Introduction
In September 2014, at the tribune offered by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro declared that ‘we must democratize and overhaul the Security Council.’Footnote 1 Venezuela under the Bolivarian Revolution (Hugo Chávez, 1999–2013; Nicolás Maduro, 2013–to date) was particularly critical of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Venezuela questioned its composition, working methods, practices (veto, sanctions) and the overly broad interpretation of its mandate.Footnote 2 However, a few weeks later, Venezuela was elected to be part of the same institution for two years.
While Venezuela has participated in the UNSC as a non-permanent member on five occasions since 1945 (1962–3; 1977–8; 1986–7; 1992–3; 2015–16), only the 2015–16 mandate took place during Bolivarian governments. Analyses of the Venezuelan presence in multilateral forums are rare. They tend not to link Venezuela's multilateral participation to its foreign policy,Footnote 3 or to adopt an official stance.Footnote 4 These references are useful to clarify crucial aspects of the Bolivarian diplomacy, but they do not allow us to catch the subtleties of Venezuelan multilateral actions in 2015–16. Indeed, this participation may seem puzzling, as it coincided with the growing multidimensional crisis in Venezuela. As the Venezuelan candidacy was presented in 2008, at the zenith of the Chávez era, it was impossible to step back for an administration that based its legitimacy on its predecessor's legacy. It was thus expected that this mandate would illustrate the contestation dimension of the Bolivarian diplomacy. The tension between the United States (US) and Venezuela was actually staged at the time of its election by the UNGA. Samantha Power, the then US Permanent Representative to the UN, responded to the Venezuelan election by declaring: ‘Unfortunately, Venezuela's conduct at the UN has run counter to the spirit of the UN Charter and its violations of human rights at home are at odds with the Charter's letter.’Footnote 5 Many observers questioned the implications of the election of a ‘radical’ state to the UNSC.Footnote 6
However, an empirical observation of Venezuelan participation at the UNSC contradicts this hypothesis. The 2014 bid seemed to respect all the procedures, including the 2008 declaration to the Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC) of Venezuela's intention to run for an UNSC seat, and then waiting for its turn. The 2014 candidacy obtained the unanimous support of the regional group, before being supported by 181 votes from the 193 member states of the UN. In 2015–16, although the Bolivarian government regularly expressed dissent and staged diplomatic contestation at the UNGA, it adopted a lower profile than expected in the UNSC, even on issues included on both agendas, such as Syria. According to a Chilean diplomat working from Santiago at the time, Venezuela ‘did it very well, it respected the UNSC forms and showed its goodwill’ in the institution.Footnote 7 In our 2017 field survey, one of the national diplomats interviewed even admitted that he was ‘not inspired by the subject’ because Venezuela ‘did not have a very strong policy in the Security Council’. In short, the respondent ‘has no striking memory’ of the Venezuelan presence at the UNSC on the issues he/she was working on.Footnote 8
Indeed, Venezuela's contestation to the UNSC during its mandate is not clear. Over the two years of its mandate, Venezuela went alone and therefore broke consensus on only four of the 141 resolutions adoptedFootnote 9 (out of 146 votes).Footnote 10 However, a more detailed analysis of the votes shows that Venezuela was the member with the most abstentions in 2015 and the member with the greatest number of negative votes in 2016. Table 1 shows Venezuela is not the only elected member that opposes consensus. While most of the ten elected members barely vote against or abstain, a few actually did it each year (Venezuela in 2015; Venezuela, Angola, and Egypt in 2016). Can these abstentions and negative votes be interpreted as a contestation practice along the lines of those displayed at the UNGA where almost all of Venezuela's votes indicate opposition to the US?
Table 1. Summary of votes at the UNSC (2015–16).
Notes: *No other member voted against or abstained. (P) refers to permanent members whose votes against correspond with the use of the veto. UNSC members voted 65 times in 2015 and 81 times in 2016, of which 86.4 per cent (55) and 82.7 per cent (81) were approved unanimously respectively. Logically, consensus was not reached regarding 10 votes in 2015 and 14 votes in 2016.
Source: United Nations Security Council website.
This case draws attention to the contestation of and within international organisations (IOs), whose studies have recently multiplied. Contestation here means the manifestation of discontent and the expression of dissent that challenges an institution, a norm, a practice, an order, or a hierarchy. Surprisingly, studies on contestation at the UNSC and at the UNGA are not common, in contrast to other institutions, such as the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) often contested due to the politicisation of the institution and the issues (human rights) on which the stakeholders negotiate.Footnote 11 Furthermore, despite recent publications about UNSC elected members,Footnote 12 we still lack in-depth studies to comprehend whether and how multilateral contestation practices work. While these references tend to focus on actors who want to integrate and do not adopt contestation as their main strategy, we turn our attention to dissenting actors that often try to disrupt the multilateral game. These actors can be expected to adopt a coherent stance to promote it in the various multilateral institutions in which he/she takes part. However, this is not always the case. A detailed study of the Venezuelan diplomacy at the UN offers a significant case to investigate and compare the simultaneous practices of contestation in different forums of an actor claiming to lead a diplomacy based on contestation.
