Sovereignty and Globalization
This chapter starts with the distinction between sovereignty and globalization as a way of getting at the big picture of international governance. What is the place of international organizations (IOs) in world politics? International organizations, defined here as inclusive intergovernmental organizations, are a relatively new phenomenon in international relations. They first appeared on the scene a little more than a century ago, in a modern state system that had already been around for more than 200 years. Before the advent of inclusive IOs there had been military alliances, exclusive intergovernmental organizations, among sovereign states. Predating the state system altogether were important international non-state actors such as the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. But these actors were not intergovernmental—they were not created by states, but rather existed independently of them.
The first organizations created by treaties among states designed specifically to deal with problems that a number of states faced in common appeared in the nineteenth century. At first they were designed to address very specific issues of an economic and technical nature, such as creating clear rules for navigation on the Rhine River, delivering international mail, or managing the Pacific fur seal fishery in a sustainable manner.1 While these very focused organizations grew slowly in number, they were followed in the wake of World War I (1914–1918) by new organizations with broader remits. The best known of these organizations was the League of Nations, created to help its member nations to maintain international peace and security, and avoid a repeat of the horrors of the war. But other organizations with relatively broad mandates were created as well, such as the International Labour Organization (ILO), the charter of which allows the organization to deal with international labor issues, broadly defined.2
The ILO still exists, and still does roughly the same job envisioned by its creators. The League of Nations does not—it failed to prevent the World War II and failed to survive it. In the aftermath of the war, the League was replaced by an even more ambitious organization, the UN. A primary goal of the UN, as stated in its Charter,
is to deal with the same sorts of issues of international peace and security that the League was supposed to deal with.3 But the UN system brings under its umbrella a broad range of organizations that run the gamut of international issues.4 Since World War II, the number of IOs has proliferated, slowly at first, and more quickly in the past few decades. According to the Union of International Associations, the number of intergovernmental organizations crossed 1,000 in the early 1980s, andby the early twenty-first century, there were more than 5,000.5
Does this proliferation of IOs fundamentally change the way in which international politics works? International relations scholarship has traditionally regarded the sovereign state as the central institution in international politics. Recently, particularly in the past ten years, the concept of globalization has begun to appear in the international relations literature. A key implication of globalization is that the state is losing its autonomy as the central locus of decision-making in international relations. The debate between those who see the sovereign state as the key institution in world politics and those who see the process of globalization as displacing states is a
good place to start the discussion of the role of IOs in international relations.
Sovereignty
When we think about international relations, we think primarily about the system of sovereign states. There are two key parts to such a system, what we might call internal sovereignty and external sovereignty. Internal sovereignty refers to autonomy, the ability of the state to make and enforce its own rules domestically. External sovereignty refers to the recognition of the state by other states, the acceptance of the state by the international community.6 States do not necessarily have equal levels of both kinds of sovereignty. Taiwan, for example, has a level of internal sovereignty that is equivalent to that of many other industrialized countries. But it does not have full external sovereignty, and as a result cannot participate in many UN activities that lead to the creation of international rules. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, by contrast, has full external sovereignty, and can thus participate more fully in international activities. But it has limited internal sovereignty, because it has no control over what happens in much of its territory.7
The sovereign state system has not always been the central organizing feature of international relations. Empires, rather than sovereign states, wrote much of the political history of ancient civilizations, and the feudal era in Europe featured overlapping and territorially indistinct patterns of political authority. The genesis of the
current system of states has often been dated back to 1648, when the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War by diminishing the political role of many tiers of the feudal nobility. While this is a simplification of history, much of the system of sovereign states as we know it emerged in seventeenth-century Europe.8
One important feature of sovereignty, however, changed fundamentally in the nineteenth century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, princes were sovereign. From the perspective of the international community, a country was the property of its ruler, and representatives of the country represented the interests of the ruler, rather than of the population. Beginning in the nineteenth century, and even more so in the twentieth, citizens became sovereign. Rulers became representative of their populations, rather than the other way around.9 In the twentieth century, even dictators usually claimed to be ruling in the interests of the people, rather than for their own gain. This meant that although countries still warred with their neighbors to increase their territory, they also became more likely to cooperate with their neighbors to maximize the welfare of their citizens. This helps to explain the
genesis of intergovernmental cooperation through IOs in the nineteenth century.
