Write an essay based on the given readings. 

Instructions attached. 

INSTRUCTIONS:

· The essay should be around 1,500 words.

· Use 12-point font, 1-inch margins, and double spacing.

· Answer should rely primarily on the material covered in the readings. Do not do outside research for this essay or bring in outside sources, but you may (and are encouraged to) consult and quote any of the sources (readings) we have used in the course so far.

· Be sure you address all the questions asked in the prompt. Write your essay in response to the following prompt.

Prompt:

One of the key questions confronting scholars of global governance concerns the role that international institutions play in world politics. International Relations (IR) theory has developed a number of distinct theoretical approaches to explain the power of international institutions and the factors that shape their creation. Each of these approaches differs in its basic assumptions about world politics, the actors it views as most consequential for global governance, and the role that institutions play in governing the world.

Discuss how the three theoretical approaches of realism, liberalism, and constructivism differ in their approach to explaining global governance.  Your answer should consist of three parts.

In part one (1), for each of the three theories listed above identify and explain the three assumptions underlying each approach and then discuss how each approach explains the role that international institutions play in global governance. How does each approach differ in its view of the power of international institutions and the functions they perform in managing global problems? 

In part two (2), discuss what these different perspectives suggest about the future trajectory of global governance and the durability of the current international order. What are the major challenges to world order envisioned by each of these three theories, and how would each theory suggest that they be managed?

In the third (3) and final section, discuss which of these three perspectives you find most convincing as a theory of global governance and why.

Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLC

International Institutions: Can Interdependence Work?
Author(s): Robert O. Keohane
Source: Foreign Policy, No. 110, Special Edition: Frontiers of Knowledge (Spring, 1998), pp. 82-
96+194
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International

Institutions: Can

Interdependence
Work?
by Robert O.

Keohane

– o analyze world politics in the 1990s is to
discuss international institutions: the rules
that govern elements of world politics and

the organizations that help implement those rules.
Should NATO expand? How can the United Nations Security Council
assure UN inspectors access to sites where Iraq might be conducting
banned weapons activity? Under what conditions should China be
admitted to the World Trade Organization (wTo)? How many billions
of dollars does the International Monetary Fund (IMF) need at its dis-
posal to remain an effective “lender of last resort” for countries such as
Indonesia, Korea, and Thailand that were threatened in 1997 with
financial collapse? Will the tentative Kyoto Protocol on Climate
Change be renegotiated, ratified, and implemented effectively? Can
future United Nations peacekeeping practices-in contrast to the UN
fiascoes in Bosnia and Somalia-be made more effective?

These questions help illustrate the growing importance of internation-
al institutions for maintaining world order. Twelve years ago in these
pages, Joseph Nye and I gave “two cheers for multilateralism,” pointing

ROBE RT O. KEOHAN E is James B. Duke professor of political science at Duke University.

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Keohane

out that even the administration of President Ronald Reagan, which took
office ill-disposed toward international institutions, had grudgingly come
to accept their value in achieving American purposes. Superpowers need
general rules because they seek to influence events around the world.
Even an unchallenged superpower such as the United States would be
unable to achieve its goals through the bilateral exercise of influence: the
costs of such massive “arm-twisting” would be too great.

International institutions are increasingly important, but they are
not always successful. Ineffective institutions such as the United
Nations Industrial Development Organization or the Organization of
African Unity exist alongside effectual ones such as the Montreal Pro-
tocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer and the European
Union. In recent years, we have gained insight into what makes some
institutions more capable than others-how such institutions best pro-
mote cooperation among states and what mechanics of bargaining they
use. But our knowledge is incomplete, and as the world moves toward
new forms of global regulation and governance, the increasing impact
of international institutions has raised new questions about how these
institutions themselves are governed.

THEORY AND REALITY, 1919-89

Academic “scribblers” did not always have to pay much attention to
international institutions. The 1919 Versailles Treaty constituted an
attempt to construct an institution for multilateral diplomacy-the
League of Nations. But the rejection of the League Covenant by the
U.S. Senate ensured that until World War II the most important nego-
tiations in world politics-from the secret German-Russian deals of the
1920s to the 1938 Munich conference-took place on an ad hoc basis.
Only after the United Nations was founded in 1945, with strong sup-
port from the United States and a multiplicity of specialized agencies
performing different tasks, did international institutions begin to com-
mand substantial international attention.

Until the late 1960s, American students of international relations
equated international institutions with formal international organiza-
tions, especially the United Nations. International Organization, the
leading academic journal on the subject, carried long summaries of UN
meetings until 1971. However, most observers recognized long before
1972 that the United Nations did not play a central role in world poli-

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International Institutions

tics. Except for occasional peacekeeping missions-of which the First
UN Emergency Force in the Middle East between 1956 and 1967 was
the most successful-its ability to resolve hostilities was paralyzed by
conflicts of interest that resulted in frequent superpower vetoes in the
Security Council. Moreover, the influx of new postcolonial states
helped turn the General Assembly into an arena for North-South con-
flict after 1960 and ensured that the major Western powers, especially
the United States, would view many General Assembly resolutions as
hostile to their interests and values-for example, the New Interna-
tional Economic Order and the Zionism is Racism resolutions of the
1970s. Analysts and policymakers in Europe, North America, and
much of Asia concluded that international institutions were marginal
to a game of world politics still driven by the traditional exercise of state
power. The UN-called “a dangerous place” by former U.S. represen-
tative to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan-seemed more a forum for
scoring points in the Cold War or North-South conflicts than an instru-
ment for problem-solving cooperation.

In reality, however, even the most powerful states were relying increas-
ingly on international institutions-not so much on the UN as other
organizations and regimes that set rules and standards to govern specific
sets of activities. From the late 1960s onward, the Treaty on the Non-Pro-
liferation of Nuclear Weapons was the chief vehicle for efforts to prevent
the dangerous spread of nuclear weapons. NATO was not only the most
successful multilateral alliance in history but also the most highly institu-
tionalized, with a secretary-general, a permanent staff, and elaborate rules
governing relations among members. From its founding in 1947 through
the Uruguay Round that concluded in 1993, the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GArr) presided over a series of trade rounds that have
reduced import tariffs among industrialized countries by up to 90 percent,
boosting international trade. After a shaky start in the 1940s, the IMF
had-by the 1960s-become the centerpiece of efforts by the major cap-
italist democracies to regulate their monetary affairs. When that function
atrophied with the onset of flexible exchange rates in the 1970s, it
became their leading agent for financing and promoting economic devel-
opment in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The sheer number of inter-
governmental organizations also rose dramatically-from about 30 in
1910 to 70 in 1940 to more than 1,000 by 1981.

The exchange rate and oil crises of the early 1970s helped bring per-
ceptions in line with reality. Suddenly, both top policymakers and aca-

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Keohane

demic observers in the United States realized that global issues
required systematic policy coordination and that such coordination
required institutions. In 1974, then secretary of state Henry Kissinger,
who had paid little attention to international institutions, helped
establish the International Energy Agency to enable Western countries
to deal cooperatively with the threat of future oil embargoes like the
1973 OPEC embargo of the Netherlands and United States. And the
Ford administration sought to construct a new international monetary
regime based on flexible rather than pegged exchange rates. Confront-
ed with complex interdependence and the efforts of states to manage
it, political scientists began to redefine the study of international
institutions, broadening it to encompass what they called “intemrna-
tional regimes”-structures of
rules and norms that could be
more or less informal. The inter-
national trade regime, for exam-
ple, did not have strong formal
rules or integrated, centralized
management; rather, it provided a
set of interlocking institutions,
including regular meetings of the
GATT contracting parties, formal dispute settlement arrangements, and
delegation of technical tasks to a secretariat, which gradually devel-
oped a body of case law and practice. Some international lawyers grum-
bled that the political scientists were merely using other terms to
discuss international law. Nevertheless, political scientists were once
again discussing how international rules and norms affect state behav-
ior, even if they avoided the “L-word.”

In the 1980s, research on international regimes moved from attempts
to describe the phenomena of interdependence and international
regimes to closer analysis of the conditions under which countries coop-
erate. How does cooperation occur among sovereign states and how do
international institutions affect it? From the standpoint of political real-
ism, both the reliance placed by states on certain international
institutions and the explosion in their numbers were puzzling. Why
should international institutions exist at all in a world dominated by
sovereign states? This question seemed unanswerable if institutions
were seen as opposed to, or above, the state but not if they were viewed
as devices to help states accomplish their objectives.

Why should international
institutions exist at allin a

world dominated by
sovereign states?

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International Institutions

The new research on international institutions broke decisively
with legalism-the view that law can be effective regardless of politi-
cal conditions-as well as with the idealism associated with the field’s
origins. Instead, scholars adopted the assumptions of realism, accepting
that relative state power and competing interests were key factors in
world politics, but at the same time drawing new conclusions about the
influence of institutions on the process. Institutions create the capa-
bility for states to cooperate in mutually beneficial ways by reducing
the costs of making and enforcing agreements-what economists refer
to as “transaction costs.” They rarely engage in centralized enforce-
ment of agreements, but they do reinforce practices of reciprocity,
which provide incentives for governments to keep their own commit-
ments to ensure that others do so as well. Even powerful states have an
interest, most of the time, in following the rules of well-established
international institutions, since general conformity to rules makes the
behavior of other states more predictable.

This scholarship drew heavily on the twin concepts of uncertainty
and credibility. Theorists increasingly recognized that the preferences of
states amount to “private information”-that absent full transparency,

states are uncertain about what
their partners and rivals value at
any given time. They naturally
respond to uncertainty by being less
willing to enter into agreements,
since they are unsure how their
partners will later interpret the
terms of such agreements. Interna-
tional institutions can reduce this
uncertainty by promoting negotia-

tions in which transparency is encouraged; by dealing with a series of
issues over many years and under similar rules, thus encouraging hon-
esty in order to preserve future reputation; and by systematically moni-
toring the compliance of governments with their commitments.

Even if a government genuinely desires an international agree-
ment, it may be unable to persuade its partners that it will, in the
future, be willing and able to implement it. Successful international
negotiations may therefore require changes in domestic institutions.
For instance, without “fast-track” authority on trade, the United
States’ negotiating partners have no assurance that Congress will

By reducing the
uncertainty of enforcing
agreements, international
institutions help states
achieve collective gains.

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Keohane

refrain from adding new provisions to trade agreements as a condition
for their ratification. Hence, other states are reluctant to enter into
trade negotiations with the United States since they may be con-
fronted, at the end of tortuous negotiations, with a redesigned agree-
ment less favorable to them than the draft they initialed. By the same
token, without fast-track authority, no promise by the U.S. govern-
ment to abide by negotiated terms has much credibility, due to the
president’s lack of control over Congress.

In short, this new school of thought argued that, rather than impos-
ing themselves on states, intemrnational institutions should respond to
the demand by states for cooperative ways to fulfill their own purposes.
By reducing uncertainty and the costs of making and enforcing agree-
ments, intemrnational institutions help states achieve collective gains.

YESTERDAY’S CONTROVERSIES: 1989-95

This new institutionalism was not without its critics, who focused
their attacks on three perceived shortcomings: First, they claimed that
international institutions are fundamentally insignificant since states
wield the only real power in world politics. They emphasized the
weakness of efforts by the UN or League of Nations to achieve col-
lective security against aggression by great powers, and they pointed
to the dominant role of major contributors in international econom-
ic organizations. Hence, any effects of these international institutions
were attributed more to the efforts of their great power backers than
to the institutions themselves.

This argument was overstated. Of course, great powers such as the
United States exercise enormous influence within international
institutions. But the policies that emerge from these institutions are dif-
ferent from those that the United States would have adopted unilater-
ally. Whether toward Iraq or recipients of IMF loans, policies for specific
situations cannot be entirely ad hoc but must conform to generally
applicable rules and principles to be endorsed by multilateral
institutions. Where agreement by many states is necessary for policy to
be effective, even the United States finds it useful to compromise on
substance to obtain the institutional seal of approval. Therefore, the
decision-making procedures and general rules of international
institutions matter. They affect both the substance of policy and the
degree to which other states accept it.

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International Institutions

The second counterargument focused on “anarchy”: the absence of a
world government or effective international legal system to which vic-
tims of injustice can appeal. As a result of anarchy, critics argued, states
prefer relative gains (i.e., doing better than other states) to absolute
gains. They seek to protect their power and status and will resist even
mutually beneficial cooperation if their partners are likely to benefit
more than they are. For instance, throughout the American-Soviet
arms race, both sides focused on their relative positions-who was
ahead or threatening to gain a decisive advantage-rather than on their
own levels of armaments. Similar dynamics appear on certain econom-
ic issues, such as the fierce Euro-American competition (i.e., Airbus
Industrie versus Boeing) in the production of large passenger jets.

Scholarly disputes about the “relative gains question” were intense
but short-lived. It turned out that the question needed to be reframed:
not, “do states seek relative or absolute gains?” but “under what condi-
tions do they forego even mutually beneficial cooperation to preserve
their relative power and status?” When there are only two major players,
and one side’s gains may decisively change power relationships, relative
gains loom large: in arms races, for example, or monopolistic competi-
tion (as between Airbus and Boeing). Most issues of potential coopera-
tion, however, from trade liberalization to climate change, involve
multilateral negotiations that make relative gains hard to calculate and
entail little risk of decisive power shifts for one side over another. There-
fore, states can be expected most of the time to seek to enhance their
own welfare without being worried that others will also make advances.
So the relative gains argument merely highlights the difficulties of coop-
eration where there is tough bilateral competition; it does not by any
means undermine prospects for cooperation in general.

The third objection to theories of cooperation was less radical but
more enduring. Theorists of cooperation had recognized that coopera-
tion is not harmonious: it emerges out of discord and takes place
through tough bargaining. Nevertheless, they claimed that the poten-
tial joint gains from such cooperation explained the dramatic increases
in the number and scope of cooperative multilateral institutions. Crit-
ics pointed out, however, that bargaining problems could produce obsta-
cles to achieving joint gains. For instance, whether the Kyoto Protocol
will lead to a global agreement is questionable in part because develop-
ing countries refused to accept binding limits on their emissions and the
U.S. Senate declared its unwillingness to ratify any agreement not con-

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Keohane

taining such commitments by developing countries. Both sides staked
out tough bargaining positions, hindering efforts at credible compro-
mise. As a result of these bargaining problems, the fact that possible
deals could produce joint gains does not assure that cooperative solu-
tions will be reached. The tactics of political actors and the information
they have available about one another are both key aspects of a process
that does not necessarily lead to cooperation. Institutions may help pro-
vide “focal points,” on which competing actors may agree, but new
issues often lack such institutions. In this case, both the pace and the
extent of cooperation become more problematic.

TODAY’S DEBATES

The general problem of bargaining raises specific issues about how
institutions affect international negotiations, which always involve a
mixture of discord and potential cooperation. Thinking about bargain-
ing leads to concerns about subjectivity, since bargaining depends so
heavily on the beliefs of the parties involved. And the most fundamen-
tal question scholars wish to answer concerns effectiveness: What struc-
tures, processes, and practices make international institutions more or
less capable of affecting policies-and outcomes-in desired ways?

The impact of institutional arrangements on bargaining remains puz-
zling. We understand from observation, from game theory, and from
explorations of bargaining in a variety of contexts that outcomes
depend on more than the resources available to the actors or the pay-
offs they receive. Institutions affect bargaining patterns in complex and
nuanced ways. Who, for example, has authority over the agenda? In the
1980s, Jacques Delors used his authority as head of the European Com-
mission to structure the agenda of the European Community, thus lead-
ing to the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty. What voting
or consensus arrangements are used and who interprets ambiguities? At
the Kyoto Conference, agreement on a rule of “consensus” did not pre-
vent the conference chair from ignoring objections as he gaveled
through provision after provision in the final session. Can disgruntled
participants block implementation of formally ratified agreements? In
the GATT, until 1993, losers could prevent the findings of dispute reso-
lution panels from being implemented; but in the WTO, panel recom-
mendations take effect unless there is a consensus not to implement
them. Asking such questions systematically about international

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International Institutions

institutions may well yield significant new insights in future years.
Institutional maneuvers take place within a larger ideological context

that helps define which purposes such institutions pursue and which
practices they find acceptable. The Mandates System of the League of
Nations depended in part on specific institutional arrangements, but
more fundamental was the shared understanding that continued Euro-
pean rule over non-European peoples was acceptable. No system of rule
by Europeans over non-Europeans could remain legitimate after the col-
lapse of that consensus during the 15 years following World War II.

The end of the Cold War shattered a whole set of beliefs about world
politics. Theories of international politics during the Cold War were
overwhelmingly materialistic, reflecting a view of the world in which
states pursued “national interests” shaped by geopolitical and economic
realities. As Stalin once famously quipped about the pope: “How many
divisions does he have?” Not only did an unarmed Pope John Paul II
prevail in the contest for the allegiance of the Polish people, but after
the failed 1991 coup against Gorbachev, the Soviet Union broke into
its constituent parts on the basis of the norm of “self-determination,”
rather than along lines of military power or economic resources. State
interests now depend in part on how people define their identities-as
Serbs or Croats, Russians or Chechens. They also depend on the polit-
ical and religious values to which their publics are committed.

Hence, the end of the Cold War made scholars increasingly aware
of the importance of ideas, norms, and information-topics that some
of them had already begun to explore. Some years earlier, such a reori-
entation might have faced fierce criticism from adherents of game the-
ory and other economics-based approaches, which had traditionally
focused on material interests. However, since the mid-1980s, bargain-
ing theory has shown more and more that the beliefs of actors are cru-
cially important for outcomes. To adapt economist Thomas Schelling’s
famous example, suppose that you and I want to meet for lunch in New
York City, but you work on Wall Street and I work on the Upper West
Side. Where will we get together? We have a mutual interest in meet-
ing, but each of us would prefer not to waste time traveling. If you leave
a message on my answering machine suggesting a restaurant on Wall
Street and are then unreachable, I have to choose between skipping
lunch with you or showing up at your preferred location. Asymmetri-
cal information and our mutual belief that I know where you will be
waiting for me have structured the situation.

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Keohane

The procedures and rules of international institutions create infor-
mational structures. They determine what principles are acceptable as
the basis for reducing conflicts and whether governmental actions are
legitimate or illegitimate. Consequently, they help shape actors’ expec-
tations. For instance, trade conflicts are increasingly ritualized in a
process of protesting in the WTO-promising tough action on behalf of
one’s own industries, engaging in quasi-judicial dispute resolution pro-
cedures, claiming victory if possible, or complaining about defeat when
necessary. There is much sound and fury, but regularly institutionalized
processes usually relegate conflict to the realm of dramatic expression.
Institutions thereby create differentiated information. “Insiders” can
interpret the language directed toward “outsiders” and use their own
understandings to interpret, or manipulate, others’ beliefs.

Finally, students of international institutions continue to try to under-
stand why some institutions are so much more effective than others. Vari-
ation in the coherence of institutional policy or members’ conformity
with institutional rules is partially accounted for by the degree of common
interests and the distribution of power among members. Institutions
whose members share social values and have similar political systems-
such as NATO or the European Union-are likely to be stronger than
those such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe or
the Association of South East Asian Nations, whose more diverse mem-
bership does not necessarily have the same kind of deep common inter-
ests. Additionally, the character of domestic politics, discussed elsewhere
in this issue by Helen Milner, as well as by Margaret Hermann and Joe
Hagan, has a substantial impact on international institutions. The distri-
bution of power is also important. Institutions dominated by a small num-
ber of members-for example, the IMF, with its weighted voting
system-can typically take more decisive action than those where influ-
ence is more widely diffused, such as the UN General Assembly.

OVERCOMING THE DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT

Even as scholars pursue these areas of inquiry, they are in danger of
overlooking a major normative issue: the “democratic deficit” that
exists in many of the world’s most important international
institutions. As illustrated most recently by the far-reaching interven-
tions of the IMF in East Asia, the globalization of the world economy
and the expanding role of international institutions are creating a

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International Institutions

powerful form of global regulation. Major international institutions
are increasingly laying down rules and guidelines that governments, if
they wish to attract foreign investment and generate growth, must fol-
low. But these international institutions are managed by technocrats
and supervised by high governmental officials. That is, they are run by
6lites. Only in the most attenuated sense is democratic control exer-
cised over major international organizations. Key negotiations in the
WTO are made in closed sessions. The IMF negotiates in secret with
potential borrowers, and it has only begun in the last few months to
provide the conditions it imposes on recipients.

The EU provides another case in point. Its most important decision-
making body is its Council of Ministers, which is composed of govern-
ment representatives who perform more important legislative functions
than the members of the European Parliament. The council meets

behind closed doors and does not
publish its votes. It also appoints
members to the European Commis-
sion, which acts as the EU execu-
tive, whose ties to the public are
thus very indirect indeed. The
European Parliament has narrowly
defined powers and little status;

most national parliaments do not closely scrutinize European-level
actions. How much genuine influence do German or Italian voters
therefore have over the council’s decisions? Very little.

The issue here is not one of state sovereignty. Economic interde-
pendence and its regulation have altered notions of sovereignty: Few
states can still demand to be completely independent of external
authority over legal practices within their territories. The best most
states can hope for is to be able to use their sovereign authority as a bar-
gaining tool to assure that others also have to abide by common rules
and practices. Given these changes, the issue here is who has influence
over the sorts of bargains that are struck? Democratic theory gives pride
of place to the public role in deciding on the distributional and value
tradeoffs inherent in legislation and regulation. But the practices of
international institutions place that privilege in the hands of the 6lites
of national governments and of international organizations.

Admittedly, democracy does not always work well. American politi-
cians regularly engage in diatribes against international institutions,

Only in the most attenuated
sense is democratic control
exercised over major
international organizations.

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Keohane

playing on the dismay of a vocal segment of their electorates at the
excessive number of foreigners in the United Nations. More seriously,
an argument can be made that the IMF, like central banks, can only be
effective if it is insulated from direct democratic control. Ever since
1787, however, practitioners and theorists have explored how authori-
tative decision making can be combined with accountability to publics
and indirect democratic control. The U.S. Constitution is based on
such a theory-the idea that popular sovereignty, though essential, is
best exercised indirectly, through rather elaborate institutions. An issue
that scholars should now explore is how to devise international
institutions that are not only competent and effective but also account-
able, at least ultimately, to democratic publics.

One possible response is to say that all is well, since international
institutions are responsible to governments-which, in turn, are account-
able in democracies to their own people. International regulation simply
adds another link to the chain of delegation. But long chains of delegation,
in which the public affects action only at several removes, reduce actual
public authority. If the terms of multilateral cooperation are to reflect the
interests of broader democratic publics rather than just those of narrow
6lites, traditional patterns of delegation will have to be supplemented by
other means of ensuring greater accountability to public opinion.

One promising approach would be to seek to invigorate transnation-
al society in the form of networks among individuals and nongovern-
mental organizations. The growth of such networks—of scientists,
professionals in various fields, and human rights and environmental
activists-has been aided greatly by the fax machine and the Intemrnet
and by institutional arrangements that incorporate these networks into
decision making. For example, natural and social scientists developed
the scientific consensus underlying the Kyoto Protocol through the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) whose scientific
work was organized by scientists who did not have to answer to any gov-
ernments. The Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, but governments
opposed to effective action on climate change could not hope to rene-
gotiate the scientific guidelines set by the IPCC.

