The Making of the World. How International Organizations Shape Our Future
by Yves Schemeil
About the book
International Organizations (IOs) were designed to provide global public goods, among which security for all, trade for the richest, and development for the poorest. Their very existence is now a promise of success for the cooperative turn in international relations. Although the IO network was once created by established powers, rising states can hardly resist the massive production of norms that their governments can be reluctant to respect without being able to discard them. IOs are omnipresent, and exert great influence on the world as we know it. However, rulers and ruled are hardly aware of such compelling and snowballing processes. Yves Schemeil uses his in-depth knowledge of IOs to analyze their current impact on international relations, on world politics, and their potential of shaping the global future.
Reading sample from pp.63-69
Part 2. IOs as Complex Organizations
3 Homogenization and Hegemonization
States are big or small, strong or weak, endowed with natural resources or not, with shorelines or landlocked: despite their great variety they are the basic entities of the globe. Change may occur across time, with city-states transformed into federations or empires. This notwithstanding, each unit is always steered by a central government embodying the sovereign power of its people or their divinity, ruling over a bounded territory, and receiving official recognition from peers. The Westphalia’s revolution was about precisely that: equal consideration for all, over and above any differences.
By contrast, international organizations remain at the pre-Westphalia stage. They have little in common–a rather embarrassing observation for scholars who try to change the focus from independent states to autonomous international organizations. Any theory of IOs expansion must therefore confront this major difficulty. How to give a global explanation to the institutionalization of the world when its actors are so diverse and when so many types of non-national bodies are at its heart? Or, to put it simply: when IOs are much more diverse and more numerous than states have ever been can we nonetheless claim that there is a general law of their evolution?
Some jurists may reply that intergovernmental organizations are created by treaty and composed of sovereign states. However, this assumption is not always true, as shown by ASEAN.[1] Legal experts also say that every nongovernmental association is the product of private initiatives, but this rule has countless exceptions. The only juridical aspects IGOs share beyond any doubt are: first, their legal personality, which enables them to make public commitments if not binding decisions; second, their status as non-profit units. Unfortunately, viewed from an organizational, political or even psychological angle these common features do not suffice to put them into the same box.
Sociologists come to rescue and focus on organizational structure. According to them an intergovernmental organization exists as soon as there is a permanent secretariat appointed by states and not only a head meeting irregularly with some aides. Again, this is not a general rule. There are exceptions, including ASEAN again. During the first period (1967-76) it had no staff. A permanent secretariat was established during the following years (1976-92). It then had to be restructured and its competencies enlarged after 1992 (Reinalda 2009). Hence, this regional organization could work with no full-fledged administrative apparatus for decades.
Specialization endlessly requires new structures. The most recent creation within the same family of organizations unfolds from a common matrix. Organization Theory points out a Russian dolls syndrome (Blavoukos & Bourantonis 2017: 304, 309, 314). A good instance of that is the UN Security Council (“doll” 1, the biggest) from which the Department of Peacekeeping Operations has emerged (“doll” 2), and then a Mediation Support Unit (“doll” 3), which helps Special Representatives of the UNSC (“doll” 4), while at the end of the line the UNDP provides logistics (“doll” 5, the smallest).
Suppose IGOs were all parts of the UN-family, it would be easier to find at least one common factor operating behind their apparent nuances and giving them some uniformity. Even in this case it cannot be proved: UNESCO and UNDP, UNDOC and the WHO, are not homogenous entities. They act internationally as “unions”, “departments”, “programs”, “conferences”, “summits”, “banks”, “funds” (e.g., the GREEN Climate Fund or the Global Environment Fund), etc. Even though they all are components of the UN they nevertheless display a great variety of types.
This diversity increases when other labels are added to the list like “protocols”, “COPs” (i.e., “conferences of the parties”, as with climate change and biodiversity issues), MOPs (“meetings of the parties”, as with economic conjuncture within the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe). There are “clubs” like the G4 within the WTO (the EU, the US, Brazil and India) or the G7 within the same organization (the 4 plus Australia, China and Japan [not to be confused with the global G7], Young 2010: 125). The most recent club is the G 20. We should not forget “contact groups”, “dialogues” (for instance, the North Pacific Cooperative Security Dialogue was launched by Canada in 1990), “missions”, “forces” (or “task forces”), “institutes”, “boards”, “offices”, “commissariats”, “bureaux” (as in the twin predecessors of WIPO, the “BIRPI”), “frameworks” (e.g., the Manila Framework issued by APEC in 1997) and so on and so forth.
