An Analysis of Turkey's and BRICS’ Voting Cohesion in the UN General Assembly during 2002–2014

Abstract

This paper attempts to analyze the voting behavior of Turkey in the UN General Assembly between 2002 and 2014 in comparison with those of the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) countries by using selected reference groups of India, Brazil, South Africa (IBSA), EU, permanent members of the UN Security Council (P5) and the Western group of P5 (USA, UK, France) with the help of a two layered methodology. In doing so, this paper, with a two‐layered quantitative and qualitative methodological model, empirically tests Turkey's voting alignments and cohesion scores in the UN General Assembly to provide a comparative perspective on the degree of foreign policy cohesion among Turkey and its BRICS peers by comparing the group and pair‐wise ‘cohesion’ results. Finally, this paper will qualitatively analyze and discuss Turkey's exceptional voting behaviors and alignments with both the Western group of P5 and the BRICS to understand the nature of the international issues leading to convergences or divisions between Turkey and the BRICS and to demonstrate Turkey's in‐between and dual foreign policy role in international affairs.

A New Eurasian Bloc? Characterizing the Activity of Former Soviet and Turkic Countries at the Un General Assembly

“…Although other modes of regional-global linkage have been theorized (see Kakowicz, 2018 for a review), these are expected to be more salient in our case given the features of the UNGA. For the most part, UNGA scholarship has focused on the agenda of the larger Eurasian powers, such as Russia and Türkiye (Kurşun & Dal, 2017), and on the dynamics of subregional agreements. The rationales of civilizational values, collective bargaining power, and service-taking can assist in making sense of the themes that emerge through the sponsorship behavior of these players at the UNGA.…”

Projecting General Assembly Voting Records onto an Enlarged Security Council: An Analysis of the G4 Reform Proposal

“…A posteriori studies, on the other hand, seek to estimate the voting influence of current permanent members within a reformed Security Council by considering their voting coherence with proposed permanent members in the General Assembly. So far, voting coherence in the General Assembly has mainly been analyzed to measure the cohesion of EU (Galariotis and Gianniou, 2017; Jin and Hosli, 2013; Rasch, 2008) and BRICS (Ferdinand, 2014; Hooijmaaijers and Keukeleire, 2016; Kursun and Dal, 2017) members’ voting behavior. To our knowledge, there are only two studies that examined voting coherence in the General Assembly with a view to a current permanent member’s influence in a reformed Security Council: in 1997, when the Razali proposal made headlines, Schaefer (1997, p. 6) compared the General Assembly voting records of potential permanent members with that of the US for the year 1996, concluding ‘that U.S. foreign policy priorities will meet even more opposition in an expanded Security Council than is currently the case’.…”