The Making of the World E-Book

Yves Schemeil

• Herausgeber: Verlag Barbara Budrich
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 778

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

International Organizations (IOs) were designed to provide global public goods, among which security for all, trade for the richest, and development for the poorest. Their very existence is now a promise of success for the cooperative turn in international relations. Although the IO network was once created by established powers, rising states can hardly resist the massive production of norms that their governments can be reluctant to respect without being able to discard them. IOs are omnipresent, and exert great influence on the world as we know it. However, rulers and ruled are hardly aware of such compelling and snowballing processes. Yves Schemeil uses his in-depth knowledge of IOs to analyze their current impact on international relations, on world politics, and their potential of shaping the global future.

Leseprobe

Yves Schemeil

The Making of the World

How International Organizations Shape Our Future

Verlag Barbara BudrichOpladen • Berlin • Toronto 2023

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[5] Preface

In a single day every one of us depends on dozens of IOs without being aware of it. In our world today there is no such thing as free speech or an individual act. Countless norms frame what we can do or say in any particular circumstance. While ordinary citizens believe they can oust rulers from power at any time, they are unaware of the invisible hand that guides them all day long.

Waking up, then using electric plugs and appliances puts you under the umbrella of ISO, which sets technical standards; whatever you wear has been bought or given to you because the WTO multi-fibre agreements made it accessible to you; the WHO has authorized any medicine you must take with your tea, coffee or chocolate–all respecting commodity trading standards, some matching fair trade labels like Max Havelaar; your food and beverages comply with the hygiene and edibility requirements from organizations like the HACCP and the Codex Alimentarius–and, if you are poor in a low income country, food is provided to you by the WFP, the FAO, UNRWA, OXFAM or any other humanitarian agencies; the music you hear while having breakfast conforms to the WIPO copyright system; the weather forecast depends on data collected worldwide according to WMO standards, before being passed to its headquarters–even in time of war and by all combatant nations!

Then, click and you are on the Internet, a miracle you owe to ICANN and ITU; inserting “emojis” in short messages on your Smartphone depends on the UNICODE Consortium agreement about their design and meaning; publishing a paper in a Journal relies on a specific authentication and registration number called “DOI” (for “digital object identifier”), which is given to authors by an international Foundation through a standardization system, itself established by ISO; if you receive traditional mail you owe it to UPU; transport to the workplace or abroad is governed by a number of automotive, rail or aircraft industries, plus regulations that prohibit certain types of fuel and impose security measures. Even your insurance policy has oversight, here the International Association of Insurance Supervisors. Indeed, every imported item you need comes to you because its trade is permitted by the World Custom Organization and environmental NGOs like Forest Stewardship.

Your working hours are under the aegis of the ILO, which regulates legal contracts and conditions of life must be. Accounting must be consistent with the templates of International Accountancy Associations. When your boss hires foreign people, she must comply with rules enacted by the EU or other regional organizations. Labour conditions must also meet the norms of the [6] UNHCR, the IOM, and various NGOs concerned with human rights and integration of refugees or repatriation of irregular migrants. Additionally, a policy of affirmative action and at the very least a concern for gender balance and equal opportunities are covered by the EU or UN agencies. Whether these organizations are public, private or both, they all affect your employment, your career, your promotions, and even your life expectancy.

How did this happen in such a short span of time without anyone being aware? Why are our freedoms restricted year after year through the proliferation of new norms, themselves enacted by new IOs without evident response on a national political stage? The answer is: because States through Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs) or activists within Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) simply delegate power to the international organization of which they are members; because they tolerate its growing autonomy; because they accept its empowerment through networking, rather than shutting it down when its mandate becomes obsolete or its resolutions can no longer be enforced. When the environment of countries or parties becomes too complex to be faced alone, coalitions address wasteful overlaps or jurisdictional trespass and turn them into a productive division of labour.

This is the very argument of this book. It goes beyond most theories in use in the field of international studies–i.e., realist, neo-realist, institutional, liberal, and constructivist thoughts–or more fine-grained perspectives such as Rational Choice, Principal-Agent, Process-Tracing, Historical/International Sociology, “Practice turn”, etc. Forcing IOs within ready-made views of the world, however fashionable they may be, will not suffice to address them adequately. This is because we have no theory of international Organization as a process (in the singular, i.e. how interstate relations are permanently organizing) nor as a collection of existing sets of decision-makers (IOs in the plural). Were we to have successfully switched from “organizations” to “organizing”, then we would already have explained why this process is unintended and perhaps undesirable for most IOs leaders although they cannot stop or even slow it at will. Be they rational or emotional, nationalistic or cosmopolitan, performing or resilient, they all contribute to a deterministic process leading to an alleged better world, despite “proof” of the contrary–with the rise of risks and threats, failed states, civil wars, persistence of MAD, etc.

As a sort of control (or counterfactual) theory of this institutionalizing trend, I conclude with an assessment of our “inevitable” march through organizational inflation towards a world government (a hundred years from now?). Clumps of international institutions here and there will probably multiply, despite national sovereigns attempts to dissolve them. Will they reach a stage where the plasma is fully liquid–when the world has a unique and transparent set of transnational institutions?

[7] I aim to provide readers with one convincing and very simple way to explain the intensification of such an organizing process. This purpose is naturally conducive to examining the expansion and sometimes death of various IOs, as well as their collaboration and competition, as it is sometimes contemplated in International Studies. However, it will also enable us to revisit Management and Organization Studies, hence focusing on hybridization and networking rather than inferring a ready-made explanation from popular theories of international regimes and complexes of regimes. Concepts that are less familiar to political scientists, historians, and sociologists will be mobilized–such as transformational leadership, ambidexterity, multistakeholderism, etc. Notions usually associated with national public authorities–such as “publicness”, global ethics, and corporate responsibility–will be discussed.

Here now are a few comments about what the book does not address. It is not about interstate cooperation, and it only superficially discusses the balance-of-power between states and IOs. It does not signpost the democratization of the world due to the increasing power of the “international community” or a worldwide “civil society”. It is not focused on geopolitical issues although geopolitics informs the book here and there–so if one is searching for a solution to the Greater Middle East or China Sea quagmires, it is not there (although such topics are not truly absent). It must be read in dynamics. Most of its propositions might be more relevant in the future than in the present. There is an extended time lag between causes and effects. A long intermediate period is necessary to switch from the anarchical world of states to a normative system of organizations.

