Routledge Handbook of International Organization

Bob Reinalda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134113057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

This Handbook brings together scholars whose essays discuss significant issues with regard to international organization as a process and international organizations as institutions. Although the focus is on intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are discussed where relevant. The handbook is divided into six parts:

• Documentation, Data Sets and Sources
• International Secretariats as Bureaucracies
• Actors within International Bureaucracies
• Processes within International Bureaucracies
• Challenges to International Organizations, and
• Expanding International Architectures.
  

The state-of-the-art articles are meant to encourage current and future generations of scholars to enjoy working in and further exploiting the field and are also of great interest to practitioners of international organization and global governance

1

International organization as a field of research since 1910

Bob Reinalda

The international relations’ (IR) subfield of ‘international organization’ (IO) is quite old and still widening. Although ‘international regime’ and ‘international institution’ became broader terms, no one has suggested using these to indicate the subfield. International organization is a set term used by political scientists, as well as scholars from other disciplines such as international law, economics and anthropology. When political scientist Paul Reinsch published his Public International Unions: Their Work and Organization in 1911, he argued that traditional ideas of international law were in need of revision: ‘the realm of international organization is an accomplished fact’ (Reinsch 1911: 4).

Within the restrictions of an article and aware that reality is far more detailed and nuanced, this chapter attempts to sketch the emergence and evolution of the field as an invitation to current and future generations of scholars to enjoy working in it. International organization is a dynamic field of research that adds to our understanding of international relations and related domestic politics.

The early years of the field

When Reinsch published his book various institutions had begun to document international relations and international organizations, among them the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the United States (US), set up in 1910 to hasten the abolition of international war. It published the somewhat older journal International Conciliation as the first professional journal in the field of IR. Andrew Carnegie, who had helped to establish numerous public and university libraries, also contributed to the Peace Palace Library, opened in The Hague in 1913, which specialized in international law and diplomacy to service the various international courts in the same building. The first listings of IOs were published by the Institut international de la paix in the first series of L’Annuaire de la vie internationale (Monaco, 1905–7). The volumes of the second series (1908–9) were coproduced with the Union of International Associations (set up 1908 in Brussels under the patronage of the Belgian government) and the 1910 and 1911 editions were published with the support of the Carnegie Endowment. The League of Nations continued these series by publishing similar sourcebooks in French and English as Répertoire des organisations internationales/Handbook of International Organizations (1921, 1923), Répertoire des organisations internationales (1925, 1936) and Handbook of International Organizations (1926, 1929, 1938).

British and American delegates at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference conceived the idea of an Anglo-American institute of international affairs, but it resulted in two separate independent think tanks, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (also known as Chatham House), founded in London in 1921, and the Council on Foreign Relations, set up in Washington, DC in 1922. Rather than being public opinion-focused, the Graduate Institute of International Relations in Geneva was established in 1927 as an academic institution awarding degrees. Other philanthropic organizations supporting scholarship in IR were the Rockefeller Foundation, established in 1913, and the Ford Foundation of 1936. Olson and Groom (1991) believe that the field barely could have progressed in this formative era without such philanthropic assistance, but also refer to the negative effect that scholars sometimes were tempted to trim their proposals according to the whims of foundation officers. An incentive to study world affairs objectively came from the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, which began its work in Paris in 1926 under League of Nations auspices. One of its activities was to encourage joint research by scientists from different states into, among other topics, IR. Thus, during the 1930s, subjects such as collective security, peaceful change and the use of economic policy as a means to peace were placed on the agenda. The subject of IOs was agreed upon in 1939, just before the outbreak of the war. Olson and Groom (1991: 74–6) showed that the study of IR could develop only in a few democratic countries, where it enjoyed indirect government support without being subject to official control, whereas in authoritarian states the study existed as an explanation and justification of state policy.

With regard to international organization the young study of IR inclined towards what may be called ‘global social engineering’ based on ‘grand design’. Both the social-liberal economist John Hobson (1915) and the publisher and publicist Leonard Woolf (1916) used the term ‘international government’ when they published detailed plans for an international peace organization. These plans were based on the idea that peace as a condition had to be actively and jointly promoted. The experiences of nineteenth-century IOs, called public international unions (see Reinsch’s book title and Reinalda 2009), were manifested in their encompassing plans. With regard to fundamental ideas, Hobson and Woolf built upon those individuals who had much earlier put forward so-called peace plans, such as the Abbé de Saint Pierre (see Ter Meulen 1917), and the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant (Perpetual Peace, 1795), in which these philosophers had advanced proposals for the creation of IOs through the designing of structures and the assignment of functions to these structures.

