International Institutions and Power Politics

Bridging the Divide

Anders Wivel, T.V. Paul, Anders Wivel, T.V. Paul

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781626167018
  9781626167001
• eBook ISBN:
  9781626167025
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book moves scholarly debates beyond the old question of whether or not international institutions matter in order to examine how they matter, even in a world of power politics. Power politics and international institutions are often studied as two separate domains, but this is in need of rethinking because today most states strategically use institutions to further their interests. Anders Wivel, T.V. Paul, and the international group of contributing authors update our understanding of how institutions are viewed among the major theoretical paradigms in international relations, and they seek to bridge the divides. Empirical chapters examine specific institutions in practice, including the United Nations, International Atomic Energy Agency, and the European Union. The book also points the way to future research. International Institutions and Power Politics provides insights for both international relations theory and practical matters of foreign affairs, and it will be essential reading for all international relations scholars and advanced students.

Part I

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Exploring International Institutions and Power Politics

Anders Wivel and T.V. Paul

The study of international institutions has waxed and waned along with major changes in the international order over the past century. The interest in institutions was prominent in the immediate post–Cold War era, as the scholarly attention on great power rivalry and nuclear deterrence became less salient. This is aptly captured by Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore when they wrote: “International organizations have never been more central to world politics than they are today” (2004, 1). Today, we may echo their assessment with the confidence that the institutional order they recognized seems even more comprehensive, more complex, and more robust than it did back then. The complexity and detail of institutional arrangements have deepened at the same time as the issues covered by institutions have continued to widen to the extent that most policy issues are now encapsulated by transborder agreements. Institutional complexity, it seems, leads to even more complexity as “the proliferation of international agreements multiplies the number of actors and rules relevant for any given decision of international cooperation” (Alter and Meunier 2009, 13). Even so, institutions can decline or can lose their strength, in particular when major powers violate the norms, principles, and rules inherent in them or engage in self-seeking policies that ignore them. The reluctance of powerful states to commit to international institutions is a recurrent phenomenon in international relations. It has recently been highlighted by the choices of the Trump presidency and their repercussions for the global and North American institutional orders (Ikenberry 2017; Stokes 2018) and by the British decision to leave the European Union with potentially important consequences for Europe’s institutional order (Diamond, Nedergaard, and Rosamond 2018). Institutions can still linger on as new ones are created, while old ones survive or perish through efforts at reforms or negligence.

This introductory chapter proceeds in five steps. First, we provide a brief overview of the institutionalization of world politics, demonstrating the continuing close relationship between international institutions and power politics. Second, we define what we mean by international institutions and power politics and unpack how our definitions relate to these concepts as usually understood in the study of international relations. This book focuses on formal institutions. Third, we situate this volume’s attempts to understand the relationship between international institutions and power politics in the study of international relations and specify how we add to the current research agenda. Fourth, we identify the major research questions of the volume and briefly introduce the chapters to follow. Finally, we address the significance of this volume and set out a future research agenda.

The Growth and Resilience of International Institutions in a World of Power Politics

The idea of “international organization,” a term sometimes used interchangeably with “international institutions,” is as old as organized politics: The Greek city-states Athens, Sparta, and Macedonia used a common currency, reflecting a high degree of international cooperation and coordination, and military alliances and trading agreements were common, as was war and military conflict (Pease 2003, 19). However, it was not until the nineteenth century that international organizations (IOs) began to play a major role in international relations, reflecting the consolidation of the state system and increased interdependence creating demand for higher levels of cooperation and coordination. The Rhine River Commission, set up in 1804 between France and the German confederation to govern the increasing traffic on the river Rhine, is often referred to as the first modern international organization with the power to establish international rules and the competency and staff to secure their implementation (Archer 2015, 11). While the Rhine River Commission may be seen as a functional response to technical problems generated by increased cross-border communication (How do we ensure that ships do not collide as traffic on the river increases?), other international institutions were more directly linked to war and power politics. The Congress of Vienna (1815–22) initiated the Concert of Europe, which is “generally seen as an important forerunner of today’s international organizations” (Rittberger, Zangl, and Kruck 2012, 36), especially the UN Security Council. The Concert of Europe successfully organized cooperation and secured peaceful relations among the European great powers until 1853 but existed in a weaker format beyond that period. Mirroring the balance of power, Great Britain, Prussia, Russia, Austria, and France “decided on meeting as it were in concert on a regular basis, in order to discuss questions of concern and to draw up agreements and treaties. From this activity, documents with legal force evolved” (Neumann and Gstöhl 2004, 3). The aim of the concert was to restrain through institutional norms the power political ambitions and warlike dispositions of the great powers of the day and to restrain revolutionary movements with the great powers system. Smaller states had no say in the concert or its institutional decisions.