Last but not least the book does not place the United Nations bodies front and centre as is done in most books on IOs. There is a good reason for this. The UN is but the front (and weak) side of a tentative political organization of the world, which may be out-dated. I am in search of the less visible though fascinating trend towards social, economic, cultural, and cognitive transformation in which the specialized agencies of the UN play a prominent role, but no more than many other IOs. There are those that were created long before 1945 and joined the UN later (like the WMO on weather and climate, the WIPO on intellectual property, or ITU in telecommunications); and those that will never be part of it (NATO, the ICRC). It is perfectly possible that at least some components of the UN system matter less today than other universal organizations created outside it, such as the WTO for trade deregulation or ICANN in Internet governance.

This book could not have been achieved and even conceived without decades of collaboration with dear colleagues across the world. Among them, some became close friends: I took my inspiration from our conversations. Reading their works and discussing their arguments made me elaborate my personal explanatory model. Wolf-Dieter Eberwein, Bob Reinalda, Louis [8] Bélanger, Eric Brousseau, and Jérôme Sgard did much to help me find my own way in the labyrinth of an all too abundant scholarly literature. They also gave me opportunities to convene seminars with them and with other specialists in IOs in various touristic and less attractive venues, like the IPSA, ECPR, EGOS, ISA, WISC, national PSAs, and “Think 7” (pre G7) meetings.

Such versatility was made possible by welcome funding from the Institut Universitaire de France, the Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Grenoble Ecole de Management, and my home institution and its lab, PACTE. I also owes much to Jean-Christophe Graz, Pierre de Senarclens, Rafael Biermann, Martin Koch, Fulvio Attinà, Dawisson Lopez, and my dear colleagues at Sciences Po (Grenoble and Paris): the list is too long to name them all but one, Jean Leca, my faithful mentor who, with Jean-Claude Thoenig, Jean-Louis Quermonne, and Alain Lancelot, believed in my potential, even when I was but a beginner. I cannot leave out those more recent friends who also contributed to whole sections of the book without being aware of it (among whom Meryem Marzouki, Francesco Amoretti, Mauro Santaniello, Nicola Palladino, Dennis Redeker, and many others, all committed to Internet Governance).

Stimulating students whose master and doctoral theses I had the privilege to supervise or read in Aix-en-Provence, Grenoble, Geneva, Beirut and Tokyo (among whom Clara Egger, Xavier Guillaume, Rachel Polaud, and Hala Subra) did more than they could possibly imagine for my argumenttation. Likewise, tens of thousands of e-learners enrolled in my MOOCs on global studies and global politics on Future Learn and EdX/Federica: the chat on whose forums put a lot of pressure on me to carefully check even the most menial details and reply to contradictors.

Finally, Barbara Budrich convinced me that I had to publish this work–if only to take Barry Buzan’s suggestion seriously: at the end of a Stockholm meeting, while I was complaining about the difficulty to publish papers in which theory and data would cohabit within a limited number of pages, he said: “Well, you must definitely write a book!”). While I was reluctant to follow this advice (or simply procrastinating) Barbara put me on track. She remained remarkably flexible about deadlines throughout the process: I must warmly thank her for both part of this equation. Special thanks to Stephen Blanford (BA Jt. Hons.) for copy, linguistic and historical consultations, I learned a lot from him.

While the usual “demerits are mine, and merits are theirs” applies here as everywhere else, I shall now invite readers to go straight to the text with just this in mind: “if you find the book too abstract, tell me; if you judge it enlightening, tell potential readers”.

Yves Schemeil

[9] Table of Contents

Introduction

The Institutional Puzzle

Methodological Solutions

The Network Growth Model

The Spirit of the Book

Part 1. What IOs Are and What We Think We Know

1 The Conventional Wisdom, First Cut: The Classics

1.1 A Taste for Typologies

1.2 An Exclusive Focus on IOs/States Relations

1.3 To Sum Up

2 The Conventional Wisdom, Second Cut: The Mavericks

2.1 Rejuvenating Old Paradigms

2.2 Bringing in New Paradigms

2.3 Discovering Organizational Mechanics

2.4 To Sum Up

Part 2. IOs as Complex Organizations

3 Homogenization and Hegemonization

3.1 Diversity

3.2 Similarity

3.3 To Sum Up

4 Centralization and Decentralization

4.1 Headquarters Matter! On the Importance of Being Central

4.2 Bottom Up, Top Down, or What?

4.3 To Sum Up

[10] Part 3. A Predictive Model of IOs’ Behaviour

5 Explanatory Factors and Drivers of Change

5.1 External and Internal Change

5.2 Leadership, Management Styles, and Innovation

5.3 Organic and Cognitive Organizations

5.4 To Sum Up

6 The Trade-off Between Resilience and Performance

6.1 What Are the Relevant Indicators of Success?

6.2 Towards New Standards of Performance

6.3 To Sum Up

7 Genesis and Expansion

7.1 Genesis: How It All Started

7.2 Drivers of Expansion

7.3 To Sum Up

Part 4. From Competition to Cooperation

8 Too Big to Fail: From Expansion to Dissolution

8.1 Mandate Overlap

8.2 Survival Strategies

8.3 Death at the Crossroads

8.4 To Sum Up

9 Coordination, Collaboration, and Cooperation: How Different Really?

9.1 Partnership Models

9.2 All in the Family: The Rush Towards Coordination

9.3 Accommodating Strangers: Occasional Collaboration

9.4 Pooling Resources: Acceptance of Full Cooperation

9.5 To Sum Up

10 The Taming of the Shrew: Avoiding the Other

10.1 A Shakespearian Dilemma: To Coordinate or not to Be Coordinated?

10.2 The Great Fear: Side-lined, Shut Down, or Merged?

10.3 To Sum Up

[11] 11 From Clusters to Networks

11.1 How Clusters Give Birth to Complex Organized Systems

11.2 Meta-organizations and their Limits

11.3 From Meta-organizations to Networks

11.4 To Sum Up

12 The Nature of Organizational Networks

12.1 How Much “Publicness” in International Organizations?

12.2 Going Hybrid

12.3 Interorganizational Networks

12.4 To Sum Up

13 The Properties of Organizational Networks

13.1 From Transaction Costs to Coordination Costs

13.2 The Threshold Effect and the End of Politics

13.3 To Sum Up

Part 5. How Likely is any Institutionalization of the World?

