UN Security Council: Differing Interests, Differing Arenas’. In The European Union at the United Nations: Intersecting Multilateralisms, eds Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Hosli, Madeleine O., Joren Selleslaghs and Bob van deMortel. ‘The European Union in the United Nations: Coordination on Peacekeeping Missions’. In The EU in UN Politics: Actors, Processes and Performances, eds Spyros Blavoukos and Dimitrios Bourantonis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Jin, Xi and Madeleine O. Hosli. ‘Pre- and Post-Lisbon: European Union Voting in the United Nations General Assembly’. West European Politics, 36, no. 6 (2013): 1274–91. Johansson-Nogués, Elisabeth. ‘Returned to Europe? The Central and East European Member States at the Heart of the European Union’. In The European Union at the United Nations: Intersecting Multilateralisms, eds Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Laatikainen, Katie Verlin. ‘Multilateral Leadership at the UN after the Lisbon Treaty’. European Foreign Affairs Review, 15, no. 4 (2010): 475–93. Laatikainen, Katie Verlin. ‘The EU Delegation in New York: A Debut in High Political Drama’. In The European External Action Service: European Diplomacy PostWestphalia, eds David Spence and Jozef Bátora (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Marchesi, Daniele. ‘The EU Common Foreign and Security Policy in the UN Security Council: between representation and coordination.’ European Foreign Affairs Review, 15, no. 1 (2010): 97–114. Official Journal of the European Union, ‘Declarations Annexed to the Final Act of the Intergovernmental Conference which Adopted the Treaty of Lisbon’, OJ C326/336, 26 October 2012. Panke, Diana. ‘Regional Power Revisited: How to Explain Differences in Coherency and Success of Regional Organizations in the United Nations General Assembly’. International Negotiation, 18, no. 2 (2013), pp. 265–91. Panke, Diana. ‘The UNGA — a Talking Shop? Exploring Rationales for the Repetition of Resolutions in Subsequent Negotiations’. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 27, no. 3 (2014): 442–458.

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Panke, Diana. ‘Speaking with One Voice: Easier Said than Done? The EU in the UNGA’. In The EU in UN Politics: Actors, Processes and Performances, eds Spyros Blavoukos and Dimitrios Bourantonis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Peel, Michael. ‘European States Reject Divisive UN Compact on Migration’. The Financial Times, 3 December 2018. Smith, Karen E. ‘Speaking with One Voice? European Union Coordination on Human Rights Issues at the United Nations’. Journal of Common Market Studies, 44, no. 1 (2006): 113–37. Smith, Karen E. ‘EU member states at the UN: A case of Europeanisation arrested?’ Journal of Common Market Studies, 55, no. 3 (2017): 628–644. United Nations General Assembly. ‘Participation of the European Union in the work of the United Nations’, Resolution 65/276, 10 May 2011. Wolfers, Arnold. Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962).

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Chapter 4

Latin American Cooperation at the United Nations: Exploring the Role of GRULAC, CARICOM and ALBA Andrea Ribeiro Hoffmann 1 Introduction Historically, Latin American countries have participated actively in discussions and negotiations at the global level, both individually and in regional groupings; these processes have been intertwined with their nation-building in the 19th century, and are still part of the (re)construction of their identities in the region.1 After the creation of the United Nations and the independence of the remaining colonies, Latin American participation was consolidated in institutions such as the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).2 Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries have been going through a radical transformation since the beginning of the 21st century, with changing relations with the United States and China, and ideological shifts at the national level.3 The decade-long ‘pink tide’ period, when centre-left governments in South America were in power in most countries, allowed the consolidation of collective middle and long-term strategies, which included the institutionalization of regional mechanisms to promote development alternatives to neoliberalism, and the promotion of regional social policies.4 During that period, 1  Katrin Sikkink, ‘Latin American countries as norm protagonists of the idea of international human rights’, Global Governance, 20: 3(2014): 389–404; Arie Kacowicz, The Impact of Norms in International Society: The Latin American Experience, 1881–2001. (Notre Dame, US: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Louise Fawcett, L. ‘The Origins and Development of the Regional Idea in the Americas’. In Regionalism and Governance in the Americas, edited by L. Fawcett and M. Serrano (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); C.W. Porto-Gonçalves and Pedro de Araújo Quental, ‘La colonialidad del poder y los desafíos de la integración regional en América Latina,’ Polis Revista Latinoamericana, 11, no. 31 (2012): 295–332. 2  M.J. Peterson, ‘General Assembly’, In The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations, edited by T. Weiss and Sam Daws (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 3  R. Biegon. US Power in Latin America: Renewing Hegemony (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Wolf Grabendorff, ‘América Latina en la era Trump:¿ Una región en disputa entre Esta-dos Unidos y China?’, Nueva Sociedad, 275 (2018): 47–61. 4  Pia Riggirozzi, P., and Diana Tussie, ‘Rethinking our region in a post-hegemonic moment,’ In Post-hegemonic regionalism in the Americas. Towards a Pacific vs. Atlantic divide, edited

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LAC countries also attempted to project common positions to the global level, in which the UN was a key forum. Currently, LAC countries participate in the UNGA via two main types of groups. The first is the Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC), one of the five official UN regional groups. The second type includes political groups such as the G-77 and regional organizations. This chapter explores the role of Latin American and Caribbean groupings at the UNGA focusing on the cases of GRULAC and two regional organizations, namely, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), in order to analyse the extent to which these groupings function as cohesive blocs.5 In doing so, we can explore the challenges in the region to participate in multilateral debates at the global level, as these groupings have voiced some of the controversial axes of conflict in the region, as discussed below. GRULAC, ALBA and CARICOM are formal groups, but their capacity to function as cohesive blocs, as well as their impact on the legitimacy of the decisionmaking fora in which they are acting, is very different. These groups aggregate votes and provide a means of information gathering, brokering interests and organizing participation in relation to goal attainment in negotiations (see chapter 2), playing a positive role for multilateral cooperation. Unlike informal groupings, they follow standards of transparency and accountability and can,

by Jose Briceno Ruiz and Isidro Morales, 16–31 (Abingdom: Routledge, 2017); Pia Riggirozzi and Diana Tussie, ‘The rise of post-hegemonic regionalism in Latin America.’, In The Rise of Post-Hegemonic Regionalism, edited by P. Riggirozzi and D. Tussie, 1–16 (Springer, Dordrecht, 2012). 5  Other sub-regional organizations are Mercosur, the Andean Community, Central American Common Market, UNASUR, and the Pacific Alliance. In addition to the sub-regional organizations, LAC countries also created the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in 2010, an organization that succeeded the Rio Group as the main forum of dialogue for LAC countries in the region and with external partners such as the EU and China, but distancing itself from the US (M. Mosquera and D. Morales Ruvalcaba, ‘La estrategia institucional de China hacia América Latina. Análisis comparado entre los foros Celac-China y Celac-Unión Europea’, OASIS, no. 28 (2018): 123–149; P.C. Hintzen, ‘The EU, CARIFORUM, and CELAC: A New Development Alliance?’ In EU Development Policies, edited by Beringer S., Maier S., Thiel M, 135–153 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). CELAC has also been active at UNGA, but it is not covered in this chapter as it focusses mostly on nuclear weapons issues. Some examples of common initiatives are the Dominican Republic’s statement on behalf of CELAC in the First Committee of the UNGA addressing the need to develop proposals to create concrete legal measures needed to maintain a world free of nuclear weapons in 2016 (https://www.nti.org/learn/treaties-and-regimes/ community-latin-american-and-caribbean-states-celac/).

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therefore, not only contribute to consensus making on specific issue areas, but to the legitimacy of UNGA and its decisions.6 This chapter proceeds first by analysing how GRULAC, CARICOM and ALBA work and how they aggregate interests and exercise leadership. It then considers the participants’ perceptions about their position in the group and the role of the group in UN multilateral politics, including the main policies and positions advanced by each of the groups. The last two sections assess GRULAC, CARICOM and ALBA cohesiveness. 2

GRULAC

GRULAC includes all 33 independent countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, representing 17% of UN members. The group has offices in Rome, Vienna and New York, and meets regularly in Geneva at technical or ambassadorial level. GRULAC’s president is elected for a two-year mandate, and all decisions are taken by consensus. As with other regional groups, GRULAC’s main function is to work as an electoral committee for appointments to seats, and to ensure a geographical distribution of the various offices, including the Secretary General and UNGA President.7 In 2018, Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garcés of Ecuador was elected president of the UNGA, the fourth woman to lead the Assembly and the first from the LAC region. She entered the contest quite late and won a competitive race against another woman, Mary Flake from Honduras, who was supported by the US, Israel and centre-right governments in Latin America, indicating some politicization in this process.8 Regional electoral groups do not often discuss substantive issues,9 but that said, GRULAC had a key role in the approval of a number of documents such as the Global Strategy Plan of Action on Public Health, Intellectual Property and Innovation in 2008 as Lima argues:

6   Thomas Christiansen and Christine Neuhold, International Handbook on Informal Governance. (Northampton: Edward Edgar Publishing, 2012); J.M. Coicaud and V. Heiskanen, eds. The Legitimacy of International Organizations (New York: United Nations University Press, 2001). 7  Ingo Winkelmann, ‘Groups and Groupings in The UN’, In A Concise Encyclopedia of the United Nations, edited by Helmut Volger (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010). 8  https://www.vistazo.com/seccion/pais/politica-nacional/dos-latinoamericanas-en-disputa -por-la-presidencia-en-la-onu. Accessed on 7 April 2019. 9  Ingo Winkelmann, ‘Regional Groups in the UN’, In A Concise Encyclopedia of the United Nations, edited by Helmut Volger. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), p. 595.

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During the negotiations of the IGWG [Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Intellectual Property and Innovation], Brazil’s activity was fundamental for aggregating the interests of the countries of the Latin American and Caribbean region (GRULAC), promoting and acting as facilitator of the sub-regional meetings, which later took substance in the form of the Rio Document, the principles of which adhered to the content of the Global Strategy, conferring upon the document an orientation in support of public health that had not existed in the previous drafts.10 Another example of a political campaign by GRULAC at the UNGA was the adoption of the Optional Protocol (OP) to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights by the UNGA in 2008. GRULAC and the African Countries were key supporters of the protocol as noted by Haldiz: During all these five sessions while most of the representatives from the GRULAC (Latin America and Caribbean Group) and African Countries were clearly supporting the protocol, the countries such as China, Egypt, India, Japan, Poland, UK and USA did not agree with them on the justiciability issue and stated their opinions against the OP. On the other hand, European Countries mostly remained reluctant by supporting the reinforcement of the ECSR but not clearly backing up the protocol.11 A third example of joint efforts by GRULAC is on the regulation of outer space. As Bezerra and Acevedo12 analyse, GRULAC has been active in this issue area for decades, and had a central role in the discussions for the creation of an International Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities, proposed by the European Union in 2008, and still under negotiation. GRULAC has consistently opposed the inclusion of the right of individual or collective self-defence in the code, arguing that it contradicts the principle of the peaceful use of the 10  Jordão Horácio da Silva Lima, ‘Global health and Brazilian foreign policy: the negotiations on innovation and intellectual property’, Ciência e Saúde Coletiva 22, 7 (2017): 2213–2221, p. 2219. 11  Ayse C. Haldiz, ‘The Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’, European Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies 2, no. 6 (2017): 37–44, p. 41. 12  R. Becerra and R. Acevedo, ‘ICoC: Perspectives from Latin America and the Caribbean’, In Awaiting Launch: Perspectives on the Draft ICOC for Outer Space Activities edited by Rajeswari P.R. and Daniel A. Porras, 169. (New Delhi: Observer Research Foundation, 2014).

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outer space. GRULAC also prefers to discuss this issue in the appropriate UNGA Committee (the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space), instead of outside it, as well as a hard instead of a soft law approach. Leadership in GRULAC can be exercised by the president, but also by its members depending on the issue-area in question; Brazil has mobilized GRULAC on key issues in the last decade such as intellectual property, health and social rights, while Venezuela was successful in opposing the US during the election of non-permanent UNSC members in 2007.13 However, given the size and diversity of GRULAC, Latin American and Caribbean States have often looked for other group configurations to work at the UNGA. Two of these, CARICOM and ALBA, are analysed next. 3

CARICOM

CARICOM was founded in 1973 and evolved out of previous projects of regional integration such as the West Indies Federation (1958) and the Caribbean Free Trade Association (1965). Its main objectives are to promote economic integration, human and social development, security, and foreign policy coordination. It currently has fifteen full member-states: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago. After independence, these countries joined the UN; they also participate in the G-77, NAM and the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). CARICOM countries also perceive themselves as small states, and have participated in international politics from this perspective. Despite their size and dependent economic relations, they have advanced common positions at the multilateral level, and at the UN. An advantage over other regional organizations is an explicit mandate to coordinate foreign policies and positions in intergovernmental organizations; additionally, they have a Council for Foreign and Community Relations, composed of Foreign Affairs Ministers.14 As Braveboy-Wagner summarizes: Caricom states have definitely shown themselves to be more capable internationally than might have been expected given their size and 13  http://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/wps/portal/rielcano_en/contenido?WCM_GLOBAL_ CONTEXT=/elcano/elcano_in/zonas_in/ARI%20125-2006 (accessed 4 March 2019). 14  https://caricom.org/work-areas/overview/foreign-policy-and-community-relations. Accessed on 4th March 2019.

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resources. With some exceptions, they are visible and active at the United Nations, have earned a central place at the Organization of American States (OAS), have been visible in the Non-Aligned Movement, and have joined and participated in many other organizations. When they have pressed for change, their numbers have sometimes been enough to guarantee it, as was the case with the creation of a special unit within the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, or changes in the OAS Charter to allow for the admission of Guyana and Belize. (…) In international forums, Caricom states have generally articulated principled stances supportive of international law and global equity.15 She also argues, however, that they have a mixed success record given that some member-states have preferred to act bilaterally in order to achieve immediate economic gains. Longer term strategies based on multilateral approaches and positions have become more important as social issues such as habitat challenges, poverty, health, and the environment have emerged as focal points on the global agenda. Among the most relevant issues CARICOM promoted at the UN level was the establishment of the International Criminal Court; Trinidad and Tobago was active in the first debates about international criminal justice in the late 1980s given its concerns with drug trafficking and the need to increase international cooperation on criminal matters, even if this topic was later replaced by war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Trinidad and Tobago ended up abstaining on the vote which adopted the Rome Statute to express its discontent with the exclusion of drug trafficking, but signed the final act, together with other CARICOM members present, Barbados, Dominica and Jamaica.16 Trinidad and Tobago is CARICOM’s leading economy and has shown leadership in the organization. During the last decade, two developments marked CARICOM’s role at the global level and at UNGA. The first is the participation of some of its member states in ALBA, explored below. The second development is the so-called ‘reparations movement’, that led to the establishment of the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC), in 2013, “with a mandate to prepare the case for reparatory 15  J .A. Braveboy-Wagner. Small States in Global Affairs. The foreign policy of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008) p. 233; J.A. BraveboyWagner. Caribbean Public Policy: Regional, Cultural, and Socioeconomic Issues for the 21st Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). 16  D. Chatoor,’The Role of Small States in International Diplomacy: CARICOM’s Experience in the Negotiations on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court’, Journal of International Peacekeeping, 7:1(2001): 295–310, p. 298–302.

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justice for the region’s indigenous and African descendant communities who are the victims of Crimes against Humanity (CAH) in the forms of genocide, slavery, slave trading, and racial apartheid”.17 The CRC is composed of National Committees on Reparations in 12 of the 15 CARICOM members (Grenada, Haiti and Montserrat did not join). Chaired by the Barbadian historian Hilary, CRC launched a Ten Point Action Plan for Reparatory Justice in 2014, in which they call “upon European governments to participate in the [CARICOM Reparatory Justice Programme] CRJP with a view to prepare these victims and sufferers for full admission with dignity into the citizenry of the global community. The CRC here outlines the path to reconciliation, truth, and justice for victims and their descendants.” The action plan demands a full formal apology, the establishment of programs for repatriation, development of indigenous peoples, cultural institutions, public health, illiteracy eradication, increasing African knowledge, psychological rehabilitation, technology transfer and debt cancelation.18 In 2016 CRC launched a website and profiles on social networking sites from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. As analysed by Esposito, CRC evolved from initiatives under the tradition of “black internationalism and Pan-Africanism which have been addressing the legacies of slavery and racial apartheid endured by people of African origins across the world”, including the US.19 In addition to the information campaign, CARICOM countries are working on law cases against European former colonizers for slavery reparations, and mobilizing to bring a case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).20 These discussions have been brought to the UNGA ever since the 2001 United Nations World Conference against Racism in Durban,21 but were catalysed by 17  http://caricomreparations.org/. Accessed on 5th March 2019. 18  https://www.caricom.org/caricom-ten-point-plan-for-reparatory-justice/. Accessed on 5 March 2019. 19  E. Esposito, ‘The Social Media Campaign for Caribbean Reparations: A Critical Multimodal Investigation’, In Discourses from Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Esposito E. and Pérez-Arredondo C., Ferreiro J. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 177. 20  https://caricom.org/communications/view/barbados-pm-writes-britain-on-reparation -on-behalf-of-caricom. Accessed on 4 March 2019. Andreas Buser, ‘Colonial Injustices and the Law of State Responsibility: The CARICOM Claim for Reparations’, Heidelberg Journal of International Law, 2 (2017): 409–446; A. Strecker, ‘Indigenous Land Rights and Caribbean Reparations Discourse’, Leiden Journal of International Law, 30:3 (2017): 629–646; James Mayall, ‘The shadow of empire: The EU and the former colonial world’, In International Relations and the European Union, edited by C. Hill and Michael Smith, 292–316 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 21  C.N. Camponovo, ‘Disaster in Durban: The United Nations World Conference against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance,’ Geo. Wash. Int’l L. Rev. 34 (2002): 659.

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CARICOM’s activism and leadership. In 2013 UNGA launched the International Decade for People of African Descent (2015–2024) which was adopted by Resolution 68/237.22 In March 2015 the Ark of Return, a permanent memorial to honour the victims of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade was inaugurated at the UN headquarters in NY. The topic has been discussed in several UNGAs and other regional groupings have expressed support, such as ALBA (14 Dec 2014) and CELAC (27 January 2016).23 Finally, CARICOM’s participation in the negotiations about the EU’s enhanced status at the UNGA in 2010 is an example of cohesive engagement, even if it did not achieve all its objectives. The EU was granted the right to speak in 2011 by UNGA Resolution A/65/276, but this process was resisted by smaller states, which saw the request as an assault on sovereign equality.24 CARICOM initially opposed the enhanced status, but also successfully argued for the possibility of enhanced status to be attributed to any regional organization, to assure equal treatment among regional organizations. 4

ALBA

ALBA was created in 2006 in the context of so-called wave of post-hegemonic regionalism in Latin America,25 following a bilateral project initiated by Venezuela and Cuba in 2004, advanced as an alternative to neo-liberal models of regional integration and development in the region and the negotiations for the Free Trade Areas of the Americas led by the United States.26 ALBA in 2014 had eleven member-states: the three founding members Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia; Nicaragua, which joined in 2007; Dominica in 2008; Ecuador in 2009; Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in 2009; Saint Lucia in 2013; Grenada, and Saint Kitts and Nevis in 2014. Honduras joined in 22  https://antiguaobserver.com/caricom-heads-to-flag-reparations-at-un-general-assembly/. Accessed 4 March 2019. 23  https://libya360.wordpress.com/2018/03/27/reparations-at-the-world-social-forum -2018/. Accessed 4 March 2019. 24  Katie Laatikainen and Martin Palous., ‘Contested Ground: The Campaign to Enhance the Status of the European Union in the UN General Assembly’, GLOBUS Research Paper 9/2018 (2018): 1–38. 25  Pia Riggirozzi and Diana Tussie, ‘The rise of post-hegemonic regionalism in Latin America’, In The Rise of Post-Hegemonic Regionalism, edited by P. Riggirozzi and D. Tussie, 1–16. (Springer, Dordrecht, 2012). 26  Jose Briceño Ruiz, ‘El ALBA como propuesta de integración regional’, In ALBA¿ Una nueva forma de integración regional, edited by Josette Altmann Brobón, 19–83 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Teseo, 2011).

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2008 but left in 2009. For almost a decade, ALBA developed a number of projects ranging from social programs (missiones) to state industrial cooperation (grannationales) and a common currency (sucre), and promoted the inclusion of grassroots groups in decision-making with the creation of the Social Movements Council, in addition to the non-reciprocal trade agreements (tratado de comercio de los pueblos). With the death of Chavez in 2013 and the crisis in Venezuela, the project decayed, and by 2018 was practically paralyzed, the year that Ecuador left the organization.27 ALBA was more of an inward-looking project in terms of its agenda, focusing on cooperation among its member-states and aiming to expand in the region; but its member-states shared a common goal of opposing neoliberalism and United States ‘imperialism’ in the world, and this was reflected in some common positions at multilateral fora, even if the organization did not have a formal mandate for that. Al-Kassimi sees ALBA as “a decolonial delinking performance, ALBA proposes an alternative to development project that embodies the spirit of Bandung and principles of South-South Cooperation thereby counterploting the supposed belief that only (western) knowledge systems lead to economic and social development”, therefore presenting itself with a potential global role.28 Muhr also discusses ALBA as a model of south-south cooperation, not confined to Latin America, but closely related to Mercosur and CARICOM and a counter-dependency strategy, in which “South–South cooperation is not per se non-capitalist as it involves private surplus value appropriation. However, as suggested with respect to Cuban socialist internationalism and fair trade as integral to South–South cooperation within the envisioned complementary economic zones practices of solidarity do undermine the competitive market and profit maximization logic while prioritizing use value over exchange value”.29 Despite the high expectations for ALBA’s role portrayed

27  A  .K. Cusack, ed. Understanding ALBA: Progress, Problems, and Prospects of Alternative Regionalism in Latin America and the Caribbean (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2018); Cusack, A.K. Venezuela, ALBA, and the Limits of Postneoliberal Regionalism in Latin America and the Caribbean (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019); Daniel Benzi. ALBA-TCP. Anatomía de la integración que no fue (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Imago Mundi — Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2017). 28  K. Al-Kassimi, ‘ALBA: A decolonial delinking performance towards (western) modernity — An alternative to development project’, Cogent Social Sciences 4 (2018): 1–35. 29  T. Muhr, South–South Cooperation and the Geographies of Latin America — Caribbean Integration and Development: A Socio‐Spatial Approach1, Antipode, 49: 4 (2017): 843–866, p. 857.

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in part of the literature, careful empirical research points to ALBA’s weaknesses in advancing these objectives even at the peak of its activism.30 Venezuela exerted a clear leadership in ALBA empowered by its ideological and financial resources. This was certainly the case within the Organization of American States (OAS), especially in the discussion about the use of democratic clauses in the political crises in Honduras, Ecuador and Bolivia, even if ALBA did not have a mandate for that.31 ALBA member-states’ voting related to Venezuela was clearly articulated at the OAS,32 but cooperation among ALBA member-states at UNGA seems to have been less articulated. 5

GRULAC, ALBA and CARICOM Cohesiveness at UNGA: Multifaceted Participation

Latin American and Caribbean countries are diverse; in addition to GRULAC and the regional organizations such as CARICOM and ALBA, most of them also participate in other groupings such as the G-77 or NAM. Brazil has participated actively in the G20 and BRICS grouping during the last decade. In other words, LAC countries´ participation at the multilateral level UNGA is multifaceted, and often fragmented. This chapter has shown that the cohesiveness of GRULAC, ALBA and CARICOM suffers from their internal fragilities derived from unclear or no mandates, and regional economic and political struggles, as well as from the ongoing changes at the global order and the place of LAC countries in it, despite the attempt by CELAC to forge a common approach at the global level.33 30  A  .K. Cusack ed. Understanding ALBA: Progress, Problems, and Prospects of Alternative Regionalism in Latin America and the Caribbean. (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2018); Cusack, A.K. Venezuela, ALBA, and the Limits of Postneoliberal Regionalism in Latin America and the Caribbean (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019); Daniel Benzi ALBA-TCP. Anatomía de la integración que no fue. (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Imago Mundi — Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2017). 31  Britta Weiffen, ‘Institutional Overlap and Responses to Political Crises in South America’, In Power dynamics and regional security in Latin America, edited by M.A.G. Soares et al, 173–197 (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2017). 32  Detlef Nolte, ‘Costs and Benefits of Overlapping Regional Organizations in Latin America: The Case of the OAS and UNASUR.’ Latin American Politics and Society, 60: 1 (2018): 128–153. 33  Mark Kirton, ‘CARICOM’s Engagement with Latin America: The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), its Promise and Challenges’, In Re-mapping the America. Trends in Region-making, edited by Knight, W.A., Castro-Rea, J., and Ghany, H., 137–152 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).

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The increasing overlap of memberships and mandates among regional organizations also led to a less straight-forward direction among LAC countries in their collective strategies at the global level.34 In the case of CARICOM and ALBA, the accession of Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts and Navis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to ALBA added complexities to the international relations of Caribbean countries and CARICOM. Girvan35 explores this overlap assessing the experience of Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines until 2011, while they were members of ALBA, CARICOM and an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the European Union (EU).36 For that period of time, he concluded that ALBA was a much more advantageous scheme given its development programs, cheaper access to credit and the equivalent to special and differentiated treatment in trade, which had been progressively abolished under the World Trade Organizations (WTO) rules. More relevantly, Gievan states that: “the CARICOM ALBA countries have not generally participated in ALBA foreign policy declarations since foreign policy coordination is an obligation under the CARICOM treaty and is the province of the CARICOM Council of Foreign and Community Relations (COFCOR). In many instances the CARICOM position and that of ALBA coincide. In such instances the three countries Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, St Vincent and the Grenadines may join in ALBA declarations where those coincide with the declared position of CARICOM”.37 Gievan’s analysis included a number of interviews with officials from these countries, who rejected the claim that they were puppets for Venezuela. He concludes that the compatibility of ALBA’s ‘socialistic’ orientation and CARICOM’s neoliberal common market, or the EPA with the EU was possible given ALBA’s flexibility; ALBA’s financing, for instance, was exclusively for the public sector, but it did not require member-states to commit to a statist and socialist model of development.38 This indicates that the overlapping membership problem varies with issue-areas. 34  Diana Panke and Soren Stapel, ‘Exploring overlapping regionalism’, Journal of International Relations and Development 21: 3 (2018): 635–662. 35  N. Girvan, ‘Is ALBA a new model of integration? Reflections on the CARICOM experience’, International Journal of Cuban Studies (2011): 157–180. 36   C ARIFORUM is a body including Caribbean ACP countries (i.e. CARICOM member-states plus Dominican Republic), created in 1992, in order to regulate their relations with the EU. The Cariforum – EU EPA agreement was concluded in 2008 but is not yet in force. 37  N. Gievan, ‘Is ALBA a new model of integration?’, p. 169; see as well Nicole D. Foster, ‘CARICOM states and the WTO dispute settlement system: the case for greater engagement’, Commonwealth Law Bulletin, 43:2 (2017):153–178. 38  N. Gievan, ‘Is ALBA a new model of integration?’, pp. 170–76.

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Bryan was less optimistic when he argued that “Dominica’s ALBA membership has generated considerable debate in the region among both policymakers and commentators over CARICOM’s inability to reach foreign policy consensus on Venezuela’s initiatives in the region” [and that] “The issue for the longer term, therefore, is the extent of the cohesiveness of CARICOM foreign policy as new global configurations alter old allegiances and traditional diplomatic positions unravel.”39 Brazys and Panke explored the cohesiveness of groupings focusing on the role of domestic and international factors in countries positions at UNGA, and the difference between low and high politics, in a quantitative study covering 150 UNGA resolutions on human rights and disarmament. These authors argue that “with respect to high politics, states have strong incentives to avoid isolation in international politics regarding the international norm embedded in a resolution. States that risk being singled out either lobby hard to encourage other states to change their foreign policy and join them in rejecting the international norm or they change their own foreign policy to align with the international community. With regard to low politics, foreign policy change occurs when the context of the resolution’s environment changes or as a result of domestic government change.”40 One of the illustrations in their study shows how Ecuador and Bolivia, both member-states of ALBA aligned their positions in human rights resolutions due to government changes: “In Ecuador, an election took place in 2006. In GA session 62, the first year of Socialist President Rafael Correa’s presidency, Ecuador shifted from ‘yes’ to ‘abstain’ on each of the three country-specific human rights resolutions tabled (Iran, DPRK and Myanmar). This movement mimics Ecuador’s neighbor in geography and ideology, Bolivia, who also shifted from ‘yes’ to ‘abstain’ on the Iran and DPRK resolutions in GA session 61, the first session of Evo Morales’ presidency.”41 The authors argue, however, that (ALBA) group dynamics were relevant, but not decisive for the overall outcome as many of the larger groups involved were not homogenous, and often chaired by countries with limited resources to lobby members into joining a coherent group position. They refer to one example when Honduras, shortly after joining ALBA was successful in lobbying the US 39  A.T. Bryan, ‘Petrocaribe and CARICOM: Venezuela’s Resource Diplomacy and its Impact on Small State Regional Cooperation’, In The Diplomacies of Small States, edited by Andrew Cooper and Thimoty Shaw, 143–159 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 153. 40  S. Brazys and Diana Panke, ‘Push and pull forces in the UNGA’: analysing foreign policy change in the context of international norms’, International Politics 54: 6 (2017): 760–744, p. 2. 41  S. Brazys and Diana Panke, ‘Push and pull forces in the UNGA’, p. 6.

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despite the increasingly confrontational approach; and quotes from interviews that the EU was also often successful in obtaining voting support from individual member-states.42 6

Concluding Remarks

This chapter has explored the characteristics and activities of some LAC formal groupings at UNGA: GRULAC, CARICOM and ALBA. It was seen that they were created in very different historical contexts, and that both global level and domestic politics influence their agenda and cohesiveness and ultimately, relevance. In addition to LAC groupings, LAC countries participate in other formal and informal groupings such as G77, NAM, Alliance of Small Island States, G20 and BRICS. Being in the LAC region is not, therefore, necessarily the main determinant of their positions. The changes in domestic regime and global level order in the last decades led to quite multifaceted trends in their participation at UNGA. Despite GRULAC’s importance for electoral matters and occasional activism in substantive matters, sub-regional groupings such as CARICOM and ALBA tend to have stronger organic relationships given their increased interconnectedness due to economic relations, migration and common policies, as well as cultural and identity commonalities, existing, or ‘imagined’.43 Despite the rapprochement between Latin America and the Caribbean since the 1990s, these countries have particularities in their engagement with the world due to historical (geo)political relations and current patterns of economic exchanges. The politicization of Caribbean relations with traditional western European countries due to the participation of some countries in ALBA and the reparations movement in CARICOM affected the dynamics of LAC groupings participation at UNGA. Overlapping memberships increased the complexity of reaching common positions and voting at UNGA; member-states´ ideological orientations have influenced these processes during the last decade as well. Along with the transition from the ‘pink tide’ to the ‘light blue tide’, and in some countries, the accession of extreme-right governments, LAC countries have changed partners and policy preferences at UNGA. This chapter has advanced some reflections about LAC countries common positions at the UN focusing on GRULAC, CARICOM and ALBA, and their 42  S. Brazys, and Diana Panke, ‘Push and pull forces in the UNGA’, p. 8. 43  Benedict Anderson. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

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outcomes, but this research agenda deserves further attention. The abandonment of these formal groupings towards more informal and flexible groups might in the short term unblock controversial stalemates and favour consensus, but these might be too shallow, and lead to further or even deeper conflict in the medium-term. The consolidation of the UN as the main forum of legitimation of collective policy-making is in the interest of LAC countries given their peripheral place in the global order. Bibliography Al-Kassimi, K. “ALBA: A decolonial delinking performance towards (western) modernity — An alternative to development project.” Cogent Social Sciences 4 (2018): 1–35. Anderson, B. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Becerra, R., and Acevedo, R. “ICoC: Perspectives from Latin America and the Caribbean.” In Awaiting Launch: Perspectives on the Draft ICOC for Outer Space Activities edited by Rajeswari P.R. and Daniel A. Porras, 169. New Delhi: Observer Research Foundation, 2014. Bekkers, Victor, Geske Dijkstra, Arthur Edwards and Menno Fenger. Governance and the democratic deficit: assessing the democratic legitimacy of governance practices. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Benzi, D. ALBA-TCP. Anatomía de la integración que no fue. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Imago Mundi — Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2017. Biegon, R. US Power in Latin America: Renewing Hegemony. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. Braveboy-Wagner, J.A. Small States in Global Affairs. The foreign policy of the Cribbean Community (CARICOM). Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. Braveboy-Wagner, J.A. Caribbean Public Policy: Regional, Cultural, and Socioeconomic Issues for the 21st Century. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. Brazys, S. and Panke, D. “Push and pull forces in the UNGA: analyzing foreign policy change in the context of international norms.” International Politics 54: 6 (2017): 760–744. Briceño Ruiz, J. “El ALBA como propuesta de integración regional”. In ALBA¿ Una nueva forma de integración regional, edited by Josette Altmann Brobón, 19–83. Buenos Aires: Editorial Teseo, 2011. Bryan, A.T. “Petrocaribe and CARICOM: Venezuela’s Resource Diplomacy and its Impact on Small State Regional Cooperation.” In The Diplomacies of Small States, edited by Andrew Cooper and Thimoty Shaw, 143–159. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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Buser, Andreas. “Colonial Injustices and the Law of State Responsibility: The CARICOM Claim for Reparations”. Heidelberg Journal of International Law, 2 (2017): 409–446. Camponovo, C.N. “Disaster in Durban: The United Nations World Conference against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance.” Geo. Wash. Int’l L. Rev. 34 (2002): 659. Chatoor, D. “The Role of Small States in International Diplomacy: CARICOM’s Experience in the Negotiations on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.” Journal of International Peacekeeping, 7:1(2001): 295–310. Cusack, A.K., ed. Understanding ALBA: Progress, Problems, and Prospects of Alternative Regionalism in Latin America and the Caribbean. London: Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2018. Cusack, A.K. Venezuela, ALBA, and the Limits of Postneoliberal Regionalism in Latin America and the Caribbean. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019. Esposito E. “The Social Media Campaign for Caribbean Reparations: A Critical Multimodal Investigation.” In Discourses from Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Esposito E., Pérez-Arredondo C., and Ferreiro J. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Fawcett, L. “The Origins and Development of the Regional Idea in the Americas” In Regionalism and Governance in the Americas, edited by L. Fawcett and M. Serrano. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Girvan, N. “Is ALBA a new model of integration? Reflections on the CARICOM experience.” International Journal of Cuban Studies (2011): 157–180. Grabendorff, W. “América Latina en la era Trump:¿ Una región en disputa entre Esta-dos Unidos y China?.” Nueva Sociedad, 275 (2018): 47–61. Haldiz, Ayse C. “The Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights”, European Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies 2, no. 6 (2017): 37–44. Hall, Kenneth, Myrtle Chuck-A-Sang. Coping with the Collapse of the Old Order: CARICOM’s New External Agenda. Bloomington, US: Trafford Publishing, 2013. Hintzen, P.C. “The EU, CARIFORUM, and CELAC: A New Development Alliance?” In EU Development Policies, edited by Beringer S., Maier S., and Thiel M., 135–153. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Kacowicz, Arie. The Impact of Norms in International Society: The Latin American Experience, 1881–2001. Notre Dame, US: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Kirton, Mark. “CARICOM’s Engagement with Latin America: The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), its Promise and Challenges.” In Re-mapping the America. Trends in Region-making, edited by Knight, W.A., Castro-Rea, J., and Ghany, H., 137–152. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Laatikainen, Katie and Palous, Martin. “Contested Ground: The Campaign to Enhance the Status of the European Union in the UN General Assembly.” GLOBUS Research Paper 9/2018 (2018): 1–38. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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Lima, Jordão Horácio da Silva. “Global health and Brazilian foreign policy: the negotiations on innovation and intellectual property.” Ciência e Saúde Coletiva 22, 7 (2017): 2213–2221. Mayall, J. “The shadow of empire: The EU and the former colonial world.” In International Relations and the European Union, edited by C. Hill and Michael Smith, 292–316. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Mosquera, M., and Morales Ruvalcaba, D. “La estrategia institucional de China hacia América Latina. Análisis comparado entre los foros Celac-China y Celac-Unión Europea.” OASIS, no. 28 (2018): 123–149. Muhr, T. “South–South Cooperation and the Geographies of Latin America — Caribbean Integration and Development: A Socio‐Spatial Approach.” Antipode, 49: 4 (2017): 843–866. Nicole D. Foster. “CARICOM states and the WTO dispute settlement system: the case for greater engagement”, Commonwealth Law Bulletin, 43:2 (2017):153–178. Nolte, D. “Costs and Benefits of Overlapping Regional Organizations in Latin America: The Case of the OAS and UNASUR.” Latin American Politics and Society, 60: 1 (2018): 128–153. Panke, D., and Stapel, S. “Exploring overlapping regionalism.” Journal of International Relations and Development 21: 3 (2018): 635–662. Peterson, M.J. “General Assembly.” In The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations. Edited by T. Weiss and Sam Daws. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Porto-Gonçalves, C.W. and de Araújo Quental, P. “La colonialidad del poder y los desafíos de la integración regional en América Latina” Polis Revista Latinoamericana, 11, no. 31 (2012): 295–332. Riggirozzi, P., and Tussie, D. “Rethinking our region in a post-hegemonic moment.” In Post-hegemonic regionalism in the Americas. Towards a Pacific vs. Atlantic divide, edited by Briceno Ruiz and Isidro Morales, 16–31. Abingdom: Routledge, 2017. Riggirozzi, P., and Tussie, D. “The rise of post-hegemonic regionalism in Latin America.” In The Rise of Post-Hegemonic Regionalism, edited by P. Riggirozzi and D. Tussie, 1–16. Springer, Dordrecht, 2012. Sikkink, K. “Latin American countries as norm protagonists of the idea of international human rights.” Global Governance, 20: 3(2014): 389–404. Strecker, A. “Indigenous Land Rights and Caribbean Reparations Discourse.” Leiden Journal of International Law, 30:3 (2017): 629–646. Weiffen, B. “Institutional Overlap and Responses to Political Crises in South America.” In Power dynamics and regional security in Latin America, edited by M.A.G. Soares et al, 173–197. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2017. Winkelmann, Ingo. “Groups and Groupings in The UN”. In A Concise Encyclopedia of the United Nations, edited by Helmut Volger. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. Winkelmann, Ingo. “Regional Groups in the UN.” In A Concise Encyclopedia of the United Nations, edited by Helmut Volger. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

Chapter 5

The African Union in the United Nations Nandi Makubalo, Madeleine O. Hosli and Michaël Lantmeeters The African Union (AU) has observer status in the UN General Assembly and a permanent office in New York. Most of its member states are also members of the official regional group, the Group of African States, the largest official regional grouping in the UN, with 28.2 percent of the UN’s membership. In terms of its activities within the UN, the AU mainly operates via the Group of African States, but this chapter focuses principally on the AU. It usually is the Group of African States rather than the AU that addresses the UNGA, but in terms of the preparation of positions within the UNGA, the AU and the Group of African States work closely together; in fact, the AU Delegation in New York supports the activities of the Group of African States by, for instance, providing logistical support and conference facilities. This chapter thus investigates the role of a regional organization that is substantially integrated with an official regional group. This chapter first discusses the AU’s composition and functioning at the UN. It then analyses AU voting cohesion within the UN General Assembly, to illustrate the extent to which the AU acts as a united group. Competition among AU states over UN Security Council reform detracts from this picture, however. The chapter then discusses some of the AU’s primary concerns within the UN, including peacekeeping, Agenda 2063, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 1

Group Composition and Functioning

The African Union was established in 2002. Its predecessor was the Organization for African Unity (OAU), formed in 1963. With 55 African member states, the AU is one of the largest regional integration schemes globally. Many of the salient decisions of the AU are taken in the framework of the AU’s bi-annual meeting of member states’ heads of state and government: the Assembly of the AU. The AU’s secretariat — the African Union Commission — ensures continuity of the AU’s work and is based in Addis Ababa. The AU overlaps in terms of membership with two other large groups within the UN, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Group of 77 (G-77).

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Currently, all African states — with the exception of South Sudan and the contested territory of Western Sahara — are also members of the NAM. The NAM, the G-77 and the Group of African States are all seen as significant actors within the UN. The G-77 was established on 5 June 1964 based on the ‘Joint Declaration of the Seventy-Seven Countries’, issued at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). In 2019, it encompassed 134 developing nations, formed to enhance the collective negotiation capacity of its members within the UN. The G-77 has a permanent office in New York. Within the UNGA, the G-77 aims to display coordinated actions in the Second, Third and Fifth Committees.1 It also aims to act collectively in the plenary sessions of the UNGA, notably in the area of economics and of development. China participates in the G-77, but does not see itself as a member. Accordingly, official statements of the group are issued as ‘The Group of 77 and China’. In 2018, the G-77 was chaired by Egypt and in 2019, by Palestine, which is an observer state of the UN. By comparison, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) consists of a group of UN member states which do not see themselves aligned in a formal way with any major power bloc on the global level. The NAM currently encompasses 118 member and 18 observer states. The NAM organizes a summit meeting every three years, with the host country of the summit chairing the group until the next summit. The continuity of the group’s activities is provided by a ‘NAM Troika’, consisting of the current, previous and incoming chairs. Within the UNGA, the NAM coordinates its positions on topics in the realm of peace and security, but it also aims at coordination in the framework of the First, Fourth and Sixth Committees, as well as selected Third Committee issues. The permanent mission of the NAM chair to the UN acts as the focal point for exchanges and communication within the group. The AU is active in using both the NAM and G77 to put forward resolutions or influence negotiations that are of interest to the AU, both within the UNSC and the UNGA. The AU-G77-NAM ‘alliance’ is notably key to resolutions concerning core issues in development — examples being agricultural technology for development, the New International Economic Order, environmental concerns related to Africa or the Developing World and resolutions relating to decolonization.2 In this sense, the aims of 1  The UNGA has six committees: 1) Disarmament and International Security; 2) Economic and Financial; 3) Social, Humanitarian and Cultural; 4) Special Political and Decolonization; 5) Administrative and Budgetary; and 6) Legal. 2  Laurent Zang, ‘The Contribution of African Diplomacy to the Non-Aligned Movement and the Group of 77’, African Journal of International Affairs 1, no.1 (1998): 1–16.

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these organizations tend to be complementary to each other, but naturally, in its diplomatic actions within the UN, the AU is first and foremost concerned with the situation on the African continent. The relation between the AU and the UN more generally is of crucial importance, not least in terms of AU efforts to enhance the prospects for peace and stability on the African continent. The AU views itself as a partner of and not just an actor within the UN. The strongest foundation for UN-AU collaboration is the UN Charter, and specifically, Chapter VIII which addresses the relationship between the UN and regional organizations. Article 52(1) addresses the possibility and role of regional organizations in the maintenance of international peace and security, based on regional action and active involvement in the maintenance of peace and security notably within the region in which the organization operates. The objectives of a regional organization and its activities, however, always have to be compatible with the principles and purposes of the United Nations.3 In 2010, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 64/288 calling for the creation of a United Nations Office to the African Union (UNOAU). In line with the purposes of this office, the UN is responsible for the financing of the UNOAU; the UNOAU integrates existing offices responsible for actions relating to the African continent: the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) Liaison Office; the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPO); the AU Peace Support Team and the Department of Field Support planning team for Somalia (AMISOM) and for Darfur (UNAMID); and the Joint-support Coordination Mechanism (JCM) in Addis Ababa.4 The office was specifically created to tackle issues pertaining to the relationship between the UN and AU. The three main mandates of the UNOAU are centered on enhancing the AU’s partnership with the UN in the area of peace and security, the provision of coordinated and consistent UN advice to the AU on long-term capacity-building and short-term operational support matters, and the streamlining of the UN’s presence in Addis Ababa to make it more cost-effective and efficient in delivering UN assistance to the AU.5 UNOAU efforts in coordinating UN-AU peace missions include the planning for and the management of peace missions (analysis, mediation, conflict prevention and elections), the organization of an annual meeting between the UNSC and the AU Peace and 3  Clement E. Adibe, Do Regional Organisations Matter? Comparing the conflict management mechanisms in West Africa and the Great Lakes Region (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 80–102. 4  For example, see the United Nations Office to the African Union, UNOAU Bulletin, March– May 2018, p. 2. 5  United Nations Office to the African Union, UNOAU Bulletin, March–May 2018, p. 2.

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Security Council and supporting the AU Commission in its efforts to enhance its institutional capacity, in support of its operations such as in Somalia, Mali, Central African Republic and the Regional Coordination Initiative against the Lord’s Resistance Army.6 The creation of this office explicitly and holistically actualizes UN-AU coordination in the key areas of a peace mission: planning, management and execution are covered and catered for under the auspices of this office. As the UNSC has the principal mandate of maintaining international peace and security, UN-AU coordination should be strongest at the UNSC and AU Peace and Security Council level. The AU has been aiming to increase the formal African participation in the UNSC in terms of (permanent) membership.7 However, as UNSC reform remains an item on the global agenda yet to be realized, other steps have been taken to increase African participation in the Security Council. Most notably, the AU Peace and Security Council (AUPSC) was established as the main pillar of the AU Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), which was created and adopted in 2004 with the intention to provide a technical framework that would frame the structure of peace missions, particularly peacekeeping and peace enforcement. Suggestions for African non-permanent member seats on the UNSC are endorsed by the AUPSC. Non-permanent members benefit from the rotational presidency of the Security Council (monthly) during which the presidency can seek to shape the agenda of the month. Additionally, through the AUPSC, African countries are among the largest Troop Contributing Countries to UN peace missions, providing them leverage in the framework of decisions on peace missions. Furthermore, UNSC Resolution 2320 (2016) aimed to establish a predictable, systematic and strategic partnership between the UN and the AU,8 notably in the areas of conflict prevention, conflict management, conflict resolution and peace building. This is of central importance to the role of the AU in the UN.

6  The UNOAU has sought to improve substantive cooperation between officials of the UN and the AU through annual desk-to-desk meetings, meetings twice a year between Under-Secretary Generals of the UN and AU Commissioners (the ‘Joint Task Force’), and through the UN Secretary-General or his Deputy’s participation in the AU summits, also held twice a year. See https://unoau.unmissions.org. 7  Madeleine O. Hosli and Thomas Dörfler, The United Nations Security Council: The Challenge of Reform (New York, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 135–152. 8  See also the Report by the UN Secretary General on strengthening the partnership between the United Nations and the African Union on issues of peace and security in Africa, including the work of the United Nations Office to the African Union (S/2016/780).

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Despite its aim to achieve sustainable self-reliance,9 APSA through the AU Peace and Security Council has received technical, financial and logistical support from the UNSC. This has helped to strengthen the AU and APSA’s capacity to respond to conflicts by itself. The joint UN-AU framework for enhanced partnership in peace and security pledged to support the APSA Roadmap. The UN and the AU have undertaken collaborative field missions, such as UNAMID and the joint AU-UN multidisciplinary mission to the Sahel. The latter later merged with operations in West Africa to form the United Nations Office for West Africa and the Sahel. This demonstrates the close patterns of collaboration between the AU and the UN in terms of activities to safeguard peace and security on the African continent. 2 The AU and UN Multilateral Politics What drives the group dynamics of the AU within the UN? Does it act cohesively within the UN? This question will now be addressed firstly by exploring the voting behaviour of AU member states within the UNGA, based on roll call vote analysis, and then by analysing the divisions within the AU over UNSC reform. As one of the least developed and most fragmented parts of the world, the African continent is likely to punch under its weight considering its population and geographical size. The AU provides the continent with a forum to improve member states’ diplomatic coordination on the international stage. To assess the actual cohesiveness of AU states within the UNGA, it is helpful to analyze respective voting data in the UNGA. To assess coherence of the AU in the UNGA, for this chapter, voting data was manually collected and analyzed using the voting records publicly available at the UN Library (United Nations Library, 2019).10 Voting cohesion was calculated based on the Agreement Index (AI), and explicitly takes three voting options of member states into account: Yes, No and Abstain, each choice weighing equally in the assessment of voting cohesion. The AI is calculated as:11

9  Throughout the APSA Roadmap, there is consistency as regards the subject of self-reliance in financing and the capacity to plan, deploy, manage, sustain and liquidate peace missions. 10  This data collection and analysis was conducted by Michaël Lantmeeters. 11  Please note that to assess voting cohesion of the AU in the UNGA, we will also calculate a slightly adapted index, where we count absences as equal to ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘abstain’ votes.

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AI =

 MAX{Y,N,A} – 0.5[(Y + N + A) – MAX{Y,N,A}] Y+N+A

Voting data in the UNGA for the AU was collected for the time span 2003 to 2017, corresponding with UNGA sessions 58 to 72. This allows us to assess changes that may have occurred in recent years as regards AU voting cohesion, in the phase after the Iraq war had started (a time span that was decisive in terms of global power adaptations and shifts, as well as changes to patterns of multilateralism). Caution though is needed when analyzing such data: the recorded UNGA votes are only on resolutions that are passed in the Assembly. Resolutions passed with consensus, for example, are not counted, nor are resolutions that failed to pass. This is a limitation of the publicly collected data. The voting data collected was classified into given issue areas to better understand the dynamics of UNGA voting and the specific role of the AU. The data were subdivided in accordance with the issue areas used by other authors before.12 Table 5.1 provides an overview of the issue areas voted on, classified by keywords. Table 5.1

Keywords for issue area classification

Issue area

Selected keywords

Cases (%)

1. Disarmament 2. Nuclear Issues 3. Middle East

Arms, disarmament, prohibition Nuclear, proliferation Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Middle East, Jerusalem Human rights, right, cultural Decolonization, colonial, coercion, Cuba Climate, economic, development, trade, ocean, environment

16.26% 18.01% 24.83%

4. Human Rights 5. Decolonization 6. Development

23.69%  9.09%  8.13%

12  Issue area categorization was based on earlier works by Erik Voeten, Anton Strezhnev, and Michael Bailey, Codebook.docx United Nations General Assembly Voting Data, (Harvard Dataverse, V20, 2009) and Xi Jin and Madeleine O. Hosli, ‘Pre- and Post-Lisbon: European Union Voting in the United Nations General Assembly’, West European Politics, 2013, 1274–1291.

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As table 5.1 demonstrates, for the time span between the UNGA’s 58th and 72nd session, most votes on resolutions concerned the areas of human rights and the Middle East, followed by those addressing nuclear issues and disarmament. Based on the actual voting data of AU member states in the UNGA, it is now possible to assess voting cohesion among its members. However, for the AU, the fact that there are many absences may be important to accurately reflect the voting cohesion of this regional integration scheme within the UNGA. Absence of representatives of AU member states, with 16.67 percent on average, is high; this could partially be due to political, organizational and financial challenges related to a state’s presence at the time of the voting.13 Results of our voting analysis are displayed in table 5.2. If absences are ignored in the calculations, voting cohesion of the AU between 2003 and 2017 was just above 90 percent, reflecting a high degree of cohesion within a regional integration scheme. Including absences as equally important ‘voting options’ as ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘abstain’, however, makes average cohesion, based on the AI, about 69 percent on average for the time span analyzed.14 The high voting cohesion, however, did not necessarily imply that the AU was able to effectively use its united membership to have leverage on the international stage. The high rates of absence may affect the capacity of the AU to effectively influence UNGA decision making, as consistent reliance on voting members is likely to increase a group’s diplomatic power on the global stage. To assess the relative coherence of the AU in the UNGA, it is helpful to compare these calculations with voting cohesion of other regional groupings or actors within the UNGA, such as the European Union (EU) as a regional integration scheme, or the BRICS. The EU and the BRICS are much studied groupings inside and outside the UNGA, as they tend to be coherent actors within the UN. Historically, the EU has some of the highest voting cohesion in the UNGA and therefore, constitutes an interesting grouping to compare the AU with, as to better reflect on the AU’s voting cohesion in a comparative perspective.15 The BRICS members also display high voting cohesion; this grouping overlaps with the AU in the sense that South Africa is a leading member of both the AU and BRICS; Brazil, India and China also have high voting cohesion with 13  E.g., Diana Panke, ‘Absenteeism in the General Assembly of the United Nations: Why some member states rarely vote’, International Politics, 51, no. 6 (2014): 729–749. 14  In the formula of the Agreement Index the Absences were considered to be a new category in the formula, with equal weight as ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘abstain’ votes. The new formula used, with  MAX{Y,N,A,Ab} – 0.5[(Y + N + A+Ab) – MAX{Y,N,A,Ab}]  Ab . denoting ‘Absence’, then is AI = Y + N + A + Ab 15  E.g., Jin and Hosli, Pre- and Post-Lisbon, 1274–1291.

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The African Union in the United Nations Table 5.2 African Union Voting Cohesion in the UNGA, 2003–2017 (58th–72th sessions)

Row labels

AI

AI (including absences)

58 (2003/2004) 59 (2004/2005) 60 (2005/2006) 61 (2006/2007) 62 (2007/2008) 63 (2008/2009) 64 (2009/2010) 65 (2010/2011) 66 (2011/2012) 67 (2012/2013) 68 (2013/2014) 69 (2014/2015) 70 (2015/2016) 71 (2016/2017) 72 (2017/2018) Average

94.12% 92.39% 92.80% 91.11% 91.51% 91.25% 91.06% 91.68% 88.68% 89.72% 91.53% 89.04% 89.12% 87.81% 92.09% 90.93%

69.90% 74.60% 62.84% 67.70% 69.82% 68.27% 68.88% 70.19% 63.17% 70.28% 74.13% 67.37% 70.11% 64.80% 69.40% 68.67%

the AU.16 The BRICS countries can serve as a comparative sample to the AU, in the sense that there seems to be a similar voting direction for the group, while there also is limited membership. This contrasts, for example, with the case of the NAM and the G77, as these groupings have an extensive membership, complicating respective calculations. As Figure 5.1 demonstrates, the AI calculated with and without considering absences turns out to be almost identical for the BRICS and for the EU. But for the AU, the results are very different when either including or excluding absences into the calculations. Ignoring the rate of absences for the calculation of AU voting cohesion provides an assessment of cohesion that is just slightly lower than for the EU (around 90 percent), but well above BRICS voting cohesion (with an average of 80.31 percent). 16   Pedro, Seabra and Edalina Rodrigues Sanches, ‘South-South cohesiveness versus South-South rhetoric: Brazil and Africa at the UN General Assembly’, International Politics, (2018): 1–20.    This finding is also supported by new calculations on this topic, conducted by Michaël Lantmeeters.

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Voting Cohesion (%)

95.0% 90.0% 85.0% 80.0% 75.0% 70.0% 65.0% 60.0%

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71

72

UNGA Session (2003‒2017) African Union

BRICS with absence

African Union with absence

European Union

BRICS

European Union with absence

Figure 5.1 Evolution of voting cohesion AU, BRICS and EU (with ‘absence’ included or excluded) Source: Calculations based on the agreement index, voting data extracted from United Nations Library (2019)

But including absences renders the assessment of voting cohesion for the AU much lower, providing estimates that are far below those for the EU or BRICS, with an average of 68.67 percent.17 While cohesion rates for the AU have been quite consistent over time, fluctuations are mainly due to diverging rates of total absences in the various UNGA sessions. We also note that the AU voting cohesion excluding absences is slightly decreasing and that UNGA session 66 is a turning point where the AU voting cohesion drops below 90% for the first time. This change is worrying for the future of AU voting cohesion if it continues. Voting cohesion can also vary across issue areas. Figures 5.2 and 5.3 provide assessments of the AU’s voting cohesion considering different substantive areas, according to the classification of resolutions shown in table 5.1. The results demonstrate that for the AU, cohesion in the UNGA was largest on contested votes related to disarmament, nuclear issues and decolonization, while both alternative ways of assessment 17  Respective calculations on the voting cohesion for the EU and BRICS conducted by Michaël Lantmeeters. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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100.0% 95.0% 90.0% 85.0% 80.0% 75.0% 70.0% 65.0%

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

UNGA Session (2003‒2017) 1. Disarmament 4. Human Rights

2. Nuclear Issues 5. Decolonization

3. Middle East 6. Development

Voting Cohesion (%)

Figure 5.2 AU voting cohesion across issue areas Source: Calculations based on the agreement index, voting data extracted from the United Nations Library (2019) 90.0% 80.0% 70.0% 60.0% 50.0% 40.0% 30.0%

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

UNGA Session (2003‒2017) 1. Disarmament 4. Human Rights

2. Nuclear Issues 5. Decolonization

3. Middle East 6. Development

Figure 5.3 AU voting cohesion with absence across issue areas Source: Calculations based on the agreement index, voting data extracted from the United Nations Library (2019)

demonstrate a low voting cohesion among AU member states related to votes on the Middle East, human rights and development. The results can be explained by specificities of development on the African continent: many of the AU member states are former colonial nations and as such are likely to demonstrate high voting cohesion on matters related to decolonization. The continent also does not have great military powers, or states with nuclear weapons. Hence, the AU is likely to have high levels of voting cohesion on disputed resolutions in these areas. A similar assessment can be made as regards issues in which voting cohesion for the AU is low. The member states of this regional integration scheme have diverging political cultures, governmental structures and are facing different geopolitical realities. Some of the AU states, for example, are in geographical proximity to the Middle East, whereas others are located far away, which may negatively affect the rate of - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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voting cohesion on resolutions related to this area. Primarily on Development and Middle East related issues the significance of session 66 (2011/12) as a possible turning point in AU cohesion becomes clear: we observe a stark drop off in the voting cohesion on Development and the start of a decrease in cohesion on Middle East issues which truly sets in after session 68 (2013/14). Possible explanations of this are that session 66 coincides with the beginning of the Arab Spring, and the independence of South Sudan, and 2013 saw the rise of ISIS and protests in Egypt. Similarly, levels of development vary among AU states as do developmental strategies, which are likely to result in some political divergence and non-cohesion on related issues within the UNGA. When ignoring absences in the calculations, the lowest voting cohesion within the AU is in the area of human rights; with the exception of the 72nd session, this area even saw a decrease of cohesion over time. When accounting for absences, voting cohesion seems somewhat more stable though. Since in terms of governmental structures, Africa has a mix of democratic, semidemocratic and autocratic regimes, it is likely that voting cohesion in this and other areas is characterized by different approaches of individual governments and accordingly, voting cohesion is relatively low. A comparison of voting cohesion of the AU with some of its sub-regional organizations provides further insights into dynamics related to African states in the UN. For our analysis, we will focus on the following organizations: The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS),18 the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS),19 the Southern African Development Community (SADC)20 and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA).21 These four sub-regional groupings are chosen as they are the most active of the sub-regional organizations recognized by the AU. Figure 5.4 provides insights into voting cohesion for these organizations. ECOWAS and SADC had a higher voting cohesion, as assessed by the Agreement Index, than the ECCAS. The COMESA started from a relatively low level of cohesion, but displayed a trend to more cohesion over time, even on

18  Membership (2019): Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Cote D’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo. 19  Membership (2019): Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Rwanda and, Sao Tome and Principe. 20   Membership (2019): Angola, Botswana, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Eswatini, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. 21  Membership (2019): Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sudan, Eswatini, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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Voting Cohesion (%)

95.0%

90.0%

85.0%

80.0%

58

59

60

61

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63

64

65

66

67

68

69

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72

UNGA session (2003‒2017) African Union

ECOWAS

ECCAS

COMESA

SADC

Figure 5.4 Evolution of UNGA voting cohesion (Regional Organizations in Africa) Source: Calculations based on the agreement index, voting data extracted from the United Nations Library (2019)

occasion having a higher cohesion than the AU overall. When absences are included, cohesion among the members of these sub-regional schemes is also lower. It has to be kept in mind, however, that membership of these sub-regional organizations partially overlaps, so cohesion assessments are somewhat less meaningful. Nonetheless, it seems that coordination within these schemes that only encompass part of the AU states may be higher on average and, in turn, influence actual outcomes in terms of cohesion on the continental level (AU). Crucial to the role of the AU in the UN has also been the potential reform of the UNSC — but here the AU is divided. Structural UNSC reform has in any event been a difficult endeavor.22 The AU has been advocating enlargement of the UNSC with new permanent members holding veto powers. More specifically, it has aimed to support the idea of having two new permanent members from Africa with veto rights in an enlarged UNSC. Geographical rivalries, 22  Hosli and Dörfler, The United Nations Security Council: History, (2019). - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

0.4 0.35 0.3 0.25 0.2 0.15 0.1 0.05 0

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Nigeria Rwanda Morocco Angola South Africa Egypt Gabon Burkina Faso Mali Congo Côte d'Ivoire Botswana Djibouti Senegal DR Congo Kenya Benin Mauritius Togo Namibia Tunisia Cameroon Zimbabwe Cape Verde Libya Guinea-Bissau Uganda Gambia Tanzania Ghana Algeria Guinea

88

AG

Figure 5.5 Years served as non-permanent members on the UNSC (since 1990, in percent of total time eligible) Source: Hosli and Dörfler, ‘The United Nations Security Council’: 13

however, still lead to tensions over which states would take up the permanent seats (among the candidates are Nigeria and South Africa).23 From the African (Regional) Group, a number of member states, including those ambitious for permanent seats — such as South Africa, Rwanda, Angola, Egypt, Gabon and Morocco — have spent 15 percent of the time they were eligible as non-permanent members of the UNSC; Nigeria, with 22 percent, had a higher share. The African Group, in contrast to other regional groups within the UN, shows a more equitable form of representation, which is due to the rotational logic of assigning seats within the Group.24 Figure 5.5 provides an overview of the years African states have served as non-permanent members of the UNSC since 1990. Clearly, many AU states have often served as non-permanent members on the UNSC, with Nigeria in the lead, followed by Rwanda and Angola, South Africa, Egypt and Gabon. Several other African states have been nonpermanent members more than five percent of the time they were eligible to serve in this capacity. Divisions over UNSC reform reveal a less-than-united AU which detracts from the unity demonstrated in voting.

23  B  ruce D. Jones, The Security Council and the Changing Distribution of Power (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. 2016), 793–813. 24  Hosli and Dörfler, The United Nations Security Council: History, 12.

