This book argues a position that will come as no surprise to the defenders of international organization—that international organizations matter. It also argues, however, that they matter in a certain way. They do not constitute, of themselves, a ‘new world order’ or a world society. They cannot change the fundamental structure of international society. They cannot produce peace or democratization or rid the world of dictators. But incrementally and over time, they can introduce changes into the more basic institutions that constitute international order. Consequently, the book presents international order as a two-level structure in which fundamental institutions enable and constrain international organizations, while international organizations introduce changes into the fundamental institutions that they generally and habitually support. More precisely, international organizations organize, specify and affect the orderly procedures and social practices that fundamental institutions make possible.
Accordingly this book is about the relations of international organizations with the more fundamental institutions of international society including the ones that Hedley Bull identified in 1977 in The Anarchical Society with inspiration from especially Martin Wight and Charles Manning . To those not familiar with that argument, Bull claimed to have located a ‘deep social structure’ in the apparently anarchical condition of inter-state relations. Working from the postulate that international relationships were orderly and indeed purposive—intended to enable social relations among states—he asked which institutions sustained that order. He posed not only a theoretical but also an empirical and historical question: what regulated state relationships during the period of the Cold War but also prior historical periods? He identified five institutions, understood as ‘a set of habits and practices shaped towards the realisation of common goals’, institutions that ‘serve to symbolize the existence of an international society that is more than the sum of its members, to give substance and permanence to their collaboration in carrying out the political functions of international society, and to moderate their tendency to lose sight of common interests’ (Bull 1977, 74). In addition to the ‘master’ institution or principle of sovereignty, they were diplomacy , international law , the balance of power , great power management and war . In relation to this ‘deep structure’, international organizations like the United Nations (UN) were best seen as ‘pseudo institutions ’ (Bull 1977, xiv). It was not that they did not matter but that they did not provide the fundamentals of international order. According to Bull, their role was to ‘contribute to’, and to sustain the fundamental institutions . The purpose of this book is to inquire how this is done and the implications of ‘how it is done’ for our understanding of what constitutes international order and how change may be brought about in it. As indicated, we believe there is considerably more to say about the role and importance of international organizations in international society than Bull said back in 1977.
The Context of the Argument
Politically the argument of the book relates to the record of non-achievement in specific situations displayed by international organizations over the last decades after a period of high hopes. We refer here to the human rights stalemates; the disappointment over the results, in some cases disastrous, of ‘Responsibility to Protect ’ (R2P) initiatives; and the growing African opposition to the operations of the International Criminal Court and also the failure to complete the Doha Round . This has led to disenchantment on the part of some of the hitherto staunchest supporters of international organizations. Thomas Weiss (2016)—addressing a retreat of UN undersecretaries-general on ‘The Imperative of Change’ at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, April 6, 2016, on inter alia climate change and terrorism—told the officials that ‘the pendulum has swung far, far away from the responsibility of states and their creation – intergovernmental organizations, especially the United Nations – to actually address these problems’.
But this focus on specific failures and setbacks tends to overlook the long-term contributions that international organizations make to international society and world order, such as the restriction of the legitimate resort to force, the routinization of collective great power management, the development of international humanitarian law and the institutionalization of law as binding and enforceable at the UN. On the other hand, however, the mainly pluralist character of the basic institutional structure of international society allows us also to understand how solidarist aspirations, crisis management and problem solving in international organizations may easily fail.
Theoretically it relates to a dispute over world order, whether it is constituted by the legal framework and implementing machineries of international organizations or whether more fundamental ordering principles are at play. There is a pervasive assumption among those who study international organizations that they intercede in or moderate anarchy directly and that they structure it through their rules and procedures (Krasner 1983; Keohane 1989; Ikenberry 2009). This assumption lies behind the charge that the UN is to ‘blame’ for the failure to resolve the civil war in Syria or that international organizations should be given more resources to ‘solve’ world order problems. However even those who share this view often argue, even in the same breath, that international organizations are subject to forces beyond their control—to great power interference, balance of power calculations or the insistence on sovereignty (Ikenberry 2009; Weiss 2014, 2016).