Based upon 14 IR textbooks published between 1919 and 1931, Olson and Groom (1991: 69) showed the various topics the textbook authors discuss, listed in order of frequency. Of the nine topics, ‘international organization’ holds second place, after ‘diplomatic history’ (first place) and before ‘economic aspects of world affairs’ (third) and ‘international law’ (fifth). Between 1931, the year in which the League of Nations failed to stem Japanese aggression in Manchuria, and 1941, when the US entered the Second World War, the mainstream IR texts continued to cover IOs designed to prevent war, consistent with the literature of the previous period. Olson and Groom (1991: 69) asked the question as to what extent this literature was ‘idealist internationalist’. They concluded that the literature of the 1920s did not particularly reflect this paradigm.

All of the authors possessed an international, as contrasted to a narrowly nationalistic, outlook. None of them thought for a moment that war as a human institution was over for good. To be sure, public opinion was now more important than ever before, but it served only to extend the political process, not to replace it.

They believed it was ‘not an exaggeration to say that the new IR literature was designed to overcome some of the dubious assumptions and hopeful expectations of the idealists, widespread as their influence may seem to have been’. They discovered neither internationalist nor idealist predominance in the approximately 40 textbooks published in the entire period between 1916 and 1941. ‘Even if by “idealist” we mean no more than stressing the efficacy of law and organization, only about half of these can be said to be even primarily idealistic in tone’ (Olson and Groom 1991: 81).

A new way of thinking about cooperation between states

David Mitrany’s (1948) liberal-utilitarian or functional-sociological approach can be seen to be in the global social engineering tradition, as he tried to look beyond the fighting during the Second World War. Using experience in wartime cooperation in shipping and the work of the League of Nations, he developed his ideas about functionalism ‘as the basis for postwar planning’ (Olson and Groom 1991: 98). Given the League’s weaknesses his approach of a ‘working peace system’ was opposed to the political-constitutional approach dominant during the interwar period. Rather than beginning with the design of federal arrangements, such as the grand design of the League, with all their attendant legal and constitutional difficulties, Mitrany suggested that international cooperation should begin ‘by dealing with specific transnational issues (such as disease control) where there was some prospect of applying specialised technical knowledge and where the success of such “functional” arrangements would lead to further efforts to replicate the experience in an ever-widening process’ (Griffiths 1999: 191). Although his theoretical approach has been subject to grave criticisms, Mitrany attempted to introduce a new way of thinking about cooperation between states and as such has contributed to the development of the subfield of international organization.

Among those who built upon Mitrany’s work was Ernest Haas, who recognized the difficulty of separating ‘technical’ from ‘political’ issues and attempted to understand the process whereby governmental elites are persuaded to shift their loyalties towards facilitating cooperation between their states, even if the gains from cooperation are unequally distributed. The formal institutions needed for this have to enjoy some autonomy from national governments in order to be effective and the whole process cannot work unless states accept the rule of law and majoritarian decision making. Progress on more technical and economic issues, with ‘spill over’ from one policy field to another, will lead to greater political cooperation and a decline of state sovereignty. In the early 1970s this neo-functionalism influenced the study of regional (Western European) integration. Its theoretical foundation was criticized and Haas (1975) himself was disenchanted with it. However, his approach clarified the ability of ‘political entrepreneurs to apply consensual knowledge to the solution of common problems’ (Griffiths 1999: 182).

Another student of closer relations between governments was Karl Deutsch, who in 1945 was a member of the international secretariat of the San Francisco Conference that established the United Nations (UN). In his work with other scholars (Deutsch et al. 1957) he pointed out that sovereign states can relate to each other in the form of ‘pluralistic security communities’. With regard to the emergence of such a community in the North Atlantic area Deutsch did not accept a strong dichotomy between domestic politics and IR, nor did he see states as unified rational actors, since he regarded domestic politics and transnational relations as influences on relations between states. Both transactions between populations and the growth of integrative practices and institutions matter in generating diplomatic techniques that can diffuse problems and crises peacefully, the mutual willingness of governments to resolve their differences at an organizational level and a common perception of threat regarding external actors (Griffiths 1999: 179).

Deutsch and the so-called English School of Hedley Bull and others (see later) can be positioned in the political thought that goes back to Hugo Grotius, by recognizing that an ‘international society’ exists when a group of states recognize certain common interests and values, regard themselves as bound by certain rules and share in the working of common institutions, such as customs and conventions of war, procedures of international law and the machinery of diplomacy and general international organization (Bull 1977: 13). This vision was not dominant in IR (realism was), but students of integration such as Haas and Deutsch ‘undermined realism by first selecting developments in international relations that fitted realist predictions poorly and then explaining those developments by processes and actors outside the state’ (Kahler 1997: 33).

