Constructing the World Polity

Essays on International Institutionalisation

John Gerard Ruggie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134856763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ruggie is one of the most important and influential International Relations theorists of the last twenty years Brings together in one volume Ruggie's most influential theoretical ideas Includes extensive introduction and material covered by essays is contextualised throughout the book Controversial - includes an extended critique of mainstream theorizing

Part I
International organization

“I wouldn’t start from here if I were you”

1 The new institutionalism in international relations

This first section of this chapter is based on 1972a, the rest on 1975b, supplemented by brief excerpts from 1972b and 1978a. Though the two core articles were written at different times and for different purposes, they were part of a systematic effort to reconceptualize the fundamental features of international organization.

Devising a simple microeconomic formulation of choice under constraints, extended by the analytics of collective goods, 1972a sought to show how unlikely it was that the process of international organization would approximate the expectation that it was part of some evolutionary trend whereby authority was transferred to ever higher and more encompassing political entities.

The 1975b article challenged another assumption of the traditional literature, that international organization is what international organizations do. Drawing on sociological and organization theory, it suggested that international institutionalization could take the form of “epistemic communities” and “regimes” as well as formal organizations. In addition, the article developed a conception of international authority that was consistent with a “modified Westphalian” view of the international polity.

Finally, the discussion of structure throughout, and most explicitly in 1972b, reflected thinking in a variety of fields on the inadequacy of prevailing “pyramidal” models of social structure, ranging from organization theory to urban planning and the beginnings of post-modernist literary theory.

Each article drew on illustrative cases from international cooperation in science, technology and the human environment in the 1960s and early 1970s; 1975b was the introductory essay to an edited volume on that subject. I have omitted most of these empirical references because they are dated, leaving mainly the exposition of key concepts. In addition, the microeconomic model in 1972a is presented here in narrative form only; a more elaborate technical exposition seemed necessary in the original because the approach was relatively novel at the time. None of the sections reproduced have been substantively altered however.

Waltz (1979:197) used the word “deft” to describe 1972a, which is still cited as a Model-T on the road to neohberal institutionalism, though my own interests subsequently led me to take a different theoretical direction. Keohane generously wrote about 1975b that it “foreshadowed much of the conceptual work of the next decade” (1990b: 755).

As a field of study, international organization has always concerned itself with the same phenomenon: in the words of a classic text (Mower 1931), it is an attempt to describe and explain “how the modern Society of Nations governs itself.” In that text, the essence of “government” was assumed to comprise the coordination of group activities so as to conduct the public business, and the particular feature distinguishing international government was taken to lie in the necessity that it be consistent with national sovereignty. Few contemporary treatments of international organization differ significantly from this definition.

At the same time, the literature suffers the debilitating effects of two sets of assumptions. The strong version of the first is that international organization is whatever international organizations do (Claude 1956, 1971 is a rare text that casts its analytical net more broadly). The weak version is that international organizations are closely involved in the process of international governance. The strong version is debilitating because it rules out too much, above all the many informal and tacit ways by which states conduct their “public business” collectively. And the weak version offers no formulation of the broader process of governance in which international organizations may—or may not—be involved, thus providing no basis for assessing their actual roles and importance.

In recent years, and to some extent all along, thinking about international organization has also been strongly shaped by “functionalist” premises, the belief that specialized international structures evolve in a quasi-automatic manner to perform new tasks or fulfill new needs as they arise (see Sewell 1966 for a good review). This is especially the case in considerations of the impact of science and technology on international relations, where technocratic and ecological “imperatives” loom large. The boldest variant of functionalism actually posits the existence of evolutionary trends: that in reacting and adapting to its environment, humanity will build for itself everhigher forms of sociopolitical organization, from tribes to baronies, from national states to global authorities:

The long-run trend toward integration seems to be for functions, authority and loyalties to be transferred from smaller units to larger ones; from states to federations; from federations to supranational unions; and from these to super-systems.