Globalization
But is this cooperation, and the increased prevalence of IOs that results from it, undermining sovereignty? The most popular set of arguments that it is can be called the globalization approach.10 This approach begins with the observation that a set of transnational forces, ranging from mobile investment capital to global environmental
degradation, is limiting the ability of states to make independent policy decisions. There are two effects of these forces. The first is an increasing tendency to act multilaterally rather than unilaterally—in other words, to create and act through IOs.11 The other effect is to mold policy to fit the dictates of international economic forces.12 A combination of these effects can be seen in many issue-areas. In international trade issues, for example, many states participate in the World Trade Organization (WTO) for fear of being ignored by international investors and
transnational corporations (TNCs) if they do not.
Globalization can undermine both internal and external sovereignty. It can undermine internal sovereignty by diminishing state autonomy. The more practical decision-making power is transferred from governments to both IOs and nongovernmental actors, the less ability states have to meaningfully make policy decisions. This can affect some states more than others. The United States, for example, has much more input into the making and changing of WTO rules than, say, Singapore, even though Singapore, being much more of a trading nation than the United States, is affected more by the rules. Critics of globalization also hold it responsible for what is called a regulatory “race to the bottom,” in which governments compete to get rid of labor and environmental regulations in order to attract investment by internationally mobile capital.13 Countries can avoid this phenomenon, goes the argument, but only at great economic cost.
Globalization can undermine external sovereignty by loosening the monopoly of the sovereign state system on international political activity. This argument suggests that the more decision-making autonomy that IOs get, the more scope private actors such as NGOs have to participate in international policy-making, and the weaker the traditional state system becomes. Furthermore, the more that IOs are looked to as the arbiters of regulation internationally, the more TNCs may be able to avoid being subject to national regulations, further weakening the state system. Of those who see IOs as helping to undermine state autonomy, some see it as a good thing, others as a bad thing. Some human rights and environmental activists, for example, see internationalization as the only effective check on regulatory races to the bottom.14 Others see IOs as contributing to the problem by forcing on countries
international rules pertaining to issues such as trade, which are not sensitive to local conditions or problems.15
These sorts of arguments are not new. In the early days of the Cold War, proponents of world government saw it as the best way to avoid perhaps the ultimate transnational problem, large-scale nuclear war.16 Opponents of world government saw it as akin to losing the Cold War, as a means of selling out our values to a global lowest common denominator. The language of the debate has changed from world government to globalization, and the idea of a centralized world government has given way to one of a more diffuse form of global governance, but the basic issues being debated have not changed fundamentally. But are those who believe that globalization is undermining sovereignty right?
Realism, Internationalism, and Universalism
One organizational framework that might help us to address this question is provided by Hedley Bull in The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics.17 Bull speaks of three traditions of thought in understanding the problem of international order: the realist tradition, the internationalist tradition, and the universalist tradition. The realist tradition sees states in a situation of anarchy, with little to constrain them except the power of other states. The internationalist tradition sees international relations as taking place within a society of states: states are the primary actors, but they are bound by this society’s rules of behavior. The universalist tradition looks not to international politics, understood as politics among states, but to a global politics, which represents people directly as individuals rather than through states. Each of these three traditions takes a very different view of IOs, and each view can be instructive in helping us to understand the role of these organizations in international relations.
Realism looks to the role of IOs in international relations with some skepticism. For realists, the ultimate arbiter of outcomes in international relations is power. Outcomes can be expected to favor those with the most power, or those who bring their power to bear most effectively. And for realists, in the contemporary world,
states are the organizations with the most power. States control most of the planet’s military power, have an ability to tax that is not shared by any other institution, and are the issuers of the world’s currencies.18 International organizations share none of these features. Having no independent military capability, they depend on states to
enforce their rules. Having no ability to tax, they depend on states to fund them Having no territory, they depend on states to host them. As such, IOs can only really succeed when backed by powerful states. For realists, then, it makes little sense to focus attention on IOs, because IOs reflect the existing balance of power and the interests of powerful states. As such, it makes more sense to understand IOs as tools in the power struggles of states, than as independent actors or independent effects.19 \
The internationalist tradition has roots in the study of international law rather than in the study of power politics. It sees states in international society as somewhat analogous to people in domestic society. Domestic society works because most people follow most of its rules most of the time. Similarly, analysts of the internationalist tradition argue that most states follow most international law most of the time.20 At any given point in time, the argument goes, there are generally accepted rules about how states should relate to each other, and we cannot understand international politics without looking at those rules. Even during times of war, when we
would expect international society to be at its weakest, states usually follow certain rules of acceptable conduct. They do not necessarily do this out of altruism, in the same way that people in domestic society do not necessarily follow laws out of altruism. Rather, they recognize that they all benefit from a society that is rule-governed,
and are therefore willing to accept rules if those rules bind others as well. From this perspective, IOs become the expressions of the rules that govern international society. Whether or not IOs have an independent effect as actors in international relations depends on whether they create the rules, or simply oversee rules created by agreement among states. But in either case, IOs are important because they regulate relations among states. It is important to note here, though, that from this perspective, states are still seen as the primary actors in international relations.