During the last decade, Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution embodied the phenomenon of these dissenting states. With Hugo Chávez's accession to power, and more significantly following the coup d’état of April 2002, Venezuela's foreign policy has often been described as confrontational by both the press and academics. The idea that the Bolivarian strategy differs from more conventional ones – which may be critical but express it more diplomatically – is widely shared, despite the variety of normative positions among scholars regarding this political project.Footnote 13 The Venezuelan position of denunciation and contestation also spread to multilateral institutions, as demonstrated in 2007 by the announced withdrawal from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, two symbols of the neoliberal economic system, and the effective withdrawal from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2013 and the Organization of American States (OAS) in 2019, two institutions known for their US strong influence. Analysts consider that Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chávez's successor since 2013, is pursuing the Bolivarian Revolution, including in the field of foreign policy.Footnote 14 Contestation therefore still characterises Venezuelan international diplomatic action.
To study its contestation practicesFootnote 15 at the UN, we draw upon the sociology of Erving Goffman and apply his work on interaction orders so as not to limit contestation to simply mean the non-compliance or questioning of formal rules and norms. We argue that contestation practices are specific to each institution's interaction order, even in the case of an actor regarded as a dissenting one, however counterintuitive. In the context of Venezuelan diplomacy difficulties, the country's delegates adopted, a contestation line widely accepted by their counterparts at the UNGA. At the UNSC, the Venezuelan role is ambivalent: even if the country publicly appeared, more often than not, as a member of the team in official performances, its representatives actually tried to adopt a more dissenting approach particularly in the backstage of the institution, not without limitations. Finally, these actors, who claimed to be dissenting ones, actually played roles that do not significantly challenge the interaction orders.
Starting from existing analytical proposals to understand Venezuela's contestation practices at the UNGA and the UNSC, we underline the innovative perspectives that Goffman's reflection on interaction order brings for our case study in a second section. Considering these two institutions as distinct orders of interaction in a third one sheds light on the different contestation practices, used by Venezuelan actors with varying degrees of success, as shown in section four. While their strategies work at the UNGA, they miss their target at the UNSC. In a final section we study how Venezuelan contestation attempts were invisibilised and relegated to backstage practices.
1. Beyond institutional contestation at the UN: Taking into account the contestation practices within interactions
Scholars from different social sciences study the contestation of IOs by states from a variety of perspectives: the exit strategy of states from IOs,Footnote 16 the contestation on a specific issue such as the sexual orientation and gender identity oneFootnote 17 or on specific cases such as Haiti,Footnote 18 the contestation of international norms,Footnote 19 the legitimacy of IOs,Footnote 20 the contestation led by major powers and its effects on international cooperationFootnote 21 or the Trump administration's effect on multilateralism.Footnote 22 The literature offers several interesting but insufficient avenues of reflection for understanding why Venezuelan contestation practices differ from one institution to another.
Classic logic of the cost/benefit ratio does not allow us to decrypt Venezuela's different behaviours in the UNSC and the UNGA. As Nicolás Maduro's legitimacy is the core objective of his foreign policy,Footnote 23 appearing as a dissenting actor at the UNGA also served internal purposes. Due to the significant media coverage of the general debate, states’ performance at the UNGA is also addressed to national public opinion and other international audiences. From 2014 on, tensions with the opposition were increasing and the economic crisis deepened in Venezuela. This situation was linked to Nicolás Maduro's failure to achieve the legitimacy of his mentor. Therefore, speeches at the UNGA were used to summon the figure of Hugo Chávez for the purpose of legitimisation. Faced with a tense national situation, the government of Nicolás Maduro sought to compensate internationally by affirming its dissenting profile and its affiliation with Hugo Chávez, thus leading to the ‘domestication of foreign policy’.Footnote 24 With the first sanctions against the Maduro administration taken in 2014, contestation was not costly. On the contrary, what is costly for a dissenting actor that uses his/her behaviour to gain international and national support is to appear as a moderate player. Then Venezuela's moderate profile at the UNSC requires further reflection. Indeed, tensions with the US, and to a lesser extent with other Northern countries, symbolise Chávez's legacy, so the Bolivarian government does not need good relations with them in the UNSC.
Some references also link contestation in IOs to specific international contexts. In his classical book, Gary Goertz considers three modes of context: context as cause, context as barrier, and context as changing meaning.Footnote 25 Regarding the international insertion of Latin American and Caribbean countries, international conditions are traditionally emphasised as a core restrictive factor to understand their capacity of actions.Footnote 26 In 2015 and 2016, the international context did not particularly favoured contestation. Consensual international circumstances, marked by Barack Obama's diplomatic gestures on Cuba and Iran – two of Nicolás Maduro government's close allies –, participated in silencing contestation. At the UNSC, terrorist offensives of the ISIS group dominated debates on Syria, relegating the negotiation on the future of Bashar al-Assad's regime to a secondary level in comparison with the debates in 2013.Footnote 27 Despite this context, Venezuela has developed a high-profile dissenting diplomacy in the UNGA. Therefore, although important, the context is not sufficient to understand the different contestation practices adopted by Venezuela at the UNGA and the UNSC.
