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Tracking the East-West Lineup
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15001 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1988 |
1,115 Words |
| Author
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James L. Payne
James L. Payne, currently a visiting scholar at the Social
Philosophy Center, Bowling Green State University, has taught
political science at Yale, Wesleyan, Johns Hopkins, and Texas
A & M. This article is based on his forthcoming book, Why
Nations Arm. |
Where does the United States stand in the world? Who are its friends, and who are its opponents? A systematic study of voting patterns in the United Nations enables us to go beyond rough impressions and achieve a precise, comprehensive answer. With this quantitative technique, it is interesting to see not only which countries are hostile, but which types of countries regularly side against the United States.
For the past four years, the U.S. delegation at the United Nations has selected 10 key votes that measure the support countries around the world give to U.S. values and purposes. It wasn't the State Department's idea to initiate this tabulation. At Foggy Bottom, they prefer to believe that everyone in the world is friendly--perhaps an understandable orientation for diplomats. But congressmen, disturbed at the way certain countries were biting the hand that was aiding them, ordered the compilation to be made. The resulting reports yield a comprehensive picture of the loyalties of different countries around the world.
The accompanying table gives the voting on these key issues for the past four UN sessions, 1983-86. The key votes are selected by the U.S. delegation and the State Department as especially important to the United Sates--votes on which the United States actively lobbied all member states, not only at the United Nations, in New York, but through the U.S. embassies in each nation's capital. They covered a broad range of major East-West issues, including U.S. policy in connection with Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, South Africa, Namibia, Israel, and Libya, as well as Soviet policy in Afghanistan and Kampuchea, and the use of chemical and biological warfare agents in these areas.
To make a more accurate East-West scale, attention is confined to those 36 votes on which the United States and the Soviet Union voted oppositely. (On the four other votes, the Soviet Union either voted with the United States or abstained). Of these 36 votes, a country is given +1 for each time it voted with the United States, -1 for each time it voted against the United States (and with the Soviet Union), and a zero for each abstention or absence. Hence, a score of +36 represents complete agreement with the United States, while a score of -36 means complete disagreement (and agreement with the Soviet Union). Excluded from the tabulation are micro-countries, dependencies, governments in exile, and nonmembers of the United Nations.
Aid and the
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