UNESCO Gathers in Paris To Vote On United States’ Bid to Rejoin Ranks

UNESCO’s 193 members, gathered in Paris Friday, are expected to approve the United State’s bid to rejoin their ranks, following four decades of turbulent relations between the cultural and scientific agency and American administrations.

President Joe Biden announced earlier this year his intention to return after a five-year absence initiated by the Trump administration. The Associated Press reports that Biden’s appeal was motivated by concern over China’s growing influence over UNESCO policymaking, in particular its role in shaping global standards on artificial intelligence. 

Rejoining UNESCO will “help us address a key opportunity cost that our absence is creating in our global competition with China,” Under Secretary of State for Management John Bass told reporters in March. 

“And there are a number of other examples in that space of UNESCO’s mission where our absence is noticed and where it undercuts our ability to be as effective in promoting our vision of a free world,” he said.

The US and UNESCO have regularly clashed over financial and ideological issues including the Cold War and Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Former President Ronald Reagan withdrew the US from UNESCO in 1983, a move later reversed by former President George W. Bush in 2002. Trump quit the agency in 2017, citing allegations of anti-Israel bias.

In a press release Monday, UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay praised Biden’s intention to rejoin the agency “a strong act of confidence, in UNESCO and in multilateralism.”

“Not only in the centrality of the Organization’s mandate — culture, education, science, information — but also in the way this mandate is being implemented today,” she said.