International Organizations and Internal Conditionality

Making Norms Matter

R. Fawn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137305480
• eBook ISBN: 9781137305497
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores how norms-based international organizations, namely the Council of Europe and the OSCE, are still able to win in world politics. Fawn uses the concept of internal conditionality to explain how these organizations have been able to respond to members with a lack of material incentives or instruments of coercion.

1

International Organizations and Internal Conditionality

How do international organizations respond when they have admitted countries that do not believe in the values of the organization? What can those organizations do when the contrarian member governments are even working to undermine and break the organizations, and the organizations lack ready tools of compliance, punishment or incentivization? With those questions asked, the post-Cold War enlargement of NATO and the EU – which have both received libraries of scholarly attention – retrospectively seems astonishingly easy.

Home now to about twice as many countries as during the Cold War, NATO and the EU faced prospective entrants who were eager to please: their elites were committed to going “back to Europe” and instinctively and publicly saw Euro-Atlantic membership as validation of their people’s geocultural belonging in the West. True, accession itself required intensive domestic changes across every aspect of governmental and often societal practices. True, also, post-communist countries made demands and negotiated; accession was not simply a unidirectional process. Aspects of conditionality were in some cases subverted or ignored, and it may be that the process remains incomplete after accession. Nevertheless, post-communist countries made enormous changes to meet the accession criteria, and went through an intensive and scrutinized process. Diplomats from existing EU member-states who were posted in Central Europe with remits to assist in the accession process admitted that their own countries would not be able to meet the accession criteria.¹

In return, however, the post-communist states sought and received enormous rewards. NATO and the EU together offered access to unrivalled military training and technology, a guarantee of hard military security; and enormous financial assistance and access to an affluent integrated market. The unparalleled attractiveness – and consequently the leverage – of these high-value offerings only reinforced the desire among Central European and Baltic states to join the two organizations. The “conditionality” that NATO and especially the EU eventually created for its aspiring members – including specific targets and annual assessment reports – became a well-known policy practice.²

That conditionality happened in the case of EU and NATO accession is incontestable. How it worked, and how successfully, remains contested.³ Nevertheless, conditionality can still be easily defined. Conditionality at its most basic is when one actor – in this case, international organizations – links “perceived benefits to another state, such as financial assistance, trade concessions, co-operation agreements, political contacts or even membership, to the fulfilment of certain conditions”.⁴ The EU and NATO demanded certain, and substantial, domestic changes of aspiring member-states in exchange for eventual entry. That process of conditionality was between separate actors and resulted in accession for the aspirant countries and enlargement for the organizations. The process of conditionality that goes to that stage was, to be clear, external conditionality.

As difficult as that external conditionality may have been for the EU, NATO and for the entrant countries, much harder politics has been waged by two international organizations far larger: the Council of Europe (CoE) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).⁵ Now comprised of 47 and 57 states, respectively, they are explicitly aimed at the promotion and consolidation of democracy and human rights and, consequently, the creation of an enduring pan-European peace.

The CoE and OSCE are not exclusively but nevertheless primarily designed to protect and advance political values. To be sure, they offer other benefits as well, and that is intrinsically part of their success. But overwhelmingly, their officials and their supporters in established democracies routinely and emphatically assert that both bodies are fundamentally about democracy and human rights (and in the case of the CoE, also expressly of the rule of law). Being primarily values-based, however, these bodies do not convey immediately tangible and material benefits to their members, and certainly quite simply nothing comparable to that generated by the EU or NATO. To be sure the CSCE, as we shall see in Chapter 2, began in order to moderate the confrontation between the two Cold War sides. Its initial and primary purpose was strategic, but it evolved into normative dimensions, and so much so that several post-Soviet governments today fiercely object to the ways the OSCE operates.

The CoE established a regime in the early 1990s for aspirant member-states to report on their fulfilment of membership obligations; but these were largely to be fulfilled not as conditions of entry but once they were inside the organization (this is discussed in Chapter 2). The OSCE’s precursor, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, accepted all successor states to the Soviet Union as participating states in early 1992. No comparable process of EU external conditionality was imposed on these new members, although all had to sign to the commitments that comprise its core documents. Nor do the CoE and OSCE exercise or carry significant sanctions for member-states that diverge from the norms and practices that are the essence of membership.⁶ Nevertheless, both organizations continue to expect that internal conditionality works – that member-states in the CoE or participating States in the OSCE will strive to meet the internal requirements of belonging.