14 A Changing Structure

14.1 A Pivot Towards the Global South

14.2 The Coining of Fair Norms

14.3 The End of Securitization

14.4 To Sum Up

15 Is Institutionalized Globalization Inevitable?

15.1 A Likely Future: Plurilateralism Rules the World

15.2 Unlikely Alternatives: New Despotism and New Medievalism

15.3 Likable Options: Constitutional Adaptation

15.4 To Sum Up

16 Towards a World Government

16.1 Is Hobbes’ Constant as Limiting as Light Speed?

16.2 Making Bull’s Dream Come True?

16.3 Is Wendt’s Recognition Process Working?

16.4 Neither Micro nor Macro: A Mesocosmic World

16.5 Wrap up: From Warfare to Welfare and Back

[12] 17 Conclusion. What We Have Achieved and What Remains to Be Done

17.1 Do Limitations Weaken the Explanatory Power of the Network Growth Model?

17.2 Do Success Stories Suffice to Explain International Organization and Organizations?

17.3 Beyond Research: Will this Book Be Helpful?

Afterword

Appendixes

Appendix 1: Primary sources

Appendix 2: Methodology

Appendix 3: List of interviews

Reference list

Subject Index

[13] Table of Graphs, Figures, Boxes and Tables

Graph 1.

The Network Growth Model: An IOs race to collaboration–a triptych

Graph 2.

Contradictory pressures on IOs and their respective achievements

Graph 3.

A dual decision-making process

Graph 4.

The WTO’s duplicate decision-making system

Graph 5.

The strategic organization

Graph 6.

An expansionist process

Graph 7.

A model of decision-making: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, or from insulation to fusion

Graph 8.

The management prism

Graph 8.

Potential harm stemming from collaboration

Graph 9.

Harm avoidance vs. benefits of collaboration

Graph 10.

The Internet governance system

Graph 11.

Decision-making norms

Graph 12.

Typical types of power-play in multilateral negotiations

Graph 13.

From norms to rules

Graph 14.

A summary of the relations found between interorganizational agents and structures

Figure 1.

Donors voluntary contributions to the UNHCR

Figure 2.

UNICEF collaboration in the health sector

Figure 3.

The migration network in the Mediterranean

Figure 4.

Publicness in various types of agencies

Figure 5.

NUKE–A non-hybrid/noncomplex interorganizational network

Figure 6.

HOSPITALITY–A complex hybrid network

Box 1.

Expert and political issues in Trade Facilitation Negotiations at the WTO

Box 2.

Goals of the joint UNODC-WHO programme

Box 3.

The UNODC collaborative Program

[14] 

Box 4.

The ICAO “cooperation and collaboration” system

Box 5.

Sharing toolkits

Table 1.

Sources of legitimacy of an international organization

Table 2.

List of Coalitions accepted at the 2019 IGF Forum in Berlin

Table 3.

Selected budgets of IOs in comparative perspective

Table 4.

Conditional funding within the IMO budget

Table 5.

Percentage of each member state assets and voting rights at the IMO

Table 6.

Standards of performance–old and new

[15] List of Acronyms

ABM

Anti Ballistics Missile Treaty

ACCTS

Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability

AIIB

Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

BIRPI

United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual property

BIS

Bank for International Settlements

CFE

Treaty on the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe

CIS

Commonwealth of Independent States

CSCE

Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe

CSD

Commission on Sustainable Development (UN)

CVF

Climate Vulnerable Forum

DG

Director General

EBRD

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development

ECHO

European Community Humanitarian Office

ECHR

European Court of Human Rights

EEC

Eurasian Economic Commission

EFTA

European Free trade Association

ESCWA

United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia

EU

European Union

FAO

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

GAC

Government Advisory Committee (ICANN)

GAELF

Global Alliance to Eliminate Lymphatic Filariasis

GAVI

The Vaccine Alliance

GONGO

Governmental Non Governmental organizations

HACCP

Hazard Critical Control Point–an FAO organization for the control of food hygiene

HELI

Health and Environment Linkage Initiative

IANA

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority

IAEA

International Atomic Energy Agency

IASC

Interagency Steering Committee (UN)

IATA

International Air Transport Association

ICANN

International Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers

ICAO

International Civil Aviation Organization

[16] 

ICC

International Criminal Court

ICJ

International Court of Justice

ICRC

International Committee of the Red Cross

IETF

Internet Engineering Task Force

IGF

Internet Governance Forum

IFC

International Finance Corporation

IGO

Intergovernmental Organization/International Governmental Organization

ILO

International Labour Organization

IMC

International Meteorological Committee

IMF

International Monetary Fund

IOM

International Organization for Migrations

IMO

International Maritime Organization

IMPACT

International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Task Force.

INCB

International Narcotics Control Board

INF

Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty

IoT

Internet of Things

IPCC

International Panel on Climate Change

IPPNW

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War

IPU

International Postal Union

IR

International Relations/International Studies

ISESCO

World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

ISO

International Organization for Standardization

ISOC

Internet Society

ITC

International Trade Center

ITLOS

International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea

ITO

International Trade Organization

ITU

International Telecommunications Union

LDC

Less Developed Countries

MAG

Multistakeholder Advisory Group

MDM

Médecins du Monde

MNF

Multinational Firms

MSF

Médecins Sans Frontières

MOST

Management of Social Transformations Programme (UNESCO)

NDB

New Development Bank

NGO

Non Governmental Organization

NSG

Nuclear Suppliers Group

OAS

Organization of American States

[17] 

OCHA

United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

OECD

Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

OIC

Organization of the Islamic Conference

OIE

World Organization for Animal Health (Organisation Internationale des Epizooties)

OPEC

Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries

OPCW

Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons

OSCE

Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe

PR

Permanent Representative

SAARC

South Asian Association for Regional Co-Operation

SADC

Southern African Development Community

SCO

Shanghai Cooperation Organization

SEATO

South East Asia Treaty Organization

SG

Secretary General

SIDH

Service International des Droits de l’Homme

SOLAS

Convention for the Safety of Life at Seas

TNC

Transnational Corporations

TRIPS

Trade-related Intellectual property Issues (WTO)

UfC

United for Consensus

UN

United Nations Organization

UN ECOSOC

United Nations Economic and Social Council

UNAIDS

United Nations Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS

UNCTAD

United Nations Conference on Trade an Development

UNDP

United Nations Development Programme

UNEP

United Nations Environment Programme

UNESCO

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

UNFCC

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

UNHCR

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

UNICEF

United Nations Children’s Fund

UNIDO

United Nations Industrial Development Organization

UNIFEM

United Nations Development Fund for Women

UNITAR

United Nations Institute for Training and Research

UNODC

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

UNPF

United Nations Fund Population Fund

UNSC

United Nations Security Council

UNSG

United Nations’ Secretary General

UN Women

United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women

[18] 