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3 Primary AU Concerns and Promotion of Interests within the UN The AU pursues a number of core concerns and interests at the UN, above all initiatives related to the SDGs and peacekeeping. Clearly, many goals of the AU are in close agreement with the goals of the UN more generally, rendering the articulation of AU interests within the UN a fairly straightforward development. The AU has initiated both ‘Agenda 2063’ and ‘Silencing the Guns by 2020’, to be carried actively into the UN framework. These initiatives are both complementary to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the universal pathway to sustainable development created by the UN. Both the UN and AU approaches are intended to form action points to enhance the two organizations’ partnership. Under this enhanced partnership, the UN and the AU meet twice per year to review their mutual commitment. The joint UN-AU framework is possibly the strongest form of commitment towards UN-AU coordination, as it works beyond mere coordination on peace missions, but ensures a holistic framework that pledges commitment to the implementation of both organizations’ key development documents and programs contained therein, thus strengthening coordination on peace missions through an array of different programs and concrete action points. Driving the dynamics of the AU in the UN is the agreement between the two institutions to implement Agenda 2063 — a strategic framework for the socio-economic transformation of the African continent over the next 50 years — by accelerating the implementation of past and existing national, regional and continental initiatives to ensure growth and sustainable development in Africa. Agenda 2063 prioritizes aspects such as inclusive growth and sustainable development; an integrated continent; good governance, democracy, respect for human rights, and the rule of law; peace and security; a strong cultural identity; people-driven development, especially for women and youth; and Africa as a united and influential global partner. Both organizations also endorse Silencing the Guns by 2020 which provides a targeted method of developing and concretizing a roadmap towards realizing a peaceful and secure Africa, free from conflict and war. On these issues, the UN and several UN specialized agencies continue to interact with the AU and AU organs such as the Pan-African Parliament and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. This forms an additional layer to UN-AU cooperation and coordination, which also includes institutions and mechanisms that strengthen UN-AU coordination such as the United Nations Office for West Africa and the Sahel which aims to promote peace in West Africa and the Sahel Region, and the International Conference

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9000 8000 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 0

Ethiopia Rwanda Nigeria Egypt Ghana South Africa Morocco Senegal Tanzania Pakistan Bangladesh India Nepal China Indonesia Jordan Sri Lanka Malaysia Ukraine Serbia Slovakia Hungary Croatia Russia Estonia Armenia Slovenia Uruguay Brazil Argentina Chile Peru Guatemala Bolivia Paraguay El Salvador Italy France Spain Ireland Austria UK Netherlands Turkey Germany

1000

AG

APG

EEG

GRULAC

WEOG

Average of Troop Contributions Average of Police Contributions Figure 5.6 Troop contributing countries, overview of regional groups (Five-year Average 2011–2016) Source: Hosli and Dörfler, ‘The United Nations Security Council’: 16 Note: Calculations by Thomas Dörfler, based on the IPI Peacekeeping Database, available at http://www.providingforpeacekeeping.org/contributions/.

on the Great Lakes Region, aiming to address conflicts and cross-cutting issues within the Great Lakes Region. Moreover, focusing on research and knowledge creation, the Africa Program of the UN-affiliated University for Peace (UPEACE) disseminates background information and insights via various publications. This provides African actors and African institutions, including the AU itself, with materials that are otherwise difficult to find and provides a platform for the establishment of peace and conflict studies in Africa.25 Without doubt, high-level research on the origins of conflict and the search for successful solutions in terms of conflict prevention, management and post-conflict institution-building and peace creation, are of a high value also to actors working in these areas in practice. One of the founding principles of the AU is its non-intervention mechanism, which was based on the respect for each state’s sovereignty and right to self-determination. This is still of core importance to the functioning of the 25   U PEACE is part of the academic wing of the UN system, and has observer status at the UNGA, while maintaining its independence in terms of academic matters, finances and management. UPEACE publications are aimed at filling the critical knowledge gap in the area of conflict research and conflict resolution in Africa. See https://www.upeace.org. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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AU as a whole. But with the evolving role of regional organizations’ responsibilities in peace and security, the non-intervention mechanism has equally been evolving.26 One of their responsibilities is to protect the mandate of the UN, especially in instances where the UNSC has experienced immobilization, e.g. due to clashing priorities of its permanent members. To a certain extent, regional organizations may regard themselves as actors upholding the Security Council’s responsibility for the maintenance of peace and security in their own regions, once circumstances warrant their intervention. The AU’s Constitutive Act of the Peace and Security Council Protocol provides the AU with the right to intervene in AU member state affairs in severe circumstances, such as war crimes, genocides and crimes against humanity.27 This gives strength to the AU independently and jointly with the UN, for example, with regards to the actual implementation and negotiation of peace agreements. Members of the AU are also crucial within the UN in terms of troop contributions. Figure 5.6 provides an overview of troop contributing countries for a five-year average in the years 2011–2016. Clearly, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Nigeria have strongly contributed to UN peace missions. Senegal’s share, by comparison, was particularly high in the area of police contributions. In terms of the number of UN peacekeepers provided, Nigeria is among the top seven (with about 4,100 troops); South Africa is also contributing significantly, ranking among the top 15, with 1,000 to 2,000 troops annually.28 Ethiopia has been contributing very actively in recent years, making it a global top troop contributor (with a large share of its troops having served in South Sudan). The UNSC has institutionalized regular briefings with the Troop Contribu­ ting Countries since 1994. Ethiopia, for example, was the sole troop contributor in the mission Sudan/Abyei (UNISFA) and Tanzania and South Africa in the “Force Intervention Brigade” in DRC (MONUSCO); this might be expected to have provided them with some leverage in UNSC deliberations. The first time the UN pursued conflict management with the OAU was during the United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC) of 1960 to 1964,29 which constituted the UN’s first large peacekeeping mission on the African continent, with a notable military force of 3000 deployed at the outset.30 This 26  Jane Boulden, ed, Dealing with Conflicts in Africa: The United Nations and Regional Organizations (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 3–6. 27  Notably see the ‘non-indifference principle of the AU’ (African Union Peace and Security Protocol). 28  Hosli and Dörfler, The United Nations Security Council. 29  Jane Boulden, ed., Dealing with Conflict in Africa: The United Nations and Regional Organizations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 12–13. 30  E.g., Center on International Cooperation, Annual Review of Global Peace Operations (2009: 54). - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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was the first time a UN mission had gone beyond monitoring, observation and supervision, and employed the use of force. This also marked the beginning of actual UN-AU coordination on peace missions. Since 1964, the AU has come to play an active role in multiple peace missions, predominantly in Sub-Saharan Africa, through coordinated efforts in either UN-led, AU-supported peace missions or UN-supported, AU-led missions. AMIS and AMISON, for example, were UN-supported, AU-led peace missions. UN support to AU-led peace missions begins with the authorization of the respective mission by the UNSC; its authorization for AU interventions or peace missions is accompanied by logistical, technical and financial support offered by the UN to the AU.31 The UNSC and the AU Peace and Security Council strive to achieve convergence of their priorities and resources to the greatest extent possible.32 Some other notable peace missions which were or are a result of UN-AU coordination include Sudan 2007 (UNAMID); South Sudan 2011 (UNMISS); Mali 2013 (AFISMA) in which ECOWAS had a leading role in the operation; DR Congo 1999 (MONUC); Sierra Leone 1999 (UNAMSIL); Liberia 2003 (UNMIL), a peace mission operated by ECOWAS and the UN; Central African Republic and Chad 2007 (MINURCAT); and the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea 2000 (UNMEE). Despite all of these cases of African involvement in peacekeeping, it would not be accurate, according to Jane Boulden,33 to infer that African countries possess the capability of undertaking peace missions on their own. Accordingly, African countries cannot engage in peace missions independently notably due to economic, but also technical-legal34 constraints. However, African countries have been able to embark on peace missions co-dependently, via regional organizations and regional economic communities such as ECOWAS, SADC, IGAD, and the AU itself. UN challenges — or even failures in certain instances35 — in the prevention of African conflicts in the early 1990s, also led to a search for alternative mechanisms to conflict prevention and catalyzed the UN’s efforts to establish 31  On this, see Arthur Boutellis and Paul D. Williams, Peace Operations, the African Union, and the United Nations: Toward More Effective Partnerships in Peace Operations, (New York: International Peace Institute 2013), 2–6. 32  Ibid, 2–6. 33  Boulden, Dealing with Conflict in Africa, 36. 34  Statements two and three of Article 3 of the OAU Charter referred to non- interference in the internal affairs of states and respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of each state and for its inalienable right to independent existence. 35  The UNAMIR mission in Rwanda is the most prominent example. UNAMIR was unsuccessful in its maintenance of peace, partially due to the mandate it had; it could not prevent a major catastrophic event from occurring: the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Adibe, Regional Organisations (2003: 11, 100) states that UNAMIR was believed to have failed as a result of poor communication, coordination and the UN’s failure to act decisively. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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a stronger working partnership with the AU. Subsequent peace missions have either begun with the AU managing the operation and later handing it over to the UN — which is normally the case when AU finances and capacities cannot handle the magnitude of the mission — or with the UN managing the mission and later handing it over to the AU (this is normally the case when violent conflict is occurring and the AU has sufficient finances, capacity and influence for conflict transformation). For example, the AMIS peace mission collaborated with the UN due to the resource and capacity gaps it faced; it became the first and largest UN-AU collaboration or ‘hybrid mission’. A notable achievement in this collaboration was the signing of the peace agreement between the Sudanese conflicting parties — Darfur’s armed movements and the Sudanese government — in September 2018. The region is reported to have now evolved from an emergency phase to a phase of reconstruction and development.36 This could be attributed to the UN-AU strength on the coordinated UNAMID hybrid mission. There clearly is a need for similar hybrid missions and collaborations that will strengthen the capacity and impact to resolve conflicts and promote lasting peace. UN-AU coordinated peace missions are significant notably to enhance the strength of respective efforts. The core elements of the partnership are comparative strengths, convergence of interests and of course, burden sharing. The official document on the joint UN-AU framework for enhanced partnership in peace and security refers to the respective comparative advantages of the organizations.37 Evidently, the global presence of the UN makes the organization politically and financially stronger than the AU, which is a continental organization and more limited in its scope of work, requiring global authorization38 before being able to embark on a peace mission. Nonetheless, the AU, being an African regional organization, is often better suited to understand and resolve African conflicts,39 and to be the driver of the peace agenda on the continent. The merging of UN-AU strengths, in this sense, presents effective ways of coordination in peace missions while preserving local ownership. UN-AU coordination, when well administrated, can draw on the com36  E.g. see ‘UNAMID full exit from Darfur to be completed within two years: FM’, Sudan Tribune, 24 September 2018. 37  The document (p. 3) states that UN-AU collaboration is guided by principles of ‘mutual respect and comparative advantage’. 38  All regional organizations and their councils, including the AU Peace and Security Council, cannot implement a peace mission without the authorization of the UNSC (articles 53 and 54 of the UN Charter). 39  African conflicts are said to be complex and one conflict may be triggered by numerous underlying factors; e.g. see Peter Nadin, Patrick Cammert and Vesselin Popovski, Spoiler Groups and UN Peacekeeping (London: Routledge, 2015), 17–34; 127–130. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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parative strengths of both organizations, facilitating results by drawing upon the readily available resources of the two institutions. The convergence of UN-AU interests and resources enhances the likelihood of success in peace missions; an example is the reported success of UNAMID, where the UN and AU pooled resources to end the violence in Darfur; both actors had similar interests aiming to restore peace.40 In institutional terms, the UN and AU also share similarities in structure: both have general assemblies, secretariats and security wings. It is these similarities in structure that make it easier for the two entities, based on converged interests, to collaborate and direct efforts to similar goals. In fact, continentally, the AU Peace and Security Council mirrors the role of the UNSC. According to the official document on the joint UN-AU framework for enhanced partnership in peace and security, the convergence of interests, in combination with similarities in terms of structure, facilitates burden-sharing and common approaches. As seen in the case of UNAMID, collective approaches can reduce the heavy weight of responsibility in peace missions and lead to shared approaches as well as a shared responsibility. UN-AU coordination is based on the premise that each organization brings its comparative strength(s) to a peace mission, with the aim of rendering the burden to execute the mission much lighter on both organizations. In this sense, military coordination by the UN-AU framework also decreases logistical and capacity-related pressure on the UNSC. While the UN provides financial and other resources necessary to execute the mission, the AU, based on experiences with African conflicts, provides the required regional knowledge and expertise. Ideally, each organization utilizes its comparative strength, but also shares in the responsibilities, enhancing prospects of success in the actual execution of a peace mission. 4 Conclusions As our chapter has shown, the AU often operates via other groupings within the UN, such as the Group of African States, the G-77 and the NAM. There are many overlaps in terms of membership of the AU with these organizations. The NAM and the G77 are trans-regional groupings that organize and coordinate the diplomatic efforts of the developing ‘South’ on the international stage. Both groupings coordinate their efforts actively. For example, during the 12th NAM Meeting chaired by South Africa, the decision was taken by the NAM membership that the NAM and G-77 Chairs would cooperate to enhance the solidarity of developing countries and South-South cooperation at the UN and 40  Boutellis and Williams, Peace Operations (2013: 3–6). - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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on the international stage. The entire AU membership is also a member of both the G77 and NAM (with the exception of South Sudan in the case of the NAM), making the AU an important regional player within both of these global diplomatic groupings. As such the AU and individual African States use their NAM and G77 memberships in the UN’s multilateral setting to make their voice heard and strengthen their leverage both individually and collectively on the international level. Issues salient on the agenda of the AU — such as those related to conflict prevention and conflict resolution and to economic development — are very much in accordance with some main initiatives and goals of the UN, as ‘Agenda 2063’, and ‘Silencing the Guns by 2020’ demonstrate. Accordingly, alignment of interests and priorities of the AU and the UN is often fairly straightforward. Our analysis, based on voting records for the UNGA, demonstrates that voting cohesion of AU member states within the UNGA in the last two decades, has been high, with an average (based on the AI index) of around 90 percent. Cohesion was higher in areas such as nuclear issues, disarmament and decolonization than, for example, resolutions relating to the Middle East or to human rights protection. With 55 member states, the AU is based on a variety of different state structures, with some states having a democratic political system and others being characterized by autocratic regimes. This largely explains differences of its member states on some of the issues voted on within the UNGA. Some AU members also aspire to gain a permanent seat on the UNSC — an endeavor that is, however, blocked by rivalries between AU members themselves as well as the many hurdles preventing a formal reform of the UNSC. References Adibe, Clement E. ‘Do Regional Organisations Matter?’ In Dealing with Conflicts in Africa: United Nations and Regional Organisations, ed., Jane Boulden (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 79–108. African Union Commission, Peace and Security Department. African Peace and Security Architecture: Roadmap 2016–2020 (Addis Ababa: African Union Commission, 2015). Alden, Chris, Sally Morphet and Marco Antonia Vieira. ‘The Non-Aligned Movement and Group of 77 During the Cold War, 1965–89’. In: The South in World Politics. (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010), 57–90. Boulden, Jane ed., Dealing with Conflict in Africa: The United Nations and Regional Organizations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Boutellis, Arthur and Paul D. Williams. Peace Operations, the African Union, and the United Nations: Toward More Effective Partnerships in Peace Operations (New York: International Peace Institute, 2013). - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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Brazys, Samuel and Diana Panke. ‘Analysing Voting Inconsistency in the United Nations General Assembly, Diplomacy & Statecraft’, 28:3 (2017), 538–560. Center on International Cooperation. Annual Review of Global Peace Operations (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2009). European Centre for Development Policy. ‘Regional Organizations in Africa’ (2019) Available at https://indd.adobe.com/view/f49ac87d-7aa3-4cf7-822e-841d674bbc92 (Retrieved July 04, 2019). Graham, Suzanne. Democratic South Africa’s Foreign Policy: Voting Behaviour in the United Nations. (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2016), 183–222. Hosli, Madeleine O. and Thomas Dörfler. ‘The United Nations Security Council: The Challenge of Reform’, in D. Lesage and T. van de Graaf, eds., Rising Powers and Multilateral Institutions (New York and Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). 135–152. Hosli, Madeleine O. and Thomas Dörfler. ‘The United Nations Security Council: History, Current Composition, and Reform Proposals’, in The Changing Global Order, Madeleine O. Hosli and Joren Selleslaghs, eds., Springer (forthcoming) 2020. Jin, Xi and Madeleine O. Hosli. “Pre- and Post-Lisbon: European Union Voting in the United Nations General Assembly.” West European Politics 36, no. 6. (2013): 1274–1291. Jones, Bruce D. ‘The Security Council and the Changing Distribution of Power’. In Sebastian von Einsiedel, David M. Malone, and Bruno Stagno Ugarte, eds., The UN Security Council in the Twenty-First Century (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016), 793–813. Nadin, Peter, Patrick Cammert and Vesselin Popovski. Spoiler Groups and UN Peacekeeping (London: Routledge, 2015). Panke, Diana. ‘Absenteeism in the General Assembly of the United Nations: Why some member states rarely vote’. International Politics, 51: 6 (2014): 729–749. Seabra, Pedro and Edalina Rodrigues Sanches. ‘South-South cohesiveness versus South-South rhetoric: Brazil and Africa at the UN General Assembly’. International Politics, (2018): 1–20. United Nations Library. “Proceedings of the General Assembly” Retrieved on July 04, 2019 Available at https://library.un.org/index-proceedings/general-assembly. United Nations Security Council Resolution 2320, UN Doc. S/RES/2320, November 2016. Voeten, Erik, Anton Strezhnev, and Michael Bailey. ‘Codebook.docx’, United Nations General Assembly Voting Data (Harvard Dataverse, V20, 2009). Zang, Lauren. ‘The Contribution of African Diplomacy to the Non-Aligned Movement and the Group of 77’. African Journal of International Affairs 1, no. 1 (1998): 1–16.

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Chapter 6

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC),1 with 57 member states and representing approximately 1.5 billion Muslims, is the second largest intergovernmental organization in the world after the UN.2 The OIC was accepted as an ‘observer member’ in the UN General Assembly and of its subsidiary organs in 1975 and it is the only UN group whose unifying denominator is religion. The League of Arab States (Arab League; LAS) is a much smaller grouping in comparison. It consists of 22 member countries and represents an estimated 356 million inhabitants of diverse confessions.3 The Arab League is one of the oldest regional groupings in the UN setting, having been present at the 1945 San Francisco Conference. The LAS Secretary General was invited to attend sessions of the General Assembly as an observer in 1950.4 This chapter will outline the group composition, function, internal dynamics and key issues for these two different organizations within the framework of the UN. It will use the analytical framework developed by Laatikainen (chapter 2) on the role of political and informal groups in multilateral settings to derive further insights. The chapter is structured in the following manner. The first section will provide insights into group composition and functioning. 1  O IC member states: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Benin, Brunei-Darussalam, Burkina-Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Comoros, Cote d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Libya, Maldives, Mali, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Suriname, Syria (suspended since 2012), Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Togo, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Yemen. 2  This chapter falls within the VISIONS research project (Visions and practices of geopolitics in the European Union and its neighborhood) funded by the National R+D Plan of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (CSO2017-82622-P). 3  L AS member states: Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria (suspended since 2011), Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. 4  C. Maksoud, “Diminished Sovereignty, Enhanced Sovereignty: United Nations-Arab League Relations at 50.” The Middle East Journal 49, no. 4 (1995): 582–94.

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The second and third sections will address participant perception and key issues/agenda, respectively. The final section will test the analytical parameters of political groups and explore how OIC and LAS map out as political groups in the multilateral context. 1

OIC and LAS Group Composition and Functioning

The Organization of Islamic Conference came about in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1969 attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of the holiest sites in Islam. Muslim leaders from around the world met in Rabat in 1969 with the intent to form an entity which could become ‘a collective voice for Muslims and protect Muslim interests’.5 In 1973 the OIC Constitution came into effect and the intergovernmental organization’s ability to act as a recognized group within the UN was confirmed in 1975. The entity changed its name to Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 2011. In terms of its functioning, the OIC rests on a light institutional structure. The Islamic Summit (Kings, Heads of State and Government) meets every three years to consider major initiatives. The Council of Foreign Ministers holds annual meetings to review policy implementation and to propose concrete areas of cooperation. The Council of Foreign Ministers is assisted by the General Secretariat, its permanent committees and some specialized organs.6 In the UN setting, OIC coordination is supported by the different OIC delegations accredited to the United Nations, whether in New York, Geneva, Vienna or Paris. The Ambassadors of OIC member states to the UN hold monthly meetings on the first Tuesday of each month to discuss current issues on the OIC and UN agenda. The monthly rotating Chair of the OIC Ambassadors is tasked with chairing meetings and introducing UN resolutions on the OIC’s behalf. The monthly chair also acts as coordinator for the co-sponsors of UN resolutions and the drafter of resolutions, sometimes in coordination with previous or future chairs. The organization, it has been noted, is run on a modest budget, composed of mandatory dues from member states and additional voluntary funding.7 5  N. S. Sheikh, The New Politics of Islam: Pan-Islamism Foreign Policy in a World of States. New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003, p. 36. 6  O IC permanent committees include the Al-Quds Committee, on matters related to Jerusalem, and three committees concerned with science and technology, economy and trade, and information and culture. Specialized organs under the OIC banner include the Islamic Development Bank and the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. 7  The mandatory dues are not regularly paid and hence the OIC budget has suffered from frequent shortfalls. I. Hossain, “The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC): Nature, Role, and the Issues.” Journal of Third World Studies 29, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 287–314. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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The political initiative within the OIC stems primarily from the member states. The entity has seen different leaders at different time periods. However, the countries which have perhaps shown most initiative and involvement over time are Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran.8 Saudi Arabia, founding member state and main donor to the OIC-affiliated Islamic Development Bank, has been a consistently prominent voice within the organization. Saudi Arabia also enjoys special standing among Islamic countries for being the home to the two Muslim holy cities: Mecca and Medina.9 Turkey, which joined the OIC in 1995, took an active role in the 2005–2013 reform attempts to make OIC more relevant beyond the Islamic world and in diverse international forums.10 Iran is a founding member and became more influential within the OIC as a result of a Iranian President Khatami’s ‘Dialogue among Civilizations’ initiative launched in 1997 and the UN proclamation of 2001 as the ‘Year of Dialogue among Civilisations’.11 By virtue or vice of being such a large, cross-regional organization, however, the OIC has regularly encountered problems in terms of reconciling the various concerns, interests and principles of group members. The OIC’s membership is united by its resolve to safeguard Islamic values, but it is also sorely divided over a range of competing claims and interpretations of what constitutes a proper ‘Islamic’ approach to justice and international relations.12 The organization lacks joint monitoring or enforcement power, and relies primarily on member states’ good will to act cohesively in the name of Islamic solidarity.13 The organization has, for this reason, relied on its larger member states’ will to use carrots (suasion, aid, concessionary loans) and the occasional ‘soft’ stick (political censure or membership suspension) to ensure group cohesion within the UN system on issues of greater transcendence for the OIC membership. 8  The OIC has been especially vulnerable to Saudi-Iranian rivalry and the impact this has on the sensitivities of sectarian polarization within the Muslim world. S. Akbarzadeh and Z. Ahmed, “Impacts of Saudi Hegemony on the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 31, no. 3 (2018): 297–311; E. Wastnidge, “Détente and Dialogue: Iran and the OIC during the Khatami Era (1997– 2005).” Politics, Religion and Ideology 12, no.4 (2011): 413–431. 9  Akbarzadeh and Ahmed, “Impacts of Saudi Hegemony.” 10  G. Bacik, “The Genesis, history, and functioning of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC): A formal-institutional analysis.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 31, no.4 (2011): 594–614. 11  The Dialogue was later transformed by Turkey and Spain into the current day Alliance of Civilizations. Wastnidge, “Détente and Dialogue.” 12  S.H. Hashmi, “International Society and Its Islamic Malcontents.” The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 13 (1996): 13–29; S. Akbarzadeh and Connor, K. “The Organization of The Islamic Conference: Sharing an Illusion.” Middle East Policy 12, no. 2 (2005): 79–92. 13  T. Kayaoglu, The Organization of Islamic Cooperation: Politics, Problems, and Potential. Milton Park: Taylor and Francis, 2015. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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The League of Arab States was founded in 1945 by Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Transjordan (Jordan from 1946). The Arab League is an intergovernmental organization aiming to foster economic, cultural and security cooperation among members, to safeguard their independence and sovereignty, and to promote the general welfare and interests of the Arab peoples.14 Moreover, the 1945 Pact of the League of Arab States affirms the member states’ will to collaborate closely with ‘the international organizations which may be created in the future to guarantee peace and security and organize economic and social relations’.15 This was a veiled reference to the nascent United Nations, launched just months after the League itself came into being. Many of the most urgent issues related to the Arab’s postcolonial statehood had to be negotiated with the great powers of the day and the UN initially appeared to offer the Arabs an eminent venue to engage with those actors jointly and on a more equitable basis.16 The functioning of the LAS rests on Arab League Summits, held annually since 2001, which provide general policy direction.17 The Arab League Council, composed of ministers, provides specific direction, assisted by the LAS Secretariat and specialized committees. Coordination in New York, Geneva and Vienna takes place through the Arab Group of Permanent Representatives, supported by the LAS Mission to the UN. The Group of Arab States Chair, which rotates on a monthly basis, chairs and calls the permanent representative meetings, as well as oversees the work of drafting resolutions and coordinates any sponsorship of UN resolutions. The LAS budget is based on national quotas. The organization has, however, struggled to meet annual budget targets over the decades, as member states have frequently not paid their dues. The political initiative rests primarily with the member states. The countries which have been most active within the League have historically been Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria, all founding members. Egypt hosts the LAS headquarters in Cairo and the Arab League has repeatedly been described as

14  F . Dakhlallah, “The League of Arab States and Regional Security: Towards an Arab Security Community?” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 39, no. 3, (2012): 393–412. 15  League of Arab States, Pact of the League of Arab States. March 22, 1945: Art. 3 available at . 16  Arab hopes were quickly dashed in the UN-led negotiations for ending the British mandate in Palestine and French troop withdrawals from Syria and Lebanon in the last years of the 1940s. Maksoud, “Diminished Sovereignty, Enhanced Sovereignty”; M.M. Ould Mohamedou, “Arab agency and the UN project: the League of Arab States between universality and regionalism.” Third World Quarterly 37, no. 7 (2016): 1219–1233. 17  The 2011 annual Summit was cancelled due to the Arab uprisings.

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‘an instrument of Egyptian foreign policy’.18 Saudi Arabia has held a lynchpin role in the Arab League on several occasions (e.g. Arab Peace Initiative of 2002) and Syria was historically one of the predominant voices on Palestine. Coordination rests on the determination of member states to act together as a group. The Arab League’s membership, while united around a principled perception of pan-Arab linguistic and ethno-cultural unity, has experienced highs and lows in its cooperation since 1945, whether outside or inside the UN context.19 Nevertheless, although a number of issues divide the Arab states, its UNGA voting record has since the 1950s still been one of the most consistently cohesive compared to most other political groups in the UN context.20 The Arab states even have a fair record of coordination of positions whenever they hold the Asian and/or African seat in the UN Security Council.21 2

OIC and LAS Participants’ Perceptions

The members of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation are bonded together by a common religion. This is a unique aspect for an intergovernmental organization. However, this has also left the organization vulnerable to Islamic sectarianism (e.g. Sunni-Shia divide) in different periods. Moreover, the OIC membership is also divided along Muslim majority-minority and rich-poor fault lines, as well as by regime types (authoritarian or democracies; secular or confessional; monarchies or republican). OIC members have clearly differentiated attitudes towards whether Islamic objectives are best pursed with moderate or radical measures. Such differences have arguably made gradual institutional harmonization between the collective rationale and individual member states’ interests or identities more difficult.22 There are no Charter provisions regarding the expulsion or voting discipline of a member, as the organization only 18  M. Kamrava, “Mediation and Qatari Foreign Policy.” The Middle East Journal 65, no. 4 (2011): 539–556. 19  Maksoud, “Diminished Sovereignty, Enhanced Sovereignty”. 20  It was only surpassed by the monolithic Eastern European Group during the Cold War era, composed of the Soviet Union and its satellite countries in East Europe. M. Marín-Bosch, Votes in the UN General Assembly. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1998; J. Xi, and M.O. Hosli, “Preand Post-Lisbon: European Union Voting in the United Nations General Assembly.” Conference paper presented at workshop Decision-making in the European Union Before and After Lisbon, Leiden University, 3–4 November 2011. 21  S. Morphet, Review Essay. “Multilateralism and the Non-Aligned Movement: What Is the Global South Doing and Where Is It Going?” Global Governance 10 (2004): 517–537. 22  This explains why some OIC countries, such as Turkey and Malaysia, envision the organization primarily as a cultural forum, while others, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran,

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envisages the possibility of suspension of membership.23 This fact has earned the OIC the reputation among observers as being ‘more a symbolic meeting place than a dynamic political body’ in which ‘the common ground for [joint] action has been but a thin line’.24 In different time periods, member states have indeed appeared to employ the organization more for the purpose of neutralizing fellow member states, rather than of advancing collective OIC objectives in international relations. For example, Saudi Arabia has used its political influence within OIC to isolate Iran, both after the Iranian Revolution in 1979 as well as in the aftermath of the outbreak of war in Syria in 2011 and in Yemen in 2015.25 The organization has also been marshalled for national interests beyond the confines of OIC such as, for example, the Pakistani or Azeri territorial claims on Kashmir and Nagorno-Karabakh, respectively, or Turkey’s historic proactiveness on Balkan Muslims or Turkish-Cypriots.26 Consequently, the organization has experienced difficulties in terms of remaining united in its defence of the Islamic faith or the ummah since its launch. Arguably, however, the OIC’s shift from being a loosely knitted ‘conference’ to an ‘organization’ in 2011 is nonetheless an indicator of member states’ continued faith in the OIC as a useful coordinating forum, with an inherent potential for concerted collective action in the UN system as well as the international arena more broadly.27 Furthermore, in 2016 a new OIC Program of Action for the period 2016–2025 was adopted at the 13th Islamic Summit held in Istanbul, Turkey. It replaces the previous Ten-Year Program of Action and sets out 18 priority areas for the organization. Palestine, Jerusalem and Islamic solidarity remain top priorities (see chapter 15). However, the 2016–2025 Program of Action also envisions to strengthen the unity and solidarity between Muslim countries to deal with issues such as, for example, peace and security, terrorism and extremism, humanitarian work, human rights, development, poverty alleviation, eradication of epidemics, the rights of women, children and the family in the Islamic world, higher education, science and technology, and cultural want a more political agenda. Akbarzadeh and Ahmed, “Impacts of Saudi Hegemony.”; I. Sharquieh, “Can the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) resolve conflicts?” 23  V.L. Gutiérrez Castillo, “The Organization of Islamic Cooperation in contemporary international society.” Revista electrónica de estudios internacionales (REEI) 27 (2014): 14–21. Several member states have been suspended ever since the OIC came into being, for instance, Sierra Leone in 1974, Burkina Faso in 1980 and, more recently, Syria. 24  Akbarzadeh and Connor, “The Organization of The Islamic Conference,” 80 and 90. 25  Akbarzadeh and Ahmed, “Impacts of Saudi Hegemony.” 26  S.S. Khan, “The organization of the Islamic conference (OIC) and Muslim minorities.” Journal of Muslim minority affairs 22, no. 2 (2002): 351–367. 27  Hossain, I. “The Organization of Islamic Conference.”

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exchange among OIC member states.28 This expanded remit of areas of OIC action is also a gauge of member states’ will to seek to foment greater cohesion and therefore to try to boost the political group’s role in the multilateral politics of the UN. As for the League of Arab States, the majority of the member states are held together by a common language, ethno-cultural links and/or regional (mostly postcolonial) history.29 While disagreements among member states have been recurrent similar to the OIC, levels of cohesion in the UN system have overall been better. The Arab League does not have an enforcement mechanism for implementing its common positions. The only formal sanctioning mechanism contemplated is the temporary suspension of membership.30 Moreover, only member states that vote in favour of a LAS resolution are bound by it. The implementation record is thus varied, and many of its resolutions remain, as the Arab saying goes, ‘ink on paper’.31 Still, analysts observe that the Arab League has also seen its share of ‘institutionalization of shared norms and perceptions’ over the decades which has an effect on stimulating intra-Arab ‘compliant behaviour through consensus, rather than coercion’, especially in the context of the United Nations.32 Such would be the case on, for example, the longstanding and well-documented Arab advocacy on decolonization and self-determination. Many LAS members take an active and specific role in drafting and monitoring, with assistance from the Arab Group and LAS missions, the numerous Middle East and North Africa related resolutions annually introduced to the UNGA. Each LAS country takes initiatives on UNGA matters related to their own country. For example, the annual UN Resolution on the Israeli land, sea and air incursions into Lebanese sovereignty or the oil slick on Lebanese shore, falls within the Lebanese brief. The UN Resolutions on the disputed Gulf islands, Abu Musa and Greater and Lesser Tunbs, fall upon UAE.33 There is also a division of labour on overarching issues, e.g. Egypt on UN initiatives related to a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, or Jordan on issues related to Jerusalem. 28  O  IC Journal, “Istanbul Summit: A New Road Map for the Islamic world.” 33 (April– July 2016): 26. 29  Ould Mohamedou, “Arab agency and the UN project.” 30  Egypt’s participation in the Arab League was suspended between 1979 and 1989 in Arab protest over the country’s signature of the Camp David accord. Libya was suspended shortly from the Arab League in 2011 and Syria has been suspended since 2011. 31  Maksoud, “Diminished sovereignty, enhanced sovereignty”, 585. 32  R.L. Butterworth, Moderation from Management: international organizations and peace. University Center for International Studies University of Pittsburgh, 1978; C. Archer, International Organisations, 3rd ed., London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2001. 33  Interview, Ambassador, Arab Mission before UN, New York, 2014.

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The Arab League and its member states understand the political group’s role in UN multilateral politics as important. The annual (re-)introduction of longstanding UN Middle East resolutions reveals a collective Arab determination to call attention to and influence global debates on regional issues. This demonstrates LAS members’ view of UNGA debates as serious and attaches great importance to this world body.34 It is worth noting that there is a distinct difference in Arab and Western attitudes to the UNGA, in this sense, as: [a]ccording to this [Arab] view, where the UN General Assembly approves a resolution by a large majority and reconfirms it year after year, the Assembly acts as a quasi-legislative body reflecting the view of the international community as to what is international law. The counterview, held by most Western international lawyers, is that UN General Assembly resolutions do not create international law and that the drafters of the UN Charter knowingly refrained from granting the Assembly such power.35 Indeed, the same author also argues, Arabs have, for example, invariably subjected the various UN Resolutions related to the Arab-Israeli conflict to the sort of legal analysis which is natural in societies ‘based on strict written legal codes and [where] great respect is given […] to legal matters’.36 Such views can be contrasted by Western understandings of the UNGA as ‘the formal expression of world opinion on a given question’ whose recommendations carry a mere moral weight as opposed to a legal one.37 3

OIC and LAS Key Issues

3.1 Palestine The Palestine Question has been the key issue pursued both by the OIC and LAS within the UN context. The defence of Palestine is an objective enshrined in the OIC charter, and the Palestinian Nakba (disaster) has been the driving 34  Ould Mohamedou, “Arab agency and the UN project.” 35  R. Sabel, “Victor Kattan. From Coexistence to Conquest, International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891–1949.” European Journal of International Law 21, no. 4 (2010): 1104. 36  Sabel, “Victor Kattan.” 37  M. Marín-Bosch, “How nations vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations.” International Organization 41, no. 4 (1987): 705; Marín-Bosch, Votes in the UN General Assembly.

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force for the Arab League since the United Nations vote on the partition plan in 1947 unleashed the first Arab-Israeli War.38 Both political groups have consequently made significant efforts over the decades to place Palestine centre stage on the international agenda.39 Moreover, both organizations have used similar strategies to achieve Palestinian self-determination and statehood, as well as control over Muslim holy sites held by Israel. The OIC and LAS position on the Palestine Question in the UNGA rests on three stable principal cognitive frames. First, they support the ‘Palestinian people in its long struggle to achieve its legitimate aspirations to self-determination, to live in dignity, peace and stability and to build its independent State’.40 Second, a majority of OIC and LAS members hold Israel as the principal culprit standing in the way of such aspirations. Finally, both the OIC as well as the Arab League perceive that constancy in their diplomatic pressure on the international community, especially on their Western partners, is vital within the UN framework as the latter’s support is perceived as pivotal for achieving Palestinian self-determination. Few resolutions related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict thus fail to exhort the end to Israeli occupation, the return to peace negotiations and/or the need to find the solution to ‘final-status issues’ (borders, Jerusalem, refugees etc.). Telling evidence that these are key cognitive frames for the OIC and LAS states is that they do not readily support resolutions drafted by non-Arab actors, no matter how favourable to the Palestinian side, if they do not include these principles. Another example of how the Palestinian Question is a core identity issue for these organizations is that when a member state deviates from the group consensus it earns a verbal sanction from other member states and/or the organization. Such was the case of OIC members Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina when they abstained from the 2012 UNGA vote on whether to grant Palestine the status of UN non-member observer state (see chapter 15). The OIC and LAS work closely together on issues related to the Palestinian Question. Frequently, UN General Assembly resolutions on different Palestinian topics are first drafted in close OIC and LAS coordination. Such was the case for example of the Palestinian applications for membership of UNESCO in 2011 or UN in 2012 (see chapter 15). Coordination between the OIC and Arab Groups in New York has also resulted in the convening of various meetings of the longstanding tenth 38  Akbarzadeh and Connor, “The organization of the Islamic conference.” 39  Interview, Senior Official at Organization of Islamic Cooperation Delegation to the UN, New York, June, 2014; Interview Ambassador Arab Mission to the UN, New York, June, 2014. 40  United Nations. “Question of Palestine.” General Assembly Sixty-eighth session, 57th plenary meeting, A/68/PV.57, 25 November 2013.

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Emergency Special Session in the UNGA Plenary related to Palestine.41 Meetings in 2017 and 2018 produced large majorities in favour of UN Resolutions exhorting UN member states not to locate diplomatic missions in Jerusalem, or on protecting Palestinian civilians from disproportionate use of force by Israeli forces in the Occupied Territories.42 3.2 OIC: Islamophobia and Conflicts in the Muslim World The OIC has also pursued other matters besides Palestine. The issue of blasphemy against Islam as a religion and Islamophobia are some of the topics which have come to hold special importance for the organization. Since the late 1990s, Islamic and Muslim-majority heads of states have consistently voiced concerns about what they believe to be growing anti-Islam sentiments in the West and manifestations of intolerance or misunderstandings of the religion.43 They have adopted a two-pronged approach within the UN system to ban insults against religions and to promote a Dialogue among Civilizations. To this end Pakistan, on behalf of the OIC, introduced a draft resolution on combating the ‘defamation of Islam’ in the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) in 1999 with the aim to protect Islam from being insulted or stereotyped as a religion of terrorism. Such efforts were rebuffed by Western states that criticized attempts to protect religions, rather than the rights of individuals.44 The OIC modified its position in 2011 through a new United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolution calling for ‘combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence, and violence against persons based on religion or belief.’ This new resolution was adopted with consensus in UNHRC. The Dialogue among Civilizations first came about in 1997 when Iran began lobbying fellow OIC members for a rapprochement with the West in favour of joint efforts to combat Islamophobia. The proposal was later given further content by the OIC Secretariat, together with a group of experts at the Iranian 41  The Tenth Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly has held sporadic meetings more than a dozen times since it was first convened in April 1997. All issues are related to the Palestinian Question. 42  United Nations General Assembly. “General Assembly Overwhelmingly Adopts Resolution Asking Nations Not to Locate Diplomatic Missions in Jerusalem.” Press Release GA/11995, 21 December 2017; United Nations. “General Assembly Adopts Resolution on Protecting Palestinian Civilians Following Rejection of United States Amendment to Condemn Hamas Rocket Fire.” Press Release GA/12028, 13 June 2018. 43  G. Bettiza and F. Dionigi, “Beyond constructivism’s liberal bias: Islamic norm entrepreneurs in a post-secular world society.” EUI Working paper MWP 10, European University Institute, Badia Fiesolana, Italy, 2014. 44  Bettiza and Diogini, “Beyond constructivism’s liberal bias.”

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Foreign Ministry.45 A resolution was introduced in the UNGA in 1998 where it met with broad approval from the international body. Subsequently, 2001 was pronounced to be the ‘Year of Dialogue among Civilizations’ and a separate UN resolution adopted the Agenda for Dialogue among Civilization by consensus. The initiative has been institutionalized into the Alliance of Civilizations, first proposed in 2005 and approved by consensus at UNGA in 2009. The Alliance of Civilizations’ Group of Friends has since grown to include 146 members of which are 119 UN member states, 1 non-member state, and 26 international organizations, and the Alliance’s action has been endorsed by continuous UNGA resolutions since 2010.46 The OIC has also regularly been called upon by the international community to involve itself in conflict settlement involving Muslim communities and management of their effects. According to data from 2015, 30 out of 50 armed conflicts recorded around the world occurred in OIC member states and resulted in severe humanitarian crises and displacement across the Muslim world.47 The same data also reveals that OIC member states are a source for 61.5 percent of all the world’s displaced population and 67 percent of its global refugee flows. However, it is also worth noting that OIC member states (including Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, Bangladesh, Jordan, Uganda and Chad) act as hosts to the 71 percent (around 89 million) of people worldwide who require humanitarian assistance. The OIC and its member states have therefore shown interest in becoming more active on facilitating international solutions to local problems. An example of the latter is the humanitarian crisis caused by the situation of the (Muslim) Rohingya in Myanmar. An OIC ‘Contact Group on Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar’ was set up in 2017 to coordinate the Islamic Group on the matter in the UN system. Also in 2017, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the European Union co-sponsored the first ever UNGA Resolution on the topic, condemning the military operations in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.48 The OIC does recognize its own limits in this area, as many of the conflicts affecting the Muslim world are produced

45  Wastnidge, “Détente and Dialogue.” 46  For more information, see United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), . 47  All data in this paragraph provided by the Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Center for Islamic Countries (SESRIC), according to OIC Journal 40 (May– August 2018). 48  The Resolution passed with a recorded vote of 142 in favour to 10 against (Belarus, Burundi, Cambodia, China, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Myanmar, Philippines, Russian Federation, Viet Nam, Zimbabwe), with 26 abstentions.

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by confrontations between OIC member states, or sponsored groups, and frequently one of the two sides blocks the organization’s involvement in conflict settlement. 3.3 Arab League: Conflicts and Terrorism The League of Arab States also pursues a number of other key issues besides the Palestinian Question. Over time there has been substantial activism on the part of the League to engage with the UN, for example in regards to the peacekeeping mission in Lebanon and the 1990 Gulf war.49 The issues which have consumed the Arab Group’s attention the most in recent years are, however, the conflicts engulfing Libya and Syria, as well as the rise of terrorism and Daesh.50 On Libya, the LAS was the key supportive regional organization behind UN Security Council Resolution 1973 mandating a no-fly zone over the country in 2011.51 In the aftermath of the fall of the Qaddafi regime, the League became involved in the International Quartet Committee on Libya (Arab League, African Union, European Union and United Nations). The task of the Quartet, headed by the United Nations, is to settle the conflict which emerged in 2014 as Libya’s National Transitional Council definitively collapsed. At their fourth meeting in 2018 the Quartet renewed their commitment to the sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and national unity of Libya and support for the internationally recognized Presidency Council of the Government of National Accord.52 On Syria, the Arab League initially took a strong stance, putting forward a Plan of Action of the League of Arab States to resolve the conflict between the government and Arab Spring protestors in late 2011, including the suspension of Syria’s LAS membership, two rounds of sanctions and sending an observer mission to the country.53 When such actions of deterrence did not change the situation on the ground, the League called upon the international community to intervene in early 2012 and co-nominated the UN-Arab League joint special 49  Ould Mohamedou, “Arab agency and the UN project.” While at other times the League, as a collective, has chosen not to engage in LAS member state conflicts, e.g. Somalia, Sudan or Yemen. 50  On other conflicts related to the Arab world, the Arab League has not been the forum to forge joint approaches. For example, in terms of Yemen the international efforts have been mostly channelled in coordination with the Gulf Cooperation Council. 51  A.J. Bellamy and P.D. Williams, “The New Politics of Protection? Cote d’Ivoire, Libya and Responsibility to Protect.” International Affairs 87 (2011): 825–850. 52  United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL). “Joint Communique of the Quartet Meeting on Libya.” Cairo, 30 April 2018. 53  The LAS sanctions against Syria included a travel-ban for Syrian officials, freezing of Syrian assets, and rupture of financial dealings with Syrian banks.

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envoy to mediate in the conflict, Kofi Annan (2012) and Lakhdar Brahimi (2012– 2014). In the same period, the Arab Group of permanent representatives also sponsored a number of resolutions in the UN General Assembly on the situation in Syria, in response to the various failed attempts to reach an agreement on the conflict among the permanent members of the UN Security Council.54 Yet, as additional parties got involved (Russia, Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant [ISIL]), and different League members began to take different sides in the Syrian conflict, the role of the League as a relevant forum for intra-Arab coordination on the Syria conflict radically diminished. This fact has bought the UN-LAS coordination on the Syrian conflict settlement to a halt, and since 2014 the special envoys to Syria — Staffan de Mistura (2014–2018) and Geir Pedersen (2018-current) — act exclusively on the UN Secretary General’s behalf. Terrorism is a final area where the Arab League activity increased exponentially in the 2010s. Although an issue of longstanding Arab concern, the political, security and economic consequences of the growth of the terrorist organization ISIL since 2014, and periodic attacks by other armed extremist groups in the region (e.g. Al-Shabaab in Somalia, Al Qaeda in Egypt, Maghreb or on the Arab peninsula), has warranted more attention to this issue. On the international stage, the Arab League has sought closer cooperation with actors, such as the UN, as well as the OIC and the EU, to coordinate counter-terrorist measures, whether ‘to implement international conventions on the combating of terrorism’ or to limit access to ‘sources for the financing of terrorism and terrorism organizations’.55 4

Political Group Functions in UN Multilateral Diplomacy: Insights from OIC and LAS

Political groups in the UN context have several basic purposes. While the UN is formally an intergovernmental organization composed of its member states, as Laatikainen notes (chapter 2), the multilateral context for diplomacy means that politics at the UN are channelled through a variety of groups — from regional organizations to single-issue, cross-national coalitions. As we have seen, OIC and LAS governments see advantages in the strength in numbers 54  See, for example, United Nations. “The situation in the Syrian Arab Republic” UNGA Resolution 66/253, 16 February 2012, United Nations. “The situation in the Syrian Arab Republic” UNGA Resolution 66/L.57, 31 July 2012. 55  League of Arab States Resolution 7804, 142nd ordinary session, 3rd meeting, 7 September 2014; League of Arab States Summit Resolution 654, 127th ordinary session, 25 July 2016.

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as opposed to acting alone, hence their respective regional organization becomes a natural focal point for its members. One of the primary functions of groups is to aggregate member state votes and strive for voting cohesion in international forums on issues important to the political group. On this point the Arab League has been more successful compared to the OIC, where the latter’s greater membership diversity often impedes strong and consistent unity. Both political groups’ success in aggregating votes in the UN context largely depends on the salience of the issue for the group members (key group interest or identity) and/or the absence of competing national agendas.56 Hence, the OIC and the Arab League show high rates of voting coordination and cohesion on the Palestinian Question (high group salience). Similarly, high LAS voting cohesion on an array of issues from Lebanese sovereignty to the UAE claims to two islands in the Persian Gulf have been enabled by the absence of competing claims from other Arab states. However, where issue salience for either the OIC or the LAS members is low, and/or competing national agendas come into play (e.g. protection of ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities within the Muslim world, gender, small arms and light weapons or death penalty) the respective organizations’ voting coordination and cohesion tend to be more fraught with problems. Laatikainen also points out that the political group is important for its individual member states as it provides a centralized means of informationgathering and circulation (see chapter 2). Hossain concurs with this view in finding that the OIC allows lines of communication and information to flow among member states, while Sharqieh sees the OIC as a collective ‘“knowledge depot” for the issues and challenges facing its member states’.57 Both OIC and LAS reveal an ability to broker interests and to organize participation in relation to group goal attainment in UN deliberations and negotiations, such as the OIC initiative on the ‘Dialogue among Civilizations’ or the UN-LAS special envoy to Syria. Moreover, the OIC and LAS provide a valuable service for national diplomats that rotate in and out of the different UN cities, as the group’s representation 56  Voting coordination and cohesion within the OIC and LAS appear not to be affected by the fact that one country may be a member of both OIC and LAS, as there is certain division of labor in terms of issues both organizations pursue. Moreover, both organizations shown relatively little apparent concern when member states vote in variance with the majority on issues of low salience for the group and/or when perceived legitimate, often longstanding, national agendas are invoked. 57  Hossain, “The Organization of Islamic Conference.”; I. Sharqieh, “Can the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) resolve conflicts?”.

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is permanent and can act as the institutional memory and help diplomats find their way through the demanding agendas and technical nature of UN negotiations. This is especially important for smaller OIC and/or LAS countries with fewer human and/or material resources. However, it is worth noting that OIC and LAS are not the only political or informal groups providing such assistance to its members. Most OIC and LAS states are also members of Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) or G-77. Certain OIC or LAS states are also members of other regional organizations coordinating their work at the UN level, such as the African Union or ASEAN. For example, Algeria (in NAM, OIC, LAS and the AU) has historically looked to the NAM and AU for pursuing the issue of Western Sahara in the context of UN debates on self-determination and/or decolonization, as the division among the OIC or LAS membership on this matter has made a common approach in the UNGA impossible. Furthermore, the OIC and LAS also compete for their member states’ attention with the numerous sectorspecific or single-issue cross-regional coalitions operating within the framework of the UN. Examples are OIC member Bangladesh’s involvement in the Climate Vulnerable Forum active within the UNFCCC or OIC and LAS member Egypt’s engagement with the New Agenda Coalition, a cross-regional group of states promoting progress on nuclear disarmament. Finally, it is worth noting that political groups, as well as intergovernmental organizations at large, appear at the surface to be ‘governed by state-centric interests of each member’ and at the mercy of their more powerful states.58 However, it is also true that even the largest member state is vulnerable to fall into rhetorical traps, face reputational costs, and succumb to processes of socialization or to the ‘better argument’ within such groups. Moreover, even if some member states clearly try to use groups to advance national agendas, such behaviour is only tolerated by the group as long it is not detrimental to the collective pursuits. When a member pursues a national agenda, which can be perceived as causing reputational damage to the group and/or threaten the overall cohesion of the group, such conduct is sanctioned by other group members (e.g. Egypt’s suspension from the OIC and LAS following its signing of a peace agreement with Israel in 1979). Hence, the political group moderately acts to regulate behaviour, whether through the logics of consequences or of appropriateness.

58  Akbarzadeh and Ahmed, “Impacts of Saudi Hegemony,” 298.

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5 Conclusions The OIC and LAS are two intergovernmental organizations which aim to coordinate their members’ work within the UN system. Critics of the OIC and LAS regularly point to their institutional weakness as political groups to safeguard collective interest when faced with competing national agendas, their tendency for being mere ‘talking-shops’ as opposed to strong, purposive collective actors, as well as their vulnerability to impositions by their respective larger member states. However, despite such weaknesses, both the OIC and LAS show clear signs of maintaining their respective attraction for their member states as political coordination forums in the UN setting in the 21st century. Both organizations have proven themselves as useful entities in different periods of time for testing out ideas, building preference-coalitions as well as providing a sense of collective direction or ‘identity’ for member states’ national diplomats as they arrive in different UN locations around the world. Moreover, OIC and LAS member states see advantages in belonging to political and informal groups in the UN, as there is a perceived strength in numbers as opposed to acting alone. Individual member states have frequently found themselves accompanied by the political group and advised on how to best approach the UN with their specific national concerns related to self-determination, state sovereignty or protection of religious and cultural values. More importantly, the political group provides crucial coordination in terms of voting in favour of and lending collective legitimacy to any national concern brought to the UN agenda. The most longstanding and paradigmatic case of OIC and LAS collective support has been the Palestinian Question, and both organizations have insisted on the importance of keeping the issue on the front-burner in most UN committees and affiliated agencies. The OIC and LAS determination on other issues, such as Islamophobia, Rohingya, Libya, Syria or counter-terrorism, also reveals the confidence that their member states have in an UN-led international order and the recognition of the inherent value of multilateral politics through political or informal groups. References Akbarzadeh, S. and Ahmed, Z. “Impacts of Saudi Hegemony on the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 31, no. 3 (2018): 297–311. Akbarzadeh, S. and Connor, K. “The Organization of The Islamic Conference: Sharing an Illusion.” Middle East Policy 12, no. 2 (2005): 79–92.

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Archer, C. International Organisations, 3rd ed., London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2001. Bacik, G. “The Genesis, history, and functioning of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC): A formal-institutional analysis.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 31, no. 4 (2011): 594–614. Bellamy, A.J. and Williams, P.D. “The New Politics of Protection? Cote d’Ivoire, Libya and Responsibility to Protect.” International Affairs 87 (2011): 825–850. Bettiza, G. and Dionigi, F. “Beyond constructivism’s liberal bias: Islamic norm entrepreneurs in a post-secular world society.” EUI Working paper MWP 10, European University Institute, Badia Fiesolana, Italy, 2014. Butterworth, R.L. Moderation from Management: international organizations and peace. University Center for International Studies University of Pittsburgh, 1978. Dakhlallah, F. “The League of Arab States and Regional Security: Towards an Arab Security Community?” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 39, no. 3, (2012): 393–412. Gutiérrez Castillo, V.L. “The Organization of Islamic Cooperation in contemporary international society.” Revista electrónica de estudios internacionales (REEI) 27 (2014): 14–21. Hashmi, S.H. “International Society and Its Islamic Malcontents.” The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 13 (1996): 13–29. Hossain, I. “The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC): Nature, Role, and the Issues.” Journal of Third World Studies 29, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 287–314. Interview, Ambassador, Arab Mission before UN, New York, 2014. Interview, Senior Official at Organization of Islamic Cooperation Delegation to the UN, New York, June, 2014. Interview, Ambassador, Arab Mission to the UN, New York, June, 2014. Kamrava, M. “Mediation and Qatari Foreign Policy.” The Middle East Journal 65, no. 4 (2011): 539–556. Kayaoglu, T. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation: Politics, Problems, and Potential. Milton Park: Taylor and Francis, 2015. Khan, S.S. “The organization of the Islamic conference (OIC) and Muslim minorities.” Journal of Muslim minority affairs 22, no. 2 (2002): 351–367. League of Arab States Resolution 7804, 142nd ordinary session, 3rd meeting, 7 September 2014. League of Arab States Summit Resolution 654, 127th ordinary session, 25 July 2016. Maksoud, C. “Diminished Sovereignty, Enhanced Sovereignty: United Nations-Arab League Relations at 50.” The Middle East Journal 49, no. 4 (1995): 582–94. Marín-Bosch, M. “How nations vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations.” International Organization 41, no. 4 (1987): 705–724. Marín-Bosch, M. Votes in the UN General Assembly. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1998.

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Morphet, S. Review Essay. “Multilateralism and the Non-Aligned Movement: What Is the Global South Doing and Where Is It Going?” Global Governance 10 (2004): 517–537. OIC Journal, “Istanbul Summit: A New Road Map for the Islamic world.” 33 (April– July 2016). OIC Journal 40 (May–August 2018). Ould Mohamedou, M.M. “Arab agency and the UN project: The League of Arab States between universality and regionalism.” Third World Quarterly 37, no. 7 (2016): 1219–1233. Sabel, R. “Victor Kattan. From Coexistence to Conquest, International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891–1949.” European Journal of International Law 21, no. 4 (2010): 1103–1109. Sharquieh, I. “Can the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) resolve conflicts?” Peace and Conflict Studies 19, no 2 (2012): 219–236. Sheikh, N.S. The New Politics of Islam: Pan-Islamism Foreign Policy in a World of States. New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003. United Nations. “The situation in the Syrian Arab Republic” UNGA Resolution 66/253, 16 February 2012, United Nations. “The situation in the Syrian Arab Republic” UNGA Resolution 66/L.57, 31 July 2012. United Nations. “Question of Palestine.” General Assembly Sixty-eighth session, 57th plenary meeting, A/68/PV.57, 25 November 2013. United Nations. “General Assembly Overwhelmingly Adopts Resolution Asking Nations Not to Locate Diplomatic Missions in Jerusalem.” Press Release GA/11995, 21 December 2017. United Nations. “General Assembly Adopts Resolution on Protecting Palestinian Civilians Following Rejection of United States Amendment to Condemn Hamas Rocket Fire.” Press Release GA/12028, 13 June 2018. United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL). “Joint Communique of the Quartet Meeting on Libya.” Cairo, 30 April 2018. Wastnidge, E. “Détente and Dialogue: Iran and the OIC during the Khatami Era (1997– 2005).” Politics, Religion and Ideology 12, no. 4 (2011): 413–431. Xi, J. and Hosli, M.O. “Pre- and Post-Lisbon: European Union Voting in the United Nations General Assembly.” Conference paper presented at workshop Decision-making in the European Union Before and After Lisbon, Leiden University, 3–4 November 2011.

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Chapter 7

ASEAN as an Actor in the United Nations: How Cohesive Is It? Jürgen Rüland The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is Asia’s premier regional organization. Founded in 1967 by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, several rounds of enlargement in the 1980s and 1990s have brought its membership to ten. Brunei joined ASEAN in 1984, Vietnam in 1995, Laos and Myanmar in 1997 and Cambodia in 1999. The grouping thus represents the whole of Southeast Asia except the region’s youngest state, Timor Leste, which gained independence in 2002. In its lifetime of more than five decades, ASEAN has become one of the globally most respected and influential regional organizations. With what became known as the ASEAN Way, the grouping developed its own repository of cooperation norms, which also guides the grouping’s interaction with international organizations such as the United Nations (UN).1 The ASEAN Way strongly relies on sovereignty norms, making ASEAN an intergovernmental organization and distinguishing it from the European Union’s selective supranationalism.2 The non-interference norm, which stipulates that members should not intervene in each other’s internal affairs, epitomizes the member states’ great concern for sovereignty. Although non-interference has not always been practised consistently3 and has been diluted by adopting new liberal norms such as democracy and respect for human rights in the ASEAN Charter,4 a quasi-constitutional document ratified by ASEAN members in 2008, 1  Paruedee Nguitragool and Jürgen Rüland, ASEAN as an Actor in International Fora: Reality, Potential and Constraints, Integration through Law 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 2  Amitav Acharya, Constructing a security community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the problem of regional order, Politics in Asia series (London: Routledge, 2001); Shaun Narine, Explaining ASEAN: Regionalism in Southeast Asia (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002); Jürgen Haacke, ASEAN’s diplomatic and security culture: Origins, development and prospects (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). 3  Lee Jones, ASEAN, Sovereignty and Intervention in Southeast Asia, Critical Studies of the Asia-Pacific (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 4  Jürgen Rüland, The Indonesian Way: ASEAN, Europeanization, and Foreign Policy Debates in a New Democracy, Studies in Asian Security (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

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in its everyday interactions the grouping continues to maintain the normative orthodoxy of non-interference. Another key norm of ASEAN is peaceful dispute settlement, a norm reminiscent of the tensions in the region prior to the formation of ASEAN and during the Cold War period. ASEAN has been impressively successful in this respect, priding itself with the fact that no member has gone to war with another member after joining ASEAN.5 Peaceful dispute settlement also facilitates ASEAN’s objective of minimizing external great power influence in the region. In the pursuit of this objective, the grouping has become a regional institution builder par excellence, a practice for which ASEAN claims centrality status in the region.6 It was on ASEAN’s initiative that major regional fora such as the East Asian Economic Caucus, ASEAN Plus Three, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting Plus, to name a few, had been created. A regional organization pursuing peaceful dispute settlement, seeking to curtail great power politics and engaging as institution builder, is predestined to a multilateral approach and an active role in global organizations such as the UN. The question is thus whether ASEAN lives up to this promise and to what extent it developed tangible collective actorness in a global organization like the UN. This chapter seeks to address this overarching question by closely following the guidelines of the editors outlined in the introductory chapter. It first takes a closer look at the grouping’s composition and functions, examining how ASEAN became a collective player in the UN, how it functions as a group in the UN, who exercises leadership and how the grouping’s diverse interests are reconciled. The second question addresses the member countries’ perceptions of their role in the group and the group’s role in the multilateral politics of the UN. The third analytical section discusses key issues and the agenda the grouping pursues collectively in the UN. The final section of the chapter summarizes the findings and provides a brief outlook.

5  Timo Kivimäki, “Power, interest or culture — is there a paradigm that explains ASEAN’s political role best?,” The Pacific Review 21, no. 4 (2008) . 6  Richard Stubbs, “The ASEAN alternative? Ideas, institutions and the challenge to ‘global’ governance,” The Pacific Review 21, no. 4 (2008); Mely Caballero-Anthony, “Understanding ASEAN’s centrality: bases and prospects in an evolving regional architecture,” The Pacific Review 27, no. 4 (2014).

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ASEAN as an Actor in the UN: Group Composition and Functions

Given the tensions in the region prior to ASEAN’s formation in 1967, including two ill-fated attempts of regional cooperation under the aegis of the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA) and Maphilindo and culminating in Indonesia’s low intensity war (“konfrontasi”) against the then newly formed Federation of Malaysia (1963–1966), regional identity developed slowly. It was an external shock, the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, that galvanized ASEAN into a more coherent regional entity. The military victory of communist North Vietnam in Indochina, the withdrawal of American ground forces from mainland Southeast Asia and the increasing significance of China drove home to the foreign policy elites in the five non-communist founding countries of ASEAN, that a grouping consisting of small and medium-sized powers must work closer together in order to protect its interests. It was thus no accident that it was in this period of fundamental geopolitical change that ASEAN leaders for the first time convened in a summit. The outcome of ASEAN’s Bali Summit in 1976 were two major documents: the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC), which spelled out ASEAN cooperation norms as embodied in the ASEAN Way, and the Declaration of ASEAN Concord, which listed areas for future cooperation. The Declaration also for the first time encouraged the grouping to pursue common interests in global fora, especially in the socio-economic domain. The Bali Concord III of 2011 intensified this call and Indonesia, ASEAN’s chair in 2011, placed its chairmanship under the motto “ASEAN Community in a Global Community of Nations.”7 More concretely, the Bali Concord III envisages the establishment of an ASEAN common platform on global issues by 2022. This platform shall help ASEAN to develop more coordinated and coherent positions “on global issues of common interest and concern, based on a shared ASEAN global view, which would further enhance ASEAN’s common voice in relevant multilateral fora.”8 It reflects “ASEAN’s commitment to take an increasing role in addressing global challenges by enhancing collaboration to adopt common position on issues of mutual interest in regional and international fora.”9 A detailed Plan of Action concretizes ASEAN’s steps in this direction. Moreover, the fact that in 2006 the 7  Bernama, 17 December 2010; The Jakarta Post, 17 November 2010. 8  Bali Concord III, available at: https://www.asean.org/uploads/2012/05/Bali%20Concord%20 III.pdf (accessed 1 March 2019). 9  Bali Declaration on ASEAN Community in a Global Community of Nations “Bali Concord III” Plan of Action 2013–2017, available at: https://www.asean.org/storage/images/2013/other_ documents/POA%20of%20Bali%20Concord%20III%20_final_.pdf (accessed 1 March 2019).

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UN General Assembly (UNGA) granted ASEAN observer status10 demonstrates that also many non-member governments support a more active role of the grouping in global affairs such as climate change, disaster management, pandemic diseases, economic development and the reform of the UN and the international financial system.11 However, it was another external shock, that is, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, which animated ASEAN to become a collective entity in the UN. From 1979 onward until the 1991 Paris Accord, which eventually ended the Cambodian conflict, ASEAN member countries sponsored annual UNGA resolutions condemning Vietnamese aggression. The need to orchestrate support for its resolutions gave rise to the formation of the ASEAN New York Committee in the 1980s. It was patterned after the ASEAN Committees that by that time already existed in other capitals such as Geneva and Brussels. The ASEAN New York Committee is now the most significant of them.12 The committee is composed of the ASEAN member countries’ permanent representatives at the UN, who are senior diplomats at the ambassadorial level. Normally they meet every four weeks, chaired by the representative of the country holding the chair of ASEAN. Yet committee activities and work effectiveness vary, depending on the issues at stake and the chair. During Cambodia’s chairmanship (2012), the committee met every four to six weeks; during Indonesia’s chair in 2011, it met more frequently; and during Vietnam’s stint (2010) only every four to five months.13 Formal meetings are attended by the ambassadors and decision-making is by consensus. The meetings are prepared by the missions’ policy experts, who usually convene on a bi-monthly basis. More often they meet informally, for instance at the occasion of diplomatic functions, and use these events for exchanging views.14 The ASEAN Committee catering to the UN organizations based in Geneva operates similarly.15 Based on a division of labor, the ASEAN New York Committee coordinates lobbying of non-member nations to mobilize support for ASEAN positions in debates and voting exercises. During the Cambodia conflict, Indonesia and Malaysia contacted member countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and the Non Aligned Movement (NAM), organizations in which they exerted leadership, while Singapore, the Philippines and Thailand 10  Philippine Daily Inquirer, 26 October 2006, 5 December 2006. 11  Surin Pitsuwan, ASEAN’s Challenge: Some Reflections and Recommendations on Strengthening the ASEAN Secretariat (Jakarta: ASEAN Secretariat, 2011). 12  Interview, 15 January 2019. 13  Interview, 30 July 2012. 14  Interview, 30 July 2012. 15  Interview, 31 July 2012.

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approached Western governments, reciprocally offering ASEAN support for the West’s Afghanistan resolutions, urging a Soviet withdrawal from the country.16 The committee pursues similar objectives in its regular interaction with other regional organizations such as the one documented with the Economic Cooperation Organization17and with China.18 Other tasks include the support of ASEAN candidacies for important UN offices. Cases in point are campaigns for non-permanent Security Council seats, or between 2004 and 2006 former Thai foreign Minister Surakiart Sathirathai’s (futile) bid for the position of UN Secretary General. While the ASEAN New York Committee is responsible for the day-to-day routine work at the UN, it is the ASEAN Summit, the Foreign Ministers Meeting and the senior officials meetings which prepare the baselines of ASEAN’s collective actions in the UN.19 ASEAN foreign ministers also meet informally on the side lines of the annual debate of the UNGA.20 Examples are the decision to apply for observer status in 200621 or interregional relations with the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the Gulf Cooperation Council22 and Mercosur.23 ASEAN members are represented in all six committees of the UNGA. There is no rotation system determining the presence in the committees. Usually, at the beginning of an Annual Assembly, ASEAN member countries express their interest to be represented in a particular committee. Once there, they inform their peers about the proceedings and decisions in the respective committee. This form of labor division enables ASEAN countries with small missions to keep track of the multiplicity of negotiations. Also on this working level, this is complemented by informal conversations among the mission staff.24 16  Kusuma Snitwongse, “Interaction and Collaboration of the EC and ASEAN in the UN System and International Conferences,” in Western Europe and Southeast Asia: Cooperation or Competition?, ed. Giuseppe Schiavone (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1989), 231–33. 17  See “The 11th ASEAN-ECO Joint Ministerial Meeting New York, USA, 24 September 2011,” available at: http://www.aseansec.org/26642.htm (accessed 29 March 2012). 18  Joint Communique of the 37th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting Jakarta, 29–30 June 2004, available at: https://asean.org/?static_post=joint-communique-of-the-37th-asean-ministerial -meeting-jakarta-29-30-june-2004-2 (accessed 10 August 2019). 19  Interviews, 30 July 2012, 15 January 2019 and 13 March 2019. 20  Channel NewsAsia, 30 September 2012; Cambodia News Gazette, 27 September 2018, The Nation, 28 September 2018; Vietnam News Agency, 29 September 2018. 21   G MA News Online, 24 September 2006. 22  Berita Dalam Negeri, 17 September 2008; Vietnam News Agency, 1 October 2012. 23   A SEAN Press Statement, available at: https://asean.org/press-statement-second-asean -mercosur-ministerial-meeting-%EF%BF%BD/ (accessed 9 March 2019). 24  Interview, 30 July 2012.

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The effectiveness of ASEAN as a collective actor in the UN greatly depends on its resources to create and shape agendas and to interact with others. Unlike the EU, ASEAN does not entertain a permanent observer mission to the UN; it is the ASEAN New York Committee and its chair which on behalf of the members represent ASEAN.25 This decision tallies with ASEAN’s intergovernmental integration concept, the ASEAN Way, and its established policy to keep its organizational infrastructure lean,26 while — as Lauro Baja Jr., former Philippine Permanent Representative to the UN, stated — “increasing ASEAN’s visibility”27 and “importance.”28 Member state missions, too, are comparatively small. Their size varies considerably as illustrated by Table 7.1. Especially ASEAN’s less prosperous new mainland Southeast Asian members can afford only a small delegation, making it difficult for them to act effectively and making them dependent on information provided by other ASEAN missions. While the Singaporean and the Malaysian delegations are also small, their staff is highly competent; the Singaporean mission includes the country’s star diplomats. Yet staffing even of the larger missions of Indonesia and the Philippines is way below the one of economically advanced industrial countries or emerging regional and global powers such as China and India. However, mission size is only a superficial criterion to assess the effectiveness of ASEAN’s UN diplomacy. As there is no collective body representing ASEAN in UN, member countries have to rely on their own resources to generate the expertise needed in technically complex negotiations. Even the ASEAN Secretariat (ASEC) as the grouping’s organ with the strongest regional identity plays virtually no role in providing expertise to the member countries.29 It does not have the staff capacities to perform think tank functions for the missions in New York and Geneva, nor do member countries see a role for the Secretariat in strengthening their UN positions.30 When the New York or Geneva-based missions need specific expertise — for instance, in health, disarmament, environmental or trade negotiations — they usually turn to their national governments. In case of need, the latter second expert officials to New York or

25   G MA News Online, 5 December 2006. 26   Ambassador-at-large and former Singaporean representative to the UN, Tommy Koh, “ASEAN and the UN: Natural partners,” available at: https://tembusu.nus.edu.sg/ news/2018/asean-and-the-un-natural-partners (accessed 29 December 2018). 27   G MA News Online, 5 December 2006. 28   G MA News Online, 24 September 2006. 29  Interviews, 10 April 2012, 27 February 2019. 30  Interviews, 30 and 31 July 2012; Nguitragool and Rűland, ASEAN in International Fora, 79.

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Staffing Pattern of ASEAN Representative Missions at the UN in New York

Country Brunei Darussalam Cambodia Indonesia Laos Malaysia Myanmar Philippines Singapore Thailand Vietnam By Comparison USA European Union Germany China India

Staffing 7 10 22 11 9 14 22 10 15 20 127 32a 90 86 26

a Only staff members ranked attaché or higher, available at: https:// eeas.europa.eu/delegations/un-new-york/33806/about_en (accessed 9 January 2019). Source: Bluebook No. 306, November 2017 (pdf)

Geneva for the duration of the respective negotiations.31 Missions hesitate to enlist the support of private sector specialists, academia and NGOs, although there is some change underway, at least in a country like Indonesia, which after the fall of the authoritarian Suharto regime deliberately opened foreign policy making to non-state stakeholders.32 Indonesia also increasingly relies on academic institutions such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) or the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), private sector expertise, lobbyists and even NGOs as consultants in UN affairs.33 The aversion of most

31  Interviews, 15 January 2019 and 27 February 2019. 32  Greta Nabbs-Keller, “Reforming Indonesia’s Foreign Ministry: Ideas, Organizations and Leadership,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 35, no. 1 (2013); Rüland, The Indonesian Way. 33  Interview, 15 January 2019.

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ASEAN governments against non-state consultancy and knowledge provision34 reflects the “regional corporatism”35 practised by ASEAN members ever since the grouping’s formation. The relatively narrow channels of knowledge provision for UN negotiations distinguish ASEAN and its member countries from advanced industrial nations and their regional organizations such as the EU and impede their effectiveness in agenda-setting and during the negotiation process. Formal leadership is exerted by the ASEAN chair and in New York or Geneva the leader of the UN mission representing the country acting as ASEAN chair. When on rare occasions ASEAN speaks as a collective entity, it is normally the country that chairs the grouping that speaks on behalf of the members. In 2011, when the Thai-Cambodian border skirmishes near the contested Preah Vihear temple threatened to escalate, it was Indonesia as the chair that reached the Security Council’s consent to settle the conflict through Indonesian mediation within the confines of ASEAN,36 rather than submitting it to the Security Council for further action.37 Yet formal leadership does not necessarily reflect the group’s internal power structure. It is Indonesia, which seeks group leadership not only in the region, but in international organizations such as the UN as well. Indonesia claims not only to be the largest ASEAN country, but also to exert “intellectual leadership.”38 By doing so it has to take into account that ASEAN’s sovereigntyconscious member countries respond sensitively to leadership claims by peers. During the second term of the Yudhoyono presidency (2004–2014), Indonesia built its leadership ambitions on its increasing “soft power” as the third largest democracy of the world and the self-styled claim of being the only country that successfully reconciles democracy, modernity and Islam. This claim encountered only thinly veiled resistance by the majority of the grouping’s members, reminding Indonesia that applying an age-honoured Javanese strategy, “leading from behind,” and limiting itself to an “primus inter pares” may result in a more effective leadership.39 In the UN, Indonesia is thus unable to impose 34  Interviews, 30 and 31 July 2012. 35  Jürgen Rüland, “The limits of democratizing interest representation: ASEAN’s regional corporatism and normative challenges,” European Journal of International Relations 20, no. 1 (2014). 36  The Jakarta Post, 11 February 2011, 16 February 2011; The Straits Times, 18 December 2018. 37  “Waging Peace: ASEAN and the Thai-Cambodian Border Conflict,” Asia Report 215 (International Crisis Group, Brussels, 2011), available at https://www.crisisgroup.org/ asia/south-east-asia/thailand/waging-peace-asean-and-thai-cambodian-border-conflict, 19–20 (accessed 10 August 2019). 38  Interview, 13 March 2019. 39  Interview, 13 March 2019.

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its preferences on other ASEAN members. ASEAN’s moderately impressive coherence in voting (see below) suggests that member countries are vigilant defenders of their policy autonomy, in particular, where leadership aspirations of others seemingly encroach on their national core interests. Finally, leadership in ASEAN’s UN policies can also be issue dependent. In crucial cases, it is the most affected country that exerts issue leadership. During the Cambodian conflict in the 1980s it was Thailand as the “front state” that set the tone for ASEAN. The other countries followed, even if for the sake of unity they had to sweep under the carpet considerable differences in their security outlook. Later, when the rather rigid Thai Indochina policy became an increasing liability, the leadership went to Indonesia as ASEAN’s interlocutor with Vietnam, a position that facilitated UN-based efforts to resolve the conflict.40 The Cambodia example is also illustrative as it demarcates the space for the reconciliation of differences. As long as national core interests of a country are not adversely affected, it is usually prepared to go along with the most affected country. The other option is to negotiate a compromise solution on the basis of the lowest common denominator. If, however, normative issues are at stake such as democracy or human rights, the common ground is thin and the likelihood of split decisions in UNGA votes increases. 2

What Group Coherence and Multilateralism Means for ASEAN Member States

This section examines ASEAN member countries’ perceptions of their role in the group and ASEAN’s role in the multilateral politics of the UN. It argues that role perceptions of ASEAN as a coherent grouping in the UN are strongly determined by the grouping’s thorough intergovernmentalist credo, which in turn is the result of persistent adverse historical experiences. Political turbulences, civil strife and inter-state wars are thus deeply entrenched in the collective memory of the region. Examples are the frequent warfare in pre-colonial times, the traumatic experience of colonial subjugation, the devastation of the region in the Pacific War, a bloody process of decolonization, a highly asymmetric and often blatantly unjust post-colonial international order, the Indochina wars and a plethora of civil wars up to the present day.41 These historical experiences generated sceptical elite worldviews largely guided by the 40  Narine, Explaining ASEAN; Haacke, ASEAN’s diplomatic and security culture. 41  Nguitragool and Rüland, ASEAN in International Fora, 40.

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tenets of realism. Modern political realism thereby tallies perfectly with ancient ideas of statecraft, inspired by the nearly 2,500-years old Arthasastra of Kautilya in the culturally Indianized parts of Southeast Asia and the no less ancient stratagems of Sun Tze or the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sam Kok) in the Sinized parts of the region. Foreign policy elites in the region thus tend to regard their countries as extremely vulnerable and persistently victimized42 by the great powers in a world where life — following Hobbes’ dictum — is “nasty, brutish and short,” and in which “big fish eats small fish,” as former Singaporean UN diplomat and subsequent foreign minister pointedly formulated in his political autobiography.43 This translates into a foreign policy behaviour in which distrust lingers and concepts such as “self-reliance” and “national resilience” predominate. Cooperation is thus neither an end in itself nor a normative objective, but rather a strategy to strengthen weak states and to protect their national interests. The sacrifice of sovereignty for the sake of collective strength is not part of this thinking. This has repercussions for their behaviour in international organizations such as the UN, where ASEAN states in the first place act as national entities and not collectively. This general assessment is largely confirmed by a 20-year content analysis (1998–2017) of the speeches of ASEAN representatives at the General Debate opening each year’s UNGA.44 There are no instances where the ASEAN chair speaks for ASEAN as a whole. All member governments address the UNGA individually. References to “ASEAN” are not a priority in these speeches. Among the eleven most frequently named topics, references to ASEAN rank sixth, mainly due to a marked increase after 2007. This is slightly more than the references to “national achievements” (seventh), to which however much more space is devoted in the speeches. National success stories are presented as best practices, elevating the respective country to an international role model. This is complemented by references to Westphalian sovereignty norms which rank tenth.45 ASEAN government representatives rarely cite each other in speeches and do not explicitly support ASEAN peers running for an important UN position such as a non-permanent Security Council seat.46

42  F ranklin B. Weinstein, Indonesian foreign policy and the dilemma of dependence: From Sukarno to Soeharto, Politics and international relations of Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976). 43  S. Jayakumar, Diplomacy: A Singapore experience (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2011), 76. 44  Jürgen Rüland, “ASEAN as an Actor in the United Nations: Role Concepts, Rhetoric and Cohesion,” Asia-Pacific Business Review, 25, no. 5 (2019). 45  Ibid. 46  Ibid.

