The values of international organizations

James D. Fry, Bryane Michael, Natasha Pushkarna, Jean d'Aspremont

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781526152411
• eBook ISBN: 9781526152404
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Derecho internacional

From the United Nations to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, the principles of international organizations affect all of our lives. The principles these organizations live by represent, at least in part, the principles all of us live by. This book quantifies international organizations' affiliation with particular principles in their constitutions, like cooperation, peace and equality.Offering a sophisticated statistical and legal analysis of these principles, the authors reveal the values contained in international organizations' constitutions and their relationship with one another. When these organizations are divided into groups, like regional versus universal organizations, many new, seemingly contradictory, interpretations of international organizations law emerge. Through elaborate network representations, radar charters, k-clusters analyses and scatter plots, this book offers an unprecedented insight into the principles and values of international organizations.

1

The principles guiding international organizations

Introduction

International organizations play a vital role in our daily lives. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer notes, international law and standards – as made and enforced by international organizations – affect even the most domestic aspects of our lives.¹ However, media attention focuses heavily on international organizations and their organs like the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice and the UN Security Council during times like the Afghanistan, Iraq, Serbia and Syria conflicts, to name only a few.² The World Trade Organization (WTO) gets paraded out when politicians want to garner political capital by appealing to written and unwritten principles of reciprocity and fair dealing.³ Some developing states may disagree so much with the values and principles of particular international organizations that they decide to splinter off, as happened with the World Olive Oil Trade Group splintering off from the International Olive Council.⁴ Staff members of international organizations may even go on strike when an international organization diverges from its principles and values, as observed with the International Telecommunication Union in 1964.⁵ These principles and values enter into the vast array of international standards that the states of the world adopt.⁶ Even though broad principles like peace are enshrined in the United Nations (UN) Charter, technical standards also reflect and help promulgate these deeper principles and values.⁷ Indeed, measurement standards from the International Bureau of Weights and Measures affect even the most seemingly non-value-laden aspects of our daily lives.

The principles these organizations live by, advocate, promulgate and otherwise serve to promote affect our lives. Do the UN, European Union (EU), North Atlantic Treaty Organization or Economic Community of West African States, among others, have a “responsibility to protect”?⁸ Must international judicial organizations act according to fundamental principles?⁹ The international community clearly sees international organizations as being able to be held responsible for their actions, as evidenced by the 2011 Articles on the Responsibility of International Organizations (ARIO). Such rules would thus make them responsible for doing an act to someone for something.¹⁰ What are these indefinable somethings?

These “somethings” represent these organizations’ principles and values. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) constitution provides an obvious example.¹¹ The nine recitals found at the beginning of the OECD’s constitution present the principles guiding the Organisation. These include “the purposes of the United Nations” (which are discussed at length throughout this book), “individual liberty,” “general well-being,” “strengthening the tradition of co-operation,” “peaceful and harmonious relations,” “highest sustainable growth of their economies” and the “improvement of international economic relations.”¹² These principles affect all of our daily lives. However, they do not come with an instruction manual or even a legal definition, which can be problematic.

Which items mentioned in the OECD’s constitution represent actual, useable legal principles? While individual liberty represents a goal, such a statement itself represents an aspiration.¹³ Cooperation represents a value (as something cherished or literally valued) as well as a guiding principle. The improvement of harmonious international economic relations probably represents a restatement of the broader principle and value of cooperation. However, neither the OECD’s constitution itself nor any law underlying the constitution, such as the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, defines these terms.¹⁴ Other cooperative arrangements have promulgated similar values, from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to the Central American Integration System.¹⁵ Despite over a century of writing and interpreting of treaties, the international legal principles driving international organizations remain as hazy now as ever.¹⁶ This book aims to remedy that situation with an empirical exploration of the constitutions that form our international organizations.

