Contents

1 International Organizations 1.1 1.2 Why are IO interesting? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . International Organizations and International relations: external constraints 1.2.1 1.2.2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3 4 Penser la guerre, Clausewitz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Neorealist theory and the emergence of IO 1 1

International Organizations

Understanding the main laws which govern human organizations is, to be sure, too large an undertaking. As a result, the main purpose of this document will be to narrow the eld of study. Political Science as a eld of the humanities has already done so for us, and shall therefore represent a useful short-cut. It is however not easy, and certainly not straightforward, to recount the many ways Political Science has done so over the past centuries. We will, therefore, only do a partial and somewhat trivial review, which will then serve to highlight what research I need to focus on.

1.1

Why are IO interesting?

I wish to concern myself with the understandings of large, explicitly structured human organization often labeled international organizations. These are particular types of human organizations for a host of reasons, but most particularly because they seek to advance goals which are assigned to them and are therefore extraneous to the people who make them up. Unlike kin groups however dened, no easy or straightforward alignment of interest can be supposed, as a rst approximation, between the people who make up international organizations and the goals these aim to advance. Using the expression kin group above, my aim is to stay nondescript and leave a more precise denition for later. At this point, I see this short summary of why IO are interesting as a quick take on their uniqueness as objects of study. As they are organizations in the sense that they are formally and not accidentally created, one may observe them through the prism of other large human institutions. One may urge caution in doing so however.

Without presuming prior knowledge of varied institutions, we can posit that they are organized both in relation to their constituting parts, including i.a. the people who make them up in their social and cultural dimensions, the force of historical inertia, and on the other hand in relation to the environment they exist in. Foxconn, the famous Apple manufacturer, is certainly dierent from Siemens, the German equipment supplier. Beyond these, both Foxconn and Siemens exist in the context of modern capitalism. They seek to manufacture and supply similar objects in the same markets; and often for the same companies. Since they therefore face similar constraints, we can expect that they will devise similar solutions at least sometimes, and come to be comparable. This is without resorting to a cruder way to think of how they can evolve in the same direction: cross-fertilization, executive poaching, etc. If we apply this line of thought to IO, we should therefore seek to understand what context we can bring to bear to understand their constituting parts, and what external constraints these organizations face. We will return to their constituting parts.

1.2

International Organizations and International relations: external constraints

IO arrive late in the eld of International Relations, both because IO are a relatively modern phenomenon, and because they were long neglected as inconsequential. The most obvious IO is the Society of Nations created at the end of World War One and noted for both its ambition and its failure to prevent the return of mass violence on the European continent and around the world. As its name suggests, it was a self-conscious eort to regulate international relations implying that the notion of an extra-national body who could succeed in bending the will of States existed long before. I must admit to knowing very little about IO pre-WW1. In part I suppose because the topic is likely fruitful for an historian of thought, but of little consequence for the data oriented education my alma mater sought to train me in. I this situation, I can only refer to a few examples. IO can only exist to constrain State behavior if we believe that international relations is fundamentally an open game, where events run a course, not a due course. Such a conviction underpins the conduct of high politics, as well as a large part of the eld of IR for the last two centuries. From Hedley Bull to Hans Morgenthau, there exists a praxis of IR which is only explained by a 2

conviction that States have the power to help themselves albeit to varying degrees. Contrast this with Thucydidess account of the Peloponnesian War, where Athens explains lyrically that confrontation with Sparta is inevitable, and that therefore a minor island must perish. 1.2.1 Penser la guerre, Clausewitz