When the roster includes “transnational” non-state actors, its scope expands dramatically. First, there are NGOs of every creed and nature. As we have seen some are QUANGOs (quasi NGOs) or BINGOs (Business NGOs). There are also GONGOs (governmental “NGOs”, i.e. those that are either controlled or sponsored by states or associations and are funded by the public institutions of their home country, see the Swiss Terre des Hommes). Others are “foundations”, “think tanks”, and “pacts”. We should not forget “agreements” like the GATT and, later on, the Dayton and Rambouillet ones on former Yugoslavia or the Wassenaar Agreement on double-use weapons. “Arrangements”–e.g., the Multifiber Arrangement–and “alliances” (either specialized, like the Climate and Clean Air Coalition or universal, like “Global Alliances”) also matter.[2] The only outsiders to exclude from the list are rating agencies (e.g. Moody’s, or Quacquarelli Symonds) and that is not for the lack of internationalization since most of them have branches nearly everywhere. It is organizational characteristics that are absent. They have no cosmopolitan administrative staff, only experts living in various countries who are consulted online or mandated to evaluate a particular context.
This much needed organizational support can come from national ministries of foreign affairs and their dedicated bureaux. There is no need to opt for a specific organizational design. The GN (G7, 8, 77) and BRICS, as well as groups such as “Cairn”, “Visegrad”, “Normandy”, etc., are not staffed. We ignore them because our attention “has been focused almost exclusively on formal IGOs (FIGOs)–official interstate arrangements legalized through a charter or international treaty and coordinated by a permanent secretariat, staff, or headquarters”. However, “FIGOs are just one point in a full range of international institutions… Informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs–which are at the lower end of the institutional spectrum) are also ubiquitous in international politics but they have not been subject to the same rigorous theoretical analysis as formal IGOs”. Were this true, outcomes would pertain more to “soft law” than to mere Law (Vabulas & Snidal 2013: 193-194) although matters arising from the meetings are carefully overseen and even evaluated by “research centres” (like the one in Toronto).
Browse the whole list of possible units operating internationally and you will also find every kind of grouping. Firstly, “advocacy coalitions”, “epistemic communities”, “public policy networks”, and “public private partnerships” coexist. Secondly, “interest groups” which are PTOs (i.e., Private Transnational Organizations) flank state agencies, while Electoral Management Bodies (or EMB) monitor democratic elections worldwide.
Thus “NGO” is as vague a term as “IGO” may sometimes be. Some units in this category demonstrably pursue advocacy goals while others specialize in confidential lobbying.
To make things even more complex, most IOs networks are duplicated: there is a global and a regional set of parallel organizations (the UN and the African Union, the Arab League, the Organization for Islamic Cooperation; as well as the WTO and MERCOSUR; WIPO and EAPO–Eurasian Patent Organization); an international branch and local offices; a universal union and several functional agencies (ITU and ICANN; the WB and the BIRD). In all, some 40 Regional International Organizations (or RIOs) are found within the lines.[3] They actually do proliferate, as shown by the 2020 RCEP bringing together in a free trade zone ASEAN and Oceanic countries (albeit with India absent), an easy substitute for the Chinese-led PTPGP for the Pacific (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership)… itself a proxy for the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement that was stillborn in 2016 after Donald Trump came to power in Washington.[4] For any rational observer, being lost in enumeration is inevitable.
There is also a slight possibility that duplication opposes “not-for-profit”, profit neutral, and “for profit” stakeholders. In the realm of health a paramount agency like the WHO traces potential epidemics and then identifies vaccines. The pharmaceutical industry produces and sells them to national governments. The Global Fund against Malaria, Tuberculosis, etc. or the Covax alliance finance aid, which implies that their activities will be selfsustaining, given overhead costs will simply be covered by a preferential interest rate ceiling.32 Even among mainstream IOs some specialize in documenting issues and bringing scientific or statistical evidence to the fore (like the OCDE, UNCTAD, and IEA) while other are more intrusive and can compel member states to change policy.