VOICE

Voluntary Organisations in Cooperation in Emergencies

WFP

World Food Programme

WHO

World Health Organization

WIPO

World Intellectual Property Organization

WMO

World Meteorological Organization (Weather, Water, Climate)

WSIS

World Summit on the Information Society

WTO

World Trade Organization

[19] Introduction

In moments of enthusiasm (1944–48 and 1989–1995) intergovernmental organizations have arisen by the tens and NGOs by the thousands. This raises high hopes about the birth of an international community and a global civil society. In nearly every realm of human activity IOs have imposed new standards, established new norms and enacted new rules. Paramount organizations such as the UN, the World Bank, and the EU have been increasingly active for decades. They have been joined by more contested institutions like the WTO or the International Criminal Court.

Since 2010 a reverse trend has seen some states switch from a cooperative game to a power play. Although few governments dare to openly challenge the global security system (as Northern Korea does), or the capitalist system (as Venezuela does) prominent members of the G 20–the club for the wealthiest countries–have recently abandoned their defensive strategy to opt for an offensive stance. By contrast, authoritarian leaders have abandoned isolationism and neutrality to go far beyond their hinterland. The transgressions of international rules by Putin’s Russia, Xi Jin Ping’s China, and Erdogan’s Turkey have replicas elsewhere in Europe, Asia, South America and the Middle East, where Saudi Arabia and Iran are at war by proxy.

None of this is new, however:1 the history of international institutions always follows the same process, with bifurcations. The first stage of the world system is a conflict between two or more states. Alliances are built to deter foes and avoid war. Belligerence is nonetheless triggered by “desperados” (so called in the early 20th century) or “rogue states” (as they have been known since the beginning of the 21st). Then, destruction is so terrible that governments pledge to prevent war happening ever again. At that stage, organizations are designed to provide global public goods (like security for all, trade for the richest, and development for the poorest). Finally, protest against their alleged partiality or an excess of secrecy favours the creation of countless NGOs of all sorts.

Such cycles have repeatedly occurred: during the 17th century (the treatises of Westphalia), in the early 19th century (the Congress of Vienna), after the two world conflicts (the Peace agreements, the League of Nations, then the UN), and following the end of the Cold War (the WTO, the OESC, the [20] OICW, the EBRD, and the ICC). Whatever the logic or the ethics behind verbal commitments to make Order lasting, entropy jeopardizes peace-making and redistributive institutions from the very first year of each successive phase.

Before announcing the end of the collaborative turn in international relations, it seems reasonable to invert the problem. Of course, mavericks contest the world system inherited from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries–the more so when they had played a major role in previous periods, like Russia and Turkey during the 17th and 18th centuries.

This is not the point, though; however hostile to a “Western” and “postcolonial” system they pretend to be transgressors cannot resist the pressure exercised by IOs through a mass production of norms. Some governments can be reluctant to comply but they are not free to discard them. Even proactive states that designed the system may try to pull out of a treaty they have drafted. Alternatively, they can block negotiation rounds. In the end, though, they will come back to the negotiating table when there are guarantees that the system will work more smoothly and fairly–a pledge that implies the creation of new institutional bodies. This is the story of trade deregulation, the upgrading of the GATT into the WTO, or the transformation of the European Common market into the EU.

The Institutional Puzzle

We are reaching a stage in history where the situation is neither new, nor more challenging than it was in the past. Of course, non-Western “big men” are bullying their peers to return to less regulated times when their troops could invade neighbouring territories and remain unpunished. What the strongest leaders cannot do is to claim openly that their hands are not tied by global norms and rules. They may criticize universal principles such as the responsibility to protect or gender mainstreaming but they cannot eradicate every embarrassing norm. They can mistake “human rights” for “Western rights”, hence refusing military intervention to rescue people under threat. This will nonetheless turn inconsistent when the victims of a potential genocide matter more to them than to other powers. At any rate, transgressors of international law must concede the validity of the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war, and civilians in wars. And even when they pretend counterfactually that they respect such Conventions, there will be occasions to support prisoners of conscience, or provide aid to refugees.

In democratic countries the room for manoeuvre of properly elected rulers is drastically limited by the myriads of commitments made by their predecessors, which would take decades to dismantle. Whatever their efforts and [21] notwithstanding the mass support of voters tempted by a “demarcation” from the non-national instead of an “integration” to the world market and to global institutions (Kriesi et al. 2008) neither Theresa May nor Donald Trump could easily withdraw from the tangled web of international agreements signed by their predecessors.

Turning to the people, most citizens in the past were conscious of the big gap between their own political skills and the sophistication of their representatives in parliament or ministers in government, not to mention judges in courts. This is no longer the case. With the increasing quantity of information available on social networks, blogs, and websites, citizens get the false impression that they could manage a country as efficiently as experts do. They are convinced that they have enough insight into how governments and administrations work. But, of course, they do not! Making political decisions is much more complex than what people could possibly imagine.

Citizens feel even more estranged from international organizations than from national administrations. Although in the eye of the public IOs share with national bureaucracies a number of negative characteristics (lack of transparency, lack of practical experience of everyday life, lack of sincerity and even lack of honesty) they are off the radar of most ordinary people who feel less concerned about their outcomes than a handful of activists may be. At best, the myriads of IOs of every status are mistaken for some deceptive UN-style agencies. Everyone is sure that the UN struggles gamely with peace-making, peacekeeping and post-conflicts reconstruction. They suspect that IOs are the seats of behind-closed-doors meetings, informal arrangements, and unknown workload. IOs do not have a better reputation than national governments.