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ASEAN countries’ success in candidacies for leadership positions is thus mixed. Diplomats of ASEAN member states were elected to the UNGA presidency twice. Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik presided the UNGA in 1971/1972, Malaysian diplomat Razali Ismail did so in 1996/1997. Unsuccessful was the campaign of former Thai foreign minister Surakiart Sathiratai for the post of UN Secretary General in 2006. Surakiart’s candidacy became a punching ball of Thai domestic politics and received only lacklustre support by other ASEAN countries as the Thais had announced Surakiart’s intention to run without prior consultation of their ASEAN partners. Lack of US support and doubts about Surakiart’s political stature also reduced his chances.47 Indonesian ambitions to become a permanent member of the Security Council48 also failed. Although in 2004 ASEAN endorsed Indonesia’s overtures,49 it did so reluctantly and only once. In view of powerful competitors such as Japan, Germany, India, Brazil and South Africa, and foot-dragging of the Permanent Five in the process of UN reform, Indonesian chances to become a permanent member are dim.50 ASEAN countries thus regularly competed for the less influential, albeit prestigious rotating non-permanent seats. So far, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines (four times, each), Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam (one time, each) have been elected as non-permanent members for a regular 2-year term. Yet success in the candidacy for a non-permanent seat is by no means a foregone conclusion. More recently, the Cambodian (2012)51 and the Thai (2016)52 candidacies fell through, the latter despite its 2016 chairmanship of the G77.53 Although fellow ASEAN member countries habitually promise to support candidacies of their ASEAN partners,54 in reality the country running has mainly to rely on its own resources and networks for organizing the election campaign.55 The strong adherence to sovereignty norms translates into a voting behaviour in the UNGA, which on the one hand shows some commitment to ASEAN 47  Nguitragool and Rűland, ASEAN in International Fora, 155. 48  The Jakarta Post, 28 September 2004; 26 November 2008, 8 April 2010, 20 November 2010, 28 December 2010. 49  Chairman’s Statement, 10th ASEAN Summit, Vientiane, 29 November 2004, para. 24, available at: https://asean.org/?static_post=chairman-s-statement-of-the-10th-asean-summit -vientiane-29-november-2004 (accessed 10 August 2019). 50  The Jakarta Post, 26 March 2005. 51  The Phnom Penh Post, 18 October 2012. 52  Bangkok Post, 4 July 2016. Two years earlier, Thailand also failed in its campaign for a seat on the UN’s Human Rights Council. Khaosod, 22 October 2014. 53  Thai News Service, 29 September 2015. 54   A SEAN Affairs, 4 October 2014. 55  Interview, 13 March 2019.

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unity, but on the other also a tendency to defect from ASEAN unanimity when core interests including normative issues surrounding democracy and human rights are at stake. Hence, especially in routine low politics issues ASEAN member governments display a modicum of unity. As Table 7.2 below demonstrates, unanimity in UNGA votes in the 68th (2013/2014) to the 72nd (2017/2018) UNGA fluctuates between 62.2 percent and 79.5 percent, averaging at 73.3 percent. Unanimity means that all ten countries cast the same vote. Cohesion improves if we take a closer look at the non-unanimous votes. Here we find that in forty-one out of 103 non-unanimous votes only one member did not vote in agreement with fellow ASEAN members. This means that only in sixty-two of the 386 votes more than one country voted against their peers. Moreover, all these deviations were the result of abstentions or absences from voting. Absence of members from voting can be the result of staff bottlenecks in small missions, but they also conceal disagreement with fellow ASEAN members. Abstentions or absences may suggest ASEAN unity where in reality there is none.56 That the non-attendance is a deliberate strategy is supported by the fact that not only small missions were absent from UNGA votes. While Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore, the ASEAN countries with the smallest missions, rarely missed a vote, Vietnam, the country with the third-largest mission, missed no fewer than thirteen votes in the 5-year period between 2013 and 2018. That nonattendance constitutes a deliberate strategy is further supported by the fact that some countries forgo votes every year on the same resolutions. Cambodia, for instance, missed votes on the human rights situation in Syria in four consecutive years and two votes on internally displaced persons and refugees in Abkhazia, Georgia and Tskhinvali. Malaysia and Myanmar, as well, did not vote at least once in the Syrian human rights issue. Myanmar also did not vote twice on human rights resolutions against Iran. Interestingly, non-attendance of votes is disproportionately high among ASEAN’s new members. With twentyfour absences Myanmar tops the list, followed by Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, with thirteen each. This may suggest that the loyalty of accession countries to ASEAN is less profound than that of the founding members. Yet ASEAN’s voting record appears in an even more positive light if only decisions are taken into account where yes and no votes were split. This happened only nine times between the 68th and 72nd UNGA. A closer look at these split

56  For non-attendance as a deliberate strategy, see also E.R. Appathurai, “Permanent Missions in New York,” in Diplomacy at the UN, ed. Geoff Berridge and A. Jennings (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985).

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ASEAN as an Actor in the United Nations Table 7.2 Voting of ASEAN Member States in the UNGA (2013/2014–2017/2018)

UNGA

Total votes

Unanimous vote

One country defecting

Absence in voting

Split yes/ no vote

68th UNGA (2013/2014) 69th UNGA (2014/2015) 70th UNGA (2015/2016) 71th UNGA (2016/2017) 72th UNGA (2017/2018) Total

 64

 49 (76.6%)

 5 (7.8%)

 9 (14.1%)

0 (0.0%)

 81

 63 (77.8%)

 5 (6.2%)

11 (13.6%)

3 (3.7%)

 73

 58 (79.5%)

 5 (6.8%)

 8 (11.0%)

2 (2.7%)

 78

 57 (73.1%)

 4 (5.1%)

16 (20.5%)

2 (2.6%)

 90

 56 (62.2%)

22 (24.4%)

26 (28.9%)

2 (2.2%)

386

283 (73.3%)

41 (10.6%)

70 (18.1%)

9 (2.3%)

Source: Voeten, Erik; Strezhnev, Anton; Bailey, Michael, 2009, “United Nations General Assembly Voting Data”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LEJUQZ, Harvard Dataverse, V18, UNF:6:xkt0YWtoBCThQeTJWAuLfg==“.

votes shows that disunity was greatest where normative issues were at stake: human rights issues, death penalty and Palestine. This corroborates a finding of an analysis of speeches in the UNGA General Debate which suggests that ASEAN positions on Palestine differ markedly. There is a pro-Palestinian position of ASEAN’s majority Islamic states (Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei) which habitually censure Israel, a pro-Palestinian diplomacy which refrains from censuring Israel (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines and Thailand) and a largely indifferent stance (Myanmar, Singapore) (see Chapter 15).57 Since the formation of the grouping, ASEAN governments have been reliable stalwarts of multilateralism. ASEAN repeatedly stresses the significance of international law for the peaceful settlement of disputes, a stance that has even been strengthened by the ASEAN Charter (2008) which seeks to transform ASEAN into a rules-based regional organization. The content analysis of General Debate speeches corroborates this observation, as references to “collective action” rank a high third among the topics ASEAN governments name most frequently. While this might appear somewhat contradictory in the light of the previous sections, it can be reconciled with them by taking 57  Rüland, “ASEAN as an Actor in the UN”.

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a closer look at the type of multilateralism ASEAN countries pursue. What ASEAN governments prefer might be described as “diminished” or “shallow” multilateralism,58 which differs from the liberal concept of “principled multilateralism” as Ruggie defined it in the immediate post-Cold War years.59 It is a multilateralism that seeks to protect equal national sovereignty and regards international norms with behind the border effects sceptically. Their support for the UN’s “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) norm is thus conditional. They support those elements of R2P such as “the protection responsibility of the state” and “International assistance and capacity building” for human rights protection, which do not jeopardize state sovereignty, but they reject humanitarian interventions as a means to end flagrant human rights violations in sovereign states.60 Major characteristics of “diminished multilateralism” are, among others, the shallowness of institutions, their contingency and flexibility for the sake of “low-intensity” cooperation, the emergence of broadband or multi-purpose fora, the instrumentalization of institutions for “soft balancing” and “hedging” and hence a tendency towards “forum shopping,” by which actors “pick and choose among the mechanisms that best fit their individual political agenda”.61 As proliferating institutions are not “nested,” that is, functionally embedded in line with subsidiarity considerations in the existing institutional architecture, “forum shopping” is a recipe for institutional redundancy.62 ASEAN governments’ multilateralism concepts are also closely aligned with what is called in the literature as “executive multilateralism.” While they strongly promote a greater democratization of international organizations through more equitable decision-making procedures, they have so far been mute — even a newly democratized country such as Indonesia — on integrating non-state stakeholders such as parliamentarians and civil society into the formal deliberative and decision-making processes of the UN.63 58  Jürgen Rüland and Karsten Bechle, “Interregionalism without Regions: IBSA as a Form of Shallow Regionalism,” in Asia and Latin America: Political, economic, and multilateral relations, ed. Jörn Dosch and Olaf Jacob, Routledge contemporary Asia series 23 (London: Routledge, 2010); Jürgen Rüland, “The rise of ‘diminished multilateralism’: East Asian and European forum shopping in global governance,” Asia Europe Journal 9, 2–4 (2012). 59  John G. Ruggie, “Multilateralism: the anatomy of an institution,” International Organization 46, no. 3 (1992). 60  Nguitragool and Rüland, ASEAN in International Fora, 112. 61  Shepard Forman and Derk Segaar, “New Coalitions for Global Governance: The Changing Dynamics of Multilateralism,” Global Governance 12, no. 2 (2006): 213. 62  Rüland, “Rise of ‘diminished multilateralism’”. 63  Nguitragool and Rüland, ASEAN in International Fora, 110.

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All in all, with a few exceptions ASEAN member countries practice a reconciliatory multilateralism. Although they adopt a succinctly “Third Worldist” stance on many issues, demanding fundamental reforms in the current political and economic world order that to a greater extent takes into account the interests of developing countries, they rarely agitate. Their rhetoric is mostly moderate, thus differing from the hard-hitting wording of other developing countries engaged in the Non-Aligned Movement and the G77. The exception are fiery speeches of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Muhamad in the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997/1998. While explicitly welcoming South-South cooperation, ASEAN countries nevertheless seek to mediate between North and South and to promote trilateral cooperation, that is cooperation between high-income, medium-income and low-income countries. 3

ASEAN’s Key Issues and Agendas in the UN

The last empirical section examines which policies or positions are the primary concerns of ASEAN member countries in the UN and how they promote them. Preliminary answers to this question can be drawn from the Bali Concord III of 201164 and the pertinent Action Plan.65 The documents name a broad range of objectives in the pursuit of which ASEAN seeks to increase its global presence. Topping the list is “peace, security and stability,” which ASEAN intends to promote by “renouncing aggression and the threat or use of force” and by fostering “non-proliferation and disarmament.” The latter includes the establishment of nuclear weapons free zones comparable to the Southeast Asian Nuclear Weapons Free Zone which ASEAN established in 1995. ASEAN also seeks to “ensure peaceful, safe, free and unimpeded international navigation,” a thinly veiled reference to the dispute over maritime borders in the South China Sea, 80 percent of which is claimed by China. ASEAN countries also pledge to boost the respect for diversity and tolerance. The Malaysian initiative towards a Global Movement of Moderates has been endorsed by its ASEAN peers and seeks to curtail all variants of extremism and terrorism. Political goals include the promotion of rule of law, good governance, democracy, constitutional government and the promotion of human rights. Economic objectives also figure 64  Bali Concord III, available at: https://www.asean.org/uploads/2012/05/Bali%20Concord %20III.pdf (accessed 8 March 2019). 65  Bali Declaration on ASEAN Community in a “Global Community of Nations,” Bali Concord III, Plan of Action 2013–2017, available at: https://www.kemlu.go.id/ptri-asean/Majalah/ Bali%20Plan%20of%20Action%20Three.pdf (accessed 8 March 2019).

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prominently, aiming to link ASEAN to all “significant regional and global economic initiatives impacting on the region.” Other economic objectives focus on sustainable development and, inspired by reminiscences of the devastating effects of the Asian Financial Crisis, economic stability. Finally, among the sociocultural objectives disaster management, climate change, health, education and human resource development stand out. These objectives resonate in member governments’ annual General Debate addresses. “Peace” comes second among the issues tackled in the speeches, exceeded only by “development.” “Non-conventional security threats,” “democracy and human rights” and “environment and sustainability” sustainable development” came in fifth, seventh and ninth, respectively.66 Yet the promotion of “democracy and human rights” has so far hardly transcended lip service. The majority of ASEAN countries is run by autocratic governments of various shades. None of the member states is currently registered as “free,” designating a country as “fully democratic” according to the Freedom House democracy ranking.67 Normative issues are thus — as stated above — a major cause for countries to defect from ASEAN unity in UNGA votes. Joint statements in the UNGA are rare — only three were submitted in the 72nd UNGA — and also resolutions are rarely sponsored collectively, although the grouping jointly cosponsors resolutions of the G77 and China. The fact that ASEAN infrequently acts collectively in the UNGA is attributed by senior diplomats to the fact that ASEAN — unlike the EU — does not engage in a common foreign and security policy.68 The high priority ASEAN governments attach to “peace” and “development” and their strong aspiration to generate “soft power” as “good global citizens” translates in a propensity to provide “public goods.” One example is participation in UN peacekeeping missions. Although an ASEAN peacekeeping force proposed by Indonesia in 2003 did not find the support of its peers,69 among 123 nations providing troops for UN peacekeeping operations, Indonesia ranks eighth, Malaysia twenty-eighth and Cambodia twenty-ninth.70 ASEAN countries frequently raise their voice for the emancipation of the world’s economically, politically and geographically most disadvantaged countries such as land-locked least developing countries, for whom Laos often acts as a speaker. 66  Rüland, “ASEAN as an Actor in the UN”. 67  Since 2014, even Indonesia has been relegated to the status of “partly free.” 68  Interview, 13 March 2019. 69  Interview information 19 March 2012; Far Eastern Economic Review, 6 May 2004; The Jakarta Post, 26 February 2004 and 30 June 2009. 70  Indonesia Tribune, 25 October 2016 and United Nations Peacekeeping, available at: https:// peacekeeping.un.org/en/troop-and-police-contributors (accessed 30 January 2019).

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The better off and larger ASEAN countries even began adopting a donor role71 by dispensing aid to African LDCs and war-torn countries such as Afghanistan, relief services to neighbours hit by natural disasters like Myanmar after cyclone Nargis in 2007 and sheltering 3,000 Syrian refugees.72 Like most new regional and global powers and the majority of developing countries, ASEAN members are ardent proponents of UN reform.73 Among the eleven topics most frequently addressed by ASEAN representatives in their annual speeches to the opening of the UNGA between 1998 and 2007, UN reform ranked fourth.74 These addresses include calls to democratize the Security Council by enlarging its permanent membership, making it more compatible with today’s global power distribution, and abolish the veto.75 Another step to democratize the UN is the strengthening of the General Assembly vis-à-vis the Security Council. Yet ASEAN members differ in how these objectives are to be achieved.76 Indonesia, for instance, harbours ambitions to become a permanent Security Council member. By contrast, Singapore — a founding member of the Forum of Small States (FOSS) and the Global Governance Group (3G)77 — actively seeks to strengthen the role of small countries in the UN and other global fora such as the G20.78 Although the presence of an ASEAN member in the illustrious club of permanent members would be an image and influence booster for the entire region, group support for Indonesia’s bid is lacklustre at best. Differences also exist on the urgency of the abolishment of the P5’s veto power. While some countries including Malaysia and Indonesia have repeatedly called for an early abolition of the veto, others such as Singapore have been less vocal in this respect. 4 Conclusion: ASEAN — a Caucus-Type Actor in the UN The key question addressed in this chapter concerned the ASEAN’s actorness in the UN. By and large, individual ASEAN countries are active players 71  Interview, 15 January 2019. 72   U NGA, A/70/PV.22. 73  Sorpong Peou, “The Subsidiarity Model of Global Governance in the UN-ASEAN Context,” Global Governance 4, no. 4 (1998). 74  Rüland, “ASEAN as an Actor in the UN”. 75  Nguitragool and Rűland, ASEAN in International Fora, 113; Rüland, “ASEAN as an Actor in the UN”. 76  Peou, “Subsidiarity Model of Global Governance”. 77  The Straits Times, 29 September 2018. 78  Nguitragool and Rűland, ASEAN in International Fora, 96; Rüland, “ASEAN as an Actor in the UN”.

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in the world organization, but mostly in an individual and not in a collective capacity. ASEAN’s collective role in the UN is thus quite limited; it acts more as a regional organization in partnership with the UN, rather than a political force in the UN. Partnership with the UN is epitomized in the so far nine summit meetings and regular annual foreign ministers’ meetings with the UN Secretariat General and extends to cooperation areas such as the promotion of peace and prosperity, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and disaster management.79 Yet for ASEAN countries — as for many other regional organizations of the Global South — the observer status has high symbolic value, and by fostering its visibility and reflecting recognition as a respected international actor bestows “soft power” on the grouping. Occasionally, in the rare cases where ASEAN’s chair can speak for the grouping in the Security Council such as on Myanmar or in the Thai-Cambodian conflict, collective action may enhance ASEAN’s political weight in the UN. The chapter has also argued that the reluctance of ASEAN countries to act collectively in the UN must be attributed to adverse historical experiences, a sceptical world view of leaders emanating from it and cooperation practices that are strongly guided by the tenets of political realism. ASEAN as a result pursues a succinctly sovereignty-based intergovernmentalist approach to regional cooperation that has only gradually given way to acting jointly, as it becomes increasingly clear to ASEAN governments, that many global problems can no longer be solved by individual nation states. Yet, when cooperation means sacrificing sovereignty, ASEAN countries are still inclined to solve this normative conflict in favour of sovereignty. ASEAN’s cohesion within the UN can thus be likened to a caucus rather than a bloc. Operating as a caucus means that members display a worldview which is more pessimistic than optimistic, that power sensitivity in foreign policy affairs is substantial, mutual distrust lingers, regional identity is limited, resting on only very general normative affinities, policy coordination is loose, often informal and non-binding and mutual support in international negotiations is limited. The resultant joint action tends to be confined to the lowest common denominator and the maintenance of a high degree of national autonomy. Defections from group unity are thus not unusual.80 Yet as Southeast Asia is currently backsliding into a theatre for Great Power rivalries reminiscent of the Cold War period, even this modest cohesion is

79  The Straits Times, 15 December 2018. 80  For a typology of collective action in international fora, see Nguitragool and Rüland, ASEAN in International Fora, 15.

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jeopardized. Events in the South China Sea since 2010 and countries such as Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar siding more with China than their ASEAN peers which have competing claims with China increase the danger that despite skilful hedging countries in the region get entangled as client states in Great Power dynamics. This would surely be a recipe for the crumbling of ASEAN’s fragile cohesion in the UN (and other international fora). Acknowledgement For their able research assistance, I thank Malte Seebens, Raphael Steinhilber, Kai Vorberg, Anna-Lena Zunftmeister and Simon Straub. References Acharya, Amitav. Constructing a security community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the problem of regional order. Politics in Asia series. London: Routledge, 2001. Appathurai, E.R. “Permanent Missions in New York.” In Diplomacy at the UN. Edited by Geoff Berridge and A. Jennings, 94–108. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985. Caballero-Anthony, Mely. “Understanding ASEAN’s centrality: bases and prospects in an evolving regional architecture.” The Pacific Review 27, no. 4 (2014): 563–84. Forman, Shepard, and Derk Segaar. “New Coalitions for Global Governance: The Changing Dynamics of Multilateralism.” Global Governance 12, no. 2 (2006): 205–25. Haacke, Jürgen. ASEAN’s diplomatic and security culture: Origins, development and prospects. London: Routledge Curzon, 2003. Jayakumar, S. Diplomacy: A Singapore experience. Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2011. Jones, Lee. ASEAN, Sovereignty and Intervention in Southeast Asia. Critical Studies of the Asia-Pacific. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Kivimäki, Timo. “Power, interest or culture — is there a paradigm that explains ASEAN’s political role best?” The Pacific Review 21, no. 4 (2008): 431–50. Nabbs-Keller, Greta. “Reforming Indonesia’s Foreign Ministry: Ideas, Organizations and Leadership.” Contemporary Southeast Asia 35, no. 1 (2013): 56–82. Narine, Shaun. Explaining ASEAN: Regionalism in Southeast Asia. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002. Nguitragool, Paruedee, and Jűrgen Rűland. ASEAN as an Actor in International Fora: Reality, Potential and Constraints. Integration through Law 7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Peou, Sorpong. “The Subsidiarity Model of Global Governance in the UN-ASEAN Context.” Global Governance 4, no. 4 (1998): 439–60.

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Pitsuwan, Surin. ASEAN’s Challenge: Some Reflections and Recommendations on Strengthening the ASEAN Secretariat. Jakarta: ASEAN Secretariat, 2011. Ruggie, John G. “Multilateralism: the anatomy of an institution.” International Organization 46, no. 3 (1992): 561–98. Rüland, Jürgen. “The rise of ‘diminished multilateralism’: East Asian and European forum shopping in global governance.” Asia Europe Journal 9, 2–4 (2012): 255–70. Rüland, Jürgen. “The limits of democratizing interest representation: ASEAN’s regional corporatism and normative challenges.” European Journal of International Relations 20, no. 1 (2014): 237–61. Rüland, Jürgen. The Indonesian Way: ASEAN, Europeanization, and Foreign Policy Debates in a New Democracy. Studies in Asian security. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Rüland, Jürgen. “ASEAN as an Actor in the United Nations: Role Concepts, Rhetoric and Cohesion.” Asia-Pacific Business Review, 25, no. 5 (2019): 751–771. Rüland, Jürgen, and Karsten Bechle. “Interregionalism without Regions: IBSA as a Form of Shallow Regionalism.” In Asia and Latin America: Political, economic, and multilateral relations. Edited by Jörn Dosch and Olaf Jacob, 167–95. Routledge contemporary Asia series 23. London: Routledge, 2010. Snitwongse, Kusuma. “Interaction and Collaboration of the EC and ASEAN in the UN System and International Conferences.” In Western Europe and Southeast Asia: Cooperation or Competition? Edited by Giuseppe Schiavone, 229–58. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1989. Stubbs, Richard. “The ASEAN alternative? Ideas, institutions and the challenge to ‘global’ governance.” The Pacific Review 21, no. 4 (2008): 451–68. “Waging Peace: ASEAN and the Thai-Cambodian Border Conflict.” Asia Report 215, International Crisis Group, Brussels, 2011. https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/ south-east-asia/thailand/waging-peace-asean-and-thai-cambodian-border-conflict. Weinstein, Franklin B. Indonesian foreign policy and the dilemma of dependence: From Sukarno to Soeharto. Politics and international relations of Southeast Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976.

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Chapter 8

The Alliance of Small Island States at the UN: the Promise and Pitfalls of Single-Issue Groups in Multilateral Negotiations Katie Verlin Laatikainen 1 Introduction In October 2009, cabinet members of the Maldives government held a press conference 20 feet under water in scuba gear to highlight the urgency of the environmental summit (COP-15) to be held in Copenhagen two months later. This publicity effort sought to emphasize the existential threat that small island states like the Maldives face with the threat of rising waters accompanying climate change. At Copenhagen, the negotiations to replace the binding Kyoto Protocol quickly unraveled when it became clear that a group of large developing countries — the BASIC coalition that included Brazil, South Africa, India and China — had agreed to act jointly with the US to prevent an agreement with binding provisions. The European Union (EU), environmentalists, and those hoping for a more ambitious, binding agreement were deeply disappointed, but none were more disappointed that the countries comprising the Alliance of Small Island States — AOSIS — which represents small island and coastal states vulnerable to climate change. Six years later at COP-21 in Paris, the conclusion of negotiations was instead marked with champagne and proclamations that finally the international community had come together to keep the increase in planetary temperature rise to ‘well below’ 2 degrees Celsius, aiming for 1.5 degrees. The successful result of this climate meeting was possible because a ‘high ambition coalition’ (HAC) coalesced between different negotiating blocs, led by the charismatic Tony de Brum, foreign minister of the Marshall Islands. Meeting secretly for months before the Paris meeting, members of AOSIS as well as the EU began to articulate common goals, such as limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, long-term decarbonization, regular reviews and transparency of national climate commitments. This ‘high ambition coalition’ seemingly appeared from nowhere. ‘Unlike the official blocs at the talks, its members did not negotiate as a group. De Brum, when pressed, could not even articulate how many members were in the coalition … But it had a galvanizing effect, allowing more

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than 90 countries to claim the moral high ground and suggesting that anyone who was not with them was “unambitious”’.1 This high ambition coalition overshadowed more than two decades of persistent advocacy by the Alliance of Small Island States. It is nonetheless a victory for AOSIS and illustrates the promise that single-issue political groups can play in stimulating multilateral diplomacy. Such groups also face pitfalls once that issue achieves prominence and is ‘mainstreamed,’ subjecting single issue groups to disintegrative forces while both more institutionalized groupings and newer coalitions absorb both the issue and diplomatic energies. This chapter examines AOSIS across the UN landscape. It analyzes its emergence and its activities across three multilateral venues: its (limited) activities in the UN General Assembly, involvement and leadership in the recurring conferences related to climate change, and in the conferences devoted to the situation of Small Island Developing States (SIDS). While AOSIS had a great deal of prominence and leadership in the early years of climate negotiations, the group has been subject to fragmentation since the mid-2000s.2 There are both internal and external explanations for this fragmentation. The growing agenda of AOSIS has led to greater intra-organizational dissension while externally AOSIS has struggled to maintain consistency and viability in the face of other political groups becoming more active on the issue of climate change. These dynamics provide a map of the overall evolution of multilateral politics and a window on the role of single-issue political groups in those processes. AOSIS in this way is a victim of its own success, exemplifying the promise and pitfalls of single issue groups in UN multilateralism. 2

Composition and Functioning

Politically active groups in UN multilateralism are often regionally organized as the other chapters in this section demonstrate. AOSIS, while influenced by regional dynamics, is not a regional political group but a trans-regional group.

1  John Vidal, Suzanne Goldenberg and Lenore Taylor ‘How the historic Paris deal over climate change was finally agreed’ The Guardian, 13 December 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2015/dec/13/climate-change-deal-agreed-paris. 2  Pamela Chasek. “Margins of power: Coalition building and coalition maintenance of the South Pacific island states and the alliance of small island states.” Review of European and Comparative International Law 14 (2005): 125–137; Carola Betzold, Paula Castro, and Florian Weiler. “AOSIS in UNFCCC Negotiations: from Unity to Fragmentation?” Climate Policy 12 no. 5 (2012) 591–613.

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Unlike the Organization of Islamic Conference, another trans-regional grouping, it does not have a permanent secretariat or charter. Like the “friends” groups that Whitfield has analyzed, AOSIS is ‘an ad hoc, informal issue-specific mini-coalition of states’ focused primarily on the issue of climate change, though ad-hoc may be something of a misnomer since AOSIS has been functioning for three decades.3 Led by the Maldives and Trinidad and Tobago, 24 island states from the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans and the Caribbean formed AOSIS as a negotiation forum in 1990 with an eye toward negotiations on a global climate treaty to emerge from the 1992 Rio conference. Ashe et al. identify the three original objectives of AOSIS as: 1) to devise a common negotiating position at the negotiations on a framework convention on climate change; 2) to focus attention on the plight of small island countries in the face of global warming; and 3) to consider strategies for coping with its damaging effects.4 AOSIS has grown to a current membership of 39 UN member states and 5 observers from US and European overseas territories (American Samoa, Netherlands Antilles, etc.). Together, AOSIS constitutes 20% of the UN membership, 28% of developing states, but only 5% of the world’s population.5 The ad-hoc nature of AOSIS means that membership has fluctuated. Malta and Cyprus were members of AOSIS until 2004 when they became members of the European Union, a more formal regional organization with a common approach to environmental policy. Members of AOSIS are divided into three regional groupings: Pacific Island states (15 countries), Caribbean states (16 countries) and the catch-all AIMS (Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean and South China Sea) grouping (8 countries). While AOSIS is often used interchangeably with SIDS, they are not synonymous; SIDS is a classification established at the Rio +20 conference referring to small island developing states facing specific vulnerabilities and warranting special protection and attention, whereas AOSIS is a voluntary negotiating 3  Whitfield, Teresa (2007) Friends Indeed? The United Nations, Groups of Friends, and the Resolution of Conflict (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2009), 9. See also Teresa Whitfield, Working With Groups of Friends (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2010). Prantl has analyzed informal groupings in the Security Council; see Jochen Prantl. The UN Security Council and Informal Groups of States: Complementing or Competing for Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006). 4  John W. Ashe, Robert van Lierop, and Anilla Cherian. “The Role of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in the Negotiation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” Natural Resources Forum 23 (1999): 209–220. 5  Timothée Ourbak and Alexandre K. Magnan “The Paris Agreement and Climate Change Negotiations: Small Islands, Big Players” Regional Environmental Change 18 No. 8, (2018): 2202.

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Table 8.1 Chairship of AOSIS

Country

Years

Vanuatu Trinidad and Tobago Samoa Mauritius Tuvalu (Acting Chair) St. Lucia Grenada Grenada Nauru Maldives Belize Antigua & Barbuda

1991–1994 1994–1997 1997–2002 2002–2005 2005–2006 2006 2006–2009 2009–2011 2011–2014 2015–2018 2019–2021 2021–

alliance.6 Membership in the two groups is overlapping, but not exactly parallel. For instance, Bahrain is listed as a SIDS, but not a member of AOSIS. Singapore is a member of AOSIS, but is not designated as a SIDS. While AOSIS is often described as an alliance of small island developing states, not all members are small (Papua New Guinea and Cuba), islands (Suriname, Belize), or developing (Singapore), though 8 members of AOSIS are among those listed as least-developed countries (LDCs).7 Primarily through their missions in New York, AOSIS works on the basis of consultation and consensus, with decisions being taken at ambassadorial-level plenary meetings. The alliance does not have a formal charter, nor is it heavily institutionalized because there is no secretariat or regular budget.8 Instead, there is a typically three-year rotating chair position that operates out of the permanent mission in New York (see Table 8.1). Leadership of AOSIS was first exercised by Ambassador Robert van Lierop of Vanuatu (1991–94), who has chronicled the role of AOSIS in the negotiations for

6  The list of SIDS is available at: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/topics/sids/list. 7  L DCs in AOSIS include Comoros, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Kiribati, Maldives, Samoa, Sao Tome and Principe, Solomon Islands, Timor Lest, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. 8  Jonathan Spangler, Jonathan. ‘Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS)’ in The Encyclopedia of Environment and Society, ed. Paul Robbins (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2007).

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the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).9 Ambassador Tuiloma Neroni Slade of Samoa, the third chair of AOSIS, has also analyzed the Kyoto Protocol from the perspective of AOSIS.10 One indication of the importance of AOSIS in multilateral negotiations on climate change is that they are the first interregional group to be granted a seat on the bureau which directs the work of intergovernmental negotiations on the climate change treaties. Typically, only those elected through the regional groups serve on the bureau. Betzold et al. note that they have managed to perpetuate this unusual practice, “as it has become common practice to include a SIDS seat in other Convention and protocol bodies, such as the Executive Board of the Clean Development Mechanism, the Adaptation Fund and the Green Climate Fund.”11 2.1 AOSIS in New York In its nearly 3 decades of existence, AOSIS has presented 110 statements at the UN bodies in New York. It devotes most of its activities to the General Assembly Plenary, the 2nd Committee of the General Assembly, and the Economic and Social Council, as detailed in Table 8.2. Remarkably, half of the statements made by AOSIS in New York have occurred since 2015 during the period when the Maldives was chairing the group. Indeed, during this period, AOSIS presented its first statement to the UN Security Council in July 2018 in a discussion of climate-related security risks.12 Prior to this energetic diplomacy by the Maldives, there have been two periods of greater AOSIS activity at the UNGA with more than 2 statements per year: 1999–2005 and then again in 2012. These spurts of activism by AOSIS at UNGA correspond with periods of AOSIS leadership by the Pacific Island states, with a more quiescent AOSIS under periods of Caribbean leadership. It is also worth noting that during the periods when AOSIS has been led by Samoa and Mauritius, there have been instances of burden-sharing, when other members of AOSIS would present statements on behalf of the group. But for the most part, AOSIS statements are delivered by the member state holding the chair of the group. Betzold et al. find that 9  John W. Ashe, Robert van Lierop, and Anilla Cherian. “The Role of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in the Negotiation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” Natural Resources Forum 23 (1999): 209–220. 10  Tuiloma Neroni Slade and Jacob Werksman. “An Examination of the Kyoto Protocol from the Small Island Perspective” in Climate Change and Development, ed. Luis Gómez-Echeverri (New Haven: UNDP Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, 2000) 63–83. http:// environment.yale.edu/publication-series/786.html. 11  Betzold et al. “AOSIS in UNFCCC”, 5. 12  United Nations. Understanding and Addressing Climate-Related Security Risks. Security Council 8307th Meeting, 11 July 2018. S/PV.8307.

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Table 8.2 aosis statements at the UN standing bodies

Year

Chaired by

1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 Total

Vanuatu Vanuatu Vanuatu Trinidad and Tobago Trinidad and Tobago Trinidad and Tobago Samoa Samoa Samoa Samoa Samoa Mauritius Mauritius Mauritius Tuvalu St. Lucia Grenada Grenada Grenada Grenada Nauru Nauru Nauru Nauru Maldives Maldives Maldives Maldives

GA PLEN GA 2nd GA 5th ECOSOC UNSC Total 1 1 1

1 1 1

1

1

1 1 1 1 1

5 2 1 3 5 4 2 1

2

1

1

1 2 1 2 1 2

1 21

3 2 2 10 8 9 61

1

1 9 8 7 26

1 1

1 2 1 1 1 0 2 0 7a 4 2 4b 6 4 4 1 0 1 0 2 0 4 4 3 13 17 17 9 110

a During Samoan leadership 1997–2002, statements delivered by Samoa, Antigua and Barbuda (6), Bahamas (1), Suriname (1), and Belize (1). b During Mauritius leadership 2002–2005, statements by Mauritius, Belize (1), and Tuvalu (3). Source: Author

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while AOSIS itself has been consistently produced about 20–25 statements in each 5 year period in the various climate conferences, there have been many more individual country submissions and joint, non-AOSIS submissions by AOSIS members in the period 2006–2011.13 AOSIS states presenting the most individual statements during climate negotiations are Belize, Papua New Guinea, Singapore and Tuvalu, while Belize, the Dominican Republic, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu have been active in presenting joint statements (not under the AOSIS banner) since 2006. Given the activism of individual members, AOSIS exhibits a far more inchoate existence as a group in multilateral diplomacy than does the European Union, for instance. In general, AOSIS does not appear to expend most of its diplomatic energy negotiating resolutions and texts within the UNGA itself, aside from the Maldives presidency. Instead, most of the AOSIS statements at the UNGA are restatements of its positions in the ongoing conferences related to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and limited participation in SIDS conferences. AOSIS has been more effective and active in conference diplomacy than in the standing bodies of the UN. It may be that the reinvigoration of UN multilateralism and the proliferation of conference diplomacy provides an opening for non-traditional groups that the ritualized diplomacy of the GA does not.14 In this way, the emergence of AOSIS may well reflect the broader post-Cold War developments in UN multilateralism. Whitfield demonstrates that the immediate post-Cold War environment was one in which the number of self-selecting “friends” groups in the Security Council increased exponentially, from one in 1987 to more than 30 by 2001.15 The post-Cold War period was one of invigorated multilateralism in which new groups — and new issues such as climate change — challenged the supremacy of long-standing groups and agendas in UN multilateralism. 3

Key Issues for AOSIS

Awareness of climate change solidified in 1988 with the conclusions of the first report of the newly established Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the consequences of such change for the small island developing states also became clear. The special case of SIDS rests upon the recognition of their 13  Betzold et al. “AOSIS in UNFCCC”, 13. 14  Michael G. Schechter. United Nations Global Conferences (New York: Routledge, 2005). 15  Whitfield, Friends Indeed, 3.

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unique vulnerability to climate change. SIDS are typically small in size both geographically and physically. This results in a narrow resource base, an excessive dependence on foreign trade, costly public administration and infrastructure, limited domestic markets and limited export volume which makes economies of scale exceedingly difficult to attain. Their isolation and geographic dispersion exacerbates these challenges. In addition to these developmental challenges, climate change adds particular burdens. Because of their coastal concentration, rising sea levels attributable to climate change pose existential risks to SIDS. Climate change threatens ‘displace coastal populations, damage fresh water reserves, and even completely submerge the low-lying coral atolls of several Pacific Island states’.16 Even without existential threats, the environmental volatility accompanying climate change — the increased frequency and strength of tropical storms — present disproportionately high costs for SIDS. With less than 1% of the world’s territory, GDP and greenhouse gas emissions,17 these states are nonetheless disproportionately affected by the effects of climate change. AOSIS, as the key representative of small island states, represents both the promise and pitfalls of single-issue groups. 3.1 Promise: AOSIS in the UNFCCC The vast majority of AOSIS activity focuses on the ever-changing negotiations on climate change, and in particular the UN Framework Convention on Climate change.18 Chasek argues that ‘the history of AOSIS during its first six years is closely woven with climate policy, particularly the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’.19 Malta sponsored the UNGA resolution calling for the intergovernmental negotiating committee (INC) for a framework treaty on climate change in 1989. At the first session of the 1992 Rio conference, AOSIS submitted a framework of principles to guide the drafting of the UNFCCC, and ‘many of the essential design features of the UNFCCC, including its emphasis on science, precaution, and equity were supported by or derived from AOSIS proposals’.20 AOSIS had 12 key objectives in the UNFCCC negotiations and sought to ensure that they were ‘represented fully not only within the INC as a whole, but within the respective regional groupings and within 16  Spanger, “AOSIS”, 29. 17  Betzold et al., “AOSIS in the UNFCCC”, 5. 18  Eric Shibuya, ‘Roaring Mice Against the Tide: The South Pacific Islands and AgendaBuilding on Global Warming’ Pacific Affairs 69, No. 4 (1996) 541–555; see also Ashe et al, “The Role of AOSIS”, Chasek “Margins of Power” and Betzold et al, “AOSIS in the UNFCCC”. 19  Chasek, “Margins of Power” 128. 20  Slade and Werksman, “An Examination” 66.

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the larger Group of 77’.21 Ashe et al. determine that the final UNFCCC reflects 10 of the 12 AOSIS priorities, and Chasek argues that were it not for the active efforts of AOSIS, preventive action, capacity building and dispute resolution mechanisms might not have found their way into the treaty or in the subsequent Kyoto Protocol.22 Shibuya argued that ‘AOSIS has developed a voice of no small import’.23 Betzold argues that by highlighting common interests, raising moral concerns, and playing by the rules, AOSIS had a great deal of success in the climate regime up to Kyoto.24 As a single-issue, trans-regional group of composed largely of SIDS, AOSIS managed to get both the developed world (particularly the EU) and the developing world (especially the G-77) to focus on the situation of SIDS rather than their traditional negotiating patterns. Developing countries were initially skeptical about obligations that might be imposed on them for climate change mitigation, considering it a responsibility of the developed world. Gómez-Echeverri argues that the G-77 and China were unable to marshal organized opposition to the unified voice of the European Union; instead, developing countries have devolved into sub-groupings based upon common interests, including AOSIS, forestry-dominated developing countries, land-locked developing countries, and so on.25 For instance, Ashe et al. show that many developing states were reluctant to use the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) administered by the UNEP, UNDP and World Bank because it was seen as lacking in transparency and universal membership.26 The AOSIS objective was to have a financial mechanism included in the UNFCCC and that this financing have dedicated funding windows for SIDS.27 Those early years may represent AOSIS at its most successful — or at least its most visible. When negotiations shifted to a binding treaty to combat climate change (the resultant Kyoto Protocol), AOSIS fared less well. AOSIS presented a proposal in the first conference of parties (COP-1) in 1995 that industrialized 21  Ashe et al., “The Role of AOSIS” 212. 22  Chasek, 2005: 128. 23  Shibuya, “Roaring Mice”, 554. 24  Betzold, “Borrowing Power” 143. 25  Luis Gómez-Echeverri. “Most developing countries are neither prepared to address nor interested in climate change”’ in Climate Change and Development, ed. Luis Gómez-Echeverri (New Haven: UNDP Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, 2000) 317. Available online at http://environ ment.yale.edu/publication-series/786.html. See also Groen chapter in this volume. 26  Ashe et al., “The Role of AOSIS”217. 27  Raul I. Alfaro-Pelico. “Small Island Developing States and Climate Change: Effects, Responses, and Positions beyond Durban” Real Instituto Elcano Working Papers, No. 1 (2012).

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countries reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 20% of the 1990 levels by 2005. By COP-3 in 1997, the agreed level of reduction for industrialized countries was a 5% reduction of 1990 levels, a standard far below the AOSIS target.28 Furthermore, the ‘flexibility’ needed to enable broad buy-in to pass Kyoto (for example, the role of carbon sinks) meant that the protocol was less aggressive in emissions reductions than it might have been. Reduced AOSIS effectiveness in climate change mitigation became readily apparent in the negotiations to replace the Kyoto Protocol. AOSIS followed the consensus of the IPCC that holding rising temperatures to +1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels was the only way that SIDS would be able to survive climate change. When a group of the most advanced, industrialized economies met in Italy at the Major Economies Forum months before the (in) famous Copenhagen Climate conference in December 2009, they agreed to a +2 degrees increase. In their September 2009 Declaration on Climate Change, AOSIS reaffirmed that target of global average surface temperatures of not more than 1.5 degrees and for a legally binding process initiated under Kyoto.29 That ambition was largely unrealized at Copenhagen. The Copenhagen deal was a reflection of the shifting ground of climate change multilateralism, where individual countries — whether emerging powers like China and India or established economies like the US — were now engaged in climate negotiations but demanding flexible, non-binding approaches to mitigation.30 3.2 Pitfalls: AOSIS at the SIDS Conferences (1994, 2005, and 2014) While AOSIS has had a consistent and progressive voice on climate in the UNFCCC (as Groen argues chapter 14), the recurrent negotiations in conferences on Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have proved more challenging. Nearly all the major conferences on the environment — UNCED 1992 (Rio), World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002), and the UNSCD 2012 (Rio+20) — have explicitly acknowledged the critical situation of SIDS and have had follow-on SIDS conferences in 1994, 2005, and 2014. The SIDS conferences have been another venue for AOSIS activity, but they also revealed the limits of a single-issue group expanding beyond its original remit and the recourse that AOSIS member states have to other group affinities, especially regional groupings. 28  Slade and Werkman, “An Examination” 66. 29   A OSIS, “Declaration on Climate Change” (2009) https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/ content/documents/1566AOSISSummitDeclarationSept21FINAL.pdf. 30  Choo, Kirsten “Washed Away: As Sea Levels Rise, Island Nations Look to the Law to Fend off Extinction” ABA Journal 98 (2012) http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/ washed_away_as_sea_levels_rise_island_nations_look_to_the_law.

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AOSIS has regularly broken down into regionalized groupings in the SIDS negotiations; in addition to differences in resources and geographic remoteness, the Pacific Island SIDS and the Caribbean SIDS diverge on the basis of population, level of development, and orientation towards agriculture and fisheries vs. tourism and off-shore banking. In preparation for the first SIDS conference, Pacific SIDS expressed concerns about nuclear testing and marine dumping, while Caribbean SIDS emphasized chemical and oil spills. The conference on implementation was also beset by a failure to prioritize, and so fell far short of expectations.31 The most recent SIDS conference took place in Samoa September 1–3, 2014 and the intergovernmental process reinforced the sub-regional groupings within AOSIS. The SIDS themselves were organized among three regions: the Pacific Region, the Caribbean Region, and the catch-all AIMS group (Atlantic, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean and South China Sea). The preparatory process also enabled other political groups and international organizations to participate, as well as inviting national contributions, which are presented in table 8.3. In the input phase to Samoa, AOSIS nearly disappeared as a cohesive negotiating alliance. Rather than taking the lead, as might be expected in a conference devoted to SIDS, AOSIS produced a least-common denominator statement. Indeed, other regional and political groups from the developing world became much more assertive in ‘representing’ SIDS during the conference. The G-77 did not miss an opportunity to remind diplomats that it had advocated a third international conference on SIDS in the run-up to the Rio+20 Table 8.3 Participants in the 2014 SIDS conference (Samoa) preparatory process

Political groups

International organizations

National initiatives

AOSIS EU G-77 and China Pacific SIDS

CARICOM Commonwealth Community Global Island Partnership

Australia, Bahamas, Barbados, Cook Islands, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Kiribati, Maldives, Mauritius, Micronesia, Nauru, New Zealand, Palau, Samoa, Tonga, Trinidad, Turkey, Tuvalu, United States

Source: www.sids2014.org

31  Chasek, “Margins of Power” 132.

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conference, and the Commonwealth noted that ‘25 of the world’s 39 SIDS are commonwealth countries’.32 What is striking about the Samoa SIDS conference was the degree to which AOSIS members highlighted their affinities to other regional or standing groups. In national statements by AOSIS members, nearly all highlighted their alignment to the G-77 or to the Pacific SIDS statements — not to AOSIS. Singapore highlighted its membership in FOSS, the 105-member Forum of Small States, which includes a great number of inland member states, thereby broadening the concept to small states rather than small island states. The pull of regionally distinctive interests overshadows the common AOSIS interest in climate at the SIDS conferences. 3.3 Does AOSIS Have a Future? Ourbak and Magnon state that AOSIS had three objectives at the COP-21 in Paris and beyond.33 First, though the Paris Agreement focuses on the commitments of all member states, AOSIS sought to have the particular vulnerabilities of SIDS recognized in the areas of mitigation, finance, capacity-building, and transparency. AOSIS successfully defended the unique status of SIDS in the Paris Agreement. AOSIS remains one of the premier coalitions negotiating on behalf of SIDS in the area of climate change (though it has been joined in the discourse by the Climate Vulnerable Forum which includes many arid and land-locked states). Second, they sought an ambitious agreement to hold temperature rise to 1.5 degrees (with the slogan ‘1.5 to stay alive’) by the end of the century. The final agreement includes that target as desirable and enabled the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to produce a report in 2018 on the scientific assessment of the 1.5 degree target. In late 2018, the IPCC’s report was sobering in its urgency, estimating that there is little more than a decade left to reduce emissions to meet the 1.5 degree target.34 At the COP-24 in Katowice, Poland in 2019, backsliding from this target occurred as the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait refused to embrace the findings of the IPCC Special Report and sought to cast doubt on the climate science. Former Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed argued ‘You cannot question the science. Science is science, and we

32  Jamaica. Statement by Lt. Col. Oral Khan at the First Preparatory Committee for the Third International Conference on Small Island Developing States, 24th February 2014. 33  Ourbak and Magnan, “The Paris Agreement” 2201–2207. 34  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees Celsius. (2018). https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/.

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are only asking countries to welcome a scientific report’.35 AOSIS will continue to champion the science around climate change in the face of nationalist and populist challenges. Finally, AOSIS sought to have Loss and Damage included in the final agreement. This was a controversial point because wealthy developed countries were worried about liability and compensation for climate change. Loss and Damage was included as a stand-alone article in the Paris Agreement, separate from Adaptation provisions, but the Paris Agreement also strengthened the Warsaw mechanism on loss and damage. At the COP-24 in Katowice, the AOSIS chairman invoked the findings of the IPCC report and called for ‘devoting as much energy to securing our priorities on adaptation and loss and damage as we do on mitigation ambition’.36 Moving forward, AOSIS, together with the Climate Vulnerable Forum, are likely to be among the foremost champions of integrating loss and damage into the multilateral climate regime. 4

Participants’ Perceptions

By their own estimation, SIDS have a great deal of moral if not material power.37 They use this moral power to hold more powerful countries — developed and developing — to account. Betzhold argues that that AOSIS negotiators have ‘borrowed power’ to have disproportionate influence over climate negotiations both in the media and across the UN system.38 This moral power comes from the close association AOSIS has to SIDS and the special recognition the climate regime has conferred on SIDS. This perspective is captured by Ibrahim Mohamed of the Maldives when he proclaimed in the UNSC that small island 35  Cited in Max Rosenthal. “Small Island Nations, Threatened by Rising Seas, Want Stronger Action at the Climate-Change Summit in Poland” The Washington Post, 13 December 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/12/12/small-island-nations -threatened-by-rising-seas-want-stronger-action-climate-change-summit-poland/ ?noredirect=on&utm_term=.babd0d70e07f. 36  Cited in Catherine Benson Whalén. “AOSIS Chair Urges Increased Focus on Loss and Damage at COP-24” (SDG Knowledge Hub: a Project by International Institute for Sustainable Development, 2018). http://sdg.iisd.org/news/aosis-chair-urges-increased-focus -on-loss-and-damage-at-cop-24/. 37  Gillian Cambers, Annette Mühlig-Hofmann, and Dirk G. Troost. “Interregional Initiatives for Sustainable Small-Island Development” in Proceedings of Environment and Development in Coastal Regions and in Small Islands (Paris: UNESCO, 2010); see also Ashe et al., “The Role of AOSIS”, 215–200. 38  Carola Betzold. “‘Borrowing’ Power to Influence International Negotiations: AOSIS in the Climate Change Regime 1990–1997”, Politics 30, no. 3 (2010), 142.

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states are on the “front line of impact from climate change, and the very existence of some of those countries is threatened by climate change and the security risks arising from its impacts.”39 The AOSIS role in multilateral negotiations clearly flows from this moral high ground in climate debates. Nearly all members of AOSIS are also members of the G-77. For AOSIS members, the G-77 was the first group whose dominance it sought to challenge in climate negotiations.40 While the G-77 has long dominated debates over the interests of developing states long past the height of north-south division,41 small island states had to carve out a profile in the midst of the G-77’s conservative stance on climate mitigation (see chapter 14). Lierop, the first chair of AOSIS, presents the logic that prompted the creation of AOSIS as distinct from the G-77: ‘larger developing countries deserve a disproportionately larger share of any political or economic benefits destined for developing countries. The end result is that small states have historically been politically and economically marginalized by the international community and by the larger states of the developing world within their respective regional groups’.42 AOSIS was seen as an alternative arena to present a common small island state perspective outside of the G-77 and regional organizations which were dominated by larger developing states. This tension with the G-77 has persisted through the evolution of AOSIS. In the aftermath of disappointing Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, leaders within AOSIS such as Tuvalu and Maldives took exception to the effort of China and India to ‘represent’ developing countries in the closed door sessions that led to the Copenhagen Accord. Tuvalu was one of the few countries to reject signing on to the Copenhagen Accord, and the Maldive’s president was vocally critical of the position of the G-77, ‘particularly telling China that they are not only a developing country but also a main emitter’.43 Open contention between the G-77 and AOSIS seems to have abated after Copenhagen. Jaschik suggests that “the G-77, especially China and India, have become more constructive since Copenhagen, even if only for tactical reasons as they do not want to be regarded as ‘the block’ any more”.44 The influence of 39  United Nations. “Summary Record,” 26. 40  Gómez-Echeverri. “Most developing countries,” 317. 41  Thomas G. Weiss “Moving Beyond North-South Theatre” Third World Quarterly 30 No. 2 Weiss, Thomas G. (2009) ‘Moving Beyond North-South Theatre’ Third World Quarterly 30–2 (2009) 271–284. 42  Ashe et al., “The Role of AOSIS”, 210. 43  Kevin Jaschik. “Small States and International Politics: Climate Change, the Maldives, and Tuvalu” International Politics 51, No. 2(2014): 272–293, pp. 283–4. 44  Jaschik, “Small States”, 284.

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small developing states vis-à-vis the larger developing states is a result of the ability of AOSIS to strategically (re) frame the issue of climate change, from an environmental issue to a security issue which steered the G-77 ‘out of a hardline position toward a more constructive position’.45 This was certainly the case for the 2014 SIDS conference; the outcome of the interregional meeting in Barbados “was submitted through the G-77 and China” before moving toward the final draft document for Samoa.46 When examining participants’ own participation in the group, the lack of institutionalization and ad-hoc nature of AOSIS has had an impact. AOSIS faces fragmenting internal dynamics as well as external competition in multilateral negotiations. Internally, the sub-regions of AOSIS membership have on occasion proved a stronger pull than AOSIS solidarity. For instance, in the past two decades as the agenda of the SIDS has moved beyond climate change, the organization of negotiations has moved toward an inter-regional process that has provided an opportunity for regional organizations and coalitions to become more central. This is certainly the case with the 2014 SIDS conference where the specific regional groups Pacific SIDS and Caricom presented more coherent and substantive positions than did AOSIS. AOSIS was in this way sidelined in the SIDS conference. Indeed, 14 members of AOSIS submitted national initiatives for the Samoa SIDS conference (see Table 8.3). In part, this is a reflection of the different geo-political, economic and environmental situation of the Caribbean and Pacific members of AOSIS. But a similar dynamic was reflected in the role of the High Ambition Coalition at the 2015 Paris Conference, which saw the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands — an AOSIS member but not the AOSIS chair — playing a key diplomatic role bringing together participants from different regional and political groups to reach a final agreement. Internal divisions may threaten longer-term prominence of AOSIS. Mitigation has been a key objective of AOSIS since its founding, but as the climate agenda has broadened, there are splits among the members of AOSIS on priorities. Some countries (e.g. members of Rainforest Coalition like Papua New Guinea) are strongly in favor of REDD reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation — while others prefer to emphasize the critical need for adaptation (Maldives, and Comoros, for example). Betzold and colleagues conclude that “As the climate agenda grows, the differences in positions and interests among AOSIS members becomes more pronounced, and it is more and more difficult to find uniting elements … where national 45  Jaschik, “Small States”, 286. 46  United Nations. Draft Outcome Document of the third International Conference on Small Island Developing States. A/Conf.223/3 (2014).

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interests are concerned, individual countries go as far as openly opposing joint AOSIS positions, as it was for Singapore in Bangkok or Papua New Guinea in Copenhagen”.47 The “ever-growing climate agenda” not only engenders internal divisions, it has prompted the growth of more specific country groupings that members of AOSIS have gravitated toward in climate negotiations.48 This makes it more difficult for any one group to have its voice heard, and it creates opportunities for regional and variations and interests to drive a wedge into a united AOSIS position. For instance, AOSIS has found it impossible to find a common position among its members on REDD. Thus, several AOSIS countries like Papua New Guinea have joined the Rainforest Coalition that seeks increased funding for REDD programs, while other AOSIS members see this as backsliding from aggressive mitigation efforts. In another example, Cuba has followed other ALBA countries (e.g. Ecuador, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba) in criticizing ‘market mechanisms’ that other members of AOSIS seem willing to accept.49 Put simply, as the climate agenda grows and mainstreams, a single-issue political group may be less viable and members begin to focus on their specific situations and interests. Another factor facing AOSIS is external competition from other established political groups and regional organizations. Formal regional organizations that pre-date AOSIS provide a means to pursue more regionally targeted diplomacy. The Pacific Island Forum was established in 1971, and has a secretariat in Suva, and includes an annual meeting devoted to the challenges facing the newly independent island atolls in the Pacific as well as their larger neighbors. Caricom is also a regional organization with an independent secretariat which has proved increasingly active in recent years, particularly in climate debates in New York (see chapter 4). The existence of regional organizations devoted to the specific circumstances of these regions provides a centripetal force sidelining AOSIS. Indeed, during the COP-21 negotiations, the Pacific SIDS held their own meetings separate from the other SIDS and AOSIS. Similarly, when the AOSIS chair from the Maldives offered the first AOSIS statement to the UN Security Council in 2018 emphasizing the existential threat of climate change, representatives from CARICOM (Trinidad and Tobago) and the Pacific SIDS (Nauru) felt compelled to offer their own statements focusing on the particular

47  Betzold et al., “AOSIS in the UNFCCC”, 26. 48  Betzold et al., “AOSIS in UNFCCC”, 2. 49  Betzold et al., “AOSIS in UNFCCC”; Alfaro-Pelico, “Small Island Developing”.

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regional consequences of climate change and security, though both did align with the AOSIS statement.50 The unprecedented Maldives leadership of AOSIS in the aftermath of the Paris Agreement suggests that it is a thriving actor in climate diplomacy. However, the activism may be a reflection of lack of alternative group affiliations for the Maldives. The Maldives is neither a member of Caricom, Pacific SIDS, nor the Indian Ocean Commission. Most members of AOSIS other than the Maldives are members of strong regional political groups, and as the climate change agenda grows, there are a variety of ways to express likemindedness among small states, island states, coastal states and developing states. The Climate Vulnerable Forum, established in 2009, is a direct competitor to AOSIS, with a formal secretariat and rotating presidency issuing joint statements at conferences.51 It includes many arid and land-locked states that share similar goals to AOSIS, including the 1.5 C temperature limit, climate financing, climate adaptation and climate-related loss and damage. 5 Conclusion These intra and external group tensions are a persistent problem for all ad-hoc or single issue groups in the multilateral process. ‘Internal differences or other factors related to the groups’ composition limited their utility in a process, creating a layer of interests to be managed and negotiated in addition to those of the parties to a conflict’.52 This coheres with Chasek’s observation about the temporal nature of shifting coalitions more generally.53 Members of such coalitions have a variety of different negotiating fora in which to pursue their national interests, and this is a challenge for informal, less institutionalized groupings. While coalitions cohere to the bloc-to-bloc nature of negotiations generally, they are much more diffuse because the members of a coalition do not all identify with the coalition’s proposals to the same extent. AOSIS, it appears, is less able to drive the issue of climate change as the climate change agenda becomes both more diverse and subject to nationally defined approaches to mitigation under the Paris Agreement. 50  United Nations. Summary Record of the UN Security Council, 8307th Meeting, 11 July 2018. United Nations, 2018 S/PV.8307. https://undocs.org/en/S/PV.8307. 51  Thomas Hirsch. The Role of Alliances in Climate Policy After Paris (Berlin: Freidrich Ebert Stiftung, International Climate and Energy Policy, July 2016). https://library.fes.de/pdf -files/iez/12689.pdf. 52  Whitfield. “Friends Indeed,” 4. 53  Chasek, “Margins of Power.”

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AOSIS is one of the most successful single-issue groups in UN multilateral negotiations. For three decades it has championed ambitious action on climate change, and has moved the debate toward collective action on this issue. While many gave credit to the High-Ambition Coalition for making the Paris Agreement possible, the HAC would not have been possible without decades of work by AOSIS to get powerful states in both the developing and developed world to take effective action on mitigation. Single issue groups can be exceedingly important in strategic framing as Jaschik argues.54 Ourbak and Magnan suggest that there is still a role for AOSIS to continue to frame climate change as ‘a matter of life or death’.55 To be sure, AOSIS runs the risk of ‘their issue’ being co-opted by existing political and regional groups as well as new forums. Nevertheless, AOSIS continues to function rather than disappear as the climate agenda broadens and the group faces competition from other groups. This ad-hoc, single-issue alliance turns 30 in 2020, and that itself is an interesting puzzle. The association with SIDS, which have statutory existence in climate agreements, creates a political space for the continued relevance of AOSIS. In addition, AOSIS is a key group championing the issue of loss and damage in climate negotiations. Hirsch argues that the High Ambition Coalition demonstrates that ‘selective, short-term and ad hoc alliances can be every bit as successful as formalised ones’.56 However, ad-hoc political groups and alliances depend upon long-standing formalized political groups that can serve as interest-channeling bodies for newer ad-hoc alliances from which to draw support. Where AOSIS now stands in this dynamic is unclear. Entering its fourth decade, is AOSIS still an ad-hoc negotiating group, or is it an institutionalized, formalized grouping like the Non-Aligned Movement that persists beyond the original conditions prompting its creation? Do single issue groups exist simply to provide a more dynamic mechanism to (temporarily) overcome regional and political group obstruction? Why do some ad-hoc single-issue groups disappear while others like NAM and AOSIS persist? Clearly, a systematic understanding of the role of single-issue groups in multilateral politics is in its infancy. Much more comparative work remains to be done empirically on how single-issue groups interact with longstanding political groups in UN multilateralism and their long-term impact in different multilateral settings and policy processes. The role of formal regional groups and international organizations in UN diplomacy have been more commonly 54  Jaschik, “Small States”. 55  Ourbak and Magnon, “The Paris Agreement,” 2206. 56  Hirsch, “Role of Alliances” 4.

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studied, but the roles played by these less institutionalized, cross-regional groups have not been subject to systematic study. This chapter suggests that they should be. Bibliography Alfaro-Pelico, Raul I. ‘Small Island Developing States and Climate Change: Effects, Responses, and Positions beyond Durban’ Real Instituto Elcano Working Papers, No. 1, 2012. AOSIS. Declaration on Climate Change, 2009. Available online at: https://sustainable development.un.org/content/documents/1566AOSISSummitDeclarationSept21 FINAL.pdf. Ashe, John W., Robert van Lierop, and Anilla Cherian. “The Role of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in the Negotiation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.” Natural Resources Forum 23 (1999): 209–220. Australia. Submission to the 2014 UN Small Island Developing States (SIDS) Conference, February 2014. Available online at: https://sustainabledevelopment. un.org/topics/sids/documents. Betzold, Carol. “‘Borrowing’ Power to Influence International Negotiations: AOSIS in the Climate Change Regime 1990–1997.” Politics 30 No. 3, (2010): 131–148. Betzold, Carola, Paula Castro, and Florian Weiler. “AOSIS in UNFCCC Negotiations: from Unity to Fragmentation?” CIS Working Paper No. 72, Zurich: Center for Comparative and International Studies (2011). (subsequently published in 2012 in Climate Policy 12, No. 5 (2011): 591–613. Brindis, Daniel. “What Next for the Alliance of Small Island States in the Climate Change Arena?” Sustainable Development Law and Policy 45 (2007): 45. Cambers, Gillian, Annette Mühlig-Hofmann, and Dirk G. Troost. “Interregional Initiatives for Sustainable Small-Island Development” Environment and Development in Coastal Regions and in Small Islands, Paris: UNESCO, 2010. Chasek, Pamela. “Margins of Power: Coalition Building and Coalition Maintenance of the South Pacific Island States and the Alliance of Small Island States” Review of European Community and International Environmental Law 14, No. 2 (2005):125–137. Choo, Kirsten. “Washed Away: As Sea Levels Rise, Island Nations Look to the Law to Fend off Extinction” ABA Journal online (2012). Available online at: www.aba journal.com/magazine/article/washed_away. Earth Negotiations Bulletin. Volume 8: Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States. Online reporting service available at: www.iisd.ca. Gómez-Echeverri, Luis. “Most developing countries are neither prepared to address nor interested in climate change.” in Climate Change and Development, edited by Luis

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Gómez-Echeverri, 309–318. New Haven: UNDP Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, 2000. Available online at http://environment.yale.edu/publication-series/786.html. Hirsch, Thomas. The Role of Alliances in Climate Policy After Paris, Berlin: Freidrich Ebert Stiftung, International Climate and Energy Policy, July 2016. Available online at: https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/iez/12689.pdf. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees Celsius. 2018. https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/. Jamaica. Statement by Lt. Col. Oral Khan at the First Preparatory Committee for the Third International Conference on Small Island Developing States, 24th February 2014. Available online at: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/topics/ sids/documents. Jaschik, Kevin. “Small States and International Politics: Climate Change, the Maldives, and Tuvalu.” International Politics 51, No. 2 (2014): 272–293. Nauru. Statement delivered by H.E. Ambassador Marlene Moses, Permanent Representative of the Republic of Nauru and Chair of the Alliance of Small Island States at the Opening of the Preparatory Committee for the Third International Conference on Small Island Developing States, 24–26 February 2014. Available online at: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/topics/sids/documents. Ourbak, Timothée and Alexandre K. Magnan. “The Paris Agreement and Climate Change Negotiations: Small Islands, Big Players.” Regional Environmental Change 18, No. 8 (2018): 2201–2207. Prantl, Jochen. The UN Security Council and Informal Groups of States: Complementing or Competing for Governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006. Prantl, Jochen. “Informal Groups of States and the UN Security Council.” International Organization 59, No. 3 (2005): 559–592. Rosenthal, Max. “Small Island Nations, Threatened by Rising Seas, Want Stronger Action at the Climate-Change Summit in Poland.” The Washington Post, 13 December 2018. Schechter, Michael G. United Nations Global Conferences, New York: Routledge, 2005. Shibuya, Eric. “Roaring Mice Against the Tide: The South Pacific Islands and Agenda-Building on Global Warming.” Pacific Affairs 69, No. 4 (1996): 541–555. Slade, Tuiloma Neroni and Jacob Werksman. “An Examination of the Kyoto Protocol from the Small Island Perspective.” in Climate Change and Development, edited by Luis Gómez-Echeverri, 63–83. New Haven: UNDP Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, 2000. Available online at http://environment.yale.edu/publication-series/786.html. Spangler, Jonathan. “Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).” in The Encyclopedia of Environment and Society, edited by Paul Robbins, pp. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2007.

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United Nations. Report of the Preparatory Committee for the third International Conference on Small Island Developing States. A/CONF.223/PC/8 Apia Samoa: 1–4 September 2014. Available online at: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/ topics/sids/documents. United Nations. Understanding and Addressing Climate-Related Security Risks. Security Council 8307th Meeting, 11 July 2018. S/PV.8307. United States. Input from the Delegation of the United States of America to the Drafting Process for the Outcome Document for the Third International Conference on Small Island Developing States, 20 February 2–14. Available online at: https:// sustainabledevelopment.un.org/topics/sids/documents. Vidal, John, Suzanne Goldenberg and Lenore Taylor. “How the historic Paris deal over climate change was finally agreed.” The Guardian, 13 December 2015. Available online at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/13/climate-change-deal -agreed-paris. Weiss, Thomas G. “Moving Beyond North-South Theatre.” Third World Quarterly 30, No. 2 (2009): 271–284. Whalén, Catherine Benson. “AOSIS Chair Urges Increased Focus on Loss and Damage at COP-24.” SDG Knowledge Hub: a Project by International Institute for Sustainable Development, 2018. Available online at: http://sdg.iisd.org/news/ aosis-chair-urges-increased-focus-on-loss-and-damage-at-cop-24/. Whitfield, Teresa. Friends Indeed? The United Nations, Groups of Friends, and the Resolution of Conflict. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2007. Whitfield, Teresa. Working With Groups of Friends. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2010.

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Part 3 Group Politics in UN Multilateral Diplomacy

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Chapter 9

Gender Equality and Sexual Orientation Discrimination Karen E. Smith 1 Introduction Human rights issues have been contested at the United Nations (UN) since its creation, with the dynamics of contestation surviving the end of the East–West divisions of the Cold War.* Both of the intergovernmental bodies at the UN that discuss human rights issues — the General Assembly’s Third Committee and the Human Rights Council (HRC) — have been described as ‘politicized’, meaning that states use them ‘to achieve political objectives’ that are not relat­ ed to human rights.1 Regional and political groups have been blamed for foster­ ing this politicization.2 However, ‘politicization’ is not helpful in illuminating all of the dynamics of contestation on human rights issues at the UN: ‘polar­ ization’ or ‘division’ are more accurate terms, as states do not just posture for domestic or foreign audiences, or attempt to deflect criticism of their human rights records; they do argue over principles and norms, but because these are seen as irreconcilable, and because groups help to solidify positions, polariza­ tion occurs. Using Rapoport’s terminology (see the Introduction to this special

*  Material published as part of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy’s Special Issue: ‘The Multi­ lateral Politics of UN Diplomacy’, Volume 12, Number 2, 2017, edited by Katie Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith. See http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/1871 191x/12/2-3. 1  Rosa Freedman, Failing to Protect: The UN and the Politicization of Human Rights (London: Hurst, 2014), p. 20. In 2006, the Human Rights Council (HRC) replaced the old Commission on Human Rights; its remit is to promote and protect human rights worldwide. The HRC is made up of 47 states elected from the five regional groups, and meets in Geneva three times a year, although one-third of the HRC membership can also call for a special session to be held to discuss urgent situations. The Third Committee consists of all of the UN member states, and meets every autumn in New York. It debates human rights resolutions before they are presented to the UN General Assembly. Far fewer resolutions are debated in the General Assembly than in the HRC. 2  Freedman, Failing to Protect, pp. 22–23.

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issue of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy), debates at the UN are both ‘debates’ and ‘games’.3 Diplomats who are familiar with both institutions see the HRC as more di­ vided than the UN General Assembly Third Committee. Since its launch in 2006, the HRC has been polarized on several issues: Israeli violations of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories; ‘country-specific’ resolutions (resolutions that address the human rights situation in specific countries); freedom of speech; gender equality and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) rights; and issues relating to civil society and human rights’ defenders. On all of these issues, regional and political groups have been active. In the first few years of the Human Rights Council, the European Union (EU) was often pitted against the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and/ or the African Group over Israeli human rights violations (EU v. OIC), free­ dom of speech (EU v. OIC) and country-specific resolutions (EU v. OIC and African Group).4 The OIC’s resolutions were usually approved. The polariza­ tion was decried by numerous commentators, including in 2008, when UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon told HRC members that they must ‘rise above partisan posturing and regional divides’.5 The perceived negative effects of group politics at the HRC have prompted some diplomats to try to change the way they work through and with groups. 3  See Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith, ‘The Multilateral Politics of UN Diplomacy: Introduction’, The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, vol. 12, no. 2 (2017), pp. x–xx, this issue; Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games and Debates (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1960), pp. 273–288. 4  See Richard Gowan and Franziska Brantner, ‘A Global Force for Human Rights? An Audit of European Power at the UN’, Policy Paper (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2008); Richard Gowan and Franziska Brantner, ‘The EU and Human Rights at the UN: 2010 Review’, Policy Brief (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2010); Richard Gowan and Franziska Brantner, ‘The EU and Human Rights at the UN: 2011 Review’, Policy Memo (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2011); Karen E. Smith, ‘The European Union at the Human Rights Council: Speaking with One Voice but Having Little Influence’, Journal of European Public Policy, vol. 17, no. 2 (2010); and Karen E. Smith, ‘The European Union and the Politics of Legitimization at the United Nations’, European Foreign Affairs Review, vol. 18, no. 1 (2013). On the OIC’s attempts to promote norms at the HRC, see Gregorio Bettiza and Filippo Dionigi, ‘How do Religious Norms Diffuse? Institutional Translation and International Change in a Post-Secular World Society’, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 21, no. 3 (2015). 5  United Nations Secretary-General, ‘Secretary-General, in Geneva, Says Work to Achieve Human Rights Declaration’s Principles Must Continue Until They Are “Foundation of Life” for All People’, Press Release SG/SM/11999-HRC/10 (12 December 2008). See also Peggy Hicks, ‘Statement by Human Rights Watch Global Advocacy Director Peggy Hicks to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 26 July 2007’; and International Federation of Human Rights, ‘Human Rights Council Unable to Act Strongly’, press release, 26 September 2008.

