International Organization

John J. Kirton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754626749
• eBook ISBN: 9781351926683
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For well over a century, international organizations have been central to the study and practice of international relations and global governance. But how much and how do they help, hinder or otherwise alter the behaviour of the actors who utilize them and provide public goals for the global community as a whole? By assembling the leading works that have defined the scholarly field of international organization from realist, liberal institutionalists, constructivists and political economy traditions, this work examines the many organizations which have formed, in ever-expanding numbers and fields, over the years, the degree to which they have succeeded and their future potential. It looks at the changing international arena, particularly with the expansion of civil society and how that affects the role of such organizations. Has a formula for an effective and successful international organization developed or will one have to wait for the next generation of organizations, institutions and regimes?

Part I
   Overviews of the Field

[1]
International organization: a state of the art on an art of the state

Friedrich Kratochwil

John Gerard Ruggie

The authors are grateful to Betty J. Starkey for bibliographical assistance, and to David Baldwin, Douglas Chalmers, Robert Jervis, Robert Keohane, Charles Lipson, Jack Snyder, and Mark Zacher for thoughtful comments on an earlier draft.

International organization as a field of study has had its ups and downs throughout the post-World War II era and throughout this century for that matter. In the interwar period, the fate of the field reflected the fate of the world it studied: a creative burst of work on “international government” after 1919, followed by a period of more cautious reassessment approaching the 1930s, and a gradual decline into irrelevance if not obscurity thereafter. Although they sometimes intersected, the fate of theory and the fate of practice were never all that closely linked after World War II. Indeed, it is possible to argue, with only slight exaggeration, that in recent years they have become inversely related: the academic study of international organization is more interesting, vibrant, and even compelling than ever before, whereas the world of actual international organizations has deteriorated in efficacy and performance. Today, international organization as a field of study is an area where the action is; few would so characterize international organizations as a field of practice.

Our purpose in this article is to try to figure out how and why the doctors can be thriving when the patient is moribund. To anticipate the answer without, we hope, unduly straining the metaphor, the reason is that the leading doctors have become biochemists and have stopped treating and in most cases even seeing patients. In the process, however, new discoveries have been made, new diagnostic techniques have been developed, and our understanding has deepened, raising the possibility of more effective treatment in the long run.

What we are suggesting, to pose the issue more directly, is that students of international organization have shifted their focus systematically away from international institutions, toward broader forms of international institutionalized behavior. We further contend that this shift does not represent a haphazard sequence of theoretical or topical “fads” but is rooted in a “core concern” or a set of puzzles which gives coherence and identity to this field of study.¹ The substantive core around which the various theoretical approaches have clustered is the problem of international governance. And the observable shifts in analytical foci can be understood as “progressive problem shifts,” in the sense of Imre Lakatos’s criterion for the heuristic fruitfulness of a research program.² This evolution has brought the field to its current focus on the concept of international regimes. To fully realize its potential, the research program must now seek to resolve some serious anomalies in the regime approach and to link up the informal ordering devices of international regimes with the formal institutional mechanisms of international organizations.

In the first section of this article, we present a review of the literature in order to trace its evolution. This review draws heavily on articles published in International Organization, the leading journal in the field since its first appearance in 1947, and a source that not only reflects but in considerable measure is also responsible for the evolution of the field. The second section critiques the currently prevalent epistemological practices in regime analysis and points toward lines of inquiry which might enhance the productive potential of the concept as an analytical tool. Finally, we briefly suggest a means of systematically linking up regimes and formal organizations in a manner that is already implicit in the literature.

Progressive analytical shifts

As a field of study, international organization has always concerned itself with the same phenomenon: in the words of a 1931 text, it is an attempt to describe and explain “how the modern Society of Nations governs itself.”³ In that text, the essence of government was assumed to comprise the coordination of group activities so as to conduct the public business, and the particular feature distinguishing international government was taken to lie in the necessity that it be consistent with national sovereignty. Few contemporary students of international organization would want to alter this definition substantially.⁴

However, there have been identifiable shifts in how the phenomenon of international governance has been conceived, especially since World War II—so much so that the field is often described as being in permanent search of its own “dependent variable.” Our reading of the literature reveals four major analytical foci, which we would place in roughly the following logical—and more or less chronological—order.