This is misinformation. The records of IOs are beyond doubt more impressive than states achievements. IOs frame or govern literally every act undertaken or opinion expressed in the daily life of ordinary citizens. Norms and standards apply to any kind of connection (plugs, chords, pipes, computers, telephones, and cars, as well as the Internet and the many uses we can make of it within ascribed limits). They condition the possibility or impossibility to convene meetings, which will be attended by how many people, in which room, with some tolerance or no tolerance at all for the possible presence of lead, asbestos, toxic particles, and for which number of attendants who will sit on flame retardant furniture, in venues that can easily be reached by handicapped people. They also dictate the edibility of food products, their price range, their composition and their type (fair trade, organic, gluten-free, etc.). Moreover, they compel critics to express their views in a politically correct way and impose a ban on potentially harmful attitudes when sensitive issues like race, religion, obesity, genocide, and so on are at stake. Even the most intimate acts of human life are under scrutiny, since schoolboys and girls as well as the weakest members of a family are [22] protected against bullying, inappropriate behaviour, and violence. In the case of Ebola, the interdiction by the WHO to bury kin is very invasive for local populations whose health authorities are only there for compulsory vaccines and temporary quarantines.

In general, people are prepared to accept global rules not by choice but by lack of familiarity with the way IOs work and the context in which they operate. They may have enough civic literacy and even some command of the idiomatic language of politics and diplomacy but they remain illiterate when confronted by the glossary that has currency within IOs. This deficit starts with acronyms (except for the UN, the IMF and the WTO). It peaks with a lack of knowledge about legal status, organizational chart and operational activities. While a surprising percentage of citizens interviewed in a survey are able to list 4 or 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council (Schemeil et al. 2012), their awareness of what occurs elsewhere is very limited if not nil. Citizens who are very expressive in the public debate about refugees nonetheless continue to be unaware of the names and numbers of IOs operating in this field, their role and their achievements. Few people, if any, would be able to justify the intervention of the International Maritime Organization in the refugee crisis. They could not tell how the “IMO” differs from “IOM” (the International Organization for Migrations, itself deeply involved in the issue). Of course, contrasting the latter with the UN Higher Commissariat for Refugees (UNHCR) is beyond reach.

Transgressing states and protesting peoples know little about IOs. Such ignorance has severe consequences on the evolution of the world, while instead weakening a scientific field in which “international studies” actually “study” states rather than organizations. When they get scholars’ attention it is mostly as aides to States, or as ways to corroborate rational theories of IR (Glaser 2010). Few academics observe them from within, as organizational sociologists do (Ness & Brechin 1988; Reinalda et al. 2004). A handful of authors attribute them a propensity to build clusters overruling governments and citizens (Orsini, Morin & Young 2013). This book speaks of networks that could not be as easily disentangled as suggested by authoritarian leaders and authoritative authors. I try to fill the gap between sketchy political knowledge about IOs and their allegedly deep and real influence. I also help readers imagine just how much more intertwined the world could be when attention shifts from international organization in the plural to international organization in the singular (from static bodies of the past to a future-oriented process).2

[23] Methodological Solutions

Before going any further, a couple of comments about methodology must be made. Firstly, to give an objective account of the “real” world we need ontological assumptions. This is mine: procedure and substance are combined in any policy measure or act of speech. “Procedure” identifies decisionmaking designs, which open opportunities for agents to coin new norms and new rules. “Substance” is the final outcome of the organizational processes, targeting the common good. Even with benevolent intentions fierce opposition to the accumulation of power and the abuse of people’s rights is typically procedural. Even when scavengers keep the poor quiet redistributing wealth is a substantial goal. While obsession with the due process of law is one of the Greek city’s legacies, a focus on the substantive provision of goods can be traced to the Ancient Orient (Schemeil 2000) as if protection and provision were two sides of the same coin. Within IOs correct procedure is a prerequisite to fair substantial benefits that, in turn, justify that the rule be made properly and implemented by the book. Due respect for organizational processes seems rather formal. It nonetheless makes possible the coming of an international community acceptable to all.

Specific methods and techniques unfold from this ontological assumption. Outsiders like anthropologists or organization specialists need to be accredited before interviewing staff members. To understand what is concealed behind public statements we must access classified documents and be sufficiently aware of their meaning and context. Evidence can either be retrieved from IO websites or found through browsing IO libraries. It consists of minutes of proceedings, provisional drafts, non-tabled papers, and nonadopted drafts. Once scholars are admitted to the headquarters, they can observe behaviour and interpret statements.

To check with insiders (as “primary informers”) that our academic interpretation is close to reality, snowballing extends the list of people to be met. First contacts can introduce the interviewer to other officers who can in turn do the same. However, this strategy is mostly valuable if it is reproducible elsewhere: beyond the organization under review, investigators look for its social environment and the invisible network of international bodies to which it belongs. Such a process stimulates comparison. It facilitates causal inference until a predictive model can be designed from the expert’s field experience.

Testing the robustness of imaginary conjectures relies on foresight. We can predict that a weakened organization will make its comeback sooner or later in the great game of multilateral decision-making. In fact, there are a limited number of recipes for survival hence the solution eventually chosen by any staff rarely surprises scholars. However, two situations are prioritized [24] here: IOs whose very resilience is at stake and, at the opposite end of the scale, IOs that are so well established that few doubts can be raised about their future. Among the dozens of IOs directly or indirectly observed (either personally or through students’ teamwork and other scholars’ monographs), I have selected the most stringent cases to test my hypotheses.

In the first category (challenged IOs), the focus is mainly on the WTO, the IAEA, UNESCO, WMO, the WHO, IOM, and most Treaties Organizations. In the second group (self-sustaining IOs), major targets are the UNDP, UNEP, UNHCR, WIPO and ICANN. Note that NGOs (or quasi non-governmental organizations) are not the primary research target. This choice is deliberate, to avoid circularity since NGOs are embedded in organizational constellations rotating around IGOs. However some non-State actors are worth studying in depth, such as Amnesty, Oxfam, and VOICE, because they operate on a large scale worldwide with a variety of supports as well as resources accruing from their home government.

As will be discussed in the next chapter, causal inference will arise from a theory mix. Unfortunately, no theory could give me a satisficing explanation of the relationships I had empirically observed for years into dozens of organizations. Truly, agents face constraints and their deeds are framed by structures. This said, they always try to proceed rationally. If not, they must feel certain enough to overcome the many difficulties with which they are confronted daily. Since they are not fully constrained by the properties of the institution to which they belong they opt for the wisest decision at the time. To trace this stance to a sort of free agents’ rational choice would be excessive. To see it with deterministic and structuralist lenses would miss all the peculiarities of personalities, moments, and historical paths. As will soon become obvious, neo-institutionalism (which relies more on IOs than on States) and constructivism (which links agreements to meaning) lack the strategic nature of IOs decisions.