In addition, scholars have often pointed out inconsistencies in the positions of a state between different IOs which can result in contested multilateralism,Footnote 28 between UN institutions,Footnote 29 or within the same institution at different moments.Footnote 30 While references about decision-making and bureaucratic processes help figure out the evolution and difficulties of states’ diplomacy towards multilateralism, they are insufficient to interpret the discrepancy of one actor's positions, at the same time, in the same place (New York), and therefore by members of the same permanent mission. In the case of the permanent mission of Venezuela to the UN, some diplomats dedicated themselves to the UNSC mandate, whereas others worked on other UN institutions. However, due to the size of the mission (22 diplomats in 2015 and 29 in 2019),Footnote 31 some coordination occurred.Footnote 32 The sole assumption of inconsistent foreign policy results irrelevant for understanding why Venezuela is systematically more moderate at the UNSC than at the UNGA.
Another way of thinking would be to mobilise the design of international institution literature.Footnote 33 The distinct institutional design of the UNSC and of the UNGA would be a variable that influences the strategies of actors. Literature on the UNSC often focuses on the intrinsic inequality between permanent and elected members. Most of the elected members suffer from a lack of knowledge of the issues and of the practices, due to their scarce and irregular participation in the UNSC, and the lack of institutional memory.Footnote 34 The result is often a reading of the UNSC as an institution designed by the most powerful for their own benefit. In such an explanation, contestation by an elected member appears to be so constrained that it seems, if not impossible, at least irrelevant. The mobilisation of permanent members to prevent the integration of potential problematic members whose dissent is too bombastic when they apply to join the UNSC seem to support this thesis. For instance, in 2006, Hugo Chávez's government launched Venezuelan candidacy for a non-permanent seat at the last minute, in order to challenge the candidacy of Guatemala, regarded as too close to the US. After 47 unsuccessful ballots, Panama was finally elected as the compromise candidate.Footnote 35
However, this idea that the UNSC does not leave much room for contestation by elected members is not consistent with others conclusionsFootnote 36 nor with the Venezuelan case study. While Venezuela always has a lower profile in the UNSC than in the UNGA, practices of contestation in the UNSC can be identified even if they are invisibilised or are not as obvious as the disregard of formal rules and legal texts. We analyse below how Venezuelan diplomats overuse of the ‘any other business’ meetings (AOBs) during their presidency in 2016, as well as how they negotiated a text with other elected members, before presenting it to the whole UNSC. To understand Venezuelan contestation, the institutional design hypothesis is not sufficiently convincing because it does not take into account the way diplomats embody their role, both as state representatives and as individuals. To this end, the prospects opened up by the practice turn and analyses based on Goffman's sociology provide heuristic avenues for reflection.
2. Goffman's interaction order to capture contestation practices at the UN
To interpret Venezuela's distinct contestation practices in the UN, we draw upon the sociology of Erving Goffman whose work is increasingly used in International RelationsFootnote 37 and sometimes to study international organisations.Footnote 38 We build our argument on his dramaturgic metaphor about actors’ practices within interactions, apprehended through behaviours in terms of ‘face-work’, performances, and roles.Footnote 39
The IR literature that uses Goffman privileges the analysis of practices in interactions beyond institutions. Goffman's sociology allows us to question the idea that institutions define the social order and to open up analytical perspectives that make it possible to interpret Venezuelan contestation ‘line’Footnote 40 at the UN in detail. It then becomes possible to understand the ambivalences pointed out in the introduction.
Goffman analyses social interactions ‘as that which uniquely transpires in social situations, that is, environments in which two or more individuals are physically in one another's response presence’.Footnote 41 Analysing this face-to-face domain ‘which might be titled, for want of any happy name, the interaction order’Footnote 42 allows us to understand how a form of social order is constituted. Indeed, from actors’ interactions, ‘a system of practices, conventions, and procedural rules comes into play which functions as a means of guiding and organizing the flow of messages’Footnote 43 thus defining a social order. To the question of ‘how will these features of the interaction order be geared or linked into, connected up with, tied into social structures, including social relationship’, Goffman answers that
Minor social ritual is not an expression of structural arrangements in any simple sense; at best it is an expression advanced in regard to these arrangements. Social structures don't ‘determine’ culturally standard displays, merely help select from the available repertoire of them. The expressions themselves … are interactional in substance and character; at best they are likely to have only loosely coupled relations to anything by way of social structures that might be associated with them.Footnote 44
By paying attention to the interactions, it is thus possible to study a social order that does not strictly correspond to that of the institutions, including contestation practices that cannot be reduced to institutional contestation as they also take place within interaction. Consequently, as Vincent Pouliot indicates, ‘from a Goffmanian perspective, each multilateral forum is structured by a particular order of interaction.’Footnote 45
Among the contributions of the IR literature inspired by Goffman's interaction order, three are of particular interest for our study, because they stress the importance of focusing on diplomats and their face-to-face interactions to understand how their practices contribute to changing or reproducing institutions, rules of the game and hierarchical orders.Footnote 46
The first one emphasises the ambivalence of the role of diplomats who are both individuals with personal trajectories and representations, and who embody their state at the same time. Rebecca Adler-Nissen underlines the possibility for diplomats to play the same role – that of representing their state – in different ways.Footnote 47 Only the analysis of interaction situations can account for these games and their effects on the social order.
