Informal institutions in global governance are generally expected to favor powerful states. According to conventional arguments, procedural justice is best secured through formal institutional rules that constrain power, while informal institutions reinforce power asymmetries. This chapter revisits this position and asks, how and under what conditions can informal institutions enhance the voice and influence of less powerful or marginalized actors in global governance? The chapter argues that while informal institutions are useful to powerful states because they remove constraints to individual action, they can also be useful to less powerful states to the extent that they positively support action through social-integrative effects. Specifically, interactions within informal groups generate two types of social effects – capacity-building and coalition-building – that can enhance the voice of developing countries and increase their control over collective decisions. The chapter illustrates the arguments by profiling informal groups in the global governance of trade and finance.

This chapter develops the closure thesis—a theoretical framework for understanding the inter-related dynamics of political equality and inequality in the international system based on joining the neo-Weberian concept of social closure and the economic idea of club goods. The closure thesis consists of a constitutive and a causal logic that together contribute an explanation for the reproduction and transformation of political inequalities, understood as the distribution of participatory and procedural rights. The closure thesis makes a constitutive and a causal argument: first, that institutions create rules of closure that over time have narrowed—rather than expanded—the type of political actors considered legitimate participants, thereby constituting members as categorical equals and non-members as categorical unequals; second, that as institutions respond to normative or functional pressures to be include more, and more diverse, states, incumbents face strong incentives to respond by protecting their privileges through institutional designs—such as assimilative multilateralism, hierarchical multilateralism, and exclusive multilateralism—that distribute procedural rights unequally. The closure thesis thus contests the view that the globalization of the international system has been a process of greater inclusiveness of formerly marginalized actors accompanied by a more egalitarian and even democratic multilateral institutional order.

This chapter argues that the emergence of what we recognize as the modern international system develops through evolving practices of diplomacy. IR literature has increasingly paid attention to the early modern development of diplomacy to understand the origins of the system. This chapter offers a distinct interpretation of the importance of diplomacy from the perspective of the closure thesis. In contrast to the typical account of diplomacy as mediating the political fractures that resulted from the breakdown of Christendom, it argues that the adoption and diffusion of specific diplomatic practices, such as the permanent resident ambassador, facilitated closure and boundary-drawing by narrowing the types of actors invested with rights of political representation. Diplomatic practices emerged in part as a means of producing common goods and securing privileged access to those goods for some political actors, while facilitating the political exclusion and subordination of others. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the argument’s contemporary relevance. In reflecting on an historical age in which the sovereign state was not yet the only legitimate political agent, the contemporary question is whether today’s legal and representational rights at the global level can or should be emancipated from the state.

The international relations (IR) literature appears to be divided into two fundamentally different views about the basic structure of the international system and its institutions. On one view, the expansion and opening of international institutions in the 20th Century to include more actors and greater geographical reach, combined with strengthening democracy norms, are driving the democratization of international institutions. At the same time, a more critical literature is emerging that instead views the system as permeated by multiple forms of hierarchy and deep structures of domination. This chapter, in contrast, argues that political equality and inequality obstinately co-exist in international institutions because of their very role in regulating access to collective goods. It develops what I call the closure thesis to explain how institutional designs reflect an ongoing struggle between the assertion of equal rights and the preservation of unequal privileges. This argument requires re-thinking three premises: that equality and inequality are antagonistic; that greater inclusiveness typically promotes a move towards greater equality; and that international institutions provide global public goods. This chapter elaborates on these points, situates them in the literature, introduces the closure thesis, and outlines the rest of the book.

International law makes a claim to universality; it is supposed to be the law that applies to the relations among all peoples. This chapter argues that international law, instead, serves as a mechanism of closure; it provides a restrictive articulation of the rules that define which actors have a capacity for international rights. The chapter offers a reading of two of the most influential figures in early international law, Grotius and Vattel, in terms of the closure thesis. It traces the principle mechanism of closure to a notion of property rights that invests the territorial state with the capacity for rights based on possession and ownership. It then details how the combination of property and natural rights as the basis for sovereignty would justify the equal treatment of some and the domination and exploitation of others. Rules of closure served to accelerate the formation of property monopolies, first in the form of colonial extraction and later in the form of market neoliberalization. The chapter considers the contemporary implications of the international-law-as-closure argument. At stake is whether universalism is understood as a project of homogenizing differences and protecting privileges, or of making space for pluralism and diversity.

This chapter asks how do international institutions adjust to changes in the number, diversity, and relative power of system members? It combines the Weberian concept of social closure and the idea of club goods to argue that, as IOs come under pressure to open up to new and more heterogenous members, the logic of closure creates incentives for incumbent members to create institutional designs that preserve their privileges. In the face of membership diversity, rules that promote procedural equality—i.e., consensus and majority voting rules—challenge status quo interests. In response, incumbents pursue designs that preserve clubs of like-minded actors through assimilative, hierarchical or exclusive multilateralism. The chapter discusses how self-determination, the principled basis for membership expansion, serves as a rule of closure. Then it considers the cases of the United Nations at its founding, the United Nations during its main period of expansion under demands for a New International Economic Order, and the G20, which many have pointed to as a new model of inclusive governance. Each case shows how expanding institutional membership may improve formal equality while triggering a decrease in procedural equality, creating institutional arrangements in which all are equal, but some are more equal than others.

This concluding chapter situates the arguments made in this book within ongoing debates about the nature of hierarchy and equality in international relations. It then turns to reflect on the implications of the closure thesis in light of contemporary developments that seem to point to an opening of the system forced by the diffusion of power away from the West or away from the nation-state. It identifies in the closure thesis one explanation for why we are witnessing institutional fragmentation instead of institutional reform in response to the global power shift. Finally, the chapter considers possible future transformations and the potential for creating more egalitarian global relations.

Abstract

The G20 has emerged as a central player in global financial regulation, but it does not easily fit existing governance models. What kind of governance power can the G20, an informal institution with no legal personality, no inherent technical expertise or infrastructure and no resources, exert? Moreover, faced with a global economic crisis, why did states work primarily through the institutionally weak G20 rather than through a stronger international financial institution? I argue that the concept of orchestration captures a good deal of how the G20 exercises governance and why it is attractive to states. Although it has no capacity of its own, the G20 is an increasingly focal actor within a large regime complex, with the power to convene and enlist intermediary bodies to carry out common regulatory goals. At the same time, only moderate convergence of state interests on regulatory goals helps explain why states pursue orchestration within the institutionally weak G20. Its design allows states to engage in regulation softly and indirectly, while avoiding sovereignty costs associated with more formal institutions. This chapter analyzes three cases of the G20 at work as orchestrator, in the areas of economic surveillance, banking regulation and accounting standards. The conclusion considers the implications of orchestration for the effectiveness of global financial regulation.