Reaction Paper on “Rules For The World: International Organizations in Global Politics. Kerlens Tilus 01/27/2014 Governance is defined as the regulation and management of collective problems (Roland Paris). In the aim to regulate and manage global collective problems, states have put in place international organizations which are defined as “organizations that have representatives from three or more states supporting a permanent secretariat to perform ongoing tasks related to a common purpose” (Barnett, Finnemore 2004). The international organizations don’t only focus on global issues, they work extensively on “domestic governance issues, overseeing matters that once used to be the prerogatives of states” (Barnett, Finnemore p.2). Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore observed that IOs can act as “good servants, but can always produce undesirable and self-defeating outcomes”. In their book, “Rules for the world: International Organizations in Global Politics” they proposed to develop a theoretical framework to understand better the behavior of IOs as they argue that international relations scholars failed to explain IOs’ behavior with their theories of states and state behavior. In fact, the international relations scholars considered IOs as tools that carried out states actions. Barnett and Finnemore admitted that this view is just part of the story, but it cannot account fully for certain behaviors of IOs as propensity toward dysfunctional and pathological behavior, and the way they change overtime. They developped a constructivist approach to understanding IOs behavior with a theoretical framework based on the fact that IOs are bureaucracies which are collections of rules that define social tasks and establish a division of labor to accomplish them. They provided an empirical examination of three major international organizations (IMF, UNHCR, UN) which intervene in three different areas of world politics. By treating IOs as bureaucracies, they considered four aspects which shape bureaucracies and triggered debates among scholars international organizations: autonomy, power, dysfunction and change. They concluded that IOs have authority because of the missions they pursue and the ways they pursue them. They distinguished three broad categories of authority that support the IOs in their existence: delegation, morality and expertise. According to them, IOs can use their knowledge to exercise power in two ways. First, they can regulate the social world, altering state behaviors and non-state actors by changing their incentives for their decisions. Second, IOs power can be better understood by viewing them as bureaucracies which are often “designed to satisfy political rather than performance criteria and are, in this sense, designed to fail” (p.8). If international relations scholars didn’t think IOs had a certain degree of autonomy, Barnett and Finnemore argued that they exert autonomy in three ways. First, they can act independently while their actions are consistent with states interests, interpreting mandates and implementing policies in ways that are perhaps unanticipated but are agreeable to states. Second, IOs operate in areas in which states are different or don’t get involved, and lastly IOs have complicated relationships of both autonomy and dependence with a variety of other actors, including states. In sum, the authority assumed either by delegation, morality and expertise gives international organizations autonomy that allows them to evolve and broaden their scope in ways unintended by their mandates and states that created them. Barnett and Finnemore presented in the first chapter how world politics is bureaucratized. International organizations came up with complex structures to tackle problems that affect world politics. They proposed a breakdown of the book and help the reader get a clear preview of the arguments that they made in the five subsequent chapters. This way of presenting the arguments in the first chapter helps the reader to grasp the main ideas and make the reading very smooth. In the second chapter, they laid the foundation of the theoretical approach by defining first bureaucracies, presenting the bureaucratic culture that “guides action but does not determine it” (p.19). In this section of the book, we get the clear idea about the way IOs organizations contribute to global governance in the sense that “the rules and routines of a bureaucracy shape bureaucrats’ view of the world, define their social tasks, shape their interests, and orient them in similar ways toward the world”(p.19). The authors explained how autonomy leads to authority, how the power of IOs “produced by the authority that constitutes them” (p.29). One of the main contributions of the book is the description of the pathologies of international organizations. The international scholars failed to explain the failure of international organizations, but Barnett and Finnemore showed that “bureaucracy’s emphasis on rules, specialization and compartmentalization can combine to create pathologies in a variety of ways” (p.39). They presented five mechanisms that they explained clearly: irrationality of rationalization, bureaucratic universalism, normalization of deviance, insulation and cultural contestation. We come to understand how pathologies are inherent to bureaucracies whom have to be taken into account in the way IOs exert their mission and power, succeed and fail, expand and trigger change overtime. The last part of chapter