Decision Making Within International Organisations

Bob Reinalda, Bertjan Verbeek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415304269
• eBook ISBN: 9781134408832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Following the end of the Cold War and in the context of globalization, this book examines the extent to which member states dominate decision making in international organizations and whether non-state actors, for example non-governmental organizations and multinational corporations, are influential. The authors assess the new patterns of decision-making to determine whether they are relatively open or closed privileged networks. The organizations examined include the Council of Europe, the United Nations, the EU, G8, the World Trade Organization, International Maritime Organizations, the World Health Organization and the OECD.

Part I
Introduction and overview

Foreword
International organization in an era of changing historical structures

Robert W. Cox

Some thirty years ago Harold K. Jacobson (‘Jake’) and I published The Anatomy of Influence. Decision Making in International Organization. The editors of the present volume recall it as a starting point in a program of studies they are now continuing. Their work and that of the contributors to the present volume prompts me to reflect upon the direction that has been taken in the interval by the study of international organization in world politics.

Like many things in intellectual life, my encounter with ‘Jake’ was a matter of chance. We first met in the autumn of 1966. I had been long established in Geneva with the International Labour Organization and Jake was coming to Geneva with his family on sabbatical leave from the University of Michigan to continue his study of international organization. It was Inis Claude who brought us together, the author of Swords into Ploughshares. The Problems and Progress of International Organization (1956), one of the first major studies in the field. I had known Inis as a participant in various Carnegie Endowment sponsored meetings. In those days the Carnegie Endowment was located in Geneva and was oriented towards studies of international organization rather more than, as it subsequently became, a think-tank for US foreign policy. A few years previously I had discussions with Ernst Haas when he came to Geneva to research for his book Beyond the Nation-State. Functionalism and International Organization (1964). This says something about the intellectual context of the meeting between ‘Jake’ and me.

During that year, 1966, ‘Jake’ joined me in a seminar I was directing at the Graduate Institute in Geneva; and we took up as a research project an idea put forward by Pierre Gerbet of the Institut d’études politiques in Paris for a comparative study of decision making in international organizations. Jake brought to that theme the thinking he had absorbed at Yale from Robert Dahl’s Who Governs? (1961). We began a collaboration, which extended to include others, that culminated in the publication of The Anatomy of Influence (1973).

That book had a certain immediate impact in the scholarly literature but, I think, was soon displaced by other directions in research. Emphasis in the scholarly world shifted from how institutions work to how and why certain issues become salient objects of international concern. For a time ‘regimes’ became preferred objects of theorizing. My own interest moved from international organization to international political economy. Jake, after producing his definitive work Networks of Interdependence. International Organizations and the Global Political System (1978), which he described as ‘an optimistic book, though I hope not an unrealistic one’, moved more in the direction of international law. That optimism, rooted in his conviction that the multilateral approach was the indispensable condition for a durable world peace, was expressed again by him in a short piece he wrote, not long before his untimely death, for a symposium to explore the relationship of international law and political science. ‘International law’, he wrote, ‘will be enormously relevant in the agenda of international relations in the twenty-first century.’

These hopeful words were followed only weeks later by the attack of 9/11, which occurred after Jake’s death. In the aftermath of 9/11 multilat-eralism and international law – along with civil liberties – have suffered a severe setback.

Jake represented, for me as a non-American, the ideal of integrity in American intellectual life. Non-Americans often perceive two qualities in Americans: patriotism or a sense of identity with the constituted authorities of the nation, and belief in a God firmly embedded in American culture. Jake’s patriotism was clear, though he never made a show of it. His religion was an important part of his life, though you had to know him well to sense what it meant to him. Both qualities have been open to distortion in politics. Patriotism can be distorted into the unilateralism of universalistic nationalism. Belief in God can be distorted into exclusionary fundamentalism. Jake maintained a commitment to openness and understanding – hence his intellectual focus on international organization and international law.

There are few constraining influences upon a unilateralist America which has the predominance of military world power. It is becoming more and more obvious that the most likely effective moderating force is that which is latent within America itself. I, as a non-American, look with cautious hope to that continuing strand of the American human and moral reality that Jake so fully represented.

