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A Note on Robert O. Keohane’s “Institutionalization in the United Nations General Assembly”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2015
Extract
There appears to be a growing consensus among those engaged in research in the international organization field that regional integration has been the most stimulating area of research for the last ten years because of the conscious efforts of the major theorists in this area to develop and test hypotheses concerning the dynamics of organizational development. There is consensus also that the rest of the field could profit by developing a more conscious concern with the dynamics of organizational development. Robert O. Keohane’s “Institutionalization in the United Nations General Assembly” represents a substantial attempt to provide the framework for a model of organizational development applicable to the United Nations.
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References
page no 951 note 1 Keohane’s article appears earlier in this issue. See pp. 859-896.
page no 951 note 2 Ibid., p. 860.
page no 951 note 3 Ibid., p. 893.
page no 952 note 4 Ibid., p. 860.
The number and character of the nations in each period, when combined with the distribution of capability to influence each other, set the scene for international interaction; their objectives and the methods at their disposal determine the interaction itself. Various combinations of actor characteristics, capability, objectives, and methods, in turn, produce typical bundles of tasks for the international organizations created by the nations. These bundles contain different ingredients, according to the period in question; moreover, the potency of each ingredient is a function of the interissue bargaining process in which the member nations engage in defining tasks for their organizations.
(Haas, Ernst, Tangle of Hopes: American Commitments and World Order [Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1969], p. 22Google Scholar.)
In the case of UN decision-making … operational goals are not rationally contrasted in policy making, there is no hierarchy, and problem solving does not predominate as a technique of deciding issues. This has been true in all phases of the system, which would come close to being identified as almost entirely dysfunctional in its behavior. Yet the system has survived, and if membership, finance, and scope of operations are the yardsticks of evaluation, even prospered. Hence formal-organization theory is unlikely to yield answers to our question.
In fact, it must be stressed that in a different focus the UN is a successful, if phase-ridden and politics-dominated, international institution.
(Haas, Ernst B., “Dynamic Environment and Static System: Revolutionary Regimes in the United Nations,” in Kaplan, Morton A. [ed.], The Revolution in World Pvlitks [New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1962], p. 281Google Scholar.)
page no 953 note 6 For example, Keohane in reference to the United Nations and similar organizations uses the phrase, “for bureaucratic or largely bureaucratic international organizations.” (P. 869.) To perceive the United Nations as “bureaucratic or largely bureaucratic” is to miss entirely the most significant, in terms of organizational dynamics, matrix of interaction: the dynamic interplay of conflicting national policies. Or as Inis L. Claude, Jr. has said:
This brings us to the political process within the organization, which is, in essence, a continuing struggle between the advocates of conflicting purposes or between those whose conceptions of the proper order of priorities are different, a struggle to determine which purposes and whose purposes the United Nations will serve. This is what politics is all about, and this is the fate of political institutions. … In large part, the changingness of the United Nations is a reflection of the changes of purpose of the states dominating the organization and of the changing fortunes of states and groups of states in the battle for control over it—that is, for the right to determine the uses to which it will be put. Changes in the foreign policy of states and in the outcome of the political struggle among states are factors of basic importance in the process of change in the United Nations.
(Claude, Inis L. Jr., The Changing United Nations [Studies in Political Science] [New York: Random House, 1967], pp. xvii-xviiiGoogle Scholar.)
page no 954 note 7 Haas, Ernst B., Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International Organization (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1964), p. 88Google Scholar.
Also relevant is Gunnar Myrdal’s judgment that
the conference of an inter-governmental organization is not in any real sense comparable with the legislative assembly of a state: die delegates are not elected by people but appointed by governments; they represent nations only indirectly; collectively they do not legislate; mere is no supranational government to execute decisions taken, no sanctions can be applied and no taxes levied. … In the typical case international organizations are nothing else than instruments for die policies of individual governments, means for die diplomacy of a number of disparate and sovereign national states. When an inter-governmental organization is set up, this implies nothing more man diat between the states a limited agreement has been reached upon an institutional form for multilateral conduct of state activity in a certain field. The organization becomes important for the pursuance of national policies precisely to the extent that such a multilateral co-ordination is the real and continuous aim of national governments.
As quoted in ibid., p. 98.
page no 954 note 8 Keohane, p. 892. Emphasis added.
page no 955 note 9 Ibid., p. 877.
page no 955 note 10 Polsby, Nelson W., “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives,” The American Political Science Review, March 1968 (Vol. 62, No. 1), pp. 144–168CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
page no 956 note 11 Keohane, pp. 861-862.
page no 956 note 12 Ibid., pp. 868, 892.
page no 956 note 13 Ibid., p. 864.
page no 956 note 14 Ibid., p. 862.
page no 956 note 15 Ibid., p. 866.
page no 956 note 16 In this connection it is interesting to note that none of the three authors from whom Keohane borrows the concept “institutionalization” employs his differentiation-autonomy distinction. Samuel Hunt-ington in discussing national political development uses autonomy, meaning the development of political organizations and procedures which are not simply expressions of the interests of particular social groups, as one of his four measures of institutionalization. (Huntington, Samuel P., “Political Development and Political Decay,” World Politics, April 1965 [Vol. 17, No. 3], pp. 401–403CrossRefGoogle Scholar.) S. N. Eisenstadt in analyz ing the social and political structure of traditional centralized empires and the development of religions within them uses differentiation, meaning the development of specific collectives and roles in the major institutional spheres, as one of the dependent variables contributing to institutionalization. (stadt, S. N. Eisen, “Institutionalization and Change,” American Sociological Review, April 1964 [Vol. 29, No. 2], p. 237Google Scholar.) Polsby in analyzing the House of Representatives speaks of one aspect of institutionalization as the differentiation of an organization from its environment, i.e., the establishment of boundaries in a political organization. (Polsby, Nelson W., The American Political Science Review, Vol. 62, No. 1, p. 145Google Scholar.) Keohane chose to ignore in his eclecticism a substantial earlier discussion of “institutionalized-interest politics” in the United Nations. See Haas in Kaplan (ed.).
page no 957 note 17 Keohane, p. 895.
page no 957 note 18 Haas, Beyond the Nation-State, pp. 103-113.
page no 957 note 19 For some suggestions as to how national policies might form the core of a model of organizational development see Kay, David A., “United States National Security Policy and International Organi zation: A Critical Review of the Literature,” International Organization, Summer 1969 (Vol. 23, No. 3), PP. 755–765CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haas in Kaplan (ed.); Haas, Tangle of Hopes.