The European Union's leverage to promote human rights values and its vision of a rules-based world order has dramatically declined over the last decade, ECFR reveals in a new report, after analysing over ten years of UN voting statistics.

Another sign for the coming decline of the West?

The report argues that the "European Union (EU) is suffering a slow-motion crisis at the United Nations (UN)".

The central thesis of the authors is the follwoing:

"The problem is fading power to set the rules of the game. The EU’s members insist that the UN is central to their vision of international order and universal human rights – but the UN is increasingly being shaped by China, Russia and their allies.
This paradox has come to the fore in 2008 as the EU has tried to work through the UN on Burma and Zimbabwe, yet been unable to get Security Council resolutions for action. These defeats come on top of previous setbacks for the EU at the UN in cases from Kosovo to Darfur."

The authors of the report provide some examples for the above:

"In the 1990s, the EU enjoyed up to 72% support on human rights issues in the UN General Assembly. In the last two Assembly sessions, the comparable percentages have been 48 and 55%. This decline is overshadowed by a leap in support for Chinese positions in the same votes from under 50% in the later 1990s to 74% in 2007-8. Russia has enjoyed a comparable leap in support. The trend away from the Europeans is markedly worse on the new Human Rights Council (HRC) where EU positions have been defeated in over half the votes."

The report takes note of the European investment in the UN system, which should have provided it with more leverage at the UN:

"The EU’s diminishing influence over the last decade is all the more surprising given the amount of money that it invests in multilateral processes, and its strong representation within the UN system. EU states finance the lion’s share of the UN budget and are collectively the world’s biggest aid donor, committed to disbursing $80 billion a year by 2010. The fact that the EU holds four or five seats on the Security Council at any given time should be another source of leverage."

The authors argue that despite of this massive EU involvement in the UN, the reality is as follows:

"..the EU is losing political credibility. It confronts a changed international context, with China and Russia emerging as alternative poles of attraction, and blocs of states from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere setting themselves in opposition to the values that Europe espouses. And the West is in disarray: the EU’s rifts with the US on many human rights issues at the UN in the Bush era have weakened both."

The report warns that "After nearly two decades in which the Security Council has been a relatively benign environment for the EU there is a threat that it will become an increasingly harsh one." This is due to the increasing use of the Russians and/or Chinese of the their veto power on the Security Council.

Download the full report.

Decline of the West as the world's leading force?

Attemping to expalin the trend mentioned in the above report, Ulrike Guérot (Obama and the future of transatlantic relations) comments as follows:

"The West is diminishing in terms of demography, power and influence - even if Europe and the US work together. By 2050, the US and Europe combined may no longer account for more than 7% of world population. A similar relative diminution is to be expected in terms of economic heft. With this will go the erosion of the ‘West's' ability to determine the terms and systems of global governance. .....

In short: no Western initiative can any longer be assumed to carry automatic weight with some two-thirds of the world‘s people. Multi-polarity is a reality and hegemony or the myth of the world's 'lonely super-power' are over....."