Do International Organizations matter?

Why or why not?

International Organizations (IOs) are formal institutional structures transcending national
boundaries which are created by multilateral agreement among nation-states. Their purpose
is to foster international cooperation in areas such as: security, law, economic, social
matters and diplomacy. (Graham & Newham , 1998, p. 270). IOs are subdivided between
Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs) and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs);
Intergovernmental Organizations are entities created with sufficient organizational structure
and autonomy to provide formal, ongoing, multilateral processes of decision making
between states, along with the capacity to execute the collective of their member (states)
(Diehl & Frederking, 2010, p. 15). NGOs are non-state voluntary organizations formed by
individuals to achieve a common purpose, often oriented beyond themselves or to the
public good (Karns & Mingst , 2010, p. 221). The development and expansion of these large
representative bodies date back to the end of the World War II, where there was a need for
world reconstruction through International Relations. Since then, there has been an
incremental rise of organizations that work on different socio-political and economic aspects
with various and specific aims in approaching states, societies, groups and individuals.
Based on these key definitions, this essay will thus attempt to explain how important are IOs
and the extent to which they have an impact on global politics and international relations
through an analysis of two main IR scholar theories namely Realism and Liberalism.
Moreover, to understand the impact of IOs, these theories will be explored and analysed
through contexts of different and conflicting realist and liberalists thinkers upon their view on
these institutional structures. It will also distinguish and compare the two theories and
determine which is more relevant to the contemporary world international relations. Finally,
the ultimate the goal of this essay is to support the view of liberalism, as the main
concluding arguments rest upon the idea that global governance requires a set of different
actors across that shape together the process of decision-making in international relations.
Realism is an IR theory based a pessimistic view of human nature. Its central feature lies
within the relative power of the state and as there is no world government to impose order
and stability, states engage in self-help to ensure their basic survival interests notably
(security , power capability and survival). Because of the absence of a world government,
the world structure is anarchic and anarchy heightens the stakes of interaction so that
competing interest have the potential to escalate into military interactions. The state is the
national arbiter who judges its foreign policies. As much emphasis is put on the power
capabilities of the state in the international system, realists pay little attention in regards to
IOs as they play little influence in global governance. States would never cede to
international institutions and IOs and similar institutions are of little interest; they merely
reflect national interests and power and do not constrain powerful states (Diehl &
Frederking, 2010). One example is the United States hegemony and the use of IOs as
means for expansion of power, pursue their self-interest and guarantee security. For
example, realists would argue that most of the IGOs that serve as a backbone for
contemporary international cooperation can be traced to American hegemony in the
immediate aftermath of WW2. The United States promoted the creation of the UN as an
umbrella organization for treaty-based cooperation in a variety of global concerns and issue
areas. It also oversaw the creation of the International Monetary (IMF), the World Bank, and
the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) with the express goal of encouraging
cooperative economic exchange and also as instruments designed for continuing utility of
U.S policies (Weiss & Wilkinson , 2014, p. 295). Even the Soviet Union used Mutual
Economic assistance to organize economic relations within the eastern bloc. Powerful
states structure organizations to further their own interests but must do so in a way that it
induces weaker states to participate (Diehl & Frederking, 2010, p. 33).
Liberalism is a post-war framework for world politics based on the construction of a global,
legal and political system which go beyond the state and afford the protection to all human
subjects. (Jackson & Sorensen, 2007). The theory is mainly subdivided by two strands;
firstly, interdependence liberalism which studies modernization as ways of increasing the
level of interdependence of states; and secondly, institutional liberalism which studies
international institutions as mechanisms of promoting cooperation between states. The
theory mainly bases its assumptions upon positive human progress and modernization in
which they together will eventually lead to cooperation. Modernization is the process of
involving progress in most areas in life as well as the development of a modern state. This
process enlarges the scope of cooperation across international boundaries. Due to
modernization, cooperation based on mutual interests will prevail that is because
modernization increases the level and scope of transnational relations where transactions
costs are lower and levels of higher interdependence are high. Under complex
