International Politics and International Organizations

Clive Archer (2001: 33) defined international organization as “a formal, continuous structure established by agreement between members
(governmental and/or nongovernmental) from two or more sovereign states with the aim of pursuing the common interest of the membership”.

LeRoy Bennett and James K. Oliver (2002: 2) identified common and constitutive characteristics of International Organizations as:
• A permanent organization to carry on a continuing set of functions;
• Voluntary membership of eligible parties;
• A basic instrument (a founding document or charter) stating goals, structure and methods of operation;
• A broadly representative consultative conference organ;
• A permanent secretariat to carry on continuous administrative, research and information functions

In terms of finance, there should be a substantial contribution to the budget from at least three states and there should be no attempt to make profits for distribution to members

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

International organizations provide arenas or forums where members to come together to discuss, argue, co-operate or disagree (Archer, 2001: 73). International organizations provide their members with the opportunity of advancing their own viewpoints and suggestions in a more open and public forum than that is provided by bilateral diplomacy (Archer, 2001: 74).

There are nine major functions that all international organizations carry out: interest articulation and aggregation, normative, recruitment, socialization, rule making, rule application, rule adjudication, information, operations.

International organizations can have an important function in the recruitment of participants in the international political system. Since intergovernmental organizations consist almost exclusively of representatives of sovereign states, it gives a further incentive for non-selfgoverning territories to achieve their independence. This provides an opportunity for them to represent their own interests in a range of intergovernmental organizations

• The rules are formulated by unanimous ornear-unanimous consensus of members
• Members have the practical option of leaving an organization and ending their assent to the existing rules
• Even within the bounds of membership, a state can assert the right to interpret unilaterally the rules to which it has consented.
• The ‘executive-bureaucratic’ structure of the organization has little or no power to formulate (and implement) rules.
• Delegates to the organizations’ rulemaking bodies are instructed by their governments and do not act as independent representatives.
• The international organization ‘has no direct relationship with private citizens of the member states’ (Archer, 2001: 103).

International organizations carry out a significant function in the field of collecting, processing, analyzing and disseminating information. For instance, the UN and its associated agencies including World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), etc. have produced a forum for governments – the marketplace where they can issue and receive information and act as providers of information, as attested by the vast amount of printed material they produce, particularly statistical data

International Organizations can be classified under three main categories defined by sovereignty, membership and aims.

• the existence of a number of states functioning as independent political units;
• the existence of a substantial measure of contact between these states;
• an awareness of problems that arise from states’ co-existence;
• state’s recognition of ‘the need for creation of institutional devices and systematic methods for regulating their relations with each other’ (Archer, 2001: 4).

The objectives of the Hague conferences were to set a limit on progressive increase in arms, and to discuss the prevention of arm conflict through the peaceful means of settlement at the disposal of modern diplomacy such as arbitration and mediation (Reinalda, 2009: 65)

The second Hague Conference was convened from 15 June to 18 October 1907 with twohundred-fifty-six delegates from forty-four states as a result of the US President Theodore Roosevelt’s initiative to continue the discussions of 1899

International Telegraph Union (ITU) was established by an international agreement signed by twenty states gathered at a conference in Paris with the aim to develop uniform rules for the worldwide use of the telegraph.

The General Postal Union (GPU) was another public international union, which was established to deal with the problems to which international postal traffic faced owing to the existence of different tariffs, national and local postal systems
which were not geared to each other, and the lack of frequency of delivery

Traditional approaches include Realism and Liberalism. They have a state-centric approach to the analysis of international organizations. For them, states are
both principal actors of international system and also rational actors making cost-benefit analysis of every alternative and select the ones that maximize their benefits

Revisionist approaches, including Functionalism, Neo-functionalism and Transactionalism go beyond the state-centric approach and examine international organizations as significant actors beside states. These are mostly
known as international integration theories.

Liberals claim that international organizations play a significant role in international politics. Although liberals do not deny the concerns about relative gains (because they also accept assumptions about state egoism), they claim
that states may be more concerned about making absolute gains (improvement in a state’s position in absolute terms).

The most prominent representative of transactionalist approach to international integration was Karl Deutsch. Deutsch defined international integration as being
about the achievement of security within a region or among a group of states

Neofunctionalism emerged in order to explain newly emerging European
integration process in the 1950s. The most important figures of Neofunctionalism are Ernst Haas and Leon Lindberg