While opting for one direction at a crossroads can be deliberate, the aggregated outcome of such options can look undesirable to some stakeholders (governments above all). So, my theoretical apparatus relies on a limited rational choice model with uncertain outcomes. Prediction cannot tell which alternative will finally be chosen; it can nonetheless say what “cone of possibilities” is open to decision-makers: several trajectories could unfold from the next move, as in a chess game.

[25] The Network Growth Model

No theory actually predicts what kind of unit an institution will become in the future, how it will get there, within which global framework. Models of IOs trajectories are merely descriptive. Designed to reach a global explanation they eliminate some alternatives among others3. They often assume a rhetorical reasoning: IOs are administrations; administrations are bureaucratic; therefore, IOs are bureaucracies that supply the world population with new activities even when there is no demand for them (Barnett and Finnemore 2004). In a nutshell, IOs can invent new procedures but they cannot create smart solutions and transform the context in which they operate.

Admittedly, this explanation meets Karl Popper’s requisites for a scientific theory of the social world. Avoiding incorrect predictions is conditioned to a preliminary elimination of errors one by one to make the realm of the untrue shrink. But what we need is a predictive model able to forecast what IOs will inevitably do most of the time all other things being equal. The only unknown parameter is when, exactly, their final resolutions will be released?

This is a delicate matter: social scientists have not yet endorsed modelling (and the explanatory parsimony at the heart of it) as an epistemologically correct way to work. It is therefore unlikely that they consider predicting as and advancement of research into historical and cultural processes.

There is one last question to ask: is it wise to write a book on the future of a multilateral multi-stakeholders world when leaders of democratic countries withdraw from international organizations and multilateral negotiations? When the UK leaves the EU while the US leaves TPFTA though not NAFTA and denounces INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty) if not NATO, then something is rotten in the kingdom of Denmark (the world community).

Beyond the fact that such withdrawals may just be temporary suspensions of participation or attempts to reshuffle the international system without subverting it there are two more substantial answers to this question. To start with, military alliances have always been more flexible and less resilient than any other sort of international agreement. So, leaving one or shutting it down is not significant. The Americans dismantled SEATO, ANZUS and CENTO decades ago, while the Russians replaced the Warsaw Pact with the CIS. Hence, what happens in the field of security should not disregard predictions made in other sectors where global public goods must be provisioned. This [26] argument would not suffice per se to discard counterfactual observation. In reality, the best defence for the “network growth model” (NGM)–or the way I have designed it here–relies on the very theoretical principles on which it has been built.

At this preliminary stage of discussion before entering into details in chapters 12 and 13 let us say that the NGM comprises several bifurcations that each generate path dependency. The three folders of graph 1 symbolize the race to networking as a prelude to the progressive institutionalization of the world. Assuming that IOs result from conflict resolution (Ikenberry 2001), a return to the situation ex ante once the environment is stabilized would normally bring two outcomes: either closing them because the goals for which they had been created are achieved or reshuffling their mission in line with their explorative capabilities. The second alternative occurs more frequently than the first: confronted by a change in their environment compared to when they were established, most IOs enlarge their mandate. Therefore, they inevitably stray across the perimeter of activity of other organisations. They can either increase their specialization to remain resilient or they can expand their mandate to better perform within a coalition of neighbouring organizations.

Staying on track increases the risk of being shut down or merged, whereas ever-expanding helps to resist change through collaboration with other IOs. In both alternatives, overlap results from expansion. “Ambidextrous” leaders who exploit their comparative advantage over rivals and explore future activities altogether know how to make the best use of any maladjustment of means and goals. They convert negative slack (waste and excess capacity) into positive slack (time to imagine new products and services). Prone to learn quickly, they can transform the conditions under which decisions are made and the norms orienting policy measures. At some point, they will switch from risk aversion to risk-taking and stop controlling their boundaries to start establishing joint ventures with peer organizations, other non-national institutions and non-state actors. Engaging in collaborative behaviour they end up becoming parts of new sets of IOs, which eventually may lead to a new stage in world history–a dream of no more wars come true with the birth of a world government.

Graph 1 can be read table by table (a, then b, then c) or synoptically (much like the Japanese or Egyptian scrolls). It represents several itineraries resulting from successive turns at each crossroads. Branching off from the main road depends, first, on the state of the environment (is it stable or critical?); second, on the style of leadership (is it structural or transformative?); third, on the relations with other stakeholders inside (its membership) and outside (its partnership) the organization.

[27] Graph 1a and b. The Network Growth Model: An IOs race to collaboration–a triptych. Source: a) & b) adapted from Schemeil, 2013 a.

[28] Graph 1c. The Network Growth Model: An IOs race to collaboration–a triptych. Source: c) ©the author, 2019.

A simple glance at this graph leaves little doubt about the relevance of leadership style: while the FAO was long stuck in a quagmire the IAEA managed to resist hegemonic pressures and competition with ad hoc inspection bodies. The former was plagued by the pusillanimity of its reactive head and so remained isolationist for decades; the latter was fuelled by the proactive behaviour of its Director General who greatly emphasised collaboration with other IOs much beyond its field.

It is obvious that turning liabilities into assets eventually depends on the flexibility of workload assignment under stress. Confronted by unexpected challenges, positions become vulnerable. Reshuffling the chart reflects environmental turbulence. Administrations, corporations, and intergovernmental organizations do it their way: national bureaucracies can resist change forever or nearly so; private firms must instantly adjust, moving people to other positions, buildings, and cities, or laying them off. As for IOs they give agents whose jobs are threatened leeway to invent goals and frame new norms.

Enlarging a mandate is not without risk. Most IO heads either stick to the Constitution of their organization or merely pay lip service to it. Enhancement can be rewarding when expansion satisfies a significant proportion of members’ visions of the future of the organization. It may also be unavoidable: once similar activities have been pursued for a while by several IOs, division of labour becomes compelling whether or not it had been [29] planned at the outset. A good case in point is a refugee crisis, which involves several regional organizations (either European or Pan-American), domestic bureaucracies and NGOs, plus the IOM, the UNHCR, and many other IOs (more about that later).

Encounters with other staff, diplomats, advocates, lobbyists, and activists are subtly conducive to increasing collaboration. They also transform IOs, which become hybridized. Eventually, individual organizations will join a set of IOs called a “meta-organization” (the UN family, or within it, the Food group composed of FAO, WFP, Codex alimentarius, HACCP, the Joint FAO/IAEA program, etc.). This meta-organization can take different guises, such as an informal and temporary cluster, a simple or complex international regime, or a true network.