interdependence, transnational actors are increasingly important, military force is a less
useful instrument and welfare, (not security) is becoming a primary goal and concern of
states (Jackson & Sorensen, 2007, p. 107). Therefore when there is a high degree of
interdependence, states will often set up international institutions to deal with common
problems and maximize welfare. These institutions are designed to promote cooperation
across international boundaries by providing information and lowering costs. Institutions can
be formal organizations such WTO (World Trade Organization) and EU (European Union),
or they can be less formal sets of agreements such as the so-called regimes. For liberals,
international cooperation and progress are the central features that drive states, IOs and
non-state actors. These different institutions are responsible for managing transnational
problems in a peaceful, human and legal way.
It is also important to emphasize the structural change in international relations during post-
Cold War period that have empowered new types of actors and opened new opportunities
for them to act. Such changes also include: globalization and privatization/deregulation.
Globalization has undermined the correspondence between social action and he territory
enclosed by states border. Ideas about human rights have become platforms for social
connections between people across the globe. The Thatcher and Reagan-led privatization
and deregulation in the 1980s revolution has compounded this change in relations between
states and social power; States transferred public enterprises and state functions to private
actors and increasingly encouraged private actors to finance policies such as education,
municipal services and even security, which has been part on the pivotal role of many
corporation social responsibility (CSR) programmes (Avant , et al., 2010, p. 5). Global
change also owes much to the end of the cold war, where a variety of political, economic
and security realms, activists and organizations began to push for change. With the triumph
of the United States and the liberal model, privatization and deregulation ideas emboldened
many organizations to drop the cold-war style of bipolarity of states and push for liberal
capitalist change that embodied presence of a variety of actors (Avant , et al., 2010, p. 6).
Indeed great proliferation of non-state actors such as NGOs has happened since the 1980s
with more than 4,000 International Non-government Organizations (INGOs) and has
increased until current years to nearly 8,000 INGOs and several millions national and
indigenous NGOs (Karns & Mingst , 2010, p. 230).
The role of these NGOs is explained by a varied number of functions and roles they exert.
NGOs can seek the best venues to present issues and to apply pressure. They can provide
new ideas and draft texts for multilateral treaties; they can monitor human rights and
environmental norms; participate in global conferences and raise issues, submit position
papers and lobby for viewpoint; and ultimately they can perform functions of governance in
absence of state authority (Karns & Mingst , 2010, p. 235). Large numbers of NGOs are
involved in humanitarian relief, from large international NGOs to small, locally based
groups. The Red Cross, Doctors without borders, the International Rescue Committee and
Oxfam are among hundreds of international humanitarian relief organizations involved in
complex emergencies such as the conflicts in Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Congo and Liberia,
the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur and natural disasters such as Hurricane Mitch in
Central America (Karns & Mingst , 2010, p. 224). Participation by NGOs has also
increasingly been involved within UN summit and global conferences. NGOs are
increasingly viewed by those in the UN system as partners or stakeholders in multitasker
coalitions. This is evident in the Global compact on corporate social responsibility, which
aims to bring multinationals and NGOs into partnership with the UN. Likewise, the
Millennium Development Goals propose partnerships for development, calling for all actors
including NGOs to cooperate in achieving those goals. In 2002, around 3,200 NGOs were
represented at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Also UN
specialized agencies work in conjunction with NGOs. Most UN agencies with field
programmes and offices, now contract with NGOs to provide services and decision-making
in areas of Humanitarian relief and economic development. For example, many services
including food, medicine are chased by the UNHCR and WFP and delivered to the local
population by CARE, Doctors without Borders or Oxfam. Whether an NGO is focused on
human rights, peace, disarmament, indigenous peoples’ rights, labour rights, climate
change, or tropical forests, it is clear that they have become an important actor in world
politics as they often to seek to change the policies and behavior of both governments and
IGOs.
Disagreement between realism and liberalism as well as other IR theories is not over the
existence of institutions or the fact that they are found where cooperation is high but rather
on the claim that whether they are more than statecraft instruments and have an
independent impact (Weiss & Wilkinson , 2014, p. 7). As realists would conceive it, IOs offer
little change to the perpetual power struggle as they cannot change the human nature
desire for power nor can they change the nature of the anarchical system. On the other