The potency of internal conditionality should be put in the context of the growing literature that maps the impact of international human rights norms on domestic state practice.⁷ One wants to share the optimism of its conclusions, such as that of one major study that contended that democratization has been “increasing in strength and robustness”.⁸ In that way, the CoE and OSCE are not unique. The idea and practice of internal conditionality is not limited to them. Regional intergovernmental organizations are gaining importance; some argue that they are essential, even the main actors in world politics.⁹ Certainly most countries have multiple memberships, and some regional international institutions have moved towards more intensive requirements for their existing members. In limited form such practice is even deemed true for the United Nations, which despite considerable membership of non-democracies, “has been able and willing to take on tasks of democracy promotion”.¹⁰

The post-Soviet space, however, generates particular concern. First, a word on geocultural terms is beneficial. Post-Soviet is taken to mean current countries that were part of the USSR since its formation in 1922. “Post-Soviet” therefore excludes the Baltic republics. “Post-communist”, however, refers to all current countries that experienced socialist rule, and thus the Baltic, and Central and Southeastern Europe, as well as the former Soviet Union. Post-Soviet countries will, where relevant, be differentiated among themselves by their political practices, collective political statements and by regional state formations. Generally, a core of self-identifying post-Soviet governments have advanced objections to how the OSCE functions and how it appeared to prioritize one dimension of its remit.

Although the post-Soviet space generally formed part of the earlier post-Cold War confidence among democracy’s expansion, this is a region where indicators have regressed concerning democratization and the protection of human rights. Many countries, representing 200 million people across a large swathe of the world’s geography, now live in consolidated authoritarian regimes. They practice elections, and often on the technical, performative level, extremely well. But in such “hybrid authoritarianism”,¹¹ genuine electoral contests have been impossible. In summary of a voluminous, detailed academic literature and of non-governmental study, most post-Soviet states, including Russia, have either not democratized or have become less democratic. Additionally, civil society, NGOs and independent media are stifled, even when their work is not hampered nor their activists’ safety threatened by the authorities.¹² Not only have domestic political conditions not improved, but post-Soviet states have devised specific forms of resistance to values and practices of what they see as these “Western” dominated IOs of the CoE and the OSCE.¹³

As partial or non-compliance with international norms is a fact of international life, these cases demand study in themselves.¹⁴ Post-Soviet Russia has been a case where the conditions for the “necessary and sufficient … spread” of international norms have been seriously hampered.¹⁵ It is also a truism of the study of International Relations and international law that: “Human rights treaties matter most where they have domestic political and legal traction”.¹⁶ The post-Soviet space has given some cause for optimism but it is also an area of significant resistance. It provides important test cases from where – in a period of great optimism – many post-Soviet governments accepted political and legal commitments but then have pulled away from them in practice, even trying to undercut them and the institutions that maintain them. The post-Soviet space therefore both shows the nonlinear implementation of human rights norms and also cases of later resistance to them. The CoE to some important extent but the OSCE to no significant extent have that domestic legal traction. The OSCE rests on political and moral commitments rather than legality. Rather than being global best cases for the development of international norms, the CoE and the OSCE face severe challenges. Success in adversity is more telling than those from situations of advantage.

In addition, compliance with human rights is recognized as the most demanding area for achievement in world politics, with the least developed compliance mechanisms and the least compliance.¹⁷ However, growing evidence suggests that membership of intergovernmental regional organizations promotes and consolidates democracy.¹⁸ The CoE and OSCE provide essential strands of the webs of IOs that are believed to contribute to democratization. Their experience now suggests a different outcome. They have admitted a series of countries that not only challenge the common values that are the essence of both bodies but also work to subvert their influence. In contradistinction to the Baltic or Central European states, many former Soviet governments have come to conceive of their geocultural orientation as, at best, coexisting with “Europe”, or even distinct from it. This self-identification fundamentally challenges the normative pull that NATO and the EU exerted on the Baltic and Central Europe and is largely absent from the CoE and OSCE. Worse still, as the book demonstrates, several of those member-states have for many years worked to evade their institutional commitments and even undermine the organizations themselves.

In the face of these internal challenges the CoE and OSCE have succeeded in clever and subtle ways to achieve their goals against internal resistance from member-states. These processes deserve documentation and analysis. Both the challenges to the organizations and their responses as identified in this book should assist in providing theoretical and policy relevance for world politics, irrespective but also because the roles of regional intergovernmental organizations are seen to be increasing. The book’s premise is the identification and evaluation of a practice that it calls “internal conditionality”.

