International Secretariats

Two Centuries of International Civil Servants and Secretariats

Bob Reinalda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000206340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Providing a comprehensive overview of two centuries of international civil servants and international secretariats, this book reveals how international secretariats have emerged and evolved, focusing on both structures (international public administrations) and the practitioners (international civil servants).

Reinalda explores the history and development of international secretariats and international civil servants, starting with the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), when the first international organization was established in the form of a river commission for the navigation of the Rhine. Charting the development of international secretariats through the nineteenth century – the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the United Nations System with its many specialized agencies, the author explains why NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) have strong, rather than weak, international secretariats, and shines a light on the registries of international courts and tribunals.

The book fills a gap in the literature by exploring the full evolution of international secretariats, covering global and continental developments as well as regional integration practices around the world. Secretariats have become the leading actors in multilateral diplomacy particularly for dealing with complex issues, and this book will be of interest to all scholars of global governance and practitioners working for a range of international organizations.

1

International river commissions

• The Congress of Vienna

• The Rhine Commission

• The Danube Commission

• Conclusion

There are good arguments to see international organization (singular, as it refers to a process) as related to a distinct phase in world politics, which started upon the end of the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The Congress established the first IGO in the form of an international river commission and a system of conferences and follow-up conferences that were later institutionalized into IGOs with secretariats.

The Congress of Vienna

The great powers in Vienna recognized that the state system as it had developed up to then was no longer adequate and that they had to seek new institutional arrangements. Napoleon Bonaparte had upset the European balance of power with his campaigns of conquest but, after a lost battle in 1814, the (first) Treaty of Paris ended the Napoleonic Wars and restored French borders. Other matters were to be completed at the Congress of Vienna in the hope that a proper balance would also produce a lasting peace. According to Inis Claude, the prerequisites for the development of IGOs were available in sufficient measure and in the right combination: states functioning as independent political units; a substantial measure of contact between them; an awareness of the problems which arose out of their coexistence; and recognition of the need to create institutional devices and systematic methods for regulating their relations with each other.¹ John Ikenberry added the role of the hegemon through its strategy of institutional binding at historical junctions after major wars, with Great Britain acting as the then new hegemon. Binding mechanisms, such as treaties, interlocking organizations, joint management responsibilities, and agreed-upon standards and principles, raised the ‘costs of exit’ and created ‘voice opportunities’ for the participating states, thereby providing mechanisms to mitigate or resolve conflicts.² The main economic debate in Vienna accepted the principle of free navigation of international rivers. The result was an IGO for the Rhine meant to remove tolls and other obstacles along this and other rivers and make them suited to modern water transport. The principles and uniform arrangements were laid down in the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna (articles 108–117), with more specific articles about the Rhine in Appendix 16B and about some other rivers in Appendix 16C. The Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine came into existence in June 1815, with its seat in the German city of Mainz.

The Rhine Commission

At the core of the Rhine Commission, the idea of an international public administration dated back to the 1804 Octroi Convention on the navigation of the Rhine between France and the Holy Roman (German) Empire, signed in August 1804 and ratified in May 1805. The states regarded the river as common to them both so far as navigation was concerned, with a common toll system and police administration.³ Although one state is missing to comply with the generally accepted IGO criterion of three or more states, Octroi Convention’s articles 42–89 created a small international bureaucracy, with both states responsible for appointing the director-general and equal numbers of inspectors and toll agents in bureaus along the river. The director-general supervised toll collection, inspected towpaths, and issued provisional new regulations.⁴ He was not responsible to his government but to “the governments as a collective organization signatory to the treaty.”⁵ The man who designed the bureaucratic infrastructure meant to implement the Octroi Convention and issue new regulations, such as procedures for legal appeals and dispute settlement, was Charles Etienne Coquebert de Montbret. First charged with the negotiations with the German Empire in 1803, he became director-general of the Octroi in 1805. When he was awarded a new role in France in 1806, he made German inspector Johann Eichhoff his successor. Eichhoff continued the institutional dynamics and was director-general until 1814, when he attended the Congress of Vienna and its Commission for Navigation as an expert. There he observed the politicians move the core of the Octroi practices to the Central Commission they were creating.