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Since 2009, there have been attempts to try to ‘break the blocs’ and engage in more cross-regional coalition-building. The space for flexibility in a diplo­ matic system that has hitherto been dominated by groups has been expanding. Interviewees in Geneva aver that when the United States joined the HRC in 2009,6 the dynamics of group politics began to shift. The United States tried to break the dynamic of the ‘EU versus the rest’ on a proposed resolution on the freedom of opinion, in which it invited one country from each region to join a ‘core group’ so that the initiative was not seen as a ‘Western’ one, and the regional and political blocs were split. Since then, attempts to build crossregional core groups have spread. Many such attempts are led by the ‘moder­ ates’ or ‘bridge-builders’ in the groups, and the informal groups have emerged in an attempt to transcend stale inter-group dynamics. One cross-regional group, the ‘Like-Minded Group’ (LMG), is, however, formed of states that are extremely protective of national sovereignty. The LMG is an opaque grouping with a shifting wider membership but a core that has usually included Russia, China, Egypt, Pakistan, Belarus, Cuba and Sri Lanka. Most of those states come from inactive regional groups: the Asia Group and the Eastern European Group (Russia, Belarus), which are too heterogeneous to do more than elect members to UN bodies. Most are also in the Non-Aligned Movement, which has been somewhat active at the HRC but is always divided on votes and rarely speaks with one voice. The LMG thus serves as a counter-weight to moderate crossregional groups. The dynamics at the General Assembly in New York have not (yet) shifted in the same direction. Diplomats there maintain that the UN General Assembly (UNGA) is becoming increasingly divided, with the EU and the African Group often opposing each other. In New York, there is more confrontation between formal groups. This article seeks to explore and explain the changing role of groups at the HRC and UNGA Third Committee by looking at recent debates on an inter­ related trio of issues: ‘traditional values’ and human rights; the protection of the family; and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. These have been some of the most contentious human rights issues debated at the UN in the last six years. Votes are called for on the resolutions, which is a clear indication of their divisiveness (most resolutions at the HRC and UNGA are passed by consensus, and consensus is often the stated aim of the resolutions’ sponsors). Furthermore, amendments have been proposed on 6  Until 2009, the United States refused to participate in the HRC, as it argued that the HRC still retained the weaknesses inherent in the former Commission on Human Rights, essentially that human rights-violating countries could still be elected to it.

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several of the resolutions to try to alter the language quite fundamentally — another sign of contestation — and the amendments have all been voted on as well. The three issues are interlinked, and they intersect with discourses on gender equality: ‘traditional values’ have been explicitly linked to an em­ phasis on the family (understood as a heterosexual couple with children) as the key unit of society, an emphasis that critics argue can mask violations of the rights of individuals (women, but also children, lesbians and gays) within families. The issues illustrate profound disagreements over cultural relativism versus universalism, the imposition of ‘Western’ values on other states, and the role that international human rights institutions should play in sovereign states. One commentator has viewed the resolutions on ‘traditional values’ as indicative of the ‘legitimate concerns that significant sections of the global South have about the human rights project’.7 Debates on the trio of issues are also ongoing outside the HRC and UNGA, in other UN contexts such as the Commission on the Status of Women and the Commission on Population and Development, within states, and in civil society internationally.8 Yet the HRC and UNGA Third Committee are the premier human rights bodies in the UN framework, so they are the focus here. The article considers the extent to which states use formal regional and political groups, or more informal cross-regional groups, in their attempts to affect these debates, and then explains how and why those groups have in­ fluenced debates and outcomes. Indications of group activity include: spon­ soring and co-sponsoring resolutions; sponsoring amendments to resolutions; presenting statements; participating in debates by presenting explanations of votes or positions on resolutions; and coordinating voting positions. The empirical data in this article derives from official documents (principally the reports of the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly), webcasts of debates and interviews with almost twenty diplomats and activists in Geneva, New York and London in 2014.9 Further background knowledge derives from 7  Christopher J. McCrudden, ‘Human Rights, Southern Voices and “Traditional Values” at the United Nations’, Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series, Paper no. 419 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, May 2014), p. 2. 8  Two examples of civil society activism, from both sides of the debate: groups such as the UN Family Rights Caucus or Family Watch International link activists in developing and de­ veloped countries and lobby in several UN forums and individual countries; and a group of human rights lawyers developed the 2006 Yogyakarta Principles on human rights and sexual orientation and gender identity, which civil society groups use to try to influence interna­ tional debates in this area at the UN and in individual countries. 9  Interviewees were asked a core set of questions about the operation and role of regional and political groups in general, and about the groups in which their states were involved. Diplomats from states in all the major groups were interviewed. All requested anonymity.

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interviews conducted with diplomats involved in EU–UN relations in 2008 and 2010, in Brussels, London and Geneva. The next two sections describe the debates at the UN on each of the three issues, first in Geneva at the HRC and then in New York at the UNGA, with particular attention paid to the role that groups played in those debates, and the arguments that they used. The role of groups in both locations is then ana­ lysed, and the final section puts forward the conclusions. 2

The Trio of Issues in Geneva

Since 2009, there have been seven resolutions presented to the HRC on the three issues (see Table 9.1). Interestingly, no regional or political group spon­ sored any of the resolutions. As will be seen below, informal groups were be­ hind the presentation of resolutions on ‘traditional values’ and ‘protection of the family’. The lack of formal group involvement in sponsorship reflects the changing dynamics of group politics in Geneva. Between 2006 and 2014, re­ gional and political groups sponsored 31 per cent of all resolutions presented; many of which were the most controversial debated at the HRC, including defamation of religions, Israeli violations of human rights and some countryspecific resolutions.10 However, diplomats in Geneva report that controversial topics are now seen to need wider cross-regional support. The trio of issues is still of interest to the groups involved in the debates, al­ though resistance to the spread of ‘Western norms’ is intrinsically part of that interest for the African Group, OIC and Arab Group. As a result, arguably both a ‘game’ and a ‘debate’ are visible with respect to these issues: the contest — such as resistance to the imposition of Western human rights norms, or attempts to push forward on issues such as human rights and sexual orientation — is im­ portant, but there are also clear attempts to persuade states, as can be seen in the language used by diplomats in the HRC.

10  Groups sponsored 222 of 713 resolutions. ‘Resolutions’ here includes substantive ‘deci­ sions’, thus excluding decisions relating to Universal Periodic Review (UPR) outcomes or administrative matters. Some resolutions were sponsored by more than one group (the OIC and Arab Group frequently acted together). Sources: UN Human Rights Council, Report of the Human Rights Council on its () Session; reports available online at http:// www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/Pages/HRCIndex.aspx.

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Table 9.1 The contested resolutions at the HRCa

Resolution

Date approved

Introduced by

Vote (yesno-abstain)

October 2009

Russia

26-15-6

March 2011

Russia

24-14-7

September 2012

Russia

25-15-7

Protection of the family 26/11: ‘Protection of the family’

June 2014

26-14-6

29/22: ‘Protection of the family’

July 2015

Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Sierra Leone Saudi Arabia, Egypt

South Africa, Brazil Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Uruguay

23-19-3

‘Traditional values and human rights’ 12/21: ‘Promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms through a better understanding of traditional values of humankind’ 16/3 ‘Promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms through a better understanding of traditional values of humankind’ 21/3 ‘Promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms through a better understanding of traditional values of humankind’

Sexual orientation and gender identity 17/19 ‘Human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity’ 27/32 ‘Human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity’

June 2011 September 2014

29-14-4

25-14-7

a Sources: United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of the Human Rights Council on its 12th Session, A/HRC/12/50 (25 February 2010); United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of the Human Rights Council on its 16th Session, A/HRC/16/2 (14 November 2011); United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of the Human Rights Council on its 17th Session, A/HRC/17/2 (24 May 2012); United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of the Human Rights Council on its 21st Session, A/HRC/ 21/2 (26 August 2013); United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of the Human Rights Council on its 26th Session, A/HRC/26/2 (11 December 2014); United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of the Human Rights Council on its 27th Session, A/HRC/27/2 (26 December 2014); and United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of the Human Rights Council on its 29th Session, A/HRC/29/2 (25 November 2015).

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2.1 Resolutions on Traditional Values The three resolutions on ‘traditional values’ and human rights call for a bet­ ter understanding of how ‘traditional values of humankind’ can contribute to the promotion and protection of human rights. Resolution 12/21 requested that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights convene a workshop to exchange views on this topic. Resolution 16/3 then requested that the Human Rights Council’s Advisory Committee prepare a study on the topic and present it to the 21st session of the HRC. Resolution 21/3 gave the Advisory Committee more time to finalize the study and requested that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights collect information from states on ‘best prac­ tices in the application of traditional values while promoting human rights and upholding human dignity’, and present a summary at the 24th session of the HRC. All three resolutions on traditional values were approved by the HRC, with the support of many African, Middle Eastern and Asian countries. Initially, groups were not much involved in the debates. The first resolution on tradi­ tional values (12/21), which was presented in October 2009 by Russia, had 29 cosponsors, all individual countries and no formal groups. Many of the sponsors were members of the LMG, which, according to my interviewees in Geneva, tends not to intervene directly in debates but works behind the scenes. The role of formal groups in the debate was relatively limited, with only the EU and Canada, Australia and New Zealand (hereafter CANZ) making state­ ments. The EU expressed concerns that the notion of ‘traditional values’ was undefined and imprecise, and that it was not clear how such values conformed to international human rights law. The EU noted that traditional practices such as female genital mutilation were contrary to human rights law, and that therefore it opposed the resolution because it could be used to weaken human rights norms. CANZ took a similar view.11 The second resolution on traditional values (16/3), which was presented in March 2011, attracted more co-sponsors, including the OIC, allowing Russia to claim that 72 states co-sponsored it. States also used groups more in the de­ bates, with Pakistan for the OIC and Nigeria for the African Group expressing support for the resolution. The OIC statement was relatively understated, not­ ing that the particularities of cultures, nations, and so on must be kept in mind. Nigeria’s statement, which was made on behalf of the African Group, was less so, indicating that to Africa, ‘God, family, community matters; the traditional way of life matters’, and that the culture of others should not be imposed on 11  Human Rights Council, archived webcast of morning session (2 October 2009), available online at http://www.un.org/webcast/unhrc/archive.asp?go=091002.

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Africa.12 The EU reiterated the objections that it had raised a year and half earlier: there was no consensus on what constituted traditional values, the resolution left too much room for interpretation and cultural relativism, and it did not condemn human rights violations that were justified by reference to traditional values. Instead, the resolution only indicated that ‘the better understanding and appreciation of these values contribute to promoting and protecting human rights and fundamental freedoms’. Chile spoke on behalf of four South American countries, expressing similar concerns. The third resolution on traditional values (21/3), which was presented in September 2012, attracted co-sponsorship by the OIC and the Arab Group. The only group that participated in the debate was the EU. This debate, however, was considerably more contentious, as the Advisory Committee had been di­ vided over the issue of traditional values, and its initial study indicated con­ siderable concerns that traditional values could be used to legitimize human rights violations. Russia neglected to mention the concerns, and pushed ahead with the resolution even though the study had not been completed. This was criticized by several diplomats during the debate.13 2.2 Resolutions on Protection of the Family Resolution 26/11 asked the HRC to convene a panel session14 on the protection of the family at its 27th session in September 2014, and requested the High Commissioner for Human Rights to present a report summarizing the panel session at the 28th session of the HRC in March 2015. Resolution 29/22 stated that the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society, noted a variety of positive outcomes to which families contribute, and requested that the High Commissioner prepare a report on the implementation by states of their obligations with regard to the protection of the family, and on the role of families in poverty eradication and sustainable development. The first resolution on the protection of the family (26/11), which was pre­ sented in June 2014, was sponsored primarily, although not officially, by the African Group (all African countries sponsored it), with the support of the OIC and countries in the core of the LMG (including Russia, China and Sri 12  Human Rights Council, archived webcast of morning session (24 March 2011), available online at http://www.un.org/webcast/unhrc/archive.asp?go=110324. 13  Human Rights Council, webcast of session (26 September 2012), available online at http:// webtv.un.org/meetings-events/human-rights-council/regular-sessions/21st-session/ watch/l.2-vote-item3-36th-meeting-21st-regular-session-of-human-rights-council/ 1863440075001. 14  Panel sessions are sessions in which a panel of experts presents views and research on particular topics, and answers questions from HRC delegates.

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Lanka). The sponsors then became known as the ‘group for the protection of the family’. Diplomats in Geneva stated that the resolution represented a re­ sponse to the debates on human rights and sexual orientation in Geneva and New York (see below), and an indication of the African Group’s ‘push-back’ against what it perceives as attempts to foist foreign values upon it. An amend­ ment to the resolution was sponsored by Chile, France, Ireland and Uruguay, and was co-sponsored by a group of states including 26 of the 28 EU member states, which would have added the wording ‘bearing in mind that, in differ­ ent cultural, political and social systems, various forms of the family exist’, but the amendment was effectively rejected when Russia moved to adjourn con­ sideration of it, and its ‘no-action’ motion was carried by a close vote of 22 in favour and 20 against, with four abstentions. The only group to participate in the debate was the EU, which opposed the resolution because it did not men­ tion that different forms of the family exist, or acknowledge that the human rights of individuals within the family must be protected, as abuses can also occur within the family. At the panel discussion in September 2014, numerous groups participated: the African Group; the Community of Latin American States (CELAC); Austria, Croatia and Slovenia; the EU; Uruguay for a cross-regional group; the United States for a cross-regional group; the OIC; Australia for a cross-regional group; the LMG; and Egypt for the sponsors of Resolution 26/11 (the group for the pro­ tection of the family). They were essentially divided along the lines indicated already in the debate on Resolution 26/11. The African Group, the OIC, the LMG and the group for the protection of the family all indicated that states must support the family as the fundamental unit of society, that families have a role to play in eradicating poverty and enabling development, and that the family is a custodian of morals and traditional values.15 All of the other groups argued that a wide variety of family types exists and that the human rights of family members had to be protected (from human rights violations such as violence, rape or forced marriage), although CELAC focused mostly on the need to pre­ vent violence against children.16 15  See ‘Statement delivered by Ethiopia on behalf of the African Group on Panel on the Protection of the Family’; ‘Statement by Pakistan on behalf of OIC on Panel Discussion on the Protection of the Family and its Members’; ‘LMG Statement Panel Discussion on Protection of the Family and its Members’; and ‘Statement by Egypt on behalf of the Main Sponsors of the Resolution 26/10’ (all 15 September 2014), available online at the HRC extranet. 16  See ‘Panel on the Protection of the Family and its Member, EU Intervention’ and ‘Panel: Proteccion de la Familia. Intervencion de la CELAC’ (both 15 September 2014), available online at the HRC extranet.

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The second resolution on the protection of the family (29/22), was present­ ed in July 2015 by Saudi Arabia and Egypt ‘on behalf of a cross-regional core group’,17 and was co-sponsored by the Arab Group, the OIC (except Albania) and the African Group (except for South Africa). Several amendments were proposed; one, by Brazil, South Africa and Uruguay, would have added word­ ing that recognized that ‘in different cultural, political and social systems, vari­ ous forms of the family exist’. Russia again called for a no-action motion on this amendment, which was carried (narrowly) by the HRC (by 22-21-3). Other amendments submitted by Albania, Ireland and Norway, and by Albania, Denmark and Norway, would have specified that the family ‘and its members’ deserved protection, and strengthened language about the protection of indi­ vidual family members. These amendments were defeated. The debate saw relatively little participation by states in the name of for­ mal groups; only Latvia spoke on behalf of the EU. There was cross-regional activity, and not just the ‘group of the friends of the family’. Estonia spoke on behalf of a large, cross-regional (although predominantly European) group of 45 states; Norway and the United States also spoke on behalf of a (much smaller) group of states. Many diplomats — speaking either for or against the resolution — mentioned repeatedly other human rights commitments to support their positions. Egypt’s introduction of the resolution began with this: ‘in accordance with international human rights law, the UDHR [Universal Declaration of Human Rights], the two international covenants, the CRC [UN Convention on the Rights of the Child] and other international instruments, the family is the natural and fundamental unit of society and as such is en­ titled to protection by the State and society’.18 Estonia, Ireland, Latvia (for EU), Norway and Uruguay — among others — referred to international human rights law, and particularly the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the rights of women and gender equality, to object to the resolution. Several dip­ lomats on both sides decried the ‘politicization’ of the debate, and lamented the use of ‘divisive’ or ‘controversial’ language that prevented consensus on the protection of the family.19

17  Permanent Mission of the Arab Republic of Egypt, ‘Introduction of Draft Resolution L.25 on “Protection of the Family” ’ (2 July 2015), available online at the HRC extranet. 18  Permanent Mission of the Arab Republic of Egypt, ‘Introduction of Draft Resolution L.25 on “Protection of the Family” ’ (2 July 2015), available online at the HRC extranet. 19  Archived webcast of 45th Meeting of the 29th Regular Session of the Human Rights Council (3 July 2015), available online at http://webtv.un.org/search/ahrc29l.25-vote-item3-45thmeeting-29th-regular-session-human-rights-council/4336313483001?term=Human Rights Council&languages=&sort=date.

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2.3 Resolutions on Sexual Orientation Surprisingly, the two resolutions on sexual orientation were approved by the HRC, despite strong opposition from the African Group and the OIC to them, and the HRC’s approval of the resolutions discussed above. Resolution 17/19 (of June 2011) requested that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) prepare a study ‘documenting discriminatory laws and prac­ tices and acts of violence against individuals based on their sexual orientation and gender identity […] and how international human rights law can be used to end violence and related human rights violations based on sexual orienta­ tion and gender identity’. A panel discussion at the 19th session of the HRC in March 2012 was then to have a dialogue about the issue of discriminatory laws and violence against individuals, as informed by the study. Resolution 27/32 (of September 2014) took note of the report and the panel discussion, and re­ quested that the High Commissioner update the report with a view to sharing ways to combat discrimination and violence, and to share the report at the 29th session in June 2015. Why did these resolutions pass? The dynamics of group politics were dif­ ferent. All of the Latin American countries in the HRC voted for the resolu­ tions, including countries that had been in the core of the LMG, so the LMG in effect ‘split’. The first resolution on sexual orientation (17/19) of June 2011 was sponsored and co-sponsored by two individual states: Brazil and South Africa. South Africa was heavily criticized by the African Group for doing so.20 In the debate, the EU, African Group and OIC intervened. The EU supported the resolution as an important step in addressing issues of discrimination and violence against people because of sexual orientation and gender identity, and argued that it did not create new rights, but merely sought to apply existing human rights standards. The OIC and African Group opposed the resolution on the grounds that the issues (‘so-called’ sexual orientation and gender iden­ tity) were only related to ‘personal behaviours and preferences’, and had noth­ ing to do with human rights. Furthermore, there was no legal foundation for the ‘notions’ and these had never been agreed by the UN general membership, and the resolution ignored the diverse cultural backgrounds of UN member

20  Eduard Jordaan points out that in the March 2011 HRC session, South Africa had put forward a much more limited resolution on sexual orientation — which would set up a working group to define ‘sexual orientation’ — but it withdrew the draft under pres­ sure from the United States. Domestic and international civil society pushed South Africa into sponsoring a more progressive resolution, but this then came under fire from other African states opposing such a resolution. See Eduard Jordaan, ‘South Africa and the United Nations Human Rights Council’, Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 1 (2014), p. 117.

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states.21 Again, states were trying to appeal to wider norms and practices (norms against violence, existing standards, or lack of previous ‘legal’ agree­ ments) to garner support. The panel discussion held in March 2012 also generated much controversy, and according to the report of the panel session, several states opposed any discussion and left the chamber.22 Every member of the OIC group left,23 al­ though Pakistan did deliver a statement on behalf of the OIC. A number of regional and political groups participated in the debate: Mercosur;24 the OIC; the EU; the Arab Group; and the African Group. Discussions in the room cen­ tred on similar views as those expressed in the debate on the resolution, with many supporting the discussion, while others (the OIC) argued that sexual ori­ entation and gender identity were new concepts outside human rights law, and that no state could be compelled to recognize these as prohibited grounds for discrimination. The gap between supporters and proponents of the resolu­ tions is wide, as can be illustrated in the OIC’s statement: Our opposition to the notion of sexual orientation also stems from the fact that it may encompass the social normalization, and possibly the le­ gitimization, of many deplorable acts, including pedophilia and incest. A number of studies have confirmed that homosexuality has a negative health impact. At the same time, such behaviour contributes to the weak­ ening of the institution of the family and can lead to a generation gap.25 Homosexuality conflicted with religious, cultural and traditional values of many communities, and therefore any attempt to ‘force’ through change would challenge cultural pluralism.26 The EU stressed that the issue was not about creating new rights, but about ensuring that ‘all human rights can be enjoyed by all human beings’.27 21  Archived webcast of the morning session on 17 June 2011, available online at http://www. un.org/webcast/unhrc/archive.asp?go=110617. 22  Human Rights Council Panel on ending Violence and Discrimination against Individuals based on their Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, Geneva, 7 March 2012, ‘Summary of Discussion’. See also the archived webcast available online at http://www.unmultime­ dia.org/tv/webcast/2012/03/panel-discussion-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity. html. 23  Freedman, Failing to Protect, p. 49. 24  Mercosur, from the Spanish Mercado Común del Sur, is a sub-regional trade bloc in South America. 25  ‘Statement by Pakistan on behalf of the OIC States’ (7 March 2012). 26  ‘Statement by Pakistan on behalf of the OIC states’ (7 March 2012). 27  ‘Statement by the EU’ (7 March 2012); emphasis in the original.

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The second resolution (27/32), in September 2014, was sponsored by four South American states (Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Uruguay) and cosponsored by a group of states including all 28 EU member states (but not in the EU’s name, in a deliberate attempt to soften ‘group politics’). It again gen­ erated considerable heat.28 Egypt — on behalf of nine or ten states in Africa and the Middle East — submitted seven amendments, all of which would have removed the terms ‘sexual orientation and gender identity’ from the resolu­ tion, replacing them with ‘individuals because of their race, colour, sex, lan­ guage, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status’. The amendments would thus have completely nulli­ fied the intention of the sponsors to overcome violence and discrimination of individuals because of their sexual orientation and gender identity. In the heated debate on the resolution and the amendments, the EU, OIC and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) intervened, expressing views already outlined above. The amendments were defeated in a series of votes, and the resolution was then approved. 3

The Trio of Issues in New York

The successes of the resolutions on sexual orientation at the HRC in Geneva have been partly responsible for what has been described by diplomats as a ‘backlash’ (or ‘counter-momentum’) in New York, led by the African Group, on, among others things, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) and family issues. While many resolutions are ‘run’ in both the HRC and General Assembly, none of the resolutions on the trio of issues have been. This may change, with the establishment of a ‘Group of the Friends of the Family’ in New York. The informal group for the protection of the family formed at the HRC became the ‘Group of Friends of the Family’ in February 2015. It was officially launched by Belarus, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Holy See, Libya, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and Tajikistan — countries that are ‘stout supporters of the traditional family and family values’.29

28  See the webcast of the session on 26 September 2014, available online at http:// webtv.un.org/meetings-events/human-rights-council/regular-sessions/27th-session/ watch/ahrc27l.27rev.1-vote-item8-42nd-meeting-27th-regular-session-human-rights -council/3808532203001. 29  Belarusian News, ‘Belarus, Egypt, Qatar initiating Group of Friends of Family in UN HQ’ (4 February 2015), available at http://eng.belta.by/all_news/politics/Belarus-Egypt-Qatar -initiating-group-of-friends-of-family-in-UN-HQ_i_79260.html.

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The activity in New York on the trio of issues has, however, been much more limited. In 2008, France led a small cross-regional group of eight states in pro­ moting a statement on human rights and sexual orientation, which was signed by 66 states and read out in the UNGA by Argentina in December 2008. It is of note that this was not an initiative of formal groups, although all EU member states signed the statement, as did many from the Group of Latin American and Caribbean Countries (GRULAC). The statement affirmed ‘the principle of non-discrimination, which requires that human rights apply equally to every human being regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity’, expressed concern about ‘violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms based on sexual orientation or gender identity’, and noted that ‘violence, harassment, discrimination, exclusion, stigmatization and prejudice are directed against persons in all countries in the world because of sexual orientation or gender identity’.30 A large group was involved, however, in the response to the statement: the OIC initiated its own statement strongly objecting to the original statement. This was signed by almost 60 states and ‘rejected the idea that sexual orien­ tation was a matter of genetic coding’ and ‘said the effort threatened to un­ dermine the international framework of human rights by trying to normalize pedophilia, among other acts’.31 The opposition reportedly shocked proponents of the French-initiated statement,32 and appears to have ended any attempt to introduce a resolution on human rights and sexual orientation in New York. In interviews in the summer of 2014, diplomats from several EU member states in New York reported that the African Group was large and therefore successful, and as a result there could be no movement on LGBT rights. The EU hesitated to push the issue, because it would be perceived as trying to impose its values on others. The other way in which the issue of human rights and sexual orientation has been addressed in New York is through a resolution on extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary executions, traditionally introduced every other year

30   Human Rights Watch, ‘UN: General Assembly Statement Affirms Rights for All. 66 States Condemn Violations Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity’ (19 December 2008), available online at http://www.hrw.org/news/2008/12/18/ungeneral-assembly-statement-affirms-rights-all. 31  Neil MacFarquhar, ‘In a First, Gay Rights Are Pressed at the UN’, The New York Times (18 December 2008). 32  Robert Kissack, Pursuing Effective Multilateralism: The European Union, International Organizations and the Politics of Decision Making (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 44.

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by Sweden or Finland.33 Since 2000, the proposed resolution has contained a provision whereby states are to investigate killings that target people based on their sexual orientation (and, since 2012, gender identity as well). Each time that it has been introduced in the Third Committee there has been an attempt either to have a vote on the paragraph containing the language about sexual orientation, or to pass an amendment to the resolution that would remove the language. These attempts have usually been initiated by the OIC. The para­ graph is usually approved or the amendment is usually rejected, but in 2010 the amendment passed in the Third Committee (by 79-70-17). (In 2010, the amend­ ment was sponsored by the OIC and the African Group.) However, when the resolution was introduced in the plenary of the General Assembly one month later, the language on sexual orientation was reinstated (93-55-27). The usual groups (the African Group, the OIC, the Arab Group and the EU) also partici­ pated in this debate and spoke in favour of or against the amendment to re­ store the language.34 The entire trio of issues has thus not been debated in the General Assembly in New York. To the extent that there has been some debate about LGBT rights, groups have played a major role, particularly in opposing attempts to intro­ duce language on human rights and sexual orientation. The OIC and African Group have tried to play the numbers game. Although they may not have suc­ ceeded in influencing the language used in the resolutions on summary ex­ ecutions, it is nonetheless notable that there have been no attempts (yet) to introduce a resolution on sexual orientation and human rights, partly because of the p ­ erceived strength of the opposition. 4

The Role of Groups

Groups — whether formal or informal, regional and political — have clearly played significant roles in the debates on the trio of issues in Geneva, and on LGBT rights in New York, although they have not officially put forward the relevant resolutions. However, the differences between the two institutional settings are also notable: in Geneva, there has been a considerable amount of cross-regional group formation and use; while this is perhaps starting to

33  The equivalent resolution in the HRC involves the mandate of a special rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary executions, and does not contain the same language. 34   United Nations General Assembly, Official Records, 65th session, 71st meeting (21 December 2010), A/65/PV.71, pp. 11–18.

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happen in New York. Group politics, in other words, is not just a case of large formal groups facing each other. The most active formal groups in both locations are the EU, the African Group and groupings consisting mostly of Arab states, such as the OIC, the Arab Group, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The salience of the is­ sues for these groups has been high, although they have been flexible about how their views can be heard and objectives attained (through the use of in­ formal groups too). These groups are also well-established in both Geneva and New York, so are seen as relevant players. Less formal political groups have par­ ticipated in debates to a lesser extent, but two such groups have been involved ‘behind the scenes’: the LMG on ‘traditional values’; and the group for the pro­ tection of the family (many members of which are also said to be in the LMG). Notably, only two groups were never ‘split’ — that is, their members voted the same way on all the resolutions, thus demonstrating considerable unity: the EU and the Arab Group. As one interviewee from a country in the Arab Group explained, the Arab Group is united on family issues, while newer coun­ try situations — such as Syria — have split the group. These issues thus help to paper over divisions and present a united front in the HRC. EU unity stems from the general framework of EU law, which bans discrimination on sexual orientation, even though there are internal EU divisions over gay marriage and LGBT rights in general.35 Other groups were less united, although the African Group and the OIC had only a few dissenters. The Latin America Group was split on all of the issues except for the sexual-orientation resolutions.36 States have thus used informal and formal groups in the process of contesta­ tion on the trio of resolutions at the HRC, but what stands out is the extent of the use of cross-regional groupings, both more formal (such as the LMG and ‘friends of the family’) and informal (including states speaking on behalf of a number of states). This reflects the changing dynamics of multilateral diplo­ macy at the HRC. Why have states used groups on these issues? As expected, the ‘numbers game’ influences behaviour: to pass or block controversial resolutions, votes are needed; and by working in large groups, this becomes easier. Yet there is awareness that this is not enough: to gain legitimacy, states must convince others; and to do this, states must refer to norms, principles and arguments that could resonate widely. The debates on the trio of issues discussed in this 35  See ‘EU Statement to the Panel on Human Rights and Sexual Orientation’ (7 March 2012). 36  This reflects the general acceptance of LGBT rights in much of Latin America (although not the Caribbean), with gay marriage legalized in a few countries, including Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, and discrimination against LGBT persons outlawed in most (but by no means all) countries. If there had been Caribbean countries on the HRC, the Latin American group would not have been united on the resolutions. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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article all reveal attempts to link the particular subject at hand to even wider debates: on prohibitions against violence; on resistance to ‘Westernization’; and on protection of cultural diversity. Diplomats made reference to language used in other declarations or resolutions (or the absence of such on ‘traditional values’) to show that there was long-standing support for their preferences. In other words, there were clear attempts on both sides to present ideas that resonate. This led to success for the sponsors of all the resolutions on the trio of issues, but not to a consensus among UN member states. Politicization is thus not an adequate description of these discussions, which show that although the parties are polarized, they are still engaged in debate more so than a game. The resolutions on traditional values and the protection of the family il­ lustrate how groups help sponsors to win the ‘numbers game’ at the HRC: the big groups (such as the OIC and African Group) were clearly in the majori­ ty (with the core LMG as well). In these cases, the largest groups prevailed. Material resources — in the sense of the combined national wealth of group members — mattered less than sheer numbers. This was a typical ‘North– South’ or ‘West-versus-the-rest’ confrontation, and the rich Northern/Western states were in the minority: a ‘game’, to a large extent. However, the resolutions were also relatively low key, in that they appeared to be limited attempts to set the tone and parameters of a much wider debate on the family, women’s rights and LGBT rights, without directly bringing those issues into the debates. The resolutions — and the debates in favour of them in the HRC — focused on generic arguments that families and respect for other cultures are important. Those opposed to the resolutions did raise the wider and more contentious issues (for example, that family types are diverse and can include gay mar­ riages; that traditional values can harm LGBT persons, women and minorities; and so on). These arguments, however, did not convince many other moder­ ate HRC members to oppose the resolutions (instead they abstained). In other words, groups could win the ‘numbers game’, but the arguments that they used did not turn moderates into opponents. In July 2015, for example, countries that had supported the sexual-orientation resolutions (Argentina, Brazil and Mexico) did not vote against the resolution on the protection of the family; instead, they abstained. The unity of groups shifted for the resolutions on sexual orientation. Those resolutions, however, indicated that even when the OIC and African Group are (mostly) united (with the exceptions of South Sudan, Mauritius and Burkina Faso), they may still not prevail: in this case, the LMG was split because all of the Latin America Group members in the HRC were united in favour (includ­ ing countries such as Cuba, Ecuador and Venezuela), and they combined with Western states and several Asian states. The resolutions on sexual orientation also garnered a wide consensus, arguably because they focused on violence - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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perpetrated against people, not on newer and more contentious issues such as the right to marry. The debates focused on violence — and the long-established fundamental human right not to be subject to it — and this increased the le­ gitimacy of the stance in favour of the resolutions. 5 Conclusions Rather than engaging only in a ‘game’ (or ‘theatre’), this article has illustrat­ ed that proponents and opponents of the trio of issues are also engaged in a principled debate on the issues (even though the principles may be repugnant to either side). Groups (formal and informal) are used by countries on both sides to try to boost support for, and the legitimacy of, their positions. They are engaged in contestation over norms, and insofar as we understand politics to encompass attempts to convince others of the legitimacy of one’s own posi­ tion, this is ‘group politics’ and not ‘politicization’. Groups matter in debates on human rights, and specifically on the trio of issues considered here. They thus matter in the processes of norm creation, norm evolution and norm diffusion that happen constantly in the UN. The role of groups in these processes in other areas deserves further research. It is mostly three formal groups that are active on the trio of issues: the OIC; the African Group; and the EU. The largest groups — the OIC and African Group — have arguably had most impact on debates and outcomes, including the non-outcomes in New York. Some informal groups (such as the Friends of the Family) have had influence, and have the potential to continue to shape future debates on these norms. Yet it is not just a group-versus-group story; it is apparent that even though groups are very significant actors, there is still flexibility in that states can act in and out of groups. There have been numer­ ous attempts to ‘break the blocs’, especially in the HRC, with moderate states forming cross-regional groupings to try to show that there is a wide section of the HRC in support of their views. Furthermore, some groups have been divided over the issues, notably the LMG over human rights and sexual orien­ tation, which essentially enabled a coalition of groups and moderate states to win approval of the resolutions. Group politics is thus not entrenched in the sense that it is always the same groups pitted against each other; the issues at stake can prompt states to form more flexible groupings, and to try to prevail in the search for collective legitimization. Diplomats at the UN are thus working within a complex multilateral system in which groups — their roles and their changing composition, and so on — must be taken into account.

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Chapter 10

Group Dynamics and Interplay in UN Disarmament Forums Megan Dee 1 Introduction When states parties to a treaty like the NPT meet to deliberate its future — and when they are obliged to reach decisions about the future of that treaty under the pressure of time — the importance of group dynamics becomes all the more apparent and undeniable. Jayantha Dhanapala President of the 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference1

In 1946, the very first resolution passed by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) established a Commission to deal with problems related to the discovery of atomic energy and to make proposals for ‘the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction’.*, 2 Today, the possession and renunciation of nuclear weapons continues to present a central topic of consideration for the United Nations (UN), addressed through multiple forums, including the UNGA First Committee, the UN Disarmament Commission (UNDC), the Conference on Disarmament (CD), and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) with its quinquennial review conferences (RevCon).3 1  Jayantha Dhanapala and Randy Rydell, Multilateral Diplomacy and the NPT: An Insider’s Account (Geneva: UN Institute for Disarmament Research, 2005), p. 30. *  Material published as part of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy’s Special Issue: ‘The Multilateral Politics of UN Diplomacy’, Volume 12, Number 2, 2017, edited by Katie Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith. See http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/1871191x/12/2-3. 2  U N General Assembly, ‘Establishment of a Commission to Deal with the Problems Raised by the Discovery of Atomic Energy’, A/RES/1(I) (1946). 3  In October 2012, the UNGA also established an Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) on ‘Taking Forward Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament Negotiations’. This was a largely ad-hoc body that met between March and April 2013 and then reported to the UNGA and CD. A further OEWG was announced following the conclusion of the 70th session of the UNGA First Committee in October 2015; see UN Resolution ‘Taking Forward Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament Negotiations’, A/C.1/70/L.13/Rev.1 (29 October 2015). Space constraints sadly

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While providing multiple forums for its members to debate and negotiate a world free of nuclear weapons is a seemingly impressive institutional response, what these numerous forums also showcase is that the UN has, since 1946, had its hands tied in terms of achieving nuclear disarmament, requiring it to seek an agreement through various treaty-based and organizational structures, none of which have been effective in providing a multilateral solution. These forums are beset by numerous challenges, not least that UN disarmament politics have been characterized by a fundamental divide between the world’s nuclear ‘haves’ — namely the five UN-recognized nuclear weapon states (NWS) — and ‘have nots’, the non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS).4 Work has thus been marred by multilateral stalemate, increasing frustrations and heightened uncertainty.5 Within these forums, however, a new dynamic is starting to emerge. As Jayantha Dhanapala highlights in the introductory quote to this article, the importance of group dynamics within forums such as the NPT are both increasingly apparent and undeniable. Within UN disarmament negotiations, individual state preferences, while regularly vocalized through formal statements or the submission of working papers, have since the late 1990s and early 2000s been far more frequently represented by a handful of prominent political groups, most notably the Permanent Five (P-5), the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the New Agenda Coalition (NAC) and a number of other important, if perhaps less high-profile, political groupings, such as the European Union (EU)6 and the League of Arab States. Since 2010, the importance of group dynamics within UN disarmament forums has become even more apparent. This upturn in group dynamics has emerged as a direct result of the creation of several new political groupings, including the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative (NPDI), which is made up of twelve middle-ground and umbrella prevent discussion of these OEWG, as well as other ad-hoc debates such as UNGA Special Sessions devoted to disarmament. 4  Christian Mölling, ‘The Grand Bargain in the NPT: Challenges for the EU beyond 2010’, in Jean Pascal Zanders (eds), Nuclear Weapons after the 2010 NPT Review Conference, Chaillot Papers (Paris: EU Institute for Security Studies, 2010), pp. 49–70. 5  For example, see Reaching Critical Will, First Committee Briefing Book (New York: Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 2015), p. 4; UN News Centre, ‘Consensus Eludes Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference as Positions Harden on Ways to Free Middle East of Mass Destruction Weapons’ (22 May 2015); and UN News Centre, ‘General Assembly President Encourages Disarmament Meeting to Stay Focused’ (3 March 2014). 6  While the P-5 and NAM have been active in UN disarmament negotiations prior to the 1990s, the EU first began to present a common position, particularly within the NPT, following the signing of the Treaty on European Union in 1992. The NAC was formed in 2000.

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NNWS, promoting bridge-building language between diverging nuclear interests, and the Group of Sixteen (G-16), made up of sixteen NNWS promo­ ting the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons (HINW) or ‘Humanitarian Initiative’.7 As this article shall argue, these new group dynamics, and their interplay with other established political groups, are indicative of a growing effort by states to overcome the stalemate of UN disarmament politics by searching for a new consensus within the global nuclear non-proliferation regime. Through cooperative group interplay, these new groups have not only promoted better information exchange and the fostering of dialogue between more entrenched group positions, but have encouraged a proactive agenda through policy entrepreneurship; further challenging the rigidity and conservatism of established bloc formations. To present this case, and in keeping with the analytical framework detailed in the introduction to this special issue of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy on the multilateral politics of UN diplomacy, this article focuses on two critical research questions. First, how do states explicitly interact through groups within UN disarmament forums? And second, what difference do these group dynamics and interplay make to consensus-building in the case of UN disarmament politics? The article draws on the literature on multilateral diplomacy and negotiation theory, and presents empirical research covering the period from 2005 to 2015. It is presented in four main sections. Section one gives a brief introduction to the established groups within the UN’s numerous disarmament forums, the challenges that they face, and the contribution that multilateral diplomacy and negotiation theory can make to understanding the group politics at play in these forums. In section two, attention turns to the new group dynamics that have emerged in these forums since 2010, with particular focus given to why and how these groups were formed and the tactics they have employed in the search for consensus within the specific context of the NPT 2010–2015 review cycle. Section three considers the influence of these new group dynamics and what this may mean for UN disarmament politics in the future. The fourth section concludes. The empirical data presented in this article is drawn from documentary analysis of state and group statements and working papers, commentary by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and UN press releases, along with data from interviews held by the author during two rounds of fieldwork undertaken in Brussels, New York and Geneva between March and June 2011, and 7  B. Tertrais, ‘The “Humanitarian Dimension” of Nuclear Disarmament: A Legitimate Debate?’, Fondation pour la Recerche Strategique, note no. 12 (2015).

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between November 2014 and June 2015, with 35 semi-structured elite interviews being conducted in total. Face-to-face and telephone interviews were conducted with officials at the level of Ambassador, Deputy Ambassador, First Secretary or Counsellor, on a non-attributable basis, and with all interviewees having first-hand experience of working within one, several, or all of the UN’s disarmament forums, including those able to speak to closed-room negotiations, which are otherwise undocumented. Interviews were sought from a representative sample of the complete regional and political spread of views held within UN disarmament negotiations, and, most pertinently, those states involved in one or more political group, including members of the newly formed NPDI and G16. As agreed, all interviewees have their anonymity preserved. 2 The UN’s Disarmament Politics: Processes and Challenges In previous decades, states have worked predominantly through a number of formalized regional and political groups within UN disarmament negotiations. As defined in the introduction to this special issue,8 regional groups are those five ‘official’ UN blocs such as the Western European and Others Group (WEOG), from which states are appointed to preside over positions within the numerous disarmament forums. In addition to the loose coordination and membership of states within these official regional blocs, states have also long been active within other typically smaller, yet often far more prominent, political groupings. Within UN disarmament forums, there are a number of active formal political groups representing the main bloc-formations of state preferences on the issue of nuclear disarmament. These most notably include: the P-5, representing the collective views of the five UN-recognized NWS; the NAM, representing over 100 non-Western, developing, NNWS that are seeking the immediate elimination of nuclear weapons by the P-5;9 the NAC, representing six prominent NNWS middle powers that are strongly in favour of nuclear disarmament;10 and, with varying levels of proactivity, the EU11 and 8  Karen E. Smith and Katie Laatikainen, ‘Introduction: The Multilateral Politics of UN Diplomacy’, The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, vol. 12, no. 2 (2017) pp. x–x, this issue. 9  For an interesting study on the functioning and politics of the NAM as a political group, see Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova and William Potter, Nuclear Politics and the Non-Aligned Movement, Adelphi series (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2012). 10  Formed in 2000 and now comprised of Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand and South Africa. 11  For an overview, see Megan Dee, ‘The EU’s Performance in the NPT Review Negotiations: Consistency, Change, Challenges’, in D. Bourantonis, S. Blavoukos and C. Portela (eds.),

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League of Arab States,12 each representing the common regional positions of their members. It is, however, important to recognize that there is not one main forum for addressing the elimination of nuclear weapons by the UN. Instead, the UN today is home to numerous venues for debate and negotiation centred upon the basic remit of nuclear disarmament,13 within which political groups loosely arrange themselves. Of particular relevance is the NPT, which is widely recognized as the cornerstone of the global nuclear non-proliferation regime. The NPT was signed in 1968 and entered into force in 1970. Its objectives were threefold. First, it enshrined the commitment by the P-5 to ‘pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament’.14 Second, it committed its majority NNWS to abstain from obtaining nuclear weapons or weapons technology and to accept safeguard and verification measures as set forth by the International Atomic Energy Agency. And third, it established the commitment by all states parties to ensure the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Now with 190 states parties, the NPT today not only commits a total 185 states to the objective of nuclear non-proliferation, but is also the only international treaty in which the P-5 commit to the goal of general and complete nuclear disarmament. The NPT is reviewed every five years in quinquennial review cycles that include three Preparatory Committees (PrepCom), which are held between New York and Geneva over three consecutive years, and culminating in a fifth year Review Conference (RevCon), which is held in New York over four weeks from April to May. NPT RevCons have a dual purpose: to review the previous five years of the Treaty’s operation to consider its implementation and oversight; and to address the Treaty’s forward momentum in agreeing points of action for the fulfilment of all states’ obligations under the Treaty. The NPT RevCon is, however, a treaty-based negotiating forum that is underwritten by a Grand Bargain: the vast majority of its signatories commit not to The EU and the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons: Strategies, Policies, Actions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 12  The League of Arab States tends to have a variable presence in these forums, but is a prominent group when it comes to discussions over the proposed Middle East WMD [weapons of mass destruction] Free Zone. 13  Space constraints prevent discussion of other UN arms control forums that seek to limit the spread, or total elimination, of other weapons of mass destruction, including biological, chemical weapons, missiles and conventional arms; see online at https://www .un.org/disarmament/. 14  UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA), Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, 1968 (Art. VI).

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develop nuclear weapons, provided that the P-5 takes practical steps towards the general and complete disarmament of their own recognized nuclear weapons’ programmes.15 Nevertheless, a general contention pervades NPT negotiations. While the Grand Bargain implies equity across each of the NPT’s three pillars,16 there is a marked imbalance in the NPT’s negotiations, which places far greater emphasis upon NNWS upholding their commitment to nuclear nonproliferation than upon the NWS and their obligation to disarm. An underlying discrimination and inequality is therefore understood to exist between the nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states,17 most commonly centred upon the frustrations of NNWS over the perceived failures of the P-5 to live up to their obligations to implement past RevCon decisions,18 or to take steps towards their nuclear disarmament. Further supplementing the work of the NPT, and mirroring many of the same inherent challenges, is the UNGA First Committee. Meeting in session for four weeks every October to November, the First Committee considers and adopts resolutions and decisions on a range of issues — from nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction to conventional arms, regional measures and disarmament machinery. Unlike the NPT, which makes decisions by consensus, the First Committee makes decisions based on one member, one vote, with voting often divided along ‘official’ UN group lines — although the P-5, NAM and NAC remain active as political groups within this forum. While the First Committee does offer the NNWS some notable advantages because of their sheer weight of numbers relative to the NWS, it is notable that consensus is also regularly sought for many resolutions that are adopted, particularly when they relate to the progress of multilateral disarmament negotiations.19 The First Committee has often been criticized for its failure to make any

15  Mölling, ‘The Grand Bargain in the NPT’. 16  Mölling ‘The Grand Bargain in the NPT’, p. 49. 17  Harold Müller, ‘A Treaty in Troubled Waters: Reflections on the Failed NPT Review Conference’, The International Spectator, vol. 40, no. 3 (2005), pp. 33–44, at p. 38; and J. Ruzicka and N. Wheeler, ‘The Puzzle of Trusting Relationships in the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty’, International Affairs, vol. 86, no. 1 (2010), pp. 69–85, at p. 75. 18  Reaching Critical Will, The NPT Action Plan Monitoring Report (New York: Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, March 2015); and Megan Dee, ‘The EU’s Multilateralist Combat against the Proliferation of WMD in the NPT: Mirroring the Grand Bargain’, European Security, vol. 24, no. 1 (2015), pp. 1–20. 19  For example, UN Resolution, ‘Revitalizing the Work of the Conference on Disarmament and Taking Forward Multilateral Disarmament Negotiations’, A/C.1/66/L.39 (2011).

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substantive progress and thus of contributing to the dysfunction of UN multilateral disarmament efforts.20 The First Committee works in close collaboration with the UN Disarmament Commission (UNDC), which was established in 1952. The UNDC is a subsidiary body of the UNGA and is composed of all UNGA members. It was created as a largely deliberative body, with the purpose of considering and making recommendations on issues in the field of disarmament. While the UNDC has in past years formulated consensus-based principles and recommendations for the First Committee, over the last decade it also has not agreed on any substantive outcome.21 Working alongside the NPT, First Committee and the UNDC is the Conference on Disarmament (CD). The CD was established in 1979 as the world’s only permanent multilateral disarmament treaty negotiating body. Based in Geneva, the CD differs from the UNDC in that it is intended as a negotiation — rather than debating and advisory — forum. It also differs from the First Committee in that its focus is explicitly on the cessation of the nuclear arms race and nuclear disarmament as opposed to the First Committee’s broader remit of international security and disarmament. Furthermore, in contrast to the NPT, the CD includes India, Pakistan, Israel and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) among its 65 members. Its negotiation remit thus spans not only the objective of nuclear disarmament among the P-5, but crucially also those non-NPT states parties that possess nuclear weapons but that go unrecognized by the UN Security Council. The CD differs moreover from the UN’s other disarmament forums in that while the P-5, NAC and EU do loosely coordinate in preparation for CD sessions,22 CD members form into four main regional groups for the purposes of negotiations: the Western Group; the (NAM) Group of 21; the Eastern European Group; and the Group of One (China). In further contrast to the First Committee and UNDC, the CD meets in annual session, divided into three parts, meeting for ten weeks from January, seven weeks from May and seven weeks from July. Despite having more time for negotiations, the CD nevertheless mirrors the NPT in that it, too, faces the challenge of decision-making on the basis of the consensus rule, whereby all 65 members must consent before 20  UN Meetings Coverage, ‘Anxiety over Nuclear Weapons “Deep and Genuine” ’ (8 October 2015); and Benjamin Seel, ‘Frustration Evident in UN First Committee’, Arms Control Today (2 December 2011). 21  UN Meetings Coverage, ‘Disarmament Commission, Concluding 2015 Session, Urged Not to Lose Faith’ (24 April 2015). 22  Interviews, June 2015.

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a decision can be adopted. The CD has subsequently been hamstrung for the past two decades, rarely able to negotiate a substantive work programme, let alone a genuine consensus-based disarmament agreement.23 As this discussion has demonstrated, multilateral stalemate besets the UN’s numerous disarmament forums. Negotiators must manoeuvre not only intense power politics between the NWS, but also between an increasingly frustrated majority of NNWS, which in turn align with various political groups reflecting a diverse mixture of geographical, political and security-related preference formations. From the perspective of multilateral diplomacy literature and negotiation theory, UN disarmament politics are therefore best characterized as an asymmetrical negotiation context,24 whereby the power symmetry of negotiations is balanced significantly in favour of the P-5, which are ultimately responsible for deciding when and how they will relinquish their nuclear arsenals. As a consequence of the consensus rule within the UN’s main negotiation forums (the CD and the NPT, as well as with most decisions of import to multilateral progress within the First Committee), the P-5 have been able consistently to present a conservative or status quo position, whereby they commit to the general objective of nuclear disarmament, but resist attempts by the UN to apply timetables, deadlines or binding imperatives.25 This does not, however, mean that NNWS political groups seeking a more progressive negotiation agenda are without resources to pursue their objectives over the course of the UN’s disarmament negotiations. As negotiation theorists suggest, there are three main stages of multilateral negotiation, including: (i) agenda-setting; (ii) negotiation for formula; and (iii) endgame bargaining.26 During the first phase, framing and argumentation may be employed in generating what Anatol Rapoport highlights as true debate, leading to consensus-building and collective action.27 Framing may, for example, be achieved through the depoliticizing of a contentious issue, focusing on 23  Kingston Reif, ‘UN Disarmament Body Still Stalemated’, Arms Control Today (2 September 2015). 24  Ole Elgström and M. Stromvik, ‘The European Union as an International Negotiator’, in O. Elgström and C. Jönsson (eds), European Union Negotiations: Processes, Networks and Institutions (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 121. 25  Interviews, May 2011; Interview, June 2015; and Reaching Critical Will, The NPT Action Plan Monitoring Report. 26   Gunnar Sjöstedt, ‘Leadership in Multilateral Negotiations: Crisis or Transition’, in P. Berton, H. Kimura and I.W. Zartman (eds), International Negotiation: Actors, Structure/ Process, Values (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 233. 27  See Smith and Laatikainen, ‘Introduction: The Multilateral Politics of UN Diplomacy’; and Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games and Debates (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1960).

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technical rather than political or strategic details, or broader normative objectives that are considered more acceptable for deliberation. Argumentation may also be employed in stressing that an agenda is motivated by friendly intentions, or spelling out the positive details of what certain objectives might achieve.28 A particular agenda may also be pushed by linking an objective with legal or scientific principles in an effort to raise the level of concern among more conservative negotiation partners in support of more progressive objectives.29 More than this, during the negotiation for formula stage, a party may undertake any number of tactics in an effort to enact change, even within an asymmetrical negotiation context. For example, a party’s ability to come up with proposals that overcome differences is an important method by which a consensus-based agreement can be reached. New policy solutions or technical language, submitted through working papers or in statements, are important provisions of policy entrepreneurship, and are critical in both persuading others to adapt their positioning and in providing language that might be utilized in endgame texts.30 More than this, as negotiation theory also indicates, in multilateral negotiations, coalitions are themselves considered an important means of bringing the number of actors involved in negotiating often complex and politicized issues down to a more manageable number, so that consensus can be more easily achieved.31 Where achieved, coalitions within multilateral negotiations are moreover seen as an important method of moving negotiations forward, or bringing them to a successful end.32 Within the context of the UN’s disarmament forums, groups or coalitions of states are therefore critical to understanding not only any stalemate that has beset negotiations, but also the potential for overcoming this stalemate moving forward. The next section considers how such new groups form and pursue their objectives.

28  F.C. Iklé, How Nations Negotiate (New York: Praeger, 1964), pp. 197–203. 29   M. Levy, R. Keohane and P. Haas, ‘Improving the Effectiveness of International Environmental Institutions’, in P. Haas, R. Keohane and M. Levy (eds), Institutions for the Earth: Sources of Effective International Environmental Protection (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 399. 30  I.W. Zartman and M.R. Berman, The Practical Negotiator (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 2; and Iklé, How Nations Negotiate, p. 193. 31  Ole Elgström and Christian Jönsson, ‘Introduction’, in O. Elgström and C. Jonssön (eds), European Union Negotiations: Processes, Networks and Institutions (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 2; and V. Rittberger, ‘Global Conference Diplomacy and International Policy-Making: The Case of UN-Sponsored World Conferences’, European Journal of Political Research, vol. 11, no. 2 (1983), pp. 167–182, at p. 177. 32  Sjöstedt, ‘Leadership in Multilateral Negotiations’, p. 242.

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New Group Dynamics in UN Disarmament Forums

Since 2010, multilateral disarmament negotiations within the UN have experienced a fundamental shift. The new decade began with a season of optimism for the global nuclear non-proliferation regime. In April 2010, the United States published its Nuclear Posture Review, setting out concrete steps to reduce its reliance on nuclear weapons and to move towards ‘global zero’.33 In May 2010, the NPT RevCon further ended with a widely lauded 64-Point Action Plan that detailed deliberate steps forward across all three pillars of the Treaty, including in nuclear disarmament.34 However, multilateral stalemate soon set in,35 and this time with growing frustrations being voiced,36 as it became apparent that several of the P-5 were not only resisting steps to enact the NPT Action Plan that had been agreed in May, but were in some cases modernizing existing arsenals.37 As a consequence of this resumption of stagnation within the global nonproliferation regime, since 2010 a new dynamic has started to emerge, which has centred upon a deliberate reframing of the nuclear debate away from the strategic and security-related discourses that have been dominant since the Cold War, towards humanitarian arguments for not only disarming, but outright banning nuclear weapons. Following the same framing logics that have been successfully employed in the banning of landmines, cluster munitions, biological and chemical weapons, and which have been legitimized by their focus on international humanitarian law,38 this new humanitarian discourse has sought to energize beleaguered NNWS, refocus the policy debate, and subsequently to inject renewed momentum into multilateral disarmament negotiations.39 Of special interest is that this humanitarian discourse has largely resulted from the creation of a new political group that has been active since 2010 both within the First Committee and the NPT’s 2010–2015 review cycle.40 The Group 33  United States Department of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review 2010 (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2010). 34  UNODA, ‘Final Document: Volume I’, 2010 Review Conference of the Parties to the NPT, NPT/CONF/2010.50 (2010). 35  Including further failures in the CD to adopt a programme of works in 2010. 36  Interviews, May–June 2011. 37  Reaching Critical Will, Assuring Destruction Forever: Nuclear Weapon Modernization Around the World (New York: Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 2012). 38  Interviews, June 2015; International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons, Catastrophic Humanitarian Harm (2012), p. 23. 39  Interviews, June 2015. 40  Interview, June 2015. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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of Sixteen (G-16) was formed as an informal and ad-hoc group of states parties and observers to the NPT shortly after the 2010 Action Plan was introduced. Within the 2010 RevCon outcome document, states parties noted their deep concern over ‘the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons’.41 Recognizing, however, that more urgency was required to generate action towards nuclear disarmament by the 2015 NPT RevCon, and that an approach that considered humanitarian consequences provided a comprehensive perspective from which to approach the problem, the new Group of Sixteen was formed. By the 2012 NPT PrepCom meeting in New York, the Group of Sixteen was presenting statements as the ‘States Parties focusing on the Humanitarian Dimension’, coordinated and led initially by Switzerland.42 From 2012 the ‘Informal Group of Sixteen’ began to undertake numerous proactive tactics to generate support for what had become widely known as the ‘Humanitarian Initiative’, including submitting working papers and hosting side-events at the NPT PrepComs in 2013 and 2014. Three of its members also hosted high-profile international conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons (HINW) in Nayarit (Mexico) in 2012, Oslo (Norway) in 2013, and Vienna (Austria) in 2014. By the 2015 NPT RevCon, the G-16, backed by an impressive civil society campaign, had generated significant support for the Humanitarian Initiative, comprising a statement by Austria on behalf of 156 NPT states parties,43 and with growing numbers further signing or endorsing a ‘Humanitarian Pledge’.44 This Pledge sets out the commitment by states parties ‘to present the factsbased discussions, findings and compelling evidence of the Vienna Conference […] to all relevant fora […] in the UN framework’; and explicitly calls on all states parties to the NPT to ‘identify and pursue effective measures to fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons’.45 While this campaign failed to achieve any timetable or agreed points of action at the

41  UNODA, ‘Final Document: Volume I’, p. 19. 42  UNODA, ‘Joint Statement on the Humanitarian Dimension of Nuclear Disarmament by Austria, Chile, Costa Rica, Denmark, Holy See, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, South Africa, Switzerland’, Statement to the First Session of the PrepCom for the 2015 NPT RevCon (2 May 2012). 43  UNODA, ‘Joint Statement on the Humanitarian Consequences of Nuclear Weapons’ (28 April 2015). 44  UNODA, ‘The Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons and the Austrian Pledge’, NPT/CONF.2015/WP.29 (2015); see also online at http://www .bmeia.gv.at/fileadmin/user_upload/Zentrale/Aussenpolitik/Abruestung/HINW14/HINW 14vienna_Pledge_Document.pdf, which, at the time of writing, had received 121 signatures. 45  UNODA, ‘The Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons and the Austrian Pledge’. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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2015 NPT RevCon, the Humanitarian Pledge has nevertheless been considered the main outcome of that negotiation,46 and continued to remain high on the UN’s disarmament agenda, featuring particularly prominently in the UN First Committee’s 70th session from October–November 2015.47 A second new group to have formed since 2010 is the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative (NPDI). Like the G-16, the NPDI came into being shortly after the 2010 NPT RevCon, with the deliberate intention of furthering the 64-Point Action Plan that had been agreed.48 Similar to the G-16, the NPDI is an ad-hoc group that has no formalized structure or secretariat. Coordination in both groups is conducted at a senior official level and with each member state taking turns to represent collective group positions within the NPT’s review cycle of PrepComs, RevCon and in First Committee sessions. Like Switzerland in the case of the G-16, the NPDI was an initiative led by Australia and Japan, which sought the formation of a small yet focused group of like-minded states that could ‘make a difference’ in the proactive, yet ‘pragmatic’, furtherance of the 2010 Action Plan.49 As with the selection of members that formed the G-16, the NPDI’s membership was explicitly intended to be cross-regional, including states of importance from regions around the world, and which were active both within the global nuclear-disarmament debate and within other political groupings.50 For the NPDI, which aims to provide what is considered a necessary bridgebuilder role within the UN’s disarmament forums,51 and particularly the NPT, this includes various high-profile middle-ground states that have consistently adopted a pragmatic line in the nuclear disarmament debate, such as Canada, Australia and Japan, as well in many cases as important regional players that themselves fall under a nuclear umbrella (for example as members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO) and thus do not proactively seek the immediate abolition of nuclear weapons. In this way, such cross-regionalism — that is, identifying key players to the debate but whose geographical location is 46  Ray Acheson, ‘2015 NPT Review Conference Outcome is the Humanitarian Pledge’, in Reaching Critical Will, Negotiation Bulletin (New York: Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 23 May 2015). 47  UN Meetings Coverage, ‘First Committee Sends 16 Drafts on Nuclear Disarmament to General Assembly, Including New One on “Ethical Imperatives”, Following 21 Recorded Votes’, 70th Session, 22nd Meeting (2 November 2015). 48  Interview, March 2015; Interview, June 2015. 49  Interview, June 2015. 50  Interviews, March 2015; Interview, June 2015; Members of the NPDI include Australia, Canada, Chile, Germany, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, the Philippines, Poland, Turkey and United Arab Emirates. 51  Interview, June 2015.

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also taken into consideration — has been seen to provide an important means of leverage for the NPDI, not least in it being able to act legitimately in a mediatory role between the P-5 and the other established NNWS groups, including the NAC and NAM.52 Like the G-16, the NPDI also adopted a proactive role within the NPT’s 2010–2015 review cycle. It actively sought to contribute to the negotiations by building more cooperative relations with other groups and through the submission of carefully considered consensus-based policy language that could enable progress.53 The NPDI further demonstrated an impressive level of coordination as a new political group,54 not only internally — whereby it has been able to share information between its own members — but also in its external coordination with other political groups, including the P-5 and NAC.55 This outreach to other groups, which has been conducted both through formal meetings and informally through the diplomatic relationships of NPDI members, was intended to ensure closer cooperation with the more established blocs and a freer exchange of views.56 As a result of this diplomatic coordination, the NPDI delivered numerous working papers to the NPT review negotiations, detailing consensus-based language, including proposals for taking forward action within the NPT. Prominent in this respect was one particular working paper, which included a comprehensive and highly detailed summary of consensus-based language that might be adopted as final texts spanning all three of the NPT’s main pillars.57 Recognized to reflect a middle-ground between the P-5 on the one hand, and the NAM and NAC on the other, this paper was subsequently reflected in the RevCon President’s own draft summary report58 and it continued to be drawn upon in reflections for how the NPT may move forward into its next review cycle.59 The significance of the NPDI was, moreover, made clear when three of its members — Japan, Australia and the Netherlands — were invited 52  Interview, June 2015. 53  Interview, June 2015. 54  Coordination was undertaken largely through regular email exchange as well as formal meetings prior to and on the side lines of NPT PrepComs and the RevCon itself. During the 2015 RevCon, NPDI members met formally once per week to share information and fine-tune their language, as well as upwards of twice per week through informal lunches (interview, June 2015). 55  Interviews, June 2015. 56  Interview, March 2015; Interview, June 2015. 57  UNODA, ‘Recommendations for Consideration by the 2015 Review Conference of the Parties to the NPT’, submitted by the NPDI, NPT/CONF.2015/WP.16 (2015). 58  Compare with UNODA, ‘Draft Final Document: Part I’, NPT/CONF.2015/R.3 (2015). 59  Interviews, June 2015.

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to join the ‘small room’ group of key negotiators who were hosted by the NPT RevCon President in order to finalize a consensus on nuclear disarmament in the final week of negotiations.60 As this discussion has demonstrated, in both the cases of the G-16 and NPDI, significant efforts have been exerted to re-energize the UN’s multilateral disarmament negotiations. For the G-16, this has been apparent through their deliberate reframing of the nuclear debate to account for the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons. Utilizing framing and argumentation tactics, the G-16 has presented an impressive case for a more progressive agenda within the UN’s disarmament forums. Through reframing the debate in terms of the positive normative necessity of protecting human life, the G-16 members generated a significant body of support, not only among beleaguered NNWS that had lost faith in consensus-based decision-making achieving results in these forums, but also among civil society, thereby bolstering the legitimacy and potency of the Humanitarian Initiative moving forward.61 For the NPDI, tactics have in contrast been geared less to reframing the nuclear debate and more towards acting in a mediatory capacity between the P-5, NAC and NAM in order to generate momentum and push forward with multilateral solutions to the issue of nuclear disarmament. This has especially involved cooperative information exchange and subsequent policy entrepreneurship, with the submission of working language to provide building blocks for incremental change. In this way, both the G-16 and NPDI sought paths for progress and consensus within the UN’s disarmament forums.62 Reflecting again upon Anatol Rapoport’s analogy, in so doing these new group dynamics are indicative of efforts to overcome the games of bloc formation, entrenchment and the conservatism of the P-5 in living up to their nuclear disarmament obligations. The new group dynamics focus instead upon facilitating debate among NWS and NNWS in order to move closer to consensus and, in time, collective action from the UN’s disarmament forums.63 While these efforts have so far had little to show for themselves in terms of generating genuine action, they nevertheless 60  This group was held at the Algerian Mission and also included all P-5 and NAC members, as well as Switzerland (a G16 member as well as holding the chairmanship of Subsidiary Body I), Iran and Cuba (NAM) and Sweden (interviews, June 2015). 61  Interview, June 2015. 62  Interview, March 2015; Interview, June 2015. 63  Smith and Laatikainen, ‘Introduction: The Multilateral Politics of UN Diplomacy’; and Rapoport, Fights, Games and Debates. After this article was published in 2017 the UN did agree the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The TPNW, which opened for signature in September 2017, was widely attributed to the success of the humanitarian initiative, and role of the G-16 within that process. Worth also noting that, at time of editing, the TPNW has received no support from any NWS, and is still far short of the necessary number of state ratifications (50) to enter into force. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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suggest a glimmer of hope for UN disarmament politics. The next section will further develop these positive signals and the influence that groups have had upon UN disarmament politics. 4

The Influence of Groups in UN Disarmament Politics

As the examples of the G-16 and NPDI serve to highlight, groups within the UN’s disarmament forums have influenced multilateral disarmament negotiations in three different ways. First, groups manage complexity by reducing the sheer number of voices, interests and perspectives at work within multilateral negotiations down to a more manageable number. This is particularly important within the NPT and First Committee, where negotiations take place within a specified, and relatively tight, time-frame. As with the other established political groups at work in the UN’s disarmament forum, including the P-5, NAC and NAM, the G-16 and NPDI were formed as coalitions of like-minded states in order to pursue collectively a broadly common position. By pursuing like-minded objectives through these groups, states have in turn been able to pool their (often scarce) resources and expertise, while bolstering their own individual leverage. As the reality of UN disarmament negotiations is of an increasingly group-dominated form of multilateralism, working within groups is becoming a necessity for any state that is seeking to exert an influence within the negotiation process, not only in the pursuit of its own national agenda, but also in broader terms of supporting a multilateral consensus-based solution to achieve nuclear disarmament. As the example of the G-16 reveals, groups can also have a substantive influence through pooled social resources. In collaborating, the member states of the G-16 became ‘norm entrepreneurs’, capable of influencing debate through framing and argumentation, and drawing upon wider normative principles — such as international humanitarian law — to enhance their legitimacy and to diffuse their group position to the wider NPT and First Committee communities. Closely related to this, groups influence UN multilateral disarmament negotiations courtesy of the enhanced diplomatic networks that they foster. As the example of the G-16 and NPDI shows, members were deliberately sought out and invited to join, not only based upon their geographical location, likemindedness and relative importance to the global nuclear-disarmament debate, but also, in many cases, because those states also crucially aligned with other established political groups that are at work within the UN’s disarmament forums.64 64  Interviews, March 2015; Interviews, June 2015. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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nam

Mexico New Zealand Austria Denmark Mexico

G-16 npdi

Germany Netherlands Poland

eu

P5

Figure 10.1

nac

South Africa Egypt Ireland

France uk

Cross-alignment of major political groups within the NPT: 2010–2015 Source: Author’s own compilation

As Fig. 10.1 demonstrates, all of the political groups at work within UN disarmament forums are closely interlinked, with several examples of cross-alignment by states that are active in multiple groups. The G-16 thus includes a crossfactional membership that includes most of the members of the NAC (Ireland, Mexico, South Africa, New Zealand and Egypt), key players of the NAM (Algeria, Chile, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines), the EU (Ireland, Denmark and Austria), and the NPDI (Mexico). The NPDI in turn comprises members of the EU (Germany, the Netherlands and Poland) as well as the G-16 (Mexico). The NAC is also notable for its cross-factional membership, including Ireland (a member of the EU and G-16), South Africa and Egypt (NAM and G-16), New Zealand (G-16), and Mexico (G-16 and NPDI). Such cross-factional group memberships can have challenges. The inclusion of Mexico in the NPDI, for example, has generated some difficulties for the group in presenting bridge-building language that would appease Mexico (which is an ardent backer of a nuclear ban treaty) and yet still be conducive

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to the P-5.65 The EU has also frequently struggled to maintain its own unity of action within the NPT because of the cross-alignment of many of its more vocal member states within other political groupings.66 However, the benefits of group cross-alignments within UN disarmament forums are also profound. Groups are considered by their members as crucial forums for informationsharing. Regular coordination between group members thus not only ensures a freer exchange of views and the pooling of intelligence, but also helps to build personal relationships, and even trust, between negotiators.67 When group members also align with other political groups, regular coordination further enables informal networks to be forged and closer intragroup exchanges to be fostered. This is an important influencing factor of group interplay because — through the active encouragement of cooperative exchanges — negotiators on opposing sides of a negotiation issue are far more likely to generate some ‘zone of agreement’ leading to possible consensus.68 Such intra-group cooperative exchange was apparent in the 2015 NPT RevCon through the activities of the NPDI, although the impact of this exchange may only become evident in the longer term. It has, moreover, been seen as a function of the EU in previous RevCons: for example, the EU acting as an intelligence-sharing hub for those member states that were involved in other political groups during the 2010 RevCon, enabling the EU to contribute consensus-based language that formed part of the 2010 outcome document.69 As these examples suggest, while entrenched bloc positions and mistrust between negotiators can cause multilateral stalemate, the cross-alignment of groups and more open diplomatic networks for information exchange could be equally as important in overcoming it. Finally, returning to the three stages of multilateral negotiation that were highlighted earlier, as this article has reflected, groups are found to have an influence within the UN’s disarmament forums through the roles that they play, particularly during the agenda-setting and negotiation for formula stages. The work of the G-16, for example, has fundamentally altered the agenda of the UN’s disarmament forum since 2010. The increased focus on the humanitarian 65  Interviews, June 2015. 66  Dee, ‘The EU’s Performance in the NPT Review Negotiations’. 67  Interview, November 2014; Interviews, June 2015. 68  Arild Underdal, ‘Causes of Negotiation “Failure” ’, European Journal of Political Research, vol. 11, no. 2 (1983), pp. 183–195. 69   Megan Dee, ‘Standing Together or Doing the Splits? Evaluating European Union Performance in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Negotiations’, European Foreign Affairs Review, vol. 17, no. 2 (2012), pp. 187–210.