Working with Jake on The Anatomy of Influence introduced me to the American political science of the 1960s in the behavioural mode – in the attempt to find quantitative measures to justify statements. I was quite fascinated by it then, though subsequently I came to wonder whether there was not something important missing in a methodology that contrived to achieve ‘objectivity’ by failing to take account of the inter-subjective element in reality. In the course of time my background training in history reasserted itself. The Anatomy of Influence was for me an epistemological moment that passed.¹ If Jake, looking hopefully from the outside at the development of international organization, was optimistic, I, with a quarter century experience within international organization behind me when we came to prepare our book, was perhaps more pessimistic. We shared the normative vision that world peace and orderly societies can only be secure when the powerful entities in the world negotiate consensus to avoid violent conflict and that multilateralism, in practice expressed through international organizations, is the way this can be pursued. Hence the importance of understanding how the process of international organization works. There is a realist basis for this – a recognition that you have to start with an assessment of the real forces. There is also a recognition that the process itself adds something over and above an inventory of the material capabilities of those forces and that an inquiry into that something else makes a useful contribution to the outcome.

A quarter century after Jake and I completed our inquiry, Bob Reinalda and Bertjan Verbeek, with their collaborators, have taken up the task again, employing more refined analytical categories of decision making and a different mix of cases, first in Autonomous Policy Making by International Organizations (1998) and now in the present volume. What difference, if any, does the interval in time make?

My question involves how the synchronic and the diachronic may be reconciled in social science research. The methods that Jake and I used like those used by the editors and collaborators in this volume work well in the synchronic dimension. They elucidate how decisions are made in a given contemporary world context. As such they are useful tools for understanding how things work under these conditions. The diachronic – the longer term dimension of change in those conditions – is more elusive. Jake and I had tried to find a place for that in the device of categorizing the environment of an international organization, both a general environment of world power relations that was common to all international organizations and a specific environment that included factors relevant to the specific functions of each organization. But this device followed the same synchronic approach, an attempt to break down these environments into factors that could be itemized or quantified in a positivist manner.

In retrospect, I think the methodological artifact of the ‘environment’ failed to take account of the way the world has changed. Positivism knows only the synchronic – perhaps it can depict sequential synchronic slices in time but it cannot explain how a complex process of change restructures the goals and opportunities open to international organization. For that, the historical method remains indispensable, the method that combines the view from without (which is that of positivism) and the view from within (which is proper to historicism).

In this approach the ‘environment’ is replaced by the historical structure. The historical structure is how the world appears to the entities – persons, states, corporations, or whatever – that are interacting in it, how they perceive the concatenation of the forces at work and the conflicting directions these forces take. This is what informs the making of decisions or non-decisions. The historicist approach is always latent even in positivist analyses like those we attempted thirty years ago when motivations and reactions to the Cold War, or to the gap between poor and rich, inevitably creep into a purportedly ‘objective’ account.

An historical structure has an objective dimension which depicts a prevailing arrangement of forces and an inter-subjective dimension in which the actors share a vision of reality. By introducing the inter-subjective dimension, however, we allow for the coexistence of different and often conflicting perceptions of reality, each of which can become transformed over time.

Thirty years ago, the uncertain balance between the United States and the Soviet Union called the Cold War was a central feature of an inter-subjective understanding of reality, with a ‘Third World’ frustrated in hopes for development as a potentially disruptive force. Functionalism was a theory derived from the wartime experience of allied countries cooperating for common purposes that seemed as though it might be a means for further knitting together the performance of common tasks, at least among developed capitalist countries, so as to minimize conflicting national interests. There was an apparent stability in the historical structure which would seem to allow for the possibility that international organizations performing technical and non-political tasks, insofar as they could avoid paralysis on Cold War issues, might quietly advance the interdependence of states. They might even, to cite the title of Ernst Haas’ book, take us ‘beyond the nation-state’ towards a more integrated transnational structure.

In the interval the world has changed and different rival historical structures have appeared on the scene. One of these collective visions of reality, based on the military predominance and economic influence of the United States, envisages a central power that penetrates throughout the world as a new emerging ‘empire’ – one core civilization that will absorb bit by bit the rest of the world into a homogeneous entity with common values. This ‘empire’ is being built through a process of economic and social globalization and cultural diffusion backed by military power.² Parallel with that is a second configuration of power, the residue of the West-phalian order of independent states that originated in seventeenth-century Europe and spread over the world in the era of European dominance. This historical structure has generated as its modus operandi diplomacy, international law, and, most recently, the United Nations and other international organizations. Evolving within the Westphalian structure is the movement towards unification in Europe, which evokes, in opposition to the vision of ‘empire’, the perspective of a future world with a balance of regional powers. Then, appearing even more recently, is yet a third configuration of world power in the shape of civil society or the social movement which is autonomous in relation both to ‘empire’ and to the Westphalian state system. This movement expresses a diversity of social forces in opposition to ‘empire’ and attempts to orient states towards peace, defence of the biosphere, respect for cultural difference, and social equity. These are three coexisting historical structures and three different visions of reality. The three tendencies are each of them global in extent. They are not territorially distinct but overlapping in space.