Eventually, a basic law of the transformation of discrete bodies into homogenous networks emerges from the heterogeneity of the field. Its explanatory variables are not “perform to overwhelm not to be shut down” but “learn to be resilient, adapt or perish, coalesce or collapse”.

The Spirit of the Book

Such keywords would probably suffice to make plain how and why this book differs from the excellent literature available after decades of ignorance. Let me nonetheless detail its added value.

Handbooks help to establish a new subfield and legitimate interdisciplinary investigation. In recent years, many have been published to which readers can refer for details as well as exhaustive reviews of contextual issues. Thanks to such achievements my current research can focus on specific questions without going in depth into syntheses. Exhaustive depictions of real cases would certainly give some flesh to the model to the detriment of parsimony. Since IOs and interorganizational cooperation specialists are members of an epistemic community worldwide they share the same background and have the same knowledge about the realm of our studies. Rather than completing the state of the art or reinforcing references to the same sources I offer a concise and topical discussion.

To succeed I need the cooperation of my readers. They are asked to fill the gaps in my presentation by digging into the encyclopaedic knowledge that has given visibility to this field and the community of scholars working herein.

Among the unavoidable sources of enlightenment about IOs and their mutual collaboration some are especially useful for their reliance on History or Organizational Studies. This is the case of Bob Reinalda’s Routledge History of International Organizations (2009), Routledge Handbook of [30] International organizations (2013) and Ashgate Companion to Non-State-Actors (2011). Rafael Biermann and Johan Koops’ Palgrave Handbook of Inter-Organizational Relations in World Politics (2017) and Dennis Dijkzeul and Dirk Salomons’ International Organizations Revisited (2022) offer extensive coverage to the cooperation issue. Bob Reinalda’s contribution to the field is also manifest in the three-volume series of collective works he edited with colleagues from 1998 (Autonomous Policy Making within International Organizations, with Bertjan Verbeek) to 2004 (Decision Making within International Organizations) and 2008 (International Organizations and Implementation: Enforcers, Managers, Authorities–with Jutta Joachim and Bertjan Verbeek).

The following content has been thought out along numbers of international meetings in which presentations were prepared for delivery without being systematically published after the meeting. Therefore, I cannot easily refer to them, although I may on occasion put readers on to papers if they have been at the root of my argument or when they are freely downloadable. Working papers that were eventually published (quoted from their public version) and my own work in progress are both excluded from the quotations.

The countless student essays and PHD work supervised for nearly two decades are not always cited in full, unfortunately, although they have consistently contributed to the making of this book.

[31] Part 1. What IOs Are and What We Think We Know

[33] 1 The Conventional Wisdom, First Cut: The Classics

International studies have been an academic discipline since the beginning of the 19th century. The subject has long been part of the legal field. Morgenthau himself defended his PHD thesis in International Law before writing his influential textbook in a department of political science. Paradoxically, accommodation by Faculties of Law helped to develop knowledge about IOs. Established by intergovernmental treatises, they had a constitution, staff members were hired or temporarily appointed according to specific regulations, activities were strictly framed by international agreements. After centuries of philosophical insistence on the right to war and the rights at war, expanding legal reflection towards organizations seemed an impressive breakthrough.

However, without sociology, anthropology, psychology, and public or business administration, building in new expertise in IOs soon proved unfeasible. Domestic politics has enough coverage in schools of government though the only focus of international specialists has long been the foreign policy of states. The nascent discipline had two main objects (IR factors and actors) and a single obsession (war or peace among nations).

An IO moment would come much later when each of these four issues was dispatched into two sets of problems. While factors combine context and conjuncture, actors may be states or non-states. While war can be just or unjust, cold or hot, cross-border or civil, peace is anything from low-intensity conflict to fair reconciliation. Above all, the first pair of concepts is now understood as associating two types of administrations (governments and organizations), which paves the way to public policy and Managerial Science specialists. The second means that discord replaces war, and collaboration is a substitute for peace.

In a nutshell, states prevent discord and IOs insure collaboration. Both types of unit evolve according to changes in their environment, which could draw them far away from each other. As logical as it may seem, this intellectual journey towards satisfying explanations has been very long and it is still unfinished. Along this path, scholars produce theory around principles that make classifications possible.

[34] 1.1 A Taste for Typologies

What is wrong with theories? Nothing! Except that they proliferate beyond reason in international studies. There are so many variants that instead of eliminating erroneous explanations of the empirical reality they sublimate them into opposed visions of the world.

What is wrong with theories of international organizations? Again, nothing but their puzzling rarity. Very few of them are actually adequate to scholarly needs.

To establish themselves as experts in the inter-national, authors must either replicate what their predecessors have already achieved, not only as a tribute to pioneers but also as a testimony of goodwill opening the doors of academia. Alternatively, they propose a new theory to seek recognition by peers working in the fields of natural and experimental sciences. It is no surprise that the progress of global knowledge is associated to theoretical rigor in the guise of long statements–compared to Morgenthau and Aron’s times (whose masterpieces had so concise titles: “Power in international relations” / “Peace and war among nations”). It is taken for granted that to be accredited in universities any nascent knowledge must be stuffed with abstract comments.

However, typologies are not theories. Obviously, when a new science emerges from a previous lack of specialization of knowledge–say, biology and zoology–typologies are useful. When adequate knowledge about the real world is lacking we can at least rely on categories instead of looking for propositions. The problem with taxonomies is their propensity to generate new cells and new columns to match a new reality (or new findings about reality). They are dichotomies of the “either/or” type. To work on longitudinal trajectories we must convert descriptive tables into explanatory models.

Experiences with classifications in IR are deceptive. They are not finegrained enough to fully catch the specificity of IOs. Consider the democratic / authoritarian regimes within the much debated “democratic peace theory”. Or, alternatively, the groups of states defined by the Correlates of War project, which put heterogeneous states into the same box (Lebanon / the Netherlands). Stranger still, we are confronted with states as “(great) powers” versus states that have no leverage over world politics (putting Japan and Nepal into the same cell), mistaken for proof that the “polarization” theory is valid. Moreover, some typologies are merely geographic, e.g. continental vs. maritime powers (Schroeder 1989) or Southern vs. Northern countries (Acharya and Buzan 2010). Others remain purely historical as in the succession of world hegemons from the Greeks facing Persia to the Romans confronting Carthage; from the Spanish carving up the Americas to the French conquering Europe; from the British despatching the Dutch from the [35] oceans before being themselves replaced by the United States at war against the former USSR now Russia (Modelski 1962).

