The European Union in the annual United Nations General Assembly Debates

We examine foreign policy preference convergence and cohesion among EU states, as revealed in the annual United Nations General Debate (UNGD). Of interest is whether the institutional adaptations following the Lisbon Treaty led to convergence towards the official EU position and more cohesion in speeches delivered by EU states. We argue that the UNGD is a distinct context where EU states feel compelled to differentiate themselves compared to other areas where EU coordination efforts are extensive. We explore EU convergence and cohesion based on all EUGD UNGD speeches between 1990 and 2019. We primarily apply text-as-data techniques to extract states' positions on well-established foreign policy dimensions. We use wordscores and text similarity measures, comparing our analysis to ideal point estimates based on UNGA voting and co-sponsorship data. We find that EU states use the UNGD as a venue to articulate their own, differentiated positions as individual UN member states.