A large segment of IR theory would object that there should exist no due course in IR. The recent focus on modeling , which began in earnest at the end of World War Two with the works of RAND and proposed to ground its conclusions in models amenable to mathematical analysis could easily and in fact did view the world as essentially composed of singular units endowed with capabilities States. In such as world, and beyond the fact that these models did not allow for intermediary actors, indeterminacy was by denition expunged. It is however this indeterminacy which alone can give legitimacy to IOs existence and action. Here, it is useful to seek the help of Raymond Aron, who in his attentive reading of Clausewitz illustrates the dierence between theory and practice in the realm of warfare. Clausewitz has no diculties arguing that the purpose of war the destruction of ones enemy and at the same facing up to the fact that few, if any war ever end with the annihilation of the opposing party. If youve won, why take chance and risk that your enemy, now standing defeated, will seek revenge in the future? Better slain him now. The answer to that question is essentially the same as to this other paradox: why does not the stronger force always win in war? There is, in fact, far between theory and practice. Life intrudes, and with it reality is not any more governed by the inner logic of war but also by the intelligence of generals, morale, technology, and above all uncertainty. The full confrontation necessary to arrive at the logical conclusion war dictates is pushed back, and wars actual, real form obtains. New rules emerge. Clausewitz argued at length that these new rules were not governed by the law of warfare, but by other elements which become important in the process actualization. Namely, politics. It is in this sens that Clausewitzs famous phrase should be understood: War is the continuation of politics by other means. In this same sense, I would concur that IR theory rarely invokes the role of
0 Politics

is logically posterior to the laws of warfare in Clausewitzs theory. But theoretical

warfare does not exist and Politics always governs it.

IO, and indeed is correct in doing to the extent that it seeks to understand the laws of IR in the same sense that Clausewitz argued that man on man combat to death exemplied the essence of war. Nevertheless, and as extensive research on IO has shown, there exists signicant space in the IR praxis for IO. 1.2.2 Neorealist theory and the emergence of IO

Neorealist theory States are integral to any theory of international relations. They represent, in the last resort, both the most credible threat of violence and the leadership with the largest following and the most resources. While IR has moved away from the simpler view of the State as a unitary actor, no theory can ignore its autonomy in the last resort. As a result, there is large tendency to consider that if IO seek to steer the patterns of state interaction away from their normal course, they can only do so when state are not particularly interested in pursuing their interests, or when States preferences are weak. In other words, when the stakes are not high. A large segment of political science is devoted to nding evidence that IO indeed contain state behavior. The E.U. is one of the most formidable example or extraneous constraints of state behavior, as is the WTO. Should this research accurately refute the above view, we should therefore consider that IO yield more power, and more often, than is often considered. We may however seek to qualify the direction in which IO exert their power, and try to analyze their inuence not in relation to the original preferences of states whose behavior they constraint, but from the point of view of the end result they achieve. Considering that state interaction is characterized rst and foremost by large imbalances in inuence, IO may not be more than mere agents of higher interests. Research naturally turned to nding evidence of constraints on the largest states. This research is faced with an existential problem: its objective is not to suggest that state interactions should be devoid of power relations thats, at the end, how their are construed but they seek to dierentiate various instances of the exercise of power and order them according to the constraints IO were able to place on them. These qualications come to question the very nature of power in international relations. Is it not, the words of a famous scientists, the power to make B do what A wants B to do? Nowhere here do we see hints of IO.

If the denition of power can be varied as these scientists are discovering, the reality of their original research agenda is called into question. Power becomes mysterious. While observable, it proves elusive once directly studied. Dissected, dismembered under the prism of IO theory, it nearly disappears. To focus on IO, in this context, is to turn our gaze to organizations which seek to steer the course of state interaction towards goals that are not essential to the patterns of state interaction. Though I am well aware of the disconnect between individuals and the state, it does not seem silly to place the state as a human organization which seeks to preserve membership to a group. To the extent that the individual has a vested interest in the preservation of the group whatever is shape of form, we may posit a conict of primary membership between IO and the state when their interests collide. Tellingly, this remark is logically posterior to my note below that IO are the locus of cooperation and conict yet I pointed it out rst. They further represent unique objects of study is that they can easily be construed to be the locus of the two main patterns of interaction one observes at the international level: cooperation and conict. In other words, the United Nations is interesting because the bureaucracy which makes it up largely advances works to advance goals which may have been deemed as harmful by their own governments. In other words, IO are interesting because they exists in large part at the level of State interaction, and because they Of all the important debates of Political Science as far as I this project is concerned, one stands out: the agent-structure debate.