two accounts for change in international organizations. The authors considered some explanations for organizational change developed by institutional and organizational theorists. They presented the internal and the external factors, and cultural and material variables. International organizations are not merely the expression of powerful states, but they account for change through a complexity of relationships with the environment, bureaucratic culture, “states and non-states actors that look for international organizations to fulfill certain functions and purposes” (p.44). The authors used empirical evidence in three different chapters to support their main arguments in the theoretical framework. Chapter three which is titled “Expertise and Power at the International Monetary Fund” shows clearly how the IMF uses his expertise to exert authority, enjoy autonomy while pursuing financial stability. This case is very brief and concise. It starts by presenting the mission, structure and autonomy of the IMF. It shows how the creation of the Polak Model gives the IMF extensive power to intervene in national economies while preserving its legitimacy. The authors showed also how the IMF was being able to further its expertise to bring correction to existent policies that didn’t alleviate poverty and conditions of the people in third world countries. Subsequently, Barnett and Finnemore presented the organizational dysfunction affecting the IMF which tends to carry out the interests of rich member states at the detriment of poor nations. The authors criticized the IMF failure to foster sound and sustainable economies with a posed tone. They praised the expertise of IMF while showing how the expression of autonomy, authority an even expertise can foster chaos. The critical view of the authors is well-balanced even though they questioned the ability of the IMF to be efficient, and expected more accountability. The tone rises in chapter four where the authors “examined the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the way it used its moral authority to expand the category of refugee and its scope of action, and explore the emergence of a repatriation culture and rules governing repatriation that led to the violation of refugee right, that is, pathological behavior” (p. 13). We judge that the chapter could have been reduced to few pages as the point made by the authors is very clear. We feel that they make too many repetitions which impede on the clarity of fact and make the ready heavier. Barnett and Finnemore are very critical of the UNHCR. They started the chapter by showing how UNHCR built expertise in its early years to shape establish its authority and exert power. They showed how the environment (world conflicts) helped it gain authority, how it “shifts toward repatriation partly the result of state pressures” (p.94). The handling of the Rohingyas case is clear evidence of pathological behavior of the institution. In chapter five, the authors use empirical evidence to show how the dysfunctional United Nations bureaucracy failed to prevent the genocide in Rwanda. The authors used empirical evidence to make a powerful case against the Security Council. They used carefully the theoretical framework in chapter two to show that how strict respect of rules can be pathological and how preserving interests of states can trigger failure as well. Rwanda was a failure and the United Nations failed to exert its moral authority to prevent the genocide. Even though we can clearly see that the authors are not amicable with the UN, but they didn’t bash the organization as well. Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore were very clear about their goal; they wanted to provide a framework to analyze International Organizations as “semi-independent actors”. Their main contribution to our understanding of governance is their argument about how “IOs have significant autonomy and derive their power from a number of sources beyond the limited leeway and resources delegated to them by member-states” (Paul F. Diehl, 2004). They constructed a new tool to grasp and understand the behavior of International organizations as autonomous actors. This theoretical framework helps “explain the power they exercise in world politics, their propensity towards dysfunctional, even pathological behavior, and the way they change overtime by grounding their analysis on the fact that IOs are bureaucracies.”(Barnett, Finnemore 2004). Since the introduction of the book, the authors made it clear that they were challenging the explanation of international relations scholars about the behavior of IOs that they considered as tools used by powerful states to safeguard their interests and carry their actions. One of the issues that we could bring that the author addressed, but we feel needed to be discussed furthermore is the way states and powerful actors coerce international organizations to carry out their actions, and a statement on their perspective in a constructivist approach to account for change in world politics. We think that the authors brought a great tool to understand and analyze IOs behavior; they used very well empirical evidence to support their main arguments. They used a poised tone to critic the legitimacy and expanding the global bureaucracy which carries liberal values by the means of questionable democratic procedures. Kerlens Tilus
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 15:06:25 +0000
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