Research Note: TESTING REALIST INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION THEORY

A basic tenet of realism is that IGOs will reflect the distribution of power in their governance. Great powers will run the institutions and get more of what they want. The classic example of this in current world politics is the division of veto-wielding power in the UN.

Yet in my previous empirical work, interviewing within the IMF and Bank suggested that this is not always the case. In-house managers and institutional leaders had varying amounts of discretion. Day-to-day operations appeared almost exclusively beyond the direction of the GPs. Even some large policy issues seemed to swing in directions other than the apparent preferences of the GPs.

There is a transmission belt effect at work. The balance of power does not exist as a tangible empirical reality. It is reflected within the institutions; it must travel to them from national capitals. This creates room for slippage. Rather than simply suggesting, as neoliberal institutionalists do, that institutions can become sticky or gain self-confidence, I propose some specific hypotheses to explain why and how IGOs can in fact attain enough institutional autonomy to skirt if not openly contravene GP wishes.

H1. The role of GPs in IGOs will be reduced, if the IGO is primarily technocratic. It is not clear at all how America’s wishes differed from even the Soviet Union’s of Nazi Germany’s on the existence of time zones or postal details, for example.

H2. IGOs that can generate revenue internally can reduce their vulnerability to GP interference. The World Bank raises funds through the IBRD on its own. This provides it with some institutional autonomy.

H3. Presidential/managerial entrepreneurship can reshape GPs’ interests to align with the organizations. James Wolfensohn has dramatically reshaped the great power’s sense of the importance of development. A flamboyant, jet-setting advocate of poverty reduction, he oversaw a major expansion of the Bank’s resources, activities and prestige. Even the Bush administration agreed the poverty and AIDS in Africa were challenges it was simply inhumane to ignore.

H4. Great power stalemates create substantial institutional discretion. The split between large borrowing states such as China and Brazil, and donors like Great Britain, in the Bank and Fund over the role of NGOs, has created a stalemate at the Board level of the BWI on this question. The leaves management room to push around on its own, experimenting with how much change the member-state owners can absorb.

H5. Great powers translation of their global stature in policy clout within IGOs requires sustained commitment of resources and interest. It is not clear that many provide that. Even the United States’ Treasury Department only devotes, at most, 50 staff to monitoring the World Bank – an institution of 10,000 staff that turns over $20B per annum in new loans and generates enormous reams of reports. Without devotion to oversight, the reality of military and economic strength does not necessarily entail dominance or control.

H6. Epistemic communities and highly consensual knowledge may overrule the raw national interest of the great powers. The best example of this is the Bank and Fund’s continuing negative statements on OECD states’ agricultural subsidies. The powerful, deeply consensual global norms of poverty alleviation, and free trade seem to have overwhelmed the GPs’ interest in keeping the agricultural subsidies out of IFI discussions. Such ‘speaking truth to power’ requires deeply held and deeply consensual norms, but clearly the intellectual/normative hegemony of the rectitude of free trade and poverty reduction have placed agricultural subsidies regularly now on the IFI/world trade agenda.

H7. Great power indecision creates room for institutional experimentation and pathbreaking. While the logic of a high-profile bail-out to South Korea or Russia may be clear to the US, in many of the places where the Bank and Fund work, it is simply unclear what the GPs’ national interests are. IGO autonomy represents a manner of benign neglect. Does the US really care if Bourkina Fasso receives a dam project? Probably not. And even if it did, one can easily imagine countervailing interests (environmental NGOs vs construction conglomerates) who might undermine the unitary actor assumption.

None of this is not to say that the GPs do not get what they want. Where they are in agreement and show the requisite interest in a topic, they get what they want. As Dave Hunter of CIEL said to me, “if the US really wants something out of the Bank or Fund, it usually gets it.” But there are power translation questions on the transmission belt from the overall distribution of power to IGO outputs.

Little actual work testing the empirics of GP control of IGOs

Does it happen and what are the mechanisms?

Do splits among the GPs create room for IGOs to act autonomously?

Do IGO have some autonomy because without it they would be deserted by others?

So there is a trade-off between control and efficacy?

The US gets a lot of what it wants (in large terms of values, and in small terms of preferred loans or programs) in exchange for a minimal amount of autonomy. Miller Adams says the Bank is a good investment for the US – costs us little and gets us a lot

Process Tracing the Actual Dynamics of GP control of the IOs

Who in the US Treasury, State Department, White House, Congress?

What connection do they have to the Board and management?

How far down into the institution does US flow?

Does it influence on macro-policies and lending picks, or does it influence staffing and staff practices?

