Roles of International Organizations in International Politics

International organization generally plays three major roles in international politics: instrument, arena and actor.

Instrument: International organizations are generally being used as an instrument by its members for particular ends. This is particularly the case with intergovernmental organizations where sovereign states are members, because they have the power to constrain international organizations from acting independently (Archer, 2001: 68). The depiction of international organizations as instruments of its members is close to Realist and Neo-realist conception of international organizations, which puts forward that international organizations are not more than sum of its constituent parts, which are states. International organizations are not superior authorities over its member states, indeed they are just instruments used by member states for gaining their foreign policy objectives. As an example for this, the United Nations (UN) in its first eight years of existence was often used by the US for pursuing its foreign policy objectives thanks to favourable majority consisting of the West European, Old Commonwealth and Latin American states in the General Assembly (thirty-four out of the original fifty-one members), on a majority in the Security Council only attenuated by the Soviet veto, and a Secretary-General with clear pro-Western sympathies (Archer, 2001: 69). As the number of UN members expanded and varied, the US lost such a control over the UN. In the same way, NATO has been used by the US as an instrument of pursuing its foreign policy thanks to its overwhelming military and political clout in the organization. Member states’ delegation of limited powers to international organizations makes them ‘nothing else and nothing more than a set of mutual promises of coordinated and synchronized national policy action’.