Thirty years ago one might speculate about the opportunity international organizations had to gain greater autonomy and, through a functionalist process, gradually to encompass all mankind in a web of technical and economic cooperation that would eliminate causes of violent conflict. Today, the US–Soviet superpower balance of Cold War has been replaced by what I have elsewhere called a decadent phase of Cold War³ in which structures created during the superpower rivalry – intelligence services practising covert violence and assassination, proliferation of weapons, control of information, and economic aggression – maintain themselves and engage in a global conflict which has now been baptised as ‘the war on terror’. The decadent phase is in direct continuity from the superpower phase. Symbolic of this affiliation are Osama bin Laden and al-Qa’eda, whose activities were initiated with US support to attack the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and then came to use Afghanistan as a base for attack on the United States. ‘Empire’ and ‘terrorism’ are engaged in a dialectic that knows no end.

The future of international organizations will very largely depend upon how far they can strengthen the historical structure out of which they have come – the inter-state system – while avoiding being taken over by the expansion of ‘empire’ and at the same time serving as a vehicle for the expression of the demands of civil society. The decision-making process of international organization now takes place within the framework of these competing historical structures. Bob Reinalda, Bertjan Verbeek and their co-authors have given us an insight into the process whereby this balancing act among coexisting and rival historical structures may be acted out.

Notes

1 There is a perceptive comment by Hadewych Hazelzet in her critical review of The Anatomy of Influence which appeared in the editors’ earlier volume Autonomous Policy Making by International Organizations in which she points to an ambiguity in the work. She writes: ‘They [Cox and Jacobson] wrote in reaction to functionalism without posing a clear alternative and arrived at a realist conclusion. Arguing against a positivist approach (which they regarded as closely connected to realism) they used instead a historicist approach which made their work more descriptive than explanatory’ (39). We were indeed working in a time when there was a tension between two conflicting theories (functionalism and realism) and between two conflicting epistemological standpoints (positivism and historicism). Perhaps as editors each of us leaned in a different direction, one towards functionalism and positivism, the other towards realism and historicism. But each of us was committed to the idea that a full understanding did not exclude the one or the other.

2 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000) give a ‘post-marxist’ critical view; Martin Shaw, Theory of the Global State (Cambridge University Press, 2000) offers a more benign version; and Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan (Penguin Canada, 2003) presents a liberal imperialist viewpoint.

3 Robert W. Cox, ed. The New Realism. Perspectives on Multilateralism and World Order (Tokyo: Macmillan for the United Nations University Press, 1997) 256–9.

1 The issue of decision making within international organizations

Bob Reinalda and Bertjan Verbeek

Introduction

The war against Iraq in 2003 may prove to be a watershed in post-Cold War international relations. The disposal of the Iraqi regime by a coalition of mainly Western states symbolizes the zenith of American hegemony. There can be no doubt that unipolarity characterizes world politics and that the remaining superpower, or hyper puissance, as French foreign minister Hubert Védrine coined it, will not hesitate to defend its vital interests, if necessary without the permission of the international community. From this perspective the United States (US) seems to be moving from a multilateral to a unilateral foreign policy. This was also illustrated by its resistance to the International Criminal Court, its struggle against the Kyoto Protocol, its driving of hard bargains over the New Economy within the context of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and its pressure on members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999 to strike against Yugoslavia over Kosovo without a resolution from the United Nations (UN) Security Council.

In a unipolar world, why bother about the role of international organizations? What use is it to investigate their decision-making processes, when it is likely that their policies will either reflect the vital interests of the most powerful state or be ignored by that state if the outcomes are inconvenient for its hegemony? The escalation process leading up to the war against Iraq, however, suggests that analysing decision-making processes within international organizations may be relevant even in such extreme cases of unipolarity and ‘high politics’. For one thing, it is important to realize that the US and the United Kingdom (UK) sought the adoption of a Security Council resolution that would legitimize their Middle East policies. States, especially democracies, cannot easily go to war without seeking international legitimacy, because this helps them to mobilize domestic and international support. In the end the US and the UK chose not to introduce a resolution giving ex...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part I: Introduction and Overview
• Part II: Leadership
• Part III: Consensus Building
• Part IV: Organizational Dynamics
• Part V: Conflicts of Loyalty
• Part VI: Policy windows
• Part VII: Learning Processes
• Part VIII: Conclusion