Behind these charges lies the other argument that international organizations reflect more basic ordering principles, with the implication that it is these that must change before ameliorations can come about. The argument is about the role that international organizations can play in the ordering of international relationships and the insistence of some scholars that there is a deeper level of institutions and practices that must be taken into account, not only to meliorate but more basically to understand international organizations and the nature of international order more generally (Bull 1966b, 1977; Claude 1966; Jackson 2000; Hurrell 2007; Hurd 2007).
But what are these basic principles? Putting aside the realist argument that the basic ordering principles of the international system are its anarchical condition and a mechanical balance of power, Hedley Bull (1966a, 1977) was rather lax in spelling out the nature of his fundamental institutions. Was sovereignty a principle, a variable or a practice; was it a shared constitutional idea or merely a convenience of power? What sort of institution was the staggeringly large and sometimes contradictory body of international law? How could diplomacy as a body of rules and practices be at the same time an ‘institution’? How could the balance of power—a notoriously shifting state of affairs—be an ‘institution’? We know how to identify a balance of power in Waltz’s and Mearsheimer’s sense, but where do we find the institution in Wight’s and Bull’s sense? In 2004, K. J. Holsti began to answer these questions in more detail.
Theoretical Inspirations and Foundations
In Taming the Sovereigns: Institutional Change in International Politics , Holsti took on Bull’s argument about the fundamental institutions of international society but made important distinctions among them. In the first place, he made a critical distinction between constitutive rules and regulative practices . A principle like sovereignty was a constitutive rule—it created agency with powers, while a principle like the sanctity of an embassy was a regulative practice—it set rules for how the agents should conduct themselves inter se. Moreover, while not enunciating any particular theory of international organization, he made it apparent that many regulative practices were sited within international organizations.
Barry Buzan , drawing on Holsti, went further. In a book of the same year, which acknowledged Holsti’s approach, he stated the proposition boldly and directly. Introducing the distinction between primary (fundamental) and secondary (international organizations and regimes) institutions, he argued that secondary institutions were developments of primary institutions and were constrained by them. Both were more suggestive of the role of international organizations than fully realized but pointed to a direct relationship between world order and international organization and called directly for a more sustained effort to theorize more fully what role international organizations actually play in the creation and sustenance of world order.
In undertaking that effort, the editors were drawn immediately back to the ‘institutional debate’ of the 1980s. Hidemi Suganami’s (1983) article on ‘British institutionalism ’ pointed to the centrality of historical and sociological institutions in the English School theory of international order. According to that theory, international organizations come into existence through the working of the more basic institutions which give the international system its distinct and orderly character (Suganami 1983, 2365). Suganami was followed by Robert Keohane (‘International Institutions: Two Approaches ’, 1988) who took up the argument from a neoliberal viewpoint. Keohane contrasted the ‘rationalist’ (neoliberal) and the ‘reflective’ (English School, constructivist and post-structuralist) approaches and presented them as equally valid and important understandings of institutions. Although he retreated a little from the reflective approaches, arguing that fundamental institutions are difficult to work with, especially when it comes to deductive explanation (383, 390), Keohane’s conceptualization of institutional conventions and practices was important from our perspective, as it made a bow in the direction of Martin Wight’s (1966, 1977, 1978) and Hedley Bull’s (1977) understanding of fundamental institutions. Also, it situated designed and negotiated international organizations within older constitutive practices and shared understandings of sovereignty and law, which he agreed informed the creation of international organizations. Keohane (1988, 389–390) also agreed with Wight and Bull that the older institutions emerged slowly and that they were often taken for granted by their creators. Furthermore, he called for a synthesis of the two approaches that would allow us to understand the relationship between fundamental institut...