Secondly, the literature addresses disruptions of the interaction order.Footnote 48 ‘Maintain[ing] both his own face and the face of the other participants’Footnote 49 is ‘a basic structural feature of interaction’.Footnote 50 To do so, individuals develop ‘face-work’ practices that are ‘the actions taken by a person to make whatever he is doing consistent with face’.Footnote 51 But they can also make a strategic use of embarrassment or an ‘aggressive use of interaction rituals’.Footnote 52 Through them and the reactions they generate, reproductions, contestations, and changes of the social order are also at play.
Finally, a third contribution delves into the practices behind the scenes, or in the ‘back region or back-stage’.Footnote 53 A large part of multilateral negotiations is based on informal discussions, off-the-record activities, oral exchanges, and behind-the-scenes operations. Goffman distinguishes the ‘front-region’ to refer to the place ‘where the performance is given’Footnote 54 from the back region ‘where the suppressed facts make an appearance’.Footnote 55 Based on Goffman and an ethnographic fieldwork at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Deepak Nair differentiates between two repertoires of face-saving in this organisation: a repertoire of practices in formal interactions, that is, in official meetings and one during informal interactions whether they take place during working hours (coffee break for instance) or outside working hours (bars, cinema).Footnote 56
Building on this literature, we refine Adler-Nissen's analysis that considers diplomacy as an interaction order ‘centred around impression management, face-work and a strong focus on avoidance of embarrassment’.Footnote 57 Despite a number of commonalities in diplomatic practices, we argue that interaction situations are not played out in strictly identical ways in different diplomatic stages. In other words, the UNGA and the UNSC each constitute a specific ‘interaction order’ in Goffmanian terms. The ‘interactional modus vivendi’Footnote 58 differs from one institution to another, leading to specific performances.
Deriving from Goffman's sociology, we set up an empirical survey mobilising qualitative methods: digital observation of the official sessions of UNSC and UNGA via UN Web TV, semi-directive interviews and an exhaustive study of the speeches of Venezuelan representatives in the UNSC and the UNGA in 2015 and 2016. Digital observation can contribute to IOs analysis in highly constrained situations or in the case of hard-to-reach institutions, such as the UNSC. It is supplemented by semi-directive interviews, ‘a second-best alternative’.Footnote 59 Given the importance of informal negotiations and discussions at the UN, interviews are sometimes the only method for obtaining information or triangulating others.Footnote 60 This analysis rests on a dozen semi-directive interviews conducted under cover of anonymity and confidentiality with national diplomats (permanent representatives, ministers counsellors, counsellors) and national or UN officials of different ranks.Footnote 61 All respondents had worked at or about the UNGA and UNSC between 2014 and 2017, in New York or from their capital. Their experiences helped us to interpret the different interaction orders at play in these two institutions.
3. UNGA and UNSC as two different interaction orders
Rather than homogenising the UN and considering it as a unitary actor, Goffman's sociology encourages us to observe the UNGA and the UNSC as two distinct stages with different sets and ways of operating formally and informally. An orderly representation of the UNSC stages it as a team responsible for maintaining international peace and security. The interactions that take place at the UNGA do not generate the representation of such a team but of an interstate community characterised by both a sense of commonality and conflicts.
First, the decorum suggests the difference between each interaction order. The UNGA is organised as a forum: during the general debate, the speaker expresses his/herself from the marble lectern in front of an immediate audience. This public, that is, representatives of other members and the media, can discuss their speeches, acknowledge these claims, strengthen, or qualify the role that each state pretends to play.Footnote 62 Even dissenting states take advantage of this forum to stage their contestation as illustrated by the way Hugo Chávez stigmatised the US in 2006.Footnote 63
As for the UNSC stage, the centrepiece of the set is the horseshoe table that implies an intimate entre-soi where all members can see each other.Footnote 64 Backstage, diplomats from UNSC member states often work in the UNSC consultation room. Its organisation implies proximity, including physical proximity.Footnote 65 Kishore Mahbubani, the then permanent representative of Singapore in the UN, insisted on the fact that ‘relationships at a personal level were marked by a warm sense of camaraderie, which is often generated by working together in close quarters over an extended period of time.’Footnote 66 Other diplomats also note this sense of camaraderie,Footnote 67 when, for example, one of them says that the Venezuelan representatives are ‘very nice people’, ‘appreciated by all’.Footnote 68 This feeling is also expressed by the respondents when they underline the use of first names and of tutoiement outside the official UNSC roomFootnote 69 and when they talk about some informal activities (for instance, having a drink) outside working hours. Another diplomat, while confirming this camaraderie, adds a nuance: ‘The camaraderie among the political coordinators is much greater than among the permanent representatives. It is possible for friendships to develop between some representatives, for example, when there are trips of the entire Security Council to a region or a country’, before concluding that ‘continuous interaction between permanent representatives tends to moderate their discourse’.Footnote 70
On these two differently decorated stages, diplomats do not interact with the same actors. At the UNGA, collective work is often the norm and most resolutions are supported by one or more groups, indicating collective affiliation.Footnote 71 Most interactions therefore take place with partners. For instance, Venezuela claimed to belong to groups that, in distinct ways, defined themselves as contesting the international order. From 2016 to 2019, Venezuela held the presidency of the Non-Aligned Movement, participated in the unity of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) on the Syrian issue,Footnote 72 and was a leading member of the G77. In formal sessions, the UNGA protocol helps to ease tensions between states that consider themselves adversaries.