The seven governmental representatives to the new Rhine Commission, which took over the seat and bureaus pertaining to the Octroi along the river, had to learn how to cooperate in a multilateral setting. They needed 17 years and some 550 meetings to issue the Commission’s first constitution, the 1831 Convention of Mainz. They had to clarify the exact interpretation of all legal clauses and to overcome the strong articulation of national interests, particularly by The Netherlands and Prussia. However, they maintained several sub-bureaucracies which had to be coordinated, such as those of the Rhine inspectors, the revenue stations, and the central accounting office. The commissioners met once a year, elected a president each year, and proposed provisions that required ratification by member states. The 1831 Convention then vested both legislative and judicial powers in an enlarged Commission. The newly created ‘chief inspector’ was an international functionary, as he was appointed by the Commission through a system of weighted voting for the member states, paid from a common treasury, and sworn to obey Commission rules. Publications about the Rhine Commission have mentioned names of commissioners, but rarely the chief inspector’s name (J.B. von Auer). The Commission functioned with a modest group of international staff, but it hired much larger groups of local personnel to maintain and improve waterways, towpaths, and ports and to prevent obstruction of navigation.⁶ Spaulding mentions up to several hundred government employees from individual member states.⁷ Litigation on “matters concerning navigation, duties, collision, and so forth could be taken on appeal from the courts established by the states for such cases” to either the appellate national court or the Commission, with the Commission receiving 61 appeals from the Rhine Courts between 1832 and 1868.⁸ Judges for the Rhine Courts were appointed nationally, but took an oath to apply the Rhine regulations unrestricted by local jurisprudence.⁹

‘Incremental decision making’ and ‘path dependence’ resulted in dozens of regulatory directives, twenty supplementary articles to the 1831 Convention, and an agreement on common police procedures. A change in power relations between Austria and Prussia resulted in the 1868 Convention of Mannheim (the new seat), which abolished the chief inspectorship, as all tolls had been removed, but not the other international staff, and it maintained the role of the Commission in passing resolutions to improve navigation and hearing appeals from the Rhine Courts: 216 cases between 1869 and 1911. Commission decisions were formally taken by an “absolute plurality of votes,” but practice was more flexible, for instance, by taking into account the lengths of the riverbanks, as those better represented the interests of the riparian states, and ongoing negotiations until all parties could agree.¹⁰

The Danube Commission

Similar administrations were set up for rivers such as the Elbe (1821), Douro (1835), Po (1849), and Pruth (1866). The European Commission of the Danube, set up after the Crimean War by the 1856 Paris Peace Treaty (articles 15–18), had seven commissioners as its executive committee. It also had a clerical staff with a secretary-general, named M. Mohler, but given his clerical function he cannot be considered to be the executive head of the IGO.¹¹ The Commission had its seat in Galatz (in what became Rumania) and worked on the navigability of the three mouths of the Danube. Unlike the Rhine Commission with its annual leadership changes, British commissioner John Stokes became the informal and long-lasting leader of the collegial institution, its bureaucracy, and local personnel, based on British hegemony and its leading role in Danubian trade, as well as Stokes’ leadership capacities.¹² Appointed for his engineering background, Stokes developed into the qualified expert in the navigation of transboundary waterways, with a solid understanding of the juridical and administrative aspects of inland navigation. After a year, four of the seven governments instructed their commissioner to stop the provisional work the Commission had started, but all four decided individually to give priority to their international allegiance. Although legally bound to execute their national mandates, they continued the work “by reason of the existence of the commission.”¹³

The Commission under Stokes’ guidance (1856–71) drafted legislation (the 1865 Public Act) in a manner which accommodated Ottoman law, the privileges of foreign citizens in the Ottoman Empire, and their own legislation. Article 1 of the Public Act placed the works, establishments, and staff “under the guarantee and protection of international law.” By convincing the British government of its relevance Stokes prolonged the existence of the organization in 1871. The inspector-general of navigation and the captain of the port of Sulina, although originally appointed and paid by the Sultan, were considered as acting under Commission direction and being invested with an international character. This was strengthened over time when the Commission alone appointed and paid all employees, formally arranged after the Russo-Turkish War in 1878 when the new state Rumania was admitted as a member. The Commission used its own flag for its buildings and ships. No court for the Danube was created, as conflicts were solved diplomatically.

The ‘Danubian model’ was embodied, in spite of French criticism, in the General Act of the 1885 Berlin Conference on Africa, albeit the intended Congo Commission never came into being.¹⁴ Later constitutions of river commissions comprised a wider interpretation of free navigation than earlier ones, but the two Chinese river commissions, established in 1901 (after China’s defeat in an intervention to suppress the so-called Boxer Rebellion), mentioned improvement of the river courses and the interests of foreigners, but did not refer to the principle of free navigation. The Suez Canal and the Panama Canal were declared open to the ships of all nations through the multilateral 1888 Constantinople Convention and the 1904 Hay/Buneau-Varilla Treaty between the United States (US) and Panama, but with, respectively, weak and no public international administration, given the dominant role of Great Britain and the US. Stokes played a role in the International Tonnage Commission which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 International river commissions
• 2 Public international unions
• 3 Concert of Europe conferences and private initiatives
• 4 War and peace: 1914–1919
• 5 The League of Nations and the International Labour Organization
• 6 Wartime international organizations
• 7 The United Nations System
• 8 Regional international organizations
• 9 NATO and OECD
• 10 International courts and tribunals
• 11 The United Nations Secretariat
• 12 Regional integration around the world
• 13 World conferences, sherpas, and treaty secretariats
• 14 Conclusion: Two centuries of international civil servants and secretariats
• Select bibliography
• Index