International Organizations Politics, Law, Practice

International organizations shape the politics and controversies that arise among countries in a number of ways. They are sometimes powerful forces in their own right, as when an international court decides that a state is violating its legal obligations or when the UN sends peacekeepers to intervene in a conflict. They can also be centers where diplomacy and negotiation among states take place – this “forum” role accounts for part of the importance of the World Trade Organization and of the UN General Assembly. In still other situations, international organizations provide the tools or resources by which countries try to advance their interests in world politics. These diverse functions mean that the relations between states and international organizations can be studied from very different perspectives, with different emphases that produce different insights.

International organizations are diverse and sophisticated entities, with legal, political, and social dimensions that overlap and conflict in interesting ways. They vary widely in their substantive areas of authority, their internal structures, and their political salience. Their complexity allows for an equally complex field of study in which contrasting perspectives offer distinct emphases and tools of analysis, and which therefore come to very different interpretations of the same real-world patterns.

For all their differences, these organizations also all share some basic features. This leads on from the basic paradox of consent and obligation that was noted in Chapter 1: all the organizations in this book were (1) founded by states with an explicit inter-state treaty; (2) have states as their members; and (3) have independent corporate personalities. Taken together these mean that they exist as autonomous legal actors distinct from their members. Jan Klabbers uses these three features to organize his excellent book on the law of international organizations.

These features mean that formal international organizations are stuck in an eternal dilemma as their powers and existence are derivative of precisely those actors (i.e. states) that they are supposed to regulate (or govern, or influence). The existence of international organizations therefore raises deep conceptual questions about the nature of international politics and the capacity for international rules to bind or even coexist with sovereign states. Their powers are in principle devolved to them from nation-states but in practice are much more complex than that and may be either more or less than they appear on paper.