Neither the CoE nor the OSCE, however, uses such a term. Due to their pervasive sense of participating states being equals, the CoE and particularly the consensus-based OSCE would not want to suggest explicitly that such processes are underway. Indeed, despite clear issues of difference among member-states, permanent staff has insisted that simply by the fact of membership, all states share the institutional values. Thus, using the term “internal conditionality” might encourage more of the criticisms that the organizations have already encountered from detracting member-states. Those attacks include verbal condemnations of a teacher-pupil relationship, of finger-wagging, of a monopoly of what constitutes morality, all underlined by the apparent hypocrisy and double standards often exhibited by individual Western governments and by Western or Western-dominated European institutions.¹⁹ Other measures have been devised to impair the practical functionality of both organizations.

Despite such resistance, both the CoE and the OSCE continue to assume adherence to the collective values and norms or require domestic political changes by their members to move closer to them. For analytical purposes we need not confound ourselves about the meaning of values and norms. Values constitute appropriate principles or standards of behaviour. Norms are mechanisms that tangibly help to achieve or enforce those values in practice. A value would be, for example, declared belief in the merit of democracy; a norm would be states paying for and inviting in international election observation missions to ensure that an election is run according to the agreed international standards. Determination specifically of what the values and norms of the CoE and OSCE are also straightforward. The organizations make these clear. Some permanent staff of the bodies interviewed for this study insisted that because states had signed the organizations’ agreements they unambiguously share the values. Official publications trumpet the shared values. Nevertheless, even carefully-crafted, polite diplomatic exchanges show that member-states challenge the extent to which others share those values; and the norms in practice have been severely challenged. As norms derive from values, the book concentrates primarily on the challenge to the major norms of both IOs.

More difficult than determining the values and norms is how those norms are diffused, shared and transferred, and indeed, when, why and in what ways action can be taken when norm transference is resisted. Such practical determinations are examined through the concept of internal conditionality.

The new member-states, flushed with their national independence in 1991 and keen for international recognition, were expected to embrace the CoE and the CSCE/OSCE’s values and norms.²⁰ Individually and collectively, some member-states have since resisted those values and norms. The organizations have been working, arguably belatedly, to meet the criticisms and challenges of their disaffected, but also nondemocratizing, members. Furthermore, and most importantly, the bodies have been providing more tangible benefits in order for these states to continue their participation.

Internal conditionality does not matter as much if an organization accepts new member-states, or has current ones, that unambiguously meet its normative values. It may well be aspects that we will recognize as internal conditionality that help or encourage member-states to live up to their commitments. Intrinsically “good” people may still be helped to remain law-abiding by reminders of the existence of laws and of the penalties for transgressing them.

In that sense, internal conditionality applies to and benefits everyone. The book’s conclusion suggests that the application of internal conditionality to wayward member-states also requires an expectation that the (self-perceived) well-behaved states will face criticism (whether justified or not). Furthermore, they must be willing to subject themselves to the same scrutiny, and, if appropriate, the same remedial assistance or penalties faced by non-confirming states.

The essence of internal conditionality, however, concerns how IOs deal with recalcitrant member-states and especially those that seek to corrupt or destroy the organization’s values and operational capacity. How internal conditionality has developed in the CoE and the OSCE constitutes the core of this study. The study employs five cases where core values of the organizations were threatened and discusses how the organizations met those challenges through the processes identified here as internal conditionality. These cases are: international election observation; the Chechen wars; abolition of the death penalty; Kazakhstan’s Chairmanship of the OSCE; and Tajikistan’s relations with the OSCE. These cases are meant to cover a range of possibilities – from democratization to open conflict. They also include cases where the IO assigned high and low priority to protecting and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 International Organizations and Internal Conditionality
• 2 The Birth of Internal Conditionality: The Conception and Evolution of the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
• 3 International Election Observation Missions: The Deepest Objections and Greatest Resilience of Internal Conditionality?
• 4 The Council of Europe and the Abolition of the Death Penalty: From External to Internal Conditionality and the Success of Norms over Interests
• 5 Success in the Toughest of Cases: The Normative Surprise over Chechnya from Internal Conditionality
• 6 Tajikistan and the OSCE: The Subtlest Victory of Internal Conditionality
• 7 The Kazakhstan Chairmanship of the OSCE: Internal Conditionality and the Risks of Political Appeasement
• 8 Making Norms Matter: The Theory and Practice of Internal Conditionality
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index