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The Oxford Handbook of INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS The Oxford Handbook of INTER NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS Edited by JACOB KATZ COGAN IAN HURD IAN JOHNSTONE 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © The several contributors 2016 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2016 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. 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Preface The growth of formal interstate organizations through the twentieth century means that virtually every important question of foreign policy, trade, and international affairs falls under the auspices of an international organization (IO). Understanding the power, limits, and consequences of these institutions is increas- ingly important. Occupying a position at the intersections of law and politics and of the domestic and the international, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) are created in law by sovereign states but by facilitating multilateral action they are expected to constrain or regulate the exercise of discretion by those states. They must respect the legal autonomy of their members and at the same time induce governments to conform with rules. How they manage that tension sheds light not only on the nature of IOs, but also on how international affairs are conducted in the contemporary era. This volume addresses these and other issues by drawing together a multidiscip- linary team of academics and a diverse collection of practitioners to write about the legal, political, and practical issues that concern contemporary IOs. It offers diverse perspectives on the creation and functioning of IOs, combining international law and international relations theory with insights from history, economics, and sociology. It digs deeply into IO practice by looking at the purposes they serve, the activities in which they engage, their structure and decision- making processes, and their relations with other organizations— intergovernmental, governmental, and nongovernmental. Rather than presenting chapters on particular organizations, this Handbook considers the problems, powers, and practices that cut across the field, and uses examples and cases from a multiplicity of organizations to examine these points. The main focus is on intergovernmental organizations, but the book includes analyses of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the private sector, and networks of various sorts— both on their own and in their relations to formal IGOs. In this preface we highlight four threads that run through the book: the creation and proliferation of IOs; their effectiveness and adaptability; their institutional design; and governance. Within each thread, a number of key themes, issues, and dilemmas that cut across the chapters are identified. vi preface Creation and Proliferation Why do states create and act through IOs, regimes, networks or other institu- tionalized arrangements? Many of the chapters in this book provide answers to that question, drawing on alternative theoretical perspectives— either implicitly or explicitly. Neorealists, Marxists, and others claim institutions are creatures of the international system’s organization; they reflect the distribution of power in that system and are dominated by the most powerful states, which use institutions for their own ends. Institutionalists focus less on power and more on mutual interests, emphasizing the role of regimes as vehicles for coordination. A variant of institutionalism is principal– agent theory, which— in the field of IGOs— considers the powers that member states delegate to the organization and the mech- anisms they put in place to ensure that those powers are not exceeded. Unlike these instrumental, interest- based theories, social constructivists emphasize the discursive role and power of institutions: they imagine organizations as locations where actors employ and contest shared understandings of international politics, sometimes but not always formalized as law. Critical theorists, like realists, look at power in the international system, but stress both its materiality and its contingent nature. It is not a natural phenomenon but rather a product of historical circum- stances. They ask how the structure came about and how institutions contribute to its stability and its possibility for change. Liberal international relations schol- ars draw attention to the internal dynamics of states, rather than the structure of the international system. They, along with others, reject the “billiard ball” view of international relations, which envisages states as uniform entities and looks only at what they do in relation to each other. Liberals are interested in what goes on within states, and how domestic politics and processes contribute to the creation and functioning of IOs. For some or all of the above reasons, many international institutions have been created since the end of World War II. Few have died. The sheer growth in numbers has caused some analysts to worry about institutional overload. Are there simply too many organizations performing overlapping functions, step- ping on each other’s toes, and sucking up resources without adding value? Is this spurring a fragmentation of the global system, generating conflicts and in- coherence among international regimes and bodies of international law? Some argue that the diversity, pluralism, and forum shopping that result from the proliferation of IOs are not a bad thing. In the human rights sphere, for example, whatever is lost in coherence may be more than made up for by the gains from multiple channels of influence. A fully integrated global order, after all, could be overly exclusive— shutting out voices, values, and interests that ought to be represented. preface vii Adding to the regime complexity, intergovernmental organizations often serve as focal points for transnational and transgovernmental networks. They are places where representatives of government agencies, international secretariats, NGOs, private sector actors, and individuals work together with member states to tackle matters of public policy. What is the relationship among the various actors in these networks? Are they in a hierarchical relationship, with states leading the way and other actors playing a subservient role? Or can international secretariats or NGOs take the initiative in an area of public policy— catalyzing action and pulling states along? An implication of this “network” approach to global governance is that it sidesteps normal channels for the conduct of international affairs. Instead of the diplomatic branches of government interacting with each other on behalf of their citizens, bureaucrats, experts, and business people engage with each other directly in a complex web of transnational interactions, oftentimes through or with IOs. What does that tell us about the evolution of state sovereignty? Many of the chapters in this book explore that question. Effectiveness and Adaptability International organizations serve many purposes. At the most fundamental level, intergovernmental organizations are “talking shops”— places where