The problem and solution: strengthening the basis for the literature

Do the agreements and rules governing international organizations like the UN even represent their own, distinct branch of law? Many researchers traditionally have argued that such law merely represents the norms and conventions of states that interact on the world stage.¹⁷ Since the Second World War, authors like Rudolf Schlesinger have noted that the development of principles guiding these organizations has arisen concomitant with the development of the broader principles governing international law.¹⁸ From the embodiment of intergovernmental relations to entities with limited self-autonomy in their own right, international organizations take actions and decisions which, over the years, have led many to argue that they represent founts of international law in their own right.¹⁹ Such a confluence of actions and principles has led some authors to argue for a common law of international organizations that is developed from the ground up.²⁰

International organizations law clearly comes from somewhere. Perhaps such law represents a haphazard group of practices and agreements – the coalescence of states’ self-interested decisions as they seek to cooperate while preserving their own interests.²¹ Perhaps such law comes from deeper principles driving peoples of all nations towards a universal jus gentium or jus cogens.²² Regardless of the position any particular scholar or international civil servant takes on these principles, steady patterns of principles and values do exist across international organizations.²³ Perhaps such law does not represent something as coherent as a system of global governance.²⁴ Nevertheless, the fact that so many researchers even accept the existence of the legal underpinnings of such global governance shows that international organizations law exists “out there in the real world.”²⁵ Despite the decades of pontificating about the principles and values driving such international organizations, no one has taken the time or exerted the energy to carry out a careful census of these international organizations’ rules. Indeed, none of these researchers can back up their observations with more than a few examples, hand-selected by the same authors, to illustrate their case.

Few authors have tried to use data and statistics to test whether the generalizations about international organizations law stand the test of falsification.²⁶ Many papers look at the way members’ preferences of particular international organizations like the World Bank may affect these international organizations’ activities, such as lending.²⁷ Others look at the way that membership in certain international organizations may correlate with certain aspects or outcomes of a state’s governance.²⁸ Many studies seek correlations between the existence of international organizations, or their underlying treaties, and the topic the treaty seeks to regulate.²⁹ Few, if any, studies look at the texts forming these international organizations. What principles do the framers think they are embedding in these institutions? Do different international organizations hold different values and act according to different principles?³⁰ A quantitative understanding of these questions could lead to rethinking the way we want international organizations law to develop and how we want the organizations to function.³¹

This book compares the values supposedly pursued by international organizations (as espoused by leading textbooks on international organizations) and quantitative textual analysis from these international organizations’ constitutions. In terms of methodology, the authors have distilled the major principles from the textbooks that supposedly guide or shape international organizations. These principles include aspiration, authority, autonomy, communication, cooperation, efficiency, equality, executive staff, staff, peace, recommendation and representativeness.³² The authors have then calculated the frequency of these principles or values from international organizations’ constitutions and compared their incidence across various types of organizations. While the basic primers, and even the latest literature, make assumptions about the way these values shape international organizations, this book provides a more balanced picture on account of its entirely inductive approach. It shows which international organizations stress cooperation – surprisingly, universal, comprehensive organizations more than regional ones.³³ It also shows the increasingly important role that values, like equality, play in the conceptualization of international organizations in the new millennium.

Distilling principles from major international organizations law textbooks

Finding major principles

What values and principles guide international organizations? This quest started with six important textbooks in the field. Henry Schermers and Niels Blokker’s 1,273-page magnum opus represents, if not the final say on the subject, certainly one of the longest.³⁴ Their coverage of every aspect of an international organization’s operations, from voting to finance and beyond, provides a thorough overview of the field.³⁵ Firmly based in the international law tradition, they base their narrative on the interaction between these organizations and the evolution of international law.³⁶ Weighing in at a far more reasonable 388 pages, Jan Klabbers’ textbook covers the essentials by discussing the cases that form many of the principles commonly accepted, as well as some of the politics locking in the way we think about international organizations law.³⁷ The book takes a strong tack against the functionalist approach used to analyze international organizations.³⁸ Probably the most functionalist of all the textbooks, Philippe Sands and Pierre Klein’s reads more like a taxonomy and less like an argument for the way international organizations positively or normatively develop.³⁹ Providing an overview of the major organizations (c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of organizations studied
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 The principles guiding international organizations
• 2 The empirics of international organizational principles
• 3 Patterns of authority in international organizations’ constitutions
• 4 The jurisprudence of organizations’ aspirational values
• 5 Towards a new jurisprudence of international organizations law
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index