Such taxonomic attitude flattens the complexity of the IOs world. Organizations are considered “governmental” and “non-governmental” if not “interstate and “non-state”. Trouble arises from the necessity to fine-tune these blunt oppositions: nongovernmental actors are distinguished from quasi-governmental ones (QUANGOs, among which, regulators of privatized utilities); national administrations that play a leading global role (the Fed, the FSB) are distinguished from a set of heterogeneous bodies like business and trade unions, market-based firms or BINGOs; transnational corporations, lobbies, Funds, and Banks are confronted to advocacy coalitions and epistemic communities. As for governments, putting China and “Hong Kong” into the same group (the first as a “state” and the second as a “Customs Territory” as in the WTO) is not insightful. Distinguishing between the UN-group and non-UN organizations seems at first glance less debatable. However, once differences in genesis are considered, we quickly find that neither the WMO nor the WIPO were born within the UN family. As for NGOs, their extreme variety challenges our imagination: no one could seriously expect to shoehorn Amnesty international and local humanitarians into the same box.

In a pseudo-scientific community in the offing, typologies are but proxies to theories. They proliferate with little rationale other than distinguishing some scholars from their peers. They also go much beyond the robust distinctions inherited from the Classics.

1.1.1 Seminal Sources

IR specialists had lived for centuries with a handful of books. Before Morgenthau and Aron their uncontested champion was Thucydides. Then legal experts, historians, and geographers came to the fore. Some were concerned with just war (war could be regulated, said Grotius). Others drew lessons from races to the bottom (war was as unavoidable as the fall of the Roman empire, quoting Gibbons). The latter group of scholars looked for natural links between states and their hinterlands (war was needed to strike a fair balance between countries, according to Ratzel). Such views were all about belligerence as if nothing else but bloody conflicts should deserve attention to study the interstice between sovereign states. Why could governments achieve an acceptable monopoly of legitimate violence at home without being able to replicate such success across borders? This enduring enigma had but a single cause for so long: national sovereignty.

In parallel with the emergence of such explanations outside political science (given this discipline did not exist as such before the second half of the twentieth century), domestic relations theories impacted analyses of [36] foreign affairs. It is nowadays fashionable to resurrect big names to provide answers–such as Hobbes and Kant who both have a theoretical explanation for the progressive disappearance of internal and external wars. Both constructed a theory of the delegation of force: the former, to a Leviathan; the latter, to a Federation of Republics. And both assigned this endgame to the unbearable aspect of permanent insecurity (in Hobbes: self-help is both risky and stressful; in Kant: the woes of war are so terrible and beyond any imaginable scale that nations eventually renounce to put a military end to conflicts). They play on a trade-off between security and sovereignty. For each gain in collective security people(s) must abandon an equivalent part of sovereignty. There is only one logical endgame: public (or international) institutions are created; individuals (or governments) now relieved from the permanent concern of protecting their own security interests transfer power to them.

The legacy of these classical giants is an equation: securitization = delegation to watchdogs + institutionalization to tame their hubris. This has been proven true domestically but is not yet a reality beyond state borders. IOs are second best; either to a Leviathan able to provide permanent security (inside) or to a Federation of Republics at the heart of perpetual peace (outside).

This unfinished journey from local stakeholders to global organizations has long been the mantra of IR handbooks and textbooks.

1.1.2 What the Textbooks (Do Not) Say

Many works on IOs assert that we are still in a phase of institution building. Much time will pass before we reach the shores of a pacified world, ruled by performing organizations that governments less and less control–if we are ever to overcome the doubts expressed by realists and neo-realists. Liberalinstitutionalists claim that we already live in a very organized world, IOs being clearinghouses for governmental feuds or stock exchanges where offers and demands are posted. Alternatively, IOs can be arenas in which “speech acts” become reality in the guise of norms (a conviction shared by supporters of constructivism, practice turn, and the English School).

Across paradigms one concept predominates. Information is systematically associated with international organizations because IOs allow their members to communicate on facts that would otherwise remain hidden. By contrast, there is only a minimum leeway conceded to states representatives in return for a better view of the goals pursued by other governments. This is the delegation/information trade-off: the more power is delegated, the more information circulates. However, scholars overlook the possibility to retrieve information without relying on membership. Staff members can collect data [37] that are inaccessible to national administrations–as does WHO agents do when predicting the next influenza virus and having vaccines ready long before the epidemics starts.

As a result of this partial blindness, classical scholars do little to explain how an IO can change. Note that Information Theory itself is little mobilized in this debate despite the insistence on information sharing as a target of intergovernmental policies. Psychological and cognitive approaches are little solicited, while Organization Theory remains ignored.

What is lost in translation here (meaning translation from a national to an international idiom) is absolutely essential to an analysis of IOs: creativity versus routine; transformative leadership of powerful states vs. weak leadership of powerless institutions; and politics versus administration.

Admittedly, psychological work does not just address personal freewill. When applying political psychology to IR attributing change to individuals is but one avenue of research. There are alternative paths towards a more exhaustive discussion of the role of personality traits, feelings and emotions. Some will nonetheless remain inconclusive because they are too far-fetched when they refer to trauma, paranoia and schizophrenia and when they assign Global organizations a responsibility to provide happiness in order to accumulate leadership and legitimacy (Beyer 2017: 129, 183).

Cognitive approaches show that learning can be procedural, as in groupthink. When choosing a policy, you stick to the group you suspect will make a wrong decision (Janis 1982). Routines prevail over change because they comfort people under pressure and forbid then to draw lessons from the past (Vertzberger 1990). This is particularly true with risk-averse people, whose dominant personality trait is conscientiousness or neuroticism instead of openness to experience, agreeableness and extraversion. Security seeking may take various guises, including procrastination–a tendency to postpone to tomorrow rather than make bold decisions.

1.2 An Exclusive Focus on IOs/States Relations

One research question haunts most textbooks: Why do States cooperate through IOs (Abbott & Snidal 2001)? The popular answer is that IOs are ancillary tools of governments, or “enabling structures” (Hall 2010: 217).

States establish them to make their ambitions visible to all; to tie their hands in public before starting to negotiate; to centralize policies and make them consistent; to handle them through a performing, neutral, and sufficiently independent administration (Abbott & Snidal 2001); to provide global public goods that no stakeholder could deliver singlehandedly.

[38]