representatives of states meet to discuss and ideally manage their mutual relations. As such, they play an agenda- setting role. They also play a normative role, in numerous ways. They legitimate action by states (like humanitarian intervention), and sometimes legitimate states themselves (like Palestine); they can also undermine state policies (like apartheid). IGOs (and NGOs) help to create, interpret, implement, and sometimes enforce international law— both soft and hard. They do this through their explicitly normative work as well as through their operational activities. With the expertise that resides in IOs, they generate ideas, knowledge, and policy advice. They are also service providers— from dispute settlement and peacekeeping to human rights monitoring and development assistance. Most IOs serve more than one purpose. A question that runs through this volume is how an institution can perform multiple functions concurrently without one undermining the other(s). Can a peacekeeping mission engage as an honest broker between the parties to a conflict while also acting forcefully to protect civilians? Can an NGO be both a humanitarian aid provider and human rights advocate? Because they perform well in one area, IOs come under pressure to expand into another; mission creep of this sort can lead to underperformance in both. viii preface Even without mission creep, many organizations exhibit dysfunction. While most IOs have mission statements that maximize consensus over goals— promot- ing peace, reducing poverty, protecting human rights— in practice they all fall somewhere short of those goals. Even worse, they can do positive harm perhaps as an unintentional byproduct of their intentional acts or because they operate in a domain of politics where there are winners and losers. Comprehensive economic sanctions, for example, can have dire humanitarian consequences. Declaring “safe areas” can become a deathtrap if the organization can’t make good on the promise of protection. Why do IOs sometimes act dysfunctionally? Is it because their activities are necessarily the product of competing interests and values, resulting in compromises that make sense on paper but are incoherent and counterpro- ductive in practice? Is it because they get overly “bureaucratized,” with the rules, procedures, and routines becoming ends in themselves? Many chapters in this volume shed light on these questions. A related concern is the tendency of institutions to go on forever, even when they seem to have outlived their original purpose. Why? A cynic might suggest it is because employees of the organization fight to hang on to their means of live- lihood. A less cynical answer is that organizations adapt to changing circum- stances, using their existing expertise, knowledge, skills, and networks to deal with new challenges. NATO and the Organization for Security and Co- operation in Europe (OSCE) transformed themselves at the end of the Cold War. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees went from being an organization for European refugees to an all- purpose humanitarian agency concerned with internally displaced persons, vulnerable migrants, and humanitarian crises more generally. Global development actors are currently struggling to adapt as the North– South dynamic changes and thinking about growth and inequality evolves. A thread that runs through this book is whether and how IOs learn and adapt. Institutional Design Form, as they say, should follow function. But does it? This brings us to questions of institutional design and reform. Membership, representation, structure, decision- making processes, and financing are all features of IOs. Two critical issues that relate to these design features are the powers of the constituent parts of the organization and the impact of power within the organization. The first can be framed in terms of autonomy. How much power does an organization have independent of its member states? Do the executive head and preface ix secretariat of the organization serve primarily an administrative role, or are they able to perform independent functions? The independent functions could be political, like those of the Secretary- General and Secretariat of the United Nations (UN). They could be based on expertise, like the professional staff of the World Bank or World Health Organization. Sometimes the powers are explicitly set out in the constituent instrument of the organization; often they are not. A critic- ally important legal issue is how much power can or should be implied from an organization’s charter. On one hand, the International Court of Justice has ruled in the Reparations case that each organization “must be deemed to have those powers which, though not expressly provided in the Charter, are conferred upon it by necessary implication as being essential to the performance of its duties.” On the other hand, the “duties” of some IOs are so comprehensive that the “implied powers doctrine” is essentially a license for an organization to do whatever a majority of its members (or its most powerful members) want it to do. The most far- reaching form of independent power is supranational. The European Union (EU), for example, can take decisions binding on its members by majority or qualified majority vote. It even has the power to make rules that directly bind European citizens and corporations, without any need for implementing legislation by national governments. The UN Security Council has supranational powers, as does the Executive Council of the African Union (AU), which can adopt binding decisions by a 2/ 3 majority vote. In some highly technical but important areas, UN specialized agencies have been granted legislative powers by their constituent instruments. Thus the International Civil Aviation Organization Council can make binding rules regulating aircraft over the high seas. While the World Health Organization, World Meteorological Organization, and International Maritime Organization do not have supranational powers per se, they can all make regulations through a tacit consent/ opt out procedure. Adopted by simple majority vote, these regulations are nevertheless binding on all members of the organizations unless they explicitly opt out. This dilutes the principle that states are bound only by rules to which they have consented: consent is still required, but the mechanism by which that consent is granted— or deemed to be granted— is less demanding than typical. The dilution of consent brings us to the second critical design issue: the impact of power within an organization. Most intergovernmental organizations operate on the basis of one state, one vote. A few employ weighted voting, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the EU. The UN does not have weighted voting, and because of the veto power held by the five permanent members of the Security Council, it does not operate entirely on the basis of full sovereign equality either. Even in organizations that formally operate on that basis, discrepancies in power matter in practice, to varying degrees. An important thread that runs through this book is shifting global power relations, not only geopolitic- ally but also between state and nonstate actors.