The dramatic fall in the cost of long-distance communication will
facilitate the development of many more such transnational networks.
As a result, wealthy hierarchical organizations-multinational corpora-
tions as well as states-are likely to have more difficulty dominating
transnational communications. Thirty years ago, engaging in prolonged

SPRING 1998 93

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International Institutions

intercontinental communication required considerable resources. Now
individuals do so on the Intemrnet, virtually free.

Therefore, the future accountability of international institutions to
their publics may rest only partly on delegation through formal demo-
cratic institutions. Its other pillar may be voluntary pluralism under
conditions of maximum transparency. International policies may
increasingly be monitored by loose groupings of scientists or other pro-
fessionals, or by issue advocacy networks such as Amnesty Interna-
tional and Greenpeace, whose members, scattered around the world,
will be linked even more closely by modem information technology.
Accountability will be enhanced not only by chains of official respon-
sibility, but by the requirement of transparency. Official actions, nego-
tiated among state representatives in international organizations, will
be subjected to scrutiny by transnational networks.

Such transparency, however, represents nongovernmental organiza-
tions and networks more than ordinary people, who may be as excluded
from e-lite networks as they are from government circles. That is,
transnational civil society may be a necessary but insufficient condition
for democratic accountability. Democracies should insist that, wherever
feasible, international organizations maintain sufficient transparency for
transnational networks of advocacy groups, domestic legislators, and
democratic publics to evaluate their actions. But proponents of democ-
ratic accountability should also seek counterparts to the mechanisms of
control embedded in national democratic institutions. Governors of the
Federal Reserve Board are, after all, nominated by the president and con-
firmed by the Senate, even if they exercise great authority during their
terms of office. If Madison, Hamilton, and Jay could invent indirect
mechanisms of popular control in the Federalist Papers two centuries ago,
it should not be beyond our competence to devise comparable mecha-
nisms at the global level in the twenty-first century.

As we continue to think about the normative implications of global-
ization, we should focus simultaneously on the maintenance of robust
democratic institutions at home, the establishment of formal structures of
international delegation, and the role of transnational networks. To be
effective in the twenty-first century, modem democracy requires interna-
tional institutions. And to be consistent with democratic values, these
institutions must be accountable to domestic civil society. Combining
global governance with effective democratic accountability will be a major
challenge for scholars and policymakers alike in the years ahead.

94 FOREIGN POLICY

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Keohane

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

The best single source for academic writings on international institutions
is the quarterly journal International Organization, published by MIT Press.
A forthcoming special issue, scheduled for Autumn 1998, will review the
last 30 years of scholarship in the field.

The sophisticated realism of the 1970s, which largely ignored inter-
national institutions, is best represented by Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of
World Politics (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1979). For data on
numbers of international organizations, see Cheryl Shanks, Harold
Jacobson, & Jeffrey Kaplan’s “Inertia and Change in the Constellation
of International Governmental Organizations, 1981-1992” (Interna-
tional Organization, Autumn 1996). For statements of institutionalist
theory, see Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony: Cooperation and Dis-
cord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1984) and Kenneth Oye, ed., Cooperation under Anarchy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). For a reflection on
this literature by an international lawyer, see Anne-Marie Slaughter
[Burley], “International Law and International Relations Theory: A
Dual Agenda” (American Journal of International Law, April 1993).

On the United Nations and multilateralism, see Daniel Patrick
Moynihan’s A Dangerous Place (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and
Company, 1978); Keohane & Joseph Nye, Jr.’s “Two Cheers for Mul-
tilateralism” (FOREIGN POLICY, Fall 1985); and John Ruggie’s Win-
ning the Peace (New York, NY: Columbia University Press for the
Twentieth Century Fund, 1996).

The “relative gains debate” is thoroughly reported in David Baldwin,
ed., Neorealism and Neoliberalism: the Contemporary Debate (New
York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993).

On bargaining and distributional issues, see Stephen Krasner’s
“Global Communications and National Power: Life on the Pareto
Frontier” (World Politics, April 1991); James Morrow’s “Modeling the
Forms of International Cooperation: Distribution versus Informa-
tion” (International Organization, Summer 1994); and James Fearon’s
“Bargaining, Enforcement and International Cooperation” (Interna-
tional Organization, forthcoming).

Work on the legalization of international institutions is just begin-
ning; my comments in this article reflect an ongoing project on this

SPRING 1998 95

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International Institutions

subject that I am codirecting with Judith Goldstein, Miles Kahler, and
Anne-Marie Burley.

On the role of ideas, see Goldstein & Keohane, eds., Ideas and For-
eign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1993) and Martha Finnemore’s National
Interests in International Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1996). Finally, on transnational issue networks, see Burley’s
“The Real New World Order” (Foreign Affairs, September/October
1997) and Margaret Keck & Kathryn Sikkink’s Activists Beyond Bor-
ders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, 1997).

For links to relevant Web sites, as well as a comprehensive index of
related articles, access www.foreignpolicy.com.

96 FOREIGN POLICY

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Letters

CORRECTION

On page 96 of this issue, we incorrectly identified Anne-Marie
Slaughter as Anne-Marie Burley. We apologize to Dr. Slaughter and to
our readers.

CREDITS
Front Cover:
Day at the Races, 1923. A Man at the Derby, Epsom, Surrey, England, Hulton Getty
Back Cover:
Detail from illustration by Vint Lawrence, page 28
Young Zairean soldiers near Goma, Zaire; Ricardo Mazalan, AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS
UN General Assembly; Bert Hardy, Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis
Detail from chart, page 100
In Text:
p. 28, Illustration by Vint Lawrence
p. 50, Young Boy Plays with Troop of Toy Soldiers, Genevive Naylor, Corbis
p. 70, First Session of International Tribunal on War Crimes in Former Yugoslavia Opens in the
Hague, UN PHOTO 184689
p. 117, Ships reflagging in Persian Gulf, AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS
p. 127, Genghis Khan, James L. Stanfield, National Geographic Image Collection; Napoleon,
Jacques-Louis David, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Samuel H. Kress Collection;
Stalin, UPI/Corbis-Bettman
p. 156, Volkswagen, compliments of Volkswagen of America, Inc.

194 FOREIGN POLICY

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• Article Contents

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p.83
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• Issue Table of Contents

Foreign Policy, No. 110, Special Edition: Frontiers of Knowledge (Spring, 1998), pp. 1-96+1-48+97-194
Front Matter [pp.1-48]
Editor’s Note [pp.9-11]
Think Again
China [pp.13-27]
The Frontiers of Knowledge
International Relations: One World, Many Theories [pp.29-46]
International Security: Changing Targets [pp.48-63]
International Law: The Trials of Global Norms [pp.65-80]
International Institutions: Can Interdependence Work? [pp.82-194]
International Economics: Unlocking the Mysteries of Globalization [pp.97-111]
International Political Economy: Beyond Hegemonic Stability [pp.112-123]
International Decision Making: Leadership Matters [pp.124-137]
International Development: Is It Possible? [pp.138-151]
International Business: The New Bottom Line [pp.152-165]
Books
untitled [pp.166-169]
untitled [pp.169-172]
untitled [pp.172-174]
untitled [pp.175-177]
untitled [pp.177-179]
untitled [pp.179-181]
Global Newsstand
Contribuciones: July/September 1997, Buenos Aires [pp.182-183]
Middle East Journal: Winter 1998, Washington, DC [pp.183-184]
Management Science: December 1997, Providence, Rl [pp.184-185]
Le Monde Diplomatique: January 1998, Paris [pp.186-187]
Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte: December 12, 1997, Bonn [pp.187-188]
South African Yearbook of International Affairs: 1997, Pretoria [pp.188-189]
State, Government, and International Relations: Summer 1997, Tel Aviv [pp.189-190]
Letters
Mexican Standoff [pp.191-193]
Back Matter

ROUNDTABLE: CHANGE AND CONTINUITY IN GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

Global Governance and Power
Politics:

Back to Basics

Roland Paris

F
or many students of global governance who explore the myriad institu-

tions, rules, norms, and coordinating arrangements that transcend indi-

vidual states and societies, what really marks the contemporary era is

not the absence of such governance but its “astonishing diversity.” In addition

to “long-standing universal-membership bodies,” such as the United Nations, writes

Stewart Patrick, “there are various regional institutions, multilateral alliances

and security groups, standing consultative mechanisms, self-selecting clubs, ad

hoc coalitions, issue-specific arrangements, transnational professional networks,

technical standard-setting bodies, global action networks, and more.” The prolif-

eration and diversification of governance mechanisms—yielding a jumble of for-

mal and informal arrangements—has supplanted the simpler image of state

representatives gathering at official assemblies. Many scholars believe this plural-

ism opens important new avenues for tackling a growing array of complex trans-

national problems, particularly at a time when the responsiveness of traditional

multilateral institutions is being called into question.

Global governance has indeed become more diversified in recent decades, and

informal arrangements do sometimes provide opportunities for action when tra-

ditional multilateral bodies are stymied. But there is something important missing

from this picture. The fundamental challenge of global governance today is not a

shortage of cooperative mechanisms but the rapid shift in power away from the

United States and the West toward emerging countries in the erstwhile periphery

of the international system—countries that do not necessarily share Western as-

sumptions about the purposes and methods of global governance. No amount

of institutional proliferation or innovation can ultimately substitute for a lack of

consensus among incumbent or rising powers on the fundamental “rules of the

Ethics & International Affairs, , no.  (), pp. –.
©  Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
doi:./S

407

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game” in world affairs, including basic norms of political legitimacy, war and

peace, and commerce. These are the foundations upon which any workable global

governance system must be built.

It was easier to disregard these foundations when they seemed more secure. The

global governance literature emerged in a particular historical context—the imme-

diate post–cold war period—when America’s predominance was largely unchal-

lenged, and when the willingness of the United States to continue underwriting

the institutional arrangements of international security and commerce was widely

taken for granted. Early contributors to this literature focused on emerging forms

of governance beyond the nation-state, or “governance without government.” The

overriding image emerging from this scholarship was that of a world inhabited by

“countless actors of many different types” that combined in diverse arrangements

to address transnational problems, regulate international activity, and provide

public goods. Global governance, according to this view, was “less state-centric

and more the sum of crazy-quilt patterns among unalike, dispersed, overlapping,

and contradictory” political actors. Material power—and state power, in particu-

lar—seemed to fade into the background.

Today, the conditions that defined the post–cold war period are fading into the

past, yet the global governance literature continues to reflect the circumstances of

its birth: too often, it takes the foundations of global governance for granted. In

this essay I argue that the study of global governance needs to bring material

power—and power politics—back into focus. Otherwise, it will have little to say

about the most important governance challenge of our time: how to adapt and

strengthen the rules-based international order, and thus preserve cooperation,

in the midst of a historic global power transition.

The remainder of this essay is divided into three parts. First, I make the case

that the study of global governance has enhanced our understanding of world af-

fairs by drawing attention to the pluralization of global governance actors and

mechanisms, a trend that is likely to continue in the coming years. Second, I con-

tend that the literature has nevertheless tended to neglect the material foundations

of global governance, as well as the imperative of consensus among the world’s

most powerful states on core norms as a basis for global stability and cooperation.

Third, I argue that remedying this shortcoming does not mean abandoning

research on informal and innovative forms of cooperation or regulation. On

the contrary, it is a combination of both perspectives—the enduring importance

of major-power consensus, and the growing pluralization of governance

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arrangements—that offers the strongest basis for analyzing today’s most pressing

global governance challenges.

The Rise of Plurilateralism

With the end of the cold war, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the decline of

great-power rivalry, many policymakers and scholars turned their attention to

other aspects of international affairs, including the globalization of capital, pro-

duction, information, ideas, crime, pathogens, and environmental damage. The

intensification of linkages across states and societies also highlighted the need

for improved methods of managing problems that transcended state borders,

which in turn fueled the growth of the academic literature examining new

forms of global cooperation and regulation. The study of global governance,

which gained prominence during this time, reflected these preoccupations.

Philip Cerny was one of the scholars writing on this subject in the early s,

and his work encapsulated many of the themes of this emerging scholarship. He

described the rise of a variegated patchwork of governance arrangements, which,

he believed, would ultimately coexist with, cut across, and rival the post–World

War II architecture of formal multilateral organizations. Cerny called this complex

system “plurilateralism” to reflect its diversity and fluidity. Although he acknowl-

edged that a plurilateral world would “not be an easy world to live in, much less to

manage,” he was optimistic about its potential to produce a stable, resilient, and

adaptable international system—partly because he expected it to be more flexible

and responsive than traditional multilateralism, and partly because shifting coali-

tions of “individuals, groups, states, firms, and other agents” working on different

issues would create new, overlapping ties of interdependence. Stability, he posited,

would not necessarily depend on a broad agreement about “the rules of the game,”

or a consensus on the fundamental norms of international affairs, but instead

could arise from “the very cross-cutting nature” of these new forms of coopera-

tion. Put differently, the apparent disorder of plurilateralism might, paradoxically,

produce order.

Interest in plurilateral global governance was not limited to the academy. The

concept gained traction in policy discussions, too, including in the  report

of the Commission on Global Governance, a blue-ribbon panel created after the

cold war to map out an agenda for international cooperation. Previously, the re-

port explained, governance had been “viewed primarily as intergovernmental

global governance and power politics 409

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relationships,” but now “a multitude of new actors . . . are increasingly active in

advancing various political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental objec-

tives that have considerable global impact.” As a result, global governance had be-

come “a broad, dynamic, complex process of interactive decision-making that is

constantly evolving and responding to changing circumstances.” Like Cerny, the

report’s authors highlighted the diversity of actors and mechanisms involved in

global governance and the fluidity and adaptability of the resulting system, as

well as its problem-solving orientation. They set out what some observers have

called a “post-internationalist” orientation, focusing on governance arrangements

and actors other than states and traditional intergovernmental organizations.

In the ensuing two decades the study of global governance burgeoned, as figure 

indicates. A total of  academic publications referred to “global governance” be-

tween  and , but by – that number had jumped to ,.

Figure  places this growth in perspective, by scaling these numbers and comparing

them to two other key terms: “international organizations” and “international rela-

tions.” While scholarly references to “global governance” increased more than

forty-two-fold from the early s to the early s, mentions of “international

organizations” and “international relations” grew by factors of only . and ., re-

spectively. These figures may help to explain why by  scholars were already ob-

serving that global governance had attained “near-celebrity status” in the political

science discipline. But this was just a start. We now know that academic interest

in the subject would continue to grow rapidly for another decade, both in absolute

terms and relative to other key concepts. By all appearances, it is growing still.

One of the drivers of this increased attention was almost certainly the propaga-

tion of new governance mechanisms themselves, along with a belief that “the

Figure . Number of Academic Publications Referring to “Global Governance”

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hierarchical old governance model” of formal treaties and universal-membership

bodies has only “limited utility in dealing with many of today’s most significant

global challenges.” Echoing Cerny’s description of plurilateralism, many more

recent analyses have traced the growth of nonstate, private, semiprivate, transna-

tional, and subnational entities in global governance, as well as the diversification

of regulatory and cooperative arrangements addressing an array of issues. On

climate change, for example, Matthew Hoffmann provides a fascinating descrip-

tion of fifty-eight “innovative initiatives” that have been pursued by “cities, coun-

ties, provinces, regions, civil society, and corporations” working outside the formal

treaty process, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

(UNFCCC). Some of these initiatives catalogue greenhouse gas emissions; others

set certification standards or supervise emissions trading schemes, or perform

other functions. The result, he notes, is “something less familiar, messier, more

diffuse and dynamic” than the top-down UNFCCC process, which has been all

but paralyzed by interstate disagreements. Hoffmann suggests that this “experi-

mental system” of patchwork governance may be able “to provide the impetus

for the global response” to climate change “in a way that multilateral treaty-

making simply cannot.” Similar analyses have been performed in other “global

policy spaces,” including trade, finance, health, labor, security, migration, and

development.

Issue-specific investigations have also spawned more theoretical studies of “re-

gime complexity,” defined as the “presence of nested, partially overlapping, and

parallel international regimes that are not hierarchically organized.” In contrast

Figure . Number of Academic Publications Referring to “Global Governance”

vs. Other Terms (Normalized)

global governance and power politics 411

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to prior research on regimes, which tended to view international governance and

regulatory systems as relatively centralized and integrated, the newer scholarship

emphasizes both the fragmentation of these systems and the absence of top-down

direction. Some observers argue that international organizations play important

and constructive roles within these regime complexes, including that of mobilizing

and working with private actors and institutions to achieve regulatory goals.

Others, however, point to apparent disadvantages: Julia Morse and Robert

Keohane, forexample,believethat regime complexityallows multilateral institutions

to be used to undermine other institutions and to weaken existing international rules

and cooperation—a practice they describe as “contested multilateralism.”

All told, such debates and investigations have shed new light on an important

phenomenon: the growth of complex networks of diverse governance mechanisms

in world politics, which now overlap with, and sometimes rival, the traditional

multilateral structures of the post–World War II era. Plurilateralism has become

a reality. Further, these trends are likely to continue, particularly as the digital rev-

olution and other “disruptive” technologies enable more nonstate groups and in-

dividuals to become transnational actors in their own right. By detailing the rise

of this plurilateral system, and showing how informal mechanisms can sometimes

facilitate cooperation when more formal multilateral organizations are unable or

unwilling to act, the global governance literature has made an important contri-

bution to our understanding of international affairs.

But the World Was Changing in Other Ways, Too

During the same period, however, other changes were taking place in the world—

changes that have revealed something of a blind spot in the study of global gov-

ernance. Whereas during the immediate post–cold war years the predominance of

the United States was largely unchallenged, by the s few doubted the diffusion

of power away from the Western core of the international system and toward

emerging countries elsewhere, particularly in Asia. China’s economic output,

for instance, was just a tenth of the U.S. figure in , but it is reportedly on

track to be  percent larger by . Meanwhile, the fatigue and expense of

long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the effects of the – finan-

cial crisis and subsequent economic recession, seemed to have diminished the ap-

petite of the U.S. leadership and public for expensive foreign engagements. As U.S.

ambitions have contracted, China, Russia, and smaller regional powers in the

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Persian Gulf and elsewhere have grown more assertive, leading observers to pro-

claim the “return of geopolitics,” or a period of more aggressive competition

among powerful states. For all these reasons, a quarter century after the end

of the cold war many question whether the United States still has the material

power, or the political will, to continue underwriting and upholding the institu-

tional foundations of international security and the global economy.

These developments have placed the study of global governance in an awkward

position. The rise of plurilateralism has been real and important, but so is the need

for consensus among the world’s most powerful states on the core norms of inter-

national relations. Such a consensus can no longer be taken for granted. Not only

is power shifting toward emerging states, thus complicating the task of reaching

consensus because it multiplies the number of influential actors who must

agree. More fundamentally, there is no guarantee that new powers will subscribe

to Western ideas about how, and to what ends, global governance should be or-

ganized. Some scholars argue that such rising states as China, India, Turkey,

and Brazil already hold different views than that of industrialized Western nations

about “the foundations of political legitimacy, the rules of international trade, and

the relationship between the state and society.” Others are more sanguine, argu-

ing that “the overarching trend in the preference of China, India, and Brazil on

existing global governance regimes has been one of convergence on the status

quo.” This debate will be resolved in time: we will eventually learn whether

emerging powers accept, seek to revise, or attempt to overthrow existing gover-

nance arrangements. At present, however, greater ideological pluralization and in-

creased geopolitical competition seem all but inevitable, which in turn raises

questions about the future of global governance.

These questions are of particular concern to policy practitioners, who face the

daunting but vital task of adapting the rules-based international order and main-

taining cooperation in the midst of a global power transition. But these develop-

ments also pose an analytical challenge to students of global governance. As noted

above, no amount of institutional proliferation or innovation in global governance

can ultimately substitute for the absence of a consensus among the world’s most

powerful states on the rules of the game in international affairs. Yet much of the

global governance literature continues to reflect the preoccupations of the imme-

diate post–cold war era, when managing the effects of globalization—rather than

ensuring the foundations of world order—was top-of-mind. Although contribu-

tors to this literature have regularly acknowledged the continued importance of

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states and of material power in world affairs, many have in practice relegated

power—and state power, in particular—to the background, focusing instead on

post-internationalist forms of global cooperation and regulation. Indeed, the liter-

ature as a whole has tended to define itself in contradistinction to traditional con-

ceptions of interstate diplomacy and multilateral organizations. At a time when

the material and ideological foundations of world order seem to be shifting, stud-

ies of global governance that have little to say about power and geopolitics are at

risk of missing the forest for the trees—or worse, of being rendered obsolete.

Back to Basics

For all these reasons, the study of global governance needs to rediscover power. I

say “rediscover” because many international relations scholars have explored the

relationship between power politics and institutionalized cooperation in depth,

and their work might provide some guidance for students of global governance

today. One notable example is Robert Gilpin, whose eclectic brand of realist anal-

ysis came quickly to be overshadowed by Kenneth Waltz’s “neorealism,” which

has dominated the discipline for decades. In contrast to Waltz’s static and un-

remittingly materialist view of world politics, Gilpin examined the dynamics of

change and the interconnections among material power, norms, and institutions.

He conceived of the international system as a set of “social arrangements,” which

include “rights and rules that govern or at least influence the interactions among

states.” These arrangements, he argued, “tend to reflect the relative powers of the

actors involved,” but they are not simply reducible to the distribution of material

power. Ideas and institutions, in other words, have an independent causal role in

world affairs, serving as a “form of control” that “regulates behavior and may

range from informal rules of the system to formal institutions.” They are not

mere artifacts of power politics.

However, Gilpin maintained that these social arrangements cannot be disso-

ciated from material power. Global governance structures may, for example, per-

sist after the disappearance of the power conditions that gave rise to them, but not

indefinitely. At some point, a “disjuncture” emerges between these structures “and

the capacity of the dominant state, or states, to maintain the system.” If rising

powers—those gaining the capacity to maintain, or to topple, the system—view

the current governance arrangements as reflecting their own interests, needs,

and values, they may opt to replace the declining powers as guarantors of these

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arrangements. According to Gilpin, such states have historically sought to change

existing governance structures, either through incremental adjustment or, more

often, by undermining or overthrowing them.

Contemporary scholars and policy experts, including many in the United States,

are aware of this risk. Charles Kupchan, for instance, an academic who has held staff

positions at the National Security Council, warns that if the West and the “rising

rest” fail to “forge a consensus on the ordering rules that define legitimacy and gov-

ern matters of commerce, war, and peace,” we may be entering a period of “consid-

erable potential for geopolitical peril.” John Ikenberry similarly argues that the

United States “will need to renegotiate its relationship with the rest of the world,

and this will inevitably mean giving up some of the rights and privileges that it

has had in the earlier hegemonic era.” Stephen Brooks and William Wolhforth,

for their part, contend that the decline in American power should not be overesti-

mated, but also note that the existing architecture of international institutions is “a

relic of the preoccupations and power relationships of the middle of the last centu-

ry,” and maintain that there are good reasons for the United States “to spearhead

the foundation of a new institutional order.” Former U.S. National Security

Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski asserts that any new institutional order must be

based on a new understanding between the United States and China. Such a com-

pact, he argues, is a necessary condition for the development of new global gover-

nance arrangements, because if the U.S.-China relationship “is not stable and is not

guided by a genuine recognition by both sides of our respective interests in working

together, then no multilateral institution created in that context is going to work.”

