Discovering Voting Groups in the United Nations

The discussion of voting groups or blocs within the United Nations General Assembly has long been a popular pastime. It is, of course, merely a special case of a wider concern with groups and coalitions in all aspects of international politics. With the apparent loosening of the early postwar bipolarity it is increasingly important to discern the number, composition, and relative strength of whatever coalitions of nations may emerge from the present seemingly transitional period. Voting groups in the General Assembly provide a relevant datum, though hardly the only one, for an effort to identify these groups. The United Nations gives no perfect image of broader international politics; due to the one-nation one-vote principle and to the fact that it is not a world government with authority to enforce its decisions, power relationships within the Assembly are not the same as in other arenas, such as functional or geographic ones. It might well be argued that because of the majority-rule principle the smaller and poorer states have an incentive to band together in the UN that they do not have elsewhere. Thus the discovery of a “bloc” of underdeveloped countries in the UN proves nothing about the cohesion of that “bloc” in other contexts. Yet votes in the General Assembly do provide a unique set of data where many national governments commit themselves simultaneously and publicly on a wide variety of major issues.