International Organizations

Clive Archer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317615378
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What is the role of international organizations in the international political system?

The fourth edition of Clive Archer's widely used textbook continues to provide students with an introduction to international organizations, exploring their rise and development, and accounts for their significance in the modern international political system.

International Organizations fourth edition:

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• has been fully updated to take into account the considerable developments in the field since the last edition was published in 2001.

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• continues to offer a unique concise yet comprehensive approach, offering students an accessible and manageable introduction to this core part of international relations.

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• offers an authoritative guide to the literature about international organizations and provides advice on further reading.

1 Definitions and history

Definitions

Both words in the title of this book have been a source of puzzlement for the student of international relations. It is worth examining them more closely before turning to the realities they represent when joined together. The term ‘international’, thought to be the creation of Jeremy Bentham, is often seen as a misnomer. Instead, it is claimed, the term ‘interstate’ or ‘intergovernmental’ should be used when describing an activity – war, diplomacy, relations of any kind – conducted between two sovereign states and their governmental representatives. Thus talk of an ‘international agreement’ between state A and state B to limit arms production or to control the selling of computer technology refers not to an understanding between the armament manufacturers of A and B nor to a pact between their computer firms, but to an arrangement by state A’s governmental representatives with those of state B.

This state- and government-oriented view of the word ‘international’ has been increasingly challenged over the past four decades, as will be seen in Chapter 3. It is no longer used synonymously with ‘intergovernmental’ to mean ‘interstate’ or relations between the official representatives of sovereign states. Instead the term has come to include activities between individuals and groups in one state and individuals and groups in another state, as well as intergovernmental relations. The first types of relationships – those not involving activities between governments only – are known as transnational relations (Keohane and Nye 1971). Connections between one branch of government in one state (say a defence ministry) and a branch of government in another country (its defence ministry or its secret service, for example), which do not go through the normal foreign policy-making channels, are called transgovernmental. All these relationships – intergovernmental, transnational and transgovernmental – are now usually included under the heading ‘international’.

The dual meaning of its singular form, and its interchanging in many books with the word ‘institutions’, confuses the use of the term ‘organizations’. International relations, whether between governments, groups or individuals, are not totally random and chaotic but are, for the main part, organized. One form of the organization of international relations can be seen in institutions – ‘the collective forms or basic structures of social organization as established by law or by human tradition’ (Duverger 1972: 68) – whether these be trade, commerce, diplomacy, conferences or international organizations. An international organization in this context represents a form of institution that refers to a formal system of rules and objectives, a rationalized administrative instrument (Selznick 1957: 8) and which has ‘a formal technical and material organization: constitutions, local chapters, physical equipment, machines, emblems, letterhead stationery, a staff, an administrative hierarchy and so forth’ (Duverger 1972: 68). Inis Claude (1964: 4) makes the following distinction: ‘International organization is a process; international organizations are representative aspects of the phase of that process which has been reached at a given time.’

Some writers confusingly refer to such international organizations as international institutions; also reference is often made to ‘the institutions’ of an organization, such as its assembly, council and secretariat. This use of ‘institutions’ to refer to the detailed structure of an international organization or as a synonym for international organizations is more restricted than the sociological meaning of the word. As can be seen from Duverger’s definition, it has a wider use that encompasses the notion of a system of relationships that may not manifest themselves in formal organizations of bricks and mortar, headed notepaper, a ready acronym such as NATO or WHO, and an international staff. An institutional framework adds ‘stability, durability and cohesiveness’ to individual relationships which otherwise might be ‘sporadic, ephemeral, and unstable’ (Duverger 1972: 68). In personal life these institutions that bind people together may be represented by an organization such as the Mothers’ Union, the Roman Catholic Church, or a trade union organization, but may also take the form of the less formal structures of the family, of a religion or of work conditions. At an international level, relations may be given a ‘stability, durability and cohesiveness’, in other words they may be organized, by the practice of diplomatic method or adherence to the tenets of international law or by regular trading – all institution in the wider sense – as well as by the activities of such international organizations as the World Movement of Mothers, the World Council of Churches or the International Labour Organization (ILO).

Regimes in international relations are defined as ‘sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations’ (Krasner 1983: 2). They thus fulfil Duverger’s wider definition of institutions but they need not be formalized in international organizations. However, it is normally the case that regimes in the areas of trade, finance, arms control or the environment do include international organizations. Krasner himself gives the example of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) that helped regulate international trade. It was an international agreement rather than an organization but it was later formalized into an international organization, the World Trade Organization, established in 1995 (www.wto.org/).

