International Organization

Theories and Institutions

J. Barkin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137302403
• eBook ISBN: 9781137356734
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The newly revised and updated edition of International Organization is an introduction to the study of international organizations in the field of International Relations intended for students in the discipline. It looks at the different ways in which IOs are studied and then applies these different modes to a variety of specific case studies.

1

Sovereignty and Globalization

This chapter starts with the distinction between sovereignty and globalization as a way of getting at the big picture of international governance. What is the place of international organizations (IOs) in world politics? IOs, defined here as inclusive intergovernmental organizations, are a relatively new phenomenon in international relations. They first appeared on the scene a little more than a century ago, in a modern state system that had already been around for more than 200 years. Before the advent of inclusive IOs there had been exclusive intergovernmental organizations, such as military alliances, among sovereign states. Predating the state system altogether were important international non-state actors such as the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. But these actors were not intergovernmental—they were not created by states, but rather existed independently of them.

The first organizations created by treaties among states designed to deal with particular problems that a number of states faced in common appeared in the nineteenth century. At first they were designed to address very specific issues of an economic and technical nature, such as creating clear rules for navigation on the Rhine River, delivering international mail, or managing the Pacific fur seal fishery in a sustainable manner.¹ While these narrowly-focused organizations grew slowly in number, they were followed in the wake of World War I (1914–1918) by new organizations with broader remits. The best known of these organizations is the League of Nations, created to help its member nations to maintain international peace and security, and avoid a repeat of the horrors of the war. But other organizations with relatively broad mandates were created as well, such as the International Labour Organization (ILO), the charter of which allows the organization to deal with international labor issues, broadly defined.²

The ILO still exists, and still does roughly the same job envisioned by its creators. The League of Nations does not—it failed to prevent World War II and failed to survive it. In the aftermath of the war, the League was replaced by an even more ambitious organization, the United Nations (UN). A primary goal of the UN, as stated in its Charter, is to deal with the same sorts of issues of international peace and security that the League was supposed to deal with.³ But the UN brings under its umbrella a broad range of organizations that run the gamut of international issues.⁴ Since World War II, the number of IOs has proliferated, slowly at first, and more quickly in the past few decades. According to the Union of International Associations, the number of intergovernmental organizations crossed 1,000 in the early 1980s, and by the early twenty-first century there were more than 5,000 (although the number seems to have held relatively steady for the past decade).⁵

Does this proliferation of IOs fundamentally change the way in which international politics works? International relations scholarship has traditionally regarded the sovereign state as the central institution in international politics. Recently, particularly in the past fifteen years, the concept of globalization has begun to appear in the international relations literature. A key implication of globalization is that the state is losing its autonomy as the central locus of decision-making in international relations. The debate between those who see the sovereign state as the key institution in world politics and those who see the process of globalization as displacing states is a good place to start the discussion of the role of IOs in international relations.

Sovereignty

When we think about international relations, we think primarily about the system of sovereign states. There are two key parts to such a system, what we might call internal sovereignty and external sovereignty. Internal sovereignty refers to autonomy, the ability of the state to make and enforce its own rules domestically. External sovereignty refers to the recognition of the state by other states, the acceptance of the state by the international community.⁶ States do not necessarily have equal levels of both kinds of sovereignty. Taiwan, for example, has a level of internal sovereignty that is equivalent to that of many other industrialized countries. But it does not have full external sovereignty, and as a result cannot participate in many UN activities that lead to the creation of international rules. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, by contrast, has full external sovereignty, and can thus participate more fully in international activities. But it has limited internal sovereignty because it has no control over what happens in much of its territory. Similarly, the government of Somaliland, a breakaway territory in the northwest of Somalia, governs far more effectively than the official government of Somalia, but is not recognized internationally as sovereign, whereas the government of Somalia, despite an almost complete lack of internal sovereignty, is.⁷

