Discursive shifts and the rise of the ‘good governance’ agenda in the United Nations General Assembly

How did the end of the Cold War change the diplomatic language spoken in international organizations? In this paper we present first results from an interdisciplinary research project, mapping discursive shifts in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) from 1970 to 2010, thus covering 20 years before and after the epochal rupture. We start our investigation with historically informed conjectures about the potential effects that the end of the East West confrontation might have had at the level of diplomatic language use. While some of our initial intuitions are disconfirmed, we can document the steep rise of a new vocabulary of democratization and ‘good governance’ that becomes prominent in UNGA debates of the 1990s. Our study is based on the analysis of a publicly available corpus that contains all opening speeches made in the UNGA during that period. We apply methods of Digital Discourse Analysis to measure the development of the relevant vocabulary and linguistic patterns. On that basis, we analyse the associated speech strategies and show the semantic variation of 'good governance' in the UNGA. Our findings not only document a shift of the global political agenda as liberal democracy becomes the hegemonic normative ideal after the end of the East-West conflict. They also indicate a shifting perception of what global politics is about, increasingly making domestic political systems and governance practices subject to international observation and scrutiny.