International regimes and international organizations, together with diplomacy, have helped to create aspects of global governance which has been increasingly discussed since the end of the twentieth century. Finkelstein (1995: 369) gives a simple definition: ‘Global governance is governing, without sovereign authority, relationships that transcend national frontiers.’ A more involved explanation by Thakur and Weiss (2006) points to the embedding of international organizations, both international organizations (IOs) and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), within this notion:

the complex of formal and informal institutions, mechanisms, relationships, and processes between and among states, markets, citizens and organizations, both inter-and non-governmental, through which collective interests on the global plane are articulated.

It is worth noting that the concept of global governance has been taken up by international organizations such as the UN (www.unhistory.org/briefing/15GlobalGov.pdf), OECD (www.oecd.org/governance/oecdglobalforumonpublicgovernance.htm) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/154300/icode/).

This book is concerned not so much with the broader notions of international organization, international institutions and international regimes, but with the more concrete manifestation of regularized international relations as seen in international organizations with their formal and material existence separate from, though for the most part dependent on, states and groups within states.

International organizations up to the First World War

Accounts of the rise of international organizations rarely begin historically in 1919 at the Versailles Peace Conference, but it is a good time and place to start. Gathered together after the First World War were the representatives of the victorious powers ready to write a peace treaty; many national interest groups; and INGOs wanting to advance public health, the lot of the workers, the cause of peace or the laws of war. The states’ representatives were also concerned to create a new, permanent world organization that would deal with the problem of peace and security and with economic and social questions. They drew on almost a century of experience of peacetime cooperation between European states and some half-century of the work of the public international unions. Their activity was underpinned by the existence of private international associations, was foreshadowed in the Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907 and in plans advanced before and during the First World War, and was moulded by the wartime experience of co-operation. The organizations they established – the League of Nations and the ILO being the leading ones – had structures determined by this background. This brief history will examine the lead-up to the creation of the League of Nations: the rise of INGOs, the parallel growth of public international unions with their major interest in economic and social questions, and the role of IGOs in dealing with peace and security up to 1919. The historical development of international organizations since that date will then be examined to demonstrate the growth of INGOs, economic and social IGOs, and IGOs involved with peace and security.

The gathering at Versailles in 1919 was primarily an intergovernmental meeting of heads of state and government, foreign ministers and their advisers. It was mostly concerned with the question of international peace and security, while economic and social questions were given only perfunctory consideration. The conference was faced with the task of writing a peace treaty and organizing relations between states after the most momentous breakdown in interstate relationships in history: the First World War. This war had arrived after a century of comparative peace since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, during which time a number of forms of international organization had burgeoned. The rise of the phenomenon of intergovernmental organizations concerned with international peace and security and with economic and social issues needs some explanation.

An understanding of the reasons why these organizations started to grow in the nineteenth century can be reached by asking the question: why were there no interstate organizations prior to that time? The most obvious reason is that these organizations had to await the creation of a relatively stable system of sovereign states in Europe. The crucial turning point was the Peace of Westphalia, 1648, ending the Thirty Years’ War, which had torn apart late medieval Europe. Prior to 1648, the concept of a unified Christian Europe dominated the thinking, if not the practice, of political life in Europe (Bozeman 1960: 514; Davies 1997: 7–10 and chs 6 and 7; Hinsley 1967, chs 1 and 8). The waning temporal power of the Catholic Church headed by the papacy and of the Holy Roman Empire demonstrated the difficulties of unifying such a diverse geographical area as the continent of Europe, even when its peoples were threatened by the march of the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Despite this, a form of unity was offered by the doctrine of a God-given natural law above mankind, adherence to which provided an opportunity for Christian rulers and their subjects to belong to a greater commonwealth.

With the questioning and later rejection of natural law tenets by certain philosophers, and with the ‘civil war’ between Christian princes from 1618 to 1648, the prospect of a politically united Europe faded into the past. The Peace of Westphalia and the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 laid the basis for the sovereign state system in Europe, a system later extended to the rest of the world. This system recognized the right of states with defined geographical boundaries, including more or less settled populations (territoriality), to have their own forms of government (non-intervention) and to conduct relations with one another on an equal legal basis (sovereign equality). Most rulers no longer utilized the natural law to guide relations between states but instead the concept emerged of an international law founded on the practice of states voluntarily making mutual agreements based either on treaty or on custom. ‘The Westphalia conception includes the idea that national governments are the basic source of order in international society.’ For international relations it means ‘decentralised control by sovereign states’ (Falk 1969: 68–9).