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consequences of nuclear weapons as a specific discourse within the NPT and First Committee can be seen as a direct consequence of this group’s formation and activities in garnering support for the Humanitarian Initiative. The NPDI has moreover demonstrated an important influence over the negotiation for formula phase of the NPT’s 2015 review negotiations through its efforts in policy entrepreneurship; coming up with consensus-based middle-ground language that was then taken forward in the President’s draft summary report. In this way, groups — and new groups especially — are starting to make a purposeful difference to the processes involved within the UN’s disarmament forums. What remains to be seen is the extent to which groups can make a direct influence upon endgame bargaining and thus the subsequent outcome of UN disarmament negotiations. The fact that the 2015 NPT RevCon failed to achieve a consensus-based final document — despite the efforts exerted by the G-16, NPDI and other group players such as the P-5, NAC and NAM — would suggest limits to the influence that political groups can have within such a difficult negotiation environment. The ongoing stalemate of UN disarmament negotiations is not easily overcome, even with new group dynamics coming to the fore. Yet the fact that it was key members of the P-5, NAC, NPDI and G-16 that came together in the final week of the 2015 NPT RevCon to seek agreement on the draft texts is suggestive of groups having an important role to play in endgame bargaining. While it is understood that states involved in such ‘small room’ endgame discussions do participate in their national capacity, it is also crucially their group participation that enables them to feed back to a wider membership, build consensus and in turn ensure support for any negotiated outcome agreement. Time will therefore tell whether these new group dynamics can make a difference in this way and, in turn, overcome the multilateral stalemate of UN disarmament forums. 5 Conclusion This article has considered group dynamics within the UN’s disarmament forums. Two research questions are at its heart: first, how do states explicitly interact through groups in UN disarmament forums; and second, what difference do these group dynamics and interplay make to consensus-building? Focusing on the first research question, the article has shown that states are understood to interact within political groups within UN disarmament forums for the purposes of pooling knowledge and resources while further enhancing their leverage, legitimacy and bargaining strength relative to other group

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players. As the example of the G-16 and NPDI groups reflect, memberships of political groups in disarmament forums are a careful calculation, taking into consideration not only like-mindedness, but the importance of the state in the nuclear disarmament debate, geographical spread and, importantly, the alignment of that state within other political groupings. This, in turn, is important for understanding the difference that group dynamics and interplay make to consensus-building within disarmament negotiations. This article finds that the influence of group dynamics within the UN’s disarmament forums is evident in three clear ways. First, the formation of political groups within UN disarmament forums manages the complexity of negotiations by reducing the number of interests, preferences and voices down to a more manageable number, thus enabling negotiators to concentrate on selected priority issues and to engage with others within the time-frame that is permitted to them. Second, the group dynamics at play within these forums, and particularly within the NPT, have since 2010 been notably more influential in fostering cooperative intra-group exchanges. By drawing upon the cross-alignment of their members with other political groupings and by acting as hubs for intelligencesharing, new groups have reflected an important means of consensus-building, which could lead to improved diplomatic networks between entrenched group positions moving forward. Finally, groups are influencing consensus-building within the UN’s disarmament forums, particularly through the agenda-setting and negotiation for formula stages of multilateral negotiation. As the group dynamics of the G-16 and NPDI represent, political groups and their interplay can make a substantive difference both to the underlying discourse and agenda of multilateral disarmament negotiations, and the processes by which consensus-based policy language can be formulated and taken through to decision-making. What will be revealing, and a topic ripe for future research, is how these groups will continue not only to shape negotiation processes, but in fact to impact the outcome through endgame bargaining. While evidence would suggest that we cannot overstate this influence to date, the new group dynamics that are now at play are indicative of groups taking on an increasingly prominent and shaping role, not only in overcoming the entrenchment of more established blocs within the UN’s disarmament forums, but, in time, of delivering consensus-based, negotiated outcome agreements that may pave the way to progress for the UN.

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Chapter 11

Negotiating the Responsibility to Protect in the UN System Alex Bellamy 1 Introduction Evolving from international society’s failures to protect people from genocide and mass atrocities in Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P)* holds that all states have a responsibility to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity,1 that the international community should encourage and assist states to fulfil this responsibility, and that the international community should use peaceful means and, if that is judged inadequate, all the means at the disposal of the United Nations (UN) Security Council, to protect populations from atrocity crimes when necessary. Few international principles have travelled further and faster than R2P.2 In the first decade since its unanimous adoption at the 2005 World Summit, R2P has been transformed from a controversial and indeterminate concept that is seldom utilized into a norm that is employed almost habitually by UN bodies and states. Agreement on the meaning and scope of the norm has emerged in the annual informal dialogues on R2P held each year by the General Assembly since 2009.3 R2P has been unanimously reaffirmed in its entirety no fewer than four times by the UN Security Council and referred to specifically in more than 30 other Security Council resolutions, including those on controversial issues such as in Syria. It has also been referred to in both thematic and country-specific resolutions of the UN General Assembly and UN Human Rights Council. By 2015, more than one-quarter of the UN’s member states (53 in total) had appointed senior officials to serve as *  Material published as part of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy’s Special Issue: ‘The Multi­ lateral Politics of UN Diplomacy’, Volume 12, Number 2, 2017, edited by Katie Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith. See http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/1871 191x/12/2-3. 1  Hereafter labelled ‘atrocity crimes’. 2  Ramesh Thakur and Thomas Weiss, ‘R2P from Idea to Norm — and Action?’, Global Responsibility to Protect, vol. 1, no. 1 (2009), p. 23. 3  A/RES/63/308 (7 October 2009).

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national R2P focal points. With only a small handful of exceptions, states accept R2P and agree on its basic elements. This article examines the role that groups played in the rise of R2P within the UN system. Utilizing the framework of analysis outlined in the introduction of this special issue of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, it focuses on the role of informal groups of states in advancing a consensus on R2P. It contrasts their role with that of the formal regional and political groups that — with the exception of the African Group — played a more marginal role. R2P has given rise to a multiplicity of informal groups of states, including the Group of Friends, the R2P Focal Points Network, the Core Group on R2P at the UN in Geneva, the Global Action Against Mass Atrocity Crimes (GAAMAC) network, and Latin American and African Networks for Genocide Prevention.4 These informal groups operate alongside the formal regional and political groups and, with one or two exceptions, have tended to be significantly more influential. The principal reason why is associated with the principle’s genesis. Arising out of fractious debates in the late 1990s about intervention and the relationship between sovereignty and fundamental human rights, R2P was from the outset a conscious attempt to bridge political divides between states in the UN — especially the ‘North–South’ theatre so ably described by Thomas Weiss.5 Conceptually, R2P advocates attempted to do this by reconceptualising sovereignty as entailing protection responsibilities and embedding the politics of intervention — along with a wide range of other protection tools — firmly within the UN’s existing collective security arrangements.6 Politically, it was understood that R2P would fail to bridge the ‘North–South’ divide if it appeared to be an exclusively ‘Western’ or ‘Northern’ project. As such, the norm’s progenitors were careful to ensure that it was crafted in an inclusive fashion, and since those formative phases, support for, and opposition to, R2P has cut across regional boundaries. Today, for example, the most vociferous opponents of the norm are found primarily in Latin America (Cuba and Venezuela) but so too are some of the most active proponents of R2P: Guatemala, which singularly sponsored the 2009 General Assembly resolution on R2P; Costa Rica which was among the first and most active members of the 4  Note that there are plans to replace the Core Group with a Group of Friends of R2P in the Geneva Initiative, led by the Netherlands and Rwanda. 5  Thomas G. Weiss, What’s Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix It (Oxford: Polity, 2nd edition 2012), pp. 50–71. 6  The story of R2P’s genesis has been told often. See Alex J. Bellamy, Responsibility to Protect: The Global Effort to End Mass Atrocities (Oxford: Polity, 2009); and Gareth Evans, Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2008).

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Group of Friends; and Chile, which co-hosted the 2015 meeting of National R2P Focal Points. Similar patterns of support and dissent can be found in other regions. The article proceeds in four parts. The first briefly explains the role of formal (political and regional) and informal groups in the rise of R2P. Following the framework outlined in the introduction, the second, third and fourth sections focus on group interaction, politics and influence, respectively. It offers three key insights about the role of groups within the UN drawn from the R2P experience. First, while the proliferation of related informal groups can help tailor policies to the specific needs of individual regions or parts of an agenda, it can also lead to unhelpful duplication and competition. Second, informal groups have played useful roles as coordinating networks and have lowered the bar to participating in decision-making about R2P, thus improving the inclusiveness of informal dialogue on R2P. However, informal groups have not necessarily succeeded in establishing leadership on an issue, harmonizing the positions of their members, or in advancing common positions. Thus, states may sometimes decide to establish further groups for specific and limited purposes. Third, single-issue groups exert influence by deepening member states’ commitment to the issue at hand and by demonstrating cross-regional support for an issue in a way that undermines attempts to paint them in terms of the UN’s ‘North–South’ divide.7 2

Groups of States, the UN and the Rise of R2P

Since 1945 at least, sovereignty has been commonly understood as entailing a right to non-interference, a right reflected in Article 2(7) of the UN Charter. This raises the difficult question of how the UN should respond to situations in which the state failed to protect its own population from atrocity crimes, or when the state itself was among the principal perpetrators of such crimes. In Bosnia and Rwanda in the early 1990s, the UN’s failure to respond was widely criticized. These questions came to the fore again during the crisis in Kosovo in 1998–1999. When international negotiations, sanctions and observers failed to stem the violence, which included ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, NATO decided to intervene militarily despite not having a UN Security Council mandate to do so. The intervention triggered global debate on the

7  For one such attempt, see Spencer Zifcak, ‘The Responsibility to Protect’, in Spencer Zifcak (ed.), United Nations Reform: Heading North or South? (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 105–127.

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circumstances in which the use of force for human protection purposes might be justifiable. Broadly speaking, large sections of the ‘Global North’ favoured a more interventionist posture in the face of gross human rights abuse, while most states in the ‘Global South’ argued for the privileging of international order and reaffirmation of the Security Council’s primacy on the use of force.8 At issue was the relationship between the state and its own population, the credibility of the UN membership’s commitment to very basic standards of human rights and the role of the UN in the twenty-first century — issues that had long animated the ‘theatrics’ of ‘North–South’ divides in the UN. Recognizing this, Secretary-General Kofi Annan posed the issue as a challenge to both sides of the divide.9 It was in order to find answers to these questions that Canada established an International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2000. Charged with trying to find common ground, the ICISS adopted a regionally inclusive approach. It was chaired by former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans and Mohammed Sahnoun, a wellregarded former Algerian diplomat. Ten other commissioners were drawn from Europe, North America, Russia, Africa, South-East Asia, South Asia and Latin America, and the commission held public consultations in every continent. The commission’s report coined the phrase ‘responsibility to protect’ and tried to bridge the two positions on intervention by recasting the issue as one of protection and reformulating sovereignty as responsibility. The ICISS argued that states had a responsibility to protect their citizens from atrocities and that when they proved unwilling or unable to fulfil this duty, residual responsibility was transferred to the international community. From this perspective, R2P comprised three interrelated sets of responsibilities — to prevent, react and rebuild — and the issue of armed intervention was cast as only one element of a much broader protection picture.10 The release of the ICISS report coincided with 9/11 and a rapid shift in Western priorities towards counter-terrorism. As a result, although Canada was energetic in its advocacy of R2P, it was not the Western regional group (WEOG) that advanced R2P onto the UN’s agenda, but rather Kofi Annan himself, who adopted R2P in his blueprint for UN reform that set the agenda for

8  This is a necessary simplification. For a more detailed assessment of responses to Kosovo, see Albrecht Schnabel and Ramesh Thakur (eds.), Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention: Selective Indignation, Collective Action, and International Citizenship (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2000). 9  Kofi Annan, ‘Annual Report to the UN General Assembly’ (20 September 1999). 10  International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001).

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the 2005 World Summit.11 R2P was thus placed squarely on the international agenda in 2005 without having been specifically championed by any regional or political grouping. When the World Summit negotiations began, the negotiation of R2P was assisted by two sets of group dynamics that prevented R2P’s critics from painting the concept as a Western interventionist doctrine. First, the African Group embraced the concept prior to the negotiations. Second, UN member states from all regional groupings played roles as key negotiators on the World Summit text, with R2P finding advocates in most regional groupings. Although many governments outside the West were sceptical about R2P, seeing it as a potential licence for intervention, a significant shift in attitudes was afoot in Africa. Indeed, one study from 2005 found ‘little or no unease among African stakeholders’, noting that the reinterpretation of sovereignty (as responsibility) ‘does not trigger the same alarm bells in Africa as it does in other regions of the world’.12 This change in attitudes, which was characterized by the African Union (AU) as one from ‘non-intervention to non-indifference’, helped to create a constituency of states in the Global South that was willing to endorse R2P and ensured that the concept would not become victim to the UN’s ‘North–South’ theatrics.13 In 2003, the Organization for African Unity (OAU) was formally replaced by the AU. Among the factors precipitating this shift was a belief that the Global North had neglected African problems and that it was incumbent on the African continent’s leaders to shoulder responsibility for peace and security.14 Under the AU’s Constitutive Act, the new organization has a right of intervention ‘in respect of grave circumstances, namely war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity’.15 In constitutional terms, at least, this placed the AU well ahead of the UN on questions of intervention. This activist stance on responding to atrocity crimes also found its way into Africa’s common position 11  Kofi Annan, ‘In larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All’, A/59/2005 (21 March 2005). 12  Greg Puley, The Responsibility to Protect: East, West and Southern African Perspectives on Preventing and Responding to Humanitarian Crises, report for Africa Peace Forum, African Women’s Development and Communication Network and Project Ploughshares (September 2005), p. 19. 13   Paul D. Williams, ‘From Non-Intervention to Non-Indifference: The Origins and Development of the African Union’s Security Culture’, African Affairs, vol. 106, no. 423 (2007), pp. 253–279. 14  See Ben Kioko, ‘The Right of Interference under the African Union’s Constitutive Act: From Non-Interference to Non-Intervention’, International Review of the Red Cross, vol. 85, no. 6 (2003), p. 852. 15  Kioko, ‘The Right of Interference under the African Union’s Constitutive Act’, p. 817.

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on UN reform in March 2005. The ‘Ezulwini Consensus’ endorsed R2P, although it went marginally further than Kofi Annan was prepared to do in granting leeway to regional organizations. Almost pre-empting future debates within the wider General Assembly, Africa’s consensus position insisted that R2P not be used ‘as a pretext to undermine the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of states’ and insisted that any use of force comply with Article 51 of the UN Charter (self-defence) and Article 4(h) of the AU’s Constitutive Act.16 The second crucial initiative that undercut the possibility of R2P being seen as a ‘North–South’ issue was the negotiating strategy adopted by the President of the General Assembly and UN Secretariat in 2005. The effort to draft a reform document based on Annan’s proposals began in late 2004 when Foreign Minister of Gabon and UN General Assembly President Jean Ping began consulting with the permanent delegations. Ping brought together a core group of ten ambassadors, including only two from the WEOG (that is, from Australia and the Netherlands) to act as summit ‘facilitators’, supported by staff from the President’s office and the UN Secretariat.17 This is common practice when it comes to major initiatives in the General Assembly, since it distributes the practical burden of negotiating consensus among all member states and creates a space for those states that have regional experience to exert it.18 Among other things, it ensured that ‘Global South’ concerns about the potential for R2P to justify the overriding of sovereignty and unilateral armed intervention were built into the process and were addressed from the outset. Thus, the ICISS proposal that intervention could sometimes be legitimate even when not authorized by the UN Security Council was simply a nonstarter in the negotiations. It was never proposed by the facilitators and from the outset it was understood by key parties that any coercive aspects to R2P would have to be tied exclusively to the Security Council in order to assuage ‘Southern’ fears.19 Nonetheless, the facilitator approach was not universally supported by diplomats. US Permanent Representative John Bolton complained that it gave too much leeway for national differences among smaller countries to stall

16  AU Executive Council, ‘Common African Position’, sections B(i) and B(ii). 17  Sadly, no definitive list of the facilitating states remains and the most detailed account of the negotiations produced thus far, which includes in-depth discussion of the role of the facilitators, does not provide such a list. See Marc Pollentine, Constructing the Responsibility to Protect, Ph.D. thesis, Cardiff University (2012). 18  Most recently, for example, the same model was utilized for the negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. 19  Pollentine, Constructing the Responsibility to Protect, p. 293.

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progress.20 Bolton preferred an approach wherein the major powers would agree text to present to the wider membership. Others made precisely the opposite point, arguing that the approach actually limited the capacity of member states to negotiate points directly — this was a critique shared by some Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and Group of 77 (G-77) member states, which believed that the model imposed unfair limitations on their capacity to influence the course of the negotiations.21 Others, including some analysts, complain that the process gave an unduly rosy account of the state of consensus, as facilitators created draft text based on their perceptions of where the consensus lay.22 Partly as a result of these limitations, the final negotiations took on a more direct and line-by-line characteristic, although the facilitators — especially Canada and its Permanent Representative Allan Rock — still played an important role. Rock, for example, engaged the Rwandan and South African permanent representatives to act as key norm entrepreneurs with the African Group.23 South Africa’s Permanent Representative Dumisani Kumalo played an especially pivotal role in persuading the African Group to support R2P, a task reportedly made easier by the AU’s prior adoption of Article 4(h).24 The facilitators were, of course, charged with negotiating the full package of UN reforms under consideration at the World Summit. Of this, R2P was just a small part. The concept’s chances, however, were strengthened in part by the fact that the facilitators included key allies of R2P (Australia and the Netherlands) and that its negotiation was prioritized by other important actors in the negotiations. In particular, R2P was identified as a priority by the UN Secretary-General and was the key priority for Canadian diplomats, who operated with the direct support of Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin. The European Union (EU), and several of its member states, also prioritized R2P, as did influential ‘Southern’ states such as Rwanda.25 The concept thus enjoyed more support — and elicited more attention — than might otherwise have been the case for such a relatively small part of the overall reform package (three paragraphs from an Outcome Document of 178 paragraphs). This meant that the reform agenda was not seen as coming from one particular group. Africa’s prior consensus on R2P also meant that the concept won 20  Statement of the Honorable John R. Bolton, US Permanent Representative to the United Nations, ‘Lessons Learned from the September 14–16 United Nations High Level Event’, Hearing before the House International Relations Committee (28 September 2005), p. 4. 21  Pollentine, Constructing the Responsibility to Protect, p. 279. 22  Pollentine, Constructing the Responsibility to Protect, p. 279 ff. 23  Memo from Allan Rock to the author (12 November 2007). 24  Pollentine, Constructing the Responsibility to Protect, p. 296. 25  Pollentine, Constructing the Responsibility to Protect, p. 220.

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vocal support from some influential states in the Global South. South Africa maintained that although it was important to incorporate safeguards against abuse, R2P was essential for dealing with Africa’s myriad problems.26 Both Tanzania and — crucially — Rwanda supported R2P vocally in the negotiations. Rwanda, in particular, publicly challenged the sceptical position adopted by the Secretariat of the NAM and lent moral weight to R2P advocates — since states found it very hard to argue with Rwanda on the subject of genocide prevention.27 Both of these African states were encouraged by Canada’s Ambassador to the UN, Allan Rock, who provided advice to the Rwandans about how to frame their support for R2P. The close working relationship between Canada and Rwanda in the UN began in 2004 when their permanent delegations in New York co-hosted a commemoration of the Rwandan genocide. It helped spearhead an important relationship with sub-Saharan Africa that proved crucially important in the final days of the negotiations. Rwanda told G-77 sceptics that R2P might provide real protection against future genocides, while South Africa told a G-77 session on R2P that ‘we’re not likely to respond to threats of genocide in London, Rome or San Francisco. […] This is all about us, in our countries, on our continent’.28 From the outset, therefore, R2P’s politics were conceptualized and practised in a cross-regional fashion, with the effect of marginalizing the UN’s formal regional and political groupings, with the notable exception of Africa and the AU. This trend continued after 2005, with a proliferation of informal groupings connected to R2P, most of which attempted — usually successfully — to maintain the cross-regional mix of states achieved in the concept’s formative years. Moreover, while the embedding of annual debates on R2P in the UN General Assembly and its implementation in substantive cases has brought new political groupings to the fore — notably the EU, which presents a common annual statement on R2P, and the once-sceptical League of Arab States — it has also complicated issues within the AU, where support for the norm may remain, but where a plurality of views about implementation (and about the related International Criminal Court) have emerged. Since 2005, a number of avenues have been developed to deepen the engagement of member states beyond the annual informal and interactive 26  See comments by the chargé d’affaires of South Africa’s Permanent Mission to the UN, Xoliso Mabhongo, at the informal meeting to consider the draft outcome document (20 April 2005). 27  See Statement by Augustine Mahinga to the United Nations at the Informal Thematic Consultations of the General Assembly on Cluster III: Freedom to Live in Dignity (20 April 2005). 28  These points are taken from a memo from Allan Rock to the author (12 November 2007).

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dialogue of the General Assembly on R2P and the Security Council’s open debates on the protection of civilians in armed conflict. Most prominent among these are the Group of Friends, the Focal Points Initiative, the Swiss-led Global Action Against Mass Atrocity Crimes, the Latin American Network for Genocide Prevention, and the more recent ‘Core Group’ of states at the UN in Geneva and the ‘Core Group’ of states negotiating on a possible new General Assembly resolution. Initially established by Canada to promote R2P prior to its adoption by UN member states in 2005, today the Group of Friends comprises around 60 member states that are drawn from every regional grouping (for example, members from East Asia, Singapore and the Philippines attend Friends’ meetings). The group describes itself as ‘an informal cross-regional group of UN member states that share a common interest in the responsibility to protect and advancing the norm within the UN system’. There is no formal ‘membership’ and attendance at meetings varies widely; the EU Delegation to the UN also participates.29 Thus, the Group of Friends is primarily a network of diplomats based in permanent missions to the UN, which is designed to help coordinate strategy at UN Headquarters in New York. Chaired by the Netherlands and Rwanda (since 2010), the Group of Friends typically meets four times a year at ambassadorial level and occasionally at the working level to discuss matters related to R2P’s political and conceptual development and situations of concern.30 Meetings often focus on specific country situations or developments within the UN. The Group of Friends has coordinated diplomatic strategy on the inclusion of R2P in Security Council statements and General Assembly deliberations and has coordinated support for the Secretary-General’s proposals to the Fifth (Budget) Committee (see below). The Group of Friends also works closely with the UN, inviting briefings from officials in the Department of Political Affairs and inviting the Special Advisers on Genocide Prevention and R2P and the working-level experts from the Office of Genocide Prevention and R2P to meetings as a matter of routine. 29  ‘Statement by the Group of Friends on Responsibility to Protect on the situation in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’ (25 February 2010), available online at http://www.missionfn newyork.um.dk/en/menu/statements/StatementbytheGroupofFriendsonResponsi bilitytoProtectonthesituationintheLibyanArabJamahiriya.htm?WBCMODE=Presentation Unpublished. 30  The Dutch Advisory Council on International Affairs advised that the Netherlands consider using the Group of Friends to advance quiet discussion about criteria for the use of force and other sensitive conceptual issues. See Advisory Council on International Affairs, The Netherlands and the Responsibility to Protect: The Responsibility to Protect People from Mass Atrocities, no. 70 (June 2010), pp. 60-61.

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It also bears mentioning that prior to the first few interactive dialogues of the General Assembly on R2P (2009-2011), the most sceptical states also convened themselves — at the Malaysian permanent mission — to assess what they expected R2P’s advocates to do and to determine their own strategy. Always a small and ad-hoc group — comprising Malaysia, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Sudan and others — these states have gradually drifted apart and no longer meet informally on R2P. Indeed, since joining the UN Security Council in 2015, Malaysia’s position on R2P has shifted significantly.31 A second informal grouping is the R2P Focal Points Network. The R2P Focal Points Initiative is another cross-regional initiative that was launched in May 2011 by the governments of Denmark and Ghana (with Australia and Costa Rica subsequently joining the facilitating group) and is administered by the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. Thus far, more than 50 states — including members of every regional grouping (the Asia Pacific Group is the least well represented, with only four members — Japan, South Korea, Jordan and Qatar) have appointed Focal Points. It is envisaged that the Focal Points’ meetings will become regular annual events. Unsurprisingly, given different systems of government and bureaucratic cultures, there is no single template for the role of a national Focal Point or uniformity on where within the government a Focal Point should sit. At the most basic level, the Focal Point should be a senior official who is ‘responsible for the promotion of R2P at the national level’ and for supporting ‘international cooperation on the issue through participating in a global network’.32 Other informal groupings include GAAMAC, another cross-regional government-led initiative that arose from a series of conferences organized by (yet another) cross-regional grouping — Argentina, Cambodia, Switzerland and Tanzania. Still in its formative phase, GAAMAC is a self-conscious attempt to establish a ‘community of commitment’ on behalf of R2P and genocide prevention.33 In addition, there are two relatively new regional groupings of states — the Latin American Network for Genocide and Mass Atrocities Prevention and the African Network, both of which are administered by the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation (AIPR). AIPR established the Latin American Network for Genocide and Mass Atrocities Prevention in cooperation with Argentina’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of 31  Author’s interview with a senior diplomat who was present at these meetings (6 September 2014). 32  Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, National R2P Focal Points: Recom­ mendations (New York: Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, 2015), p. 1. 33  See online at http://www.gaamac.org.

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Justice, Security and Human Rights. The Latin American Network has eighteen member governments (including several that are sceptical of R2P, but happy to support genocide prevention)34 and ‘was conceived as a capacity-building mechanism for the region, as well as a forum to support the development of more effective policy to prevent genocide and other mass atrocities’. Its members are expected to appoint a national Focal Point to ‘coordinate policy and share information’ with each other.35 The African Network is still at its formative stage.36 Informal groups have also been established in response to more specific needs. For example, friends of R2P established a ‘Core Group’ of states in Geneva in order to coordinate R2P-related activities in the UN’s Geneva-based institutions, especially the Human Rights Council. As with the New York-based groups, the Geneva ‘Core Group’ is informal and cross-regional, including Australia, Ghana, Hungary, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uruguay. In 2016, the Core Group evolved into a second ‘Group of Friends’ network for the UN’s Genevabased institutions.37 Another ‘cross-regional group’, meanwhile, was established in New York in 2015, to canvas positions on and share the drafting of a potential new General Assembly resolution on R2P. This group, whose members were drawn from every regional grouping and including Australia, Korea, Malaysia, Brazil and Slovenia, came together in an ad-hoc way to find common ground on a resolution and to consult and coordinate with the wider UN membership.38 From this brief overview, we can see that R2P was developed as a way of bridging what was seen as a pronounced ‘North–South’ policy divide. Accordingly, while those wanting to block R2P’s adoption were eager to paint the norm as 34  Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. 35   Declaration of the Latin American Network for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, Fourth Focal Points Meeting, Santiago, Chile (29 May 2015). 36  Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation, ‘Africa Takes Great Stride Towards Preventing Atrocities in Golden Jubilee Year’, press release (20 February 2013), available online at http://www.auschwitzinstitute.org/news/auschwitz-institute-and-african-union -create-african-network-for-genocide-and-mass-atrocity-prevention/ (accessed 14 June 2016). 37  See ‘Statement by the Group of Friends of the Responsibility to Protect in Geneva at the Informal Interactive Dialogue with Under-Secretary-General Mr Adama Dieng, Special Adviser to Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide’ (3 March 2016). 38  Author’s correspondence with senior diplomats from Australia, Brazil, Luxembourg and South Korea (2015–2016). Additionally, the author participated in one of this crossregional group’s informal meetings.

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Western in orientation so as to mobilize the UN’s large groups — the G-77 and NAM — against it, advocates were always careful to ensure cross-regional inclusivity. As a result, with the exception of the African Group in the lead-up to 2005, political and regional groups have played a relatively marginal role in the advancement of R2P in the UN. Instead, emphasis was placed on the development of cross-regional groupings, each with distinct roles: at one end of the spectrum, the national Focal Points Network, which was designed to be a permanent grouping of like-minded states committed to implementing R2P in their domestic and foreign policies; and at the other end, the ‘Cross-regional Group’, which was convened for the specific purpose of negotiating a potential new General Assembly resolution. The following sections consider the interaction, politics and influence of these different configurations. 3

Group Interaction

Over time, two types of informal group have risen to prominence in relation to R2P: semi-permanent informal groupings of like-minded states (the Group of Friends, Focal Point Network members and the Geneva Core Group); and adhoc groupings established for specific purposes (such as the informal group of sceptics, the cross-regional group for a 2015 General Assembly resolution). By contrast, the UN’s political and regional groups (including the formal regional groupings, the NAM, G-77 and regional organizations) have played a more marginal role. The principal reason why these informal groupings have proven more significant than the political and regional groups is that R2P politics have effectively cut across traditional dividing lines, especially beyond the WEOG. This has made it difficult for larger regional or political groups (such as the G-77 and NAM) to articulate common positions on R2P-related matters. As noted earlier, the main exception to this general insight is the early, and quite pivotal, role played by the African Group within the UN. By endorsing R2P in advance of the 2005 World Summit, the group made it difficult for sceptical states to paint the norm as a ‘Western’ or ‘Northern’ initiative inimical to the interests of the Global South. This was in part an accidental product of the fact that — almost uniquely among the UN’s formal regional groups — the African Group strives to reach a consensus position among its members on important issues before the General Assembly.39 With 54 votes (the largest of 39  On making this point, albeit in the context of UN Security Council reform, see Vincent Pouliot, International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilateral Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 163.

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any regional group), the African Group judges — with good reason — that its members carry more influence when they act together as a single bloc in the Assembly. The challenge of coordinating positions is helped by the fact that the African Group is unique, inasmuch as its membership overlaps almost perfectly with the membership of the AU. In contrast, the Asian Group does not seek internal consensus prior to General Assembly debates and is almost entirely used for negotiating ‘election’ to various UN decision-making bodies.40 None of the Asia-Pacific’s various regional organizations — the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the Asia-Pacific Regional Cooperation (APEC) — come close to directly overlapping with the composition of the Asian Group at the UN. Yet although the African Group played a significant role in the deliberations of 2005, over time African consensus on the implementation of R2P has been difficult to find and neither the group nor the AU have brought common positions to the General Assembly’s dialogues on R2P. That is primarily because African states have come to disagree about the relative merits of the norm itself (for example, contrast the sceptical views of Zimbabwe and Sudan with the proactive support for R2P offered by Ghana, Botswana, Rwanda and Mozambique) and do not see themselves as bound by AU common positions.41 This was most starkly the case in deliberations on the crisis in Libya in March 2011: while the AU determined that it preferred negotiations over the use of force, all three African members of the Security Council at the time (Nigeria, South Africa and Gabon) voted for Resolution 1973 authorizing the use of force.42 Beyond Africa — and with the notable exception of the role of the League of Arab States on Libya (below) — other formal groups have tended to play marginal roles on R2P and its implementation. This was largely because the political dividing lines cut across group loyalties as a result of a very deliberate strategy to win cross-regional support for R2P and bridge the sovereignty– human rights divide. For example, under the chairmanship of Malaysia — an early sceptic whose position began to change only in the 2010s — the NAM Secretariat issued statements objecting to the inclusion of R2P in the World Summit Outcome, but substantively these were summaries of individual

40   Author’s interview with diplomats from three Asia-Pacific Group member states, (9-11 September 2015). 41  All UN member state statements to each of the interactive dialogues (2009–2015) can be found online at http://www.globalr2p.org/resources/897. 42  See Alex de Waal, ‘African Roles in the Libyan Conflict of 2011’, International Affairs, vol. 89, no. 2 (2013), pp. 365–379.

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country positions rather than a consensus position of the NAM as a whole.43 Once it became clear, however, that a significant number of NAM members supported the norm (including all African members and a large majority of Latin American members), the Secretariat was forced to change its position and recognize that a diversity of views exists.44 Since them, the NAM has not adopted a position on R2P. The G-77 also failed to articulate a position on R2P for similar reasons: the group was divided when Rwanda and South Africa offered strong statements of support for R2P at a G-77 open meeting on the subject in the build-up to the 2005 World Summit.45 Regional organizations faced similar issues — the EU being the only one to develop common positions on R2P. While East Asia’s regional bodies — like the Asian Group in the UN — prefer not to adopt common positions on external matters, Latin America was deeply divided on R2P with a large majority of states supportive of the principle and a small, but vocal, minority opposed.46 Between 2005 and 2011, the League of Arab States (LAS) was broadly hostile to R2P but failed to establish a common position owing to the support of states such as Qatar and Jordan.47 As a result of the Arab Spring, the League’s position underwent a significant change as the organization confronted a series of crises in its own region. In 2011, the LAS took the extraordinary step of suspending Libya’s membership and calling for the imposition of a no-fly zone.48

43  ‘Non-Aligned Movement Statement on Responsibility to Protect (delivered by Malaysia)’, New York (April 2005), available online at http://www.iilj.org/courses/documents/ DevelopingCountryStatementsonR2P.pdf. On Malaysia’s position on R2P, see Shazelina Abidin, The Politics of the Responsibility to Protect: Why States Are Not Authorizing the UN to Implement R2P, Ph.D. thesis, University of Sheffield (2016). 44  The NAM’s statement at the 2009 UN General Assembly dialogue recognized ‘mixed feelings and thoughts’ on the implementation of R2P and endorsed further deliberations to ‘reconcile all the divergent concerns and viewpoints’; see ‘Statement by H.E. Ambassador Maged A. Abdelaziz, Permanent Representative of Egypt, on Behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement’, UN General Assembly (23 July 2009). 45  Memo from Allan Rock, Permanent Representative of Canada to the UN in 2005, to the author (12 November 2007). 46  These disputes are a matter of public record and can be seen in the differing perspectives presented to the UN General Assembly. All of the statements can be found online at http://www.globalr2p.org/resources/897. 47  Fateh Azzem and Coralie Hindawi, ‘The Arab World’, in Alex J. Bellamy and Tim Dunne (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Responsibility to Protect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 48  See Mikael Eriksson, ‘Towards Selective Regionalization? The Intervention in Libya and the Emerging Global Order’, in Peter Wallensteen and Anders Bjurner (eds), Regional Organizations and Peacemaking: Challenges to the UN (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 218.

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Not surprisingly, therefore, groupings on R2P have tended to emerge along lines of support and opposition to the norm, rather than more established dividing lines. These groups have often emerged as a result of needs that have been identified by states. Thus, the Group of Friends in New York was partly a response to the failure of like-minded states to coordinate their response the UN Secretary-General’s first report on R2P, which led to a fractious debate on strategy and resulted in Guatemala going it alone in negotiating (successfully, it transpired) a General Assembly resolution.49 Its purpose is primarily to coordinate like-minded governments in the UN’s New York bodies — a goal mirrored by the recently established Group of Friends in Geneva.50 Likewise, the Focal Points Network arose out of the need to find practical ways of ensuring that states follow up on their commitments to R2P with implementation — in both domestic and foreign policies.51 Sometimes, however, groups have emerged as a result of initiatives from individual or small groups of states attempting to advance their own interests or conceptions. GAAMAC, for example, arose from a four-state partnership of regional consultation, but was advanced strongly by the government of Switzerland, in part to support its bid for election to the UN Security Council.52 The Latin American and African networks, meanwhile, arose from the training work undertaken by a non-governmental organization, the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation.53 Several GAAMAC members have raised questions about the duplication of resources with the Focal Points Network and have proposed the rationalization of groupings and concentration of resources.54 Meanwhile, although the Latin American and African groupings have proven to be useful vehicles 49  Author’s interviews with senior diplomats and UN officials (6 September 2014 and 9–11 September 2015). The author has participated in several Group of Friends’ meetings where these points have been made. 50  Points made at the informal dialogue of Group of Friends’ member states in Geneva to commemorate the tenth anniversary of R2P (19 November 2015). For details, see http:// graduateinstitute.ch/events/_/events/corporate/2015/10th-anniversary-of-the-responsi. The author delivered a statement at the informal dialogue and attended a side-event of the ‘Core Group’ and other interested parties hosted by the Permanent Mission of Australia, where the purposes of the Group of Friends were discussed. 51  Author’s frequent communication with Simon Adams, Executive Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, which houses the Secretariat of the Global Focal Points Network. 52  The author participated both in the pre-GAAMAC meetings and in GAAMAC II. The association of the initiative with Switzerland’s bid for a UN Security Council seat is widely suggested by diplomats. 53  See online at http://www.auschwitzinstitute.org/what-we-do/. 54  Author’s engagement with diplomats of at least three prominent states involved with GAAMAC (2014–2015).

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for training officials, their broader impact on government policy is less clear. Thus, while the proliferation of related informal groups can help to tailor policies to the specific needs of individual regions or parts of a rapidly evolving agenda, it can also lead to unhelpful duplication and competition — as, for example, in the emergence of different networks of ‘Focal Points’ — one, a global network of formally appointed senior officials; the other, regional Latin American and African networks of self-selecting Focal Points from various levels of government. 4

Group Politics

Have these various groups facilitated ‘games’ or ‘debates’ — to borrow Anatol Rapoport’s terminology, as described in the introduction to this special issue of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy — about R2P and its implementation?55 The answer is probably both. Because R2P was conceived, conceptually and politically, as a bridge-builder, it has avoided being dragged into the theatrics of the UN’s ‘North–South’ political divide. What it means to ‘win’ in this context, therefore, is somewhat different to other policy issues — such as development and democracy — that have become staple parts of the UN’s ‘theatre’.56 From the outset for R2P, ‘winning’ politically has meant securing as large a consensus among states as possible in order to demonstrate the principle’s capacity for bridge-building. That said, some of the informal groupings were initially established to improve the tactical capacity of like-minded states to prevail in key debates. Perhaps the most important, yet least well understood, of these has been the annual discussion in the UN General Assembly’s Fifth Committee on the budget for the UN’s Office for Genocide Prevention and R2P. In successive years, Cuba and Venezuela have tried to limit the UN’s capacity for work on R2P by preventing funds from flowing to the office to support work other than that connected with its mandate on genocide. Often these votes come late at night in the days immediately before Christmas. The Group of Friends has played a useful role in ensuring that sufficient numbers of states are aware of the challenge and are present in the Fifth Committee to vote in support of the office. 55  See Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith, ‘Introduction: The Multilateral Politics of UN Diplomacy’, The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, vol. 12, no. 2 (2017), pp. 95–112, this issue; Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games and Debates (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1974). 56  Weiss, What’s Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix It, pp. 50–71.

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This has resulted in a string of votes — by large majorities — in support of the office, which has had the effect of gradually strengthening financial support to it. Here, however, the role of the Group of Friends has not been one of galvanizing fresh support, but of coordinating the support that the principle already has to ensure that this is reflected in relatively obscure votes of the Fifth Committee, where opponents have tried to stall the agenda.57 Yet perhaps precisely because R2P has avoided becoming a ‘North–South’ issue over which the UN’s established groups clash in ritualistic fashion, most of its groupings are focused on promoting debates rather than winning games. In some cases, ad-hoc groups were established precisely to facilitate debate with the wider membership. For example, states that were interested in pursuing a new General Assembly resolution in 2015–2016 consciously decided not to launch negotiations through the Group of Friends, Network of Focal Points or WEOG because of the imperative for consensus-building.58 As such, an adhoc group of interested states was established that included advocates such as Australia, states such as Brazil that were broadly supportive of the norm but with distinct perspectives to bring to the debate (in Brazil’s case, its concept of ‘responsibility while protecting’ aimed at limiting the ability of states acting on UN Security Council mandates to use force to determine their own courses of action independently of the Council),59 and states such as Malaysia that had been quite critical of R2P. Led by South Korea, members of this adhoc group are expected to consult with like-minded diplomats and engage in dialogue within the group, aimed at finding common ground on the text for a resolution.60 This may, of course, lead to the lowest-common denominator, but that is not necessarily a bad thing when the aim is to inch an agenda forward while preserving, as far as possible, the consensus on which it is based. This approach helpfully marries the pragmatic need that negotiations on early drafts be limited to a few states that are capable of acting as ‘bellwethers’ for the larger membership, with an inclusive approach aimed at identifying common ground and the limits of possibility. 57  For a good summary, see the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, ABACQ and Fifth Committee Negotiations on the Joint Office, report (New York: Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, January 2011), available online at http://www.globalr2p.org/ media/files/report-acabq-and-fifth-committee-negotiations.pdf. 58  The author was present at one of the conception meetings, New York (15 October 2015). 59  On which, see Paula Almeida, ‘The Brazilian View of the Responsibility to Protect’, Global Responsibility to Protect, vol. 6, no. 1 (2014), pp. 29–63; Derek McDougall, ‘Responsibility whilst Protecting’, Global Responsibility to Protect, vol. 6, no. 1 (2014), pp. 64–87. 60  Based on the author’s own notes from multiple meetings that he has attended and conversations with diplomats directly involved in the process (September 2015–March 2016).

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Informal groups have also lowered the bar to participating in decisionmaking about R2P, improving the inclusiveness of informal dialogue on R2P and encouraging a surprisingly wide range of states to become engaged. For example, only five years after R2P’s launch, more than one-quarter of the UN’s membership has appointed a national R2P Focal Point. Because it is well understood that the precise roles given to Focal Points will differ from place to place, and that there is no single template, states are able to participate in the network at relatively modest cost. This has proven advantageous for at least two reasons. First, diplomatically, it has ensured that the Focal Points Network has become an inclusive grouping of states from different regions and of different regime types, and not just an exclusive club for Westerners. This keeps the network squarely in the spirit of cross-regional collaboration, which that has animated the whole R2P endeavour. Second, functionally, it has opened opportunities for engagement with states on a wide range of issues. Indeed, because its deliberations are largely off the record and because it encourages informal bilateral engagement, the Focal Points Network has opened up safe spaces in which states can engage seriously with the process of implementing R2P. For example, at the 2014 network meeting in Botswana, the presence of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda helped convey to WEOG members the enormity and complexity of political projects such as building the rule of law in ways that are not possible in more formal settings.61 At the 2015 meeting in Spain, Focal Points Network members shared experiences on countering violent extremism and preventing sexual violence — the latter being an uncomfortable subject matter for officials representing countries with questionable records on gender equality. Although the inclusion of states such as the DRC, Rwanda, Qatar and Jordan has attracted criticism from some (Western) academics, the diplomatic reality is that their participation is vital for maintaining the inclusiveness of dialogue about R2P, and that progressive change can only be achieved through such engagement.62 As such, the Focal Points Network establishes a low bar to active participation and offers a framework in which states can engage with each other on both the domestic and foreign affairs aspects of implementing R2P.

61  ‘Fourth Annual Meeting of the Global Network of R2P Focal Points, Gaborone, Botswana, June 2014’, Meeting Summary (New York: Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, 12 September 2014). Also, author interview with diplomats present at the meeting (July 2014). 62  The author participated in this meeting. For a summary, see ‘Fifth Annual Meeting of the Global Network of R2P Focal Points, Madrid, Spain, 23–24 June 2015’, Meeting Summary (New York: Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, 22 October 2015).

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However effective they have been in helping to advance R2P through the UN system, the informal groups established to support the principle have been less successful in two key areas. First, they have not necessarily succeeded in establishing leadership on key issues. At several critical junctures, the perceived need for an inter-regional approach has inhibited the capacity of groups to lead on an issue. For example, many ‘friends of R2P’ opted not to lobby actively on behalf of a resolution in 2009 for fear that it could provoke a counter-productive backlash among the wider membership. As a result of that reticence, Guatemala took the task upon itself.63 As a consequence, a more recent practice has been for states to establish additional inter-regional groups for specific and limited purposes. Second, informal groupings have not always succeeded in harmonizing the positions of their members, or in advancing common positions. The Group of Friends attempts to set priorities prior to the annual dialogues of the UN General Assembly, and some of these are evident in the statements of the group itself (which delivered a joint statement in 2015) and its individual members. Yet take-up is relatively patchy. For example, in 2015, one of the principal objectives of the group was to persuade the General Assembly to adopt a further resolution on R2P, yet many group members omitted to mention this in their contributions to the dialogue.64 For its part, the Focal Points Network does not (yet) aspire to facilitate common positions on specific matters. 5

Group Influence

To what extent have the informal groups influenced formal groups, and has the whole panoply of groups influenced UN policy? The first thing that can be said is that R2P has influenced the way in which the UN responds to atrocity crimes. The UN Security Council is more likely to respond to atrocity crimes by passing a resolution than it was pre-R2P, and when it does respond, the Security Council is much more likely to prioritize the protection of civilians from atrocity crimes than it was prior to R2P.65 Also important, however, is the way in which the UN’s wider membership has responded to obvious failures 63  This point has been raised with the author by multiple diplomats and UN officials. 64  Compare the statements in 2015 on behalf of the Group of Friends with those of individual members. All of the statements are available online at http://www.globalr2p.org/ resources/897. 65  The empirical evidence behind these claims is provided in detail in Alex J. Bellamy, ‘The Humanization of Security? Towards an International Human Protection Regime’, European Journal of International Security, vol. 1, no. 1 (2016), pp. 112–133.

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to prevent. In the case of Syria, for example, the UN General Assembly voted by large majorities to censure the Security Council’s poor performance and endorse policies that had been vetoed in the Council. The General Assembly has also voted to bring human rights emergencies that may include atrocity crimes to the Security Council’s agenda, as it did with regard to North Korea in late 2014.66 So to the extent that the various groups described above have sustained and advanced international consensus on R2P, it can be said that they have influenced policy. In the case of R2P, it seems clear that single-issue groups exert influence by bringing the like-minded together, lowering entry barriers to newcomers that want to express their commitment, deepening member states’ commitment to the issue at hand and — perhaps most significant in this case — demonstrating cross-regional support for an issue in a way that undermines attempts to paint it in terms of the UN’s ‘North–South’ divide. In particular, the informal groups on R2P have achieved both ‘presence’ and ‘resonance’, as described in the introductory article in this special issue of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy. In terms of presence, the Group of Friends was permitted by the President of the General Assembly to make a joint statement at the Assembly’s 2015 dialogue, signalling a degree of recognition of its authoritativeness on this subject.67 In terms of resonance, specific policy prescriptions that arose within the Group of Friends, such as the need for a new General Assembly resolution on R2P or the proposal for a code of conduct to restrain the use of the Security Council veto when atrocity crimes are committed, have secured support from a wider body of states beyond the group. For example, by late 2015, some 114 states had pledged their support for a code of conduct on the use of the veto in cases of atrocity crimes.68 However, there is little evidence that any of the groups have prompted other groups to alter course, or that they have directly influenced policy on a specific issue. To the extent that the UN’s formal political and regional groups influenced one another, that came only in 2005 as the African group — and key individual states such as Rwanda, Tanzania and South Africa — stymied attempts to utilize the NAM and G-77 to block consensus on R2P. Having prevented those groups from opposing R2P, little attention has been paid to persuading them to commit to supporting the principle. Instead, like-minded states and advocacy groups have focused on identifying and persuading individual states 66  A/RES/69/ 188 (18 December 2014). 67  The author participated in, and delivered a statement at, this informal dialogue. 68  This was a campaign that was led by the Global Centre for R2P; see online at http://www .globalr2p.org/our_work/un_security_council_code_of_conduct.

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to join one or more of the supporter networks, always with a keen eye on preserving regional balance.69 With the exception of the African Group, the UN’s formal regional groups have tended not to articulate a common position on R2P — choosing instead to implicitly mirror the NAM’s position that a ‘plurality of views’ exists. Nor have there been serious questions raised about ‘defections’ from regional groups, since states largely acknowledge that there are supporters and critics of R2P in every continent. As a result, the proliferation of informal groupings and bifurcation of opinions on R2P within regional groupings has not been understood as an assault on the cohesiveness of the regional groups themselves. Moreover, there is little evidence to suggest that informal groups have directly influenced UN Security Council decision-making or the positions of the Permanent Five on individual crises — although the same could also be said of the political and regional groups too. Security Council decision-making is driven by a broad range of considerations, including the often divergent national interests of the five permanent members and the Council’s need to balance the imperatives of human rights’ protection with the maintenance of international peace and security.70 As such, the Security Council takes on its own political dynamics and it is not uncommon to see members vote independently of the wishes of their regional grouping. As noted earlier in this article, all three of Africa’s UN Security Council members in 2011 voted to support measures on Libya that were different from those advanced by the AU. That said, one of the principal functions of an informal group is to deepen the commitment of its member states to the principle at hand. It is no coincidence that states that are active in these informal groupings are also the states most willing and active in pressing the case for R2P in the UN’s political bodies. Guatemala’s role in the General Assembly, for example, was described earlier. Another key advocate of R2P, Australia, used its UN Security Council term to press the case for R2P, achieving some success with Resolution 2165 (2014), which referred to the principle and authorized the delivery of humanitarian aid to Syria without the Syrian government’s consent. That resolution, which Australia signalled its intent to pursue at the very start of its term on the Security Council, took eighteen months to negotiate. 69  The Asia-Pacific Centre for R2P, which the author directs, has played a part in these recruitment efforts. As such, the author has participated in both coordination meetings and meetings with Permanent Representatives from the Asia-Pacific region that are aimed at increasing participation in R2P’s informal groupings. 70  For the best account, see Edward C. Luck, The United Nations Security Council (London: Routledge, 2006).

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6 Conclusion This article suggests that informal groups have played an important role in negotiating R2P in the UN system. Although one of the UN’s regional groups — the African Group — played a crucial role in negotiations on the adoption of R2P, this proved to be an exceptional case, because informal, cross-regional groups tended to play a more significant and influential role in R2P’s development. This was primarily because R2P was designed from the outset to reconfigure debates about sovereignty and human rights that had become mired in the UN’s deeper ‘North–South’ politics, and to secure support in different regions of the world. As a result, ‘Southern’ concerns about sovereignty were taken on board at an early stage by proponents, who ensured that R2P remained consistent with existing international law. It also meant that opponents were unable to mobilize either the NAM or the G-77 against R2P, because significant voices within those groups supported the emerging norm. Similarly, patterns of support and opposition cut across regional lines, with the result that with the exception of WEOG, whose members are uniformly supportive, each of the UN’s regional groupings includes both critics and champions of R2P. Informal, cross-regional groups were therefore developed along these political lines, initially to coordinate stances and prepare negotiating tactics. The least formal of these was an ad-hoc group of sceptical states, which has since stopped meeting regularly. Supporters of R2P, meanwhile, coalesced into a number of informal groups that were designed to coordinate policy and encourage implementation of R2P. The article shows that while these groups — like others in the UN system — might not directly impact upon individual policy decisions in the UN Security Council, they have nevertheless helped to deepen the commitment of states to R2P, supported the principle’s tactical advancement through the UN, and have lowered the bar to participation in debates about the implementation of R2P, which has helped to widen the circle of support for the principle. In terms of their sources of influence, three of the factors identified in the introduction stand out. First, the groups’ unity of purpose. These informal groups were mobilized in support of a specific and narrowly defined goal — to secure the adoption and implementation of R2P. This principle runs to only two paragraphs of text and relates to only one, relatively specific, element of human security. The fact that the informal groups comprised states from every region was significant, however, since those key states were able to translate R2P into a form that is compatible with regional principles and values — showing, for example, its compatibility with the African conception of ‘nonindifference’. Over time, size has also become a key asset, with one-quarter of

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the UN’s membership appointing R2P Focal Points. Second, the employment of social resources by states with significant credibility on this issue proved pivotal. Most obviously, for example, Rwanda played a central role in persuading African states, in particular, to endorse R2P and its implementation. After the international community’s failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide in 1994, few — if any — states were prepared to challenge Rwanda’s advocacy of R2P. Other states, such as Guatemala and post-apartheid South Africa, made similar use of their social capital, and this was a key source of group influence. Third, R2P was negotiated and implemented against a backdrop of shared recognition of the UN’s failures in Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere, as well as acknowledgement that the organization’s legitimacy rested on its capacity to do better in future. This shared understanding of the issue’s relevance, and recognition that R2P sought to balance humanitarian imperatives with sovereign prerogatives — established a relatively permissive political context for the informal groups. Finally, it is also worth noting that one of the other more prominent factors — material resources — played less of a role in shaping the outcomes described above. This was most obviously the case in 2009, when Guatemala alone sponsored the successful UN General Assembly resolution on R2P.

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Chapter 12

Discussing Global Health and Access to Medicines in the UN System: the Case of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) Andrea Ribeiro Hoffmann and Jana Tabak 1 Introduction The Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) is a relatively new organization, having been created only in 2008, but it has become extremely active in the discussions and negotiations related to global health governance.* Despite the paralysis of this organization in 2018, caused by the escalation of the democratic crisis in Venezuela, cooperation on health has not been completely interrupted, as will be explored below. Debates on global health take place in a number of institutions within the United Nations (UN) system, including the UN General Assembly (UNGA), the Human Rights Council (HRC), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Health issues have gained increasing prominence on the global agenda. In 2000, two key documents were adopted, facilitating the normative evolution of the right to health on the global level. The first was the ‘General Comment on the Right to Health’ by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; and the second was the ‘Resolution on Intellectual Property and Human Rights’ by the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights.1 The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) also had an impact on the global health agenda. Eight MDGs affirmed health as a focal point of global governance, with three of them targeting specific health objectives (HIV/AIDS, maternal health and child health), and four others attempting *  The authors would like to thank Juliana Tappe for bibliographical research assistance. This chapter contains material published as part of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy’s Special Issue: ‘The Multilateral Politics of UN Diplomacy’, Volume 12, Number 2, 2017, edited by Katie Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith. See http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/ journals/1871191x/12/2-3. 1  Laurence R. Helfer, ‘Pharmaceutical Patents and the Human Right to Health: The Contested Evolution of the Transnational Legal Order on Access to Medicines’, in Terence Halliday and Greg Shaffer (eds), Transnational Legal Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 311–339.

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to improve social determinants of health. This momentum has been coined as a revolution in global health. Development assistance for health rose from US$ 5.6 billion in 1990 to US$ 21.8 billion in 2007, with the amount allocated to HIV/AIDS alone changing from 3.4 per cent to 23 per cent of the total increase. In addition to the growth in the budget, health is no longer a purely humanitarian objective, but linked to national and international security, as well as economic and social development. New institutions and new actors have become increasingly active in global health governance, challenging previous patterns and hierarchies of multilateral cooperation. Private actors, such as multinational corporations from the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, and nongovernmental organizations and philanthropic foundations, especially the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have become key actors in health governance.2 These developments call for a closer look at health and the intersection between the global and regional levels. Regional organizations have become more present in international dialogues despite the variance in their formal and informal ‘actorness’.3 The European Union (EU) is the most advanced in this respect, but other regional organizations — such as UNASUR, the African Union (AU) and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) — have also become key actors in the processes of global governance. In the case of health, issues such as the responsibility of governmental and private actors, and linkages with other areas such as economic development and security, have been addressed by these organizations. Regional organizations have become key actors in the UN system in addition to the original five ‘official’ UN regional groups — namely, the African Group, the Asia-Pacific Group, the Eastern European Group, the Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC), and the Western European and Other Group (WEOG) (see Chapter 1). South American countries do participate in GRULAC, as well as political groups such as the G-77 and a number of regional organizations, including the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Southern Common Market (Mercosur, from the Spanish Mercado Común del Sur), but, as this chapter argues, in the area of health, UNASUR has become a key actor at the UN level of multilateral cooperation. By focusing on UNASUR, 2  David Fidler, The Challenges of Global Health Governance, Working Paper (New York, NY: Council on Foreign Relations, May 2010), pp. 7–8. 3  Charlotte Bretherton and John Vogler, The European Union as a Global Actor (London: Routledge, 1999, 2nd edition 2006); and Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith, ‘Introduction’, The European Union at the United Nations: Leader, Partner or Failure? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

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this chapter aims to contribute to the scarce literature on groups with a regional basis beyond the official regional groups and the EU. This chapter addresses questions such as why South American states used UNASUR to discuss global health, as well as the influence of South American identity and shared normative issues in the practices of multilateral cooperation at the UN level. More specifically, the chapter argues that the creation of UNASUR and its activism in global health governance evolved in the context of the reconfiguration of multilateral cooperation in the Americas, in which health has been defined as a human right and key to regional citizenship. UNASUR’s framing of health differed from the more conventional framings in other regional organizations in the Americas — such as the Andean Community (CAN), Mercosur, and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the specialized health agency of the Organization of American States (OAS). This differentiated concept and approach to dealing with global health governance resulted from the reconfiguration of regional identities, but also from UNASUR’s mandate and capacities, and the interests of its member states, such as Brazil, which became very active in health diplomacy in the last decade. The chapter first discusses the practices of multilateral cooperation and the institutions of regional health governance in the Americas. The second section analyses the creation of UNASUR and its role in health governance in more detail. The third section focuses on UNASUR’s activism in the UN system and the case of access to medicines, because this was the first and the most recurrent topic in UNASUR’s efforts for policy coordination at the global level. The final section concludes by discussing the reasons why UNASUR became involved in these debates about health in the UN system. 2

Health Governance in the Americas

Latin American countries have a long history of regional cooperation, from the processes of independence to the two waves of regionalism in the twentieth century. Several regional organizations were created, such as the Central American Common Market (CACM), Caribbean Community (CARICOM), CAN and Mercosur. In addition to these regional organizations, Latin American countries have also engaged in multilateral cooperation in the American hemisphere, in the context of the OAS, which was created in 1948.4 4  Louise Fawcett and Andrew Hurrell (eds), Regionalism in World Politics: Regional Organization and International Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

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In the 1990s, most countries (with the major exception of Cuba) agreed to increase the OAS’ role in the region, but since the mid-2000s, a new scenario has evolved, with the creation of several new organizations. These were at least partially aimed at diminishing the role of the United States in the region, and have, intentionally or not, contributed to the displacement of the OAS as a key organization and platform for multilateral cooperation among Latin American countries.5 One of these organizations is UNASUR; the other is CELAC, which was created in 2010 and includes all of the countries from the Americas except the United States and Canada. UNASUR and CELAC are alternative institutions to the OAS, but UNASUR has advanced faster in the creation of norms and institutions. CELAC is much more diverse than UNASUR, but its member states declared it a peace zone at the 2014 Summit in Cuba, and agreed to reject US sanctions in Venezuela and support Argentina’s right to the Falkland Islands at the 2015 Summit in Costa Rica. It does not so far have a specific mandate in the area of health. UNASUR was created in the context of a reconfiguration of regional identities, which has fostered the concept of a common identity in South America, and contested regional identities based on other regions such as Latin America or the Americas. This can be observed in the debates about the role of the OAS in South America in general, as well as in the issue-area of health, where UNASUR promoted the framing of health mainly as human rights, which was different from other regional organizations such as CAN, Mercosur and PAHO, which approached health from a more technical perspective. UNASUR has framed health as a human right, as vital to human development, and has created institutions and mechanisms in order to coordinate positions in global health governance projecting these common understandings. This framing was at the centre of UNASUR’s role in South America, and a direct link between regional citizenship and health was established. The project of UNASUR was related to the discussion about regional identity in the region, and the search for institutional fora that could consolidate and project common values and norms. This common approach has been challenged by newly elected right-wing and neoliberal governments in countries such as in Argentina, Chile, Peru and Paraguay, and above all Brazil, raising the question of the extent to which the 5  Brigitte Weiffen, Leslie Wehner and Detlef Nolte, ‘Overlapping Regional Security Institutions in South America: The Case of OAS and UNASUR’, International Area Studies Review, vol. 16, no. 4 (2013), pp. 370–389; and Detlef Nolte and Leslie Wehner, ‘Geopolitics in Latin America, Old and New’, in David R. Mares and Arie M. Kacowicz (eds), Routledge Handbook of Latin American Security (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 33–43.

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concept of South America and the framing of health as a human right was socially internalized, or if it was rather a result of governmental ideology and political leadership. The accession to power of these governments has challenged the very existence of UNASUR, mainly due to their position in the crisis of Venezuela and wish to push for the removal from President Maduro more vehemently. The Venezuelan crisis was a key reason why UNASUR member states did not reach a consensus on a new secretary-general to replace Ernesto Samper in 2017, and why Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay and Peru suspended their participation in the organization in 2018. By early 2019, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru withdrew from UNASUR completely, denouncing its treaty.6 It is not clear whether the practices of cooperation and the social changes which were evolving and which were connected to UNASUR’s structure will continue through different mechanisms, since health cooperation has not been an issue of contention in UNASUR’s crisis. In other words, it remains to be seen whether the community of experts and networks which gravitated around UNASUR will survive the dismissal of the organization, and sustain health cooperation in South America. In fact, health has been addressed in several regional organizations in the Americas, the first being PAHO, which was founded in 1902. PAHO is the world’s oldest international public health agency, and was incorporated into the Inter-American System as a specialized health agency after the creation of the OAS. It also serves as the Regional Office for the Americas of the WHO. The fundamental purposes of PAHO are to provide technical support and to coordinate member states’ efforts to combat disease and improve health and quality of life in the countries of the Americas. In South America, Mercosur and CAN have also addressed health. Mercosur established a regular meeting of health ministers in 1995 with PAHO as the technical–advisory body. This meeting defines Mercosur’s policies and strategies in the area of health, and has several intergovernmental commissions in areas such as public health surveillance, control and the standardization of sanitary products. A Working Group on Health (SGT11) was created in 1996,

6  See Detlef Nolte and Victor M. Mijares. ‘Regionalismo posthegemónico en crisis.¿ Por qué la Unasur se desintegra?’ Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica vol. 18, nr. 3 (2018), pp. 105–112, and Editoria Mundorama. “UNASUR paralysis facing the Venezuelan’s conundrum, by Victor M. Mijares”. Mundorama — Revista de Divulgação Científica em Relações Internacionais. Available at https://www.mundorama.net/?p=23798 (accessed 10 January 2019). For a broader discussion of the impact of the ideological shift in the region see José Antonio Sanahuja and Nicolas Comini, ‘Las nuevas derechas latinoamericanas frente a una globalización en crisis’. Nueva sociedad, vol. 275 (2018), pp. 32–46.

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which brings together leaders, specialists and technical experts from the national ministries and other related public bodies, with the objective of promoting harmonization of legislation and guidelines in the policy areas already defined, as well as technical cooperation and joint actions among member states in healthcare services, goods, commodities and products, epidemiologic and sanitary surveillance.7 CAN established the Andean Health Organization (Organismo Andino de Saude — Convenio Hipolito Unanue, ORAS/CONHU) in 1974 with the mission of harmonizing and developing public policies, providing a space for the exchange of best practices, and defining strategies to deal with common problems. It currently has five main action lines: integration in health; epidemiologic surveillance; access to medicines; human resources; and social determinants of health and universal systems of health. Despite the activities of Mercosur and CAN, UNASUR and its international activism have represented an additional breakthrough in the area of health cooperation in the Americas, and are therefore worth analysing in depth. The following session analyses health governance in UNASUR focusing in the period from its creation until 2018, before its paralysis. Despite the withdrawal of several member states, UNASUR still exists, and it is not clear to what extent new electoral cycles in its member states might reactivate it. 3

UNASUR and Regional Health Governance

UNASUR was created in 2008 in a context of change in Latin American regionalism that was launched by the economic crisis and the so-called ‘left turn’; authors such as José Antonio Sanahuja describe this context as ‘post-liberal regionalism’.8 The central pillar of post-liberal regionalism was not the liberalization of trade and investments as in earlier regional projects, but rather cooperation in infrastructure, development policies, health, education, environment, security and defence. Regionalism was then perceived as a space for

7  Andrea Bianculli and Andrea Ribeiro Hoffmann, ‘Health and Regional Integration: Health Governance Challenges in Mercosur’, PRARI Working Paper 15/7 (Milton Keynes: Open University, 2015), available online at http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/prari/files/ working_paper_7_en.pdf. 8  José Antonio Sanahuja, ‘“Del regionalismo abierto” al “regionalismo post-liberal”: Crisis y cambio en la integración latinoamericana’, Anuario de la Integración Regional en América Latina y el Gran Caribe, no. 7 (2010), pp. 11–53.

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contestation and resistance vis-à-vis neo-liberalism, with the potential for alternative models of integration.9 To achieve these aims, several councils were created in the areas of social development, health, education and culture, in addition to the Council of Economics and Finance. The Social Development Council, for instance, has a broad mandate and seeks to contribute to the achievement of fairer, more democratic societies, and to promote cooperation mechanisms in order to achieve integrated social development, to reduce asymmetries and to deepen the process of regional integration. The Health Council (CSS) was created in 2008 during the first meeting of the Council of Heads of State and Government of UNASUR, to consolidate South America as a space of integration in the area of health, based on the consensus that health is a fundamental right and is key to human development. In this sense, going far beyond the framing in Mercosur, CAN and PAHO, health is addressed in UNASUR as a social right, related to inclusion and citizenship.10 UNASUR has brought the issue of health to the centre of its agenda, not only as a sanitary problem of trans-border relations, but also — and fundamentally — as a right to be sought in intra-regional relations and in global governance diplomacy.11 While the framing of health in Mercosur, CAN and PAHO fits better the concept of low politics, health in UNASUR is seen as intrinsically political and related to other areas of cooperation. UNASUR has thus focused on the broadening idea of strengthening health governance capacity through an ambitious agenda. The CSS is composed of health ministers, and includes a coordinator committee, five technical groups and six structuring networks. In 2010, the CSS established a South America Agenda for Health, consolidated in the Quinquennial Working Plan (2010–2015). This plan established five priorities: vigilance and response in health; development of universal health systems; 9   José Briceno Ruiz and Andrea Ribeiro Hoffmann, ‘Post-Hegemonic Regionalism, UNASUR and the Reconfiguration of Cooperation in South America’, Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, vol. 40, no. 1 (2015), pp. 48–62. 10  Mariana Faria, Ligia Giovanella and Luana Bermudez, ‘A Unasul na Assembleia Mundial da Saúde: posicionamentos comuns do Conselho de Saúde Sul-Americano’ [Unasur in the World Health Assembly: Common Positions of the South American Health Council], Saúde em Debate, vol. 39, no. 107 (October–December 2015), pp. 3–4. 11  Maria Belen Herrero and Diana Tussie, ‘UNASUR Health: A Quiet Revolution in Health Diplomacy in South America’, Global Social Policy, vol. 15, no. 3 (2015), pp. 261–277. María Belén Herrero and Jorgelina Loza, ‘Building a regional health agenda: A rights-based approach to health in South America’, Global Public Health, vol. 13, no. 9 (2018), pp. 1179–1191.

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universal access to medicines; promotion of health in its social determinants; and development and management of human resources in health. In 2011, the South American Institute of Government in Health (ISAGS) was established in Rio de Janeiro in order to promote innovation and strategies in health policy and to disseminate best practices.12 Based on this structure, UNASUR promotes technical support and movement towards a new type of diplomacy in a two-fold strategy, which reinforces its role in global governance: (i) horizontal or intra-regional diplomacy, focusing on intra-regional cooperation; and (ii) transversal or extra-regional diplomacy, seeking to redefine the North–South divide in health negotiations and strategies. In Pia Riggirozzi’s words: While horizontal diplomacy reflects the formation of a new consensus in the region about social inclusion and rights, framing new terms of cooperation and mobilization of human and financial resources; extraregional diplomacy concerns interventions of UNASUR as a bloc in the WHO and World Health Assembly (WHA), and vis-à-vis international pharmaceuticals.13 Regarding intra-regional diplomacy, the activities range from those led by Technical Groups, which are responsible for analysing, preparing and developing proposals, plans and projects according to the Five Year Plan, to networks of national health institutions and public health schools that promote technical education, research and exchange in order to develop the public health workforce across the region. From the perspective that health is not simply an issue of public policy but also a problem of governance, ISAGS has played a key role within this context for gathering knowledge and assessing and disseminating data on the health policies of UNASUR countries; benchmarking health policy and targets; and establishing effective mechanisms of diffusion 12  Wilson Lopes Neves, O Conselho de Saúde Sul-Americano (Unasul-Saúde) e seus primeiros anos de institucionalização (2008–2013), MA dissertation (Rio de Janeiro: Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública Sergio Arouca, 2014); Faria, Giovanella, and Bermudez, ‘A Unasul na Assembleia Mundial da Saúde’; and Paulo Buss, Sebastian Tobar, Oscar Feo, Alvaro Matilda, Claudia Hoirisch, ‘A Saúde nos Processos de Integração Regional da América Latina e Caribe’, in Paulo Buss, Sabastian Tobar, Diplomacia em Saúde e Saúde Global (Rio de Janeiro: Fiocruz, 2017). For a complete description of ISAGS structure and activities, see online at http://www.isags-unasul.org/ (accessed 5 June 2016). 13  Pia Riggirozzi, ‘Regionalism and Health Policy in South America: Tackling Germs, Brokering Norms and Contesting Power’, EUI Working Paper RSCAS (2014), p. 11.