Formal institutions

The first is a formal institutional focus. Within it, the assumption was made or the premise was implicit that (1) international governance is whatever international organizations do; and (2) the formal attributes of international organizations, such as their charters, voting procedures, committee structures, and the like, account for what they do. To the extent that the actual operation of institutions was explored, the frame of reference was their constitutional mandate, and the purpose of the exercise was to discover how closely it was approximated.⁵

Institutional processes

The second analytical focus concerns the actual decision-making processes within international organizations. The assumption was gradually abandoned that the formal arrangements of international organizations explain what they do. This perspective originally emerged in the attempt to come to grips with the increasingly obvious discrepancies between constitutional designs and organizational practices. Some writers argued that the formal arrangements and objectives remained relevant and appropriate but were undermined or obstructed by such political considerations as cold war rivalry and such institutional factors as the veto in the UN Security Council, bloc voting in the UN General Assembly, and the like.⁶ Others contended that the original designs themselves were unrealistic and needed to be changed.⁷

Over time, this perspective became more generalized, to explore overall patterns of influence shaping organizational outcomes.⁸ The sources of influence which have been investigated include the power and prestige of individual states, the formation and functioning of the group system, organizational leadership positions, and bureaucratic politics. The outcomes that analysts have sought to explain have ranged from specific resolutions, programs, and budgets, to broader voting alignment and the general orientation of one or more international institutions.

Organizational role

In this third perspective, another assumption of the formal institutionalist approach was abandoned, namely, that international governance is whatever international organizations do. Instead, the focus shifted to the actual and potential roles of international organizations in a more broadly conceived process of international governance.⁹ This perspective in turn subsumes three distinct clusters.

In the first cluster, the emphasis was on the roles of international organizations in the resolution of substantive international problems. Preventive diplomacy and peace-keeping were two such roles in the area of peace and security,¹⁰ nuclear safeguarding by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was another.¹¹ Facilitating decolonization received a good deal of attention in the political realm,¹² providing multilateral development assistance in the economic realm.¹³ The potential role of international organizations in restructuring North-South relations preoccupied a substantial number of scholars throughout the 1970s,¹⁴ as did the possible contributions of international organizations to managing the so-called global commons.¹⁵ Most recently, analysts have challenged the presumption that the roles of international organizations in this regard are invariably positive; indeed, they have accused international organizations of occasionally exacerbating the problems they are designed to help resolve.¹⁶

The second cluster of the organizational-role perspective shifted the focus away from the solution of substantive problems per se, toward certain longterm institutional consequences of the failure to solve substantive problems through the available institutional means. This, of course, was the integrationist focus, particularly the neofunctionalist variety.¹⁷ It was fueled by the fact that the jurisdictional scope of both the state and existing international organizations was increasingly outstripped by the functional scope of international problems. And it sought to explore the extent to which institutional adaptations to this fact might be conducive to the emergence of political forms “beyond the nation state.”¹⁸ Neofunctionalists assigned a major role in this process to international organizations, not simply as passive recipients of new tasks and authority but as active agents of “task expansion” and “spillover.”¹⁹ Other approaches concerned themselves less with institutional changes than with attitudinal changes, whether among national elites, international delegates, or mass publics.²⁰

The third cluster within the organizational-role perspective began with a critique of the transformational expectations of integration theory and then shifted the focus onto a more general concern with how international institutions “reflect and to some extent magnify or modify” the characteristic features of the international system.²¹ Here, international organizations have been viewed as potential dispensers of collective legitimacy,²² vehicles in the international politics of agenda formation,²³ forums for the creation of transgovernmental coalitions as well as instruments of transgovernmental policy coordination,²⁴ and as means through which the global dominance structure is enhanced or can possibly come to be undermined.²⁵

The theme that unifies all works of this genre is that the process of global governance is not coterminous with the activities of international organizations but that these organizations do play some role in that broader process. The objective was to identify their role.

International regimes

The current preoccupation in the field is with the phenomenon o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• PART I Overviews of the Field
• 1 International organization: a state of the art on an art of the state
• 2 Theories and Empirical Studies of International Institutions
• 3 What Are International Institutions?
• PART II Core Concepts and Competing Theories
• 4 Revisited
• 5 Structural causes and regime consequences: regimes as intervening variables
• 6 International regimes, transactions, and change: embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order
• 7 International Institutions: Two Approaches
• 8 Collective Security, and the Future of Europe
• 9 The halse Promise of International Institutions
• PART III New Directions
• 10 Introduction: epistemic communities and international policy coordination
• 11 Multilateralism and world order
• 12 Is American Multilateralism in Decline?
• 13 Imagined (Security) Communities: Cognitive Regions in International Relations
• 14 Governance, good governance and global governance: conceptual and actual challenges
• 15 The Emerging Roles of NGOs in the UN System: From Article 71 to a People’s Millennium Assembly
• PART IV Compliance, Effectiveness and the Domestic Dimension
• 16 Diplomacy and domestic politics: the logic of two-level games
• 17 The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations
• Name Index