“The intense interest of the United States in the IMF sometimes borders on a proprietary interest. More than any other member, the United States has viewed the IMF as an instrument of its foreign policy” (Leo Van Houten, “Governace of the IMF,” 2002, IMF pamphlet 53, p. 42)

The US is so important to the functioning of the BWI that external review of the IMF’s external relations strategy recommended specific liaison with the US Congress (2000 annual report 154) had a section specifically on outreach to the US Congress, and the Bank has had separate meeting with the Congress (and the Bundestag) as well, outside of its normal accountability channels (The World Bank: Its First Half Century, Vol.I, ch.7 & Vol.II, 653ff)

What is the transmission belt of US preferences into BWI policy and does it work?

Interview the US EDs at the Bank and Fund.

Find the number and positions of influence of US nationals in the BWI

Is there a correlation between the US percentage vote at Boards and its influence?

Does the US have more than 17.14% influence? Probably

Why can the US punch above its weight?

How do the Great Powers Control IGOs?

1. GDP-indexed voting

Both BWI have weighted voting which is maintained despite the formalities of sovereign equality through the leverage granted by their status as creditors to the poor. The choice for the developing world is between an IMF and MDBs mostly dominated by the GPs or no IFIs, at all, and NOT as NGOs would have them

think, between the current voting structure and a more democratic one

2. Thorough staffing of the Boards of, and missions to, IOs

See interview with Keith Kozloff and Leo Van Houten, “Governace of the IMF,” 2002, IMF pamphlet 53, p. 15. The GPs have the money and trained staff to fill out their national missions and offices at the IO, as well as build responsible offices within their own executive and legislative bureaucracies. There are offices and staff in the various responsible ministerial department, EBAs and legislative committees overseeing the actions of the IGO. Developing countries frequently cannot compete with this level of oversight. Hence the miss important information and are unable to participate meaningfully in decision-making.

3. Culture of IOs, especially IFIs

All of the major IFIs have their HQs in the North, are financed heavily by the North, are staffed disproportionately by Northern-nationals, are staffed disproportionately by Northern-educated professionals, and have internal codes of conduct that reflect Northern modes of professionalism and business conduct. The IMF feels like another organization in Washington, and is a part of the larger Washington ‘theater of politics’ – including external protests, media attention and close alignment with the Washington political calendar, especially the American budget cycle

Research Note

Thesis: The resurgence of American hegemonic pretensions threatens the GG project. It suggests a return to a strictly power-driven process informing bargaining outcomes. However the US will not wholly reject GG schemes for three reasons. 1. There are high costs to be carried by going it alone. Cooperation, even with NGOs, has real benefits to the US it will not be anxious to forego. 2. The US controls power domestically through process and law. It is proud of this achievement. This creates internal popular pressures for American power to wielded internationally through processes rather than naked or arbitraty displays of force which would be unacceptable in domestic politcs. 3. The US is pluralist. With a strong civil society tradition at home including its access direct to the public policy process, there would be high domestic reputation and ideology costs were we to seek to exclude civil society and NGOs from the international public policy process.

Why are these relevant?

Realism suggests to us that the distribution of military capabilities and economic capacity among states is the pre-eminent measure of power and ‘outcome-determination’ in world politics. By such a measure, we need not examine ‘global get-togethers’ like the UN mega-conferences or the smaller BWI meetings. The important decisions are made in the capitals of the state-system’s poles, and in unipolarity, there is only one capital that is truly relevant for shaping world political outcomes.

GG scholars respond to this critique in 2 ways.

1. GG theory understands the world political system more sociologically. World politics is a community exercise in administration and management. Few would dispute that states are the most relevant actor, however they move in a world of other actors as well as norms. There is a ‘constitutional architecture’ in which World politics is more communal than neorealism admits.

2. These many actors include IGOs, MNCs and GCS/NGOs. States are more powerful, by realism’s hard indicators on military and economic might. However GG suggests that hard power is not wholly efficacious for the outcomes states seek, and that power is more diffuse than states realize. States ability to win contests of national might are simply not relevant in most dealings in IR. It may be the ultima ratio in the high politics of security, but as Graham suggested in his models 2 and 3, much of most of world politics is low politics – bargaining, arranging, coordinating, sharing on mundane or highly technical issues. Issues such as the environment, trafficking (drugs, human, weapons), development, tracking terrorism and others are simply not amenable to national power traditionally conceived. In lieue of world conquest, even hegemons will come to the table anf bargain and deal with other states and other actors.