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through seminars, workshops, capacity-building and special meetings in support of policy reform by member states.14 Regarding extra-regional diplomacy, which is the focus of this chapter, UNASUR differs in its health strategies from previous regionalist attempts by Mercosur and CAN, which tackled specific needs for trans-border epidemiological control and surveillance in response to increased traffic of trade and people. UNASUR seeks both to reduce cross-border health risks and to carve out a space for new forms of collective action within the region, renegotiating the terms of existing health policies in international forums, such as the WHO, and vis-à-vis international pharmaceutical corporations. In other words, UNASUR provides a new space for state and non-state actors to define policy and development, challenging the common idea that states of the Global South are simply ‘receivers’ of global norms, or norm-takers.15 With the flag of promoting rights to health and universal access, this activism within UNASUR is related to the trend of addressing health in external relations by several countries in the world, referred to as ‘health diplomacy’.16 In the face of pandemics such as HIV/AIDS, and the outbreaks of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in China and Canada, to the spread of pandemic influenza A (H1N1) between Mexico and the United States, a proliferation of players, resources and policy frameworks such as the MDGs emerged in order to tackle the critical state of global health at the turn of the millennium. Not only was the impact in terms of morbidity and mortality caused by these communicable diseases being documented, but so was their capacity to interfere with economic activity and population movements.17 Against this new ‘geopolitics’ of disease, health was increasingly perceived as a global security threat, providing new grounds for international policymaking. This is manifested through the increasing number of commitments 14  A  na B. Amaya et al., ‘Monitoring Pro-Poor Health-Policy Success in UNASUR’, PRARI Policy Brief, no. 6 (Milton Keynes: Open University, February 2015). 15   Pia Riggirozzi, ‘Regionalism through Social Policy: Collective Action and Health Diplomacy in South America’, Economy and Society, vol. 43, no. 2 (2014), pp. 432–454. 16  R. Katz et al., ‘Defining Health Diplomacy: Changing Demands in the Era of Globalization’, The Milbank Quarterly, vol. 89, no. 3 (2011), pp. 503–523; Paulo M. Buss and Miriam Faid, ‘Power Shifts in Global Health Diplomacy and New Models of Development: South–South Cooperation’, in Ilona Kickbusch, Graham Lister, Michaela Told and Nick Drager (eds), Global Health Diplomacy: Concepts, Issues, Actors, Instruments, Fora and Cases (New York, NY: Springer Verlag, 2013), pp. 305–322. 17  Paulo Buss and José Roberto Ferreira, ‘Critical Essay on International Cooperation in Health’, RECIIS Revista Eletrônica de Comunicação, Informação and Inovação em Saúde, vol. 4, no. 1 (2010), pp. 86–97.

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to global cooperation in public health surveillance and response, which placed new demands on international institutions and required new agreements between states. Global health has thus become part of foreign policy agendas, included in discussions on national security, trade and diplomacy.18 This scenario is a defining feature of the notion of global health diplomacy, which emerged to address activities ranging from formal negotiations to a vast array of interactions and partnerships between governmental and nongovernmental actors focused on health factors that transcend national borders and expose countries to global influences, whether they relate to trade, economic growth, or social development. Through health diplomacy, it was possible to improve coordination between the health and foreign policy sectors, fostering the acceptance of the MDG’s health topics, as well as their incorporation into health and development policies.19 The Global Health Initiatives for the increase of funds for immunization against infectious diseases, such as AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, defined health not only as a sanitary problem, but also as one determined by socio-economic conditions. Finally, UNASUR’s focus on health issues speaks of this new understanding of global health governance, through which health policies work as a ‘locus for integration’ to advance historically constituted claims of social and rightsbased medicine, as well as innovative legal paradigms linking citizenship and health. In other words, this activism in health sectors also can be understood as a UNASUR framework that enables South America to take a stronger and unified position to address health issues, while promoting new rights in global governance.20 As discussed above, the extent to which ISAGS will survive UNASUR’s paralysis remains to be seen. Its expert-based network structure and separate headquarters might contribute to relative autonomy and resilience. Interestingly, despite the crisis, ISAGS managed to approve an operative plan for 2019, due to the commitment of remaining member states.21 18  Alan Ingram, ‘The New Geopolitics of Disease’, Geopolitics, vol. 10, no. 3 (2005), pp. 522– 545. Health is referred to as a security threat in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1308 (2000). 19  Buss and Ferreira, ‘Critical Essay on International Cooperation in Health’. 20   Pia Riggirozzi, ‘Regionalism, Activism, and Rights: New Opportunities for Health Diplomacy in South America’, Review of International Studies, vol. 41, no. 2 (2015), pp. 407–428. 21   I SAGS Operative Plan for 2019 is available online at http://isags-unasur.org/wp-content/ uploads/2019/01/poa-2019-esp.pdf (accessed 10/01/2019). Nolte, D., and Mijares, V.M. (2018). Regionalismo posthegemónico en crisis.¿ Por qué la Unasur se desintegra?. Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica, 18(3), 105–112. ISAGS was formally closed down in June 2019, after the final submission of this chapter.

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4

UNASUR in the UN System: the Case of Access to Medicines

Within the UN system, health is primarily dealt with within the WHO, but has also been discussed at the UNGA, UN Security Council, ECOSOC, WTO and, more recently, the HRC. According to the literature and interviews,22 UNASUR has been more active in institutions that deal specifically with health, such as the WHO, and international conferences such as the International Conference of Drug Regulatory Authorities (ICDRA), the Global Forum on Human Resources in Health, and the Global Conference on Social Determinants of Health. It has been less active in the organs and organizations of the UN system with broader mandates, but it has sought to promote the coordination of positions at these institutions as well. UNASUR has developed several strategies of action at the WHO. In addition to presenting common positions at WHO Assembly Committees, UNASUR has also sought to strengthen its representation at the WHO’s Executive Council, which is vital to ensure that UNASUR’s priorities are included in the WHO’s agenda. Despite this activism, UNASUR does not have formal representation at the WHO, unlike other regional organizations such as the EU, AU, CARICOM and the Central American Integration System (SICA), all which have the formal status of Permanent Observer. UNASUR member states cannot, therefore, speak in the name of the regional organization, so even in cases when they agree on common positions and promote resolutions based on consensus at the regional level, the author of a resolution has to be a member state, and the others individually support it.23 UNASUR’s first common position was adopted in 2010, and was about the impact of intellectual property rights upon access to medicines and the monopoly power of the pharmaceutical industries in fixing prices and decisions about generic medicines. This common position was promoted by Ecuador and Argentina, which at the time occupied UNASUR’s presidency pro tempore and coordinated the Working Group for Universal Access to Medicines, respectively. From this case to the end of 2014, UNASUR produced common positions regarding 25 resolutions in the WHO Assembly. Several resolutions were related to access to medicines (eight of 25), but other topics were

22  Interviews were conducted with four Brazilian government officials from the Ministry of External Relations, Ministry of Health and ISAGS under conditions of anonymity. 23  Faria, Giovanella, and Bermudez, ‘A Unasul na Assembleia Mundial da Saúde’, p. 5; and L.V. Langenhove and S. Kingah, ‘Conditions for Effective Regional Social (Health) Policies: The EU and UNASUR Compared’, UNU-CRIS Working Papers (Bruges: UNU-CRIS, 2014).

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addressed as well, such as the International Sanitary Regulation, WHO reform and the MDGs. Strengthening the WHO’s leadership in defining health policies and regulations at the global level has been one of UNASUR’s priorities.24 Table 12.1 WHO Resolutions where UNASUR Presented Common Positions

Number of resolutions Total WHO Percentage of WHO Year and resolutions assembly resolutions with number of WHO with a UNASUR UNASUR common position common position assembly 2010 / 63 2011 / 64 2012 / 65 2013 / 66 2014 / 67

2 5 2 6 11

66 64 58 73 73

3 7.8 3.4 8.2 15

Source: Faria, Giovanella and Bermudez, ‘A Unasul na Assembleia Mundial da Saúde’; and http://apps.who.int/gb/ (accessed 5 June 2016).

According to interviews, UNASUR coordinated effectively in meetings before and after the World Health Assembly (which takes place in Geneva), and exchanged positions and communications via internet networks; Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia were particularly active in coordination efforts. South American countries belong to three groups that are active and recognized at the WHA: the Group of the Americas; GRULAC; and UNASUR. Still, according to interviews, the most active group is the Group of the Americas; despite controversies related to broader geopolitical strategies, South American countries have many common interests with the United States and Canada in the area of health, especially in coordinating among domestic regulatory agencies. Despite this, UNASUR activism increased significantly during its first decade of existence, as reflected in the common positions that have been continuously adopted by its member states at the WHO Assembly since 2010. Unlike the other issues set by UNASUR’s Five Year Plan, access to medicines is the only issue on which the member states have constantly agreed with each other; related to health in Table 12.2, among the 25 common positions adopted by 24  Faria, Giovanella and Bermudez, ‘A Unasul na Assembleia Mundial da Saúde’, p. 8.

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Table 12.2 UNASUR’s Common Positions at WHO: Committees and Topics

Year/ Number of assembly

2010 / 2011 / 2012 / 2013 / 2014 / Total 63 64 65 66 67 2010–2014

Number of Resolutions with common positions WHO Committee A Committee (technical issues related to health) Committee B (WHO financial and administrative issues) Medicines Topic according to UNASUR Quinquennial Plan Universal health system Human resources Social determinants of health Vigilance and reaction Financial and administration

2

5

2

6

11

26

2

4

1

4

10

21

0

1

1

2

0

4

2

1

1

2

2

8

0

2

0

1

1

4

0 0

0 0

0 0

0 1

1 3

1 4

0

1

0

0

3

4

0

1

1

2

1

5

Source: Faria, Giovanella and Bermudez, ‘A Unasul na Assembleia Mundial da Saúde’

UNASUR at the WHO between 2010 and 2014, eight regarded the topic of access to medicines. At the 65th World Health Assembly in 2012, a resolution proposed by UNASUR and led by Ecuador and Argentina was approved that asked for an intergovernmental group to replace the International Medical Products Anti­Counterfeiting Taskforce (IMPACT) — an agency led by Big Pharma and

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the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) — to act on, and prevent, counterfeiting of medical products.25 According to Faria, Giovanella and Bermudez,26 one of the main factors that explained the increase in the number of common positions by UNASUR members on access to medicines is the work of the Technical Group on Universal Access to Medicines (GAUMU), which has held regular meetings and promoted the common agenda. Another factor has been a shortage of medicines. Felipe Baptista Krykkhtine also refers to the role of UNASUR institutions to understand the increase in common positions, and highlights the role of ISAGS in the preparative talks about the MDGs and universal access to health among UNASUR member states before the 67th WHO General Assembly Meeting in 2014.27 UNASUR promoted universal access to medicines through several strategies and policies, such as the development of a South American health production complex to allow access to medication to vulnerable groups below the poverty line, and the Medicine Price Bank, a computerized database revealing prices paid by UNASUR countries for drug purchases, which aims to foster regional public policies related to the production of and access to quality medicines. Once this information is public, it can be compared and used by policy-makers and health authorities so that they can strengthen their position when purchasing medicines vis-à-vis pharmaceutical companies.28 These actions are fundamental in a context in which, according to UNASUR Secretary-General Ernesto Samper, almost 30 per cent of the total public and private health care budget in South America is spent on medicine.29 The effective functioning of the Medicine Price Bank is, however, quite challenging given the difference in regulations and market conditions of UNASUR member states, as well as the influence of the pharmaceutical companies in domestic politics. Concerns about the impact of patents regarding access to medicines in developing countries led WTO members to adopt a special Ministerial Declaration at the WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha in 2001, to clarify ambiguities between the need for governments to apply the principles of public health and the terms of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights 25  Riggirozzi, ‘Regionalism, Activism, and Rights’. 26  Faria, Giovanella and Bermudez, ‘A Unasul na Assembleia Mundial da Saúde’. 27  Felipe Baptista Krykhtine, A criação da UNASUL SAÚDE e do ISAGS e as estratégias de cooperação em saúde na América do Sul: um estudo exploratório, MA dissertation (Rio de Janeiro: Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública Sergio Arouca, 2014). 28  Riggirozzi, ‘Regionalism, Activism, and Rights’. 29  See online at http://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/es/internacional/noticia/2015-05/UNASU R-creara-banco-de-precios-para-ampliar-acceso-medicamentos (accessed 5 June 2016).

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Agreement (TRIPS). While acknowledging the role of intellectual property protection for the development of new medicines, the Declaration specifically recognizes concerns about its effects on prices.30 The Doha Declaration explicitly affirmed that ‘the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement does not and should not prevent members from taking measures to protect public health’. Even more directly, Paragraph 6 of the Declaration stated that ‘WTO members with insufficient or no manufacturing capacities in the pharmaceutical sector could face difficulties in making effective use of compulsory licensing under the TRIPS Agreement’ and instructed the TRIPS Council to find an expeditious solution to this problem and to report to the General Council before the end of 2002. In August 2003, the General Council finally adopted the Decision on Implementation of Paragraph 6 of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, establishing a waiver for export restrictions, thereby allowing a total number of products under a compulsory license to be exported.31 According to secondary literature and interviews, some of UNASUR’s member states, such as Brazil, have been active in these discussions at the WTO, but not UNASUR as a regional grouping.32 Access to medicines has also been discussed in the UN General Assembly. During the last few years, the UNGA has adopted resolutions on Global Health and Foreign Policy, pushed by a group of countries known as the Oslo Group (because of the leadership of the foreign minister of Norway in its creation).33 The Oslo Ministerial Declaration, which was adopted in 2007, expressly articulated health as a foreign policy issue, and called for a stronger strategic focus on the global health agenda. In addition to Norway, the members of the group are Brazil, France, Indonesia, Senegal, South Africa and Thailand. The 30  See online at http://www.who.int/medicines/areas/policy/globtrade/en/ (accessed 5 June 2016). 31  See online at http://www.who.int/medicines/areas/policy/globtrade/en/ (accessed 5 June 2016). 32  Deisy Ventura, ‘Public Health and Brazilian Foreign Policy’, SUR — International Journal On Human Rights, vol. 10, no. 19 (2013), pp. 94–113; and Paulo Buss, José Roberto Ferreira and Claudia Hoirisch, ‘A Saúde Pública no Brasil e a Cooperação Internacional’, Revista Brasileira de Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade, vol. 2, no. 2 (2011), pp. 213–229. 33  United Nations, Resolution Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on ‘Global Health and Foreign Policy’ (A/Res/63/33), 63rd session, Agenda item 44 (27 January 2009), available online at https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N08/472/77/ PDF/N0847277.pdf?OpenElement (accessed 5 June 2016); and United Nations, Resolution Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on ‘Global Health and Foreign Policy’ (A/64/L.16), 64th session, Agenda item 123 (4 December 2009), available online at https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/N09/634/37/PDF/N0963437.pdf? OpenElement (accessed 5 June 2016).

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Oslo Group’s first meetings took place during UNGA meetings in New York, but it also established a network of Geneva-based diplomats and met several times thereafter in order to coordinate its foreign policies in multilateral negotiations.34 According to interviews, about 60 countries regularly support the Oslo Group’s proposals, which aim at ‘mainstreaming’ health issues — that is, increasing awareness about health at the global political level. The discussions about health and access to medicines in UNGA are therefore not restricted to technical issues, and are better conceived as high politics. As in the case of the WTO, UNASUR has not used the UNGA to advance common positions. Some UNASUR countries, such as Brazil, are active in the Oslo Group — this case shows that regional organizations are not necessarily always the favoured group in which South American countries advance multilateral cooperation at the UN level, and that cross-regional groups such as the Oslo Group might play a more relevant role. In the case of health, Oslo Group members all have an approach of health diplomacy, whereas this is not the case for all members of UNASUR individually. The Oslo Group might be more effective for a country such as Brazil, since these countries have more institutional capacities than a regional organization to advance complex and multifaceted foreign policy strategies in the area of heath, which might include links to other issue-areas such as economic and security issues. The Human Rights Council approved two paradigmatic documents related to access to medicines in 2000, namely: the General Comment on the Right to Health by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; and the Resolution on Intellectual Property and Human Rights by the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. These documents have been important conceptual sources, which have influenced discussions in other institutions as well. According to interviews, Brazil has been actively engaged in these debates, supported by other South American countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Ecuador. Until the end of 2018 this pattern was not interrupted, despite the changes of government and orientation towards health at the national level especially in Brazil. Other countries, such as Colombia and Chile, have oscillated depending on the government in power. Despite the similar framing, UNASUR has not acted as a unified actor in the HRC; the diverging interests of member states might have been one reason, in addition to the lack of technical capacity in legal aspects, since most UNASUR institutions have staff who are trained in health and public 34  K  .I. Sandberger et al., ‘Health as Foreign Policy’, Tidsskrift for Den norske legeforening, no. 131 (18–20 September 2011), pp. 1784–1786, available online at http://tidsskriftet.no/ article/2145031/en_GB.

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policies. Despite the frame of human rights, UNASUR does not have regional mechanisms for promoting human rights, unlike other regional organizations in the Americas, such as the OAS and Mercosur. To sum up, access to medicines is discussed in several institutions in the UN system, from different perspectives and different framings. While the WTO focuses on the regulation of trade, for instance, the HRC frames health and access to medicines as a human right. Framing is less homogeneous at the UNGA, where states can approach health from different perspectives, including their links with development and security. Despite working separately, these institutions often coordinate their activities. Since 1996, when the WHA adopted a resolution requesting that the WHO report on the impact of the WTO’s agreements with respect to national drug policies and essential drugs, successive resolutions have requested that the WHO undertake work that ensures that its medicines’ strategy addresses the important issue of the impact of international trade agreements on public health and access to medicines. In 2003, the WHA expressed concerns about access to medicines in developing countries and the implications of the current patent-protection system, and urged member states to adapt national legislation to use to the full the flexibilities contained in the TRIPS Agreement. In 2004, member states were further encouraged to ensure that bilateral trade agreements take into account the flexibilities contained in the WTO’s TRIPS Agreement, as recognized by the Doha Ministerial Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health.35 Despite these attempts by UN institutions to coordinate their activities, their mandates remain very different, which influences the capacity of regional organizations to engage with them as well. UNASUR does not have a mandate in the area of international trade, for instance, so therefore it can hardly address discussions at the WTO. The only organization in the UN system in which UNASUR has systematically tried to operate has been the WHO, but the UNGA and the HRC are also not incompatible with its mandate. To coordinate positions at the UNGA and the HRC would, however, require a diplomatic effort that might be too demanding for UNASUR even in its heyday. In light of the current crisis this seems even more unlikely.

35  See online at http://www.who.int/medicines/areas/policy/globtrade/en/ (accessed 5 June 2016).

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5 Conclusions This chapter has addressed questions raised in the Introduction, such as why South American states use UNASUR to discuss global health, as well as the influence of South American identity and shared normative issues in the practices of multilateral cooperation at the UN level. It has argued that UNASUR was created in the context of a reconfiguration of multilateral cooperation in the Americas, in which South American countries have attempted to develop and project a regional collective identity at the global level and have sought a political space and institutional forums that can consolidate and project common values and norms. Health has been framed as a human right and the key to regional citizenship and identity. Access to medicines has been the main topic that UNASUR has promoted in common positions at the UN system. During its first decade of existence, UNASUR engaged in an attempt to coordinate the positions of its member states in the issue-area of health on a global level as no other regional organization in Latin America (such as Mercosur or CAN) had done before. UNASUR created organs such as the Health Council, the South American Institute of Government in Health (based in Rio de Janeiro) and the Technical Group for Universal Access to Medicines, and established strategies in documents such as the South American Agenda for Health and the Quinquennial Working Plan, with priorities that guided activism on a global level through extra-regional diplomacy. One of UNASUR’s main initiatives was the creation of the Medicine Price Bank. UNASUR was not, however, equally effective in all of the UN system’s institutions. Its institutional characteristics and the interests of its member states, especially Brazil, have contributed to this variance. For this reason, UNASUR’s activism will most probably suffer during the government of President Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the withdrawal from the organization in 2019. In the case of access to medicines, UNASUR was more active and effective at the WHO, in addition to international conferences such as ICDRA, the Global Forum on Human Resources in Health and the Global Conference on Social Determinants of Health. At the WHO, despite not having a formal representative status unlike other regional organizations (such as the EU), UNASUR presented common positions at the Assembly Committees and sought to strengthen its representation at the Executive Council. UNASUR produced common positions regarding 26 resolutions in the WHO Assembly between 2010 and 2014, ranging from 3 per cent of total resolutions in 2010 to 15 per cent in 2014. These cases show that UNASUR was able to leverage influence under specific conditions — namely, by institutional capacity and the support of leading member states, in this case Brazil.

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UNASUR did not, however, manage to coordinate positions as effectively in the WTO, HRC and UNGA even during its phase of consolidation. The abovementioned conditions were not met in these cases then. UNASUR’s staff are mainly public policy experts rather than economists or lawyers. The linkages of health, trade, development and security demand a much more complex strategy and coordination efforts to present common positions in these forums. Despite its engagement in extra-regional diplomacy, UNASUR does not have the institutional capacity to be as efficient in health diplomacy at the UNGA as other actors, such as the members of the Oslo Group, which also includes Brazil. Their differences in terms of size and the composition of member states, level of formality, mandate, resources, coherence and therefore influence make UNASUR and the Oslo Group more complementary than competitive. Countries that participate in both — such as Brazil — can potentially act as bridge-builders when they share similar objectives. The case of discussions on global health and access to medicines shows how multilateral cooperation at the UN system is a complex political process in which actors such as regional and political groupings can be confronted with often polarized discussions, but at the same time are also able to accommodate changes in international politics by allowing for flexible configurations. Specific member states or sub-groups might participate in different ‘official’ regional groups and political groups, depending on the issue-area and their framing. In sum, despite the fact that UNASUR does not necessarily act cohesively, and its member states do not always assume a coherent policy in all areas and have shown inconsistent action in different international organizations and forums, UNASUR presented itself as a new space during the last decade, in which South American states could carve out new normative consensus and definitions of policy and development that were guided by the idea of health as a social right and not only as a technical issue. In doing so, they questioned and reworked global health governance at the UN system. It remains to be seen to what extent the election of right-wing and neoliberal governments in the region, and the anti-globalist foreign policy of the new Brazilian president will have an impact on these trends, and whether health cooperation in South America will thrive given its expert-network based structure and connections with other organizations in the region. Bibliography Amaya, Ana B. et al. “Monitoring Pro-Poor Health-Policy Success in UNASUR.” PRARI Policy Brief, no. 6 (2015): 1–5.

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Discussing Global Health & Access to Medicines in the UN System 239 [UNASUR in the World Health Assembly: Common Positions of the South American Health Council].” Saúde em Debate, vol. 39, no. 107 (October–December 2015): 3–4. Fawcett, Louise and Andrew Hurrell (eds). Regionalism in World Politics: Regional Organization and International Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Fidler, David P. “The Challenges of Global Health Governance.” Working Paper Council on Foreign Relations, May 2010 (2010): 1–31. Helfer, Laurence R. “Pharmaceutical Patents and the Human Right to Health: The Contested Evolution of the Transnational Legal Order on Access to Medicines.” In Transnational Legal Orders, edited by Terence Halliday and Greg Shaffer, 311–339. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/N09/634/37/PDF/N0963437. pdf?OpenElement (accessed 5 June 2016). Ingram, Alan. “The New Geopolitics of Disease.” Geopolitics, vol. 10, no. 3 (2005): 522–545. Katz, R. et al. “Defining Health Diplomacy: Changing Demands in the Era of Globalization.” The Milbank Quarterly, vol. 89, no. 3 (2011): 503–523. Laatikainen, Katie Verlin and Karen E. Smith. “Introduction.” In The European Union at the United Nations: Leader, Partner or Failure?, edited by Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Langenhove, L.V. and S. Kingah. “Conditions for Effective Regional Social (Health) Policies: The EU and UNASUR Compared.” UNU-CRIS Working Papers 2014/3 (2014): 1–24. Lopes Neves, Wilson. O Conselho de Saúde Sul-Americano (Unasul-Saúde) e seus primeiros anos de institucionalização (2008–2013), MA dissertation (Rio de Janeiro: Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública Sergio Arouca, 2014). Mijares, Victor Mijares. “UNASUR paralysis facing the Venezuelan’s conundrum.” Mundorama — Revista de Divulgação Científica em Relações Internacionais, 28/07/2018. Nolte, D., and Victor M. Mijares. “Regionalismo posthegemónico en crisis.¿ Por qué la UNASUR se desintegra?” Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica, 18, no. 3 (2018): 105–112. Riggirozzi, Pia. “Regionalism and Health Policy in South America: Tackling Germs, Brokering Norms and Contesting Power.” EUI Working Paper RSCAS (2014). Riggirozzi, Pia. “Regionalism through Social Policy: Collective Action and Health Diplomacy in South America.” Economy and Society, vol. 43, no. 2 (2014): 432–454. Riggirozzi, Pia. “Regionalism, Activism, and Rights: New Opportunities for Health Diplomacy in South America.” Review of International Studies, vol. 41, no. 2 (2015): 407–428. Sanahuja, José Antonio and Nicolas Comini. “Las nuevas derechas latinoamericanas frente a una globalización en crisis,” Nueva sociedad, vol. 275 (2018): 32–46.

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Sanahuja, José Antonio. “‘Del regionalismo abierto’ al ‘regionalismo post-liberal’: Crisis y cambio en la integración latino-americana.” Anuario de la Integración Regional en América Latina y el Gran Caribe, no. 7 (2010): 11–53. Sandberger, K.I. et al. “Health as Foreign Policy.” Tidsskrift for Den norske legeforening, no. 131, 18–20 September (2011): 1784–1786. United Nations, Resolution Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on ‘Global Health and Foreign Policy’ (A/Res/63/33), 63rd session, Agenda item 44 (27 January 2009), available online at https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/ UNDOC/GEN/N08/472/77/PDF/N0847277.pdf?OpenElement (accessed 5 June 2016). United Nations, Resolution Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on ‘Global Health and Foreign Policy’ (A/64/L.16), 64th session, Agenda item 123 (4 December 2009). Ventura, Deisy. “Public Health and Brazilian Foreign Policy.” SUR — International Journal On Human Rights, vol. 10, no. 19 (2013): 94–113. Weiffen, Brigitte, Leslie Wehner and Detlef Nolte. “Overlapping Regional Security Institutions in South America: The Case of OAS and UNASUR.” International Area Studies Review, vol. 16, no. 4 (2013): 370–389.

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Chapter 13

Negotiating the Sustainable Development Goals Mary Farrell 1 Introduction Contemporary global development policy has been shaped within the concerted multilateralism of the United Nations (UN) system over several decades. With the introduction of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000, the myriad actors of the global community embarked on a coordinated and unprecedented linkage of policies, actions, programmes and initiatives by national governments, international organizations, regional development banks, development organizations and UN agencies to deliver the targets and reduce poverty in the world’s poorest countries by 2015.* In 2012 the global community began a wide-ranging series of consultations, negotiations and dialogue to establish a consensus on the post-2015 global development agenda, this time reaching out beyond the customary range of actors such as national and regional political groups and the interest groups within the development community, to include also non-governmental and civil-society actors, local organizations and private-sector interests.1 The political groups involved in the negotiations for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) included the five regional (electoral) groups, crossregional political groups such as the Group of 77 (G-77), and single-issue groups that were often involved through the ‘friends’ groups. In addition, a vast array from the world’s development and civil societies were present at the negotiations, engaging directly with the individual (state) members, and submitting written and verbal contributions to shape the discussion. To what extent were these groups influential in shaping the negotiations and outcomes? Can we identify a consistent pattern of engagement within and across groups between the two eras of global development policy: the Millennium Development *  Material published as part of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy’s Special Issue: ‘The Multilateral Politics of UN Diplomacy’, Volume 12, Number 2, 2017, edited by Katie Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith. See http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/1871191x/12/2-3. 1  The broad and inclusive participation in the SDG negotiations was highlighted by the UN Task Team think pieces intended to support the SDG negotiations. See, for example, UN Task Team, ‘Analysis and Overview of New Actors and Formats for the Global Partnership for Development Post-2015’ (New York: UNDESA/UNDP, January 2013).

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Goals and the successor Sustainable Development Goals? As Katie Verlin Laatikainen noted in chapter 2, three broad groups have historically participated in UN political processes: electoral groups; regional organizations; and political groups.2 These political groups were initially a response to pragmatic considerations about equal representation in the UN bodies. Although they continue to channel the UN intergovernmental negotiations, the groups increasingly engage with new and different configurations of actors in modern diplomatic practice. Structural and technological changes over the past couple of decades have created new opportunities for communication globally, facilitating the emergence of a political community with common interests beyond the territory of the state. Moreover, the view that public engagement in policy formulation makes for more effective, accountable and democratic politics has opened the way for the participation of civil society and interest groups. The negotiations of the post-2015 global development policy attracted a diversity of political groups, together with non-governmental and civil-society organizations, in voluntary and often shifting coalitions where the collective interest in securing an agreement shaped the group dynamics in a generally collegiate manner, linked to a collective interest in securing an agreement. As the following discussion indicates, the SDG negotiations differed significantly from the practice adopted in the formulation of the MDGs. While the MDG negotiations were a top–down process involving key actors in the multilateral development community, the SDGs were negotiated through a complex web of relationships involving groups at all levels of the global community. This article focuses on the multilateral negotiations and the deliberations within and among political groups, and seeks to reveal the relations between international actors and the practice of diplomacy that shaped the outcomes. Without doubt, diplomatic practice at both the individual and structural levels reflects the patterns of regularity over time that Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot have noted.3 Beyond this, global development negotiations reflected the three types of diplomacy identified by Katie Verlin Laatikainen in chapter 2 — public, multilateral and polylateral — and the evidence suggests that group politics was (and indeed continues to be) essential to the realization of collective responsibility. However, as this article indicates, the range 2  See the article by Katie Verlin Laatikainen, ‘Conceptualizing Groups in UN Multilateralism: The Diplomatic Practice of Group Politics’, The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, vol. 12, no. 2 (2017), pp. 113–137, this issue. 3  Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, ‘International Practices’, International Theory, vol. 3, no. 1 (2011), p. 16.

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and diversity of the groups that engaged in the UN politics marks a shift in the multilateral diplomacy of global development policy away from the traditional group politics towards an evolving practice of inclusive diplomacy. In the MDG policy, the overall focus was on poverty reduction in the poorest countries, with all the UN member states framing their respective national policies (such as development, aid and trade, etc.) around the need to support poverty reduction in those countries. The SDG policy is more broad-based, engaging all of the UN countries in policies and activities towards sustainable development (with poverty reduction as one goal). While the MDG goals focused on a limited set of goals and were the result of a top–down process, the SDG process was wider, involving extensive consultation of local communities, civil society and development actors, national agencies and the UN member states. UN political processes are, inevitably, complex, characterized as multidimensional, multi-actor, and with a geographical sweep that distinguishes the study of group politics in this political arena from the study of more ordered national or regional contexts where the rules of the game are more clearly defined, the political actors are fewer, and where the ‘national interest’ figures prominently in the calculation of outcomes. The diplomatic context for the global development negotiations plays out as a multi-level consultation of actors — UN member states, regional organizations, interest groups, civil-society organizations and the extensive network of UN agencies, programmes, funds and development banks, as well as the international financial institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organization (WTO). Consultation and engagement with this diverse community has characterized the UN’s approach to development policy since the 1970s, from the intergovernmental world summits to the specific arenas such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) meetings, as well as in General Assembly Committees, where the rules of procedure facilitate more structured engagement. In marked contrast to the MDG approach, the lengthy and broad-ranging consultation with civil society was a hallmark of the SDG political process, and the UN made extensive use of electronic media to engage with the widest possible audience and to elicit viewpoints from individuals and local groups around the world that might not otherwise be represented through the more formal political process. Which voices were influential among this cacophony, and how did the global community arrive at a consensus to focus global efforts on poverty reduction in the first fifteen years of the millennium, and on sustainable development for the years up to 2030? Was there consensus? Whose consensus?

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This study has particular relevance for the politics of UN multilateralism because the global development issue-area engages a diversity of actors (national, international and global), encompassing states and non-state actors, and private and public entities, in a mix of powerful and not-so-powerful groups. How do the groups interact with each other? And to what extent do national or collective interests shape the negotiations within and among groups? Do group politics produce a collective identity that shapes group interaction? The overarching question here is why rational considerations did not override or subsume the collective identity that supports norm creation and common values. The discussion begins below with an examination of the politics in formulating and adopting the Millennium Development Goals, highlighting the role of different actors in the political process at the global level. The contrast between the MDG and SDG eras is highlighted in the subsequent section, which describes how the UN adopted a broad-based consultative approach to the Sustainable Development Goals, reaching out to state and non-state actors and local communities, and culminating in the intergovernmental negotiations to produce the negotiated consensus around the post-2015 global development agenda. The article assesses the nature of group politics, particularly in the SDG phase, the reactions of the UN member states and other actors to the SDG proposals, and concludes with an assessment of group politics in this process and the possible implications for the future implementation of the SDG development agenda. 2

Shaping the MDGs: Summits and Conferences

The link between poverty reduction and development was identified by several development scholars during the 1960s and 1970s,4 and the issue was addressed through the UN framework at the discussions on the Basic Needs Approach during the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) World Employment 4  Dudley Seers, ‘The Meaning of Development’, IDS Communication no. 44 (Brighton: Institute for Development Studies, Sussex University, 1996); Paul Streeten and Shahid Javed Burki, ‘Basic Needs: Some Issues’, World Development, vol. 6, no. 3 (1978), pp. 411–421; Paul Streeten, ‘Basic Needs: Premises and Promises’, Journal of Policy Modeling, vol. 1 (1979), pp. 136–146; Richard Jolly, ‘The World Employment Conference: The Enthronement of Basic Needs’, Development Policy Review, vol. 9, no. 2 (1976), pp. 31–44; Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij and Thomas Weiss, ‘The UN and Human Development’, UN Intellectual History Project, Briefing Note no. 8 (July 2009); and ‘Basic Needs’, ODI Briefing Paper no. 5 (London: Overseas Development Institute, 1978).

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Conference in 1976. The ILO report identified basic needs such as food, clothing, housing and education as keys to development, and employment as both a means and an end to the achievement of development goals.5 The Basic Needs Approach to development attracted the interest of the scholarly and policy communities, and was picked up by World Bank President Robert McNamara, who appointed a commission led by Paul Streeten to investigate the policy potential of this approach.6 Prior to 2000, development policy differed in content, focus and priorities, with more emphasis on economic development, and this was underpinned from the 1980s by neo-liberal ideas that promoted market liberalism as the route towards development. In this political context, poverty reduction was in large part expected to be an outcome of the operation of efficient market processes. Multilateral development agencies were seemingly at cross purposes with public statements of development goals by the UN being implemented by neoliberal-oriented agencies. Yet the ongoing development gap between advanced and developing countries and the evident poverty in the latter group highlighted the failure of neoliberalism and the need for collective action. The political vacuum was to some extent taken up by the UN, with the publication of influential reports from the World Bank (such as the World Development Report series, WDR), and the UNDP (Human Development Report). The 1990 WDR Poverty emphasized the provision of basic social services, including primary healthcare, family planning, nutrition and primary education. The 1991 WDR The Challenge of Development made the case for domestic policies and institutions, highlighting the role of both the state and the market in fostering development. The following year, the 1992 WDR Development and the Environment introduced the link that would become more prominent in global development policy a decade later. Together, these three WDRs reflected the World Bank’s approach to development, which — although rooted in neoliberalism throughout the 1980s — articulated ideas around basic needs that the UNDP would take forward in the development policy of subsequent decades. The UNDP’s strong emphasis on human development reflected the ideas of the Basic Needs Approach and, to a lesser extent, the thinking around the Capabilities Approach advocated by Amartya Sen.7 Both approaches connected 5  D.P. Ghai, A.R. Khan and E.L.H. Lee (eds.), The Basic Needs Approach to Development: Some Issues Regarding Concepts and Methodology (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 1980). 6  Paul Streeten (ed.), First Things First: Meeting Basic Human Needs in Developing Countries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 7  Amartya Sen, ‘Development as Capability Expansion’, Journal of Development Planning, vol. 19 (1989), pp. 41–58; Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

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poverty to human development, with an emphasis on three priorities and actions that differed with those associated with economic development: human development required the inclusion of a broader range of public and private actors; broader indicators of human and social development were needed; and stronger international actions and more flexible cooperation was required. The first UNDP Human Development Report (HDR) in 1990 declared that a comprehensive policy for the participation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) was essential for any viable strategy of human development. The report proposed that ‘sustainable development strategies should meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs’ (p. 6). It also noted that poverty was one of the greatest threats to the environment. UNDP ideas were developed again in the 1997 HDR, Human Development to Eradicate Poverty, which called for policy actions to be directed towards gender equality, pro-poor growth, globalization and democratic governance. The 2003 HDR, Millennium Development Goals: A Compact among Nations to End Poverty, reflected on the already adopted MDGs, and outlined the processes, decisions and activities to implement the goals and to monitor progress. The UN increasingly convened world summits and/or international conferences to facilitate broad-based discussions around thematic issues such as development, poverty, food, women, children, MDGs and the information society. Between 1990 and 2015, some 45 of these global events were organized, including the two Rio de Janeiro conferences on the environment, the 1995 Beijing conference on women and, also in 1995, the World Summit on Social Development, in Copenhagen.8 These conferences served to initiate discussions around agenda-setting, identifying priorities for cooperative action, and in a general sense to establish common frameworks for policy formulation and implementation. They can also be considered as part of a process of norm diffusion, with the UN as norm entrepreneur, overseeing the emergence and cascading of the global norm of poverty reduction, and the eventual internalization of the norm by states and other international development actors.9 Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink’s account of the stages of norm change — from emergence to acceptance (cascade) and then internalization — offers a useful lens through which the MDG process can be viewed. The international 1999); Amartya Sen, ‘Capabilities, Lists and Public Reason: Continuing the Conversation’, Feminist Economics, vol. 10, no. 3 (2004), pp. 77–80. 8  See online at http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/what-we-do/conferences.html (accessed 16 April 2016). 9  Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘International Norm Dynamics and Political Change’, International Organization, vol. 52, no. 4 (autumn 1998), pp. 887–917.

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conferences and global summits provided the platform for the ‘active process of socialization to induce norm breakers to become norm followers’.10 Yet this remains a partial view of the consensus on global development policy, in the absence of a detailed perspective on which actors pushed the process, and which sought to change or adapt the priorities. The UN summits and international conferences were intergovernmental, but they also attracted thousands of non-governmental organizations, civilsociety actors and activists from the 1990s onwards, with a myriad of networks and coalitions. The UN Copenhagen conference on climate change in 1995 attracted 40,000 people, including leaders from 114 states, as well as NGO representatives, the media and UN agency representatives.11 The 1995 Beijing conference had 5,000 representatives from 2,100 NGOs, 5,000 media representatives and a total of 30,000 individuals in attendance.12 As David Hulme acknowledged, there was considerable difficulty in assessing the contribution of these networks and coalitions to the MDG process.13 However, the gradual increase in the participation of civil-society actors in these UN-sponsored conferences paved the way for the development community to engage in the wider dialogue that was initiated around the post-2015 agenda. Hulme suggested that the initial roots of the development agenda that would eventually become the Millennium Development Goals originated with the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and not with the UN itself.14 In 1996, the DAC produced a list of International Development Goals15 that were favourably received by a number of OECD member states. There was a mixed reaction from the NGOs, some of which regarded the UN as the legitimate authority for development policy. By 1998, the UN was discussing the content and context for the Millennium Assembly to be held in 2000, the issues and priorities that would frame the debates and resolutions, and was talking to UN member states and NGOs to decide on the precise topics — global poverty 10  Finnemore and Sikkink, ‘International Norm Dynamics and Political Change’, p. 902. 11   See online at http://UNFCCC.int/meetings/copenhagen_dec_2009/meeting/6295.php (accessed 6 April 2016). 12  See online at http://www.un.org/geninfo/bp/women.html (accessed 6 April 2016). 13  David Hulme, ‘Global Public Policy and the Millennium Development Goals: A Short History of the World’s Biggest Promise’, BWPI Working Paper no. 96 (Manchester: University of Manchester, Brooks World Poverty Institute, 2008), p. 39. 14  Hulme, ‘Global Public Policy and the Millennium Development Goals’, p. 8. 15  DAC, ‘Shaping the 21st Century: The Contribution of Development Cooperation’ (Paris: OECD, 1996). The International Development Goals included well-being, social development (by progress in primary education, gender equality, basic health care and family planning) and environmental sustainability.

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reduction was one of the main themes. In the early months of 2000, the general shape of UN proposals was revealed in UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s document: We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century.16 Between March and September 2000, UN officials in New York engaged in a frantic round of negotiation and discussion with UN member-state delegations, leading up to the Millennium Summit and the declaration adopted by the UN member states on 8 September 2000.17 During this phase of UN agenda-setting, the eventual outcome resulted from the negotiations between the UN and its member states, as well as key individuals and organs within the UN system. By the time when the UN General Assembly voted in September 2000, there was a unanimous vote, with no need for coalitions or block votes among the groups of states. The political interests of certain states, and the differences among states, played out in the opposition to some of the content. Opposition to gender equality and women’s empowerment was implicit rather than explicit, and the eventual text focused on educational targets instead. Reproductive rights were not included, and the opposition of the Vatican and Sudan, and indeed many of the G-77 member states, ensured that there would be no reference to these rights in the Millennium Declaration.18 The United States had no major interest in reproductive rights. Eventually, the final version of the MDGs included goals on infant, child and maternal mortality. The MDGs were the product of an accumulated set of interactions, reflections and ideas emanating from the global policy community, including key individuals at the heart of the UN system. Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, one of these key individuals, criticized the lack of broad consultation in the process of identifying goals, but acknowledged that the drive to construct a united community around a global development project was a crucial force in the eventual consensus on MDGs.19 The IMF/World Bank approach to structural adjustment throughout the 1980s and 1990s had required governments to make policy changes that imposed burdens on developing countries and a disproportionate cost on the poorer sections of society, dividing the development community at the domestic and international levels. The fact of increasing donor fatigue was recognized in the countries of Western Europe, which were reluctant to continue support for public spending on development aid. Fukuda-Parr de16  Kofi Annan, We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century (New York: United Nations, 2000). 17  UN General Assembly, Millennium Declaration, A/RES/55/2. 18  Barbara Crossette, ‘Reproductive Health and the Millennium Development Goals’, Studies in Family Planning, vol. 36, no. 1 (March 2005), pp. 71–79. 19  Sakiko Fukudu-Parr, ‘Should Global Goal Setting Continue, and How, in the Post-2015 Era?’, UNDESA Working Paper no. 117 (New York: UNDESA, 2012), p. 5. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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scribes the divisions between the NGO development community and the IMF/ World Bank, and within the UN system itself.20 Yet poverty reduction had a unifying force, and there was no convincing counter-argument against this goal. It had the normative force and moral weight that allowed a somewhat centralized drive by the UN institutions to shape the content of the MDGs from an early stage towards their eventual adoption at the UN General Assembly’s Millennium Summit in September 2000. Critics pointed to the failure to engage civil society more directly in the negotiation of the MDGs (despite increasing involvement through the various global conferences), delinking human rights from development, and the absence of gender equality and sustainability.21 On the other hand, as the MDG programme was rolled out over the subsequent fifteen years, it proved popular with civil society and non-governmental organizations. In the public’s mind, the MDG initiative became a platform for political and social action, stimulating the emergence, for example, of the British Make Poverty History movement, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, and the Live8 campaigns, among others. The MDG programme also created a diverse global community, including interest groups that focused on development and expectations about what a global development policy might do, as well as epistemic communities across a range of priority issue-areas with the capacity for and inclination towards diplomatic engagement. Building on the legacy of the MDGs, the SDG negotiations incorporated the unfinished business by incorporating goals on poverty, hunger, education, health, and maternal and child mortality, and partnerships for development. 3

Towards Inclusivity and Participation

The SDG negotiations broke with tradition, moving away from the top–down narrow approach adopted in the MDG process to embracing a broad-based global consultation that involved an unprecedented volume of contributions 20   Fukudu-Parr, ‘Should Global Goal Setting Continue, and How, in the Post-2015 Era?’, p. 14. 21  Gita Sen and Avanti Mukherjee, ‘No Empowerment without Rights, No Rights without Politics: Gender Equality, MDGs and the Post-2015 Development Agenda’, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, vol. 15, nos. 2–3 (2014), pp. 188–202; Ashwani Saith, ‘From Universal Values to Millennium Development Goals: Lost in Translation’, Development and Change, vol. 37, no. 6 (November 2006), pp. 1167–1199; Patrick Bond, ‘Global Governance Campaigning and MDGs: From Top–Down to Bottom–Up Anti-Poverty Work’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 2 (March 2006), pp. 339–354; and Jeffrey Sachs, ‘From Millennium Development Goals to Sustainable Development Goals’, The Lancet, vol. 379 (June 2012), pp. 2206–2211. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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from a wide range of actors, organizations and communities around the world. Mindful of the criticisms that the MDGs were top–down, technocratic and devised without the input of civil society, the UN system had launched a global online conversation via the web platform, worldwewant2015.org, used Facebook and other forums, and conducted a global ‘MY World’ survey asking citizens to identify their top six development priorities. Civil-society organizations also undertook their own surveys and gave input to the discussions led by the Open Working Group (OWG). The 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, known as the Rio+20 conference, was attended by a large and very diverse development community, and this community would grow as the SDG discussions gathered pace. Informal alliances of states in the form of friends’ groups worked with experts, stakeholder groups and political groupings to shape gradually the substance of what would emerge as the Sustainable Development Goals.22 The Friends of the SDGs emerged before the Rio+20 conference as a group of countries that supported the proposal from the initial phase, and pushed for an ambitious agreement.23 The Friends of Water group, which was started initially in 2010 by Tajikistan to coincide with the International Decade for Action on Water, later expanded to include 39 members and supported the goal of water and sanitation. The Friends of Sustainable Energy for All pressed member states for an energy goal and maintained alliances with the Major Groups and other Stakeholders (MGoS). The Friends of Governance for Sustainable Development emerged to engage in the Rio+20 negotiations, then found new impetus in the OWG, offering governments technical expertise and the space to hold informal discussions on implementation, indicators and institutional reform. Other prominent friends’ groupings included the Friends of Food and Nutrition Security, Friends of Children and Friends of Rule of Law. The outcome document of the 2012 Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development had already highlighted the requirement of an inclusive process to deliver Sustainable Development Goals, and the UN Secretary-General’s office continued to promote wider public participation as well as enhanced coordination among the UN entities, thus ensuring that inclusivity would be adopted across the UN system. This emphasis on inclusivity and the engagement of civil-society organizations in the discussions was taken up in the 22   Felix Dodds, Ambassador David Donoghue and Jimena Leiva Roesch, Negotiating the Sustainable Development Goals: A Transformational Agenda for an Insecure World (Abingdon: Routledge/Earthscan, 2017), pp. 58–61. 23  The Friends of the SDGs included Bhutan, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.

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working methods adopted in the OWG during 2013 and 2014, as well as in the subsequent intergovernmental negotiations of 2015. The co-chairs of the intergovernmental negotiations stipulated that the modalities for the conduct of the discussions among all the UN member states would be ‘open, transparent and guided by the rules of procedure and established practices of the General Assembly’. The co-chairs went further to indicate their intention to build on what had been agreed in the OWG negotiations instead of opening the negotiations again: ‘in accordance with General Assembly resolution 68/309, the proposal of the Open Working Group shall be the main basis for integrating sustainable development goals into the post-2015 development agenda’.24 Civil-society engagement in the SDG negotiations took a variety of forms and went through various channels, including the Major Groups and other Stakeholders (MGoS), non-governmental and civil-society organizations, development organizations, and the global civil society movement that emerged as the ‘Beyond 2015’ campaign. In the lead-up to the SDG negotiations, the UN system had already conducted the global online survey and consulted with thousands of local organizations and communities around the world. The Major Groups originated out of the ‘Agenda 21’ action plan that had been adopted at the Rio 1992 Earth Summit and that formalized nine sectors of society through which broad participation would be facilitated in UN activities on sustainable development.25 After the Rio+20 outcome document, The Future We Want,26 had identified additional groups to participate in UN processes, including local communities, volunteer groups, migrants and families, older persons and persons with disabilities, this opened the way for the establishment of the Major Groups and other Stakeholders. Briefing sessions for the MGoS that were organized by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) in September 2013 provided substantive guidance and direction on how they could take part in the negotiations. This paved the way for the high level of participation in the OWG negotiations, which agreed on a proposal for the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals.27 The MGoS continued to participate in the 24  Letter from Permanent Representatives Ambassador Macharia Kamau (Kenya) and Ambassador David Donoghue (Ireland), accessed online at http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015. 25  The full text of Agenda 21 can be accessed online at https://sustainabledevelopment. un.org/content/documents/Agenda21.pdf. 26  The Rio+20 outcome document, The Future We Want, accessed online at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/733FutureWeWant.pdf. 27  The report of the briefing days can be accessed online at https://sustainabledevelopment. un.org/content/documents/2783eventsummary.pdf.

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TABLE 13.1 Groups involved in the SDG negotiations

Group type

Name

Regional groups

African Group; Asia-Pacific Group; Eastern European Group; Latin American and Caribbean Group; Western European and Others Group (WEOG) Group of 77+China; Non-Aligned Movement; Nordic Group; JUSCANZ (Japan, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) Friends of SDGs; Friends of Water; Friends of Sustainable Energy for All; Friends of Governance for Sustainable Development; Friends of Food and Nutrition Security; Friends of Children; Friends of Rule of Law; Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS); Small Island Developing States (SIDS) Major Groups and other Stakeholders Beyond 2015; Global Call to Action Against Poverty 30 states from the five regional groups All UN member states

Regional and cross-regional political groups Single-issue political groups

Civil-society groups Development groups Open working group Intergovernmental group

intergovernmental negotiations throughout 2015, with their input to the negotiations coordinated by UNDESA. Given the scale and diversity of this MGoS group, and its status as a relative newcomer to the political negotiations, the group contributed to the SDG process through thematic clusters, with each cluster coordinated by steering committees that were responsible for preparing joint position papers for the consideration of the OWG.28 4

SDG Politics: a Change to New Diplomatic Practice?

The general view of diplomacy is of the management of relations between states, and between states and other actors. Participants in this ‘management’ process engage in a variety of actions, including advising, shaping and 28  The thematic clusters and the position papers submitted by the Major Groups and other Stakeholders can be accessed online at http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/ majorgroups/post2015/thematicclusters/participate.

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implementing foreign policy. In contemporary practice, what constitutes diplomacy goes beyond the traditional ceremonial activities in the international domain, to include many international negotiations and a variety of contributions to international order (creating, drafting and implementing rules and norms that structure the international system).29 Traditionally, these diplomatic practices by states were conducted within a fairly stable structure of institutional arrangements through which ambassadors, diplomats and negotiators represented the interests of their state within an acknowledged set of parameters. However, new players such as civil-society organizations and non-state actors increasingly share the diplomatic arena with blocs and regional groups, and there is less likely to be a seamless web that links the creating, drafting and implementation of decisions. In UN global diplomacy, diplomatic practice rests upon a complex multi-level and multi-actor institutional structure. The SDG negotiations reflected this complexity very well, building upon a variety of outcomes, including the UN Conferences on Sustainable Development, the leadership and contributions of the UN Secretary-General, other areas of the UN and particularly the UN System Task Team, and culminating in the negotiations conducted in the Open Working Group and subsequently the intergovernmental negotiations among the 193 UN member states. Multilateral diplomacy in the UN is often linked to consensus decisionmaking, and voting within the various organs has thus tended to shift away from decision-making based on unanimity. It is not simply a matter of procedural rules, but often the outcome of the many preceding stages of consultation and negotiation towards an eventual point of consensus or agreement. This process explains why and how the MDGs and SDGs were adopted without challenge in the UN General Assembly. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon played an important role in guiding the SDG process. The establishment of the UN System Task Team in 2012 facilitated a more integrated and coordinated approach to global development policy by bringing together some 60 UN entities and international organizations, co-chaired by UNDESA and UNDP, to support the post-2015 process by producing think pieces and research.30 More political input from around the globe was sought by the UN Secretary-General through the appointment of a High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons in July 2012 to advise on 29  R.P. Barston, Modern Diplomacy (Oxford: Routledge, 4th edition, 2013). 30  The UN System Task Team report, Realizing the Future We Want for All, which was published in June 2012, set out the vision of the UN system on global development beyond 2015; see online at http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/policy/untaskteam_undf/ report.shtml.

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global development. This High-Level Panel reported in May 2013.31 Through his annual reports to the General Assembly, the Secretary-General stressed the importance of a UN system-wide approach to mainstreaming sustainable development. The report Initial Input of the Secretary-General to the Open Working Group on SDGs32 in December 2012 emphasized features that would emerge in the subsequent negotiations — engaging stakeholders, global partnerships, national targets for universal goals, and the need for a shared vision of the Sustainable Development Goals. The Secretary-General’s report in August 2013, A Life of Dignity for All,33 drew on the work of the UN Task Team, the UN Development Group (UNDG) consultations and the Open Working Group discussions to summarize the progress of deliberations. Finally, the Secretary-General’s Synthesis Report, which was produced in December 2014, The Road to Dignity by 2030,34 offered a coherent and useful summary of results and the framework for action, ahead of the intergovernmental negotiations among the 193 UN member states that were scheduled to start in January 2015. Intergovernmental negotiations among the UN member states were conducted in two phases: through the OWG, which was established in January 2013;35 and then from January 2015 until August 2015 in intergovernmental negotiations involving all 193 UN member states. The Rio+20 outcome document had stated that the OWG would decide its own methods of working, including developing ways to involve relevant stakeholders and experts from business, academic and civil-society organizations, as well as from the UN system. The OWG structure comprised 30 seats shared between 69 UN member states, with five seats allocated to each of the African and Asian regional groups, six seats to the Latin American and Caribbean Group, and five each to the Western European and Others Group (WEOG) and the Eastern Europe regional groupings.36

31   High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development (New York: United Nations, May 2013), available online at https://www.un.org/sg/sites/ www.un.org.sg/files/files/HLP_P2015_Report.pdf. 32  General Assembly, A/67/634, Initial Input of the Secretary General to the Open Working Group on SDGs (New York: United Nations, December 2012). 33  General Assembly, A/68/202, A Life of Dignity for All (New York: United Nations, August 2013). 34  General Assembly, A/69/700, The Road to Dignity by 2030 (New York: United Nations, December 2014). 35  The OWG was established by decision 67/555 of the General Assembly (A/67/L.48/rev.1). 36  See details of the OWG membership, available online at https://sustainabledevelopment .un.org/owg.html.

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Civil society participated in the OWG negotiations under the Major Groups and other Stakeholders, with nine major groups represented, together with civil-society networks, Beyond 2015, and the Global Call to Action Against Poverty.37 The extensive engagement of civil society in the negotiations throughout the OWG from 2013–2014 and the subsequent intergovernmental negotiations among all of the UN member states in 2015 marked a significant contrast with the approach adopted previously for the Millennium Development Goals. The civil-society organizations presented their views in the thematic areas of the discussions, tabled position papers and negotiated directly in the OWG sessions and the subsequent intergovernmental negotiations.38 The OWG was coordinated by the permanent representatives of Kenya (representing the developing countries) and Hungary (representing the developed countries) over thirteen sessions between March 2013 and July 2014, when the Open Working Group produced its draft outcome document setting out the list of Sustainable Development Goals and targets.39 The OWG was central to the SDG negotiations, channelling the views and expectations of a future post-2015 global development agenda. Other actors, including regional commissions, regional groups, international organizations and civil-society organizations, as well as the various units within the UN system, likewise participated in the OWG negotiations. This group was the forum where priorities and interests were articulated and negotiated, and compromises were made, following the principles of openness, transparency, inclusiveness and consensus. The work of the OWG was guided by the rules of procedure and the practices followed by the Committees of the General Assembly although, where appropriate, the group could decide on other practices. It was decided that the OWG would adopt its report and recommendations by consensus, reflecting different options if necessary. 37  The nine groups in the Major Groups and other Stakeholders included representatives of: indigenous peoples; local authorities; NGOs; workers and trade unions; farmers; women; children and youth; science and technology; and business and industry. ‘Beyond 2015’ and the Global Call to Action Against Poverty also participated. This inclusion of civil-society organizations was anticipated in the outcome document of the MDG Special Event in September 2013, which called for ‘a transparent intergovernmental process that will include inputs from all stakeholders, including civil society, scientific and knowledge institutions, parliaments, local authorities and the private sector’ (see UN General Assembly, A/68/L.4). 38  See official statements from civil-society organizations, available online at https://sustain abledevelopment.un.org/majorgroups/post2015/thematicclusters (accessed 31 October 2016). 39  This Report of the OWG of the General Assembly (GA) on the Sustainable Development Goals was presented to the UN General Assembly in August 2014 (GA A/68/970).

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The OWG’s work developed through several phases, beginning with a ‘stocktaking’ phase between March 2013 and February 2014, at the end of which the co-chairs released a stock-taking document that reviewed the discussions to date and that was accompanied by a focus note outlining nineteen areas for discussion.40 In June 2014, a ‘zero draft’ document detailing the seventeen goals and 212 targets was produced. One month later, in July 2014, the OWG adopted a report containing seventeen proposals and a now reduced set of targets, down to 169.41 The second phase of intergovernmental negotiations was conducted among the 193 UN member states between January 2015 and August 2015 through a series of eight sessions, after which the outcome document was published in August 2015.42 The adoption of the SDGs at the 70th UN General Assembly in September 2015 was unanimous, and to all intents and purposes the global community was set to embark on the next phase of sustainable development. It is early days to assess the progress made, but there is no doubt that translating this ambitious programme into substantive actions and coordinated endeavours will prove a real test of the declarations and promises made individually and collectively by the global community of states during 2015. China’s position paper on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development illustrates well how countries enthusiastically embraced the agenda.43 However, the extent to which this continues into the implementation phase has yet to be determined and, as the following discussion suggests, the question of national

40  See the OWG Co-Chairs’ focus document, available online at https://sustainabledevelop ment.un.org/content/documents/3402Focus%20areas_20140319.pdf (accessed 31 October 2016). 41  See ‘Summary of the Third Session of the Intergovernmental Negotiations on the post2015 Development Agenda’, Earth Negotiations Bulletin, vol. 32, no. 16 (30 March 2015). The Open Working Group proposal for Sustainable Development Goals was accessed at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/focussdgs.html. 42  UN General Assembly A/69/L.85, Draft Resolution submitted by the President of the General Assembly, ‘Draft Outcome Document of the United Nations Summit for the Adoption of the Post-2015 Development Agenda — Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ (12 August 2015), available online at http://www .un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=a/69/L.85&lang=e. The UN General Assembly adopted the draft outcome document on 25 September 2015, and the resolution GA A/RES/70/1 can be accessed online at http://www.un.org/ga/search/view-doc.asp? symbol=a/RES/70/1&Lang=E. 43  ‘China’s Position Paper on the Implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ (Beijing: Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 22 April 2016), available online at http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/2649_665393/t1357701.shtml .bxw/t1357701.shtml.

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sovereignty remains central to the way in which states will respond to their responsibilities and commitments in the future. 5

Taking Stock: From the OWG to Global Intergovernmental Negotiations

Whether the SDG negotiations could be described as a hard-fought battle on the part of the UN member states, or a case of negotiated intergovernmental discussions, depends on the perspective of the viewer. Given what is an ambitious global agenda, the final stage of negotiations was conducted over a relatively short period of time after the list of goals had been agreed by the Open Working Group in July 2014. The final phase of the intergovernmental negotiations with all the UN member states was conducted over eight thematic sessions between January and July 2015 (six monthly meetings, and two meetings in July). The intensity of this schedule no doubt kept the momentum going, but the organizers were also under pressure to meet the deadline and to deliver on the heightened expectations around the SDG agenda. The UN System Task Team, coordinated by UNDESA and UNDP, provided substantial guidance and organizational support, and there was continuity between the OWG and the intergovernmental phases of negotiation through the co-chairing arrangements which saw one of the chairs of the OWG negotiations, Ambassador Macharia Kamau, the Kenyan Permanent representative to the UN, moving on to cochair the intergovernmental negotiations during 2015 with Ambassador David Donoghue, the Irish Permanent Representative. The SDG negotiations were conducted with a myriad of actors, and the process was shaped by the outcomes of various UN-sponsored conferences and the UN entities over a period of years. Against this background of global multilateral diplomacy, it is more difficult to clearly attribute influences and changes to specific actors or to identify how individual actors shaped the negotiation outcomes. In reality, the path to consensus was a long one that started when Columbia first proposed a set of universal development goals in 2011 to replace the MDGs that had been targeted specifically at the poorest countries in the world.44 The global consensus around poverty reduction in the Millennium Development Goals was undoubtedly critical to initiating new collective action on development, just as the Rio conferences likewise established the groundwork for a new consensus on sustainable development as a priority for global action (see Fig. 13.1). 44  Dodds, Donoghue and Roesch, Negotiating the Sustainable Development Goals, p. 17.

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January 2012: May 2012–April 2013: 20–22 June 2012: 31 July 2012: June 2012: 25 September 2012: 31 October–2 November 2012: 22 January 2013: 30 January–1 February 2013: March 2013:

Establishment of the UN System Task Team Thematic consultation coordinated by the UN Development Group Rio+20 global conference Establishment of the UN High-Level Panel (HLP) Publication of the Task Team’s report, Realizing the Future We Want for All First meeting of the HLP in New York Second meeting of the HLP in London Establishment of the Open Working Group (OWG) Third meeting of the HLP in Monrovia UN System Task Team Report, A Renewed Global Partnership for Development

14–15 March 2013: First meeting of the OWG 25–27 March 2013: Fourth meeting of the HLP in Bali 17–19 April 2013: Second meeting of the OWG 22–24 May 2013: Third meeting of the OWG 30 May 2013: Publication of the HLP’s report on vision for the post-2015 agenda June 2013: September 2013:

Fourth meeting of the OWG Opening of the 68th UN General Assembly, agreement to start SDG negotiations

25 September 2013:  U N General Assembly Special Event to follow up efforts towards achieving MDGs November 2013–July 2014: OWG negotiation process among 30 UN member states on post-2015 development agenda (with Major Stakeholders and Other Groups) January 2015–July 2015: Intergovernmental negotiations among 193 UN member states (with Major Stakeholders and Other Groups) August 2015: Informal adoption by all UN member states of the SDG outcome document September 2015: July 2016:

UN General Assembly Post-MDG Review Summit High-Level Political Forum on SDG Implementation in New York, Leave No One Behind

Source: Hollander and Panday, and author’s own amendments FIGURE 13.1

Negotiation timeline for the SDGs Note: Saskia Hollander and Cheshtay Panday, ‘Lessons learned from the MDGs: The Process of Defining a Post-2015 Agenda’, The Broker (7 May 2013), available online at http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/Articles/Lessons -learned-from-the-MDGs. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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The five regional groups within the UN General Assembly did not establish clear lines of division in the SDG negotiations and did not dominate the intergovernmental negotiations to the extent that might have been expected.45 The OWG negotiations had an informal working structure where three states shared one of the 30 seats and there was scope for cross-regional agreement, something that the co-chairs encouraged. Although this was not possible in the intergovernmental negotiations among the 193 UN member states, there was some residual informality from the earlier phase of negotiations.46 Regional groups did speak at the intergovernmental negotiations, but there were significant interventions by individual states, making it easier to identify common ground. The G-77 plus China emphasized the need to preserve what had been agreed in the OWG outcome, reflecting the views of a majority of the developing countries, and this consensus preserved the political balance that had been agreed during the OWG negotiations. Given the short timeframe, the co-chairs of the intergovernmental negotiations were not keen to unravel what had been painstakingly agreed at the earlier phase of the OWG negotiations. Some countries, including the United Kingdom, wanted a reduction in the number of goals, but the insistence by 134 of the UN member states that the goals agreed by the OWG could not be altered set the tone of the negotiations, and on 1 June 2015 the co-chairs circulated a ‘zero draft’ of the outcome document. Six drafts quickly followed as the member states engaged in shuttle diplomacy, until 2 August 2015 when the sixth draft was agreed by the 193 UN member states. Despite this rapid pace towards consensus, the discussions still reflected the national political interests that are likely to play out in a variety of ways throughout the SDG implementation between now and 2030. Nevertheless, there was general agreement during the inter-governmental negotiations that the focus of the agenda must be on poverty reduction, and that the agenda must be communicable. There was disagreement over the reference to Common but Differentiated Responsibilities, particularly for climate change, although for a variety of reasons.47 There was general agreement on the principle of ‘leave no 45  The membership of the regional groups (the African Group, Asia-Pacific Group, Eastern European Group, Latin American and Caribbean Group, and Western European and Others Group) can be accessed online at http://www.un.org/depts/DGACM/ RegionalGroups.shtml. 46  David Donoghue, ‘My Perspective on the SDG Negotiations’, accessed online at http:// deliver2030.org/?p=6909. 47   Clara Nobbe, ‘Universality, Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and the Sustainable Development Goals’, SWP Working Paper FG8 (Berlin: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), April 2015); and Pieter Pauw, Steffan Bauer, Carmen Richerzhagen, Clara

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one behind’, while the co-chairs’ proposal of the so-called ‘5Ps’ (People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace and Partnership) was questioned but ultimately supported. The situation of the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) was supported widely, particularly by the SIDS Group, the land-locked developing countries, and by the Dominican Republic and Ghana.48 The Group of 77 plus China, with Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Panama and Peru, all agreed that poverty is dimensional, and the proposal that migration should be captured as a positive phenomenon also met with consent. On the consideration of the vulnerable situation of middleincome countries, there was no cross-cutting support, but Vietnam, Ecuador and Costa Rica spoke in favour. Proposals on gender equality, the importance of peace and security, and a SDG agenda with a strong human rights foundation all received consensus (or at least no dissent). On the actual goals and targets, there was general consensus that the indicators be defined at the national level with country ownership, but less agreement on the question of indicators being modified in the future. Some, but not all, states were satisfied to entrust the UN Statistical Commission to define global indicators. There was widespread disagreement over the modalities in relation to targets and indicators, with dissent on such issues as the proposal that SDGs have to be aspirational and short, the need for flexibility to revise the SDGs and targets from the OWG, and reservations on reviewing the targets and indicators. The means of implementation of the SDGs gave rise to significant differences among the states, although there was consensus on following the Vienna programme of action for landlocked developing countries, and broad support for the development banks as providers of finance for developing countries. On the more general question of Financing for Development (FfD), a process underway separately within the UN system, and rooted in the 2002 Monterrey Consensus, there was disagreement among the states as to whether the post2015 and the FfD should have two means of implementation. The Group of 77 plus China, the Arab states, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), Cuba,

Brandi and Hanna Schmole, ‘Different Perspectives on Differentiated Responsibilities: A State-of-the-Art Review of the Notion of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities in International Negotiations’, Discussion Paper no. 6 (Bonn: Deutsche Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), 2014). 48  Marta Batalla, ‘Green, Yellow, Red: The State of the Debate around the Post-2015 Development Agenda’, Global Policy Watch (July 2015), available online at http://www.global policywatch.org/blog/2015/07/06/green-yellow-red-the-state-of-the-debate-around-the -post-2015-development-agenda/.

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China, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, India, Indonesia, Iran and Mexico all considered that there should be two means of implementation. Countries that regard the FfD as the pillar for implementing the new development agenda include Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland, South Korea, Liechtenstein, Netherlands, the United States, Canada, New Zealand and the European Union. At the core of this difference between the supporters and the opponents of FfD to implement the SDG agenda lies a contrasting view of responsibility and the appropriate level of action. For a developing country, the tax base is a main source of government revenue and the means to finance development. If taxation capacity is limited, there are fewer resources at the national level. The question thus remains of where and how to access financial resources? For developing countries, the UN multilateral forum offers a venue where they have a voice and where participants are bound by international law and the international norms of sustainable development. The supporters of FfD favoured the international financial institutions (the IMF and the World Bank) for their technical expertise and their reputation as commercially-minded lenders with a leaning towards private-sector engagement and liberal economic values. However, in contrast to the UN, the IMF and organizations such as the OECD lack universality and do not have an explicit priority to promote sustainable development with human rights. On the question of follow-up and review, there were several differences among the countries, and there was disagreement on the question of voluntary implementation. Countries that held the position that implementation should be voluntary included the Group of 77 plus China, the Arab Group, CARICOM, Vietnam, Guatemala, Turkey, Senegal, Timor-Leste, Ecuador, Egypt, AOSIS, the Russian Federation, Ghana, and Iran. On the proposal that the challenges for SIDS to collect data should be reflected in the follow-up there was consensus, but on the proposals for the UN Statistical Commission to develop national indicators, or to assess progress towards achieving sustainable development goals, there was mixed support but no cross-cutting agreement.49 The question of national ownership of the follow-up and review, taking account of country realities, caused disagreement. The countries supporting this included the Group of 77 plus China, the Arab group, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), SIDS, Vietnam, Senegal, Timor-Leste, Indonesia, India and Mongolia. Similarly, the issue of peer review at the national level was divisive, although the European Union, South Korea, Sweden, Spain and Canada were in favour of regional-level action in support of monitoring 49  Batalla, ‘Green, Yellow, Red’.