At the UNSC, the 15 members are required to collaborate, even when bilateral relations are strained. Venezuelan representatives work for consensus including with the US colleagues.Footnote 73 It was sometimes reported in the pressFootnote 74 and often mentioned in interviews that the relationship between the representatives of the two countries was described as ‘respectful’;Footnote 75 ‘Amb. Ramírez and Amb. Power made the effort to work for the benefit of the UNSC agenda’;Footnote 76 ‘the relationship was very good at PR level’, there was ‘mutual respect’, ‘a willingness to understand’ and ‘work together’.Footnote 77 The negotiations of Resolution 2334 of 23 December 2016 on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict illustrate their ability to do so. At first, Egypt took the lead but, due to very strong pressure, its diplomats decided to abandon it. Venezuela then declared itself ready to assume the draft resolution, even alone. This protagonism could have harmed the project: the US would have had more difficulty not voting against it if Venezuela was the only leader on the subject.Footnote 78 In the end, the representatives of the Latin American country opted for a pragmatic alternative: four non-permanent states (Malaysia, New Zealand, Senegal and Venezuela) representing four different regional groups (Asia, Western European and Other States, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean) co-sponsored the draft resolution, that was adopted as Resolution 2334 (2016). For the first time in eight years, the UNSC succeeded in adopting a text on Israeli settlements, avoiding the US veto.Footnote 79 It is quite striking that Venezuela begun its mandate by abstaining alone on Resolution 2209 and finished it by successfully negotiating a text about an UNSC sensitive issue in collaboration with the US.
Each of these two interaction orders ‘both promotes and constraints particular behaviour’.Footnote 80 In addition to other uses of collective legitimisation,Footnote 81 equalisation,Footnote 82 and political influence,Footnote 83 the UNGA usually serves as a tribunician platform.Footnote 84 States present themselves to the world, claim the hierarchical status they aspire to as well as the teams they belong to. At the UNGA, the interactional modus vivendi allows for the representation of disagreements.Footnote 85 ‘All sensitivities, ideologies, differences in culture and interests can be expressed there in speech and by votes.’Footnote 86 Hugo Chávez's intervention at the 2006 UNGA general debate embodies the interactions allowed at this institution. In a famous speech, he took advantage of the UNGA's general debate to stage his criticism of his US counterpart: ‘The Devil came yesterday, right here. It still smells of Sulphur today. Yesterday on this rostrum the President of the United States, whom I refer to as the Devil, talked as if he owned the world. … The address of the world tyrant, cynical and full of hypocrisy, shows the imperialists’ intention to control everything.’Footnote 87
At the UNSC, official sessions stage a team responsible for the maintenance of international peace and security.Footnote 88 The intimacy mentioned earlier is at the service of solidarity. The team's solidarity is measured by the audience (UN member states, UN Secretariat, other UN institutions, public opinion, media, etc.) through decisions (resolutions or presidential statements). Team members are not expected to denounce their team during UNSC meetings.Footnote 89 The UNSC is not the place where one actor ‘points the finger’Footnote 90 at another one. ‘It is crucial for the maintenance of the team's performance that each member of the team possess the dramaturgical discipline and exercise it in presenting his own part.’Footnote 91 The ‘working consensus’Footnote 92 that characterises the UNSC, whose solidarity among its members must be staged in official sessions, makes the contestation line that Venezuela adopted at the UNGA, delicate to implement at the UNSC as well.
To maintain face, Venezuelan delegates were expected to demonstrate ‘loyalty, discipline, and circumspection’Footnote 93 at each performance so as to perpetuate the representation of UNSC as a team. The Venezuelan cooperation with other permanent representations, in particular those of Chile, another elected member in 2015, and Cuba helped to advise and mentor Venezuela through informal contacts in order to preserve the UNSC team. These informal contacts went beyond ideological criteria: while Cuba was a close ally of Venezuela, this was not the case for Chile, which adopted a moderate diplomatic strategy. In the words of a Chilean diplomat, ‘Venezuela showed maturity to understand that the work in the UNSC must be different than in the Latin American context.’Footnote 94 Other diplomat noted that the Venezuelan staff assigned to the UNSC were among the most moderate.Footnote 95 These exchanges between Latin American diplomats aimed at softening the Venezuelan contestation practices.Footnote 96
The Venezuelan justification of its abstention on Resolution 2244 (2015) on the situation in Somalia, whose committee it co-chaired, is an illustration of the framing of its contestation in an acceptable way. Interestingly, Rafael Ramírez justified his criticism in the name of ‘the transparency and inclusiveness that should prevail at all stages of negotiation in order to guarantee the participation of all its members and, ultimately, the unity of the Security Council.’Footnote 97 While stating that ‘My country demands respect in the Security Council – respect from the penholders for the opinions and points of views of every country, whether permanent or elected Council members’, he lifted his gaze and addressed it to the rest of the room. His look was not loaded with hostility and the tone of his speech was rather monotonous, except when he spoke about respect, but without getting carried away.Footnote 98 In a reversal of argument, his abstention was therefore justified by the need to preserve the unity of the team even in behind-the-scene processes, but the UNSC interactional codes in official performance were respected. In view of the UNSC's and UNGA's own interaction order, contestation and disagreements are to be channelled differently, as the Venezuelan case demonstrates.