The sovereign state system has not always been the central organizing feature of international relations. Empires, rather than sovereign states, wrote much of the political history of ancient civilizations, and the feudal era in Europe featured overlapping and territorially indistinct patterns of political authority. The genesis of the current system of states has often been dated back to 1648, when the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War by diminishing the political role of many tiers of the feudal nobility. While this is a simplification of history, much of the system of sovereign states as we know it emerged in seventeenth-century Europe.⁸

One important feature of sovereignty, however, changed fundamentally in the nineteenth century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, princes were sovereign. From the perspective of the international community, a country was the property of its ruler, and representatives of the country represented the interests of the ruler rather than of the population. Beginning in the nineteenth century, and even more so in the twentieth, citizens became sovereign. Rulers became representative of their populations, rather than the other way around.⁹ In the twentieth century, even dictators usually claimed to be ruling in the interests of the people, rather than for their own gain. This meant that although countries still warred with their neighbors to increase their territory, they also became more likely to cooperate with their neighbors to maximize the welfare of their citizens. This helps to explain the genesis of intergovernmental cooperation through IOs in the nineteenth century.

Globalization

But is this cooperation, and the increased prevalence of IOs that results from it, undermining sovereignty? The most popular set of arguments that it is can be called the globalization approach.¹⁰ This approach begins with the observation that a set of transnational forces, ranging from mobile investment capital to global environmental degradation, is limiting the ability of states to make independent policy decisions. There are two effects of these forces. The first is an increasing tendency to act multilaterally rather than unilaterally—in other words, to create and act through IOs.¹¹ The other effect is to mold policy to fit the dictates of international economic forces.¹² A combination of these effects can be seen in many issue-areas. In international trade issues, for example, many states participate in the World Trade Organization (WTO) for fear of being ignored by international investors and transnational corporations (TNCs) if they do not.

Globalization can undermine both internal and external sovereignty. It can undermine internal sovereignty by diminishing state autonomy. The more practical decision-making power is transferred from governments to both IOs and nongovernmental actors, the less ability states have to meaningfully make policy decisions. This can affect some states more than others. The United States, for example, has much more input into the making and changing of WTO rules than, say, Singapore, even though Singapore, being much more of a trading nation than the United States, is affected more by the rules. Critics of globalization also hold it responsible for what is called a regulatory “race to the bottom,” in which governments compete to get rid of labor and environmental regulations in order to attract investment by internationally mobile capital.¹³ Countries can avoid this phenomenon, goes the argument, but only at great economic cost.

Globalization can undermine external sovereignty by loosening the monopoly of the sovereign state system on international political activity. This argument suggests that the more decision-making autonomy that IOs get, the more scope private actors such as NGOs have to participate in international policy-making, and the weaker the traditional state system becomes. This would help to create a system of global governance beyond international politics, understood narrowly as the relations among states. Furthermore, the more that IOs are looked to as the arbiters of regulation internationally, the more TNCs may be able to avoid being subject to national regulations, further weakening the state system. Of those who see IOs as helping to undermine state autonomy, some see it as a good thing, others as a bad thing. Some human rights and environmental activists, for example, see internationalization as the only effective check on regulatory races to the bottom.¹⁴ Others see IOs as contributing to the problem by forcing on countries international rules pertaining to issues such as trade, which are not sensitive to local conditions or problems.¹⁵

These sorts of arguments are not new. In the early days of the Cold War, proponents of world government saw it as the best way to avoid perhaps the ultimate transnational problem, large-scale nuclear war.¹⁶ Opponents of world government saw it as akin to losing the Cold War, as a means of selling out our values to a global lowest common denominator. The language of the debate has changed from world government to globalization, and the idea of a centralized world government has given way to one of a more diffuse form of global governance. However, the basic issues being debated have not changed fundamentally. But are those who believe that globalization is undermining sovereignty right?

Realism, Internationalism, and Universalism

One organizational framework that might help us to address this question is provided by Hedley Bull in The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics.¹⁷ Bull speaks of three traditions of thought in understanding the problem of international order: the realist tradition, the internationalist tradition, and the universalist tradition. The realist tradition sees states in a situation of anarchy, with little to constrain them except the power of other states. The internationalist tradition sees international relations as taking place within a society of states: states are the primary actors, but they are bound by this society’s rules of behavior. The universalist tradition looks not to international politics, understood as politics among states, but to a global politics, which represents people directly as individuals rather than through states. Each of these three traditions takes a very different view of IOs, and each view can be instructive in helping us to understand the role of these organizations in international relations.

