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Researching Your Country In order to represent your assigned country well, you will need to be familiar with your country's foreign policy regarding the topic being debated in your committee. Foreign policy is what diplomats call a country's official position on international issues, and it is found in statements made by representatives of that country on these issues. Before you can really understand your country's foreign policy, however, you need to know certain things about your country. This section will help you to find the background information that you will need in order to understand your foreign policy. The next section will help you to discover what that foreign policy is. Background Information The first thing to understand about foreign policy positions is that they are more than just opinions about issues. Decisions made by the international community can have serious effects, both positive and negative, for individual states and their citizens. For this reason, countries usually try to influence debates at the UN in directions that they see as being good for them or their citizens. Decisions of the
international community affect states and their citizens in many ways.
They could have political, economic, or security implications, or affect
such things as the practice of religion or standards of human rights.
The history of your country, and the circumstances in which it exists
now, have a lot to do with its opinion about such issues. This means
that the better you know your country, the more you will understand
its foreign policy. One very reputable Model United Nations organization
has suggested that delegates should know about the political structure,
economic condition, religion(s), history, and culture of the state they
represent.(1)
You should look for some basic information on these five aspects of
your country as soon as you get your country assignment. Below are addresses
for a couple of web-sites that should contain the kind of information
you need: The World Factbook
- produced by the CIA - www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook Altapedia Online
- www.altapedia.com
After getting some
basic information about your country, you may be interested in learning
more detailed information about some aspect of your country that you
think is particularly relevant to your foreign policy. Chances are you
can find what you are looking for in the excellent Country Studies
produced by the U.S. Library of Congress. They are quite long, but they
have good indexes so you should easily be able to find what you are
looking for. So far about 100 of them have been placed online at www.lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs.
Groupings In the UN there
are groups of countries that tend to agree with each other more than
they agree with other countries. For this reason, knowing about your
country's associations with other countries can be very helpful in understanding
your foreign policy. There are two basic types of groupings that you
should be concerned with: In the General
Assembly, five informal regional groupings have emerged over the years.
They are the African States, the Asian States, the Eastern European
States, the Latin American and Caribbean States, and the Western European
and other States. Although these groupings are based primarily on geography,
they can be politically significant, since countries in a region often
face common challenges and have some common interests. While regional
groupings provide a good basis for working toward common goals, however,
political groupings are often more important in determining foreign
policy. In other words, a country is likely to feel more loyalty to
a group of countries that it chooses to be associated with than to a
group of countries which happen to be located close to it. Some of the
political groupings which tend to be significant at the UN are the European
Union (EU), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Nordic
Countries, the Non-Alligned Movement (NAM - sometimes also referred
to as the Group of 77 Non-Alligned Countries), the Association of South
East Asian Nations, the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC), and
the Arab League. As you can see from these examples, there is often
some correspondence between political and regional groupings. For example,
the countries of the European Union are grouped both politically and
geographically. Regional or political
groups will sometimes designate one country to make a statement on their
behalf on a particular issue. When this is the case, it is noted in
the UN Press Releases that they are "speaking for" that group. This
will be important to remember when you are looking for statements of
your foreign policy on an issue. In some cases, the relationship between your country and another single country can be an important influence on foreign policy as well. There are three situations in particular where this is the case: 1) when two states are major trading partners; 2) when there is an agreement of "mutual defence" in place between two states, or one state has given guarantees of security to another; and 3) in the case of developing countries, when one state is a major donor of aid to the another. In such cases there is often more pressure for one state to agree with the other on certain issues. The existence of these conditions does not mean that these states will always agree, but these relationships are often a major consideration when foreign policy decisions are being made. 1 Reincke, Mary Beth, Nathan Walz, and Matthew Strickler, Delegate Preparation Manual : 2000 National Model United Nations Conference, The National Collegiate Conference Association, Inc., 1999, p. 10. |