4. Venezuela's contestation practices: Working at the UNGA, missing their target at the UNSC
Venezuela's contestation line at the UNGA did not find its way to the UNSC or missed its objectives, because each interaction order implies different ways of expressing contestation. At the UNGA, Venezuela expressed its contestation through the use of particularly aggressive vocabulary, the staging of its solidarity with deviant regimes, and votes, all practices that have no place in official interactions at the UNSC.
At the UNGA, Venezuelan anti-capitalist,Footnote 99 anti-imperialist,Footnote 100 and anti-USFootnote 101 rhetoric was strong, particularly in the general debate and plenary sessions. The vocabulary chosen disrupted euphemised diplomatic phrases;Footnote 102 the US and Israel were explicitly denounced and singled out.Footnote 103 At the UNSC, Venezuela's delegates avoided denouncing partners. Their statement discarded the ‘anti' rhetoric. Except for a few explicit denunciations as for instance, in December 2016, at the very end of Venezuela's mandate, when Israel was explicitly mentioned as ‘the occupying Power’, a disparaging phrase generally used at the UNGA,Footnote 104 the style reflected the majority of interventions at the UNSC. Even the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Delcy Rodríguez, whose speeches were often more virulent in tone,Footnote 105 resorted to periphrases to avoid denouncing the US explicitly.
Furthermore, at the UNGA, Venezuela representatives ostensibly marked their solidarity with disapproved or even deviant regimes, including their support for the Bashar al-Assad government for example.Footnote 106 Of all the resolutions on the human rights situation in the Syrian Arab Republic, Iran and North Korea, for which a vote was requested, Venezuela voted against, thereby tacitly or expressly showing support for these regimes. It thus stood out from most other states, as less than twenty of them voted against these resolutions. When UNGA Resolutions 71/202 and 72/188 on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea were adopted without a vote, Venezuela requested the floor to ‘dissociate itself from the consensus on that resolution’.Footnote 107
Concurrently, at the UNSC, Venezuela works for consensus, even on Syria, as symbolised by the presidential statement of 17 August 2015.Footnote 108 As these declarations are made on behalf of the UNSC, they involve a consensus of all 15 members, which makes agreement on a statement sometimes more complicated than the adoption of a resolution.Footnote 109 During the informal discussions, it appears that Venezuela was the only state opposed to this text. Some diplomats suggested a compromise solution to their Venezuelan counterparts; they did not oppose the declaration but dissociated Venezuela from the paragraphs they considered problematic after the reading of the text in the meeting. Thus, ‘while it did not block the adoption of presidential statement S/PRST/2015/15 and joined in the consensus, the delegation of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela does not subscribe to paragraphs 8 and 10 of the statement.’Footnote 110 In the end, Venezuela often helped preserving the unity of the team during official performances and, consequently, the UNSC interaction order.
Finally, at the UNGA, Venezuela used its vote as a contestation practice. At the 70th session of the UNGA, 73 resolutions were put to a vote. Venezuela and the US differed 61 times out of 69 votes (Venezuela was absent four times).Footnote 111 Similarly, at the 71st session of the UNGA, Venezuela and the US opposed 71 times, out of 83 resolutions voted (Venezuela was absent during a vote).Footnote 112
At the UNSC, deadlocks, vetoes, the non-adoption of the agenda or a resolution, or the adoption of a resolution without unanimity look like failures, more or less significant, of the UNSC team. The four times Venezuela voted against a draft resolution, the consensus breakdown was also the result of other states’ position, most of the time vetoes from permanent members (notably Russia and, to a lesser extent, China)Footnote 113 and, on one occasion, from an elected member.Footnote 114
More interestingly regarding Venezuela's contestation, the Latin American state abstained alone on four occasions (three in 2015 and one in 2016).Footnote 115 In most cases, this practice of contestation was blatantly undermined by the interactions that follow the vote. On no account this gesture, nor the following statement, provoked a debate among the UNSC members.Footnote 116 On one occasion, at the beginning of Venezuela's mandate, interactions during the UNSC 7401st meeting even shifted the focus from Venezuela's abstention to an oral confrontation between Russia and the US. During the vote on the draft that will become Resolution 2209 (6 March 2015), only Venezuela abstained, being also the first time it broke the consensus alone. This abstention could be interpreted as a strong act of contestation in an institution where a large part of the interactions is geared towards consensus building. However, a closer look at the interactions during this formal session opens the way to another interpretation. Following the vote, the UNSC chair gave the floor to the Venezuelan representative. In his speech, there is little evidence he was playing a contentious role. The clothes he worn (a suit), the behaviour of the diplomats in the background (very serious), the respect of the turn to speak, the language in which he expressed himself (Spanish), the way he thanked the Chair and then read the statement sometimes looking up at the chair, everything indicates a respect of the order of interaction.Footnote 117
His speech was actually in keeping with standard practice. It was followed by statements from the other member countries that have asked to speak: Russia, China, the US, the United Kingdom (UK), Jordan, and France. However, the subsequent interactions changed the scene. The Russian representative, Vitaly Churkin, asked for the floor again to react to the speech by the US representative, Samantha Power, who in turn reacted to Churkin's speech, who replied again before the closing of the meeting. Churkin challenged Power's position by explicitly naming her. In his third intervention, he addressed her directly by looking at her when speaking. The exchanges between Churkin and Power made them the focus of attention, thus taking over the leading roles. These interactions highlighted the opposition between the US and Russia, despite both voted positively the draft resolution. Venezuela's act of contestation was clearly overshadowed by the confrontation between the two powers.