As illustrated by Rittberger, Zangl, and Kruck (2012, 37), war and power politics have often stimulated the establishment or development of IOs from the European Concert and onward.¹ The Napoleonic Wars were an important stimulus for the establishment of the European Concert, the first Geneva Convention, and the Hague Convention. World War I inspired the League of Nations and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the end of World War II was the starting point for the United Nations, the Arab League, and the Organization of the American States. The Cold War stimulated the creation of several security institutions, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Warsaw Pact Organization, the ANZUS Security Treaty between Australia, New Zealand, and the US, as well as the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). It was also a main driver behind the establishment of organizations for economic cooperation and trade, such as the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the European Economic Community (EEC), and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT). Groupings such as SEATO and CENTO did not survive beyond a few years. The end of the Cold War was an important stimulus for reforming and transforming the institutions of the Cold War: the EEC into the EU, GATT into the World Trade Organization (WTO), and CSCE into the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The closure of the Warsaw Pact resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of Cold War systemic rivalry, even though NATO survived by adapting its institutions and strategic objectives to the new strategic environment (Rynning 2005; Wallander 2000). The end of the Cold War was also the impetus for reforming NATO and stimulated the creation of institutions such as the African Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum.²

Recently, observers have argued that the long-term trend toward increased institutionalization of world politics is giving way to a return of the transactional self-help politics of the past (Patrick 2017). Provoked by the Trump administration’s questioning of institutional commitments in NATO as well as the faltering nuclear agreement with Iran and the US withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (and US intention to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement), this “back to the future” scenario has gained a significant following in American foreign policy circles (Kristensen 2017). We take issue with this reading of the current institutional order. First, it tends to juxtapose self-help and power with institutionalization and cooperation. However, institutionalized cooperation is often the result of the “power politics of peace,” for example, balancing threat or power or exercising hegemony (Wivel 2004). In the history of international relations, there are numerous examples of the coexistence of power politics and international institutions and the use of institutions by stronger or weaker actors to maximize their interests and power (Paul 2018; A. Watson 1992). In the highly legalized settings of the current international order, power is often exercised in nuanced ways by setting agendas, influencing informal facts, and bargaining in the shadow of the law. In this way, the US and the EU do not win more WTO disputes, but they do appear to exert far more influence than other members over the WTO jurisprudence that results from these disputes (Daku and Pelc 2017).

Finally, the institutional order established by the end of the Second World War has proved to be extraordinarily resilient. A low point of the international trade regime in the 1970s and 1980s was subsequently counteracted by the Uruguay Round and subsequently the creation of the WTO. Since 2018 the United States and China have been engaged in a trade war, imposing tariffs worth hundreds of billions of US dollars. The long-term effects of this dispute on the institutional landscape of international trade are yet to be seen. The trade war may damage parts of the current economic order but, at the same time, strengthen other parts, for example, by creating an incentive for the EU and China to work closer together. The deep transatlantic divide over Iraq in 2003 gave way to cooperation over security and trade, for example, the attempt to create the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). It seems that once institutional norms set in, it becomes difficult to shift back to unilateralism, even for the hegemon.³ Thus, the current institutional order has so far proved to be robust in the face of potentially lethal challenges that sprung up during the past decades. For instance, NATO survived the deep disagreement between the United Kingdom and the United States on the one side and France and Germany on the other in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003. Although leading security experts saw this as evidence of “soft balancing” (e.g., Pape 2005; Paul 2005; 2018, chap. 5),⁴ NATO continues as a defensive alliance, as a forum for debates over Euro-Atlantic and global security between the US and its allies, and as an instrument for out-of-area missions, such as the 2011 military intervention in Libya. In 2017, during the first months of his presidency, US president Donald Trump failed to affirm his commitment to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty and questioned the commitment of the US to come to the rescue of allies under attack. He scorned European members of the alliance for assigning less than 2 percent of their gross domestic products (GDPs) to defense budgets. However, even though European alliance members responded with anger and disbelief, they also responded with a strong reaffirmation of alliance commitments, which was within a few months echoed by the US administration.

From 2008, the EU, viewed by its proponents as an important cause of peaceful change and prosperity in Europe and as a model for institution building in other regions (Murray 2010), suffered a longtime and multidimensional crisis.⁵ President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker (2016) described the crisis as “at least in part . . . existential.” It was characterized by leading analysts as “wicked crises” in which attempts to fix one type of crisis would intensify other types of crises (Dinan, Nugent, and Paterson 2017, 361). Yet despite predictions of the union’s likely demise (Mearsheimer 2010; Rosato 2011), the EU emerged robust and, in some policy areas, strengthened by the crisis—even after the decision of the United Kingdom to leave the EU (Wivel and Wæver 2018). To be sure, a more robust EU may also be necessary in the future as Europe’s political leaders attempt to tackle challenges, such as the ongoing fiscal problems of Italy, the long-term consequences of the 2015–16 migration crisis, and the rise of illiberal populism in several member states.