The challenge for students of global governance is to blend such insights with

the concurrent reality of institutional proliferation and diversification in global

governance. Returning to the example of climate change provides a small but tell-

ing illustration of why this is important. In spite of the plethora of governance in-

struments and experiments aimed at reducing emissions, the net results have been

less than satisfactory. The authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change has reported that global emissions of greenhouse gases grew more quickly

between  and  than in each of the three previous decades—arguably the

clearest measure of governance effectiveness on this issue. If anything, the most

hopeful recent development in this field was not the appearance of a variety of

new governance mechanisms, but rather the November  agreement between

the United States and China that set “new targets for carbon emissions reductions

by the United States and a first-ever commitment by China to stop its emissions

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from growing by .” Perhaps this agreement, or another like it, will serve as a

basis for a renegotiated approach to climate change that could be broadened to

include more countries and eventually institutionalized in new governance struc-

tures. Indeed, beyond the issue of climate change, achieving a new modus vivendi

between these two countries—the preeminent incumbent and rising powers, re-

spectively—on critical and contentious matters of international economics, secur-

ity, and environmental sustainability may be the single most important

requirement to adapt the system of global governance to new power realities.

Brzezinski probably gets this right.

At the same time, the sheer complexity of today’s transnational problems may

defy the capacity of even the strongest states, acting in concert, to manage. This is

why research on the growing role of nonstate actors in global governance and the

emergence of informal cooperative and regulatory mechanisms will remain rele-

vant and important. Too often, however, these two perspectives—one emphasiz-

ing the enduring importance of major-power consensus as a basis for world order,

the other highlighting the remarkable proliferation of global governance actors

and arrangements—have been treated as rival approaches to the study of interna-

tional affairs. In fact, each is incomplete without the other. A synthesis of both

perspectives would offer the strongest basis for analyzing the most pressing prob-

lems of order and governance facing the world today.

Taking the study of global governance “back to basics,” in other words, does not

mean returning to the past. Power is diffusing not only toward the emerging econ-

omies but also toward transnational and nonstate actors. Realists who fail to ac-

knowledge this trend, or who paint a picture of international relations that

depicts little more than interstate politics, will almost certainly face greater diffi-

culty explaining world affairs. Similarly, as the number and variety of participants

in global politics multiplies, the most strategically minded international actors, be

they governmental or nongovernmental, will be those that comprehend that get-

ting things done on a more crowded world stage requires mobilizing diverse co-

alitions of like-minded actors. The global governance literature, with its insights

into the pluralization of cooperative mechanisms, is already well-positioned to un-

derstand and to explain this tactic.

Yet, for all this transformation, states remain the most influential actors in

world affairs, and material power continues to be the primary source of influence.

It is one thing to acknowledge these facts in words, but another to build them into

analyses of international relations. The study of global governance should start

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from the recognition that complex new patterns of cooperation ultimately depend

on whether or not the foundations of global cooperation are maintained. Those

foundations, as Gilpin observed, are made up of mutual understandings among

the world’s most powerful actors. What is most needed today, therefore, is

more research and analysis not only about the actual or potential renegotiation

of these foundations but also, and more specifically, about the ways in which

the proliferation and diversification of global governance actors and mechanisms

might advance this most fundamental goal. In this sense, going “back to basics” is

about moving the field forward.

Conclusion

In their essay for this forum, Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson call on glob-

al governance scholars to consider “bigger questions that deal with where we have

come from and where we are going.” I agree. Navigating the current period of glob-

al power transition is a generational challenge that will require enlightened political

leadership informed by an understanding of how power, norms, and institutions

can interact to produce systemic stability. The contributions of global governance

scholars will be essential, but answering such “bigger questions” will require a

broader view of governance, one that blends the literature’s new insights about

the rise of plurilateralism with older truths about the foundational importance

of consensus among the world’s most powerful states on “the rules of the game.”

NOTES

 Stewart Patrick, “The Unruled World: The Case for Good Enough Global Governance,” Foreign Affairs
, no.  (), p. .

 Ibid., p. .
 James N. Rosenau and Ernst O. Czempiel, eds., Governance Without Government: Order and Change in
World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).

 Rainer Baumann and Klaus Dingwerth, “Global Governance vs Empire: Why World Order Moves
Toward Heterarchy and Hierarchy,” Journal of International Relations and Development , no. 
(), p. .

 James N. Rosenau, “Information Technologies and the Skills, Networks, and Structures that Sustain
World Affairs,” in James N. Rosenau and J. P. Singh, eds., Information Technologies and Global
Politics: The Changing Scope of Power and Governance (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York
Press, ), p. .

 Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, “Power in Global Governance,” in Michael Barnett and
Raymond Duvall, eds., Power in Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ),
p. .

 Notable exceptions include Jamie Gaskarth, ed., Rising Powers, Global Governance and Global Ethics
(Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, ); Andrew Hurrell, On Global Order: Power, Values, and the
Constitution of International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, ); and Barnett and
Duvall, eds., Power in Global Governance.

 Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Globalization: What’s New? What’s Not? (And So What?),”
Foreign Policy, no.  (), pp. –.

global governance and power politics 417

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 Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, “Rethinking Global Governance? Complexity, Authority,
Power, Change,” International Studies Quarterly , no.  (), pp. –.

 Philip G. Cerny, “Plurilateralism: Structural Differentiation and Functional Conflict in the Post–Cold
War World Order,” Millennium , no.  (), pp. –.

 Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighborhood: The Report of the Commission on
Global Governance (New York: Oxford University Press, ).

 Baumann and Dingwerth, “Global Governance vs Empire,” p. .
 Barnett and Duvall, eds., “Power in Global Governance,” p. .
 John Gerard Ruggie, “Global Governance and ‘New Governance Theory’: Lessons from Business and

Human Rights,” Global Governance , no.  (), p. .
 For example, Mark Raymond and Laura DeNardis, “Multistakeholderism: Anatomy of an Inchoate

Global Institution,” International Theory, , no.  (), pp. –; Michael Zürn, “Global
Governance as Multi-Level Governance,” in David Levi-Faur, ed., Oxford Handbook of Governance
(New York: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –; and Luk Van Langenhove, “The
Transformation of Multilateralism: Mode . to Mode .,” Global Policy , no.  (), pp. –.

 Matthew J. Hoffmann, Climate Governance at the Crossroads: Experimenting with a Global Response
after Kyoto (New York: Oxford University Press, ), p. .

 See, for example, Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, eds., International Organization and Global
Governance (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, ); and Sophie Harman and David Williams, eds.,
Governing the World? Cases in Global Governance (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, ). On “global policy
spaces,” see William D. Coleman, “Governance and Global Public Policy,” in Levi-Faur, ed., Oxford
Handbook of Governance, pp. –.

 Karen J. Alter and Sophie Meunier, “The Politics of International Regime Complexity,” Perspectives on
Politics , no.  (), p. . See also Kal Raustiala and David G. Victor, “The Regime Complex for
Plant Genetic Resources,” International Organization , no.  (), pp. –.

 Frank Biermann, Philipp Pattberg, Harro van Asselt and Fariborz Zelli, “The Fragmentation of Global
Governance Architectures: A Framework for Analysis,” Global Environmental Politics , no.  (),
pp. –.

 Kenneth W. Abbott and Duncan Snidal, “International Regulations Without International Government:
Improving IO Performance through Orchestration,” Review of International Organizations , no. 
(), pp. –.

 Julia C. Morse and Robert O. Keohane, “Contested Multilateralism,” Review of International
Organizations , no.  (), pp. –.

 Moisés Naím, The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In
Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be (New York: Basic Books, ); and Taylor Owen, Disruptive Power:
The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age (New York: Oxford University Press, ).

 Keith Fray, “China’s Leap Forward: Overtaking the US as World’s Biggest Economy,” Financial Times,
FT Data Blog, October , .

 Walter Russell Mead, “The Return of Geopolitics,” Foreign Affairs , no.  (), pp. –.
 Charles Kupchan, No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (New York:

Oxford University Press, ), p. .
 Miles Kahler, “Rising Powers and Global Governance: Negotiating Change in a Resilient Status Quo,”

International Affairs , no.  (), p. .
 Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); and

Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, ).
 Kupchan, No One’s World, pp. x and .
 G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World

Order (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), p. .
 Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “Reshaping the World Order,” Foreign Affairs , no. 

(), p. .
 David Rothkopf, “A Time of Unprecedented Instability?” Foreign Policy website, July , , foreign-

policy.com////a-time-of-unprecedented-instability.
 International Panel on Climate Change, Mitigation of Climate Change: Working Group III Contribution

to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (New York:
Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –.

 Mark Landler, “U.S. and China Reach Climate Accord after Months of Talks,” New York Times,
November , .

 See Rothkopf, “A Time of Unprecedented Instability?”

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• Global Governance and Power Politics: Back to Basics

The Rise of Plurilateralism
But the World Was Changing in Other Ways, Too
Back to Basics
Conclusion

THE GLOBAL FORUM

The Last Two Centuries
of Global Governance

�
Craig N. Murphy

IN RECENT ESSAYS, THOMAS WEISS AND RORDEN WILKINSON ARGUE THAT
analysis of systems of global governance going back to the beginnings of
the earliest state systems could provide fundamental insight into the prob-
lems that trouble the scholarly field of international relations today.1 While
no social scientist or historian is yet able to give a credible account of
global governance over those many millennia, it is possible to begin to
recount the history of global governance far back beyond the events with
which scholars of international relations begin, 1945, the end of World War
II and the founding of the postwar UN system—as Thomas Weiss and Dan
Plesch do in their essay in this issue of Global Governance—to provide
valuable insights for contemporary global governance.

An even more reasonable date for the beginning of the contemporary
system of global governance would be 1815. The associated events were the
end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna and the beginning
of a system of governance of Europe and its empires that eventually led to
the global system that we now have. The conservative governments that held
the congress created many of the institutions that still characterize global
governance and gave new life to older institutions and practices whose
sources and consequences were central to the nineteenth-century interimpe-
rial organizations out of which the United Nations grew. Many of the goals
of the interimperial system—the economic goals as well as the goal of uni-
versalizing and perfecting the state system—also are still with us. Moreover,
the constitutional dynamics of the nineteenth-century system—the forces
that led to change within international governance—remain the same. Atten-
tion to those dynamics can, as Weiss and Wilkinson would suggest, help us
understand the prospects for ameliorating current global problems, including
problems that could not have been anticipated two centuries ago.

New Institutions
The Congress of Vienna imposed a peace on France and Napoleon’s allies
by doing much more than reestablishing something like the eighteenth-

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century European balance of power. The victors sought to create a system
that would assure continent-wide and interimperial rule by conservative
social forces far into the future. The congress itself was the first of a series
of nineteenth-century multilateral conferences of the great powers called to
deal with European and interimperial conflicts. The Hague international
peace conferences of 1899 and 1907 (and a third, planned for 1915, aborted
after the outbreak of war) also built on the earlier conferences by attempt-
ing to institutionalize general processes for resolving conflicts among all
national governments. The goal remained the same with the 1919 Paris
Peace Conference that established the League of Nations and the 1945 San
Francisco conference that agreed on the UN Charter.

The congress or conference system not only made multilateral treaty
making a common practice, it quickly led to the simultaneous or sometimes
separate meetings of periodic congresses or conferences of representatives
of ministries involved with transportation, communication, commerce,
health, currency, finance, and almost every other aspect of government.
This was the beginning of the “legislative branch” of today’s global gover-
nance, the system of global multilateral conferences.

At the same time, and often in the same cities where nineteenth-century
public officials met, private associations of transnationally oriented com-
munities of professionals and social activists also met to agree on voluntary
international standards affecting almost every aspect of economic and
social life throughout Europe and its empires. Moreover, long before the
congresses of the great powers became truly global, the private interna-
tional governance system welcomed professionals and activists from every
part of the world.

By the mid-nineteenth century, many of the periodic conferences, both
public and private, had created permanent administrations (secretariats) to
carry out tasks between the meetings of national representatives. The secre-
tariats prepared conferences; helped set agendas; proposed new agreements;
helped monitor compliance with previous agreements; and, in some cases,
provided specific services to governments, national associations, or even to
citizens in many parts of the world. The nineteenth-century secretariats
became the “executive branch” of contemporary global governance; the
administrative history of the UN system and other global international organ-
izations begins there, as a visit to the archives of almost any agency of the
UN system readily confirms. Some were originally part of the nineteenth-
century system of “public international unions” (e.g., the International
Telecommunications Union [ITU] and the Universal Postal Union). Others
grew out of or incorporated nineteenth-century predecessors (e.g., the Inter-
national Labour Organization and the Food and Agricultural Organization).
And the rest were modeled on nineteenth-century antecedents in different
older fields (e.g., the International Civil Aviation Organization on the early
ITU and railway unions).

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A final new, and continuing, institution initiated at the end of the
Napoleonic Wars is the practice of giving systemwide sanction to some, but
not all, successful nationalist movements. For example, the victors over
Napoleon approved the freedom that the Norwegians won from Napoleon’s
ally, Denmark (albeit, allowing only a limited freedom under a personal
union of Norway and Sweden under the Swedish king), but the revolution-
aries who had defeated Napoleon in Haiti did not gain similar recognition.
As the nineteenth century went on, the creole-ruled American states,
Greece, Belgium, Romania, and others gained interimperial recognition, but
not Liberia, Ethiopia, or other nonwhite-ruled states that were distant from
Europe.

Incorporating Older Institutions
The differential practice of nineteenth-century multilateral recognition
reflected a European institution that only slightly predated the Congress of
Vienna, the idea that legitimate sovereignty depended on governments
adhering to “the standard of civilization,” or, perhaps it is better to call that
standard “white hegemony.” As W. E. B. Du Bois describes it in “The Souls
of White Folk,”

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very
modern thing, a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. . . . [E]ven
up into the eighteenth century we were hammering our national manikins
into one, great, Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race
even more than birth. Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sud-
den, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token,
wonderful!2

The discovery of whiteness and of the standard of civilization were reac-
tions to the resistance to European colonization of much of the world,
worldwide colonization that was made possible by the fortuitous European
discovery of America and its exclusive exploitation by Europeans through-
out the three centuries before the Congress of Vienna.

Access to the wealth of the Americas and the exploitation of African
labor gave Europe and the United States their head start into the Industrial
Revolution. It also gave the world what Ian Morris describes as the West’s
(temporary) global “rule,” something that only began in the 1770s, when
Napoleon was a boy.3 Looked at through the historical lenses of Morris or
Du Bois, contemporary global governance started as a set of institutions
designed to help secure the global dominance of white folks by managing
some of the conflicts among Europe’s imperial powers. The early system
seems to have done the job of helping secure European dominance quite
well; after all, when Du Bois was writing the “The Soul of White Folks” in
1910, the number of nonwhite-ruled states whose sovereignty remained

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uncompromised by any of the European empires could have been counted
on one hand. Nevertheless, contradictions within the nineteenth-century
system of global governance assured that it would eventually help under-
mine the white hegemony that it originally served.

Despite the focus of the nineteenth-century great-power conferences on
the high politics of potential armed conflict, most of the staff and the
resources of the public international unions were dedicated to supporting
what we would now call “economic globalization.” The unions eased trade
and international communication among industrial firms while mollifying
powerful business and labor groups that might be harmed by ever greater
economic integration; the League and the UN systems continued to do the
same. Ultimately, though, economic globalization undermined white privi-
lege and power, acting as an often unexpected ally of the forces of nation-
alist resistance to European imperialism that gave rise to the defensive ide-
ology of the standard of civilization.

Similarly, the secretariats of the public international unions, the
League, and the UN attracted idealistic internationalists who often believed,
in the words of John A. Hobson, that

nationalism is a plain highway to internationalism, and if it manifests diver-
gence we may well suspect a perversion of its nature and its purpose. Such a
perversion is Imperialism, in which nations trespassing beyond the limits of
facile assimilation transform the wholesome stimulative rivalry of varied na-
tional types into the cut-throat struggle of competing empires.4

Moreover, from the beginning, Hobson and other activists who supported
the emerging system of global governance considered the training of native
administrators and eventual decolonization something that anyone who
believed in good government and internationalism should support. For that
reason, international institutions designed to improve the state and the state
system should, as a matter of course, be anti-imperialist.

The Dynamics: Why and How the System Changed
In 2015, global governance may still promote economic globalization, but
it is hardly still the champion of formal imperialism. This is, in large part,
due to the forces that have influenced the global governance system over
the past two centuries: the system has responded to the will of the govern-
ments of the great powers, particularly that of the hegemonic powers,
changing in response to changes in the ideology of the hegemon and with
the change of the hegemon. The system has also responded to civil society
and political forces from below, forces that have been strong enough to
maintain global agendas even after they have been dropped by the hege-

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mon. And perhaps most significantly, global governance has both
responded to—and helped shape—the phases in the increasingly global
industrial economy, the periodic creative destruction that took the world
from the early Industrial Revolution to the Information Age.

Great Britain led the victors over Napoleon and it remained the Euro-
pean hegemon. Therefore, when the balance of social forces within Britain
shifted in the mid-nineteenth century and all of its governments began to
give active support to a liberal international order, Britain became a leader
in the campaign to create the governance that made the first era of eco-
nomic globalization possible. Britain’s nineteenth-century humanitarian
sympathies also received special attention in nineteenth-century global gov-
ernance; for example, the Congress of Vienna took the time to condemn the
slave trade even though most of the conservative governments in atten-
dance thought the issue a bit off-topic or even outré. Of course, not all of
the nineteenth-century hegemons’ hobbyhorses appeared this progressive.
In the quarter-century before World War I, an official British skepticism
about the “germ theory of disease” led to its implacable (and effective)
opposition to an international regime to require quarantine of ships infected
with cholera, influenza, and the like (a regime opposed by British shipping
interests). After World War I, the end of British hegemony, and the 1918 flu
pandemic, such a global regime became possible. Arguably, the end of
British hegemony also meant the beginning of the real possibility of a
global governance system indifferent to, or even opposed to the chummy
global condominium of the world by the European empires.

The relative dominance of the United States after World War II assured
that global governance would learn to ride American hobbyhorses, one of
which (although it is now often forgotten) was economic development.
From 1946 through Richard Nixon’s first administration, the United States
provided more than half of the finance of the UN development system of
technical assistance (coordinated by the UN Development Programme
[UNDP] and its predecessors and initially carried out by the specialized
agencies), development finance (primarily the task of the World Bank), and
humanitarian relief. Americans were at the helm of all of the main devel-
opment agencies and Americans designed and helped establish most of the
lasting institutional innovations within the development system.

All that changed in the mid-1970s. A good marker and explanation of
the change is “The United States in Opposition” written by Gerald Ford’s
UN ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which laments the waning influ-
ence of the great powers in favor of the states newly liberated from colo-
nialism.5 Despite this rebalancing of power, the UN development system
continues to dominate the entire UN system forty years later in terms of
staffing and expenditure, demonstrating that the identity and will of the
hegemon is only one part of the dynamics of global governance. Certainly

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hegemons remain important; after all, when US governments began to push
economic deregulation, with Jimmy Carter, and neoliberalism, with Ronald
Reagan, most of the UN agencies began acting as transmission belts of the
same policies to the developing world. Nevertheless, the UN system also
remained a well-endowed site of alternatives to the economic vision pre-
ferred by the hegemon and this was not just a consequence of the feckless
third world majority that Moynihan blamed. It had to do with the policy
preferences of many UN members in all parts of the world, the advocacy of
groups within international civil society, and with the independent judg-
ment of professionals on the UN staff. Many, like the founder of the UN
Development Office, Mahbub ul Haq, were actually brought into the system
due to their expertise by Americans with close connections to its new
neoliberal leaders (in this case, to Reagan who nominated UNDP’s admin-
istrator, Bill Draper, a venture capitalist who recruited Haq simply because
he had the widest reputation as the wisest and most creative person in the
development business).

A final aspect of the dynamics of global governance—and one often
overlooked by scholars who focus on the formal intergovernmental organi-
zations (the public international unions, the League, and the UN system)—
is the role of changes in the global industrial economy. Global governance
not only encourages and shapes globalization, it is affected by it, particu-
larly by the new sectors that emerge in the processes of creative destruction
that have marked industrial capitalism from its beginning. If that creative
destruction is the stuff of industrial entrepreneurs—of the Thomas Edisons,
Henry Fords, and Bill Gateses who create whole new lead industries—there
is equally a lesser known pantheon of institutional entrepreneurs who have
created the new forms of global governance necessary to sustain each suc-
cessive industrial age.

In the most recent era the name of one of them, Sir Timothy John “Tim”
Berners-Lee, the “inventor of the World Wide Web,” is widely known. He
is not widely known as the inventor of one of the most powerful institutions
of contemporary global governance, the voluntary consensus standard-set-
ting organization called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), formed in
1994. Often much to the irritation of the world’s most powerful govern-
ments, W3C along with other relatively new groups (the Internet Society,
Internet Engineering Task Force [IETF], and Internet Architecture Board
[IAB]) and much older organizations such as the IEEE Standards Associa-
tion (originally the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, founded
in 1884) govern the Internet, the essential infrastructure of the Information
Age global economy, through a set of committees that include representa-
tives of major infrastructure producers and consumers (and many others)
that operate on the basis of consensus rules, meet continuously, and have lit-
tle or no relationship to national governments or the UN system.

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The Internet governance structure is not the only system critical to the
current global economy that operates this way. Containerized shipping, an
infrastructure essential to global manufacturing (and, in that way, to the
economic rise of China) both began with and is largely governed through
technical committees of the International Organization for Standardization
(ISO) an ostensibly private network set up after World War II but growing
out of the wartime “United Nations” (the official name of the anti-fascist
alliance) standard-setting organization. Global financial transactions are
facilitated by a similarly organized voluntary consensus body, the Society
for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), and even
many of the environmental and social externalities associated with contem-
porary global industrial capitalism are dealt with (to the extent that they are
dealt with at all) through a similar set of standards-creating and -monitoring
organizations that are part of the ISEAL Alliance, “the global membership
association for sustainability standards,” whose members most of us know
only through various fair trade, organic, or other seals on the packages of
some the products we buy.

Many, perhaps most, of the hundreds of thousands of people involved
in these global standard-setting and -monitoring organizations who have
reflected on their history think of them as something fundamentally new,
something required by the rapid rate of technological innovation that has
taken place since the early 1980s and by the lack of interest—and often the
incompetence—of governments to establish the regulatory frameworks nec-
essary to gain the greatest public benefit from the new technologies, and to
avoid the greatest risks of harm from their exploitation. In fact, as the date
of the founding of IEEE might suggest, this belief is fundamentally incor-
rect. At least since the second half of the nineteenth century—that is, since
that first era of economic globalization before World War I—governments
have been reluctant (and often unable) to regulate new globalizing tech-
nologies in the public interest and private transnational associations of
engineering professionals and social activists have stepped in to fill some of
the gaps.