Venezuela's abstention can be considered as a misstep, that others members chose to ignore. This misstep reveals the difficulties specific to Venezuelan diplomacy, the ideological incoherence and the lack of internal capacity that were more acute during the period under review. Nicolás Maduro's foreign policy inherited the inconsistencies of the alliances sealed by Hugo Chávez, converting it into a biased and therefore less convincing diplomacy,Footnote 118 as illustrated by the alignment on Russia even when it was contrary to the principle of self-determination at the heart of the Bolivarian discourse.Footnote 119
The Bolivarian project also suffered from the purges carried out in the public administration following Hugo Chávez's radicalisation, what undermined its capacities to catch the game of contestation practices at the UNSC – along with its long absence from the institution. After the attempted coup d’état in 2002, appointments were guided more by trust and ideology than by professionalism. Beyond the learning capacity of the people recruited, technical skills required for participation in the UNSC (prior knowledge of the files, familiarity with working methods) are difficult to replace in the short term. Indeed, the appointment of Rafael Ramírez as the permanent representative of the Venezuelan delegation in 2014 is striking. Minister of Energy and Minerals since 2002 and president of the national oil company, PDVSA, since 2004, he was then a key figure close to Chávez with a diplomatic trajectory in multilateral oil issues, but he had no previous UN experience and benefited from a certain degree of independence regarding Caracas. Not surprisingly, Rafael Ramírez was subsequently ordered to resign by the Venezuelan President on 5 December 2017.Footnote 120
The specific difficulties of Venezuela's diplomacy also led to missed opportunities, as illustrated by the African agenda. Venezuela often privileged alignment with the positions of the three African elected members, over contestation.Footnote 121 African issues mainly dealt with peacekeeping operations that the Maduro government overtly opposed for sovereignist purposes. However, Venezuelan statements were limited to broad foreign policy principles such as the protection of sovereignty.Footnote 122 Venezuela supported the continuation of the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO),Footnote 123 and did not even intervene at the time of the vote on Resolution 2295 (2016) on Mali, which was one of its main cooperation partners in Africa.Footnote 124
Venezuelan contestation practices at the UNGA were not well adapted to the official UNSC interactional situation. But the analysis of contestation practices does not stop at these formal sessions. There are also several indications that Venezuelan representatives attempted backstage contestation practices.
5. Backstage contesting attempts at the UNSC
A closer look at Venezuela's mandate shows behind the scenes attempts to pursue a diplomacy based on contestation, although not without difficulty. According to a Chilean diplomat, ‘the visible face of the UNSC's work is the sessions, but it is also necessary to take into account the preparation, when it is necessary to reach a consensus, which is done in parallel, in an informal manner.’Footnote 125 Despite their structural disadvantages as elected members, most of them go through a learning process and ‘are able to play a more assertive role’ during the second year of their mandate.Footnote 126 Not surprisingly, the best examples of backstage contestation practices carried out by Venezuela all occurred in 2016, particularly during its presidency of the UNSC, an important agency moment for elected members.
Debates around Resolution 2144 and the sanctions against Somalia constitute a first example of backstage contestation practices. Elected members usually chair the UNSC's subsidiary bodies. Venezuela, while opposed to sanctions, chaired the Somalia and the Sudan/South Sudan committees. On these two topics, the penholders were at least two Western permanent states, the UK and the US. While it chaired the Somalia sanction committee, Venezuela was not consulted by the penholders (Lithuania, the UK, and the US) during the negotiations leading to Resolution 2244. Venezuelan frustration, while framed in acceptable way during the official session, as already mentioned, led to an ‘institutional rebellion act’Footnote 127 during the negotiation of the presidential note (S/2016/170) that took place under the Venezuela presidency of the UNSC.
A former Venezuelan diplomat gave us this insightful testimony about this significant episode that marked on Venezuelans’ minds,Footnote 128 and influenced the following Venezuelan presidency of the UNSC.