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progress on achieving the SDGs. On the question of regional commissions to lead the follow-up and review, there was no cross-cutting support, but the Arab Group, CARICOM and a number of individual countries supported the proposal. Many countries recognized that the regional level offered flexibility in terms of follow-up and review. On the participation of civil society in the follow-up review of progress on the SDG agenda, there was some variation in the position of states, with Brazil, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Sweden, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada and the European Union in favour. Likewise, the multi-stakeholder monitoring of progress was supported by several states, but there was no overall consensus. Yet the positive impact of the engagement of civil society in both the OWG and the intergovernmental negotiations was evident in the member states’ statements and in the individual interventions that cited findings from the ‘MY World’ survey. In both the OWG and intergovernmental negotiations, the co-chairs made specific arrangements for the civil-society organizations to be briefed regularly, even daily when the negotiations were under way, and to meet the state representatives informally, as well as to present questions or interventions in the formal negotiations. The Major Groups and other Shareholders presented a shared commitment to the goals throughout the negotiations. 6

‘Transforming Our World’: Reactions to the Outcome Document50

The responses to the outcome document at the General Assembly meeting in September 2015 are insightful not just for what we can learn about individual countries or regional groups but also perhaps as a portent of things to come.51 The Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, said it broke new ground by linking peace and security to sustainable development, rule of law, and access to justice.52 Contributions from the floor were favourable, but comments also reflected particular national interests or concerns about the agenda at the implementation phase.53

50  ‘Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’, available online at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld. 51  ‘Setting the Stage for Upcoming Session of the General Assembly’, UN press report (1 September 2015), available online at http://www.un.org/press/en/2015/ga11670.doc.htm. 52  See online at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/20229sg.pdf. 53  Full reports of the UN General Assembly meeting in September 2015, when the SDG programme was formally adopted, as well as the interventions by the individual UN member

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Geopolitical or geo-economic considerations were also in evidence, as were the differences and commonalities in developed and developing countries, as well as cultural and religious considerations. Senegal (speaking on behalf of the African Group) welcomed the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, but had reservations about the follow-up, and expressed concern that the goals and targets should not undermine the right of states to create their own national policies.54 There was no need to ‘universalize’ the values of the world’s peoples — a view that was expressed by many of the delegates. Several UN member states expressed reservations about references to reproductive rights, sexual orientation and the definition of ‘family’ — Qatar, Senegal, Iran, Egypt, Chad and the Holy See.55 Tonga (on behalf of the twelve Pacific SIDS) stated that the new agenda had the potential to meet the specific needs and vulnerabilities of the group, especially on climate change. The Republic of Maldives (on behalf of AOSIS, and associating with the G-77 plus China) endorsed the commitment to poverty reduction and highlighted the need for data collection and capacity-building to help with implementation of the SDG agenda.56 Venezuela challenged the Western view of development that was represented in the outcome document, Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.57 Japan welcomed the ‘people-centredness’ of disaster preparedness and noted the consistency with the Third United Nations World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction. India welcomed the focus on poverty reduction and highlighted — from its own national experience — that inclusive economic growth, industrialization and innovation were essential for the eradication of hunger. Egypt noted that the right of every state to exercise full sovereignty must be respected, and that implementation must be in line with national priorities.58 The Egyptian delegate also noted with regret that goal number 16 left out the issue of ending foreign occupation, while Israel regretted the politicized language in the text and suggested that using the agenda states, are available online at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/summit (accessed 29 November 2016). 54  For Senegal’s intervention, see online at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/ documents/20553senegal.pdf. 55  For the Holy See’s intervention, see online at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/ content/documents/20225pope-francis-eng-pdf. 56  For the Republic of Maldives’ intervention, see online at https://sustainabledevelopment. un.org/content/documents/20913maldives.pdf. 57   For Venezuela’s intervention, see online at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/ content/documents/20818venezuela.pdf. 58  For Egypt’s intervention, see online at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/ documents/20253egypt.pdf.

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to score political points diluted its power, asserting that outstanding issues between Israel and Palestine could only be resolved through direct negotiation. The US delegate considered the agenda to be a ‘testament to the promise of multilateralism’,59 but noted that none of the agenda’s provisions would create new rights or international law obligations, and that the permanent sovereignty of each state should be recognized. The Iranian delegate highlighted the importance of national ownership in relation to the question of common but differentiated responsibility, but had reservations on the OWG report, suggesting that there should only be one reporting system led by national governments. Nothing should override national priorities, including national understandings of ‘other status’ and ‘family’. Looking back at the SDG negotiation process, it is evident that the nature of the negotiations makes it difficult to identify clearly when individual national positions shifted, to recognize where pressure points originated, or to identify clearly the drivers of particular goals or individual priority actions. By contrast, where international negotiations are conducted around a specific policy issue, or a treaty where the parties to the negotiations are limited in number (possibly with a specific historical, or shared common experience), the process of negotiation and the path to agreement are easier to follow. However, the SDG negotiations challenge any similar characterization of diplomacy, even though they were clearly part of the deliberative multilateralism of UN processes. The eventual outcome (seventeen goals and 169 targets) was the product of multiple processes and multiple actors, building on the input from a number of global summits where states, interest groups and civil-society organizations engaged in a dialogue that ultimately engaged a global community. Many voices shaped the process of formulating the SDGs. The modalities of negotiation, including the working methods of the Open Working Group, which continued into the subsequent intergovernmental negotiations, were critical to reaching consensus within a short timeframe. Leadership mattered, from the UN Secretary-General to the leaders of the OWG and intergovernmental negotiations, and from the UN departments, as well as the representatives of the different political groups that were closely involved in the different phases. However, in the OWG and thereafter in the intergovernmental negotiations of the 193 UN member states, the countries did not simply negotiate within their regional grouping. Instead, there was much cross-region interaction as states identified like-minded counterparts and allies, and as common

59  See the UN Press report, available online at http://www.un.org/press/en/2015/ga11670 .doc.htm.

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interests emerged from the wide-ranging dialogue on the agenda, which was more complex and multifaceted than anything that had gone before.60 Cross-regional negotiation did indeed involve states, but it also brought states, non-governmental and civil-society organizations into direct contact, breaking down the long-established intergovernmental/regional procedures that had historically guided UN negotiations. The diplomatic practice that was evidenced in the SDG negotiations reflected institutionalized communication that Corneliu Bjola and Markus Kornprobst have described as involving ‘the production of decisions, relations and global norms’ that are not confined by the boundaries of the state.61 While international relations scholars may justifiably find evidence to support a realist, liberal or even constructivist explanation for the diplomatic practice that characterized the SDG negotiations, the critical role of inclusive diplomacy in global governance is also now well-established. In the case of the SDG negotiations, inclusive diplomacy involved the engagement of many different actors (public and private) in multiple issue-areas, where the diplomats have to ‘function as facilitators between domestic and civil society groups, establish and manage global policy networks, and manage the tensions arising from the international interference in domestic affairs’.62 In the SDG negotiations, inclusive diplomacy challenged the traditional politics of the regional group, as diverse and complex issues were brought into focus by a broader range of political actors. There is no doubt that the move towards inclusive diplomacy beyond traditional group politics within the UN was, and will continue to be, critical in maintaining the broad-based support that will be needed to implement the post-2015 agenda. 7 Conclusion The framing of global development policy around the normative agenda of poverty reduction widened the political/policy community to include a larger and more diverse UN community. Group politics in the global development field were conducted within a structured arena where non-state groups (civil society, development organizations and single-issue groups) had the opportunity to engage with the intergovernmental process both during the Open 60  Dodds, Donoghue and Roesch, Negotiating the Sustainable Development Goals, p. 32. 61  Corneliu Bjola and Markus Kornprobst, Understanding International Diplomacy: Theory, Practice and Ethics (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 201. 62  Bjola and Kornprobst, Understanding International Diplomacy, p. 207.

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Working Group stage and during the intergovernmental negotiations in the final phase. The outcomes of the SDG negotiations were the product of this negotiated consensus among the different group interests. The Millennium Development Goals were shaped to a significant degree by the politics of multilateralism, building on a series of global conferences that were organized by the UN institutions and key international actors such as the OECD and the World Bank. Over the course of a decade, international conferences and global summitry were the mechanisms through which the United Nations acted as the norm entrepreneur, shaping the thinking of states and non-state actors and, increasingly, civil-society organizations around collective action to address development in the world’s least-developed states. The negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals adopted a broadbased global consultation of communities, groups and individuals from 2012 in a process of inclusive diplomacy, which culminated in the intergovernmental process of the Open Working Group and the intergovernmental negotiations. There was another difference as well, which was reflected in the SDGs’ triangular focus on poverty, the environment and development. Substantively, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is an ambitious programme, not only because of its goals and targets, but also because of the integrated scale and scope of the programme. However, the broad-based consultation marks the SDG process as a new practice of inclusive diplomacy in UN politics — participatory, innovative and truly global. As one of the co-chairs of the final intergovernmental negotiations described it, the SDG consultation was ‘an extraordinary negotiation process which defied conventional UN experience in various ways’.63 It was an agreement based on genuinely global consultation, concluded ahead of the deadline and without the need to add reservations from the 193 UN member states or to involve external mediation, and where civil society had unprecedented access to, and participation in, the negotiations. Many challenges face the UN member states in implementing these Sustainable Development Goals during the next decade and a half, and — with the uncertainty and insecurity that currently characterize the global system — it is too early to assess the long-term prospects for inclusive diplomacy in global governance. 63  Donoghue, ‘My Perspective on the SDG Negotiations’.

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Chapter 14

Group Interaction in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Lisanne Groen 1 Introduction From the negotiations on a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the early 1990s onwards, many country delegations have been teaming up in negotiation groups. Why? Because cooperation in groups can increase the chances of especially small country delegations to reach their preferred outcome in the UNFCCC, where close to 200 country delegations make decisions by consensus at yearly Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings and intersessional meetings at least once a year. Cooperation in a group can, for example, increase the weight of their arguments or their negotiation capacity by pooling resources.1 Groups moreover contribute to structuring an otherwise immensely complicated negotiation process. They make it more manageable by reducing the number of actors involved and add stability as they guide behaviour.2 This chapter is not about why countries participate in groups in the UNFCCC negotiations, though. Rather, it will analyse group interaction in the UNFCCC negotiations, including the impact on negotiation outcomes. It will zoom into one case: the process of negotiating the Paris Agreement (PA), the most recent UNFCCC agreement, from 2011 until 2015 (COPs 17–21). Many groups participate in the UNFCCC, several of them since the start of the convention. Considerable changes in group composition have taken place over time. Moreover, new groups have emerged and some old ones have 1   Marc Williams, “The Third World and Global Environmental Negotiations: Interests, Institutions and Ideas,” Global Environmental Politics 5, no. 3 (2005): 48–69; Farhana Yamin and Joanna Depledge, The International Climate Change Regime: A Guide to Rules, Institutions, and Procedures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 2  Gunnar Sjöstedt, Bertram I. Spector, and I. William Zartman, “The dynamics of regimebuilding negotiations,” in Negotiating international regimes: Lessons learned from the united nations conference on environment and development (UNCED), ed. Bertram I. Spector, Gunnar Sjöstedt, and I. William Zartman (London: Graham and Trotman, 1994); Yamin and Depledge, The International Climate Change Regime.

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dissolved. Most UNFCCC parties (countries) belong to at least one group. This creates ‘a multi-layered system of alliances that shapes the political dynamics of the climate change negotiations’.3 UN electoral regional groups, regional/international organisations, and political groups have been present in the climate negotiations. The African Group is the only UN electoral regional group that has been active as a negotiation group4 and the EU the only regional organisation. In contrast, many political groups have been active in the UNFCCC. Examples are the G77 and China (hereafter ‘G77’) and the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS; see also chapter 8). Academics have conducted considerable research on UNFCCC groups. Most have focused on the EU5 and AOSIS,6 with some studies on the G77 and China,7 the African Group,8 the BASIC group,9 or AILAC (the Independent Association

3  Yamin and Depledge, The International Climate Change Regime, 33–34. 4  In addition, the UN regional groups system with its five groups (Africa, Asia and Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Western Europe and Others), plus the Small Island Developing States as a sixth group, is used in the UNFCCC to elect members of its Bureau and specialised bodies (Yamin and Depledge, The International Climate Change Regime; UNFCCC, Bureau of the COP, CMP, and CMA, https://unfccc.int/process/ bodies/supreme-bodies/bureau-of-the-cop-cmp-and-cma (accessed January 21, 2020)). 5  Karin Bäckstrand and Ole Elgström, “The EU’s role in climate change negotiations: from leader to ‘leadiator’,” Journal of European Public Policy 20, no. 10 (2013): 1369–86; Sebastian Oberthür and Lisanne Groen, “Explaining goal achievement in international negotiations: the EU and the Paris Agreement on climate change,” Journal of European Public Policy 25, no. 5 (2018): 708–727. 6  John W. Ashe, Robert Van Lierop, and Anilla Cherian, “The role of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in the negotiation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC),” Natural Resources Forum 23, no. 3 (1999): 209–220; Carola Betzold, “‘Borrowing’ power to influence international negotiations: AOSIS in the climate change regime, 1990–1997,” Politics 30, no. 3 (2010): 131–148. 7  Antto Vihma, Yacob Mulugetta, and Sylvia Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, “Negotiating solidarity? The G77 through the prism of climate change negotiations,” Global Change, Peace and Security 23, no. 3 (2011): 315–334; Lesley Masters, “The G77 and China in the climate change negotiations: a leaky umbrella?,” Global Insight 111 (Oct. 2014): 1–5. 8  Anesu Makina, “Managing Climate Change: The Africa Group in Multilateral Environmental Negotiations,” Journal of International Organizations Studies 4, no. 1 (2013): 36–48; Charles Roger, “The Evolution of the African Group of Negotiators in the UNFCCC,” Africa Portal Backgrounder, no. 64 (2013), Centre for International Governance Innovation, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. 9  Karl Hallding et al., Together alone: Brazil, South Africa, India, China (BASIC) and the climate change conundrum (Stockholm: Stockholm Environmental Institute, 2011); Xinran Qi, “The rise of BASIC in UN climate change negotiations,” South African Journal of International Affairs 18, no. 3 (2011): 295–318.

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of Latin America and the Caribbean).10 Others have analysed certain COP meetings and included several negotiation groups,11 or studied the formation of specific coalitions.12 However, group interaction in the UNFCCC — and its impact — has, surprisingly, not been studied before.13 Therefore, this chapter tries to answer the following questions: 1) How did groups interact with each other in the negotiation process towards the PA? It identifies the groups and analyses their interaction and fluidity (emergence and evolution). 2) What was the impact of group interaction on climate change mitigation in the negotiation process towards the PA (mitigation was one of the most crucial issues), and on the UNFCCC in general? 3) Why do groups have influence in the UNFCCC negotiations? To what extent do material resources (e.g. the wealth of the group) and/or social resources (e.g. the perceived legitimacy of the group’s positions) contribute to their influence? This analysis relies not only on official documents and academic articles, but also on participant observation of the UNFCCC negotiations (2013–17) and interviews with (ex-) negotiators. The chapter proceeds as follows: the second section identifies the groups and presents their interactions and fluidity in the negotiation process towards the PA; the third section analyses the impact of group politics on mitigation in the PA negotiations and on the UNFCCC in general; the fourth section tries to explain why certain groups were influential; and a final section presents conclusions. 2

Group Interaction and Fluidity in the Negotiations on the PA

Negotiations on the PA started in December 2011 at COP 17 with the establishment of an ‘Ad-Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced 10  Guy Edwards et al., “Small group, big impact: how AILAC helped shape the Paris Agreement,” Climate Policy 17, no. 1 (2017): 71–85; Joshua Watts and Joanna Depledge, “Latin America in the climate change negotiations: Exploring the AILAC and ALBA coalitions,” WIREs climate change 9, e533 (2018): 1–14. 11  René Audet, “Climate justice and bargaining coalitions: a discourse analysis,” International Environmental Agreements, 13 (2013): 369–86; Lau Øfjord Blaxekjær and Tobias Dan Nielsen, “Mapping the narrative positions of new political groups under the UNFCCC,” Climate Policy 15, no. 6 (2015): 751–766. 12  Rishikesh Ram Bhandary, “Coalition strategies in the climate negotiations: an analysis of mountain-related coalitions,” International Environmental Agreements 17 (2017): 173–90. 13  But see an attempt by Carola Klöck and Paula Castro, “Coalitions in global climate change negotiations,” Innovations in Climate Governance Policy Brief, no. 5 (August 2018).

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Action’. This Working Group was tasked with the development of a ‘protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force’ to be adopted at COP 21 in 2015 and implemented from 2020. The PA was adopted according to schedule at COP 21.14 Many more groups participated in the negotiations on the PA than in those on the Kyoto Protocol — the first key UNFCCC agreement — in 1995–97. Between 1997 and 2011, several negotiation groups emerged, such as the Least Developed Countries (LDC) and Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDC), and only a few ceased to exist. Klöck and Castro15 point out that most UNFCCC groups persist once formed and new groups appear next to existing ones instead of replacing them. Most new groups consisted of developing countries only (e.g. the LDC and LMDC). According to Yamin and Depledge, the growing number of negotiation groups ‘reflects the growing maturity of the regime’, greater country and group awareness of their interests, and greater desire to participate actively.16 It also seems to respond to the greater use of groups in the negotiations in ‘Friends of the Chair’ and other consultations ‘to prepare, reframe, and redefine text in order to develop consensus’ and assist the COP Presidency (country) that chairs the negotiations.17 The growing number of groups may have been a result of the growing number of UNFCCC agenda items too. Moreover, from 2010 onwards groups came into being that included both developed and developing countries, such as the Cartagena Dialogue (CD) and High Ambition Coalition (HAC). These two are rather ad-hoc coalitions that do not have an official seat at the negotiation table, in contrast to the G77, AOSIS or the EU. Their creation reflected serious efforts to bridge the divide between Annex I parties (developed countries and economies in transition (EITs) listed in Annex I to the UNFCCC) and non-Annex I parties (developing countries) to arrive at a new global agreement (the PA) in which all UNFCCC parties were to take on greenhouse gas (GHG) emission mitigation commitments. Before COP 15 in 2009, the Annex I versus non-Annex I divide had been rather static.18

14   U NFCCC, Decision 1/CP.17, FCCC/CP/2011/9/Add.1, https://UNFCCC.int/sites/resource/ docs/2011/cop17/eng/09a01.pdf (accessed January 21, 2020). Lisanne Groen, The importance of fitting activities to context: the EU in multilateral climate and biodiversity negotiations, PhD Thesis (Brussels: Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2016), 207. 15  Klöck and Castro, “Coalitions in global climate change negotiations,” 2. 16  Yamin and Depledge, The International Climate Change Regime, 34. 17  Makina, “Managing Climate Change,” 39. 18  Blaxekjær and Nielsen, “Mapping the narrative positions of new political groups under the UNFCCC,” 752–53.

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Many groups participated in the negotiations on the PA. Figure 14.1 provides a visual overview. The EU and the Umbrella Group participated as Annex I country groups. While the EU is an official negotiation party (as a ‘regional economic integration organization’), the Umbrella Group is not. The EU — which grew from 12 member states in 1992 to 28 in 2013 — was highly active in the negotiations, reaching out to many groups. This outreach was part of its Climate Diplomacy Action Plan, which the European Commission and European External Action Service launched in early 2015. The EU was one of the founding members of the HAC.19 The Umbrella Group (Australia, Canada, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Ukraine, US) had emerged in 1997 out of another group.20 It is a loose coalition that shares information and puts forward common positions on some issues.21 While the US and Norway were highly active and important in bringing about the PA, the Umbrella Group as a whole was less so.22 Many more non-Annex I (developing country) groups participated in the PA negotiations, old and new ones: at least 16 (see figure 14.1). Here, I elaborate on the most influential ones. Most developing countries are members of more than two groups. The G77 includes almost all developing countries and has been participating in the UNFCCC since the start. It aims to represent the position of the developing world. G77 members find common interests in defending the right to develop and demanding financial and technological support.23 AOSIS, created in 1990 to participate in a climate change convention, consists of about 40 low-lying island developing countries with a strong will to tackle climate change. In the PA negotiations, AOSIS urged major emitters to reduce their GHG emissions.24 It was highly active, from the early stages 19  Groen, The importance of fitting activities to context, 233; European Commission, “Energy Union Package. Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council. The Paris Protocol — A blueprint for tackling global climate change beyond 2020,” COM(2015) 81 final/2, Brussels, 4 March 2015, https://ec.europa.eu/clima/sites/ clima/files/international/paris_protocol/docs/com_2015_81_en.pdf (accessed January 21, 2020); Interviews with EU officials in Brussels, December 15 and 21, 2015 and January 20, 2016. 20  Sebastian Oberthür and Hermann E. Ott, The Kyoto Protocol. International Climate Policy for the 21st Century (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1999), 17; Groen, The importance of fitting activities to context, 212. 21  Yamin and Depledge, The International Climate Change Regime, 45–46. 22  Groen, The importance of fitting activities to context, 225–46. 23  Kathryn Ann Hochstetler, “The G-77, BASIC, and global climate governance: a new era in multilateral environmental negotiations,” Revista Brasileira de Politica Internacional 55 (2012): 61. 24  Vihma, Mulugetta, and Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, “Negotiating solidarity?,” 328; Hochstetler, “The G-77, BASIC, and global climate governance,” 61.

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onwards, trying to bring its proposals across to realise ambitious outcomes. It reached out to civil society and research institutes to build a coalition of advocates for a 1.5oC temperature increase limit, and to negotiation groups that shared its objectives: the African Group (± 50 African countries25), LDC, and the EU. AOSIS was one of the founders of the HAC.26 The LDC (2000) is a group of close to 50 countries defined as least developed by the UN. When these countries realised that their concerns were not adequately represented by the G77, they started their own UNFCCC group.27 It includes African Group and AOSIS members and was one of the groups that founded the HAC.28 The BASIC group (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) came into being just before COP 15 in 2009 to agree on a joint strategy for the conference. It has often concurred with G77 statements and claimed to speak on behalf of all developing countries.29 The group was rather vocal in the PA negotiations. One of its demands was more financing from developed countries.30 In 2012, the Independent Association of Latin America and the Caribbean (AILAC)31 and the LMDC joined as new political groups in the PA negotiations. AILAC considers itself a progressive negotiation group within the G77 that aims to bridge the North-South divide. It participated actively in the HAC.32 The LMDC includes rather conservative developing countries, large and small, including China, India, Saudi Arabia, but excluding Brazil and South Africa. It has been highly vocal, trying to avoid binding developing country GHG emission reduction commitments and criticising the lack of action by developed countries.33 The Environmental Integrity Group (EIG), Cartagena Dialogue for Progressive Action (CD — 2010), Durban Alliance (DA — 2011) and High Ambition 25  United Nations, United Nations Regional Groups of Member States, http://www.un.org/ depts/DGACM/RegionalGroups.shtml (accessed March 2, 2019). 26  Inés de Águeda Corneloup and Arthur Mol, “Small island developing states and international climate negotiations: The power of moral leadership,” International Environmental Agreements 14, no. 3 (2014): 286–91. 27  Yamin and Depledge, The International Climate Change Regime, 35, 39–40. 28  Interviews with EU officials in Brussels, December 21, 2015 and January 20, 26 and 27, 2016. 29  Blaxekjær and Nielsen, “Mapping the narrative positions of new political groups under the UNFCCC,” 756. 30  Hochstetler, “The G-77, BASIC, and global climate governance,” 62. 31  Groen, The importance of fitting activities to context, 212. 32  Blaxekjær and Nielsen, “Mapping the narrative positions of new political groups under the UNFCCC,” 760. 33  Ibid., 759.

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Coalition (HAC — 2015) all consist of both Annex I and non-Annex I parties. The EIG was formed by Switzerland in 2000 as the country ‘felt excluded’ from closed negotiation meetings held in final negotiation stages, because of the ‘emerging tendency’ to structure these ‘based on negotiating coalitions’.34 The latter three groups — the CD, DA and HAC — do not make statements or formulate common positions on particular issues as the EIG does. These are looser entities in which motivated negotiation groups from the developed and developing world gathered to shift the Durban COP 17 negotiation outcome and/ or PA into a more ambitious direction via bridgebuilding efforts.35 The CD, created in 2010, consists of parties from the EU, Umbrella Group, EIG, AOSIS, African Group, LDC and Latin America. They share the view that all UNFCCC parties must undertake climate action. The CD considers itself a platform for dialogue to bridge the North-South divide.36 The DA was active in 2011 at COP 17 in Durban. It consisted of the EU, AOSIS, LDC and South Africa. As a precursor of the HAC, it was able to put pressure on the BASIC group and the US and played an important role in the coming into being of an Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action that started the process towards the PA.37 The HAC came into being in 2015, aiming for a highly ambitious agreement in Paris with mitigation commitments for both developed and developing countries, which it helped bring about. It started with AOSIS, LDC, EU, Norway and AILAC ministers gathering informally from May 2015 onwards. Shortly after its official announcement at COP 21 in December 2015, the US and Brazil joined the coalition.38 Figure 14.1 provides a visual overview. The more a group’s name is placed outside of the G77 circle, the more of its members are not G77 members. Of groups fully inside the circle, all members are G77 members too.

34  Yamin and Depledge, The International Climate Change Regime, 47. 35  Blaxekjær and Nielsen, “Mapping the narrative positions of new political groups under the UNFCCC.” 36  Audet, “Climate justice and bargaining coalitions,” 382; Blaxekjær and Nielsen, “Mapping the narrative positions of new political groups under the UNFCCC,” 758. 37  Ibid., 758–9. 38  Wolfgang Obergassel et al., “Phoenix from the Ashes: An Analysis of the Paris Agreement to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — Part 1,” Environmental Law & Management 27, no. 6 (2016): 251; Karl Mathiesen and Fiona Harvey, “Climate coalition breaks cover in Paris to push for binding and ambitious deal,” The Guardian, December 8, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/08/ coalition-paris-push-for-binding-ambitious-climate-change-deal (accessed March 4, 2019); Interviews with EU officials in Brussels, December 21, 2015 and January 20, 26 and 27, 2016.

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Figure 14.1

3

Groups in negotiations on the PA (2011–15) Note: ALBA= Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America; CACAM= Central Asia, Caucasus, Albania and Moldova; CfRN= Coalition for Rainforest Nations; COMIFAC= Central African Forestry Commission; CVF= Climate Vulnerability Forum; MLDC= Mountainous Landlocked Developing Countries — one of the few groups that dissolved; OPEC= Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries; SICA= Central American Integration System. Source: Author’s own compilation

The Impact of Group Interaction in the UNFCCC

Impact of Group Interaction on Mitigation in the Negotiation Process towards the PA The mitigation of climate change by reducing GHG emissions is one of the most important issues on the UNFCCC agenda. The UNFCCC’s ultimate objective, in its article 2, is ‘to achieve […] stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.’ The UNFCCC requests industrialised country parties to take the lead in mitigating climate change.39 Opinions in 2011–15 about which UNFCCC parties should mitigate their GHG emissions from 2020 onwards, developed and/or developing countries, varied. Some argued that emerging economies, which emitted increasingly large amounts of GHGs, should be bound by emission reductions in the PA too, but others were 3.1

39  United Nations, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, FCCC/ INFORMAL/84, Article 3.1, http://UNFCCC.int/resource/docs/convkp/conveng.pdf (accessed March 2, 2019). - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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Figure 14.2

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Position of key groups’ and US’ objectives on mitigation in the negotiations on the PA Note: Groen, ‘The importance of fitting activities to context: the EU in multilateral climate and biodiversity negotiations’, p. 227. Note that the G77 is not included, as its members’ positions are represented by smaller groups shown in the figure (LMDC, BASIC, AG, AILAC, AOSIS). Source: Adapted from Groen

not convinced. What rules on mitigation should be included in the PA was not obvious either.40 The dynamics of recurrent UNFCCC negotiations and an expanding agenda have led to a proliferation of groups. It is important that the interaction aimed at finding a common agreement involves the key negotiation groups, because to be adopted, the agreement must satisfy them in particular.41 Figure 14.2 shows the position of key negotiation groups’ objectives on mitigation in the negotiation process towards the PA. The LMDC, BASIC and African Group, on the one hand, had moderately conservative positions on mitigation. They aimed to keep the divide between developed country parties with mitigation obligations and developing country parties without such obligations in place. The US, LDC, AILAC, EIG, EU and AOSIS, on the other hand, were reformist, aiming to put in place mitigation commitments for all UNFCCC parties. Among them, AOSIS was most reformist and the US the least. These major groups tried to reach agreement on the issue, rather than the ±190 countries they represented trying to pursue their individual interests, based on an informal understanding. This made the process towards a consensus much easier. From the UNFCCC’s start, smaller parties understood that they had to cooperate in groups to have an impact on the multilateral negotiations, and groups helped structure the process. After this group architecture had been in place for some time, it became a key element of the UNFCCC negotiations. The major groups incorporated some smaller and less significant negotiation groups, such as SICA or ALBA. Single-issue coalitions like CfRN 40  Hermann Ott et al., “Climate policy: road works and new horizons — an assessment of the UNFCCC process from Lima to Paris and beyond,” Environmental Liability — Law, Policy and Practice 6 (2014): 223–38; Oberthür and Groen, “Explaining goal achievement in international negotiations.” 41  Groen, The importance of fitting activities to context. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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and COMIFAC on forestry did not try to influence the debate on mitigation.42 The French COP 21 Presidency reduced final discussions on the PA on certain key topics, including mitigation, to a circle of several key groups only. The Presidency took their red lines into account when it skilfully shaped a final compromise, which they ultimately accepted.43 The divide between the positions of reformist and conservative parties on mitigation reflects to some extent the divide between developed and developing country parties that the UNFCCC put in place at its start. However, some developing country groups — AILAC, AOSIS and LDC — bridged this divide by sharing the reformist position of the EU and US to create mitigation commitments for all UNFCCC parties. Moreover, the HAC united the groups on the reformist side of the spectrum of interests on mitigation (AOSIS, LDC, EU, Norway, AILAC, US) as a coalition builder. As the HAC’s members were convinced of the need to realise an ambitious PA to tackle climate change, they worked together to stand stronger against conservative parties. This broad coalition composed of key developed and developing countries helped convince the Presidency to aim for an ambitious PA mitigation outcome.44 The PA’s articles on mitigation do not oblige specific behaviour to realise concrete results. They oblige all UNFCCC parties to ‘prepare, communicate, and maintain successive nationally determined contributions (NDCs) that it intends to achieve’45 (Article 4.2), containing domestic mitigation measures that reflect their ‘highest possible ambition’46 (Article 4.3). The PA also includes a periodic global stocktake of the NDCs with the aim to increase their ambition over time (Article 14), and it specifies that parties aim to reach global peaking of GHG emissions ‘as soon as possible’47 to achieve ‘a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century’ (Article 4.1). This moderately reformist outcome is close to the US position, and less ambitious than the EU/EIG/LDC/ AILAC and especially AOSIS had hoped.48 42  See footnote 39 for full names of SICA, ALBA, CfRN and COMIFAC. 43  Radoslav S. Dimitrov, “The Paris Agreement on climate change: behind closed doors,” Global Environmental Politics 16, no. 3 (2016): 1–11; Oberthür and Groen, “Explaining goal achievement in international negotiations”; participant observation; interviews with EU officials in Brussels, December 21, 2015 and January 20, 26 and 27, 2016. 44  Obergassel et al., “Phoenix from the Ashes,” 251; Interviews with EU officials in Brussels, December 21, 2015 and January 20, 26 and 27, 2016. 45  Rather than ‘shall’ achieve. 46  This language is rather vague. 47  This language is not concrete either. 48  Groen, The importance of fitting activities to context, 216–18.

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3.2 Group Interaction Impact on the UNFCCC in General Does group interaction lead to debates that facilitate collective action, or contribute to diplomatic theatrics that do not lead to any action at all? As for the UNFCCC, the former applies in a large majority of cases. In the negotiations towards the PA and Kyoto Protocol, for example, group interaction helped bring about agreements. However, these agreements have not always been as ambitious as some may have liked. The 2009 Copenhagen Accord is a clear example (see below), but even the PA was not as reformist as ambitious parties like AOSIS had hoped. An agreement in the UNFCCC has to be found somewhere in the middle of all groups’ positions to be accepted by consensus. Final agreements at the yearly UNFCCC COPs consist of a collection of decisions on several agenda items that comes about by shaping a package deal in which all key groups have to make some trade-offs and get something they want. The nature of this process may have stimulated group and coalition creation. The more intense constructive group interaction is, the easier it is to find trade-offs for a package deal. Intense, constructive interaction helps build trust, which is crucial for the process. Coalitions like the HAC that bring several groups together on the same page further stimulate this process. The coalition’s interests, size, its members’ influence, etc. determine whether it can shift a final agreement into a (slightly) more ambitious / conservative direction. In the Copenhagen Accord negotiations, cooperation between the US and BASIC at COP 15’s (2009) final stages tipped the balance towards a more conservative outcome.49 From time to time, certain key groups use their ability to walk out of the negotiations to stall the process. An example is the African Group’s walkout (supported by the G77) at COP 15 related to discussions about ending the Kyoto Protocol they were unhappy with.50 Such moves have delayed and therefore hampered the negotiation process to some extent, but not considerably, as most often a large majority of key groups desires a final agreement, which requires constructive group interaction. Until COP 24, the negotiations have only completely failed to produce an agreement at COP 6 in the Hague in 2000 (and to some extent at COP 15), on the rules to implement the Kyoto Protocol. This was due to a too slow pace of work at the technical level and the inability of the

49  Robert Falkner, Hannes Stephan, and John Vogler, “International Climate Policy after Copenhagen: Towards a ‘Building Blocks’ Approach,” Global Policy 1, no. 3 (2010): 256–57; Bäckstrand and Elgström, “The EU’s role in climate change negotiations,” 1379. 50  Makina, “Managing Climate Change,” 45.

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278 Groen key groups to make political compromises. Agreement was found somewhat later at COP 6 bis and COP 7.51 As the number of agenda items and thereby the number of groups in the UNFCCC has increased over time, in particular since the late 2000s, group interaction and coalitions have become more important to streamline the negotiation process.52 Especially after the chaotic Copenhagen negotiations in which only a few major groups were included in final discussions on key elements of the final Accord, smaller groups have learned that they must reach out to larger, likeminded key groups and work together in coalitions to get closer to their objectives in the negotiation process.53 Finally, the COP Presidency can stimulate or hamper the creation of a final deal with its management of the group interaction process. The French COP 21 Presidency, on the one hand, acted skilfully and effectively, as a neutral broker that parties trusted.54 It held many meetings with the major negotiation groups at COP 21, including the HAC, and used their red lines as a basis for shaping the text of the PA, with success.55 The Danish COP 15 Presidency, on the other hand, seems to have hampered the COP 15 negotiations towards a Copenhagen Accord. Its chaotic management of the negotiations seems to have damaged the trust among parties. In addition, the Danish Prime Minister does not seem to have been familiar enough with the UNFCCC procedures.56 4

Explaining the Impact of Groups

Why do groups have influence in the UNFCCC? According to Betsill and Corell, influence does not only mean shaping outcomes (= result), but also the agenda

51  Christiaan Vrolijk, “COP-6 collapse or ‘to be continued?’,” International Affairs 77, no. 1 (2001): 163–69. 52  Carola Betzold, Paula Castro, and Florian Weiler, “AOSIS in the UNFCCC Negotiations: From Unity to Fragmentation?,” Climate Policy 12, no. 5 (2012): 592. 53  Groen, The importance of fitting activities to context. 54  Interviews with EU officials in Brussels, December 15 and 21, 2015 and January 20, 26 and 27, 2016; Interview with South African official via Skype, January 22, 2016, Interview with UNFCCC expert via Skype, January 25, 2016. 55  Interviews with EU officials in Brussels, January 26 and 27, 2016; participant observation; Oberthür and Groen, “Explaining goal achievement in international negotiations.” 56  Per Meilstrup, “The Runaway Summit: The Background Story of the Danish Presidency of COP15, the UN climate change conference,” in Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook 2010, ed. Nanna Hvidt and Hans Mouritzen (Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies, 2010), 129–33.

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(= starting point), or discussions (= process).57 To be able to shape any stage of the negotiations, a group should be able to convince other groups. Both material resources (e.g. the wealth of the group and/or its members) and social resources (e.g. the perceived legitimacy of the group’s positions) can be at the basis of influence. AOSIS, for example, has been exerting influence in the UNFCCC via both social and (borrowed) material resources. First, it has been influencing debates by arguing that its islands, as ‘innocent victims’, are disappearing due to GHG emissions, which must be stopped. It makes use of powerful moral narratives to convince others that climate action is important, which turned it into the ‘international conscience’ of the negotiations.58 This social resource guaranteed AOSIS a seat next to UN regional groups on the UNFCCC Bureau and in the COPs, which boosted its participation. Second, using similar moral narratives to emphasise the need for climate action, AOSIS has been teaming up with other ambitious negotiation groups from both the developed and developing world, to isolate non-ambitious parties.59 The EU has been creating coalitions too. Together with AOSIS, it was one of the initiators of the HAC, for example.60 AOSIS has also been teaming up with scientists and receiving assistance from capable NGOs that helped it shape text proposals, which influenced the negotiation process. By teaming up, it could “borrow material power”.61 This explains how traditionally weak states can negotiate with stronger states and still achieve their objectives.62 AOSIS was not able to achieve its ambitious objectives on mitigation in the PA, though, as shown above. It had to move to the position of the more conservative negotiation groups to some extent for a final compromise. Its social and borrowed material resources thus have their limits.

57  M  ichele M. Betsill and Elisabeth Corell, “NGO Influence in International Environmental Negotiations: A Framework for Analysis,” Global Environmental Politics 1, no. 4 (2001): 65–85. 58  W. Jackson Davis, “The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS): The International Conscience,” Asia-Pacific Magazine, 2 (1996): 17–22; Betzold, “‘Borrowing’ power to influence international negotiations,” 138–39. 59  Ibid., 140. 60  Groen, The importance of fitting activities to context; Oberthür and Groen, “Explaining goal achievement in international negotiations.” 61  Betzold, “‘Borrowing’ power to influence international negotiations,” 141; Yamin and Depledge, The International Climate Change Regime, 38. 62  Betzold, Castro, and Weiler, “AOSIS in the UNFCCC Negotiations”; William Mark Habeeb, Power and tactics in international negotiation: How weak nations bargain with strong nations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

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Having technical experts such as lawyers in your delegation who can help with interpreting legal language — as well as other human resources — is a material resource most richer delegations possess, but poor ones lack.63 Another material resource most large and richer countries possess (including emerging economies like China and India) is their considerable contribution to climate change, the problem under negotiation. The BASIC group’s influence in the UNFCCC grew over time as their collective GHG emissions rose. Richer delegations cannot rely solely on material power, though. They need legitimacy to attract followers. For example, realising GHG emission reductions at home is one of the conditions for credible EU climate leadership.64 How coherent a group is (in terms of its members’ interests) and how well its members cooperate with each other also affects its influence. Because of its members’ diverse policy preferences, the G77 usually formulates broad positions on headlines. This means that it cannot move debates forward by proposing specific solutions. It most often reacts to suggestions proposed by other parties.65 Many have been puzzled by the G77’s continued existence alongside several other non-Annex I groups.66 Bhandary clarifies, quoting Chasek and Rajamani, that ‘smaller, issue-based coalitions can often be an important complement’ to a large coalition: smaller groups allow countries to pursue particular interests while receiving political support from the large coalition.67 Finally, it matters whether a group’s position on an agenda item is an outlier in the spectrum of positions of all negotiation parties or close to the middle. With a position in the middle of the spectrum of interests, it is easier for a group to interact with the others in a constructive manner and influence them and to build bridges and coalitions to get closer to an outcome it prefers.68

63  Makina, “Managing Climate Change,” 43. 64  Robert Falkner, “The political economy of ‘normative power’ Europe: EU environmental leadership in international biotechnology regulation,” Journal of European Public Policy 14, no. 4 (2007): 507–526; Christer Karlsson et al., “The legitimacy of leadership in international climate change negotiations,” Ambio, 41 (2012): 46–55. 65  Makina, “Managing Climate Change,” 40. 66   Yamin and Depledge, The International Climate Change Regime, 35; Kathryn Ann Hochstetler, “The G-77, BASIC, and global climate governance,” 59–60; Masters, “The G77 and China in the climate change negotiations,” 2. 67  Bhandary, “Coalition strategies in the climate negotiations: an analysis of mountainrelated coalitions,” 176; Pamela Chasek and Lavanya Rajamani, “Steps toward enhanced parity: Negotiating capacity and strategies of developing countries,” in Providing global public goods, ed. Inge Kaul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 255. 68  Groen, The importance of fitting activities to context. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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5 Conclusion This chapter has analysed group interaction in the UNFCCC, including its impact, with a focus on the negotiation process towards the PA. It has also tried to answer the question why groups have influence in the UNFCCC. Over time, several negotiation groups have emerged and only a few have left the scene. This growing number of groups seems to reflect the UNFCCC’s increasing maturity and seems to respond to the greater use of groups in the negotiations and the growing number of agenda items. Most groups consist of developing countries only. However, after 2009 coalitions with both developed and developing countries emerged, such as the HAC. Trying to bridge the North-South divide in the PA negotiations via a coalition of ambitious parties, helping to foster an ambitious consensus on the main elements of the PA, the HAC has facilitated the negotiation process towards a more ambitious outcome. In a large majority of UNFCCC negotiation processes, group interaction helped bring about an agreement. The more intense constructive group interaction is, the more chance there is to find trade-offs for a package deal. The interaction builds trust, which is crucial for the process. The COP Presidency’s management of the interaction process is of high importance too. Group impact in the UNFCCC results from both social and material resources. Material resources can also be borrowed by teaming up with NGOs, or with other negotiation groups in coalitions. Richer delegations normally possess higher amounts of material resources than poor ones, but cannot rely solely on material resources. They need some legitimacy to attract followers, as more than 190 UNFCCC parties make decisions by consensus. The degree of group coherence and the position of its interests in the spectrum of all groups’ interests also help explain its influence. This chapter’s findings highlight the importance of group interaction in the UNFCCC for building trust and making package deals. These are part of a captivating new research agenda on group interaction in multilateral negotiations, with lots of opportunities for future research. The analysis of group interaction in various fora will allow us to compare results, identify variation and similarities, and find explanations. These results could potentially be used to inform the creation of new multilateral fora and improve the rules and procedures of existing ones. Bibliography Ashe, John W., Robert Van Lierop, and Anilla Cherian. “The role of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in the negotiation of the United Nations Framework - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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Falkner, Robert, Hannes Stephan, and John Vogler. “International Climate Policy after Copenhagen: Towards a ‘Building Blocks’ Approach.” Global Policy 1, no. 3 (2010): 252–262. Groen, Lisanne. The importance of fitting activities to context: the EU in multilateral climate and biodiversity negotiations. PhD Thesis. Brussels: Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2016. Habeeb, William Mark. Power and tactics in international negotiation: How weak nations bargain with strong nations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Hallding, Karl, Mikael Román, Aaron Atteridge, Marcus Carson, and Marie Jürisoo. Together alone: Brazil, South Africa, India, China (BASIC) and the climate change conundrum. Stockholm: Stockholm Environmental Institute, 2011. Hochstetler, Kathryn Ann. “The G-77, BASIC, and global climate governance: a new era in multilateral environmental negotiations.” Revista Brasileira de Politica Internacional 55 (2012): 53–69. Karlsson, Christer, Mattias Hjerpe, Charles Parker and Björn-Ola Linnér. “The legitimacy of leadership in international climate change negotiations.” Ambio, 41 (2012): 46–55. Klöck, Carola, and Paula Castro. “Coalitions in global climate change negotiations.” Innovations in Climate Governance Policy Brief, no. 5 (August 2018). Makina, Anesu. “Managing Climate Change: The Africa Group in Multilateral Environmental Negotiations.” Journal of International Organizations Studies 4, no. 1 (2013): 36–48. Masters, Lesley. “The G77 and China in the climate change negotiations: a leaky umbrella?”. Global Insight 111 (2014): 1–5. Mathiesen, Karl, and Fiona Harvey. “Climate coalition breaks cover in Paris to push for binding and ambitious deal.” The Guardian, December 8, 2015, https://www .theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/08/coalition-paris-push-for-binding -ambitious-climate-change-deal. Meilstrup, Per. “The Runaway Summit: The Background Story of the Danish Presidency of COP15, the UN climate change conference.” In Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook 2010, edited by Nanna Hvidt and Hans Mouritzen, 113–135. Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies, 2010. Obergassel, Wolfgang, Christof Arens, Lukas Hermwille, Nicolas Kreibich, Florian Mersmann, Hermann E. Ott and Hanna Wang-Helmreich. “Phoenix from the Ashes: An Analysis of the Paris Agreement to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — Part 1.” Environmental Law & Management 27, no. 6 (2016): 243–262. Oberthür, Sebastian, and Lisanne Groen. “Explaining goal achievement in international negotiations: the EU and the Paris Agreement on climate change.” Journal of European Public Policy 25, no. 5 (2018): 708–727.

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Oberthür, Sebastian, and Hermann E. Ott. The Kyoto Protocol. International Climate Policy for the 21st Century. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1999. Ott, Hermann, Wolfgang Obergassel, Christof Arens, Lukas Hermwille, Florian Mersmann and Hanna Wang-Helmreich. “Climate policy: road works and new horizons — an assessment of the UNFCCC process from Lima to Paris and beyond.” Environmental Liability — Law, Policy and Practice 6 (2014): 223–38. Qi, Xinran. “The rise of BASIC in UN climate change negotiations.” South African Journal of International Affairs 18, no. 3 (2011): 295–318. Roger, Charles. “The Evolution of the African Group of Negotiators in the UNFCCC.” Africa Portal Backgrounder, no. 64 (2013), Centre for International Governance Innovation, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Sjöstedt, Gunnar, Bertram I. Spector, and I. William Zartman. “The dynamics of regimebuilding negotiations.” In Negotiating international regimes: Lessons learned from the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), edited by Bertram I. Spector, Gunnar Sjöstedt, and I. William Zartman. London: Graham and Trotman, 1994. United Nations. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, FCCC/ INFORMAL/84, Article 3.1, http://UNFCCC.int/resource/docs/convkp/conveng.pdf (accessed March 2, 2019). United Nations. United Nations Regional Groups of Member States. http://www.un.org/ depts/DGACM/RegionalGroups.shtml (accessed March 2, 2019). UNFCCC. Bureau of the COP, CMP, and CMA. https://unfccc.int/process/bodies/ supreme-bodies/bureau-of-the-cop-cmp-and-cma (accessed January 21, 2020). UNFCCC. Decision 1/CP.17, FCCC/CP/2011/9/Add.1. https://UNFCCC.int/sites/default/ files/resource/docs/2011/cop17/eng/09a01.pdf (accessed March 5, 2019). Vihma, Antto, Yacob Mulugetta, and Sylvia Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen. “Negotiating solidarity? The G77 through the prism of climate change negotiations.” Global Change, Peace and Security 23, no. 3 (2011): 315–334. Vrolijk, Christiaan. “COP-6 collapse or ‘to be continued?’.” International Affairs 77, no. 1 (2001): 163–169. Watts, Joshua, and Joanna Depledge. “Latin America in the climate change negotiations: Exploring the AILAC and ALBA coalitions.” WIREs climate change 9, e533 (2018): 1–14. Williams, Marc. “The Third World and Global Environmental Negotiations: Interests, Institutions and Ideas.” Global Environmental Politics 5, no. 3 (2005): 48–69. Yamin, Farhana, and Joanna Depledge. The International Climate Change Regime: A Guide to Rules, Institutions, and Procedures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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Chapter 15

Group Politics and the Question of Palestinian Recognition in the UN System Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués The Palestinian leadership has set into motion a series of requests for membership in different UN bodies and accession to international treaties.1 Palestine first applied for full UN membership in 2011, only to have its application indefinitely deferred by the UN Security Council months later. The Palestinian Authority was, however, admitted as a member state of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) later that year. Palestine was also granted ‘non-member observer state’ status in the United Nation General Assembly (UNGA) in 2012.2 The latter status upgrade opened the door to accession to a range of international treaties and conventions in principle only open to states which enjoy full diplomatic recognition as sovereign states. The Palestinians have since become state party to a number of key international treaties such as, for example, the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court, the UN Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The primary driver behind the Palestinian quest to join international bodies, or attain enhanced observer status, is to gain universal recognition for the Palestinian state.3 Palestine declared itself an independent state in 1988. After independence, and in the period leading up to 2010, Palestinian statehood had been recognized bilaterally by almost 120 states, as well as by several regional or cross-regional organizations of which it is a full member. However, despite such bilateral and multilateral support, the Palestinian statehood issue has been perceived by its leaders as stymied by the combined failure of the 1993 1  The author would like to thank the editors for their insightful help throughout the writing process. This chapter falls within the VISIONS research project (Visions and practices of geopolitics in the European Union and its neighborhood) funded by the National R+D Plan of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (CSO2017-82622-P). 2  The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had held a UNGA ‘observer entity’ status prior to that (1974–2011). 3  M. Abbas, “Speech to the UN General Assembly.” New York, September 29, 2012, available at: , all web-sites last accessed 24 May 2019.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004384446_016

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Oslo Agreement’s two-state objective and the lack of bilateral recognition by the main Western states. For this reason, memberships and status upgrades in international forums are sought to ‘normalize’ and legitimize the notion of a Palestinian state, in the hopes that this will generate a positive spill-over effect on those states that remain hesitant about extending bilateral recognition.4 This chapter explores the multilateral politics surrounding the Palestine petition for recognition through UNESCO membership and UNGA non-member state status.5 The League of Arab States (Arab League, LAS; see chapter 6) and the Arab Group at the UN became the key actors in assisting the process by co-sponsoring the membership and status upgrade petitions.6 Moreover, the LAS would provide a multiplier effect for Palestinian efforts through its lobbying efforts and institutionalized dialogues with other UN political groups, such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the Africa Group or African Union (AU) and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) as well as with the European Union (EU). The chapter thus pays special attention to the multilateral channels through which Palestine and the Arab League promoted the issue, and the effects of the group-to-group coalition-building, and some of the national motivations that led some countries to converge towards or diverge from the group position. The argument below is structured as following: the first section will explore the institutionalized frameworks through which the Palestinians and the Arab League have promoted the issue of Palestine more generally, and particularly the membership/upgrade question in 2011 and 2012. The second section will survey the voting patterns on the Palestinian UNESCO membership and the 2012 non-member state status in the UNGA and the main motivations behind the votes; the latter reveal that a pro-Palestinian vote was not always intended as a vote for Palestinian statehood recognition. The third section will look at group politics surrounding the votes and see what impact that debates have had on individual members of groups and what influence non-group states have exerted over group discussions.

4  K. Elgindy, “Palestine Goes to the UN: Understanding the New Statehood Strategy.” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 5 (Sept/Oct 2011): 102–113. 5  This chapter will therefore not cover regional or political groupings that have not tried to coordinate members’ views on the Palestinian issue, such as the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) or the Latin American and Caribbean Group. 6  The Arab diplomats in New York and Geneva refer to themselves as the Arab Group or “Group of Arab States”. This denomination was also employed in the early days of the United Nations to refer to the long-since disappeared Arab regional electoral group.

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287

The Preparatory Multilateral Politics for Palestinian Membership/Upgrade

Once the decision to pursue enhanced international status through different membership bids was taken in early 2011, the Palestinian leadership turned to the Arab League to obtain crucial political backing. The League of Arab States has been the Palestinians’ foremost allies in UN bodies for decades. The Arab League’s coordination on Palestine began in the very first session of the UNGA in the context of the committee deliberations prior to the 1947 Partition Plan. During the Cold War the Arab League subsequently was recognized as a clearly distinctive and ‘powerful voice’ in the UN framework on Middle Eastern affairs, Palestine in particular.7 The group’s identity in most international forums continues still today to be closely linked to Palestinian issues.8 Palestine has been a full state member of the Arab League since 1988 (from 1976 to 1988 the PLO held the seat). The Arab states’ support for the Palestinian cause is linked to a complex combination of elite personal ties, the domestic popularity of the Palestinian issue, and decolonization and self-determination efforts. The support also emanates from regional desires to achieve politics of scale for their critiques of the US and Israeli roles in the Middle East and the negative repercussions that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has on all countries in the region whether in terms of territorial sovereignty, Palestinian refugees or economic impact. One observer argues that: [t]oday the Palestinians are engaged in what is possibly the last anticolonial struggle in the world. In the minds of the [Arab] masses, national dignity is thus inextricably linked to justice for the Palestinians. The Palestine cause remains suffused in symbolism that transcends the narrow borders of its patrimony.9 Palestine is a full member of the Arab League, and all 21 of the other member states have recognized the Palestinian state bilaterally and established full diplomatic relations. Coordination on the Palestinian issue takes place at summit, ministerial and permanent representative meetings, and alongside 7  N.J. Padelford, “Regional Organization and the United Nations.” International Organization 54, no. 8 (1954): 203–216. 8  S. Ferabolli, “The League of Arab States and the international projection of an Arab collective identity.” Século XXI, Porto Alegre 3, no. 2 (2012): 85–94. 9  A. Shlaim, “Israel, Palestine, and the Arab Uprising.” In The New Middle East: Protest and Revolution in the Arab World, ed. F. Gerges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 380–401.

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informal bilateral or multilateral contacts whenever necessary (see chapter 6). In May 2011 the Arab foreign ministers welcomed the Palestinian proposition to pursue full membership of the UN and UNESCO. In 2012 the Arab League also fully embraced the objective of pursuing the upgrade of Palestine’s status in the UNGA to a ‘non-member observer state’. Prior to both votes, Palestinian and League leaders prepared the diplomatic groundwork in Paris (UNESCO) and New York (UNGA), as well as through diverse regional cooperative formats with the OIC, NAM, AU, UNASUR and EU.10 To support the membership/status upgrade, Palestine’s and the League’s first ports of call were to be the Organization for Islamic Cooperation and the Non-Aligned Movement. The Arab Group continues to table almost all UN resolutions introduced each year related to the Palestine and Israel. However, they rarely appear alone. Most resolutions are sponsored jointly with OIC, NAM or a coalition of member states drawn from those entities. Resolutions related to Palestinian self-determination, refugees, Israeli settlements activities or alleged human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, East Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan have regularly been co-sponsored by OIC or NAM. This constant support and co-sponsoring stand testimony in part to Palestinian and Arab ability during the bipolar era to establish a conceptual passarelle between the Palestinian quest for self-determination and African and Asian states’ own independence processes in a way that remains relevant for such postcolonial countries even today.11 Palestine also continues to be a symbolic issue for those NAM countries affiliated with centre-left or leftist ideology and national liberation movements in Latin America, Africa or Asia.12 The current concerns over the status of Jerusalem — the third holiest city in Islam — violence, anti-Islamism, discrimination and racism against Muslims, whether in the West or in Israel, have become additional sources of cohesion in the OIC in favour of Palestine (see chapter 6).13 Palestine has been a member state in its own right of both the OIC and NAM since 1988. Of the 57 OIC member states, all but one (Cameroon) recognize the Palestinian state bilaterally.14 Of the 120 members of the NAM, 103 had 10  A  ljazeera (Doha). “Arab League discusses Palestinian statehood.” August 4, 2011. 11  A  .A. Akinsanya, “Afro-Arab Relations and North Africa.” Paper Presented to the Conference on Regional Integration in Africa: Bridging the North-Sub-Saharan Divide, Cairo, Egypt, November 5–7, 2010. 12  Socialist International, ‘Socialist International welcomes UN vote on Palestinian status’, November 30, 2012, available at: . 13  E. İhsanoğlu, The Islamic World in the New Century: The Organisation of the Islamic Conference. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. For a more elaborate discussion on OIC and the Palestinian Question, see Ch. 6 in the current volume. 14  Cameroon has, however, established diplomatic relations with the Palestinian Authority. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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recognized the Palestinian state bilaterally prior to the 2011 UNESCO and 2012 UNGA votes.15 Coordination between the Arab League and OIC or NAM on political issues, such as the Palestinian Question, regularly takes place at summits and/or ministerial meetings. Both NAM and the OIC have active standing committees on Palestinian issues, both of which prepare statements and propose initiatives related to Palestine and Jerusalem.16 In the summer of 2011, the 38th Session of the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers in Astana and the 16th NAM Ministerial Meeting in Bali reaffirmed their support for an independent state of Palestine and took note of the Palestinian intention to submit a membership application to the UNESCO. At the Bali meeting the NAM chair, Egypt, and Indonesia also actively encouraged all NAM members that had not yet done so to recognize Palestine bilaterally.17 The Arab League has also established ties with other regional or political UN groups to engage in political dialogue, including on the Palestinian issue. First, Afro-Arab Cooperation between the LAS and the African Union (then the Organization of African Unity) was launched in the 1970s and Palestine figures prominently on its agenda. Also here identity issues play a large role. Whether through the interaction with LAS, or through their overlapping ties through NAM, OIC and/or AU memberships, ‘Africans have found the Palestinian cause to be one that is as African as it is Arab, with its basis in a right that they too struggled hard to achieve: the inalienable right of peoples to self-determination and independence’.18 Moreover, for many individual states members of the AU, the strong linkages in past decades between apartheid in South Africa and Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, or current concern with racial discrimination against peoples of African or Arab descent in Israel, foment cohesion in this group in favour of the Palestinian Question.19 South 15  The sixteen NAM members that had not recognized the Palestinian state prior to the two votes were: Bahamas, Barbados, Cameroon, Colombia, Eritrea, Fiji, Guatemala, Haiti, Jamaica, Myanmar, Panama, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Singapore, South Korea and Trinidad and Tobago. 16  The NAM Committee on Palestine was established in 1983 to support the right of the Arab Palestinian people in accordance with international law and the will of the Non-Aligned countries and their peoples. The OIC’s Al-Quds Committee was established in 1975 to monitor the Arab-Israeli conflict, in particular in relation to Jerusalem. 17  Antara News (Jakarta). “NAM Meeting in Bali Momentum to Garner Support for Palestine.” May 27, 2011. During 2011, 9 additional NAM members recognized Palestine as a state and Thailand did so before the 2012 UNGA vote. 18  S. Maïga, “Building an international consensus on a just and viable solution of the question of Jerusalem.” Paper presented to United Nations African Meeting on the Question of Palestine: Strengthening the support by African States for a just and lasting solution of the question of Jerusalem. Rabat, Morocco, July 1 and 2, 2010. 19  Akinsanya, “Afro-Arab Relations.” - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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Africa has been one of the more active AU members in denouncing Israeli discriminatory practices in, for example, the UN Human Rights Council. Of the 54 AU member states, 52 have recognized Palestine as a state and have established full diplomatic relations. Cameroon and Eritrea are the only two AU members currently withholding bilateral recognition, although both have established full diplomatic relations with Palestine. Palestine and the LAS have also reached out to Latin American countries, among them the Union of South American Nations group (UNASUR). In May 2005, the first South American-Arab Countries Summit (ASPA) was held in Brazil.20 ASPA’s chief architect, then Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula, had originally intended the cooperation to focus on trade and energy. However, the first meeting revealed a bi-regional interest in exploring political issues, and Palestinian affairs have regularly featured in ministerial meetings.21 Many UNASUR countries are also NAM members and hence their views draw upon the Movement’s stance on Palestinian self-determination.22 However, for nonNAM members, like Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay or Uruguay, other motivations for support in 2011 and 2012 include wanting to make a clean break with their pro-Israeli dictatorial pasts, a substantial resident Arab population and/or the popularity of the Palestinian cause among leftist or centre-left governments as a way to contest the neoliberal world order as well as the US’ dominant role whether in South America or in the Arab world.23 Indeed, then Argentinian Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman declared in 2010 that his country’s decision to recognize the Palestinian state was in part a foreign policy strategy to help shield the Middle East from U.S. ‘hegemonic interferences’.24 All but one of UNASUR’s 12 member states (Colombia) had recognized the Palestinian state in 2011–12.25 20  For a fuller explanation of emergence and evolution of ASPA, cf. S. Ferabolli, “Regions That Matter: the Arab–South American Interregional Space.” Third World Quarterly 38, no. 8 (2017): 1767–1781. 21  C. Amorim, “Brazil and the Middle East: reflections on Lula’s South-South Cooperation.” Cairo Review 2/2011 (2013): 48–63; C. Baeza, “América latina y la cuestión palestina (1947– 2012).” Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades 14, no. 28 (2012): 111–131. 22  Ferabolli, “Regions That Matter.” 23  Amorim, “Brazil and the Middle East.”; Baeza, “América Latina.”; J. Stites Mor, “The Question of Palestine in the Argentine Political Imaginary: Anti-Imperialist Thought from Cold War to Neoliberal Order.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 20, no. 2 (2014): 183–197. 24  Cited in Washington Post. “Palestinians Seek Global Recognition through South America.” February 17, 2011. 25  Colombia recognized Palestine as a state in 2019.

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The Arab League has also sought to coordinate on the Palestinian issue with the European Union. The two organisations created an institutionalized forum in 2008 (Malta I) in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has constituted a major issue for discussion at ministerial and ambassadorial levels.26 EU member states have a longstanding interest in the Palestinian status issue. In the hopes of assisting the settlement of the Middle East conflict, the EU became a participant and promoter of different peace initiatives as a member of the Middle East Quartet (with the UN, US, and Russia) in 2002. The EU’s political dialogue with the League on Palestine is therefore seen by some EU members as key to the EU’s role as an international actor and a promoter of peace and guardian of the Quartet’s two-state solution.27 In 2011–12, of the EU’s 27 member states at the time, eight had recognized the Palestine state (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Romania and Slovakia).28 All EU member states, and the EU itself, have established bilateral diplomatic relations with the Palestinian Authority. Some of the above-mentioned regional and political groupings operate as nested clusters within ever larger groupings (such as LAS within the OIC and NAM) to achieve the necessary politics of scale to maintain the Palestinian Question high on the agenda of different international bodies. A separate and networked inter-group relationship has been set up in other cases, e.g. ministerial or permanent representative meetings between the different groupings, to harness a regional interest for Palestine (e.g. LAS with AU), or to be able to share information and engage on the issue with countries that are not members of the OIC or NAM (e.g. LAS with UNASUR or the EU). The group-to-group dialogues on Palestine function on the basis of non-binding consensus. This is also the modus operandi of the majority of the regional and political groups under survey here. In practice this means that an individual member state is encouraged to vote in international bodies according to the inter-group/group majority position, but it is not formally bound to do so. In contrast, EU member states are obliged to vote along the lines of an EU common position, if one exists. In the cases of the UNESCO and UNGA votes, the EU attempted to forge common positions, but failed. Hence, EU member states were free to adhere or not to the recommendations stemming from the EU-LAS dialogue. 26  For more on EU-LAS relations, see E. Johansson-Nogués, “The New EU–Arab League Dialogue: The Contours of a Cooperation.” Mediterranean Politics 20, no. 2 (2015): 295–302. 27  R. Miller, “Europe’s Palestine Problem: Making Sure the EU Matters to Middle East Peace.” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 5 (2011): 8–12. 28  E. Johansson-Nogués, “Returned to Europe? The Central and East European member states at the heart of the European Union.” In The European Union at the United Nations, ed. K.V. Laatikainen and K.E. Smith, 92–111. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

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The Multilateral Politics of Palestinian Membership/Status at UNESCO and UNGA

As a consequence of all bilateral and multilateral preparatory contacts over the summer and early fall of 2011, a grouping of countries drawn from Africa, Asia and Latin America petitioned the UNESCO Board to re-open the Palestinian membership application.29 The Board responded positively and on 29 October 2011 a total of 43 LAS, OIC, NAM, AU and/or UNASUR countries sponsored the draft resolution ‘Request for the admission of Palestine to UNESCO’ which enabled the final vote on Palestinian membership.30 Intensive diplomatic exchanges were also put into the ‘Status of Palestine in the United Nations’ Resolution of 2012 in regard to the non-member status.31 A total of 70 LAS, OIC, NAM, AU and/or UNASUR countries sponsored the resolution together with two representatives outside the group-to-group context: China and Iceland. Half of the sponsors were the same as on the UNESCO resolution. The sponsorship and outcome of the two votes is summarized in Table 15.1. Table 15.1 Sponsorship and votes on the Palestinian membership in UNESCO (2011) and non-member state status in UNGA (2012)

LAS OIC NAM AU UNASUR EU

Total membership of group in 2011–2012

UNESCO 107Y-14N-52A

Non-member state status 138Y-9N-41A

Sponsors

Sponsors

Votes

22 57 120 54 12 27k

21 31 41 23 1 0

20 39 57 21 9 0

20-0-0b 49-0-3d 99-1-16f 46-0-5h 10-0-1j 14-1-12m

19-0-0a 43-0-5c 79-2-21e 33-0-9g 10-0-1i 11-5-11l

a Libya and Comoros were absent, the latter due to overdue UNESCO membership fees. b Syria was suspended from LAS in November 2011. 29  The Palestinian membership request had originally been lodged in 1989, but the matter had been deferred. 30   U NESCO. “Draft resolution: Request for the admission of Palestine to UNESCO.” 36 C/ PLEN/DR.1, October 29, 2011. 31  United Nations. Sixty-seventh session, 44th plenary meeting, A/67/PV.44, November 29, 2012.

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c Albania, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Togo and Uganda abstained. Comoros, Guinea Bissau, Guyana, Libya, Maldives, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan were absent, some for having failed to pay their UNESCO dues. d Albania, Cameroon and Togo abstained. Gabon and Gambia were absent. e Panama and Vanuatu voted against and 21 other NAM members abstained (Bahamas, Bangladesh, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Fiji, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Liberia, Papua Guinea, Republic of Korea, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Singapore, Thailand, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, and Zambia). 17 NAM members were absent (Antigua and Barbuda, Central African Republic, Comoros, Dominican Rep, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Libya, Madagascar, Maldives, Mongolia, Sao Tomé and Principe, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, Timor Leste, and Turkmenistan). f Panama voted against and 16 members abstained (Bahamas, Barbados, Cameroon, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Fiji, Guatemala, Haiti, Malawi, Mongolia, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Singapore, South Korea, Togo and Vanuatu). 3 were absent (Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, and Madagascar). g 9 abstained (Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Rwanda, Togo, Uganda, and Zambia), while 11 were absent (Central Africa Republic, Comoros, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea Bissau, Libya, Madagascar, Sao Tomé and Principe, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and Swaziland). h 5 abstained (Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Rwanda, and Togo) abstained, while 2 were absent (Equatorial Guinea and Liberia). i 1 abstained (Colombia) and 1 was absent (Guyana). j Colombia abstained. Paraguay was suspended from UNASUR between June 2012 and August 2013. k Croatia acceded to the EU as its 28th member on 1 July 2013. l Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovenia and Spain voted yes. Czech Republic, Lithuania, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden voted no, while Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia and the UK abstained. m Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Spain and Sweden voted yes. Czech Republic voted no, while Bulgaria, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the UK abstained. Source: UNBISnet

The preparatory group-to-group meetings in 2011 and 2012 thus appeared overall to have been successful in generating strong cross-regional support for the Palestinian UNESCO membership as well as for the UNGA status upgrade. LAS, OIC and AU members were clearly the most supportive in both sponsorship and number of votes on the UNESCO vote, while the EU was the most divided group. The number of sponsors and favourable votes grew in the 2012 UNGA upgrade vote, especially among NAM and UNASUR countries. However, although the Palestinian membership and status upgrade was supported by solid majorities in both 2011 and 2012 — and both votes endowed Palestine with rights and obligations in principle only bestowed on a fully-recognized

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sovereign state — the explanation of votes in the UNGA reveals a highly variegated understanding of what the vote meant, as we will see below. 2.1 To Recognize or Not to Recognize the Palestinian State The Palestinians interpreted the 2011 and 2012 votes as a clear success for their goal to gain universal recognition as a state. The Palestinian envoy to UNESCO, Elias Wadih Sanbar, held that ‘[w]e are inaugurating a new era in which Palestine is recognized’.32 The Permanent Observer for the State of Palestine to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, affirmed that the 2012 vote meant that ‘the international community had recognized the existence of a Palestinian State’.33 This view was supported by rotating Chairman of the Group of Arab Ambassadors at the United Nations Sudan, as well as by Bolivia, Indonesia, Kuwait, North Korea, South Africa, Tanzania and the United Arab Emirates in their explanations of votes in 2012. NAM member North Korea echoed such understandings as its representative stated that his country ‘welcomes and congratulates Palestine on having received an absolute majority in recognition of its statehood at the United Nations’.34 For NAM/AU member South Africa it was ‘satisfying that the [UN] Organization has now cemented in the books of history the fact that Palestine is indeed a State’.35 NAM/UNASUR member Bolivia held that through the vote ‘[t]he General Assembly [had] fulfilled its incontrovertible moral, political and legal obligation to guarantee recognition of the Palestinian State’.36 Other countries were much more cautious in their reading of the vote. Egypt, Honduras, Iran, Morocco, Qatar or Tunisia — which all have recognized Palestine bilaterally and which voted in favour of both the 2011 UNESCO and 2012 UNGA votes — concurred with the view of Iraq in seeing the UNGA vote more as a ‘first step towards full recognition of the State of Palestine’ rather than an accomplished fact.37 Even the LAS representative present at the UNGA status upgrade vote indicated his belief that the adoption of the resolution was a mere ‘point of departure’, because full-fledged statehood recognition could 32  N  ew York Times (New York). “Palestinians Win a Vote on Bid to Join Unesco.” October 5, 2011. 33  R. Mansour, Speech to Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP), April 30, 2013. 34  United Nations. Sixty-seventh session, 46th plenary meeting, A/67/PV.46, November 30, 2012. 35  United Nations., Sixty-seventh session, 45th plenary meeting, A/67/PV.45, November 29, 2012. 36  United Nations, A/67/PV.46. 37  United Nations, A/67/PV.46.

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only come when Palestine has ‘become an independent sovereign State on its own territory, living in peace within internationally recognized borders with its neighbours’.38 Similarly, most UNASUR countries that had recognized the state of Palestine and voted in favour of the 2012 UNGA vote perceived it, along the lines of Argentina, as a mere formality and ‘one additional step towards the long overdue decision that the Organization has yet to take, namely, Palestine’s admission as a Member State of the United Nations’.39 As for the EU, no member state considered the 2012 Resolution either as an explicit or implicit recognition of the state of Palestine. However, it was clear that several EU members were mindful that such an interpretation could be made. Among those EU countries that voted in favour of the 2012 UNGA Resolution on Palestine’s observer upgrade, France declared that: [t]he international recognition that the Assembly has today given the proposed Palestinian State can become fact only through an agreement based on negotiations between the two parties on all final status issues, within the framework of a fair and comprehensive peace settlement.40 Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece, and Portugal also made statements clarifying that their favourable votes should not be construed as recognition of a Palestinian state. Finland affirmed that ‘[t]he world had witnessed that the Palestinian Authority now had institutions of a “model State”, a fact which deserved recognition’.41 However, he added that ‘the Assembly’s vote did not entail a formal recognition of a Palestinian State. Finland’s national position on the matter would be considered at a later date’.42 Divided on Recognition, United on Impetus for Middle East Peace Process A closer scrutiny of the explanations of votes and/or related statements on the 2011 UNESCO and the 2012 UNGA vote reveal that the predominant rationale behind most LAS, OIC, NAM, AU and UNASUR countries’ favourable votes was the belief that the Palestinian membership/status upgrade would enhance chances of success of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and catalyse the two-state solution. In 2011 the OIC Secretary General stated that his 2.2

38  United Nations, A/67/PV.46. 39  United Nations, A/67/PV.46. 40  United Nations, A/67/PV.44. 41  United Nations, A/67/PV.44. 42  United Nations, A/67/PV.44.