To increase variety, if possible, in some regional or functional IOs a new format becomes increasingly trendy: the « + » adds a country which remains outside the organization although it has much influence on its members, e.g., “ASEAN+” (South Eastern Asian states plus China, Japan and South Korea), or “OPEC+” (the historical founders of the organization plus Russia). This addition is not only a matter of architectural design. Naturally, China and Russia are too big to be fully integrated into any regional organization without breaking its initial equilibriums. For similar reasons, Turkey (with a population over 85 million) could one day be in the same position with the European Union and we could then see an “EU+”. Such an explanation has its own limitations, though: it does not give proper account of the Shanghai Organization’s success, a coalition of powerful and powerless states grouped together, within which China and Russia cohabit with Tajikistan and Kirghizstan.
Perhaps fluctuating coalitions of countries with flexible boundaries and variable life expectations will make this depiction even more complex inserting one IGO (a temporary alliance of countries) into another (the intergovernmental organizations to which these states belong). This may well be the case of the Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA, the Australian- Japanese alliance signed in November 2020, which is inserted into the regional Quad with the same partners plus the US and India). Sometimes, they are also suggestions of IGOs in the offing, as in the successive Central Asia and Eurasian trials to establish economic or defence unions between successor states to the USSR (Laruelle & Peyrouse 2012).
Thus, there is much diversity: contrary to biodiversity “organizational diversity” is not threatened. This, however, is not the end of the story as behind such pluralism similarities nonetheless emerge: firstly, stakeholders themselves address heterogeneity frontally; they try to homogenize every unit, organize a division of labour among them, or just simplify the taxonomy. Secondly, the normalization process concentrates power into a few decisive hands. Then, hegemony emerges as a solution to excessive diversity of status and increasing fragmentation of mandates.
3.1 Diversity
A metaphor is useful prior to considering what non-national organizations active beyond borders have in common: celestial bodies vary considerably from meteorites to comets, and from stars to planets, not to mention black holes. Planets themselves vary in nature (gaseous or rocky), their rotation speed and trajectory, distance from their sun, etc. Therefore, looking for a global causal explanation of the universe cannot rely on the classification of such units. It must, on the contrary, focus on the processes that made all this possible in dynamics, for instance in energy, gravity and relativity. The same reasoning applies to IOs diversity: in a taxonomic spirit, it can be assessed per various standards, like the scope of IOs activities, the size of their membership and its political nature (democracies, autocracies), funding, and of course geography. In fact, the number of classification standards is already excessively high and increases exponentially with new publications in the field of IR. However, it can also be measured according to relationships with member states, size, seniority (since historical ties do matter), and evolution. In the same vein scholars checking for “contractual dynamics”, rank the EU on top of the list with the old NAFTA at the bottom; they also select “delegation” to secretariats as another decisive variable, which puts the European Union ahead of every RIO, while the South Asian SAARC is the least prone to delegate (Marks et al. 2014: 9, 12).
[1] ASEAN was launched “in August 1967 in Bangkok by the foreign ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand… The Bangkok Declaration is not a traditional international treaty which binds the parties, but rather an impetus for voluntary cooperation, describing in a general way the aims and purposes of the association, with a fairly light organizational structure” (Reinalda 2012: 222, my emphasis).
[2] Like the Global Alliance for vaccine and Immunisation, cited by Jönsson 2017: 60.
[3] 30 RIOs “have a distinct physical location or website, a formal structure (i.e. a legislative body, executive, and administration), at least 50 permanent staff…, a written constitution or convention, and which have a decision body that meets at least once a year. 35 RIOs fit all or all but one of these criteria, including two that no longer exist, COMECON and the first East African Community” (Marks et al. 2014: 15).
[4] This RIO lasted for 11 months, from 4 February 2016 to 23 January 2017.
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The Making of the World. How International Organizations Shape Our Future
by Yves Schemeil