One of the things that motivated us to organise this discussion and prepare the Note was our experience in the Somalia and Eritrea Sanctions Committee. … In our capacity as Chairman of the Committee we tried – in 2015 – to persuade its members to consider lifting the sanctions against this country. The United Kingdom, the penholder, and the United States, were vehemently opposed, others were more neutral. In 2015, Venezuela was the only country to abstain. In 2016, the resolution received only 10 votes in favour. In 2018, the sanctions were lifted. In the background, it was the intransigence of some Council members and the inherent injustices of the UN sanctions system that motivated us to convene this debate and produce that note.Footnote 129
Most of the resolutions are drafted by the US, France, and the UK, and negotiations informally take place among permanent members before being presented at the plenary.Footnote 130 But it was not the case on this occasion. On the contrary, Venezuela's delegates first interacted with elected members to negotiate the presidential statement draft. They adopted a backstage dissenting practice that is increasingly used by elected members.Footnote 131 Then, they presented it to the permanent members, thus inverting the common practice. However, this rebellion act never appeared publicly in the PV or in an official performance of the UNSC, which invisibilised contestation.
A second clue to learn about practices that take place behind the scenes is given by the way UNSC members react in formal meetings. While Venezuela respected the practices when public records were taken, it controversially used the ‘any other business’ meetings (AOBs) with no public records. During the Venezuelan 2016 UNSC presidency, the delegation organised an unusual number of AOBs meetings. Fourteen were held according to Rafael Ramírez.Footnote 132 Several of this AOBs meetings, particularly on Palestinian issues, only aimed at ‘scor[ing] political points’.Footnote 133 This strategy allowed the Bolivarian government to appear officially as a member of the team and to pursue dissenting objectives backstage. Hence, thanks to media coverage, the Maduro administration sent a message to its support without incurring a high diplomatic cost.Footnote 134
During an official meeting that occurred at the end of Venezuelan presidency, representatives from other countries reprimanded – diplomatically – their counterpart for this unusual and intense use of AOBs. They intentionally expressed their rebukes during an official session, so that their remarks would be included in the record. According to the representative of the UK, February was ‘a very busy month’. The Spanish representative concluded: ‘My team has been working intensively and, according to our calculations, you, Sir, convened 12 such meetings – although, you, Sir, say the number is 14. This practice seems to me to be necessary and advisable because, in fact, that is the work of the Security Council. … However, despite all the fondness and trust that I have for you … 14 meetings seem perhaps a bit too many.’Footnote 135
The aim is to signal the misstep but to do so in a friendly manner. Gestures and facial expressions provide a better understanding of the interaction. After French representative thanked the Chair, he let out a small laugh. When he stated that ‘With a smile, you, Mr. President, have imposed on us an intensive program of work with a record number of items under “Other matters”, including four that were discussed yesterday’, the two individuals sitting behind him smiled. Similarly, when the New Zealand representative talked about ‘yesterday's marathon’, the person sitting behind him on his right, also smiled.Footnote 136 As for the Spanish representative, he was on first-name terms with his Venezuelan counterpart. As these examples illsutrate, while contestation practices are possible at the UNSC, they are also strongly constrained by interactions.
Conclusion
Interaction orders strongly influence contestation practices at the UN, as illustrated by Venezuelan different lines adopted at the UNGA and the UNSC during 2015 and 2016. The interactional sociology of Erving Goffman allows to shed light on a seemingly contradictory situation: while Venezuelan representatives expressed radical positions at the UNGA, they display moderation in the UNSC. In both cases, Venezuelan authorities respected to a large extent the interaction order of each institution and adopted expected roles: a dissenting participant at the UNGA and a team member at the UNSC, at least during official performances.
An analysis based on the notion of interaction order provides a better understanding of Venezuela's moderation at the UNSC. It is not the result of a lack of contestation but of an invisibilisation of contestation by interactive practices. Contestation initiatives often became invisible through different processes. Venezuelan contestation was downgraded either by the interactions between permanent members as was the case after the vote on Resolution 2209 or because it was part of a configuration linked to divisions between permanent states, namely the US versus Russia and China. In other cases, Venezuela contestation was often relegated backstage or behind the scene and/or was framed in acceptable forms when it occurs during official meeting.
Venezuelan contestation occurred at the UNSC, but its containment led to the reproduction of the interaction order or for changes to take place only at the margin. Thus, it opens the analysis of the UNSC change processes beyond institutional reforms. Our study provides a better understanding of the complexity of dissenting practices at the UN, at a time when a growing number of actors contest multilateral formal and informal rules. The votes of Angola and Egypt at the UNSC (see Table 1) confirm the need for further research on contestation in IOs.
Acknowledgements
In addition to the three reviewers whose comments allowed us to improve our article substantially, we would also like to acknowledge the feedback of the following colleagues who provided comments on our article: Ana Covarrubias, Guillaume Devin, Milena Dieckhoff, David Martini, Vincent Pouliot, Emily Riley, Carlos Romero, Arturo Santa Cruz, Thomas Risse, and a Venezuelan ex-diplomat that agreed to revise the draft. We are also thankful to the discussants (Nicole Jenne, Stefano Palestini, Carsten-Andreas Schulz, and other participants) of our article during the Workshop on International Relations organised by PUC-Chile in December 2020.