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organization perceived the Palestinian UNESCO membership bid as a means to ‘increase the possibilities for a lasting peace based on the vision of the twostate solution’.43 Sudan, speaking on behalf of the 70 co-sponsors of the 2012 Resolution on Palestinian non-member status, argued that ‘the draft resolution is a qualitative addition along the path to achieving the international will to establish a real peace in the Middle East based on the two-state solution’.44 NAM and AU member Tanzania contended that: [w]e are optimistic that the enhanced status granted today by the Assembly to the State of Palestine will provide renewed impetus to the parties to pursue vigorously all efforts to create a conducive environment to the resumption of direct and meaningful [peace] negotiations.45 Among the UNASUR countries explanations of votes, the Palestinian-Israeli peace process was to figure prominently in favour of the Palestinian status upgrade. Brazil expressed concern for the escalating violence.46 The Chilean delegation called ‘for the rapid resumption of direct negotiations between the Israeli Government and the Palestinian Authority, with a view to finding a stable and lasting solution based on two independent and sovereign States’.47 However, some UNASUR member states also challenged the Israeli-US argument that recognition of the Palestinian state should only come as a part of the package of the two-state solution. In their view it was important that the Palestinian state be recognized as a fully-fledged state prior to peace negotiations. Uruguay’s representative maintained that ‘there cannot be a solution to the peace process in the Middle East without the existence of two strong States’.48 In terms of the EU member states, France, together with Finland and Greece, believed that the vote to grant Palestine non-member observer status was supportive of the peace process as it was a vote, in the words of the French representative: in favour of the two-State solution, of two States for two peoples, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security within secure and internationally recognized borders; we have voted in favour of a solution 43  E  . İhsanoğlu, Statement by H.E. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, UNESCO General Conference Paris, October 31, 2011. 44  United Nations, A/67/PV.44. 45  United Nations, A/67/PV.45. 46  United Nations, A/67/PV.46. 47  United Nations, A/67/PV.46. 48  United Nations, A/67/PV.46.

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that we had advocated before the entire international community rallied to it — in favour of a solution today.49 However, most other EU members were concerned that the decision to upgrade Palestine to non-member observer state might upset and/or delay a return to the negotiations between Palestine and Israel. Germany, which abstained on the vote along with Bulgaria, Hungary Romania and UK, expressed the opinion that: there is reason to doubt whether the step taken today is helpful to the peace process at this point in time. We are concerned that it might lead to further hardening of positions instead of improving the chances of reaching a two-State solution through direct negotiations.50 The Czech Republic, which voted against the Resolution, reiterated its support for direct negotiations leading to Palestinian statehood and called upon on all concerned parties to ‘avoid steps’, such as the observer upgrade, that might interfere with, or precondition, the peace process.51 A majority of EU members thus — independently of their split vote in UNESCO and UNGA or whether they have recognized the Palestinian state bilaterally or not — appear to converge around the shared intra-group politics idea that Palestinian recognition is best settled in the context of the two-state solution. Asseburg acknowledges the logics of EU group politics and argues that a majority of EU states, independent of their 2011 and 2012 votes, appear to cling ‘to the idea that any solution in the Middle East should be the outcome of direct bilateral negotiations between the parties to the conflict’ and thus not be played-out in an ad-hoc manner in multilateral settings like those of the UNESCO and the UNGA.52 In sum, most LAS, OIC, NAM, AU and UNASUR countries followed the group-to-group recommendation to vote in favour in 2011 and 2012. However, opinions diverged about the significance of the favourable votes. Palestine and some LAS, OIC, NAM, AU and UNASUR countries held the votes as plebiscites on a full-blown recognition of the Palestinian state, while for most other states it was not. Rather, as we have seen, the predominant rationale for voting in favour on the 2012 vote among LAS, OIC, NAM, AU and UNASUR members was 49  United Nations, A/67/PV.44. 50  United Nations, A/67/PV.44. 51  United Nations, A/67/PV.44. 52  M. Asseburg, “The Arab Spring and the European Response.” International Spectator: Italian Journal of International Affairs 48, no. 2 (2013): 60.

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the perception that the vote supported a future Israeli-Palestinian peace process. As for the EU, member states were divided in the votes on the Palestinian UNESCO membership and the UNGA non-member state status. However, other intra-group politics dynamics were at play as they were unanimous in not considering the votes as implying recognition of the Palestinian statehood as well as in urging a return to peace talks. 3

The Impact of Political Groups and External Actors on Multilateral Politics of Palestinian Membership/Upgrade

As Laatikainen notes in this volume, while the UN is formally intergovernmental in its set-up, the multilateral context for diplomacy in the UN General Assembly privileges politics conducted through a variety of political and informal groups.53 The prime purpose of such groups in the UN context is to circulate information about and act to influence issues of high salience for its members. The UNESCO and UNGA votes demonstrate Palestine’s and Arab states’ ability to achieve the necessary politics of scale to have influence in these two international bodies even beyond the LAS membership. The Palestinian/ LAS influence through nested and networked group-to-group politics rests predominantly on social resources, i.e. the perceived legitimacy of the Palestinian cause in Africa, Asia and Latin America, shared group-to-group identities and the constancy of the Palestine/LAS lobbying work over the decades on most issues related to Palestine. However, inevitably symbolically important events had also turned the tide for greater sympathy in the international community for the Palestinian people, such as the different Israeli Gaza incursions, the Gaza Flotilla incident in 2009 and continued Israeli settlement policies beyond the 1967 borders. Palestine/LAS have managed to harness such social and symbolic resources by building broad, cross-regional group-to-group preference coalitions inside international bodies supportive of the Palestinian cause. However, while Palestine and the Arab League managed to muster a strong show in terms of pushing the ‘yes buttons’ on the UNESCO membership and UNGA status upgrade through their group-to-group coalitions, they have only been partially successful in accomplishing the primary Palestinian goal: universal international recognition of its statehood. A decided advance has been made as 18 new countries, many of them participants in the group-to-group dialogues, have recognized Palestine since the Palestinian diplomatic drive 53  See also K.V. Laatikainen, “Conceptualizing groups in UN multilateralism: The diplomatic practice of group politics.” The Hague Journal of Diplomacy 12, no. 2–3 (2017): 113–137.

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was first announced in spring 2011. Central American and Caribbean NAM countries constitute the majority, together with South Sudan (AU), Iceland, Thailand (NAM), the Holy See, Sweden (EU) and Colombia (NAM, UNASUR).54 Nevertheless, prior to the 2012 UNGA status upgrade status vote, the President of the Palestine Authority Mahmoud Abbas had passionately called for the vote to constitute a definitive ‘birth certificate’ for the Palestinian state.55 Abbas’ call apparently went unheard by many UN members, as we saw from the above explanation of votes. Here the failure for supporting broader recognition lies in part with the lack of intra-Arab consensus around whether the 2011 and the 2012 votes formally represented an act of recognition of the Palestinian state or not. Moreover, the Arab states are divided over whether further recognition of Palestinian statehood could precede or must follow a peace process with Israel. The latter view is held by the supporters of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative that envisions a comprehensive regional solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The League thus falls short of speaking with one voice on the matter and hence having sufficient cohesion as a policy entrepreneur to influence nested and networked group-to-group debates decisively. Another reason for the failure on making inroads on the Palestinian ‘birth certificate’ can be found in the complexities of multilateral group politics whereby individual member states of regional and political groupings at times have to negotiate between conflicting domestic and group identities and interests. A clear example is Cameroon. The country has not recognized the Palestinian state bilaterally, although it has established diplomatic relations with the Palestinian Authority. The reason for this ambivalence is that the country is torn between collective identities and specific domestic interest. Cameroon’s vote on the Palestine UNESCO membership reveals the intricacy of such negotiations. The country’s primary referent on many global issues is France, although the country also adheres to the positions of the regional and political groupings which it is a member of such as OIC, NAM and AU.56 In 2011, these four identity constellations — France, OIC, NAM and AU — were 54  Sweden recognized Palestine as a state in 2014. For a fuller explanation of the historical evolution of the Palestinian issue in Swedish party politics, see E. Johansson-Nogués, “Sweden: a ‘supporting actor’ to the EU?” In Northern Europe and the Making of the EU’s Mediterranean and Middle East Policies: Normative Leaders or Passive Bystanders? ed. T. Behr and T. Tiilikainen (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2015), 147–162.; L. Aggestam and F. Bicchi, “New Directions in EU Foreign Policy Governance: Crossloading, Leadership and Informal Groupings.” Journal of Common Market Studies on-line first (2019): 1–18. 55  Abbas, Speech to the UN General Assembly. 56  A. Noah Awana, “La Palestine admise à l’UNESCO: Le Cameroun refuse de se prononcer.” Le Messager, November 2, 2011.

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aligned in favour of the resolution. However, voting yes would have positioned Cameroon against the wishes of the US and soured its good economic and security relations with Israel. Caught between the two positions, Cameroon chose to abstain. Bahamas (NAM), Colombia (NAM/UNASUR), Fiji (NAM), Singapore (NAM) and South Korea (NAM) also chose to abstain on the 2011 and 2012 votes. These countries have not recognized Palestine bilaterally either, although Colombia, Singapore and South Korea had established diplomatic relations with Palestine prior to 2010. These five countries only partially identify with the current predominant ethos of the NAM and the UNASUR groups respectively. While they support Palestinian self-determination and statehood objectives, they perceive that the Palestinian issue has become radicalized in these groups. Moreover, all these countries maintain excellent relations with Israel and/or the US (economic, military) and their preference is to have balanced relations with both Israel and Palestine.57 The Senior Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Home Affairs of Singapore, Masagos Zulkifli, for example, felt it necessary to clarify Singapore’s abstention on the 2012 UNGA vote after it became the focus of domestic critique. He argued that the abstention reflected a desire for even-handedness in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. He noted that ‘Singapore has consistently supported the right of the Palestinian people to a homeland.58 However, he also went on to say that: Singapore abstained on this latest [2012 non-member state status] resolution because we believe that only a negotiated settlement consistent with UN Security Council Resolution 242 can provide the basis for a viable, long term solution. […] We sincerely believe that Palestine’s aspirations are not helped by this latest unilateral move as facts on the ground will not be changed.59 The NAM and UNASUR members’ abstentions are thus the result of negotiating the domestic and the collective, sometimes in an uneasy juggling act. Domestic interests and identities also explain EU member state the Czech Republic’s decision to vote against the 2011 and 2012 Resolutions. The country’s post-Cold War foreign policy has distinguished itself for close commercial ties 57  United Nations. “United Nations Asian and Pacific Meeting on Question of Palestine Expresses Strong Support for Two-State Solution.” GA/PAL/1131), June 2009. 58  Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Singapore). “SMS Masagos Zulkifli clarifies Singapore’s abstention on UN resolution to grant Non-Member Observer State to Palestine.” Press Release, December 1, 2012. 59  Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Singapore). “SMS Masagos Zulkifli clarifies Singapore’s abstention”.

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with Israel, and for its sympathies for Israel ‘as a small, democratic country in a very dangerous region with very dangerous neighbours’.60 The country has, however, not found echo for its staunch pro-Israeli outlook among most other EU member states. This has caused the Czech Republic to pursue an independent foreign policy on the Middle East, sometimes at variance with the EU. Prague remained unconvinced in 2012 by the EU’s attempts to coordinate the EU position on the UNGA vote in favour of abstention. Identity-interest negotiations stood in this case in the way of bilateral or multilateral recognition for the Palestinian state. A final reason for the failure to reach a broad LAS, OIC, NAM, AU, UNASUR and EU common understanding on the issue of Palestinian recognition in the context of group-to-group dialogues is the significant pressure exerted by extra-group states. The US and Israel firmly opposed both votes. Formally they lost the votes, as they were in a position neither to impede the votes, nor to marshal their own voting group beyond the mere symbolic ‘friends of the US’ group (e.g. Canada, Czech Republic, Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau and Panama). However, the US and Israel were still able to significantly condition the group-to-group debates, as well as individual countries as we saw in the cases of Cameroon or Singapore, to the extent that only a small minority of countries voting in favour would argue that the UNESCO or the UNGA votes represented official recognitions of the Palestinian state. Moreover, both votes largely reconfirmed the international community commitment to the US’ and Israel’s at the time preferred two-state solution.61 These elements indicate a strong influence of non-members (US and Israel), not only on individual UN members, but also on group debates when it comes to the Palestinian issue. 4 Conclusions In 2011 the Palestinian leadership began a set of requests for membership or upgraded observer status in different UN bodies and affiliated international treaties. The Palestinians came to UNESCO and UNGA with the hopes of strengthening their statehood by achieving a universal recognition of their state. The Arab League became the Palestinians’ prime backer and together 60  L. Najšlová, “The Czech Republic: Many Friends, One Ally.” In Northern Europe and the Making of the EU’s Mediterranean and Middle East Policies: Normative Leaders or Passive Bystanders? ed. by T. Behr and T. Tiilikainen (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2015), 170. 61  The US traditional support for the two-state solution appears at the time of writing to be under re-evaluation by the Trump Administration.

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they unleashed a strong diplomatic offensive in 2011 and 2012 with and within political groupings such as OIC, NAM, AU, UNASUR and EU. Their efforts resulted in supermajorities voting in favour of the Palestinian UNESCO membership in 2011 and its upgraded status in UNGA in 2012. However, while Palestine and the Arab League managed to marshal groupto-group coalitions to push the yes buttons on the UNESCO membership and UNGA status upgrade, the Palestinian goal of universal international recognition has not been fulfilled. This failure can be partially explained as a consequence of the League’s inability to speak with one voice in regard to supporting Abbas’ call for a birth certificate for Palestine. Another failure stems from the complexities of group politics when individual members are torn between adhering to collective identities and securing fundamental domestic goals. Finally, it is clear that non-members, even if not present in group politics settings, can have considerable sway over in-group discussions. Although the US and Israel lost the ‘battle’ over the vote on UNESCO membership and UNGA status upgrade for Palestine, they won the ‘war’ in terms of conditioning intergroup debates in such a way that support for the status quo on the two-state solution remained intact. Universal recognition for Palestinian statehood thus still hinges on the outcome of a successful peace process. Hence, the power asymmetries between Palestine and Israel at any eventual peace negotiation table continue to be stark. Bibliography Abbas, M. “Speech to the UN General Assembly.” New York, September 29, 2012, available at: , all web-sites last accessed 24 May 2019. Aggestam, L. and Bicchi, F. “New Directions in EU Foreign Policy Governance: Crossloading, Leadership and Informal Groupings.” Journal of Common Market Studies on-line first (2019), pp. 1–18. Akinsanya, A.A. “Afro-Arab Relations and North Africa.” Paper Presented to the Conference on Regional Integration in Africa: Bridging the North-Sub-Saharan Divide, Cairo, Egypt, November 5–7, 2010. Aljazeera (Doha). “Arab League discusses Palestinian statehood.” August 4, 2011. Amorim, C. “Brazil and the Middle East: reflections on Lula’s South-South Cooperation.” Cairo Review 2/2011 (2013): 48–63. Antara News (Jakarta). “NAM Meeting in Bali Momentum to Garner Support for Palestine.” May 27, 2011.

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Asseburg, M. “The Arab Spring and the European Response.” International Spectator: Italian Journal of International Affairs 48, no. 2 (2013): 47–62. Baeza, C. “América latina y la cuestión palestina (1947–2012).” Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades 14, no. 28 (2012): 111–131. Elgindy, K. “Palestine Goes to the UN: Understanding the New Statehood Strategy.” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 5 (Sept/Oct 2011): 102–113. Ferabolli, S. “The League of Arab States and the international projection of an Arab collective identity.” Século XXI, Porto Alegre 3, no. 2 (2012): 85–94. Ferabolli, S. “Regions That Matter: the Arab–South American Interregional Space.” Third World Quarterly 38, no. 8 (2017): 1767–1781. İhsanoğlu, E. The Islamic World in the New Century: The Organisation of the Islamic Conference. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. İhsanoğlu, E. Statement by H.E. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, UNESCO General Conference Paris, October 31, 2011. Johansson-Nogués, E. “Returned to Europe? The Central and East European member states at the heart of the European Union.” In The European Union at the United Nations, edited by K.V. Laatikainen and K.E. Smith, 92–111. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Johansson-Nogués, E. “The New EU–Arab League Dialogue: The Contours of a Cooperation.” Mediterranean Politics 20, no. 2 (2015): 295–302. Johansson-Nogués, E. “Sweden: a ‘supporting actor’ to the EU?” In Northern Europe and the Making of the EU’s Mediterranean and Middle East Policies: Normative Leaders or Passive Bystanders? edited by T. Behr and T. Tiilikainen, 147–162. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2015. Laatikainen, K.V. “Conceptualizing groups in UN multilateralism: The diplomatic practice of group politics.” The Hague Journal of Diplomacy 12, no. 2–3 (2017): 113–137. Maïga, S. “Building an international consensus on a just and viable solution of the question of Jerusalem.” Paper presented to United Nations African Meeting on the Question of Palestine: Strengthening the support by African States for a just and lasting solution of the question of Jerusalem. Rabat, Morocco, July 1 and 2, 2010. Mansour, R. Speech to Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP), April 30, 2013. Miller, R. “Europe’s Palestine Problem: Making Sure the EU Matters to Middle East Peace.” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 5 (2011): 8–12. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Singapore). “SMS Masagos Zulkifli clarifies Singapore’s abstention on UN resolution to grant Non-Member Observer State to Palestine.” Press Release, December 1, 2012. Najšlová, L. “The Czech Republic: Many Friends, One Ally.” Northern Europe and the Making of the EU’s Mediterranean and Middle East Policies: Normative Leaders or

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Passive Bystanders? edited by T. Behr and T. Tiilikainen, 159–78. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2015. New York Times (New York). “Palestinians Win a Vote on Bid to Join UNESCO.” October 5, 2011. Noah Awana, A. “La Palestine admise à l’UNESCO: Le Cameroun refuse de se prononcer.” Le Messager, November 2, 2011. Padelford, N.J. “Regional Organization and the United Nations.” International Organization 54, no. 8 (1954): 203–216. Shlaim, A. “Israel, Palestine, and the Arab Uprising.” In The New Middle East: Protest and Revolution in the Arab World, edited by F. Gerges, 380–401. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Socialist International. ‘Socialist International welcomes UN vote on Palestinian status’, November 30, 2012, available at: . Stites Mor, J. “The Question of Palestine in the Argentine Political Imaginary: Anti-Imperialist Thought from Cold War to Neoliberal Order.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 20, no. 2 (2014): 183–197. UNESCO. “Draft resolution: Request for the admission of Palestine to UNESCO.” 36 C/ PLEN/DR.1, October 29, 2011. United Nations. “United Nations Asian and Pacific Meeting on Question of Palestine Expresses Strong Support for Two-State Solution.” GA/PAL/1131), June 2009. United Nations. Sixty-seventh session, 44th plenary meeting, A/67/PV.44, November 29, 2012. United Nations. Sixty-seventh session, 45th plenary meeting, A/67/PV.45, November 29, 2012. United Nations. Sixty-seventh session, 46th plenary meeting, A/67/PV.46, November 30, 2012. Washington Post (Washington). “Palestinians Seek Global Recognition through South America.” February 17, 2011.

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Chapter 16

Conclusion: “The Only Sin at the UN Is Being Isolated” Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith The social imperative of working in groups in UN multilateralism is inescapable. As one UN diplomat observed, “The only sin at the UN is being isolated.”1 This captures the fundamental finding of this volume: the socio-political dynamic of group politics is central to multilateral diplomacy at the UN. While considerable scholarly attention has been given to the inter-organizational relationship between the UN and a variety of formal regional organizations, there is clearly a group dynamic that extends beyond inter-organizational relations and includes regional groups, trans-regional groupings, and single-issue groups. There is, however, much less literature on this dynamic. This volume is intended to foster a research agenda on multilateralism that takes such groups, and not just states and international organizations, into consideration. In this concluding chapter, we reflect on the contributions from the different parts of this volume and argue that group dynamics play a central role in UN multilateralism. First, we situate this understanding of group dynamics in the overall literature on multilateralism, and demonstrate how focusing on groups provides a unique political perspective on UN multilateralism. We argue that the centrality of group dynamics is manifest in the wide variety of groups active in UN multilateralism, in the variety of institutional contexts in which such groups are active, in the fluidity of group membership, and in the variety of interactions among these groups. We do note in the conclusion of this section that diplomatic participation in group politics varies, with some regions and some UN member states (notably the United States, Russia and China) less inclined to conduct their multilateral diplomacy through groups, and some states (such as non-EU European states) squeezed out by the sometimes dominant role of regional organizations to which they are not members. There is a great deal of movement in the way that UN member states engage with group dynamics, and this creates ambiguity and challenges for theorizing about the impact of groups. In the second section of the chapter, we draw 1  Cited in Vincent Pouliot. International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilateral Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

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upon Jackson and Nexon’s notion of relationalism, that it is the relations rather than the entities that should be central to the study of international relations, to contextualize our understanding of group politics in UN multilateralism. 1

The Centrality of Groups in Multilateral Diplomacy

A significant finding of this volume is that groups — both informal and formal — are significant features of multilateral diplomacy. Observing group dynamics in UN multilateral debates points to a decidedly different perspective on UN multilateralism, one that emphasizes the political nature of UN diplomacy. Unlike the literature on negotiation, this volume highlights the social rather than instrumental nature of multilateral negotiation at the UN. States are privileged actors in UN multilateralism, but very few states ‘act individually’ in UN diplomacy. While diplomats at the UN are tasked with representing the national interest, the collective nature of multilateralism requires that they seek out others with similar interests, perspectives, and orientations. This is so whether the multilateral effort is to agree on a new treaty, pass a resolution, or seek legitimacy for a particular position. A large proportion of UN member states conduct their diplomacy via groups. In other words, the everyday practice of most diplomats at the various sites of the UN involves meeting and negotiating within chosen groups, representing group positions in larger forums, and/or seeking different group affiliations or building new groups. Furthermore, our understanding of multilateral diplomacy in the UN context has benefited from drawing upon both rationalist and constructivist frameworks in articulating an explicitly political perspective on UN multilateralism. This political perspective is surprisingly novel and provides a new way to look at UN multilateralism — that is, what diplomats do in the UN is engage in politics, and that politics is embedded in the social dynamic of groups. This political perspective also challenges the governance perspective on multilateralism, which focuses on the contribution of multilateralism to broader international order. The volume demonstrates that national diplomats are immersed in a context that is socially constructed by group affiliations as well as permanent representation.2 This section discusses five key characteristics of group politics in the UN that are apparent from the contributions to this volume: groups come in a wide

2  On the practice of permanent representation in New York, see Pouliot, International Pecking Orders, 2016.

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variety of forms; they arise in all multilateral contexts; they interact with each other in different ways; their memberships can be fluid; yet state engagement in groups varies with many UN members intensively engaged but a few others hardly at all. 1.1 There Are a Wide Variety of Politically Consequential Groups Politically consequential groups at the UN are not only numerous but also varied. Only two of the official UN regional groups matter to their members beyond their purposes as vehicles for elections to selective membership bodies (such as the UN Security Council or Human Rights Council): the African Group and the Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC). The African Group is well-organized not only in terms of procedures for electing African states to those limited membership bodies, but also in terms of promoting shared interests and voting cohesion, though the African Union (AU) will also conduct its negotiations in the General Assembly through other diplomatic groupings like the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and G-77 (chapter 5 by Makubalo, Hosli, and Lantmeeters). GRULAC’s influence is perhaps most evident in debates on human rights (chapter 9 by Smith), and some other substantive questions (chapter 4 by Hoffman), but is affected by the sheer proliferation of groupings of various combinations of Latin American states, from ALBA and CARICOM (chapter 4) to UNASUR (chapter 12 by Hoffman and Tabak) – reflecting to a large extent ideological and material differences among the states of the region. In contrast, the Asia-Pacific Group, the East European Group and the Western European and Other Group (WEOG) hardly appear in this volume because they are simply not viewed or used by their members for anything other than elections. Political groups — encompassing both regional or other international organizations, and UN-specific political groups such as the G-77 – are the most prevalent in group politics. The most influential political groups tend to be regional/ international organizations with a strong collective identity: the European Union (chapter 3 by Smith), the African Union (chapter 5), the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) (chapter 6 by Johansson-Nogués), the League of Arab States (LAS) (chapter 6), and so on. Yet not all regional organizations are cohesive enough to exercise influence, as chapter 7 by Rüland on ASEAN illustrates, and as discussed further below, all political groups can find unity difficult to maintain. However, while regional groups and regional/international organizations have a rather observable existence, quite frequently the influential or preferred negotiation groups are less institutionalized. In order to capture the dynamics of multilateral politics and the importance of groups in that process, we have

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to look beyond the formal regional organizations and groups and examine how sub- and splinter group interactions shape diplomatic negotiations. Single-issue groups form and play significant roles in UN politics. Laatikainen (chapter 8) shows how the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) has tried to influence climate change negotiations, as have the High Ambition Coalition and the Cartagena Dialogue (chapter 14 by Groen). The Group of Friends of R2P was critical to the adoption of the Responsibility to Protect, as Bellamy argues in chapter 11. Disarmament negotiations are characterized by a wide variety of often overlapping single-issue groups (see Figure 10.1 in Dee’s chapter). ‘Standing’ political groups that have grown up within the UN system, such as the G-77, play an important organizing role in the initial stages of debates, but outside groups (regional organizations and single-issue political groups) are often used during the process of debate in order to move past deadlocks. Wherever debates are polarized, states have created informal groups to try to bridge stalemates, which formal groups are considered to have helped solidify. Groups are not static; indeed, nearly all of the contributors point to the idea of existing political groups being ‘made to be broken’ as new groups emerge in multilateral processes. Cross-regional and cross-factional informal groups have been used by states to try to overcome stalemates and to foster debates on difficult issues. This is the case in the Human Rights Council’s debates on gender equality and sexual orientation discrimination (chapter 9). It is the case throughout those UN forums where nuclear disarmament and climate change are discussed (chapters 10 and 14). In the General Assembly, states have created informal groups to try to break the static standoffs between formal groups, on issues such as the R2P (chapter 11). This effort to bridge the structural divides between what we are calling the ‘standing groups’ is itself becoming a more institutionalized practice in UN diplomacy. In chapter 13, Farrell shows how the creation of open-ended working groups in the negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was an attempt to ‘manage’ group dynamics. Yet states can also form such informal groups to offer more effective opposition to collective action. Smith demonstrates how small group activity by the EU and its member states in the Human Rights Council and UNGA Third Committee was met by the creation of the Like-Minded Group (chapter 9). Bellamy demonstrates that the momentum captured by the pro-R2P networks and groups was met by those who tried to organize opposition by creating their own cross-regional political group (chapter 11). This oppositional organizing behaviour points to a political rather than a diplomatic or problem-solving orientation to UN multilateralism, as Laatikainen suggests in chapter 2. Group dynamics play a central role in the contestation of norms in UN multilateralism.

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The informal group dynamics observed throughout the contributions further suggests that the emphasis on ‘forum-shopping’ in the literature on multilateralism needs to be supplemented.3 Forum-shopping occurs when international actors navigate strategically among nested international institutions and mechanisms. While the concept focuses on institutional mechanisms, the contributions to this volume show that social-selection processes are occurring as well. There is no limitation on social relations for diplomats engaged in broader multilateral processes, so standing groups (whether regional groups, regional organizations or large political groups) are not the only possibility for group interaction. Countries like Brazil and South Africa that were once champions of the G-77 now also coordinate in the BASIC and BRICS configurations. Indeed, Dee shows very clearly in chapter 10 that for many EU member states involved in non-proliferation debates, ‘like-mindedness’ is not only found among EU partners. Ireland, for instance, is not only a member of the EU, but also the New Agenda Coalition and the Group of 16. Diplomats are not typically constrained in diplomatic partners; they seek out the likeminded wherever they can be found, and do not simply engage in whipping votes. Overlapping group affiliations reflect this social dynamic. Dee’s nonproliferation case shows that like-mindedness can trump the numbers game in difficult debates. The existing regional and political groups often do not represent the like-minded, and smaller group affiliations are preferable to larger ones even if it means duplication and redundancies. Groen and Laatikainen suggest as much in their respective chapters; in the negotiations over climate, AOSIS became divided over the question of REDD (reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) and those countries in favor of REDD created the Rainforest Coalition and land-locked countries formed the Climate Vulnerable Forum. As Hoffman and Tabak demonstrate in chapter 12, Brazil has been active within the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) at the World Health Organization, but has also acted within informal groups such as the Oslo Group in the UN General Assembly. Because UNASUR does not have a mandate on trade, it is not active in World Trade Organization negotiations relevant to global health, and therefore UNASUR member states cannot act within that grouping. In the Human Rights Council, states wishing to pursue issues such as the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation cannot act within groups where the preponderant view resists such action.

3  Marc L. Busch, ‘Overlapping Institutions, Forum Shopping and Dispute Settlement in International Trade’, International Organization, vol. 61, no. 4 (2007), pp. 735–761.

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A question for further research based on these observations is how to understand the interaction of the existing political groups and regional organizations in relation to the emergence of single-issue and new groups. Are the more established groups functioning more as ‘selection pools’ from which adhoc or new groups emerge in specific debates? Smith in chapter 9 suggests that the ‘Like-Minded Group’ that defends national sovereignty and noninterference in human rights debates emerged from regional groups that are largely inactive, such as the Asia-Pacific Group. Thus, the importance of broader political and regional groups may be that they provide a network that can be activated in establishing these single-issue, cross-regional groupings and networks. Farrell (chapter 13) demonstrates that there is a regional orientation and perspective in selecting negotiation facilitators and participants in the open-ended working groups that are tasked with preparing negotiations on the SDGs. This regional dynamic is a dominant one, and exerts influence even over the trans-regional political groups. Laatikainen observes that the single-issue group AOSIS, which was established to become a trans-regional negotiating group focused intently on climate change mitigation, over time established sub-regional groupings among the Caribbean and Pacific Island states with slightly different orientations (chapter 8). This practice of ‘representation of points of view’ simultaneously acknowledges group identities in UN multilateralism and attempts to overcome them in the effort to build consensus. Smaller groups can serve as ‘brokers’ between existing group interests, or they may take more progressive or stronger positions than those that are possible within broader political groupings.4 Smith shows the latter dynamic in debates over lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) rights at the UNGA and the Human Rights Council, as both the EU and the ‘Friends of the Family’ staked out strong positions in the debate (chapter 9). Bellamy shows that while the EU generally supported the R2P agenda, the role of Australia, the Netherlands and Canada as key interlocutors meant that the issue was not seen as captured by one group, thus facilitating acceptance of the R2P language at the 2005 summit (chapter 11). Groen shows that a variety of groups including a dominant regional organization (the EU) and the single-issue group AOSIS, among others, joined forces to create a (temporary) new grouping, the High Ambition Coalition, in order to realize the Paris Agreement (chapter 14). This project thus provides a different perspective than studies that focus on inter-organizational relations or nested institutions. The contributors show repeatedly that regional groups and organizations may have a role in multilateral negotiations even when they 4  Miles Kahler, ‘Multilateralism with Small and Large Numbers’, International Organization, vol. 46, no. 3 (2009), pp. 681–708, at p. 706. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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themselves are not ‘actors’ in the process; such groups become fertile fields for creating broader constituencies in the debates. 1.2 Groups Arise in Nearly All Multilateral Contexts Although ‘group politics’ is most evident in the UN General Assembly and many of its committees, one key finding of this volume is that groups operate in a variety of multilateral contexts. The General Assembly is clearly the foremost site of group politics, as almost all of the chapters in this volume illustrate. Groups have played key roles in General Assembly debates on the Responsibility to Protect (chapter 11), gender equality and sexual orientation debates (chapter 10), the Sustainable Development Goals (chapter 13), and debates about recognizing Palestine (chapter 15). As noted in chapter 1, the General Assembly is the premier site of collective legitimization in international politics, and also the most significant venue in which all states have a voice. It is surely significant that the states investing most in group politics are not in fact the most powerful states, the US, China and Russia (see section 1.5 below): states use groups to, yes, gather the votes necessary to prevail in UN politics, but also to present counter-hegemonic views and gather support for core interests in the ‘parliament of man’.5 Political groups seek observer status in the General Assembly to establish their prerogative of voice in this multilateral context: all of the standing political groups considered in part 2 of this volume (the AU, ASEAN, CARICOM, EU, Arab League, and OIC) have observer status in the General Assembly (and the EU expended considerable political capital to obtain ‘enhanced’ observer status). Observer status is not necessary, however, for political groups to play a role and members of political groups without observer status can still speak on their behalf. But group politics extends well beyond the General Assembly and is evident throughout the UN system and conference diplomacy. As Dee shows (chapter 10), groups are very active in UN Disarmament Forums including the Conference on Disarmament and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Likewise, Groen (chapter 14) illustrates the importance of group activity in climate change negotiations. Hoffman and Tabak (chapter 12) focus on the World Health Organization Assembly and other UN conferences on health. Groups are active at the Human Rights Council (chapter 10) and UNESCO (chapter 15). One arena where groups are less central to negotiation and multilateral diplomacy is in the UN Security Council. While the African Group has a well-organized rotation for electing non-permanent members to the Security Council, once ensconced neither the African Group nor the AU appears to play 5  Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (London: Allen Lane, 2006). - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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a role in the deliberations of African member states serving on the Council. In addition, the two EU permanent Security Council members, France and currently the UK, do not often conduct their Security Council diplomacy with reference to their EU membership and have been reticent about coordinating with fellow EU member states serving as non-permanent members of the UN Security Council.6 Member states serving in the Security Council generally do not present statements or positions on behalf of groups. Groups and statements on behalf of groups do occur in Security Council meetings, as when AOSIS spoke on behalf of members in addressing the security aspects of Climate Change (chapter 8) or when the AU consults on peacekeeping operations that are undertaken in partnership with the UN (chapter 5). In addition, groups outside of the Security Council like the 100 plus members of the ACT group promote a code of conduct for members of the Security Council. So group dynamics may be present in Security Council deliberations, but do not usually represent group positions as is the case in other fora. The extent to which groups play important roles in multilateral institutions and negotiations seems to indicate that the groups — and not just states, international organizations, or regions — are constitutive of multilateralism, though given the fluidity of group membership we discuss below it may be more accurate to state that the practice of group formation and re-formation is constitutive of multilateralism. 1.3 A Variety of Interactions within and among the Groups The groups investigated here engage in a variety of actions and interactions. At a minimum, groups perform an information function. As Rüland observes, even groups like ASEAN that do not put forward common positions or joint resolutions still play an important role in information sharing for members. Because the agenda of the UNGA is so extensive and the number of resolutions adopted annually numbers in the hundreds, groups provide a means for member states to share information about negotiations and positions among member states and groups. Smith also notes that although the EU has more ambition to have a single voice on human rights issues, this information function is critical for the smaller EU member states whose permanent missions are more limited in size. However, many groups — above all the EU — aim to 6  Spyros Blavoukos and Dimitris Bourantonis, ‘The EU’s Performance in the UN Security Council’, Journal of European Integration, 33, no. 6 (2011); Edith Drieskens, ‘Beyond Chapter VIII: Limits and Opportunities for Regional Representation at the UN Security Council’, Inter­ national Organizations Law Review, 7, no. 1 (2010); Daniele Marchesi, ‘The EU Common Foreign and Security Policy in the UN Security Council: between representation and coordination’ European Foreign Affairs Review, 15, no. 1 (2010). - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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do more than exchange information: they coordinate positions and members’ voting behaviour. There is also a great deal of variety in how groups are organized. The five regional electoral groups operate according to internally derived practices. The African Group has a well-organized rotation for elections, while the Western European and Other Group runs contested elections, even among the EU member states that in many other instances seek to have a common position. Political groups — even ASEAN, arguably the least cohesive of the groups considered in this volume (chapter 7) — have established procedures or rules regarding who chairs meetings and speaks on behalf of the group in the UN, but they vary considerably in terms of how common stances are decided (some by majority vote, some — e.g. the EU — by unanimity). Institutional status of the groups also varies considerably. Some regional organizations have observer status in the UNGA; the EU obtained enhanced observer status in 2011. Some regional organizations have a formal partnership with the United Nations (the AU, the EU) while others do not. Some political groups like the Organization of Islamic Conference have their own permanent observer missions to the UN while others are operated through the member state mission which holds the chair (NAM, AOSIS). There are a variety of ways that groups interact with one another as well. Groups work together a lot — every chapter in this volume observes this. Groups of all sorts work together on shared values or interests, often forming temporary coalitions (climate change, the recognition of Palestine, human rights issues, and so on) and illustrating that group-to-group diplomacy is a significant feature of group politics. Groups also work through other groups, as the African Union does vis-à-vis the African Group, NAM and the G-77 (chapter 5). The reasons why states work in groups and why groups work with other groups are similar: shared interests and like-mindedness. A notable conclusion by many contributors to this volume is that while ‘games’ are not entirely absent in the interactions between these groups, ‘debates’ are nonetheless a predominant feature. States use groups to put forward principled positions, in an attempt to influence a wider audience and thus legitimize desired outcomes. There can be polarization, but this seems frequently to be the function of strongly held views on all sides: groups can mobilize to block and contest positions put forward by other groups. Furthermore, the role of groups in resisting western hegemony is another important feature of group politics at the UN. This isn’t merely a game, but a way to organize better to ensure that the views and interests of countries in the ‘Global South’ are represented and legitimized; the activity of the G-77, NAM, ALBA, the AU, the OIC and so on, should be seen in this light. CARICOM - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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mobilized against the EU’s initial proposal for enhanced observer status in the General Assembly (chapters 3 and 4) out of concern that the EU was seeking to consolidate and strengthen European power. The OIC and the Arab League have focused on what they see as a core injustice in international relations, the non-recognition of Palestine as a state (though Johansson-Nogués illustrates how states external to the groups can prevent success, also by exploiting divisions in groups such as NAM or the G-77). So concerns about equality in international relations can motivate group formation and group-to-group diplomacy. 1.4 Group Membership Is Fluid Another significant finding of this volume is that groups are not ‘fixed’: states can and do move in and out of groups. All of the groups covered in this volume experience internal contestation and defections (which can be expressed in absences, as chapters 5 and 7 illustrates). The OIC — the only group considered here which is linked by a clear cultural/religious identity — has experienced this. Johansson-Nogués shows that the OIC and LAS are quite united on topics such as recognition of Palestine (chapter 15) but subject to some centrifugalism as, for example, the war in Syria progressed (chapter 6). Even the most cohesive, visible and arguably influential group at the UN, the European Union, is not always united, and its member states can and increasingly do act in other groupings — mostly informal, cross-regional groupings — at the UN as Smith demonstrates (chapter 3). UN Security Council reform is one of those issues that divides even normally cohesive groups, such as the EU and AU. Where groups lose or never quite achieve consistent cohesiveness, their influence within the UN can suffer. Regional organizations may lack the cohesiveness required to make much of an impact on UN politics, as Rüland illustrates with respect to ASEAN (chapter 7), or may lose their cohesiveness, as Hoffman and Tabak show in the case of UNASUR (chapter 12). Yet group members still search for other groups through which they can conduct diplomacy — perhaps other established groups (NAM, G-77) or ad hoc cross-regional groups. Indeed the use of cross-regional coalitions (on the Responsibility to Protect or Sustainable Development Goals, for example) is another striking illustration of the felt imperative to engage in UN politics via groups. 1.5 But … Variation in States’ Engagement with Groups While groups are clearly important in UN diplomacy, it is still the case that not all UN member states view them as essential or important facets of their diplomacy at the UN. For small countries, pursuing national interests in the multilateral setting is often only possible through group affiliations. The Maldives used its chairship of AOSIS to energize the activities of AOSIS in new arenas - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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such as the Security Council; chapter 8 suggests that unlike other members of AOSIS that participate in regional groupings (Pacific Island Forum, CARICOM), the Maldives does not have a viable alternative group in which to conduct its multilateral climate diplomacy. Conversely, three of the permanent members of the UN Security Council — China, Russia and the United States — are not deeply embedded in group politics. It also surely no coincidence that the three regional groups of which they are members are those whose role is restricted to electing members to limited membership bodies within the UN. The US is a member of WEOG and JUSCANZ but is not active in them nor is it pushing for the groups to have more prominent roles at the UN. It is a ‘member’ of the P-5 but the permanent five UN Security Council members share few interests or identity — with some exceptions such as resisting nuclear disarmament (see chapter 10). Russia is a member of the largely dormant East European Group, which may have carried more weight during the Cold War when its members largely voted as a bloc,7 but now does not as it does not function as a cohesive group. Russia has used informal, ad hoc ‘Friends of’ groups outside of the Security Council to gather support for its preferences such as ‘protection of the family’, and is apparently the driving force behind the creation of the ‘Like Minded Group’ at the Human Rights Council (see chapter 9). China is in the Asia-Pacific Group, long the most dormant regional group in the UN, and now associates itself with the G-77, but otherwise stays out of group politics. Only France and the UK, members of the P5, have actively participated in the group diplomacy of the EU (to which they are treaty-bound to coordinate in the UNGA), but it is noteworthy that they are among the most frequent defectors from EU cohesion.8 While the P-5 collectively attempt to maintain control over resolutions and actions in the Security Council agenda through the practice of ‘pen-holding’ — being the permanent coordinator of Security Council action on specific agenda items — this practice is more institutional than reflective of group dynamics and in fact replaces the groups of friends dynamic that originated and has largely dissipated in the Security Council.9 Indeed, the Security Council is the one venue in which group dynamics plays a more limited diplomatic role as indicated above. 7  Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués, ‘Returned to Europe? The Central and East European Member States at the Heart of the European Union’, in The European Union at the United Nations: Intersecting Multilateralisms, eds Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 8  Christopher Hill, ‘The European Powers in the UN Security Council: Differing Interests, Differing Arenas’, in The European Union at the United Nations: Intersecting Multilateralisms, eds Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 9  Security Council Report, ‘Penholders and Chairs’ 10 July 2019. Accessible at https://www .securitycouncilreport.org/un-security-council-working-methods/pen-holders-and-chairs.php. - 978-90-04-38444-6 Downloaded from Brill.com09/01/2023 02:49:54AM via Western University

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Asian countries in general have also resisted forming political groups amongst themselves — in stark contrast to Arab states, African states, European states and Latin American states. ASEAN, Rüland shows in chapter 7, has occasionally intervened in debates, but hardly acts as a forum for amassing votes or expressing the collective preferences of its members at the UN. Instead, many Asian countries play a role in large cross-regional groups such as the NAM, G-77 or the OIC but have with few exceptions not attempted to lead such groups. Some Western ‘middle’ powers also operate less in group settings, mostly because they are not members or prospective members of the European Union. The EU, with 27 member states, is a fairly modest proportion of total UN membership, but countries that wish to join it are generally expected to adopt EU positions in major debates (this includes not just official candidate countries such as Montenegro but aspirant countries such as Ukraine). The dilemma for non-EU European countries such as Switzerland and Norway (and perhaps in future a post-Brexit UK), but also Australia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand is how close to the EU they desire to work. They certainly do not want to be isolated within the UN. With the exception of Japan, these countries are in WEOG, but WEOG is not a player in the politics of UN multilateralism. JUSCANZ (Japan, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) operates behind the scenes in the Second and Third Committee of the UN General Assembly (most often as CANZ only), and may include Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and micro states such as Monaco or Andorra in discussion, but JUSCANZ does not present resolutions or issue statements in those forums. Elsewhere some of these ‘in-between’ states have formed coalitions to try to influence climate change negotiations (the ‘Umbrella Group’; see chapter 14) and disarmament negotiations (such as the New Agenda Coalition, the Non Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative, and the Group of 16; see chapter 10). In sum, there is variation across UN member states in terms of their proclivity to join or lead groups in UN diplomacy. The occasionally frustrated efforts by non-EU middle powers to find a group to pursue their ‘national’ diplomacy at the UN attests to the importance of the group dynamic in UN multilateralism. While the P-3 may be able to pursue a Security Council-centric diplomacy free from group affiliations, they still must interact with other UN member states that are embedded in such groupings. For most other delegations, group affiliations are necessary to be active participants in UN multilateralism as contributors to this volume have demonstrated. However, states can go cold on some groups — as seen by the loss of interest or commitment to UNASUR (chapter 12). The EU –members of which are linked by strong legal

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and normative commitments to act collectively in international affairs — has not been immune to this, as member states can and do prefer to act within other groupings (see chapters 3 and 10). Regional organizations may have a life outside of the UN, but in UN multilateralism, member states can and do ‘defect’ to work with different diplomatic groups. Informal political groups have proliferated across the multilateral landscape. While a great deal of attention has been focused on formal regional organizations within UN multilateralism, they are not always the most critical groups in the multilateral process. While we have demonstrated the central role that groups play in negotiations, the considerable variation and flux in group affiliation in multilateral diplomacy presents an analytical challenge in definitively answering a key question we posed at the outset of this project: does group politics bolster or undermine UN multilateralism? 2

Group Politics in Multilateral Diplomacy: a Relational Perspective

Groups are everywhere in UN multilateralism, but not nearly as “solid” as we expected when we commenced this project. When we crafted the framework for this project, we envisioned a comparative analysis of politically consequential groups. We sought to understand them as actors in the multilateral process, and conceptually we sought to navigate between a rationalist and reflectivist understanding of groups by examining their functioning, leadership and how participants understood the group’s role and their role in the group. Indeed, we sought to understand them as entities in their own right in the multilateral process. However, once we included analysis of the groups in interaction with one another, it became clear than the groups were more inchoate than our analytical framework anticipated. The boundaries between regional groups, regional organizations, trans-regional political groups and single issue groups are blurred in practice. The African Union is a regional organization whose member states participate in the African Group, but as often work through the Non-aligned Movement or the G-77 as the African Group in their UN diplomacy. AOSIS presents a statement on the security risks of climate change at the UN Security Council, but so do AOSIS members Nauru (on behalf of the Pacific SIDS) and Trinidad and Tobago (on behalf of CARICOM). Groups, and member states representing groups, are clearly important in the multilateral process, but these groups proved to be curious, amorphous entities when we examined them in interaction with one another.

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To understand this analytical puzzle, that groups are central to UN multilateralism but are themselves in flux, we returned to Jackson and Nexon’s approach to relationalism that privileges relations over entities in understanding international relations.10 Jackson and Nexon assert that there is a substantialist bias in most IR theorizing in which “entities precede interaction, or that entities are already entities before they enter into social relations with other entities” and instead argue (with Tilly) for relationalism which posits the “configurations of ties — recurrent social interaction — between social aggregates of various sorts and their component parts as the building blocks of social analysis.”11 Using the analogy of light being both wave and particle, they make the point that analytical separation of agents and the social structures and processes in which they are embedded is not essential separateness. Norbert Elias captures this relational dynamic when he observes “we say ‘the wind is blowing’ as if the wind were actually a thing at rest which, at a given point, begins to move or blow. We speak as if the wind were separate from its blowing, as if a wind could exist which did not blow.”12 Using their relational perspective allows us to understand groups in process terms rather than as entities. Multilateral diplomacy is inseparable from group relations at the UN; it cannot be otherwise, because even though member states individually exercise permanent representation, it is the nature of multilateralism to produce collectively determined outcomes. Groups are not entities that replace member states in importance; group formation and reformation is the essential process producing (and reproducing) multilateralism. We and others have written extensively to understand the EU and other regional organizations in UN multilateralism.13 The political, legal and regional distinctiveness of such regional organizations has been widely studied, yet the way we have studied how such organizations interact with the UN reinforces this substantialist bias. It certainly informed our initial conceptualization of this project. Understanding group politics in UN multilateralism from a relational perspective involves understanding that social interaction is logically 10  Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon. “Relations Before States: Substance, Process and the Study of World Politics.” European Journal of International Relations 5, No. 3 (1999) 291–332. 11  Jackson and Nexon, “Relations Before States”, 291–292. 12  Norbert Elias. What is Sociology? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970) cited in Jackson and Nexon, “Relations before States” 300. 13  Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith, eds. The European Union at the United Nations: Intersecting Multilateralisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2006); Diana Panke, Stefan Lang and Anke Wiedemann. Regional Actors in Multilateral Negotiations: Active and Successful? (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).

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prior to the entities doing the interacting; groups are thus configurations in the process of multilateralism rather than separate entities that have a life of their own. Group dynamics in multilateral diplomacy precedes the efforts of regional organizations to be actors at the UN; indeed, regional organizations became politically active because group dynamics were already in play. Despite their ubiquity, groups in UN multilateralism are not coherent, separate entities that display consistent variable attributes that allow for causal theorization. Groups are what Jackson and Nexon call configurations rather than entities. This shift to understanding groups not as entities but as processes of interaction central to multilateralism has important epistemological consequences.14 “If the world is understood to be composed of processes and relations, then we cannot divide the world into discrete variables … These processes cannot be variables” because they are not independent of one another.15 It is not that the EU has an internally derived human rights normative agenda a priori and we can assess its influence on broader processes; from a processual perspective, it is through engaging in multilateral debates over gender and sexuality that the EU develops a focused human rights agenda. We agree with Jackson and Nexon that network approaches do not capture the importance of process in the group dynamics we are investigating. Network approaches focus on positionality and dispense with norms, preferences and interaction. In network approaches, ‘positionality in a network of relations, rather than decontextualized variable attributes, becomes the primary explanation for social phenomena … Network theory has often been relational, but not processual in that configuration of ties are treated as static things between concrete entities.’16 Groups in UN multilateralism are not simply reified networks of relations because they reflect intentionality (interests or identity). Unlike network approaches that conceive of agency as related to positionality in a network, we find that member states exercise agency through group affiliation based on identity or interest, and there are many opportunities to affiliate with different sorts of groups. Agency is not, however “owned” by a single agent (member states). This means that agency is intentional, shared and intersubjectively meaningful. The multilateral project is to produce collectively meaningful outcomes, and groups are configurative of that process. Group politics in UN multilateralism is ineffably social. 14  On the ontological and epistemological issues in social science, see Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics (London: Routledge, 2016). 15  Jackson and Nexon, “Relations Before States” 306. 16  Jackson and Nexon, “Relations before States”, 305.

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The process/relational approach rejects the duality of agent and structure in favor of configurational analysis. “Agency is created by networks of relations, but that does not mean that positionality overdetermines the actions of agents … Relationalism allows us to begin to see agency not as a singular, essential element but to disaggregate what we mean by agency into different aspects — layers of process — which may not be constant for each and every agent.”17 Agency in multilateral diplomacy is curious. While member states have permanent representation which creates the potential for agency, no single member state can on its own move the multilateral process; multilateral agency entails fostering the collective in diplomatic practices. Since permanent representation produces necessary but not sufficient agency for member states, the imperative for groups arises. As we have indicated above, not every member state engages with group dynamics the same way, groups themselves reflect considerable variation in how they operate, but groups constitute a stable configuration of the multilateral process across the UN. Even powerful states like the P-5 must interact with others in the multilateral process; they do not on their own have the agency to move the UN to act. The P-5 have the agency to stop collective action at the UN through the use of the veto, but cannot on their own produce it. A relational perspective is related to the developments associated with practice theory as well as network theory and pragmatism.18 It eschews abstract explanatory theories for understanding behavior and meaning “in the field.” We have found that it helps us understand group dynamics as configurative of multilateralism, and now we cannot unsee the group dynamic when we observe diplomacy at the UN. This approach does not discount scholars who seek to understand multilateralism though the lens of global governance, negotiation theories, and the like (see chapter 2). We do not propose this relational perspective of groups as superior to those approaches or in an effort to synthesize distinct theoretical perspectives.19 We looked at how groups operate in practice in UN multilateralism and demonstrated that they are central 17  Jackson and Nexon, “Relations before States”, 318. 18  For an updated review of the relational perspective in IR, see Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon. “Reclaiming the social: relationalism in anglophone international studies” Cambridge Review of International Affairs Published Online: 15 Mar 2019, https:// doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2019.1567460. 19  On synthesizing theories of regional and international organizations, see Knud Erik Jørgensen and Katie Laatikainen. “The political impact of the EU’s interaction with international institutions Towards a two-way street — both inside-out and outside-in perspectives” in Ramses A. Wessel and Jed Odermatt, eds. Research Handbook on the European Union and International Organizations (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2019).

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Conclusion: “ The Only Sin at the UN Is Being Isolated ”

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in multilateral processes. It has shaped how we see multilateralism: we now find it is impossible to view member states or groups as analytically separate from the configuration of group politics (group formation, group reformation, group interaction) in UN multilateralism. Singling out particular agents from the multilateral process to determine their impact may be analytically possible, but we find that it undermines the integrity of the process of multilateral diplomacy. It is through examining the interaction of groups and member states that we have found a stronger purchase in understanding UN multilateralism. We think that there is a great deal more work that can be done to focus on the social interaction of agents in the multilateral process and hope that this volume helps to spark a research agenda to further this line of inquiry into the social relations of multilateralism. We set out to determine the degree to which groups fostered or impeded collective action at the UN. In so doing, we attempted to treat groups as independent variables explaining UN multilateralism. What we have found is that it was impossible to disentangle groups from UN multilateralism itself in order to make a determination about their impact. The practice of group politics at the UN produces and reproduces collective action and meaning for participants in the process of multilateralism. The configuration of group politics has changed over time, from the bloc politics during the Cold War to the reinvigoration and increased participation of regional organizations in multilateral diplomacy during the post-Cold War era. Politicization among groups has led to new group dynamics in the multilateral process in the 2000s, from open-ending working groups to cross-regional informal groups of friends. As the UN moves beyond its 75th anniversary with new and unprecedented challenges, new developments in group politics and multilateral relations are sure to emerge. The research horizon on the social dynamics of groups and inter­action of agents in collective multilateral processes is invitingly open for further study. Bibliography Blavoukos, Spyros and Dimitris Bourantonis. ‘The EU’s Performance in the UN Security Council’, Journal of European Integration, 33, no. 6 (2011). Bush, Marc L. ‘Overlapping Institutions, Forum Shopping and Dispute Settlement in International Trade’, International Organization, vol. 61, no. 4 (2007), pp. 735–761. Drieskens, Edith. ‘Beyond Chapter VIII: Limits and Opportunities for Regional Representation at the UN Security Council’, International Organizations Law Review, 7, no. 1 (2010).

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Elias, Norbert. What is Sociology? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). Hill, Christopher. ‘The European Powers in the UN Security Council: Differing Interests, Differing Arenas’, in The European Union at the United Nations: Intersecting Multilateralisms, eds Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus. The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics (London: Routledge, 2016). Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus and Daniel H. Nexon. “Relations Before States: Substance, Process and the Study of World Politics.” European Journal of International Rela­ tions 5, No. 3 (1999) 291–332. Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus and Daniel H. Nexon. “Reclaiming the social: relationalism in anglophone international studies.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs Published Online: 15 March 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2019.1567460. Jørgensen, Knud Erik and Katie Laatikainen. “The political impact of the EU’s interaction with international institutions Towards a two-way street — both inside-out and outside-in perspectives” in Ramses A. Wessel and Jed Odermatt, eds. Research Handbook on the European Union and International Organizations (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2019). Johansson-Nogués, Elisabeth. ‘Returned to Europe? The Central and East European Member States at the Heart of the European Union’, in The European Union at the United Nations: Intersecting Multilateralisms, eds Katie Verlin Laatikainen and Karen E. Smith (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Kahler, Miles. ‘Multilateralism with Small and Large Numbers’, International Organization, vol. 46, no. 3 (2009), pp. 681–708. Kennedy, Paul. The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (London: Allen Lane, 2006). Laatikainen, Katie Verlin and Karen E. Smith, eds. The European Union at the United Nations: Intersecting Multilateralisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2006). Marchesi, Daniele. ‘The EU Common Foreign and Security Policy in the UN Security Council: between representation and coordination’ European Foreign Affairs Review, 15, no. 1 (2010). Panke, Diana, Stefan Lang and Anke Wiedemann. Regional Actors in Multilateral Negotiations: Active and Successful? (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). Pouliot, Vincent. International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilateral Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). United Nations Security Council, Report, ‘Penholders and Chairs’ 10 July 2019. Accessible at https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un-security-council-working -methods/pen-holders-and-chairs.php.

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Index Access to medicines 14, 221, 224, 226, 229, 231–237 Accountability, Coherence and Transparency Group (ACT) 20, 23 African Group 4, 6n, 9, 20, 23–24, 24n, 25, 27n, 28, 87, 160–161, 163, 165–176, 197, 200, 202, 207–208, 210, 215–217, 220, 252, 259n, 263, 268, 272–273, 275, 277, 307, 311–313 African Union 13, 23, 26, 55, 76, 78, 87, 108, 111, 200, 220, 286, 289, 298, 307, 313, 317 Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) 78 Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) 79–80, 80n Peace and Security Council (AUPSC) 79 Alliance of Small Islands States (AOSIS) 13, 20, 27, 64, 252, 260, 308 Andean Community (CAN) 61, 221 Arab Group 9, 100, 103, 105, 108–109, 163, 163n, 166, 168, 170, 173–174, 261–262, 286, 286n, 288 Asia-Pacific Group 4–5, 46, 208n, 220, 252, 259n, 307, 310, 315 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) 13, 23, 115, 208, 220, 286 Bolivia 67, 69, 71, 206n, 231, 234, 294 Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America 61, 274 Brazil 3, 63–64, 69, 82, 125, 135, 164, 168–169, 171, 174–175, 180n, 206, 206n, 212, 221–223, 231, 233–234, 236–237, 261–262, 272–273, 290, 296, 309 Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRICs) 69, 72, 82–84 Brazil, South, Africa, India and China (BASIC) 135, 268, 272–273, 275, 277, 279 Cambodia 107n, 115, 118, 121, 123, 126–127, 130, 133, 205 Canada 5n, 23, 165, 188, 188n, 199, 202–204, 209n, 222, 227, 231, 252, 261–262, 271, 301, 310, 316

Caribbean Community (CARICOM) 20, 27–28, 61–62, 64–70, 70n, 71–72, 145, 149–151, 221, 229, 261–262, 307, 311, 313, 315, 317 Caricom Reparations Commission  65–66, 168 Cartagena Dialogue 270, 272, 308 Central African Forestry Commission (COMIFAC) 274–275 Central American Common Market (CACM) 61n, 221 Central American Integration System (SICA) 229, 274–275 China 3, 23, 60, 61n, 63, 77, 82, 107n, 117, 119–121, 129–130, 133, 135, 137, 143–145, 148–149, 161, 166, 183, 227, 252, 256, 259–261, 263, 268, 272, 279, 292, 305, 311, 315 Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) 274 Coalition for Rainforest Nations (CfRN) 274–275 Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) 86–87 Community of Latin American and Caribbean states (CELAC) 61n, 67, 69, 167, 220, 222 Conference on Disarmament 177, 183, 311 Conference of Parties (COP) 20, 267, 269, Cuba 67, 81, 138, 150, 161, 175, 190n, 197, 205, 211, 222, 260 Dialogue among Civilizations 99, 106–107, 110 Disarmament 14, 23, 27, 48, 71, 77n, 81–82, 84, 94, 111, 120, 129, 177, 177n, 178, 178n, 179–188, 190–191, 193–195, 308, 311, 315–316 Durban Alliance 272 Eastern European Group 4, 11, 23–25, 46, 101n, 161, 183, 220, 252 Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) 86–87 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) 86–87, 91–92

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324 Ecuador 62, 67–69, 71, 150, 175, 206n, 223, 229, 232–234, 260–261 Egypt 63, 77, 85, 86n, 87, 97n, 100, 103, 103n, 109, 111, 161, 164, 167–168, 171, 180n, 187n, 192, 261, 263, 289, 294 Environmental Integrity Group (EIG) 272 European Union (EU) 3, 5, 13, 20, 23, 45–46, 50n, 56, 63, 70, 82, 107–108, 115, 121, 135, 137, 141, 143, 160, 178, 178n, 202, 220, 261–262, 286, 291, 307, 314, 316 European External Action Service (EEAS)  47, 271 France 45, 48, 50–51, 167, 172, 192, 234, 293, 295–296, 299, 312, 315 Germany 51, 121, 125, 188n, 192, 293, 297 Group of Friends 107, 171, 197–198, 204, 204n, 206–207, 210, 210n, 211–212, 214–215 Of the Family 171 Of R2P 197n, 308 group politics 3–5, 8–10, 12–16, 34, 36, 38, 40–42, 50, 160–161, 163, 169, 171, 174, 176, 179, 242–244, 265, 269, 286, 297–299, 302, 305–307, 311, 313, 315, 317–319, 321 G16 Group of 16 179–180, 187–190, 190n, 191–195, 309, 316 G20 Group of 20 69, 72, 131 G-77 Group of 77 5–6, 11, 61, 64, 69, 76–77, 94, 111, 143, 145–146, 148–149, 202–203, 207, 209, 215, 217, 220, 241, 248, 259, 263, 307–308, 313–317 JUSCANZ 5, 5n, 23, 252, 315, 316 Latin American and Caribbean group (GRULAC) 4, 8–9, 23–24, 61–64, 69, 72, 172, 220, 231, 252, 254, 286n, 307 High Ambition Coalition 20, 135–136, 149, 152, 270–273, 276–279, 281, 308, 310 Human Rights Council (HRC) 4, 5n, 12, 34, 45, 49–50, 52, 54, 106, 159, 159n, 160–161, 161n, 162–163, 165–166, 168, 169n, 171, 173n, 174, 174n, 175–176, 196, 206, 219, 229, 234–235, 237, 290, 307–311, 315 Independent Association of Latin America and the Caribbean (AILAC) 268, 272–273, 275–276 India 3, 63, 82, 120–121, 125, 135, 144, 148, 183, 261, 263, 272, 279

Index Indonesia 97n, 115, 117–118, 120–123, 125, 127–128, 130, 130n, 131, 171, 192, 234, 261, 289, 294 International Conference of Drug Regulatory Authorities (ICDRA) 229, 236 International Criminal Court (ICC) 55, 65, 203, 285 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 243, 248–249, 261 Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee 142 Iran 71, 97n, 99, 101n, 102, 106–107, 126, 171, 190, 261, 263, 294 Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) 109 Islamophobia 106, 112 Kyoto Protocol 135, 139, 143–144, 270, 277 League of Arab States 98, 100, 103, 108, 178, 181, 181n, 203, 208–209, 286–287, 307 Least Developed Countries 131, 138, 138n, 270, 272–273, 275–276 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) 160, 171–174, 174n, 175, 310 Libya 51, 86n, 97n, 103n, 108, 112, 171, 208–209, 216, 292–293 Like-Minded Developing Countries 10, 270, 272, 275 Malaysia 97n, 101n, 115, 117–118, 121, 125–127, 130–131, 192, 205–206, 208, 212 Maldives 97n, 135, 137–138, 138n, 139–141, 145–151, 263, 314–315 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)  219, 227, 230, 232, 241–242, 244, 246–250, 253, 255, 257–258, 266 multilateralism 3–5, 10–13, 16–17, 21, 23, 25–26, 28–31, 33–38, 40, 54–56, 81, 127–129, 136, 141, 144, 152, 191, 241, 244, 264, 266, 305–306, 308–310, 312, 316–321 Myanmar 71, 107, 107n, 115, 121, 126–127, 131–133, 289n New Agenda Coalition 23, 27, 111, 178, 309, 316 Nigeria 86n, 87, 90, 97n, 165, 187n, 188n, 206, 208

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Index Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) 5, 9, 23, 27, 54, 65, 76, 77, 111, 118, 129, 152, 161, 178, 183, 190n, 202, 252, 286, 288, 299–300, 307, 317 Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative (NPDI) 178, 188 Nordic Group 9, 23, 52, 252 Nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT)  177–179, 181–184, 186–189, 189n, 190–195, 311 Nuclear weapons 61n, 84, 129, 177–183, 186–188, 190, 193 Open Working Group on the Sustainable Development Goals (OWG) 250–252, 254, 254n, 255–260, 262, 264 Organization of American States (OAS) 65, 69, 221–223, 235 Organization of African Unity (OAU) 76, 91, 91n, 200, 289 Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) 8, 21, 23, 97–98, 107, 286 Pacific Island Forum 150, 315 Palestine 77, 81, 97n, 97n2, 100n, 101–102, 104–106, 127, 264, 285–289, 289n, 289n2, 290, 290n, 291–299, 299n, 300, 302, 311, 313–314 Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) 221–223, 225 Paris Agreement 146–147, 151–152, 267, 310 Philippines 107n, 115, 118, 120–121, 125, 127, 188n, 192, 204, 260 Political groups 3–5, 10–11, 13, 17, 21, 23, 25, 27–28, 36–37, 46, 61, 98, 101, 105, 109–112, 136, 145, 149–152, 159–160, 162, 162n, 163, 170, 174, 178–182, 184, 189, 191, 193–195, 197, 207, 220, 237, 241–242, 252, 264, 268, 272, 286, 291, 307–311, 313, 316–317 Protection of the family 161, 163–164, 166–168, 171, 174–175, 315 Rapoport, Anatol 14, 184, 190, 211 Regional groups 3–5, 9, 15, 23–25, 37, 46, 51–52, 61–62, 87, 139, 148–149, 152, 159n, 161–162, 180, 183, 207, 215–217, 220–221, 237, 252–255, 259, 262, 268, 268n, 279, 305, 307, 309–310, 315, 317

325 Responsibility to Protect 7, 14, 23, 128, 196–218, 308, 310–311, 314 Russia 107n, 109, 146, 161, 164–168, 171, 199, 261, 271, 291, 305, 311, 315 Rwanda 86n, 86n21, 87, 90, 92, 196, 197n, 198, 202–204, 206, 208–209, 213, 215, 218, 293 Saudi Arabia 97n, 97n3, 99–101, 101n, 102, 146, 164, 168, 171, 272 Sexual orientation 14, 161, 162n, 163–164, 167, 169, 169n, 170, 170n, 171–172, 172n, 173–174, 174n, 175–176, 263, 308–309, 311 Singapore 115, 121, 125–127, 131, 138, 141, 146, 150, 204, 289n, 293, 300–301 Small Island Developing States (SIDS) 27, 136–139, 141–147, 149, 151–152, 252, 260–261, 263, 317 South American Institute of Government in Health (ISAGS) 226, 228, 229n, 232, 236 South Africa 82, 86n, 87, 90, 94, 125, 135, 164, 168–169, 169n, 180n, 192, 202–203, 208–209, 215, 218, 234, 272–273, 289, 294 Southern African Development Community (SADC) 86–87, 92 Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR)  61n, 68, 119, 170, 170n, 220–225, 227, 235–236 Sustainable Development Goals 14, 54, 76, 88, 132, 201n, 241–242, 244, 250, 250n, 251–255, 258, 260–262, 264, 266, 308, 310–311, 314 Syria 52, 81, 98n, 98n3, 100, 100n, 101–102, 102n, 103n, 108, 108n, 109–110, 112, 126, 174, 196, 215–216, 292, 314 Technical Group on Universal Access to Medicines (GAUMU) 232 Thailand 115, 118, 121, 123, 125, 125n, 127, 234, 289n, 293, 299 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS) 233, 235 Traditional values 161–167, 170, 174–175 Trinidad and Tobago 64–65, 137–138, 140, 150, 289n, 293, 317 Turkey 10, 97n, 99, 99n, 101n, 102, 107, 145, 188, 261

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326 Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) 23, 27, 61n, 219–237, 286, 288, 290–297, 299–302, 307, 309, 314, 316 United Kingdom 45–46, 48, 50–52, 63, 192, 259, 261–262, 293, 297, 312, 315–316 United Nations 3, 10, 12, 20, 23, 25, 26n, 28, 34, 41, 45, 54, 60, 65–66, 77–78, 80, 89, 91, 98, 100, 103, 105–106, 108, 116, 159, 177, 196, 219, 241, 243, 248, 250–251, 253, 263, 266, 285, 286n, 292, 294–295, 313 Department of Peacekeeping Operations 78 Disarmament Commission 177, 183 Economic and Social Committee (ECOSOC) 140, 229 United Nations-African Union Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID) 78, 80, 91–93 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 77 United Nations Educations, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 105, 285–286, 288–289, 291–295, 297–299, 301–302, 311 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) 7, 20, 24, 29, 34, 37, 40, 60–61, 61n, 62–67, 69, 71–72, 76–77, 77n, 80–82, 84–85, 94, 101, 103–107, 111, 118–119, 123–127, 130–131, 139, 141–142, 161–163, 172, 177, 182–183, 219, 229,

Index 233–235, 237, 285–289, 291, 293–295, 297–302, 308, 310, 312–313, 315 United Nations Office to the African Union (UNOAU) 78, 79n United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC) 91 United Nations Security Council (UNSC)  26n, 45, 77–80, 87, 89–91, 93, 93n, 94, 147 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 20, 37, 111, 139, 142–144, 267–268, 268n, 269–281 Conference of Parties 20 University for Peace 89, 89n United States 5, 23, 37, 45, 56, 60, 67–68, 145, 161, 161n, 167–168, 169n, 186, 222, 227, 231, 248, 252, 261–262, 305, 315 Venezuela 39n, 64, 67–71, 150, 175, 197, 205, 206n, 211, 219, 222–223, 260, 263 Vietnam 115, 117–118, 121, 123, 125–127, 260–261 Western Europe and Others Group (WEOG) 4, 23–24, 46, 180, 199, 201, 207, 212–213, 217, 220, 252, 254, 307, 315–316 World Health Organization 219, 223, 226–227, 229–232, 235–236, 309, 311 World Trade Organization 70, 219, 229, 233–235, 237, 243, 309

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