hand, liberalists cannot imagine a contemporary world where governments act solo.
Cooperation has made states very interdependent and has also opened new paths for new
actors that are willing to work more efficiently together. IR is not only a study of relations
between international governments. Overlapping interdependent relations between people
and voluntary organizations are bound to be more cooperative than relations between
states because states are exclusive and their interests do not overlap and cross-cut
(Jackson & Sorensen, 2007, p. 102). Liberals also emphasize that states interest have
changed throughout history. Whereas before it was a matter of security and power, today
more primacy has been given towards economic development and trade. Throughout
history states have sought power by means of military force and territorial expansion. But
for highly industrialized countries economic development and foreign trade are more
adequate and less costly means of achieving prominence and prosperity; that is because
the costs of using force have increased and the benefits have declined. (Jackson &
Sorensen, 2007, p. 102).
Realists though maintain that the state is the ultimate authority, they are the ones to sign
interstate treaties, create international law, and promulgate wide-ranging rules to initiate,
regulate, and govern activity desired. States are by no means alone in this endeavor. They
explanation on powerful states using IGOs as means to achieve their ends can be
implemented on UN permanent members of the security council which is formed by the
most powerful states, that have larger power than other UN member states. Also, there has
been many situations where IGOs have failed to constrain powerful states from acting in a
certain way, for example, during the cold war, the security council was much ineffective in
solving large differences between the U.S and the Soviet Union, more recently Russia’s
occupation of Crimea in which no IGO (including the UN) prevented such act from
happening. In regards to NGOs, realists explain that they hardly appear as viable
international actors. They pose no threat to state sovereignty. While state and non-sate
actors may have differentiated responsibilities, ultimately authority rests with the state and
that is the essence of sovereignty. The role of states remains central to global governance,
no matter how much political authority is decentralized and power diffused to the
burgeoning non-state actors (Karns & Mingst , 2010, p. 253).
Liberals on the other hand acknowledge that powerful states will not easily be completely
constrained. However, institutional liberals do not agree with the realist view that
international institutions are a mere scrape of paper, that they are completely mercy of
powerful states. International institutions are more than mere handmaidens of strong states
(Diehl & Frederking, 2010, p. 32). Liberals argue that there is credibility and functionality
within IOs in influencing international relations and that they attempt to critic realists idea of
IOs as mere instruments led by powerful states but rather they are led universally by
different member states and other actors. For example, when the United States decided to
reverse the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, it did not act unilaterally as it turned to the United
Nations Security Council. Similarly, when the International Community sought to maintain
the suspension of combat in Bosnia, it did not rely on national efforts, it sent in
peacekeeping units under the aegis of the UN and NATO (Diehl & Frederking, 2010, p. 27).
In regards to non-state actors, such as NGOs, liberals argue that in few cases NGOs can
take the place of states, either performing services that an inept or corrupt government is
not doing, or stepping in for a failed state. For example, Bangladesh hosts the largest NGO
sector in the world (more than 20,000) responding to what Bangladeshi describe as ‘the
failure of government to provide public goods and look after the poor, and the failure of the
private sector to provide enough employment opportunities (draws on Waldman 2003)
NGOs have taken on roles in education, health, agriculture, and microcredit, all of which
originally were government functions (Waldman, 2003 cited in Karns & Mingst, 2010, p.
224). Liberals argue that realism fails to read contemporary international order correctly. A
priori privileges the states, misses the importance of non-state actors, fails to recognize the
social construction of IR because of its rationalist assumptions and its fatalistic tendencies
counsel conservative foreign policies that reinforce power politics and hence its own
explanations for world affairs (Weiss & Wilkinson , 2014, p. 102).
To conclude, it is imperative that one acknowledges Global governance in assessing who
exercises power in decision-making. Based on the arguments on this essay, one would
mostly agree that no government/state can govern/act alone. The growing authority of a
wide variety of agents/actors can also add potential partners to states and distributing
different tasks to different actors. By working collectively, one can certainly argue that
multilateralism often requires a network of cooperation that leads to interdependence
between different actors whether they are states, IOs or non-state actors, thus after all ‘It is
impossible to imagine a contemporary international life without formal organizations.’
(Schermers and Blokker, 1995 cited in Diehl & Frederking, 2010, p. 28).