(Etzioni 1966:147)

Neofunctionalism is the least presumptuous and most social-scientific variant of functionalism in international relations theory (see Haas 1966 for an overview). Nevertheless, even though shorn of teleology, neofunctionalism still attributes significant existential autonomy to the integrative potential of “functional contexts.” But functional contexts do not exist apart from particular configurations of actor attributes in relation to any given issue: different actors’ differing objectives, pursued with unequally distributed resources, define “functional” contexts. In addition, neofunctionalism still retains the implausible working hypothesis that state-like forms of organization will emerge at the level “beyond the nation state” (Haas 1964).

As models of the process of international organization, all versions of functionalism ultimately rest on an apolitical understanding of “how the modern Society of Nations governs itself.” And as models of the structure of international organization, they hold the expectation that international governance ultimately will conform to hierarchically ordered relations between superordinate and subordinate units, characteristic of Weber’s rational-legal notion of domestic authority. The problem with both premises is that, at bottom, they are inconsistent with national sovereignty and the structure of the modern world polity.¹ As a result, the enterprise is doomed to theoretical and practical failure by its very nature.

I, too, am interested in the possibility of new international policies and arrangements, in new aims and expectations that national actors may come to hold, and in new forms of global sociopolitical organization. But I do not equate international organization with the activities of international organizations, and I make no assumptions about policies or institutions evolving in quasi-automatic fashion from new functional contexts or springing from new and inherently international needs. My starting point is the international political system as it is. Given that perspective, the relevant questions about international organization become: When and how do states choose to organize activities internationally? What particular modes of organization—coordination, collaboration, integration—are selected under what conditions? And what are their consequences for the manner in which political life is organized, both nationally and internationally?

This chapter is organized as follows. The first section sketches out a model of the core logic of choice under different kinds of constraints that characterizes national decisions about international organization in a system governed by national sovereignty. The second section proposes a conceptual framework for analyzing the forms in which states’ decisions to organize internationally become institutionalized collectively. And the third section develops an understanding of authority relations that remains consistent with the structure of the international polity and yet allows for the possibility that international authority will emerge from the processes of institutionalization.

CHOICE

The contemporary interstate system is here viewed as a modified Westphalia system (Gross 1968; Falk 1969). Since the Peace of Westphalia, the interstate system, in principle, has been a decentralized one: states are subject to no external earthly authority, and there exists no organization above states, only between them. The Westphalia system consists of a multiplicity of independent states, each sovereign within its territory, and each legally equal to every other. This system recognizes only one organizing principle, the will of states, thereby giving the collective decision-making system its decentralized character. In practice, the Westphalia system has become partially but progressively modified: spheres of influence modify the principle of equality; supranational actors modestly modify the principle of no external earthly superior authority; an ever more complex pattern of interconnectedness of decisions, events, and developments modifies the principle of independence. And to the extent that states subsequently “will” collective principles and forms of decision-making, the decentralized character of the system is itself modified—much as a market economy is modified by governmental intervention and regulation. In fact, one can sensibly speak of an interstate system only insofar as the systematic collective organization of activities exists, however informal or minimal it may be.

The general model

Our analysis of the process of international organization will begin with the least complex case: one state producing one good (performing one task); and the least complex issue: what combination of international and national efforts that state will choose in doing so. In the modified Westphalian world described above, a state can be expected to tend toward international production to the extent it lacks sufficient capabilities to produce the good itself. The state’s resources may be inadequate because it does not have enough of them, or because the extant definition of property rights places the source of the problem within the jurisdiction of another. International, for the time being, will refer to any non-national form.

