Drivers of differentiation between EU Member-states in the UN General Assembly

Abstract

The European Union (EU) has laboured hard to gain the right to make oral interventions in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in pursuit of a more active international role. At the same time, though, EU member-states continue to take the floor to make their own interventions, thus differentiating – but not necessarily distancing – their stance from the officially expressed EU position. In that respect, it is important to examine the drivers behind the differentiating activity of EU member-states and their engagement in UNGA deliberations. We identify structural, institutional, political and thematic drivers. They relate to resources, the EU system of external representation in the form of the EU rotating Council Presidency and the opportunities that it provides during each country's period in office, national political aspirations for greater influence, as well as issue-specific assertiveness. We operationalize and control for these drivers by looking at the size and economic resources of EU member-states, their individual statements while holding the EU rotating Council Presidency, their membership in the UN Security Council (UNSC) or candidacy for it, and the issue specificity of each UNGA Main Committee. Our analysis is based on a three-level longitudinal multilevel random intercept model and relies upon a new dataset that compiles the oral interventions made by representatives of EU member-states and by EU officials in UNGA through an automated content analysis of the verbatim records of the UNGA meetings from 1998 to 2017.