The Next Half-century of Global Governance
It is probably more difficult for us to imagine the world of 2215 than it was
for the people of 1815 to image the world today, but fifty years forward,
2065, is much less difficult. If the dynamics operating since the Congress of
Vienna remain the same—and, barring the revolutionary transformation of
capitalism or disasters triggered by unregulated climate change—global
governance in 2065 will still involve a thin layer of global institutions sup-
porting the global economy and helping to mitigate its harms. The eco-
nomic rise of China and of other large industrializing countries will mean

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that the agenda of the global institutions will be shaped as much by their
governments as it is now by the preferences of the United States and of the
first countries to industrialize. Those governmental preferences will be
shaped by the domestic and transnational social conflicts that emerge
throughout the century. And even though many of the social scientists of
2065 may be oblivious to it, institutional entrepreneurs, among the engi-
neers who have created the newest industries of the day, will be doing much
of the work of world government alongside, and sometimes competing
with, transnational activists and socially responsible companies. �

Notes
Craig N. Murphy teaches at Wellesley College and the University of Massachusetts
Boston’s McCormack Graduate School for Global and Policy Studies. He received
the 2013 International Studies Association (ISA) Distinguished Senior Scholar
Award in International Political Economy for his work on global governance and
economic development. He is past president of the ISA, past chair of the Academic
Council on the UN System, and a founding editor of Global Governance. His recent
publications include a Japanese translation of his history of the UN Development
Programme, UNDP: A Better Way? (2014), and a Portuguese translation of his study
of global governance, International Organization and Industrial Change: Global
Governance Since 1850 (2014).

1. Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, “Global Governance to the Res-
cue: Saving International Relations?” Global Governance 20, no. 1 (2014): 19–36;
Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, “Rethinking Global Governance? Com-
plexity, Authority, Power, Change,” International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 1
(2014): 207–215.

2. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” The Independent 69, no. 3220
(18 August 1910): 339.

3. Ian Morris writes that, if he were forced to specify a year for the beginning
of the West’s lead, it would be 1773. See Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—For
Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (New York:
Random House, 2011), p. 167.

4. John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (New York: James Pott, 1902), p. 9.
5. Daniel P. Moynihan, “The United States in Opposition,” Commentary 59,

no. 3 (March 1975): 31–44.

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THE GLOBAL FORUM
The Last Two Centuries of Global Governance
New Institutions
Incorporating Older Institutions
The Dynamics: Why and How the System Changed
The Next Half-century of Global Governance
Notes

The Agency and Authority of International
NGOs
Sarah S. Stroup and Wendy H. Wong

“Lost” Causes: Agenda Vetting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security. By Charli Carpenter.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. 256p. $82.50 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Rethinking Private Authority: Agents and Entrepreneurs in Global Environmental Governance. By Jessica Green.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. 232p. $75.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Help or Harm: The Human Security Effects of International NGOs. By Amanda Murdie. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2014. 320p. $60.00.

T
he study of global politics today encompasses an
enormous array of actors, relationships, and processes
beyond the state. The growth in the study of one

nonstate actor, international nongovernmental organizations
(INGOs), is particularly noteworthy.1 We frequently hear
about INGOs because they claim to challenge the existing
social and political order on issues such as human rights
abuses, poverty, and environmental degradation, and they
appear to have had substantial victories in championing new
ideas and changing state policy.

Are INGOs powerful actors that are able to transform
global politics, noisy interest groups whose influence is
severely constrained by increasingly complex global
structures, or epiphenomenal representations of an
increasingly liberal world order? To answer this question
requires more research into the incredible variation
among the tens of thousands of INGOs active around
the world. Politics happens within and among INGOs,
and those processes directly affect both the way that
INGOs engage with their environment and their ability
to influence international policies and social practices.

A quarter century of serious scholarship on INGOs has
demonstrated the utility of a more expansive conception
of power in global politics.2 Research on INGOs brings
together foreign policy analysis, scholarship on interest
groups, a constructivist concern for social norms, and
network analysis, all in an attempt to explain politics
beyond the state. In showing how INGOs change policies,

create global rules, and advance new normative frame-
works, scholars have drawn upon a vast array of concepts
and methodological tools from political science and
beyond. The three recent books by Charli Carpenter,
Jessica Green, and Amanda Murdie are exemplary in the
creativity and care that they bring to the question of the
ways in which INGOs set policy agendas, improve human
security, and participate in global governance. All three
books treat INGOs as agents that have capabilities and
weaknesses that affect how they achieve their goals.
We suggest that a stronger focus on INGOs as agents

can help explain which INGOs are able to exercise
influence and under what conditions. Armed with greater
knowledge about individual INGOs and their practices,
we can then understand how these traits shape
their relationships with those they seek to influence.
Authority—by its nature a relational concept—exists for
certain INGOs in their relationships with particular audiences.
INGO authority is real, but it is also uneven and contested.
We are not the first to engage the question of INGO

power and authority, but the debate too often treats
INGOs as abstractions rather than as real-life, differen-
tiated actors. Just as the answer to the question of “how
powerful is the state” will vary depending on whether the
state in question is Japan or Jamaica, an understanding of
INGO power requires disaggregation of the category of
INGO. Groups like Oxfam, Human Rights First, and the
Environmental Defense Fund are wildly different, and
these differences shape their reception by the many and
varied audiences that they seek to reach. The agential study
of INGOs should complement, not replace, the more
structural and constructivist perspectives in international
relations, while offering insight into bigger questions
about power and authority.

Sarah S. Stroup (sstroup@middlebury.edu) is Associate
Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College.
Wendy H. Wong (wendyh.wong@utoronto.ca) is Associate
Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto.

138 Perspectives on Politics
doi:10.1017/S153759271500328X

© American Political Science Association 2016

Review Essay

The State of the Nonstate?
Private transnational groups are not new, but a new and
intense focus on them emerged in the 1990s as part of the
growing attention to nonstate actors. The United Nations
defines an “NGO” as “a not-for-profit group, principally
independent from government, which is organized on
a local, national, or international level to address issues in
support of the public good.”3 International NGOs
(INGOs) work in more than three or more countries,
according to the Union of International Associations, and
over the past 20 years the number of INGOs has almost
tripled, reaching more than 55,000 in 2010.4

These definitions of INGOs are widely cited but also
problematic. First, they are overly inclusive. The afore-
mentioned definitions include such groups as the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC),
private actors that may be very influential but have
a different form of power than groups such as Doctors
without Borders and the World Conservation Union.5

Second, the definition emphasizes formal legal status,
when in fact many NGOs are not registered as nonprofits.
In fact, social recognition rather than legal status may be
much more important for an INGO’s authority: Amnesty
International, for example, is registered in Britain as
a company and a charity. The public benefit orientation
that supposedly distinguishes INGOs is a third area of
confusion. Many INGOs respond to a perceived need for
which there is often no direct demand; these groups decide
what to work on in accordance with their own agendas.
Finally, the definition places INGOs in opposition to
states; in fact, many INGOs work closely with or through
states and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). These
conceptual ambiguities are not merely academic. Scholars
who make claims about what INGOs really are often have
very different sorts of groups in mind.
Generally, we can organize INGO scholarship into

several waves. At the end of the Cold War, a first wave of
scholars focused on demonstrating that INGOs were
powerful actors in global politics, worthy of serious study.
Often depicted as nodes in transnational advocacy net-
works, INGOs could create external pressure to change
state policies, bring new issues like torture to the global
agenda, or change social practices around environmental
protection and sustainability.6 This early work was
sympathetic to, or explicitly part of, a constructivist re-
search program that sought to unpack the importance of
ideational forces and processes. As such, INGOs were
often portrayed as transmission belts for emergent norms,
and the emphasis was on the ideational structures that
INGOs create and recreate.7 The focus was on showing
that INGOs influenced political outcomes, but not in
a way that systematically evaluated differences in the
identities, tactics, or issue areas.

Since the late 1990s, two questions have dominated
a second wave of INGO research. First, what do INGOs
do and why? Challenging the idea that INGOs are
distinctive because of their principled orientation, a num-
ber of scholars have suggested that the demands of
organizational maintenance, rather than commitment to
lofty goals, best explains how INGOs choose to engage in
advocacy and service delivery. Second, what is the nature
of the relationship between INGOs and the states that
have been traditionally the focus of IR scholarship? In
fact, states and INGOs can collaborate, compete, or
complement one another; INGOs can be instruments of
state power at one point while later directly challenging
state authority. Outside of a narrow cohort of state-
centric realists, IR scholars seem open to the potential
power of INGOs in governance while demanding greater
specificity around the scope conditions enabling INGO
influence and how those opportunities have changed
over time.

Within this second wave, a strong structuralist
critique offers a challenge to the idea of examining
individual INGOs by locating the source of their power
in global social processes. In this perspective, the ability
of INGOs to make specific principled claims rests on
a broader liberal normative framework that legitimates
the right of individuals to speak for themselves. Only
those INGOs that conform to certain standards—
liberal, rationalist, acceptant of the basic legitimacy of
markets and states—are recognized as legitimate gover-
nors.8 In this Foucaultian view, INGOs lack agency within
a liberal governmental rationality. Real resistance is very
difficult.9 While we accept the point that liberal norms
facilitate the participation of civil society groups in global
political processes, this determinism ignores the fragmenta-
tion of the global social structure and the diversity of INGOs
within it. INGOs actively advance or resist this liberal
rationality: Some INGOs like Amnesty have been at the
forefront of the expansion of universal human rights and the
responsibility to protect, but others like Focus on the Global
South resist this liberalism as imperialistic. Proponents of
global civil society, in particular, see much more possibility
for change, as the issues promoted by INGOs directly address
problems of injustice that are created by sovereign states and
liberal free markets.10 At the more micro level, there is also
substantial variation in the way that INGOs respond to the
structural conditions that they face, as the works under review
here demonstrate.

Across these several strands of INGO research, one
unifying thread is the privileged attention that the
INGO—state relationship receives. This relationship is
doubtless a critical one, as states enable, constrain, and
respond to them.11 But INGOs engage all kinds of
political actors—IGOs, local communities, multinational
corporations, and other INGOs. As Green explains,
“governance is expanding: there are multiple loci of

March 2016 | Vol. 14/No. 1 139

authority rather than a single locus that rests with the state”
(Rethinking Private Authority, p. 164). Theoretically,
therefore, we need greater attention to the diversity of
INGOs and the choices that they make. How INGOs
define their missions, how they choose different audiences
to target, and which strategies they choose to employ help
define INGO agency. In turn, these agential qualities
shape the INGOs that are able to exercise influence.

INGOs as Agents
INGOs are often portrayed as an increasingly important
type of global actor: What type of actions, then, do
INGOs take? Both scholars and practitioners separate the
work of INGOs into advocacy and service delivery. In
actual practice, the divide between advocacy and service
delivery is blurred, and many organizations do both or
have changed the balance of their activities over time.12

Whether pushing for policy changes from states and IGOs,
providing ideas and goods to target populations, or some
mix of the two, INGOs see advocacy and service delivery
as tactics for advancing social change.

One central debate among INGO analysts is over
whether and how these practices are shaped by the moral
commitments of INGOs. While usually presented as
mutually exclusive, NGOs may be motivated by both
principles and self -interest.13 As Murdie argues, the fact
that some INGOs are not principled does not mean that
all INGOs are not principled (Help or Harm, p. 239). We
ultimately agree with Thomas Risse that INGOs that
neglect their principled orientation risk the attribute that
makes them distinctive and potentially powerful.14

INGOs must maintain their organizational capacity, but
their claims to serve others underpin their legitimacy in the
eyes of global audiences.

The three books under review offer valuable insight
into the various audiences affected by INGO work.
Carpenter’s “Lost” Causes concentrates on relationships
among INGOs and other members of issue advocacy
networks. Murdie’s Help or Harm focuses on the impact of
INGOs on populations in developing countries. Finally,
in Rethinking Private Authority, Green explores how
private actors create or enforce rules that shape the
environmental practices of firms and states.

The politics among INGOs were initially neglected, but
have been drawn into the spotlight through the works of
Carpenter and Clifford Bob.15 INGOs often work together
in advocacy coalitions to push for policy change, in more or
less formal versions of the many networks that connect
INGOs. These campaigns—perhaps most famously the
International Coalition to Ban Landmines—can be very
effective but are not always so.16 Precisely how do INGOs
interact with one another in these networks? Carpenter has
written the statement book on gatekeeping by advocacy
INGOs and their effects in “agenda vetting” within the
human security and human rights networks. Some INGOs

are able to decide the merit of certain issues for global
campaigns and eliminate others. These network hubs have
kept issues such as male circumcision, compensation for
victims of war, and autonomous weapons on the sidelines of
global INGO advocacy. The structure of networks directs
the way that ideas travel to achieve international support.
Perhaps most cogently, Carpenter’s focus groups and
network analysis demonstrate how INGOs work with other
INGOs: Smaller, less well-known actors can be stifled, and,
similarly, larger actors are courted by other INGOs and
policymakers. We can clearly observe how, as separate
agents interacting in issue-specific networks, some INGOs
exercise power over others, but Carpenter also shows how
INGOs serve different purposes and therefore bring value to
a coalition in distinct ways.17

Complementing Carpenter’s focus on advocacy
INGOs working on human security, Murdie explores
how both service delivery and advocacy INGOs can “help
or harm” populations in need. In her methodologically
sophisticated but accessible book, Murdie uses game
theory, regression analysis, and illustrative case studies to
show that INGOs can improve access to potable water and
increase the protection of physical integrity rights. Her
general finding is based on careful delineation among
different INGOs, both in terms of their varied motivations
and their practices. Murdie argues that INGO motivations
condition their ability to improve human security. Service
INGOs can signal their good intentions by joining
voluntary accountability programs, which then increase
the support they receive from donors and improve their
capacity to provide services. In a chapter on advocacy
INGOs, she also argues that they can be effective
promoters of some human rights, but finds that INGOs
are less likely to succeed when global and local norms are
at odds and INGO agendas are biased toward their
international donors (Help or Harm, p. 196). Her analysis
of the human impact of INGOs ably incorporates
structural factors and individual agency. Structural con-
ditions do matter—for example, in countries with high
levels of corruption, rent-seeking INGOs are more likely
to flourish (ibid., p. 163)—but INGOs also make choices
about whether to send costly signals about their motiva-
tions, as when they choose to go through the onerous
process of applying for consultative status at the United
Nations. They come to difficult situations armed with
their own interests, and “good” and “bad” INGOs will
respond to social and political conditions quite differently.
Beyond political activism and service delivery, INGOs

also attempt to create and enforce new rules for global
governance. Green’s book examines when and how private
actors have authority in the environmental sector. State
preferences are important determinants of environmental
governance, Green explains, but there can be structural
openings that allow INGOs to govern using private
authority. Where private actors wield delegated authority,

140 Perspectives on Politics

Review Essay | The Agency and Authority of International NGOs

she argues, states must have collectively agreed to delegate
authority and agreed upon a specific agent; by contrast,
entrepreneurial authority is most likely to emerge when
state preferences are heterogeneous, leaving a regulatory
vacuum. Examining 152 multilateral environmental trea-
ties over a 150-year period, Green finds that states rarely
delegate to private actors. But entrepreneurial authority by
private actors has grown substantially; of the 119 envi-
ronmental civil regulations created between 1950 and
2009, almost 60% (69) were created in 2000 or later
(Rethinking Private Authority, p. 92). While Green does
not differentiate between firms and NGOs engaged in
environmental governance, she suggests that all private actors
bring particular strengths to the design of new rules. Private
actors, perhaps because of their small size, can promote
experimentation; they can build political support for new
regulatory models; they can use their expertise to inform
better rule-making; and competition among these different
rules may ratchet up regulations (ibid., pp. 174–76).
Whether private authority is in fact beneficial for environ-
mental protection depends on coordination among “rule
makers of all kinds” (ibid., p. 178)— INGOs and beyond.

The Authority of INGOs
Even though the books reviewed here show that the
ability of INGOs to draw attention to and command
policy space for their concerns attests to their power and
authority, we still lack a unified way to conceptualize why
and how they do. One promising move is to disaggregate
the different bases of authority for INGOs by explicitly
evaluating their audiences. Deborah Avant, Martha
Finnemore, and Susan Sell offer a useful typology of
forms of authority.18 Global governors, they argue, may
have five types of authority, and for each, some audience
has deferred to that governor. This authority allows these
actors to set agendas; make, implement, and enforce rules;
and then evaluate, monitor, and adjudicate outcomes.19

Using this typology, and drawing on the books under
review, we argue that INGOs enjoy three types of
authority—delegated, expert, and principled. First,
INGOs may act as delegated authorities when states or
intergovernmental organizations task them with monitor-
ing the implementation of treaties or delivering foreign
aid.20 Such delegation appears growing in the humanitar-
ian sector but rare in the environmental sector.21

Second, INGOs’ research and experiences in the field
translate into expert authority. INGOs make defensible
policy prescriptions using their specialized knowledge. For
example, the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) claims expert knowledge on the treatment of
prisoners of war, and the access they have enjoyed as
a result has reinforced their authoritative status.22 Some-
times, working with epistemic communities, INGOs may
help define an issue and recommend solutions, as many
environmental INGOs do in their work alongside the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.23 Expert
authority allows INGOs to access media outlets and
policymakers, creating political salience and political
opportunities.24

Finally, principled authority is critical for INGOs.
Perhaps more so than others, this brand of authority is
both contested and more difficult to pinpoint precisely
because so many audiences might confer it on the basis of
various principles.25 As the discussion of organizational
motivations makes clear, INGOs may not in fact serve
others, but INGOs that appear to serve only private
interests lose their principled authority. The principled
authority of INGOs thus depends on the perceived
legitimacy of their claims, in which signaling (a la Murdie)
is critical to how organizations are viewed. Organizations
are legitimate in the eyes of a particular audience if that
audience agrees with the social purpose and practices of the
organization.26 Importantly, INGOs face many audiences.
As Bob illustrates in the case of gay rights proponents, an
INGO may be legitimate in the eyes of one audience but
wholly rejected by another.27

Setting aside broad structural processes, the authority
of INGOs rests on two important factors: their internal
capacities and their relations with external audiences. We
see three important tasks for future INGO research, all of
which are premised on the primacy of INGO agency.
First, at the risk of stating the obvious, INGOs are not all
the same; they share certain attributes but are not
interchangeable, and these differences shape the type
and level of authority that they enjoy.28 Second, in order
to better understand the effects of INGOs, we need a more
rigorous way to study and measure the relationships
between INGOs and multiple, distinct audiences. INGO
activity affects more than just states, including the
beneficiaries of INGO service-delivery activities.29 Third,
an agent-centered perspective on INGO authority neces-
sarily raises questions about whether INGOs are most
powerful individually or collectively. The INGO literature
has been an important focal point for discussions of the
power of networks (see “Lost” Causes, for example). Future
research on INGO networks must move more easily
between the study of network structures and the organi-
zational nodes. Our ability to address these questions turns
on the quality of organization- and network-level data on
INGOs—data that are inconsistent or nonexistent.

A focus on the differences in the level and scope
of INGO authority suggests new research questions.
Perhaps most importantly, the politics of interactions
among INGOs requires much more attention. Beyond
gatekeeping, we expect that powerful INGOs influence
other practices within the INGO sector as well, including
fund-raising strategies, program design, patterns of pro-
fessionalization, and networking practices. Just as firms
may imitate the new strategies of leaders in their fields,30

smaller or less competitive INGOs operating in highly

March 2016 | Vol. 14/No. 1 141

uncertain environments may follow their seemingly suc-
cessful peers.

A particularly pressing problem for INGO scholars is
the lack of rigorous and comparable data at the organi-
zation level across the global population of INGOs.
Murdie uses the Union of International Associations
Yearbook, which offers membership data over time at the
global level. Still, as she and others have explained, the
Yearbook indicators at the organizational level are self-
reported and unstandardized, with inconsistent categori-
zation of INGOs by subject matter and organizational
type. Generally, the most extensive data on individual
organizations are collected at the national level, but each
country has its own reporting requirements for charities.
Future INGO research depends on developing better
descriptive statistics of the global population under
examination.31

Conclusion
INGO research has come a long way from its origins. We
know a lot about how INGOs interact with states, and
the zero-sum conception of the ways in which states and
INGOs interact has been debunked, even if the reality of
the state—INGO relationship is not easily summarized.
The field remains split between those who see INGOs as
creative agents and those who understand them as role
players in larger dynamics. We see this tension as healthy,
but our sympathies lie with the former conception of
INGOs.

Future research needs to treat INGOs as diverse actors
worthy of study in themselves, as the three books
reviewed here do. This means taking into account their
internal organizational dynamics and external relation-
ships with their audiences. Without an understanding of
differences among INGOs, structural perspectives miss
the additional internal constraints that they face, as well
as the prospect that INGOs create structural change.
Without attention to the ideational and material environ-
ments in which INGOs operate, researchers risk advanc-
ing a triumphalist perspective that is increasingly distant
from the frustrating reality faced by INGOs on a global,
and increasingly crowded, stage. Indeed, we view this as
a natural progression of research that has strayed too far
into the stylized view of INGOs, or for that matter “civil
society actors,” treating such actors as interchangeable and
monolithic, rather than colorful and unique as their
Websites and branding materials suggest. In essence, we
are bringing the organization (the “O”) back in to the study
of INGOs, a turn that allows us to reach more deeply into
the real world of INGOs and offers the promise of
advancing theory and practice. IR has a long history of
stylization and specificity, as we see with studies of states,
where neorealists and neoliberals alike theorized generalized
state “interests” before bringing domestic politics into more
nuanced and contemporary theories of interstate politics.

Although we prioritize the agent-centric view of
INGOs, we understand that isolating the independent
effects of INGO advocacy on state policy is difficult. As
a practical matter, informants can be reluctant to assign
credit or blame to interest groups. In addition, we should
not mistake high volume of advocacy for policy influence.
As one view claims, the loudest INGOs are actually least
influential since they have “gone public” without chang-
ing policymakers’ attitudes.32 However, the latest research
reviewed here suggests that INGOs’ voices can be heard,
albeit not always by the same audiences and not always by
states. Carpenter’s work shows that other INGOs and
individual state officials are affected by the decisions of
gatekeepers in very direct ways. Green’s idea of entrepre-
neurial authority shows that vocal INGOs may be pushing
for new regulations rather than quietly implementing laws
as state delegates, thereby taking on new roles that affect
both governments and corporations. Murdie shows how
substate actors can be adversely affected by varying
intentions. Her research definitively demonstrates that
once we disaggregate the idea of “the state,” we can see
how INGOs affect the decision matrix and, at times, the
welfare of governments. These three works, and we hope
future projects, will show how audiences vary for different
INGOs, and furthermore, how these audiences differen-
tially affect and are affected by INGOs.
Several decades of scholarship have yielded an

incredibly rich depiction of INGO participation in global
politics. INGOs deliver billions of dollars’ worth of social
services around the world, pressure other “global gover-
nors” to live up to their commitments, and attempt to
reframe the basic values around which global politics
might be organized. This work involves constant contact
with sovereign states, a relationship that can be compet-
itive, collaborative, deferential, or disjointed. For individ-
ual INGOs, the capacity to govern and their ultimate
influence are shaped by their choices and their environ-
ment. A closer look at the relationship between INGOs’
strategic choices and the audiences that they seek to
influence can be practically useful while revealing the
complex nature of power and authority in global politics.

