An empirical analysis of the EAEU’s voting behavior in the UN General Assembly, 2000–2020 Shatlyk Amanov Department of Social Sciences, Suleyman Demirel University, Kaskelen, Kazakhstan. Email:
[email protected] Abstract This paper examines the voting behavior of the member states of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) to find out their preference similarities on foreign policy issues. Based on a specific data set of UNGA resolutions from 2000 to 2020 and using two different indexes of voting cohesion, the present research addresses two empirically motivated questions: to what extent does the EAEU speak in unison externally in the context of UNGA plenary? And secondly, what was the impact the formation of the EAEU in 2015 had upon common foreign policy? The results reveal that the EAEU scores a “medium” level of cohesion as measured within the UNGA context which may indicate that members oftentimes speak with one voice while defections still occur on controversial votes. Besides, the findings suggest that no meaningful cohesion difference exists between pre- and post- EAEU periods. Finally, the study finds that the Eurasian nations are most cohesive on developmental resolutions, but least cohesive on security and human rights issues as expressed in their recorded voting behavior. Keywords: Eurasian Economic Union, Eurasian integration, Eurasia, United Nations, UN General Assembly, voting cohesion. 1. Introduction Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Eurasian integration1 has gone through several stages, following the “CIS-EurAsEC-CU/SES-EAEU” line2 (Vinokurov, 2018), and ultimately establishing the EAEU, the most sophisticated regional organization that 1 In this paper, “Eurasian integration” refers to the integration process in the post-Soviet space, primarily within the EAEU as opposed to an alternative Eurasian “continental” integration, promoted by China (through the Belt and Road Initiative), Russia, and Kazakhstan, among others (Vinokurov, 2018).