At the same time, however, cooperating with and thereby becoming dependent on others for the production of a good itself poses a problem for the state by giving rise to “interdependence costs” (Buchanan and Tullock 1962), reckoned in such terms as circumscribed options or general loss of autonomy. These costs are incurred over and above the more direct payments, to whatever institutional arrangement the state has selected, for the actual production costs. Given our assumptions, even though interdependence costs may not appear significant or may not be calculable for any one particular instance, over the long run a state is expected to keep these costs to the least necessary level. Hence, in calculating whether to organize activities internationally, a state will include not only the direct gains and the direct costs of producing a good with others, but also the overall interdependence costs of international organization.

Thus we arrive at our basic proposition: the propensity for international organization will be determined by the interplay between the need to become dependent on others for the production of a specific good (or performance of a specific task), and the general desire to keep that dependence to the minimum level necessary. And the equilibrium point for the state under consideration is defined where the marginal benefit gained by one extra unit of international production, less the extra cost of producing it internationally (direct and interdependence costs), equals zero (Bator 1957).

A number of important corollaries follow from this basic proposition. First, and comparing states with different levels of capabilities, there will be an inverse relationship between the ratio of international over national production (i/n) and the total level of national capabilities: smaller (less capable) states will exhibit a higher ratio of i/n; larger (more capable) states, a lower ratio. Second, it follows that as the capabilities of states change over time so, too, will the ratio of i/n: as national capabilities increase, the ratio will decrease.

Hence—and most critically—built into the international performance of any given task is a process of encapsulation, ending in a situation where no further commitments are made, and in which no further increase in the scope of the collective arrangement nor in its institutional capacity occurs. The processes of “task-expansion” and “spillover” that neofunctionalists expect cannot take place, therefore, unless the factors held constant in our model are also shown to change. Thus, to predict the growth of collective arrangements internationally, it will not do simply to point to new problems that states will face (such as those generated by science, technology, or the human environment), and then to posit new tasks for international arrangements. For unless the constants also change, such growth will be truncated. ^*

Collective goods

This general model describes only an exceedingly restrictive case: no direct interaction between states; completely undifferentiated tasks or activities; and in which the international organizational arrangement is simply any nonnational form. Yet we know that the activities of one state are affected by others and, in turn, have consequences for others—that there is a collective dimension to the behavior of states. And we know that different kinds of activities lead to different forms of organizational arrangements internationally. Here I will seek to demonstrate, in a manner consistent with the general model, that different kinds of activities will lead to different organizational forms—not because of a priori substantive differences, however, but because of the impact the collective dimension of states’ behavior may exhibit.

According to the classical definitions, goods and services are of two polar types: purely private or purely collective, or public (Samuelson 1945; Head 1962; Buchanan 1968). Purely private goods and services can be parceled out among different individuals in such a way that the total quantity available to the group equals the sum of the quantities available to the individuals within the group. Purely collective goods are common to the group in that their benefits are perfectly indivisible among the separate individuals, so that the total quantity available to the group is precisely the same as that available to any member of the group, and no one individual’s consumption of the good in any way subtracts from the consumption of it by any other.

Thus, were A’s production of a good to exhibit the attributes of pure publicness, the benefits of A’s activity would be extended to each and every member of the entire system. If those benefiting from A’s production fail to pay for those benefits, and if state A acts in accordance with our assumptions, then A would cease the activity that provides the collective benefits, or seek to have their production organized collectively. In its pure form, public goods would appear to be limited to very special cases indeed. A closer examination of the concept reveals two major dimensions, however, yielding a more discrete and more broadly applicable fourfold classification.

The first dimension of a collective good is that it may be “indivisible” or in “joint supply.” By joint supply is meant that once the good or service is produced or performed, for and by one producer, its extension to others is facilitated: once produced, any given unit of the good can be made equally available to all. And, up to a point, its extension to any additional individual does not imply a corresponding reduction in the quantity of the good available to others (Head 1962:201–207). Simply because such an indivisibility exists, however, does not necessarily imply that the good must be made equally available to all; it may be perfectly possible to exclude outsiders. It means only that the opportunity cost of extending the good or service to any additional individual may be negligible.