Global Governance

GG is the large web of rules and institutions that generate outcomes in world politics. It is the “constitutional architecture” (Reus-Smit) of the world political system and the beginnings of an international public policy process (Commission on Global Governance). Traditionally realists IR scholarship speak of global governance as the provision of a hegemon or k-group. Yet we have learned that much of what states seek to achieve is impossible or far more costly without cooperative global governance. To be more precise, global governance could be raw hegemony to the exclusion of other actors, enforced on the world by the unipole. But even in this era of unrivalled American national might, it hasn’t the power to govern by such diktat. In lieu of global conquest, GG is “complex multilateralism” (O’Brien, Goetz, Scholte and Williams) rather the unipolar fiat. We talk of GG rather than hegemony because the architecture includes more than the superpower and the great powers.

There is much that states cannot do for themselves. Many issues, such as trafficking, the environment or terrorism are not amenable to ‘hard power.’ They require cooperation. Power, the ability to achieve one’s desired outcomes, is diffuse in the world political system, not nearly as concentrated as realists would have us believe. Different actors have different capabilities. Even superpowers like the United States has use for NGOs (for information on human rights, treaty monitoring, or development aid delivery) and IGOs (for coordination and lower transaction costs) and private firms (for impartial credit ratings, e.g.) As Rosenau and many others have observed power cascades through the systems where there is social complexity. New centers of authority, specifically, authoritative knowledge arise. This is not the fall of the state, but the rise in the importance of other actors.

These points bear restating in an era of description of the United States as a colossus that bestrides the world (Economist). Despite the unrivalled might of the United States by the realist measures of military capability and economic capacity, unipolarity does not translate into omnipotence. Even the United States will pay attention to the smallest NGOs which have definitive knowledge in some area of interest. This understanding lies behind the continuing international architecture to which the United States belongs and whose conferences it attends.

1. The resurgence of hard power in international politics has once again proven the centrality of the state. Luck was right.

2. The traditional indices of power – military capability and economic capacity – were never irrelevant. Rather so concentrated in one state were they, that seemed to recess in ‘daily IR’ because almost everyone was bandwagoning or hedging. If everyone signs up for the hegemon’s project, unipolarity can be pleasant (Wohlforth, Stability). Because there was no balancing, in the 1990s the topical debates became did not concern national power. Other concerns like GG and NGOs arose, but only in the shadow of Unipolar power.

3. GG only arose because the unipole was liberal, plural and deomcratic. It is premised on liberal unipolarity. Had the SU won the Cold War, or were China to usurp hegeomic leadership, the cooperative, inclusive bargaining of GG would disappear. Because the hegemon is liberal, it would carry high domestic political costs and world reputational costs if it openly sought to exclude NGOs, MNCs and IOs from relevance. Yet illiberal states with no tradition of openness would hardly permit “complex multilateralism.” They would exploit their hard power advantages to leverage outcomes as they saw fit with little regard for non-state and weak state actors.

3a. There is a polict prescriptive element to the liberal hegemonic basis to GG. NGOs particularly should be more forgiving of the US. The only reason the unipole listens to it and forces some changes in the IFA, is because it is a liberal. If poor states think they are getting a bad deal under the US, imagine the other picks – China, Russia. Even liberal France should be expected to its unipolarity more exploitative than the US as it is an ex-imperial power.

4. However, global governance does try to include the role of the state in its ‘constitutional archiecture’ of world politics (Reus-Smit). “Complex multilateralism” does not debunk the state’s role, but rather seeks to accentuate the role of other actors. Hence the question is whether GG can survive in an environment when one of those actors is vastly more powerful than all the others (even combined). Luck has counseled IO elites not try to makes deals with NGOs around the backs of state decision-makers, because such a 2 vs 1 scheme will backfire due to power inequalities. The result will be state elites’ distrust of both NGOs and IOs and greater state supervision of IOs. (And this ultimately runs counter to NGO goals. NGOs endorse neoliberal institutionalism. They want autonomous IOs. They can be lobbied far more easily than greatpowers.)

Literature:

Peter Spiro, “The New Sovereigntists” Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 2000

Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “The Present Danger” The National Interest spring 2000

David Rivkin and Lee Casey, “The Rocky Shoals of International Law” The National Interest winter 2000

Jesse Helms, “American Sovereignty and the UN” The National Interest winter 2000

John Bolton, “Should We Take Global Governance Seriously?” Chicago Journal of International Law, Fall 2000

Kal Rustia, “Trends in Global Governance: Do They Threaten American Sovereignty?” hicago Journal of International Law fall 2000

Commentary January 2000 Symposium on American Power