Notes
1 A fairly restrictive search on JSTOR (Journal Storage)
for “nongovernmental organization” yields 1,755
articles from 1922 to 2013. Seventy-seven percent of
the articles date from 1990 to the present. The exact
results are as follows: 117 (before 1970), 119
(1970–79), 160 (1980–89), 332 (1990–99), 793
(2000–2009), 234 (2010–13).

2 Barnett and Duvall 2005.
3 http://www.unrol.org/article.aspx?article_id523
(accessed April 29, 2014).

4 UIA, various years.
5 Büthe and Mattli 2011.

142 Perspectives on Politics

Review Essay | The Agency and Authority of International NGOs

6 Clark 2001; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Khagram, Riker,
and Sikkink 2002; Wapner 1995. For excellent
reviews, see Wapner 1995 and Price 2003.

7 Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Lynch 2008.
8 Neumann and Sending 2010, 129.
9 Lipshutz 2005.
10 Anheier, Glasius, and Kaldor 2001; Dryzek 2012.
11 Busby 2010; Neumann and Sending 2010.
12 Barnett 2011; Nelson and Dorsey 2008; Wong 2012.
13 Clark 2001; Hopgood 2006; Keck and Sikkink 1998;

Lynch 2008; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999; Wapner
1995. For self-interested conceptions, see Bob 2005;
Bloodgood 2011; Cooley and Ron 2002; Prakash and
Gugerty 2010; Sell and Prakash 2004.

14 Risse 2010, 288–89.
15 Bob 2005.
16 Including, and not limited to, the networks in support

of the International Criminal Court, against cluster
munitions, and in favor of the Arms Trade Treaty. For
a more comprehensive list, see Moyes and Nash 2011.

17 For the practitioner view, see Moyes and Nash 2011.
18 Avant, Finnemore, and Sell 2010.
19 Ibid., pp. 14–16.
20 In addition to Rethinking Private Authority, see Cooley

and Ron 2002.
21 Contrast Barnett 2011 to Rethinking Private Authority.
22 Finnemore 1996; Forsythe 2005.
23 Haas 2004.
24 Gourevitch, Lake, and Gross Stein 2012; Ron, Ramos,

and Rogers 2005; Wong 2012.
25 Hopgood 2009.
26 Thaut, Gross Stein, and Barnett 2012.
27 Bob 2012.
28 Stroup 2012; Wong 2012.
29 Barnett 2011.
30 Lieberman and Asaba 2006.
31 Bloodgood and Schmitz 2013.
32 Drezner 2008, 86.

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Avant, Deborah D., Martha Finnemore, and Susan K.
Sell, eds. 2010. Who Governs the Globe? New York:
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Barnett, Michael. 2011. Empire of Humanity: A History of
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Barnett, Michael and Raymond Duvall. 2005. “Power
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. 2012. The Global Right Wing and the Clash of
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Busby, Joshua. 2010. Moral Movements and Foreign Policy.
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Büthe, Tim and Walter Mattli. 2011. The New Global
Rulers: The Privatization of Regulation in the World
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Clark, Ann Marie. 2001. Diplomacy of Conscience: Amnesty
International and Changing Human Rights Norms.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Cooley, Alexander and James Ron. 2002. “The NGO
Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political
Economy of Transnational Action.” International
Security 27(1): 5–39.

Drezner, Daniel. 2008. All Politics Is Global: Explaining
International Regulatory Regimes. Princeton: Princeton
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Dryzek, John. 2012. “Global Civil Society: The Progress
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Finnemore, Martha. 1996. National Interests in
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Finnemore, Martha, and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998.
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Forsythe, David. 2005. “Naming and Shaming: The
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Haas, Peter M. 2004. “Addressing the Global Governance
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Hopgood, Stephen. 2006. Keepers of the Flame:
Understanding Amnesty International. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.

. 2009. “Moral Authority, Modernity, and the
Politics of the Sacred.” European Journal of International
Relations 15(2): 229–55.

Keck, Margaret and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists
Beyond Borders. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Khagram, Sanjeev James V. Riker, and Kathryn Sikkink,
eds. 2002. Restructuring World Politics. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.

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Firms Imitate Each Other?” Academy of Management
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March 2016 | Vol. 14/No. 1 143

Lipschutz, Ronnie. 2005. “Global Civil Society and
Global Governmentality.” In Power in Global
Governance, ed. Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall.
New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lynch, Cecelia. 2008. “Reflexivity in Research on Civil
Society: Constructivist Perspectives.” International
Studies Review 10(4): 708–21.

Moyes, Richard and Thomas Nash. 2011. Global
Coalitions: An introduction to working in international
civil society partnerships. Article 36/ Action on Armed
Violence (AOAV). http://www.globalcoalitions.org
(accessed January 8, 2016).

Nelson, Paul J. and Ellen Dorsey. 2008. New Rights Advocacy.
Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Neumann, Iver and Ole Jacob Sending. 2010. Governing
the Global Polity: Practice, Mentality, Rationality. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Prakash, Aseem and Mary Kay Gugerty, eds. 2010.
Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action. New
York: Cambridge University Press.

Price, Richard. 2003. “Transnational Civil Society and Advo-
cacy in World Politics.” World Politics 55(4): 579–606.

Risse, Thomas. 2010. “Rethinking Advocacy Orgnizations?
A Critical Comment.” In Advocacy Organizations and
Collective Action, ed. Aseem Prakash and Mary Kay
Gugerty. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Risse, Thomas, Stephen Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds.
1999. The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and
Domestic Change. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Ron, James, Howard Ramos, and Kathleen Rogers. 2005.
“Transnational Information Politics.” International
Studies Quarterly 49(3): 557–88.

Sell, Susan and Aseem Prakash. 2004. “Using Ideas
Strategically: The Contest Between Business
and NGO Networks in Intellectual Property
Rights.” International Studies Quarterly 48(1):
143–75.

Stroup, Sarah S. 2012. Borders Among Activists. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.

Thaut, Laura, Janice Gross Stein, and Michael Barnett.
2012. “In Defense of Virtue.” In The Credibility
of Transnational NGOs: When Virtue Is Not
Enough, ed. Peter Gourevitch, David A. Lake, and Janice
Gross Stein. New York: Cambridge University Press.

UIA (Union of International Associations). Various years.
Yearbook of International Associations. Brill.

Wapner, Paul. 1995. “Politics Beyond the State: Envi-
ronmental Activism and World Civic Politics.” World
Politics 47(3): 311–40.

Wong, Wendy H. 2012. Internal Affairs: How the
Structure of NGOs Transforms Human Rights. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.

144 Perspectives on Politics

Review Essay | The Agency and Authority of International NGOs

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.

S
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C
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G
Y This Time Is

Different
W h y U.S. Foreign Policy
W ill Never Recover

Daniel W. Drezner

I
t is a truth universally acknowledged
that a foreign policy community
in possession of great power must

be in want of peace of mind. Climate
change, the Middle East, terrorism,
trade, nonproliferation—there is never
a shortage of issues and areas for those
who work in international relations
to fret about. If you were to flip through
the back issues of Foreign Affairs, you
would find very few essays proclaiming
that policymakers had permanently
sorted out a problem. Even after the Cold
War ended peacefully, these pages
were full of heated debate about civili­
zations clashing.

It is therefore all too easy to dismiss
the current angst over U.S. President
Donald Trump as the latest hymn from
the Church of Perpetual Worry. This is
hardly the first time observers have
questioned the viability of a U.S.-led
global order. The peril to the West was
never greater than when the Soviet Union
launched Sputnik—until U.S. President
Richard Nixon ended the Bretton
Woods system. The oil shocks of the
1970s posed a grave threat to the liberal
international order—but then came the

DANIEL W. DREZNER is Professor o f In te rn a ­
tio n a l P o litics a t th e F le tch e r School o f Law and
D ip lo m a cy and a re g u la r c o n trib u to r to The
W ashington Post.

explosion of the U.S. budget and trade
deficits in the 1980s. The perpetrators of
the 9/11 attacks seemed like an existential
threat to the system—until the 2008
financial crisis. Now there is Trump. It is
worth asking, then, whether the current
fretting is anything new. For decades, the
sky has refused to fall.

But this time really is different. Just
when many of the sources of American
power are ebbing, many of the guardrails
that have kept U.S. foreign policy on
track have been worn down. It is tempt­
ing to pin this degradation on Trump
and his retrograde foreign policy views,
but the erosion predated him by a good
long while. Shifts in the way Americans
debate and conduct foreign policy will
make it much more difficult to right the
ship in the near future. Foreign policy
discourse was the last preserve of
bipartisanship, but political polarization
has irradiated that marketplace of
ideas. Although future presidents will
try to restore the classical version of
U.S. foreign policy, in all likelihood, it
cannot be revived.

The American foundations undergird­
ing the liberal international order
are in grave danger, and it is no longer
possible to take the pillars of that order
for granted. Think of the current
moment as a game of Jenga in which
multiple pieces have been removed but
the tower still stands. As a result, some
observers have concluded that the
structure remains sturdy. But in fact, it
is lacking many important parts and,
on closer inspection, is teetering ever so
slightly. Like a Jenga tower, the order
will continue to stand upright—right
until the moment it collapses. Every effort
should be made to preserve the liberal
international order, but it is also time to

1 0 F O R E I G N A F F A I R S

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W
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O
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K
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S

/
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E
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U
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This Time Is Different

Confidence man: Trump aboard A ir Force One in Maryland, October 2018

start thinking about what might come
after its end.

The gravity of the problem is dawning
on some members of the foreign policy
community. Progressives are debating
among themselves whether and how they
should promote liberal values abroad if
they should return to power. Conserva­
tives are agonizing over whether the
populist moment represents a permanent
shift in the way they should think about
U.S. foreign policy. N either camp is
really grappling with the end of equilib­
rium, howrever. The question is not what
U.S. foreign policy can do after Trump.
The question is whether there is any viable
grand strategy that can endure past an
election cycle.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS
In foreign policy failures garner more
attention than successes. D uring the
Cold War, the “loss of China,” the rise of

the Berlin Wall, the Vietnam War, the
energy crisis, and the Iran hostage crisis
all overshadowed the persistently effec­
tive grand strategy of containment.
Only once the Soviet Union broke up
peacefully was the U nited States’ Cold
War foreign policy viewed as an over­
arching success. Since then, the wars in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria,
along with the 2008 financial crisis and
the rise of populism, have dominated the
discussion. It is all too easy to conclude
that the United States’ recent foreign
policy has been an unmitigated disaster.

At the same time that all these
negative developments were taking place,
however, underlying trends were
moving in a more U.S.-friendly direction.
T he number of interstate wars and
civil wars was falling dramatically, as
was every other metric of international
violence. Democracy was spreading,
liberating masses of people from

May/June 2019 11

D a n ie l W. D re zn e r

tyranny. Globalization was accelerating,
slashing extreme poverty. The United
States could take a great deal of credit
for these gains, because the liberal order
it nurtured and expanded had laid
the foundations for decades of relative
peace and prosperity.

Washington made mistakes, of course,
such as invading Iraq and forcing
countries to remove restrictions on the
flow of capital across their borders.
As misguided as these errors were, and
as much as they alienated allies in the
moment, they did not permanently
weaken the United States’ position in
the world. U.S. soft power suffered in
the short term but recovered quickly
under the Obama administration. The
United States still managed to attract
allies, and in the case of the 2011
intervention in Libya, it was natq allies
begging Washington to use force, not
vice versa. Today, the United States has
more treaty allies than any other
country in the world—more, in fact,
than any country ever.

The United States was able to
weather the occasional misstep in large
part because its dominance rested on
such sturdy foundations. Its geographic
blessings are ample: bountiful natural
resources, two large oceans to the east
and the west, and two valued partners
to the north and the south. The country
has been so powerful for so long that
many of its capabilities seem to be
fundamental constants of the universe
rather than happenstance. The United
States has had the most powerful
military in the world since 1945, and its
economy, as measured by purchasing
power parity, became the biggest around
1870. Few people writing today about
international afFairs can remember a

time when the United States was not the
richest and most powerful country.

Long-term hegemony only further
embedded the United States’ advantage.
In constructing the liberal interna­
tional order, Washington created an array
of multilateral institutions, from the
un Security Council to the World Bank,
that privileged it and key allies. Having
global rules of the game benefits
everyone, but the content of those rules
benefited the United States in particu­
lar. The Internet began as an outgrowth
of a U.S. Department of Defense
initiative, providing to the United
States an outsize role in its governance.
American higher education attracts the
best of the best from across the world, as
do Silicon Valley and Hollywood, adding
billions of dollars to the U.S. economy.
An immigrant culture has constantly
replenished the country’s demographic
strength, helping the United States avoid
the aging problems that plague parts of
Europe and the Pacific Rim.

The United States has also benefited
greatly from its financial dominance.
The U.S. dollar replaced the British pound
sterling as the world’s reserve currency
75 years ago, giving the United States the
deepest and most liquid capital markets
on the globe and enhancing the reach
and efficacy of its economic statecraft.
In recent decades, Washington’s financial
might has only grown. Even though the
2008 financial crisis began in the Ameri­
can housing market, the end result was
that the United States became more,
rather than less, central to global capital
markets. U.S. capital markets proved
to be deeper, more liquid, and better
regulated than anyone else’s. And even
though many economists once lost
sleep over the country’s growing budget

12 F O R E I G N A F F A I R S

This Time Is Different

deficits, that has turned out to be a non­
crisis. Many now argue that the U.S.
economy has a higher tolerance for public
debt than previously thought.

Diplomatically, all these endowments
ensured that regardless of the issue at
hand, the United States was always
viewed as a reliable leader. Its dense and
enduring network of alliances and
partnerships signaled that the commit­
ments Washington made were seen as
credible. American hegemony bred
resentment in some parts of the globe,
but even great-power rivals trusted
what the United States said in interna­
tional negotiations.

At the same time as the international
system cemented the United States’
structural power, the country’s domestic
politics helped preserve a stable foreign
policy. A key dynamic was the push
and pull between different schools of
thought. An equilibrium was main­
tained—between those who wanted the
country to adopt a more interventionist
posture and those who wanted to
husband national power, between those
who preferred multilateral approaches
and those who preferred unilateral ones.
When one camp overreached, others
would seize on the mistake to call for a
course correction. Advocates of restraint
invoked the excesses of Iraq to push
for retrenchment. Supporters of inter­
vention pointed to the implosion of
Syria to argue for a more robust posture.

Thanks to the separation of powers
within the U.S. government, no one
foreign policy camp could accrue too
much influence. When the Nixon White
House pursued a strictly realpolitik
approach toward the Soviet Union,
Congress forced human rights concerns
onto the agenda. When the Obama

administration was leery of sanctioning
Iran’s central bank, congressional hawks
forced it to take more aggressive action.
Time and time again, U.S. foreign policy
reverted to the mean. Overreaching was
eventually followed by restraint.
Buck-passing led to leading. The results
of these crosscutting pressures were far
from perfect, but they ensured that U.S.
foreign policy did not deviate too far
from the status quo. Past commitments
remained credible into the future.

For decades, these dynamics, global
and domestic, kept crises from becoming
cataclysmic. U.S. foreign policy kept
swinging back into equilibrium. So what
has changed? Today, there is no more
equilibrium, and the structural pillars of
American power are starting to buckle.

THE NEW NORMAL
Despite the remarkable consistency
of U.S. foreign policy, behind the scenes,
some elements of American power
were starting to decline. As measured
by purchasing power parity, the United
States stopped being the largest econ­
omy in the world a few years ago.
Its command of the global commons has
weakened as China’s and Russia’s asym­
metric capabilities have improved.
The accumulation of “forever wars” and
low-intensity conflicts has taxed the
United States’ armed forces.

Outward consistency also masked the
dysfunction that was afflicting the
domestic checks on U.S. foreign policy.
For starters, public opinion has ceased
to act as a real constraint on decision­
makers. Paradoxically, the very things that
have ensured U.S. national security—
geographic isolation and overwhelming
power—have also led most Americans
to not think about foreign policy, and

M a y/J u n e 2019 13

Daniel W. Drezner

rationally so. The trend began with the
switch to an all-volunteer military, in
1973, which allowed most of the public to
stop caring about vital questions of war
and peace. The apathy has only grown
since the end of the Cold War, and today,
poll after poll reveals that Americans
rarely, if ever, base their vote on foreign
policy considerations.

The marketplace of ideas has broken
down, too. The barriers to entry for
harebrained foreign policy schemes have
fallen away as Americans’ trust in
experts has eroded. Today, the United
States is in the midst of a debate about
whether a wall along its southern border
should be made of concrete, have see-
through slats, or be solar-powered.
The ability of experts to kill bad ideas
isn’t what it used to be. The cognoscenti
might believe that their informed opin­
ions can steady the hands of successive
administrations, but they are operating
in hostile territory.

To be fair, the hostility to foreign
policy experts is not without cause. The
interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Libya were massive screwups. Despite
what the experts predicted, globalization
has not transformed China into a
Jeffersonian democracy. The supposedly
infallible advice enshrined in the Wash­
ington consensus ended up triggering
multiple financial crises. Economists and
foreign affairs advisers advocated
austerity, despite the pain it caused the
poor and the middle class, and consis­
tently cried wolf about an increase
in interest rates that has yet to come.
No wonder both Barack Obama and
Trump have taken such pleasure in
bashing the Washington establishment.

Institutional checks on the presi­
dent’s foreign policy prerogatives have

also deteriorated—primarily because
the other branches of government have
voluntarily surrendered them. The
passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act
of 1930, which exacerbated the Great
Depression, showed that Congress
could not responsibly execute its consti­
tutional responsibilities on trade. With
the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements
Act, it delegated many of those powers
to the president, marking the beginning
of a sustained decline in congressional
oversight. More recently, political
polarization has rendered Congress a
dysfunctional, petulant mess, encour­
aging successive administrations to
enhance the powers of the executive
branch. Nor has the judicial branch acted
as much of an impediment. The Su­
preme Court has persistently deferred to
the president on matters of national
security, as it did in 2018 when it ruled
in favor of the Trump administration’s
travel ban.

Foreign policy analysts largely
celebrated this concentration of power
in the executive branch, and prior to
Trump, their logic seemed solid. They
pointed to the public’s ignorance of and
Congress’ lack of interest in interna­
tional relations. As political gridlock and
polarization took hold, elected Demo­
crats and Republicans viewed foreign
policy as merely a plaything for the next
election. And so most foreign policy
elites viewed the president as the last
adult in the room.

What they failed to plan for was the
election of a president who displays the
emotional and intellectual maturity of
a toddler. As a candidate, Trump gloried
in beating up on foreign policy experts,
asserting that he could get better results
by relying on his gut. As president, he

14 F O R E I G N A F F A I R S

has governed mostly by tantrum. He has
insulted and bullied U.S. allies. He
has launched trade wars that have accom­
plished little beyond hurting the U.S.
economy. He has said that he trusts
Russian President Vladimir Putin more
than his own intelligence briefers. His
administration has withdrawn from an
array of multilateral agreements and bad-
mouthed the institutions that remain.
The repeated attacks on the eu and nato
represent a bigger strategic mistake
than the invasion of Iraq. In multiple
instances, his handpicked foreign policy
advisers have attempted to lock in
decisions before the president can sabo­
tage them with an impulsive tweet. Even
when his administration has had the
germ of a valid idea, Trump has executed
the resulting policy shifts in the most
ham-handed manner imaginable.

Most of these foreign policy moves
have been controversial, counterproduc­
tive, and perfectly legal. The same
steps that empowered the president to
create foreign policy have permitted
Trump to destroy what his predecessors
spent decades preserving. The other
branches of government endowed the
White House with the foreign policy
equivalent of a Ferrari; the current
occupant has acted like a child playing
with a toy car, convinced that he is
operating in a land of make-believe.

After Trump, a new president will no
doubt try to restore sanity to U.S. foreign
policy. Surely, he or she will reverse
the travel ban, halt the hostile rhetoric
toward long-standing allies, and end
the attacks on the world trading system.
These patches will miss the deeper
problem, however. Political polarization
has eroded the notion that presidents
need to govern from the center. Trump

K e n n e t h Y a m j g u c h i , P h . D .

Professor, C hem istry

J o in o u r g lo b a l c o m m u n i t y :

1 0 0 + c o u n t r ie s . 6 0 + la n g u a g e s .

NEW JERSEY
CITY U N IV E R S ITY

15

Daniel W. Drezner

has eviscerated that idea. The odds are
decent that a left-wing populist will
replace the current president, and then
an archconservative will replace that
president. The weak constraints on the
executive branch will only make things
worse. Congress has evinced little
interest in playing a constructive role
when it comes to foreign policy.
The public is still checked out on world
politics. The combination of worn-down
guardrails and presidents emerging
from the ends of the political spectrum
may well whipsaw U.S. foreign policy
between “America first” and a new
Second International. The very concept
of a consistent, durable grand strategy
will not be sustainable.

In that event, only the credulous will
consider U.S. commitments credible.
Alliances will fray, and other countries
will find it easier to flout global norms.
All the while, the scars of the Trump
administration will linger. The vagaries
of the current administration have
already forced a mass exodus of senior
diplomats from the State Department.
T hat human capital will be difficult to
replace. For the past two years, the
number of international students who
have enrolled in U.S. university degree
programs has fallen as nativism
has grown louder. It will take a while to
convince foreigners that this was a
tem porary spasm. After the Trum p
adm inistration withdrew from the Iran
nuclear deal, it forced s w i f t , the private-
sector network that facilitates interna­
tional financial transactions, to comply
with unilateral U.S. sanctions against
Iran, spurring China, France, Germany,
Russia, and the U nited Kingdom to
create an alternative payment system.
T hat means little right now, but in the

long run, both U.S. allies and U.S. rivals
will learn to avoid relying on the dollar.

Perhaps most im portant, the Trum p
administration has unilaterally surren­
dered the set of ideals that guided U.S.
policymakers for decades. It is entirely
proper to debate how much the U nited
States should prioritize the promotion
of human rights, democracy, and the rule
of law across the world. W hat should
be beyond debate, however, is that it is
worthwhile to promote those values
overseas and enshrine them at home.
Trum p’s ugly rhetoric makes a mockery
of those values. Although a future presi­
dent might sound better on these issues,
both allies and rivals will remember the
current moment. The seeds of doubt
have been planted, and they will one
day sprout.

T he factors that give the United
States an advantage in the international
system—deep capital markets, liberal
ideas, world-class higher education—have
winner-take-all dynamics. O ther actors
will be reluctant to switch away from
the dollar, Wall Street, democracy, and
the Ivy League. These sectors can
w ithstand a few hits. Excessive use of
financial statecraft, alliances with overseas
populists, or prolonged bouts of anti­
immigrant hysteria, however, will force
even close allies to start thinking about
alternatives. T he American advantage
in these areas will go bankrupt much like
Mike Campbell in The Sun Also Rises
did: “gradually and then suddenly.” Right
now, the United States’ Jenga tower is
still standing. Remove a few more
blocks, however, and the wobbling will
become noticeable to the unaided eye.