Given the existence of the sovereign state system, why did governments not create a network of international organizations throughout the eighteenth century? Claude (1964: 17) sets four preconditions before such action could be taken: the existence of a number of states functioning as independent political units; a substantial measure of contact between these subdivisions; an awareness of problems that arise from states’ co-existence; and their recognition of ‘the need for creation of institutional devices and systematic methods for regulating their relations with each other’. Only the first of these prerequisites manifestly existed before the nineteenth century. A form of diplomacy existed between the courts of the European powers, and trade and travel grew throughout Europe during the eighteenth century (Berridge 2002). The measure of contact built up between states in the 150 years following Westphalia could scarcely be described as substantial, and an all-too-common form of contact was warfare. It has been calculated that there were sixty-seven significant wars in the period from 1650 to 1800, a time particularly noticeable for the large number of major wars in which great powers participated on each side (Wright 1965: 636–51).

The international system that existed outside Europe before the area was integrated into the European system in the nineteenth century also showed little propensity for creating international organizations. The various arrangements of the Chinese Empire ranging from the feudal system of the Western Chou period (starting some 1,100 years BCE) to the imperial rule of the Manchus (from the latter half of the seventeenth century until the revolution of 1912); the divided warring India of the statesman Kautilya (about 300 BCE) to that of the decaying Mogul Empire of the seventeenth century; and the Muslim Ottoman Empire, were all familiar with war, trade, alliances, federations and even forms of diplomacy, but none produced the permanent institutions of international organizations. One possible exception is the Amphictyonic Councils of ancient Greece

which were something between a Church Congress, an Eisteddfod and a meeting of the League of Nations Assembly … Although the main purpose of these conferences, as of the permanent secretariat which they maintained, was the safeguarding of shrines and treasures and the regulation of the pilgrim traffic, they also dealt with political matters of common Hellenic interest and, as such, had an important diplomatic function.

(Nicolson 1969: 18–19)

A forerunner of humanitarian international organizations can possibly be seen in the Knights of St John of Jerusalem (also known as the Order of Malta) who administered hospitals in the Holy Land during the Crusades from the twelfth century to the thirteenth century. They later had their headquarters in the Mediterranean islands of Rhodes, Cyprus and Malta before being based in Rome. However, it seems that this international order (drawn from citizens of many European states) exercised elements of sovereignty over areas in which it operated, and indeed claims a sovereign existence even today (Beigbeder 1992: 61–3).

Apart from these examples, the various polities in the systems mentioned, as in those of pre-nineteenth-century Europe, found that contact with other political units was either in a belligerent form or, if peaceful, could be satisfied by the skills of the merchants and the occasional envoy. In 1786 Thomas Jefferson, later to become US president, proposed an international naval fleet under the control of a council of ministers and an ambassadorial committee in order to control the pirates of the Barbery states in North Africa. However, the idea demanded co-operation between hostile European states and the establishment of a fleet funded by quotas at a time when national navies were often short of money (Szasz 1981).

The reasons why the nineteenth century provided such fertile ground in Europe for international organizations can be found in Claude’s final two points: an awareness of the problems of states’ co-existence and the recognition of the need for means different from those already used to regulate relationships. Governments’ growing acceptance of new devices with which to conduct their relations arose partly out of the changed political situation post-1815 and partly from economic and social developments.

Peace and security

First, the Vienna Congress of 1814–15 codified the rules of diplomacy, thereby establishing an accepted mode of regular peaceful relationships among most European states. This was an important development in one of the key institutions governing interstate relations, turning diplomacy from a rather discredited activity to one that served the international system as well as the individual state (Nicolson 1969, ch. 1).

The American Revolution, which led to the independence of the United States of America in 1776, and to the French Revolution of 1789, brought into play novel political factors on the international scene. Previously the important European states had been monarchies of one form or another; the interests of the state and those of the ruler were held to be convergent. Cromwell’s Commonwealth in England deviated from this pattern and in 1689, when certain British political leaders considered King James II unsatisfactory, a new dynasty was installed. Still it was the King’s parliament, the King’s army and the King’s peace that existed in England. The two revolutions in America and France made a change by popularizing the state. The state no longer, even in legal theory, had to be the property or the trust of a monarch. It could be the instrument of popular will: ‘Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it’ (The American Declaration of Independence).

There were immediate and noticeable effects on international relations by these two revolutions: the victory of the American settlers weakened Britain; the new revolutionary France was ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface to fourth edition
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Definitions and history
• 2 Classification of international organizations
• 3 Writings on international organizations
• 4 Role and function of international organizations
• 5 International organizations: the future
• Bibliography
• Index