Realism: less and more nuanced

The process of international organization also promoted the development of public international law as an academic discipline. During the nineteenth century the concept of the ‘law of nations’, as deriving from the law of nature, was steadily being abandoned and was moving towards positivism. But although international law developed as a system of rules governing the relations between sovereign states, and as such influenced thinking about IR, it has grown beyond that, with an open mind on the process of international organization and multilateral legal rule making.

The introduction of the concept of ‘power politics’ in IR theory as it was breaking away from international law caused the first great debate between different schools, with ‘realists’ on the one hand, armed with a theory grounded in human nature and state action and therefore prescient in its reading of IR, and liberal institutionalists on the other, often referred to as ‘idealists’, ‘wedded to legal and institutional analysis and blind to the requirements of power politics’ (Kahler 1997: 21). German emigrant Hans Morgenthau introduced the Continental European emphasis on power politics in American political science, which was professionalizing, and through the ‘Chicago School’ adopting the model of natural science for its research. However, when Morgenthau arrived in Chicago in 1943 his vision was not particularly welcomed, as the scientific movement of the 1920s and 1930s shared more goals and personnel with liberal institutionalism than it did with realism. ‘Power politics was a dirty and forbidden word in the Chicago of his time’ (ibid.: 26).

Nonetheless, realism ultimately established itself as the dominant IR paradigm with Edward Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1940) and Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations (1948). A caveat applies with regard to the term ‘idealistic’. Cecelia Lynch (1994: 594) argued that Carr’s labelling of peace actors as ‘utopian’, as opposed to ‘realist’, has created a stigma around attempts by social forces to influence the course of IR. ‘This stigma has endured in both popular and theoretical parlance over the past fifty years and should be re-examined’, as it prevents research into what actually happened. Portraying world federalists and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as clumsy and insignificant obscured both their often very practical contributions to the functioning of IOs and the implementation of their policies, and the goodwill they created by their distribution of knowledge about the purposes and activities of IOs among citizens: qualities stressed by Mitrany and Deutsch. During the 1950s, IOs and international law were ‘hardly regarded as the most exciting frontiers of research in the field’, according to Kahler (1997: 29), as they had been ‘tarred with the idealist brush’.

Realists recognize the existence of international law and IOs, but are ‘careful not to overstate their importance in the search for power and peace’ (Archer 2001: 122). Morgenthau in fact did pay attention to international law and organizations, which is to be appreciated, but he saw their contribution as ‘modest’ and as part of the general intercourse between states and governments. Functional IOs, even the UN, were not given any particular role in solving the problem of peace and transnational and international NGOs were not given real consideration. Morgenthau (1993: 255) characterized international law as ‘primitive’. Neo-realist Kenneth Waltz (1979: 88) followed suit, neglecting IOs by arguing that they ‘reveal their inability to act in important ways except with the support, or at least the acquiescence, of the principal states concerned with the matters at hand’.

Inis Claude, Jr in his Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization (1956, third edition 1964) provided a far more balanced approach, with his discussion of historical backgrounds, constitutional problems and approaches to peace through international organization. Like other realists, he saw international organization as a product of international politics between states, but his open mind allowed him to also see ‘a mutuality of interaction, with international organization becoming a factor influencing the course of international politics’ between states (Claude 1966: 7). He predicted that international organization might prove to be ‘the most significant dynamic element in the developing reality of international relations’ (Claude 1966: 4).

Claude’s focus on intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) to a large extent excluded the realm of NGOs from his scope. F.S.L. Lyons, who, supported by the Council of Europe, published his Internationalism in Europe 1815–1914 in 1963, included both IGOs and international NGOs. He found it curious that historians had largely neglected the nineteenth-century experiments in international government and organization, while international lawyers and political scientists had long studied them (Lyons 1963: 4). However, the historians’ lack of attention is linked to the same dominant suggestion of IOs as not-really-important instruments of nation-states (see Rodogno et al. in this volume).

The field of international organization became well informed about IGOs after the trustees of the World Peace Foundation had decided in the spring of 1946 ‘to take definite action toward the dissemination of accurate information and informed comment on the manifold problems of international organization’, a field that was becoming ‘an increasingly important part of the study and understanding of international relations’. The requirement of ‘a comparative knowledge of international organizations and why they have or have...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables and annexes
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• This volume
• 1. International organization as a field of research since 1910
• Part I: Documentation, data sets and sources
• Part II: International secretariats as bureaucracies
• Part III: Actors within international bureaucracies
• Part IV: Processes within international bureaucracies
• Part V: Challenges to international organizations
• Part VI: Expanding international architectures
• Index