W hat would collapse look like? The
United States would remain a great
power, of course, but it would be an

16 F O R E I G N A F F A I R S

This Time Is Different

ordinary and less rich one. On an increas­
ing number of issues, U.S. preferences
would carry minimal weight, as China
and Europe coordinated on a different
set of rules. Persistent domestic political
polarization would encourage Middle
Eastern allies, such as Israel and Saudi
Arabia, to line up with Republicans
and European allies, such as Germany and
the United Kingdom, to back Democrats.
The continued absence of any coherent
grand strategy would leave Latin America
vulnerable to a new Great Game as
other great powers vied for influence
there. Demographic pressures would tax
the United States, and the productivity
slowdown would make those pressures
even worse. Trade blocs would sap global
economic growth; reduced interdepen­
dence would increase the likelihood
of a great-power war. Climate change
would be mitigated nationally rather than
internationally, leaving almost everyone
worse off.

WHAT, ME WORRY?
It would be delightful if, ten years from
now, critics mocked this essay’s mis­
placed doom and gloom. The state
of U.S. foreign policy seemed dire a
decade ago, during the depths of the
financial crisis and the war in Iraq. That
turned out to be more of a blip than a
trend. It remains quite possible now
that Trump’s successor can repair the
damage he has wreaked. And it is worth
remembering that for all the flaws in
the U.S. foreign policy machine, other
great powers are hardly omnipotent.
China’s and Russia’s foreign policy
successes have been accompanied by
blowback, from pushback against infra­
structure projects in Asia to a hostile
Ukraine, that will make it harder for

those great powers to achieve their
revisionist aims.

The trouble with “after Trump”
narratives, however, is that the 45th
president is as much a symptom of the ills
plaguing U.S. foreign policy as he is a
cause. Yes, Trump has made things much,
much worse. But he also inherited a
system stripped of the formal and infor­
mal checks on presidential power. T hat’s
why the next president will need to
do much more than superficial repairs.
He or she will need to take the politically
inconvenient step of encouraging greater
congressional participation in foreign
policy, even if the opposing party is in
charge. Not every foreign policy initia­
tive needs to be run through the De­
fense Department. The next president
could use the bully pulpit to encourage
and embrace more public debate about
the United States’ role in the world.
Restoring the norm of valuing expertise,
while still paying tribute to the wisdom
of crowds, would not hurt either. Nor
would respecting democracy at home
while promoting the rule of law abroad.

All these steps will make the political
life of the next president more difficult.
In most Foreign Affairs articles, this is
the moment when the writer calls for
a leader to exercise the necessary
political will to do the right thing. That
exhortation always sounded implausible,
but now it sounds laughable. One hopes
that the Church of Perpetual Worry
does not turn into an apocalyptic cult.
This time, however, the sky may really
be falling.®

M a y / J u n e 2019 17

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Constructing International Politics
Author(s): Alexander Wendt
Source: International Security, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Summer, 1995), pp. 71-81
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Constructing Alexander Wendt
biternational Politics

John J. Mearsheimer’s
“The False Promise of International Institutions”1 is welcome particularly in
two respects. First, it is the most systematic attempt to date by a neorealist to
address critical international relations (IR) theory.2 Second, it reminds neo-
liberals and critical theorists, normally locked in their own tug-of-war, that they
have a common, non-realist interest in the institutional bases of international
life.3 “False Promise” is likely, therefore, to spur productive discussions on all
sides.

Unfortunately, it will be hard for most critical theorists to take seriously a
discussion of their research program so full of conflations, half-truths, and
misunderstandings. However, to some extent misunderstanding is inevitable
when anthropologists from one culture first explore another. A dialogue be-
tween these two cultures is overdue, and “False Promise” is a good beginning.

Critical IR “theory,” however, is not a single theory It is a family of theo-
ries that includes postmodernists (Ashley, Walker), constructivists (Adler,
Kratochwil, Ruggie, and now Katzenstein), neo-Marxists (Cox, Gill), feminists
(Peterson, Sylvester), and others. What unites them is a concern with how
world politics is “socially constructed,”4 which involves two basic claims: that
the fundamental structures of international politics are social rather than
strictly material (a claim that opposes materialism), and that these structures

Alexander Wendt is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

For their exceptionally detailed and helpful comments I am grateful to Mike Barnett, Mlada
Bukovansky, Bud Duvall, Peter Katzenstein, Mark Laffey, David Lumsdaine, Sylvia Maxfield, Nina
Tannenwald, Jutta Weldes, and the members of the Yale IR Reading Group.

1. John J. Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions,” International Security, Vol.
19, No. 3 (Winter 1994/95). Subsequent references appear in parentheses in the text.
2. Other efforts include Robert Gilpin, “The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism,”
International Organization, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Spring 1984), pp. 287-304, and Markus Fischer, “Feudal
Europe, 800-1300,” International Organization, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 427-466.
3. On neoliberalism and critical theory, see Robert Keohane, “International institutions: Two ap-
proaches,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 4 (December 1988), pp. 379-396, and Wendt,
“Collective Identity Formation and the International State,” American Political Science Review, Vol.
88, No. 2 (June 1994), pp. 384-396. Mearsheimer treats collective security as a third form of
institutionalism, but this is unwarranted. Collective security is an approach to international order,
arguable on either neoliberal or critical grounds, not a form of institutional analysis.
4. This makes them all “constructivist” in a broad sense, but as the critical literature has evolved,
this term has become applied to one particular school.

International Security, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Summer 1995), pp. 71-81
( 1995 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

71

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International Security 20:1 | 72

shape actors’ identities and interests, rather than just their behavior (a claim
that opposes rationalism). However, having these two claims in common no
more makes critical theory a single theory than does the fact that neorealism
and neoliberalism both use game theory makes them a single theory. Some
critical theorists are statists and some are not; some believe in science and some
do not; some are optimists and some pessimists; some stress process and some
structure.5 Thus, in my reply I speak only for myself as a “constructivist,”
hoping that other critical theorists may agree with much of what I say I address
four issues: assumptions, objective knowledge, explaining war and peace, and
policymakers’ responsibilities.

Assumptions

I share all five of Mearsheimer’s “realist” assumptions (p. 10): that interna-
tional politics is anarchic, and that states have offensive capabilities, cannot be
100 percent certain about others’ intentions, wish to survive, and are rational.
We even share two more: a commitment to states as units of analysis, and to
the importance of systemic or “third image” theorizing.

The last bears emphasis, for in juxtaposing “structure” to “discourse” and in
emphasizing the role of individuals in “critical theory” (p. 40), Mearsheimer
obscures the fact that constructivists are structuralists. Indeed, one of our main
objections to neorealism is that it is not structural enough: that adopting the
individualistic metaphors of micro-economics restricts the effects of structures
to state behavior, ignoring how they might also constitute state identities and
interests.6 Constructivists think that state interests are in important part con-

5. These are far more than differences of “emphasis,” as suggested by Mearsheimer’s disclaimer,
note 127.
6. “Constitute” is an important term in critical theory, with a special meaning that is not captured
by related terms like “comprise,” “consist of,” or “cause.” To say that “X [for example, a social
structure] constitutes Y [for example, an agent],” is to say that the properties of those agents are
made possible by, and would not exist in the absence of, the structure by which they are “consti-
tuted.” A constitutive relationship establishes a conceptually necessary or logical connection be-
tween X and Y, in contrast to the contingent connection between independently existing entities
that is established by causal relationships.
The identity-behavior distinction is partly captured by Robert Powell’s distinction between

preferences over outcomes and preferences over strategies; Robert Powell, “Anarchy in Interna-
tional Relations Theory,” International Organization, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Spring 1994), pp. 313-344. The
main exception to the mainstream neglect of structural effects on state identity is Kenneth Waltz’s
argument that anarchy produces “like units”; Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Read-
ing, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 74-77. Constructivists think there are more possibilities than
this; see Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power
Politics,” International Organization, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 391-425.

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Constructing International Politics | 73

structed by systemic structures, not exogenous to them; this leads to a socio-
logical rather than micro-economic structuralism.

Where neorealist and constructivist structuralisms really differ, however, is
in their assumptions about what structure is made of. Neorealists think it is
made only of a distribution of material capabilities, whereas constructivists
think it is also made of social relationships. Social structures have three ele-
ments: shared knowledge, material resources, and practices.7

First, social structures are defined, in part, by shared understandings, expec-
tations, or knowledge. These constitute the actors in a situation and the nature
of their relationships, whether cooperative or conflictual. A security dilemma, for
example, is a social structure composed of intersubjective understandings in
which states are so distrustful that they make worst-case assumptions about
each others’ intentions, and as a result define their interests in self-help terms.
A security community is a different social structure, one composed of shared
knowledge in which states trust one another to resolve disputes without war.8
This dependence of social structure on ideas is the sense in which constructiv-
ism has an idealist (or “idea-ist”) view of structure. What makes these ideas
(and thus structure) “social,” however, is their intersubjective quality In other
words, sociality (in contrast to “materiality,” in the sense of brute physical
capabilities), is about shared knowledge.

Second, social structures include material resources like gold and tanks. In
contrast to neorealists’ desocialized view of such capabilities, constructivists
argue that material resources only acquire meaning for human action through
the structure of shared knowledge in which they are embedded.9 For example,
500 British nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than 5
North Korean nuclear weapons, because the British are friends of the United
States and the North Koreans are not, and amity or enmity is a function of
shared understandings. As students of world politics, neorealists would prob-
ably not disagree, but as theorists the example poses a big problem, since it
completely eludes their materialist definition of structure. Material capabilities
as such explain nothing; their effects presuppose structures of shared knowl-
edge, which vary and which are not reducible to capabilities. Constructivism
is therefore compatible with changes in material power affecting social relations

7. What follows could also serve as a rough definition of “discourse.”
8. See Karl Deutsch, et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1957).
9. For a good general discussion of this point, see Douglas Porpora, “Cultural Rules and Material
Relations,” Sociological Theory, Vol. 11, No. 2 (July 1993), pp. 212-229.

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International Security 20:1 | 74

(cf. Mearsheimer, p. 43), as long as those effects can be shown to presuppose
still deeper social relations.

Third, social structures exist, not in actors’ heads nor in material capabilities,
but in practices. Social structure exists only in process. The Cold War was a
structure of shared knowledge that governed great power relations for forty
years, but once they stopped acting on this basis, it was “over.”

In sum, social structures are real and objective, not “just talk.” But this
objectivity depends on shared knowledge, and in that sense social life is “ideas
all the way down” (until you get to biology and natural resources). Thus, to
ask “when do ideas, as opposed to power and interest, matter?” is to ask the
wrong question. Ideas always matter, since power and interest do not have
effects apart from the shared knowledge that constitutes them as such.10 The
real question, as Mearsheimer notes (p. 42), is why does one social structure
exist, like self-help (in which power and self-interest determine behavior),
rather than another, like collective security (in which they do not).

The explanatory as opposed to normative character of this question bears
emphasis. Constructivists have a normative interest in promoting social
change, but they pursue this by trying to explain how seemingly natural social
structures, like self-help or the Cold War, are effects of practice (this is the
“critical” side of critical theory). This makes me wonder about Mearsheimer’s
repeated references (I count fourteen) to critical theorists’ “goals,” “aims,” and
“hopes” to make peace and love prevail on Earth. Even if we all had such
hopes (which I doubt), and even if these were ethically wrong (though Mear-
sheimer seems to endorse them; p. 40), they are beside the point in evaluating
critical theories of world politics. If critical theories fail, this will be because
they do not explain how the world works, not because of their values. Empha-
sizing the latter recalls the old realist tactic of portraying opponents as utopians
more concerned with how the world ought to be than how it is. Critical
theorists have normative commitments, just as neorealists do, but we are also
simply trying to explain the world.

Objectivity

Mearsheimer suggests that critical theorists do not believe that there is an
objective world out there about which we can have knowledge (pp. 41ff). This
is not the case. There are two issues here, ontological and epistemological.

10. On the social content of interests, see Roy D’Andrade and Claudia Strauss, eds., Human Motives
and Cultural Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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Constructing International Politics | 75

The ontological issue is whether social structures have an objective existence,
which I addressed above. Social structures are collective phenomena that con-
front individuals as externally existing social facts. The Cold War was just as
real for me as it was for Mearsheimer.

The epistemological issue is whether we can have objective knowledge of
these structures. Here Mearsheimer ignores a key distinction between modern
and postmodern critical theorists. The latter are indeed skeptical about the
possibility of objective knowledge, although in their empirical work even they
attend to evidence and inference. Constructivists, however, are modernists who
fully endorse the scientific project of falsifying theories against evidence. In an
article cited by Mearsheimer, I advocated a scientific-realist approach to social
inquiry, which takes a very pro-science line.1″ And despite his claims, there is
now a substantial body of constructivist empirical work that embodies a
wholly conventional epistemology.12

Mearsheimer is right, however, that critical theorists do not think we can
make a clean distinction between subject and object. Then again, almost all
philosophers of science today reject such a naive epistemology All observation
is theory-laden in the sense that what we see is mediated by our existing
theories, and to that extent knowledge is inherently problematic. But this does
not mean that observation, let alone reality, is theory-determined. The world is
still out there constraining our beliefs, and may punish us for incorrect ones.
Montezuma had a theory that the Spanish were gods, but it was wrong, with
disastrous consequences. We do not have unmediated access to the world, but
this does not preclude understanding how it works.

Explaining War and Peace

Mearsheimer frames the debate between realists and critical theorists as one
between a theory of war and a theory of peace. This is a fundamental mistake.

11. See Alexander Wendt, “The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory,” Inter-
national Organization, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Summer 1987), pp. 335-370; and, for fuller discussion, Ian
Shapiro and Alexander Wendt, “The Difference that Realism Makes,” Politics and Society, Vol. 20,
No. 2 (June 1992), pp. 197-223.
12. See, among others, Michael Barnett, “Institutions, Roles, and Disorder,” International Studies
Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 3 (September 1993), pp. 271-296; David Lumsdaine, Moral Vision in Interna-
tional Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Samuel Barkin and Bruce Cronin, “The
State and the Nation,” International Organization, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Winter 1994), pp. 107-130; Rey
Koslowski and Friedrich Kratochwilj, “Understanding Change in International Politics,” Interna-
tional Organization, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Spring 1994), pp. 215-248; Thomas Biersteker and Cynthia Weber,
eds., State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming);
and Peter Katzenstein, ed., Constructing National Security (working title), forthcoming.

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International Security 20:1 | 76

Social construction talk is like game theory talk: analytically neutral between
conflict and cooperation.”3 Critical theory does not predict peace.14 War no
more disproves critical theory than peace disproves realism. The confusion
stems from conflating description and explanation.

The descriptive issue is the extent to which states engage in practices of
realpolitik (warfare, balancing, relative-gains seeking) versus accepting the rule
of law and institutional constraints on their autonomy States sometimes do
engage in power politics, but this hardly describes all of the past 1300 years,
and even less today, when most states follow most international law most of
the time,15 and when war and security dilemmas are the exception rather than
the rule, Great Powers no longer tend to conquer small ones, and free trade is
expanding rather than contracting.16 The relative frequency of realpolitik, how-
ever, has nothing to do with “realism.” Realism should be seen as an explana-
tion of realpolitik, not a description of it. Conflating the two makes it impossible
to tell how well the one explains the other, and leads to the tautology that war
makes realism true. Realism does not have a monopoly on the ugly and brutal
side of international life. Even if we agree on a realpolitik description, we can
reject a realist explanation.

The explanatory issue is why states engage in war or peace. Mearsheimer’s
portrayal of constructivist “causal logic” on this issue is about 30 percent right.
The logic has two elements, structure and agency. On the one hand, construc-
tivist theorizing tries to show how the social structure of a system makes
actions possible by constituting actors with certain identities and interests, and
material capabilities with certain meanings. Missing from Mearsheimer’s ac-
count is the constructivist emphasis on how agency and interaction produce
and reproduce structures of shared knowledge over time. Since it is not possi-
ble here to discuss the various dynamics through which this process takes
place,17 let me illustrate instead. And since Mearsheimer does not offer a

13. On the social basis of conflict, see Georg Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations
(Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955). This is also why I prefer to avoid the term “institutionalism,” since
it associates sociality with peace and cooperation.
14. Fischer’s suggestion that critical theory predicts cooperation in feudal Europe is based on a
failure to understand the full implications of this point; see Fischer, “Feudal Europe, 800-1300.”
15. See Louis Henkin, How Nations Behave (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1979), p. 47.
16. On the inadequacy of “realist” descriptions of international politics, see Paul Schroeder, “His-
torical Reality vs. Neo-realist Theory,” International Security, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Summer 1994), pp.
108-148.
17. For a start, see Alexander Wendt, “Collective Identity Formation,” and Emanuel Adler, “Cog-
nitive Evolution,” in Emanuel Adler and Beverly Crawford, eds., Progress in Postwar International
Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 43-88. The best introduction to proc-
esses of social construction remains Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction
of Reality (New York: Anchor Books, 1966).

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Constructing International Politics | 77

neorealist explanation for inter-state cooperation, conceding that terrain to
institutionalists, let me focus on the “hard case” of why states sometimes get
into security dilemmas and war, that is, why they sometimes engage in real-
politik behavior.

In “Anarchy is What States Make of It” I argued that such behavior is a
self-fulfilling prophecy,18 and that this is due to both agency and social struc-
ture. Thus, on the agency side, what states do to each other affects the social
structure in which they are embedded, by a logic of reciprocity If they milita-
rize, others will be threatened and arm themselves, creating security dilemmas
in terms of which they will define egoistic identities and interests. But if they
engage in policies of reassurance, as the Soviets did in the late 1980s, this will
have a different effect on the structure of shared knowledge, moving it toward
a security community. The depth of interdependence is a factor here, as is the
role of revisionist states, whose actions are likely to be especially threatening.
However, on the structural side, the ability of revisionist states to create a war
of all against all depends on the structure of shared knowledge into which they
enter. If past interactions have created a structure in which status quo states
are divided or naive, revisionists will prosper and the system will tend toward
a Hobbesian world in which power and self-interest rule. In contrast, if past
interactions have created a structure in which status quo states trust and
identify with each other, predators are more likely to face collective security
responses like the Gulf War.19 History matters. Security dilemmas are not acts
of God: they are effects of practice. This does not mean that once created they
can necessarily be escaped (they are, after all, “dilemmas”), but it puts the
causal locus in the right place.

Contrast this explanation of power politics with the “poverty of neoreal-
ism.”20 Mearsheimer thinks it significant that in anarchy, states cannot be 100
percent certain that others will not attack. Yet even in domestic society, I can-
not be certain that I will be safe walking to class. There are no guarantees in
life, domestic or international, but the fact that in anarchy war is possible does
not mean “it may at any moment occur.'”21 Indeed, it may be quite unlikely, as
it is in most interactions today Possibility is not probability Anarchy as such

18. A similar argument is developed in John Vasquez, The War Puzzle (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993).
19. On the role of collective identity in facilitating collective security, see Wendt, “Collective
Identity Formation.”
20. Richard Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism,” International Organization, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Spring
1984), pp. 225-286.
21. Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 232.

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International Security 20:1 | 78

is not a structural cause of anything. What matters is its social structure, which
varies across anarchies. An anarchy of friends differs from one of enemies, one
of self-help from one of collective security, and these are all constituted by
structures of shared knowledge. Mearsheimer does not provide an argument
for why this is wrong; he simply asserts that it is.

Other realist explanations for power politics fare somewhat better. Although
neorealists want to eschew arguments from human nature, even they would
agree that to the extent human-beings-in-groups are prone to fear and compe-
tition, it may predispose them to war.22 However, this factor faces countervail-
ing dynamics of interdependence and collective identity formation, which
sometimes overcome it. The distribution of material capabilities also matters,
especially if offense is dominant, and military build-ups will of course concern
other states. Again, however, the meaning of power depends on the underlying
structure of shared knowledge. A British build-up will be less threatening to
the United States than a North Korean one, and build-ups are less likely to
occur in a security community than in a security dilemma.

In order to get from anarchy and material forces to power politics and war,
therefore, neorealists have been forced to make additional, ad hoc assumptions
about the social structure of the international system. We see this in Mear-
sheimer’s interest in “hyper-nationalism,” Stephen Walt’s emphasis on ideol-
ogy in the “balance of threat,” Randall Schweller’s focus on the status
quo-revisionist distinction and, as I argued in my “Anarchy” piece, in Waltz’s
assumption that anarchies are self-help systems.23 Incorporating these assump-
tions generates more explanatory power, but how? In these cases the crucial
causal work is done by social, not material, factors. This is the core of a
constructivist view of structure, not a neorealist one.

The problem becomes even more acute when neorealists try to explain the
relative absence of inter-state war in today’s world. If anarchy is so determin-
ing, why are there not more Bosnias? Why are weak states not getting killed
off left and right? It stretches credulity to think that the peace between Norway
and Sweden, or the United States and Canada, or Nigeria and Benin are all
due to material balancing. Mearsheimer says cooperation is possible when core
interests are not threatened (p. 25), and that “some states are especially friendly

22. For a good argument to this effect, see Jonathan Mercer, “Anarchy and Identity,” International
Organization, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Spring 1995).
23. John J. Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future,” International Security, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Summer 1990),
pp. 5-56; Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Randall
Schweller, “Tripolarity and the Second World War,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1
(March 1993), pp. 73-103; and Wendt, “Anarchy is What States Make of It.”

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Constructing International Politics | 79

for historical or ideological reasons” (p. 31). But this totally begs the question
of why in an ostensibly “realist” world states do not find their interests
continually threatened by others, and the question of how they might become
friends. Perhaps Mearsheimer would say that most states today are status quo
and sovereign.24 But again this begs the question. What is sovereignty if not
an institution of mutual recognition and non-intervention? And is not being
“status quo” related to the internalization of this institution in state interests?
David Strang has argued that those states recognized as sovereign have better
survival prospects in anarchy than those that are not.25 Far from challenging
this argument, Mearsheimer presupposes it.

Neorealists’ growing reliance on social factors to do their explanatory work
suggests that if ever there were a candidate for a degenerating research pro-
gram in IR theory, this is it.26 The progressive response (in the Lakatosian sense)
would be to return to realism’s materialist roots by showing that the back-
ground understandings that give capabilities meaning are caused by still
deeper material conditions, or that capabilities have intrinsic meaning that
cannot be ignored. To show that the material base determines international
superstructure, in other words, realists should be purging their theory of social
content, not adding it as they are doing.27 And anti-realists, in turn, should be
trying to show how the causal powers of material facts presuppose social
content, not trying to show that institutions explain additional variance beyond
that explained by the distribution of power and interest, as if the latter were a
privileged pre-social baseline.

Responsibility

An important virtue of “False Promise” is that it links neorealism and its rivals
to the ethical responsibilities of foreign policymakers. These responsibilities

24. Mearsheimer and Waltz both assume sovereignty, without acknowledging its institutional
character; see Mearsheimer, “False Promise,” p. 11, and Waltz, Theory of International Politics,
pp. 95-96.
25. David Strang, “Anomaly and Commonplace in European Political Expansion,” International
Organization, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Spring 1991), pp. 143-162.
26. “Degenerating” problem shifts are adjustments to a theory that are ad hoc, while “progressive”
shifts are those that have a principled basis in its hard core assumptions. See Imre Lakatos,
“Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Lakatos and Alan
Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1970), pp. 91-196.
27. The significance of Dan Deudney’s work lies partly in his appreciation of this point; see Dan
Deudney, “Dividing Realism: Structural Realism versus Security Materialism on Nuclear Security
and Proliferation,” Security Studies, Vol. 1, Nos. 2 and 3 (1993), pp. 7-37.