Outside the Euro-Atlantic area, the activities of organizations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) exemplify the importance of organizations to those states seeking to maintain the status quo and those seeking to challenge or even revise regional and global orders. The SCO survived deep disagreements over Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008, which China and the Central Asian member states feared could create a precedent, and in 2017 the organization expanded its membership to include Pakistan and India in addition to founding members China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. In the Pacific, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) survived the withdrawal of the United States when remaining member states Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam successfully renegotiated the agreement and reached a partial deal in 2017.

The rising powers have been creating new institutions, especially in the economic arena. The prominent institutions have a Chinese mark to them, although other states, such as India, have been active in these groups as well. G20 and BRICS were institutional frameworks that came about in the post-2008 financial crisis. BRICS has since then created two financial institutions—New Development Bank and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank—with members’ contributions to support developmental and infrastructure needs of all member states. In fact, the rising powers have been supporters of many existing international institutions, including the UN, although they clamor for reforms, especially in financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and their governing structures. The rising powers have focused on institutions—existing and new—as a way to manage relations among themselves and with the established powers. In many respects, this shows institutions’ value as tools for power transitions and peaceful accommodation, an aspect of institutions often neglected in realist and other systemic theories on power transition conflicts.

In sum, “cooperation under anarchy” (cf. Oye 1986) seems to be the rule rather than the exception in world politics today, and cooperation is often institutionalized in IOs—“created by the commitments made by sovereign states”—at the same time as “their purpose is to bind those states to their commitments” (Hurd 2018, 1). While the “back to the future” argument is misguided in its prediction of an imminent demise of the current institutional order and its juxtaposition of power politics and international institutions, it rightly points to the continued importance of power politics for the form and content of this order (e.g., Colgan and Keohane 2017; Ikenberry 2017; Patrick 2017). This volume attempts to examine the multifaceted relationships between power politics and international institutions in both theoretical and policy dimensions. In the next section, we define what we mean by “international institutions” and “power politics.”

Defining International Institutions and Power Politics

The aim of this volume is to explore how the logic(s) of power politics are at the same time influencing and being influenced by the institutionalization of world politics. All contributions to the volume start from the assumption that power politics remains an important, even defining, characteristic in international relations and the empirical observation that international institutions are now more numerous and comprehensive than in the past. This does not mean that variations do not exist in terms of their importance or value for the conduct of international relations. But how should we understand “international institutions” and “power politics”?

The examples in the previous section illustrate the close relationship between power politics and international institutions as well as the diversity of international institutions. Some are military, others are economic, and yet others deal with issue areas, including security cooperation, climate change, and human rights. The examples also illustrate the need for defining what we mean by international institutions in a way that is sufficiently inclusive to capture the diversity yet specifies what institutions we do not include in our use of this term.

We define international institutions as associational clusters among states with some bureaucratic structures that create and manage self-imposed and other-imposed constraints on state policies and behaviors. While we find previous definitions, such as that of Koremenos, Lipson, and Snidal—“explicit arrangements, negotiated among international actors, that prescribe, proscribe, and/or authorize behavior” (2001, 762)—or that of Robert Keohane—“particular human constructed arrangements, formally or informally organized” (1988, 383)—appealing, they seem incomplete. Our definition focuses on formal IOs with bureaucracies, budgets, and elaborate rules for decision making and membership (Archer 2015, 1–3). We focus mainly on international governmental organizations (IGOs), which “are founded either through an intergovernmental agreement or a decision of an existing IGO [and] have a membership mainly composed of or dominated by states, usually represented by governmental agents” (Rittberger, Zangl, and Kruck 2012, 7). Our definition also includes international regimes understood as “implicit or explicit principles, norms and rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations” (Krasner 1982, 186). Our definition of international institutions does not include historically evolved fundamental and durable practices such as sovereignty, war, diplomacy, and the balance of power or what the English school terms primary institutions (see Buzan 2004, 167–76). These primary institutions and other social institutions (e.g., public opinion, which was discussed by classical realists in the 1950s) may affect the creation and life of international institutions as defined here, but they are not themselves part of our definition or the focus of attention in this volume. This is not because we regard primary institutions as unimportant but because the focus of the volume...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Theorizing Power Politics and International Institutions
• Part III: The Processes of Power Politics and International Institutions
• Part IV: The Power Politics of Global and Regional Institutions
• Part V: Conclusions
• References
• List of Contributors
• Index