Bibliography
Avant , D., Finnemore , M. & Sell , S. eds., 2010. Who governs the Globe? . In: Who
governs the Globe? . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-31.
Diehl, P. & Frederking, B., 2010. The Politics of Global Governance: international
Organizations in an Independent World. 4th ed. Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Graham , E. & Newham , J., 1998. Dictionary of International Relations. 1st ed. London:
Penguin Books.
Jackson , R. & Sorensen, G., 2007. Introduction to International Relations: Theories and
Approaches. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press .
Karns, M. & Mingst , K., 2010. International Organizations: The Politics and Processes of
Global Governance. 2nd ed. Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Weiss , T. & Wilkinson , R., 2014. International Organization and Global Governance. 2014
ed. Oxford : Routledge.

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International organizations (IOs) are essential and controversial actors in world politics today. They
work on just about every imaginable issue that states cannot easily address individually.

The Role of International Organisations in

World Politics
It is widely believed that international organizations should be responsible for the
maintenance of international peace and stability, be this economic, social or political,
and that they should act in the interest of the international community. According to
critics of these institutions, there should be greater transparency, regulation and control
within these organizations so that they reflect more than just the interest of the powerful
States.
http://www.e-ir.info/2012/02/07/the-role-of-international-organisations-
in-world-politics/

Do International Organizations Matter On

The World Stage?
In the era of globalization, International Organizations (IOs) is crucial and influential to the
world. By the network development and rapid information transmission, the importance and
influence of IOs grow rapidly, so do their social power in world politics. Moreover, there is
lack of discussion over IOs in International Relations (IRs), as the main actor of IRs is
"state". IOs were interpreted to facilitating cooperation to solve the problem for state, such
as market failure, and strengthen the state power ultimately. This article "The Politics,
Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations" by Martha Finnemore and Michael
Barnett (1999) in the International Organization ( 53:4) raise the discussion of IOs by
applying both the economistic and sociological theoretical approaches, see bureaucracy as
generic cultural form shape IO behavior, which advance our understanding about IOs
behavior, and why IOs exercise power autonomously in the ways that is unintended and
unanticipated by state and how IOs influence world politics.
Barnett and Finnemore (1999) suggested IOs are purposive actors instead of simply pursue
state policies. Moreover, did IO really matters to the state? In the following, I will take United
Nations (UN) as an example to further elaborate. UN is found in 1945 after WWII by 51
countries and 192 state members now. The fundamental aim of UN is maintaining world
peace and security, promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights
throughout the world. The founding Charter vested its power and the Charter enables UN to
take action on a wide range of issues, such as worldpeace keeping, legitimately. While US
is UN's largest contributor, us contributes 22% of UN regular budget and 27% of the UN
peacekeeping costs, which is more than US$2 billion in 2010.

In today's complex and complicated world, state cannot defeat the global issues on its own,
UN act as an important platform to sustain international cooperation, such as organizing UN
Climate Change Conference to address environmental issues. UN also set the standard of
global norms, such as affirmed the access to clean water and sanitation as essential human
rights; and response to world disaster, such as Pakistan flooding and Haiti earthquake.
Moreover, does the UN matter when it comes to its fundamental principal, maintaining world
peace and security?

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world-stage-politics-essay.php
While their existence in the international system is relatively new, the presence of these IOs have shaped
the way that international relations between different actors are carried out. International Organizations,
while often a vessel of state actions, have also themselves become actors. International organizations are
organizations, comprised of states, in order to pursue some sort of common purpose or objective. Often,
these organizations set the rules for behavior and activity among state and non-state actors in the
international system.

Why do they exist?

International Organizations

Some international agreements create international organizations,which are

institutions that set rules for nations and provide venues for diplomacy. There
are two types of international organizations: international governmental
organizations (IGOs) and international nongovernmental
organizations (INGOs or, more commonly, NGOs). In recent
years, multinational corporations(MNCs) have also had a significant impact
on the international system.

IGOs and NGOs exist for a variety of reasons, such as controlling the
proliferation of conventional and nuclear weapons, supervising trade,
maintaining military alliances, ending world hunger, and fostering the spread
of democracy and peace.

http://www.sparknotes.com/us-government-and-politics/political-
science/international-politics/section4.rhtml