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International Security 20:1 | 80

depend in part on how much it is possible to change the structure of shared
knowledge within anarchy If such change is impossible, then Mearsheimer is
right that it would be irresponsible for those charged with national security to
pursue it. On the other hand, if it is possible, then it would be irresponsible to
pursue policies that perpetuate destructive old orders, especially if we care
about the well-being of future generations.

To say that structures are socially constructed is no guarantee that they can
be changed.28 Sometimes social structures so constrain action that transforma-
tive strategies are impossible. This goes back to the collective nature of social
structures; structural change depends on changing a system of expectations
that may be mutually reinforcing. A key issue in determining policymakers’
responsibilities, therefore, is how much “slack” a social structure contains.
Neorealists think there is little slack in the system, and thus states that deviate
from power politics will get punished or killed by the “logic” of anarchy
Institutionalists think such dangers have been greatly reduced by institutions
such as sovereignty and the democratic peace, and that there is therefore more
possibility for peaceful change.

The example of Gorbachev is instructive in this respect, since the Cold War
was a highly conflictual social structure. I agree with Mearsheimer (p. 46) that
Soviet nuclear forces gave Gorbachev a margin of safety for his policies. Yet
someone else in his place might have found a more aggressive solution to a
decline in power. What is so important about the Gorbachev regime is that it
had the courage to see how the Soviets’ own practices sustained the Cold War,
and to undertake a reassessment of Western intentions. This is exactly what a
constructivist would do, but not a neorealist, who would eschew attention to
such social factors as naive and as mere superstructure. Indeed, what is so
striking about neorealism is its total neglect of the explanatory role of state
practice.29 It does not seem to matter what states do: Brezhnev, Gorbachev,
Zhirinovsky, what difference does it make? The logic of anarchy will always
bring us back to square one. This is a disturbing attitude if realpolitik causes
the very conditions to which it is a response; to the extent that realism counsels
realpolitik, therefore, it is part of the problem. Mearsheimer says critical theorists

28. Hence, contra Mearsheimer, there is nothing problematic about the fact that critical theorists
do not make predictions about the future. What happens in the future depends on what actors do
with the structures they have made in the past.
29. This is not true of classical realists; for a sympathetic discussion of the latter from a critical
standpoint, see Richard Ashley, “Political Realism and Human Interests,” International Studies
Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 2 (June 1981), pp. 204-237.

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Constructing International Politics | 81

are “intolerant” of realists for this reason (p. 42). The ironies of this suggestion
aside, what matters is getting policymakers to accept responsibility for solving
conflicts rather than simply managing or exploiting them. If neorealism can
move us in that direction, then it should, but as I see it, neorealist ethics come
down to “sauve qui peut.”

To analyze the social construction of international politics is to analyze how
processes of interaction produce and reproduce the social structures-coopera-
tive or conflictual-that shape actors’ identities and interests and the sig-
nificance of their material contexts. It is opposed to two rivals: the materialist
view, of which neorealism is one expression, that material forces per se deter-
mine international life, and the rational choice-theoretic view that interaction
does not change identities and interests. Mearsheimer’s essay is an important
opening to the comparative evaluation of these hypotheses. But neorealists will
contribute nothing further to the debate so long as they think that construc-
tivists are subversive utopians who do not believe in a real world and who
expect peace in our time.

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• Article Contents

p. 71
p. 72
p. 73
p. 74
p. 75
p. 76
p. 77
p. 78
p. 79
p. 80
p. 81

• Issue Table of Contents

International Security, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Summer, 1995), pp. 1-195
Front Matter [pp. ]
Editors’ Note [pp. 3-4]
Democratization and the Danger of War [pp. 5-38]
Promises, Promises: Can Institutions Deliver?
The Promise of Institutionalist Theory [pp. 39-51]
The Promise of Collective Security [pp. 52-61]
The False Premise of Realism [pp. 62-70]
Constructing International Politics [pp. 71-81]
A Realist Reply [pp. 82-93]
Guidance from Above
New Satellite Images for Sale [pp. 94-125]
The GPS Dilemma: Balancing Military Risks and Economic Benefits [pp. 126-148]
In the Shadow of the Bear: Security in Post-Soviet Central Asia [pp. 149-181]
Correspondence
History vs. Neo-realism: A Second Look [pp. 182-195]
Correction: Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict: The Case of Serbia [pp. 195]
Back Matter [pp. ]

The “Third” United Nations

c

Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis,

and Richard Jolly

Analysts usually identify two United Nations, one composed of member
states and a second composed of the secretariats. A third UN should also
be recognized, composed of actors that are closely associated with the
world organization but not formally part of it. This “outside-insider” UN
includes nongovernmental organizations, academics, consultants, experts,
independent commissions, and other groups of individuals. These informal
networks often help to effect shifts in ideas, policies, priorities, and prac-
tices that are initially seen as undesirable or problematic by governments
and international secretariats. KEYWORDS: United Nations, nongovernmen-
tal organizations, intellectual history, networks, international secretariats.

R
esearch and oral histories from the United Nations Intellectual History
Project (UNIHP) demonstrate that ideas, one of the UN’s most im-
portant legacies, have made a substantial contribution to international

society.1 This work also suggests that the concept of a “third UN” should be
added to our analytical toolkit in order to move beyond Inis Claude’s clas-
sic twofold distinction between the world organization as an intergovern-
mental arena and as a secretariat.2

This “additional” UN consists of certain nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs), external experts, scholars, consultants, and committed citizens who
work closely with the UN’s intergovernmental machinery and secretariats.
The third UN’s roles include advocacy, research, policy analysis, and idea
mongering. Its elements often combine forces to put forward new informa-
tion and ideas, push for new policies, and mobilize public opinion around
UN deliberations and operations. Critics might disagree and regard our per-
spective as quite orthodox.3 However, in our view, informed scholars, prac-
titioners, and activists have a value-added and comparative advantage within
intergovernmental contexts to push intellectual and policy envelopes. These
circles—a third UN—are independent of and provide essential inputs into
the other two UNs. Such “outside-insiders” are an integral part of today’s
United Nations. What once seemed marginal for international relations now
is central to multilateralism.

We begin by situating the notion of a third UN among broader schol-
arly efforts to reconceptualize multilateralism before briefly examining
Claude’s two traditional components. We then consider the contributions of
the third UN concept by exploring key definitional questions and parsing its

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membership and interactive dynamics in the world organization. Finally, we
spell out why the idea of a third UN is significant for the theory and prac-
tice of international organization and propose an agenda for future research.

New Multilateralisms and Public Policy Networks
The notion of a three-faceted UN is a contribution to the challenge of the-
orizing contemporary global governance. It builds on a growing body of
work that calls for a conception of “multiple multilateralisms.”4

Why bring forward this idea now? After all, networks of diplomats and
professionals are hardly new. Although major governments have resisted
the influence of nonstate actors and, particularly, civil society organiza-
tions, parts of the UN system have long engaged them and drawn on aca-
demic expertise located outside the system. The International Labour Orga-
nization (ILO) has incorporated representatives of trade unions and the
business sector into its tripartite structure since 1919. NGOs have been sig-
nificant for advances in ideas, norms, and policies at the UN beginning
with advocacy for the inclusion of human rights in the UN Charter in 1945
and for the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights three
years later. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has long had
close interactions with civil society groups for a wide range of children’s is-
sues and for fund-raising and advocacy. The United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations De-
velopment Fund for Women (UNIFEM) have interacted with national com-
mittees consisting of academics and NGOs. Indeed, most parts of the UN
have drawn on academic or professional expertise located outside the system.

A growing number of authors have attempted to conceptualize the phe-
nomenon of nonstate actors, especially NGOs, as they intersect with the
United Nations.5 The number of nonofficial groups involved has grown dra-
matically, while the density of globalization has meant that communications
and technological developments have increased the reach of their voices as
well as their decibel levels.

Adopting the notion of the third UN is a sharper way to depict inter-
actions in and around the world organization than employing the usual three-
fold vocabulary of state, market, and civil society. This terminology res-
onates for students of international organization who were raised on Claude’s
framework, including much of the Global Governance readership. More-
over, beyond the United Nations there could also be a third European Union
(EU), a third Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD), and so on. However, the data and argument presented here relate
more specifically to the UN.

Why have analysts relatively neglected—or often resisted address-
ing—something that seems so obvious? Part of the answer lies in difficult

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definitional questions about an amorphous, fluid, and ill-defined group of
actors who engage with the United Nations at various levels, at various
times, and on various issues. Patterns are hard to grasp, and many of the in-
teractions are ad hoc. Which groups should be included? Should one exam-
ine all NGOs and all academics? Where does one draw the line? Would it
make more sense to focus on policy orientations rather than on sectors of
actors? Once in, are actors forever part of the third UN, or do they move in
and out depending on the issue, their influence, or the calendar? This arti-
cle is another step in conceptualizing global governance in terms of free-
flowing networks rather than rigid formal structures.6

Most social scientists—development economists, students of compara-
tive politics, sociologists, and anthropologists—have long recognized the
empirical and theoretical importance of nonstate actors. However, this in-
sight largely eluded international relations (IR) specialists who, with their
preoccupation with issues of sovereignty and with the UN’s being com-
posed of member states, tended to minimize or even ignore interactions
with nonstate actors and their influence on decisionmaking. Beginning in
the 1970s with Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye,7 the growing presence and
activities of actors other than states have gradually forced many main-
stream IR theorists to pry open the lid on the black box of state-centric
theories of international organization. Realists remain unreconstructed in
this regard. But with issues as varied as gender and climate change mov-
ing into the limelight on the international agenda, largely as a result of
efforts by nonstate actors, and despite the recalcitrance of many states and
international civil servants, it is imperative to better understand the impact
of the third UN.

The First and the Second UN
Unsurprisingly, the first UN and the second UN have long provided the prin-
cipal grist for analytical mills about the world organization. After all, mem-
ber states—51 in June 1945 and 192 today—establish the priorities and pay
the bills, more or less, thus determining what the world body does. Inter-
national civil servants would not exist without member states, nor could a
permanent institution of member states operate without a secretariat.

Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore distinguish five roles for the
first UN: “as an agent of great powers doing their bidding; as a mechanism
for interstate cooperation; as a governor of international society of states; as
a constructor of the social world; and as a legitimation forum.”8 States pur-
sue national interests in this arena, which varies from “high politics” in the
Security Council to “low politics” in the boards and governing councils of
UN funds and specialized agencies. States caucus in regional groups for the
General Assembly and in smaller groups for numerous issues. Notions of

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the first UN find a home in virtually all IR theory: for a realist emphasizing
self-interested states within an anarchical system; for a liberal institutional-
ist looking for a stage where states pursue mutual interests and reduce
transaction costs; for a proponent of the English School seeking to foster
shared norms and values in an international society; for a constructivist
looking for a creative agent for ideational change and identity shaping; and
for a pragmatist seeking a place to legitimate specific values and actions.

The second UN is also a distinct sphere, consisting of career and long-
serving staff members who are paid through assessed and voluntary con-
tributions. This international civil service is a legacy of the League of
Nations. Article 101 of the UN Charter calls for a core of officials to tackle
international problems. A leading advocate for the second UN was Dag
Hammarskjöld. His May 1961 speech at Oxford does not ignore the reality
that the international civil service exists to carry out decisions made by
states; but it emphasizes that a UN official could and should pledge alle-
giance to striving for a larger collective good, rather than defending the
interests of the country that issues his or her passport.9 The practice of
reserving senior UN positions for former high-level officials approved by
their home governments undermines the integrity of secretariats. Moreover,
a shadow today hangs over the UN Secretariat as a result of corruption in the
Oil-for-Food Programme, sexual exploitation by peacekeepers, and the Staff
Council’s vote of no-confidence in the secretary-general in May 2006.

Nonetheless, a basic idealism continues to animate the second UN. The
likes of Ralph Bunche and Brian Urquhart indicate that autonomy and in-
tegrity are realistic expectations of international civil servants.10 Today’s pro-
fessional and support staff number approximately 55,000 in the UN proper
and another 20,000 in the specialized agencies. This number excludes tem-
porary staff in peace operations (about 100,000 in 2007) and the staff of the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group (another 15,000).
These figures represent substantial growth from the 500 employees in the
UN’s first year at Lake Success and the peak total of 700 staff employed by
the League of Nations.11

The second UN does more than simply carry out marching orders from
governments. UN officials also present ideas to tackle problems, debate
them formally and informally with governments, take initiatives, advocate
for change, turn general decisions into specific programs of action, and work
for implementation. None of this should surprise. It would be a strange and
impotent national civil service whose staff took no initiatives or showed no
leadership, simply awaiting instructions from the government in power. The
second UN is no different, except that the formal decisionmakers are gov-
ernment representatives on boards meeting quarterly, annually, or even bi-
ennially. With the exception of the Security Council, decisionmaking and re-
sponsibility for implementation in most parts of the UN system, especially

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the development funds and specialized agencies, depend in large part on the
executive head or a staff member of the second UN.

What Is the Third UN?
From the outset, nonstate actors have been active in UN corridors and field
projects. The Charter’s 1945 Preamble opened with a clarion call from “We
the Peoples of the United Nations,” when one might have expected “We the
Representatives of Sovereign Member States.” Article 71 explicitly made
room for NGOs in UN debates. Nonetheless, the extent to which nonstate
actors are now routinely part of what passes for “international” relations by
“intergovernmental” organizations is striking.

Involvement of NGOs has been a routine part of all UN-sponsored
global conferences since the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human
Environment, when the conference secretary-general, Maurice Strong, in-
sisted on their presence. NGO parallel meetings, usually called “forums,”
have become a prominent fixture of deliberations and have been an impor-
tant force in pressing for more forward-looking policies. For the Millennium
Summit and the 2005 World Summit, special hearings involving NGOs were
organized in advance.

Although the terminology may sound odd, it is appropriate to refer to
such networks as a “third United Nations.” Many individuals who have
played an essential role in the world organization’s intellectual and norm-
building activities were neither government officials nor international civil
servants. Moreover, many key contributors to ideas as members of the first
and the second UN had significant prior associations with a university, a
policy think tank, or an NGO—or joined one after leaving government or
UN service. Many individuals have served as members or chairs of inde-
pendent panels and commissions that examined emerging problems not yet
on the international radar screen. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change is a prominent example. Many also served as staff or board mem-
bers of NGOs, and most have attended ad hoc global conferences that pull
together a range of actors on the international stage.

We define the third UN as comprising NGOs, academics, consultants,
experts, independent commissions, and other groups of individuals that rou-
tinely engage with the first and the second UN and thereby influence UN
thinking, policies, priorities, and actions. The key characteristic for this third
sphere is its independence from governments and UN secretariats. Thus, leg-
islators in Parliamentarians for Global Action as well as local governmental
officials in United Cities and Local Governments would be part of the third
UN by virtue of their position outside the executive branch of government.

Deciding who is in or out of the third UN depends on the issue and the
period in question. But the third UN consists of “outsiders”—that is, persons

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who are not on the regular payroll of a government or a secretariat—who
complement the “insiders” of the other two United Nations in collective
efforts to generate, debate, implement, and disseminate ideas and programs.
That said, the distinction between outsiders and insiders can blur in the case
of many prominent individuals who move in and out of institutions through
a “revolving door.”

At the same time, it is essential to distinguish persons who are neither
government representatives nor international civil servants when they make
certain contributions to the UN. Outsiders are often better placed to be more
adventuresome and critical. Anyone who has attended a UN-sponsored
global conference is quite aware that Secretariat staffers who organize these
meetings are joined not only by representatives of governments who make
decisions, but also by a legion of NGOs, think tanks, and academics. The
Beijing conference on women in 1995 perhaps illustrated this interaction
most visibly.12 The same is true of the board meetings of many UN funds,
programs, and specialized agencies.

In spite of the Global Compact and other schemes for “corporate social
responsibility,” we do not include the for-profit sector in the third UN. The
primary focus of business is not on any larger community of interests, but
on financial bottom lines. Companies also have relatively little direct in-
teraction with the first and the second UN in the context of the organiza-
tion’s policy formulation and project execution.13 Business groups that pro-
mote fair trade or microcredit, for instance, are better considered as NGOs.
The same holds for corporate-centered NGOs such as the World Business
Council for Sustainable Development and the World Economic Forum.

The mass media that follow UN activities often have an impact on in-
ternational thinking and action. However, their primary role as a category
of actors in global governance is to report on and not to alter policy. For
this reason we do not include media organizations within the third UN. On
the other hand, investigative journalists and columnists who are in the opin-
ion business can be aptly considered part of the third UN as influential in-
dividuals, like scholars and policy analysts.

In brief, then, three main groups of nonofficial actors compose the third
UN: nongovernmental organizations; academics and expert consultants; and
independent commissions of eminent persons. None of these subgroupings
is monolithic. The importance of particular individuals and organizations in
multiactor policymaking or project execution varies by issue and over time.
Thus “membership” in the third UN is temporary and contingent.

Eight roles played collectively by the first, second, and third UNs can
be summarized as: providing a forum for debate; generating ideas and poli-
cies; legitimating ideas and policies; advocating for ideas and policies; im-
plementing or testing ideas and policies in the field; generating resources to

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pursue ideas and policies; monitoring progress in the march of ideas and
the implementation of policies; and occasionally burying ideas and policies.
As is elaborated in subsequent sections, the importance of each role and the
importance of each of the three UNs in those roles varies depending on how
new a particular policy approach is at a given moment, and how much it
flies in the face of strong national or regional interests and received wisdom.

Intellectual energies among the three UNs blend. Indeed, there is often
synergy. A revolving door turns as academics and national political actors
move inside to take staff positions in UN secretariats, or UN staff members
leave to join NGOs, universities, or national office and subsequently en-
gage from outside, but are informed by experience inside. Primary loyalties
to, or location in, one of the three UNs provide strategic and tactical ad-
vantages and disadvantages, which give these analytical distinctions their
importance.

Nongovernmental Organizations
In the last six decades, there has been a dramatic growth in the role and in-
fluence of NGOs in UN corridors as elsewhere. The result is a qualitatively
different debate than would take place without their inputs. “I think life
would be duller without the NGOs, and there would probably be much less
point to it also,” said Viru Dayal, the former chef de cabinet of two UN sec-
retaries-general. “Besides, civil society knows where the shoe pinches.
They know when to laugh and they know when to cry.”14

Most UN global meetings attract NGO participants, and in large num-
bers. Usually the scenario does not resemble the Seattle Ministerial Con-
ference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in late 1999, when tens of
thousands of protesters filled the streets. In fact, most involvements by the
third UN are more peaceful and more supportive of the other two UNs.
While estimates vary because of different ways that delegates are counted,
the orders of magnitude are striking. The Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 had
some 17,000 nongovernmental participants, the Fourth World Conference
on Women in Beijing in 1995 drew some 32,000 (including 5,000 Chinese),
and UNICEF’s World Summit for Children in New York in 1990 stirred
over a million people worldwide to join in candlelight vigils.15

Commentators rightly emphasize the last few decades of NGO growth,
but the phenomenon has been gaining momentum over two centuries, begin-
ning with the antislavery movement late in the eighteenth century.16 Before
and during the San Francisco conference in 1945, US-based private actors
of the third UN were especially visible, including forty-two consultants
officially recognized by Washington, plus some 160 other observers from
diverse NGOs, including religious groups.17

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The Cold War slowed the growth of nonstate actor participation in the
UN. The communist bloc and many totalitarian developing countries resisted
independent and dissident voices. NGOs in such places were essentially an
extension of the state and its views, which prompted the ugly acronym
GONGO (government-organized NGO). Indeed, there are still so-called
NGOs in repressive countries that are anything but nongovernmental. Purists
would also point to problems when democratic governments provide sub-
stantial funding to NGOs, even if few visible strings are attached. Moisés
Naím’s proposal for a credible rating agency to evaluate the backers, inde-
pendence, goals, and track records of NGOs is intriguing,18 as is the signa-
ture in 2006 of an Accountability Charter by eleven of the world’s leading
international NGOs in the fields of human rights, environment, and social
development.19 Since the thaw in East-West relations and the changing bal-
ance between markets and states, human rights advocates, gender activists,
development specialists, and groups of indigenous peoples have become
more vocal, operational, and important in contexts that were once thought to
be the exclusive prerogatives of states or international secretariats.

Since the 1990s, the sheer growth in NGO numbers has prompted Lester
Salamon to discern an “associational revolution” that has been largely driven
by communications technology and funding availability.20 The Union of In-
ternational Associations currently estimates international NGOs (those operat-
ing in more than two countries) to number 25,000.21 Not all of these organi-
zations are active in UN matters, but the size of the phenomenon is clear.
Much NGO engagement with the first and second UNs occurs at headquar-
ters, where some 2,870 NGOs now have “consultative status” and are rou-
tinely joined by others without such status. In the field, meanwhile, out-
sourcing and subcontracting to members of the third UN also reflect the
changing balance between markets and states in global governance. Execut-
ing predetermined activities as subcontractors is not the same as shaping
policy, but many dual-purpose NGOs use field experience in advocacy and
vice versa. In fact, NGOs had already become substantial executors of projects
funded by the second UN by the time that the Economic and Social Council
(ECOSOC) agreed to more flexible NGO accreditation standards in 1996.

NGOs in the third UN are not always appealing bodies. Much has been
made of the ugly elements of local civil society in the genocides in Rwanda
and Sudan. NGOs with direct links to the UN also include “nasty” social
movements,22 or what Cyril Ritchie has called “criminals, charlatans and
narcissists.”23 For instance, the National Rifle Association hardly pursues
a human security agenda that most NGOs with consultative status at the UN
would support. In humanitarian emergencies, a number of mom-and-pop
organizations as well as larger operations proselytize and/or have agendas
that reflect the biases of government funders—especially evident in Afghan-
istan and Iraq—that are anathema to most NGOs in the third UN. But despite

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such shortcomings in some cases, NGOs have become integral to UN pro-
cesses and to global governance more generally.

Academics, Consultants, and Think Tanks
The bulk of scholarship about the United Nations and the main substantive
issues on the world organization’s agenda emanates from universities, spe-
cialist research institutes, and learned societies in North America and West-
ern Europe.24 During World War II, the notion that the UN would be a
major instrument of Washington’s foreign policy attracted support from US
foundations. For example, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
actively followed and promoted research on the new organization by schol-
ars and by officials from the League of Nations. Such support has contin-
ued in fits and starts since then, including the $1 billion gift from the busi-
ness leader Ted Turner in 1997 to create the UN Foundation and Better
World Fund. Other external policy research organizations with intimate
links to UN affairs include the Stanley Foundation, the International Peace
Institute, the Center for International Cooperation, and the Center for Hu-
manitarian Dialogue. Two professional associations, the Society for Inter-
national Development (founded in 1967) and the Academic Council on the
United Nations System (founded in 1987), emerged as part of policy re-
search networks focused on the UN and the international system.