There is a second basic dimension of a collective good. It may, in fact, be impossible to exclude others from sharing, or to charge them the full cost of sharing, the benefits of the good. (Or it may be impossible to exclude oneself from the suffering caused by the production of a good by others, or to obtain compensation for such suffering.) Here, a state would confront an “impossibility of exclusion,” or a “nonappropriability of costs” (ibid.). But impossibility of exclusion or nonappropriability of costs do not necessarily mean that the good in question is in joint supply; in the technical sense the good may be perfectly divisible. What is implied is that there exist “imperfections in property titles,” making it impossible to contain benefits or exclude suffering.

These two dimensions of a collective good yield a fourfold classification.

(1) Divisibility and appropriability

In the strict sense employed here, A’s production of a good or service that is perfectly divisible and from which others can be kept from benefiting (or be charged for benefiting) exhibits no collective dimension whatever. Yet, it is the production of just these goods and services that accounts for most of the activities of international organizations. This is the case in part for the kinds of reasons explicated in the general model: deficiency of national capabilities. In addition, states may bring to bear various efficiency considerations, such as economies of scale, and therefore seek the collaborative production of a particular good or service. Simply in order to be able to do what they cannot now do, or to do more—or more efficiently—what they are already doing, states may enter into international arrangements that facilitate these objectives.

What kinds of organizational arrangements would these be? Their purpose, clearly, would be to facilitate or enhance particular national capacities—to enlarge the range of what is technically possible for their members. But their role would likely be limited to the simple pooling or coordination of national activities. For given the grounds for entering into such arrangements in the first place, the interdependence costs of more demanding organizational forms would quickly exceed the benefits obtained from them.

(2) Joint supply and appropriability

The second case arises when the product of A’s activities is in joint supply, in the sense that extension of the good to others is facilitated, even though others can be excluded or charged for it. If other states were of the impression that A would supply the good or service in any case, they would have no incentive to contribute to its production. But even if others were willing to contribute, the opportunity cost of supplying the good or service to the last user might well be negligible. In all probability, A would try to charge average costs, but so long as any state were willing to pay marginal costs a socially suboptimal outcome would exist by excluding any such state. Finding itself in a dilemma of this kind, A has a number of available options: exclude others and ignore the social pressure that may result; extend the good to others and absorb the cost; cease the production and deny itself the benefit of the good; or seek to organize production internationally in the first place, with all contributing from the beginning. Any of these are possible, depending on circumstances.

What kinds of international arrangements would these be? Their purpose would no longer be merely to enhance or facilitate national capabilities or actions. They would also be designed to compensate for the decentralized structure of the interstate decision-making system that created the inefficiencies. Modest forms would include joint observation, surveillance and monitoring, thereby enhancing the transparency of the condition of jointness, and facilitating movement toward greater social efficiency. Where symmetry in jointness among states is approximated (that is, where a number of states are in roughly the same situation), the arrangement may be designed to collect “taxes” to help pay for the production of the good.

(3) Divisibility and nonappropriability

The third case that may affect a state’s basic propensity toward international organization is that in which the good or service in question is strictly divisible, but because of “imperfections in property titles”—i.e., the nature of political jurisdictions—others cannot be excluded from benefiting from it, or cannot protect themselves from any disservice it might be causing them. If other states are enjoying the benefits of A’s production of a good or service and A can in no way exclude them or charge them the cost of partaking, it would be unrealistic—given our assumptions—to expect them to contribute voluntarily. Or, if other states are suffering from A’s production of a good or service and cannot exclude themselves from that suffering, it would be unrealistic to expect A voluntarily to offer compensation. In both cases, a divergence between private and social costs results, as A would tend to underproduce the first kind of good, and to overproduce the second.

Organizationa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction: What makes the world hang together? Neo-utilitarianism and the social constructivist challenge
• Part I International Organization
• Part II The system of states
• Part III The question of agency
• Notes
• Publications by John Gerard Ruggie
• References