Realism looks to the role of IOs in international relations with some skepticism. For realists, the ultimate arbiter of outcomes in international relations is power. Outcomes can be expected to favor those with the most power, or those who bring their power to bear most effectively. And for realists, in the contemporary world, states are the organizations with the most power. States control most of the planet’s military power, have an ability to tax that is not shared by any other institution, and are the issuers of the world’s currencies.¹⁸ International organizations share none of these features. Having no independent military capability, they depend on states to enforce their rules. Having no ability to tax, they depend on states to fund them. Having no territory, they depend on states to host them. As such, IOs can only really succeed when backed by powerful states. For realists, then, it makes little sense to focus attention on IOs, because IOs reflect the existing balance of power and the interests of powerful states. As such, it makes more sense to understand IOs as tools in the power struggles of states, than as independent actors or independent effects.¹⁹

The internationalist tradition has roots in the study of international law rather than in the study of power politics. It sees states in international society as somewhat analogous to people in domestic society. Domestic society works because most people follow most of its rules most of the time. Similarly, analysts of the internationalist tradition argue that most states follow most international law most of the time.²⁰ At any given point in time, the argument goes, there are generally accepted rules about how states should relate to each other, and we cannot understand international politics without looking at those rules. Even during times of war, when we would expect international society to be at its weakest, states usually follow certain rules of acceptable conduct. They do not necessarily do this out of altruism, in the same way that people in domestic society do not necessarily follow laws out of altruism. Rather, they recognize that they all benefit from a society that is rule-governed, and are therefore willing to accept rules if those rules bind others as well. From this perspective, IOs become the expressions of the rules that govern international society. Whether or not IOs have an independent effect as actors in international relations depends on whether they create the rules, or simply oversee rules created by agreement among states. But in either case, IOs are important because they regulate relations among states. It is important to note here, though, that from this perspective, states are still seen as the primary actors in international relations.

The universalist tradition differs fundamentally from both the realist and internationalist traditions in that it is not state-centric. Whereas the internationalist tradition sees states as constrained by the norms of a society of states, the universalist tradition sees states as increasingly irrelevant in the face of a developing global society, a society of people rather than of states. This tradition shares with the internationalist tradition the presupposition that domestic society works as much because its population accepts its rules as because the state enforces them. The difference is that the internationalist tradition applies this by analogy to states, whereas the universalist tradition applies it to people globally.²¹ The greater the extent to which global civil society comes to be governed by a set of rules and behavioral norms shared across different peoples and cultures, the greater the extent to which it is this civil society, rather than the society of states, that guides global politics. In this tradition, IOs are more important as expressions of, and creators of, global civil society than they are as regulators of relations among states.²² Accordingly, IOs should be studied as partial replacements for states rather than as mediators among states.

Approaching the sovereignty/globalization debate from the perspective of these three traditions, we get three different answers to what is happening. The pure realist answer to the question of the future of sovereignty is that the sovereign state system is continuing much the same as always. States remain the locus of power in the int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Acronyms
• Preface
• Introduction: The State and International Organizations
• Chapter 1: Sovereignty and Globalization
• Chapter 2: Power and Interdependence
• Chapter 3: Regimes and Institutions
• Chapter 4: Efficiency and Ideas
• Chapter 5: The United Nations and Its System
• Chapter 6: From International to Human Security
• Chapter 7: The Institutions of Collective Security
• Chapter 8: Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid
• Chapter 9: Economic Institutions and Trade
• Chapter 10: International Finance
• Chapter 11: Development
• Chapter 12: The Environment
• Chapter 13: The Technical Details
• Chapter 14: The Fuzzy Borders of Intergovernmentalism
• Chapter 15: Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Index