“Knowledge networks”25 have become an analytical concern for stu-
dents of global governance because they create and transfer knowledge and
influence policymakers irrespective of location. These networks often frame
debate on a particular issue, provide justifications for alternatives, and cat-
alyze national or international coalitions to support chosen policies and ad-
vocate change. What Peter Haas called “epistemic communities” influence
policy, especially during times of uncertainty and change when the demand
for expertise increases.26 Much literature relates to scientific elites with par-
ticular expertise in areas such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the environ-
ment.27 A related approach to knowledge networks is Peter Hall’s earlier
study of the cross-national dissemination of ideas among experts in the
postwar period, when Keynesianism spread largely because it “acquired in-
fluence over the economic policies of a major power and was exported as
that nation acquired increasing hegemony around the world.”28

Three panels of experts in the late 1940s and early 1950s—not then
called “knowledge networks”—produced pioneering reports for the United
Nations that launched the world organization’s use of external expertise:
National and International Measures for Full Employment; Measures for
the Economic Development of Under-Developed Countries; and Measures
for International Economic Stability.29 These groups permitted the entry of
outside expertise—including prescient thinking by such later Nobel laureates

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as W. Arthur Lewis and Theodore W. Schultz—as parts of teams of promi-
nent economists from different parts of the world, supported by professionals
within the UN Secretariat.

In the 1960s, the Committee for Development Planning (since 1999,
“Policy” has replaced “Planning” in the acronym, CDP) was created and
initially chaired by Jan Tinbergen, who later won the first Nobel Prize in
Economic Sciences. The CDP usually comprised twenty-four economists,
all unpaid and appointed in their personal capacities by the UN secretary-
general, without nomination by governments. The CDP met a few times a
year to bring external expertise into the UN regarding development and in-
ternational economic policy.

A strong ethical dimension was present among such teams—pursuing a
world of greater economic and social justice with less poverty and a more
equitable income distribution. Nobel economics laureate Lawrence Klein,
an eloquent member of the third UN on disarmament and development, ob-
served, “I believe that it would be quite valuable if the UN had a better
academic world contact.”30 Indeed, the import of new thinking, approaches,
and policies from scholars in the third UN remains vital to the world or-
ganization, as suggested by recent reports from Jeffrey Sachs and the UN
Millennium Project.31

The UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) was the
first of a handful of United Nations think tanks, and the core fourteen re-
search entities of the UN University (UNU) are now collectively the largest.
While the staffs of these units have somewhat more autonomy than most in-
ternational civil servants, UNRISD and UNU remain part of the second UN
because their research agendas are subject to subtle and not-so-subtle fi-
nancial pressure from governments. However, they often provide a back-
door channel for external academic and analytical expertise.

Independent Commissions
In addition to NGOs and experts, some of the loudest and most challeng-
ing voices in the third UN come from “eminent persons.” For example, as
part of the lead-up to the UN’s sixtieth anniversary, Secretary-General Kofi
Annan convened the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.
As part of the follow-up to the September 2005 World Summit, Annan
pulled together the High-level Panel on System-wide Coherence in the areas
of development, humanitarian aid, and the environment.

This tradition goes back to the late 1960s and the panel, headed by for-
mer Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson, that produced Partners in
Development (1969). The so-called Pearson Commission was followed by a
host of others, including commissions on development issues chaired by for-
mer German chancellor Willy Brandt (1980 and 1983); on common security

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by former Swedish prime minister Olof Palme (1982); on environment and
development by serving Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundt-
land (1987); on humanitarian problems by Iranian and Jordanian princes
Sadruddin Aga Khan and Hassan bin Talal (1988); on South-South coop-
eration by serving Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere (1990); on global
governance by former Swedish prime minister Ingvar Carlsson and the
Commonwealth secretary-general Shridath Ramphal (1995); on humani-
tarian intervention and state sovereignty by former Australian minister of
external affairs Gareth Evans and former Algerian ambassador to the UN
Mohamed Sahnoun (2001); on human security by Sadako Ogata and
Amartya Sen (2003); and on civil society by former Brazilian president
Fernando Henrique Cardoso (2004). There are also commissions that are
recalled more by their sponsors’ names rather than those of their chairs—
for example, the Club of Rome (1972) and the Carnegie Commission on
Preventing Deadly Conflict (1997).

This type of expertise—combining knowledge with political punch and
access to decisionmakers—has been influential in nourishing ideas. Com-
missioners speak in their individual capacities and can move beyond what
passes for received wisdom in governments and secretariats. The reports are
normally presented to the secretary-general, who can point to multinational
composition and a variety of perspectives behind a consensus and thus use
the findings and recommendations more easily than ideas emanating from
inside the Secretariat, which many governments believe should not go be-
yond established intergovernmental positions. Research teams are often led
by academics and usually located “outside” the UN but sometimes tem-
porarily in the employ of the second UN. The researchers play an important
role not only by supporting the commissioners’ deliberations with necessary
documentation, but also by providing an entry point for ideas that eventually
get carried forward by the commissioners and the published panel reports.

These examples indicate the utility for international deliberations of a
mechanism that takes visible individuals who made careers as senior gov-
ernmental or intergovernmental officials, or both, but who subsequently—as
independent and usually prominent elders—are willing to voice criticisms at
higher decibel levels and make more controversial recommendations than
when they occupied official positions. These commissions are a key part of
the third UN even if they are established and bankrolled by the first or the
second UN. They can formulate ideas beyond what passes for political cor-
rectness in governments and secretariats.

Interactions Among the Three UNs
Understanding the interactions among the three United Nations is crucial in
the analysis of global policy processes. It is a difficult task in view of the

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increasing ease of movement by talented people who contribute to UN de-
liberations and actions from several vantage points during their careers. In
the contemporary world, it is common for leading policy figures to have
significant exposure to all three United Nations. For instance, Adebayo
Adedeji was a junior academic working on UN issues before becoming a
government minister, before taking over as the head of the Economic Com-
mission for Africa (ECA), and before setting up his own UN-related NGO
in Nigeria after his retirement from the ECA secretariat in Addis Ababa.
Bernard Chidzero was about to start as an academic, then became a UN of-
ficial, and finally, after Zimbabwe’s independence, became a member of
parliament, minister of economic planning and development, and then sen-
ior minister of finance. Julia Taft ran the emergency program of the United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP), after having been the CEO of
InterAction—a consortium of some 165 US development and humanitar-
ian NGOs—while being a member of a UN committee coordinating emer-
gency operations, and after having headed the US State Department’s Bu-
reau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Boutros Boutros-Ghali earned
a reputation as a professor of international law and a government minister
in Egypt before spending five years at the helm of the United Nations. He
subsequently headed two NGOs in Europe after his failed bid for reelection
as the UN’s top civil servant.

Figure 1 depicts the three United Nations as separate circles whose
overlaps convey interactive space. This article focuses on where the three
come together (D), but also addresses where the third and the second inter-
act (C), because these networked spaces have been underexplored in the lit-
erature and help explain shifts in ideas, policies, priorities, and practices.
The universe of UN activities is illustrated by these interplays in combina-
tion with the interactions between the first and the second United Nations
(A) as well as between the first and the third (B), spaces that have received
more significant scholarly scrutiny. The interactions between governments
and secretariats have constituted the bulk of UN studies over the past six
decades, while those between governments and nonstate actors have be-
come prevalent as an explanation for influencing many international policy
outcomes.

In terms of advancing ideas, the most obvious target is the first UN,
since member states make policies, sign treaties, deploy soldiers to halt mass
murder or keep the peace, and establish priorities and budgets. Ideas can
also emanate from visionary individuals within the first UN. Examples in-
clude Canadian foreign minister Lester B. Pearson’s call for the first peace-
keeping effort in 1956 and the Swedish government’s decision to organize
the first ad hoc global conference on the human environment in 1972.

In addition, influential ideas sometimes gravitate from the second UN
to the first UN. An intriguing example is the notion of declining terms of

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trade, a thesis formulated by Hans Singer in 1949 at UN headquarters in the
Department of Economic Affairs and rapidly further developed and applied
by Raúl Prebisch at the UN Economic Commission for Latin America
(ECLA).32 The two intellectual stalwarts were highly influential members
of the second UN who pulled together the initial data and argument. They
then publicized the problems created by the tendency of the terms of trade
to move against primary commodities, thus creating persistent balance-of-
payments problems for poor countries and slowing their economic growth.
This argument, radical at the time, framed debates on economic develop-
ment for the 1960s and 1970s and led to the establishment in 1964 of the
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

However, this article focuses on the third UN, whose members often
launch or doggedly pursue notions about which important players in the
first or the second UN are less than enthusiastic. “Sovereignty as responsi-
bility,” which Francis M. Deng and Roberta Cohen deftly designed in the
late 1980s and early 1990s to help foster international assistance and pro-
tection for internally displaced persons (IDPs),33 in turn was made more
visible and palatable in 2001 by the report of the International Commission

Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis, and Richard Jolly 135

Figure 1 Interactions Among the Three United Nations

First
UN

Second
UN

Third
UN

A B

C

D

A International and national civil servants’ interactions
B State–civil society interactions
C Secretariat–civil society interactions
D The networked space within which individuals and private

organizations interact with the first UN and the second
UN to influence or advance UN thinking, policies,
priorities, or actions

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on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect.34 For
decades, few members of the first or the second UN embraced the notion of
international responsibility to enforce basic human rights standards because
of sacrosanct Article 2 (7) of the Charter. When Secretary-General Kofi
Annan dared to speak out in 1998–1999,35 many member states were livid
and many staff members were baffled. Nonetheless, this emerging norm
figured in the consensus of the 2005 World Summit, where it was one of the
few issues on which progress was made.36

In many instances, various constellations of the first, the second, and
the third UN constitute a like-minded partnership to move ahead on issues,
with or without some member states, including major powers. One promi-
nent case was the coming together of like-minded governments, UN offi-
cials, analysts, and NGOs in the Ottawa Process, which in 1997 produced
the convention banning antipersonnel landmines.37 A similarly diverse co-
alition led to the adoption of the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the
International Criminal Court.38

In another variation, members of the second UN may sometimes turn
to the third UN to formulate ideas that are controversial but propitious to
place on the agenda and pursue when they come from nonstate actors. One
of the clearest examples is the idea of “human development,” which UNDP
administrator William Draper imported through the work of Mahbub ul Haq
and Amartya Sen. The concept has seen continual refinements since the
publication of the first Human Development Report in 1990.39 Certainly,
some UNDP staff members were keen on the notion, but the technical de-
tails were the work of minds outside the Secretariat. These outside-insiders
also took the political flack from governments that were irritated with the
publicity given to their embarrassing positions in the rankings. Indeed,
many governments at first disputed the appropriateness of paying the bill
for such research, a complaint arising from disgruntled governments as
viewed in the research about international commissions as well.40

A Research Agenda
Too little is known about the precise roles and impact of the third UN. In
particular, future research should aim to fill three lacunae: mapping net-
works; tracing movements of individuals; and measuring relative influence
in specific settings.

Mapping Networks
The first pressing task is the rather unexciting, though necessary, exercise
of systematic data gathering in order to acquire thick descriptions of the
loose networks of individuals and groups across the three UNs. Lacking
such data, we cannot move beyond black boxes and sweeping generaliza-

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tions as explanations for action or inaction. Anne-Marie Slaughter, for in-
stance, has done ground-breaking work in tracking transgovernmental net-
works, for which the building blocks are not “states but parts of states:
courts, regulator agencies, ministries, legislatures.”41 Other scholars have
dissected networks of transnational activists organized to “multiply chan-
nels of access to the international system,”42 transnational movements to
end the Cold War,43 and knowledge-based networks.44

Multiactor policymaking networks for the United Nations are less pre-
cisely defined, which poses a substantial analytical challenge. However, the
basic notion that transnational actors contribute to changes in thinking and
policy is similar to that put forward by Slaughter. As such, social network
analysis holds the promise of better being able to capture complex relation-
ships among the three UNs.45 This research method focuses on the patterns
of interactions among actors rather than on the attributes of individual units.
Some networks have informal, decentralized, and horizontal relationships,
while others have a more hierarchical organization. There is little defini-
tional consensus about networks, given wide variations in structures. How-
ever, network analysts do agree that, regardless of the type of structure, the
nodes (or actors) in these networks are interdependent. They are therefore
“not seen as acting in isolation, but within complex linkages with other ac-
tors that influence decision making.”46

Social network analysis potentially can help explain which portions of
which networks are more important than others under specified circum-
stances. Key individuals are so embedded in diplomatic, policy, research,
and other social networks that separating them for analytical purposes is ex-
tremely challenging, but nonetheless it is a critical part of the contemporary
puzzle of international cooperation and global governance. The next step is
to move the discussion beyond which nonstate actors matter toward deter-
mining more precisely how each matters in the UN’s policy-shaping process.

Tracing Individuals’ Trajectories
The second research area involves mapping the movements of key individ-
uals who are active in UN policymaking. In view of the increasing ease of
movement by policy professionals, a proposition to be tested is that promi-
nent individuals may be more influential, internationally or nationally, be-
cause of their firsthand exposure to a wide variety of institutions. Many in-
dividuals are, in effect, “cross-dressers” whose membership at any moment
in one of the three UNs reflects the extent to which they are embedded in
larger social networks.

As Barnett and Finnemore observe, “Many UN staff and field personnel
have varied careers and move back and forth between UN appointments, jobs
within their own governments at home, and positions in the private sector,
universities, and NGOs.” They go on to note that work by sociologists,

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anthropologists, and scholars of organizational behavior indicates that such
backgrounds are important in explaining flows of information and individ-
ual behavior. “Good network analysis and good ethnographic work on the
UN would contribute greatly to our understanding of its behavior.”47 While
privacy legislation applying to personnel files may be an obstacle to ob-
taining relevant data, a pertinent research task is to track career movements
and to explore whether exposure to the culture of an international secre-
tariat, for instance, is an asset in career development in government or
NGO service, and vice versa.

Weighing Influence
Distinguishing forums for state decisionmaking, international secretariats,
and the outside-insiders are essential to determine which UN is behind
which policy or action, and to what extent they are responsible for desirable
outcomes to be emulated or for undesirable results to be avoided. Analysts
of global governance are obliged to design better empirical indicators to
move beyond the adage that success has numerous parents, but failure is an
orphan.

States rarely are willing to blame themselves for breakdowns in inter-
national order and society; and UN secretariats often indiscriminately fault
governments for their lack of political will. The first UN has a convenient
scapegoat in the second UN, and vice versa. Sometimes the third UN adds
to this confusion, blaming or praising the world organization in general.
But in other cases—say, the influence of the Bretton Woods institutions on
structural adjustment policy or the slowness of developed country govern-
ments to finance debt relief—members of the third UN have pointed fingers
with more precision and effect.

Agency is crucial, but students of global governance know too little
about the relative influences of the actors in what Conor Cruise O’Brien
aptly called the “sacred drama” of the United Nations.48 The stage with
Claude’s two United Nations has, over the last six decades, become in-
creasingly crowded with other actors who play more than bit parts. States
are still on the marquee, and national interests have not receded as the basis
for decisionmaking; and international secretariats still largely serve these
state masters but with margins for independence and maneuver. And there
is substantial evidence that the third UN is increasingly salient—sometimes
in the wings or dressing room, sometimes in the limelight. Hence, numer-
ous individuals and institutions that are neither states nor their creation in
the form of intergovernmental bureaucracies contribute to and circumscribe
virtually every deliberation, decision, and operation by either of the other
two UNs.

Deciphering what Robert Cox and Harold Jacobson long ago called “the
anatomy of influence”49 requires identifying the strengths and weaknesses

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of a seemingly ever growing number of actors. A third research task in-
volves identifying better criteria to measure which actors have contributed
to “success” and which to “failure” within the United Nations. And a com-
parable research task for global governance would apply to other intergov-
ernmental arenas—for example the “third EU” and the “third OECD.”

Conclusion
A special section of the journal Foreign Policy in fall 2002 was titled, “What
Is the International Community?”50 The lead-in quipped, “Invoking the in-
ternational community is a lot easier than defining it.” It no longer makes
sense to use the term restrictively to states alone, because nonstate charac-
ters are playing essential roles with respect to virtually every global chal-
lenge to human survival and dignity. International lawyers conceive of the
international community narrowly in terms of “peace-loving states”—that is,
euphemistically, the first UN. Other observers employ the concept more ex-
pansively and also include the creations of states in the form of intergovern-
mental secretariats—that is, the second UN. Still other commentators also
embrace nonstate actors operating internationally—that is, the third UN.

We hazard a step in this wider direction by beginning to parse the con-
temporary international community in terms of interactions among three
United Nations. Filling the glaring gaps in global governance51 leads us to
urge that “the UN”—first, second, and third—continue to pool energies and
make maximum use of its comparative advantages.

The value of the third UN, in practice as well as in theory, is clear.
States and intergovernmental organizations cannot adequately address threats
to human security. Whether the UN is seen as a convener, a norm entrepre-
neur, or an operator, we the peoples require all the helping hands we can
get—and many of those are toiling in the third United Nations. c

Notes
Thomas G. Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science and director of the
Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The City University of New York
(CUNY) Graduate Center, and codirector of the UN Intellectual History Project
(UNIHP). Tatiana Carayannis is associate director at the Social Science Research
Council and, until recently, UNIHP’s research manager. Richard Jolly is honorary
professor at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex and
codirector of UNIHP.

1. Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij, and Thomas G. Weiss, The Power of UN
Ideas: Lessons from the First Sixty Years, available along with other information at
www.unhistory.org. See also Robert J. Berg, “The UN Intellectual History Project,”
Global Governance 12, no. 4 (2006): 325–341. For the capstone book in the series,
see Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij, and Thomas G. Weiss, UN Ideas That Changed
the World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2009).

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2. Inis L. Claude Jr., Swords Into Plowshares: The Problems and Prospects of
International Organization (New York: Random House, 1956); Inis L. Claude Jr.,
“Peace and Security: Prospective Roles for the Two United Nations,” Global Gov-
ernance 2, no. 3 (1996): 289–298.

3. Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World
Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Robert C. Cox, The New
Realism: Perspectives on Multilateralism and World Order (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1997).

4. Barry Carin, Richard Higgott, Jan Aart Scholte, Gordon Smith, and Diane
Stone, “Global Governance: Looking Ahead,” Global Governance 12, no. 1 (2006):
1–6. Other authors have begun to speak of “new multilateralism”: Michael G.
Schechter, ed., Innovation in Multilateralism (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
1999); “complex multilateralism”: Robert O’Brien, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart
Scholte, and Marc Williams, Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic
Institutions and Global Social Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000); “polylateralism”: Geoffrey Wiseman, “‘Polylateralism’ and New Modes of
Global Dialogue,” Discussion Paper No. 59 (Leicester: Leicester Diplomatic Stud-
ies Programme, 1999); and “plurilateralism”: Philip G. Cerny, “Plurilateralism:
Structural Differentiation and Functional Conflict in the Post–Cold War World
Order,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 22, no. 1 (1993): 27–51.

5. Thomas G. Weiss and Leon Gordenker, eds., NGOs, the UN, and Global
Governance (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996); Peter Willetts, ed., The “Conscience”
of the World: The Influence of Non-Governmental Organisations in the UN System
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1996); Bob Deacon, Global Social
Policy and Governance (London: Sage, 2007); Jan Aart Scholte, Civil Society
Voices and the International Monetary Fund (Ottawa: North-South Institute, 2002).

6. Wolfgang R. Reinicke, Global Public Policy: Governing Without Govern-
ment? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1998); Wolfgang R. Reinicke, Fran-
cis Deng, Thorsten Benner, and Jan Martin Witte, Critical Choices: The United Na-
tions, Networks, and the Future of Global Governance (Ottawa: IDRC Publishers,
2000). Jan Aart Scholte has suggested that it may be more useful to distinguish be-
tween “conformist,” “rejectionist,” “reformist,” and “transformist” orientations rather
than focus on sectors, in Democratizing the Global Economy: The Role of Civil So-
ciety (Coventry: Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, 2004).

7. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, eds., Transnational Relations and World
Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).

8. Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, “Political Approaches,” in Thomas
G. Weiss and Sam Daws, eds., The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 42.

9. Dag Hammarskjöld, “The International Civil Servant in Law and in Fact,”
reprinted by permission of Clarendon Press, Oxford, quotes at pp. 329 and 349.

10. Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis, Louis Emmerij, and Richard Jolly,
UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2005). See also The Complete Oral History Transcripts from UN
Voices, CD-ROM (New York: United Nations Intellectual History Project, 2007).

11. Thant Myint-U and Amy Scott, The UN Secretariat: A Brief History (1945–
2006) (New York: International Peace Academy, 2007), pp. 126–128.

12. Devaki Jain, Women, Development, and the UN: A Sixty-Year Quest for
Equality and Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

13. John G. Ruggie, “global_governance.net: The Global Compact as Learning
Network,” Global Governance 7, no. 4 (2001): 371–378. See also Tagi Sagafi-nejad,

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in collaboration with John Dunning, The UN and Transnational Corporations: From
Code of Conduct to Global Compact (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

14. Weiss et al., UN Voices, p. 387.
15. UNRISD, UN World Summits and Civil Society Engagement, UNRISD

Research and Policy Brief 6 (Geneva: UNRISD, 2007), p. 2. See also Michael G.
Schechter, United Nations Global Conferences (London: Routledge, 2005).

16. Steve Charnowitz, “Two Centuries of Participation: NGOs and International
Governance,” Michigan Journal of International Law 18, no. 2 (1997): 183–286.

17. Stephen Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations
(Boulder: Westview, 2003), p. 122.

18. Moisés Naím, “Democracy’s Dangerous Impostors,” Wall Street Journal, 21
April 2007.

19. “INGO Accountability Charter,” available at www.ingoaccountabilitycharter
.org.

20. Lester M. Salamon et al., Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the Nonprofit
Sector (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, 1999).

21. Union of International Associations, “International Organizations by Type
(Table 1),” in Yearbook of International Organizations, available at www.uia.org//
uiastats/stbv196.htm.

22. Peter Waterman, “Global Civil Society: A Concept Worth Defining; A Ter-
rain Worth Disputing,” available at www.nigd.org/docs/GlobalCivilSocietyPeter
WatermanNovember2005.

23. “Overview by Cyril Ritchie, Secretary of CONGO,” available at www.ngo
congo.org/index.php?what=doc&id=1121.

24. W. Andy Knight, S. Neil MacFarlane, and Thomas G. Weiss, “Swan Song,”
Global Governance 11, no. 4 (2005): 527–535; Leon Gordenker and Christer Jöns-
son, “Knowledge,” in The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations, pp. 82–94.

25. Diane Stone, Global Knowledge Networks and International Development
(London: Routledge, 2005); Janice Gross Stein, Richard Stren, Joy Fitzgibbon, and
Melissa MacLean, Networks of Knowledge: Collaborative Innovation in Inter-
national Learning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).

26. Emanuel Adler and Peter M. Haas, “Epistemic Communities, World Order,
and the Creation of a Reflective Research Program,” International Organization 46,
no. 1 (1992): 367–390.

27. For example, Leon Gordenker, Roger A. Coate, Christer Jönsson, and Peter
Söderholm, International Cooperation in Response to AIDS (London: Pinter, 1995); Peter
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Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis, and Richard Jolly 141

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142 The “Third” United Nations

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The “Third” United Nations
New Multilateralisms and Public Policy Networks
The First and the Second UN
What Is the Third UN?
Nongovernmental Organizations
Academics, Consultants, and Think Tanks
Independent Commissions
Interactions Among the Three UNs
A Research Agenda
Mapping Networks
Tracing Individuals’ Trajectories
Weighing Influence
Conclusion
Notes