The universalist tradition differs fundamentally from both the realist and internationalist traditions in that it is not state-centric. Whereas the internationalist tradition sees states as constrained by the norms of a society of states, the universalist tradition sees states as increasingly irrelevant in the face of a developing global society, a society of people rather than of states. This tradition shares with the internationalist tradition the presupposition that domestic society works as much because its population accepts its rules as because the state enforces them. The difference is that the internationalist tradition applies this by analogy to states, whereas the universalist tradition applies it to people globally.21 The greater the extent to which global civil society comes to be governed by a set of rules and behavioral norms shared across different peoples and cultures, the greater the extent to which it is this civil society, rather than the society of states, that guides global politics. In this tradition, IOs are more important as expressions of, and creators of, global civil society than they are as regulators of relations among states.22 Accordingly, IOs should be studied as partial replacements for states rather than as mediators among states.
Approaching the sovereignty/globalization debate from the perspective of these three traditions, we get three different answers to what is happening. The pure realist answer to the question of the future of sovereignty is that the sovereign state system is continuing much the same as always. States remain the locus of power in the international system. Therefore, external sovereignty can be expected to remain as strong as ever, because states, the organizations with the power, have an interest in keeping it that way. In this view, states’ degree of internal sovereignty is also not changing. Larger states are not losing autonomy to IOs, because those same large
states are creating the rules of those organizations. Smaller, weaker states, it is true, do lack autonomy in the face of some IOs, but these states were always subject to a similar degree to the preferences of the larger, more powerful states.23
The pure universalist answer to the question of the future of sovereignty is that globalization is undermining it. The greater the extent to which IOs make rules that reflect global civil society, the less autonomy states have to make rules domestically that are incongruent with international norms. By the same logic, globalization also undermines external sovereignty, as IOs, NGOs, and other representatives of global civil society begin to replace states as the legitimate representatives of the global citizenry.24
The internationalist answer to the future of sovereignty in the face of globalization depends on whether one is asking about internal or external sovereignty. The internationalist tradition agrees with the universalist that globalization is eroding internal sovereignty, the autonomy of states to make rules domestically as they see fit. As international society, as represented by IOs, becomes stronger, states are increasingly bound to make rules collectively rather than individually. For example, as states participate increasingly in international trade, they gain a greater stake in trade rules that everyone shares, because trade would be hurt by the absence of such rules. This leaves states with less autonomy to make rules that conflict with those embodied in IOs. At the same time, however, the internationalist tradition agrees with the realist that the sovereign state system remains strong in the face of globalization. Rules are being made by states collectively rather than individually, but they are still being made by states.
This increasing tendency of states to make rules collectively is often labeled multilateralism and is the basis of a school of analysis located within the internationalist tradition. Unilateralism refers to a state acting alone, bilateralism to two states acting together. Multilateralism refers to a system in which it is expected that states
will act as a group, through negotiation and IOs. The multilateralist school of analysis argues that multilateralism has, in the past half century or so, become the expected way of doing business internationally.25 States, multilateralists argue, still sometimes act alone, but this has become the exception rather than the rule. As
such, multilateralism is a concept that will reappear regularly throughout this book.
Multilateralism can be seen as a form of globalization. In fact, antiglobalization protestors often point to multilateral organizations, such as the WTO and the IMF, as undermining national autonomy, the ability of countries to make trade and monetary policy to suit local conditions.26 In other words, antiglobalization protestors are often opposed to some of the ways in which multilateralism undermines internal sovereignty. But it is also possible to argue that the state system as a whole, and with it external sovereignty, is actually made stronger when IOs are responsible for international decision-making. Multilateralism, and internationalist logic more generally, sees states, as opposed to other political actors or other potential representatives of global civil society, as the key decision-makers and policy-makers in global politics. To the extent that only states have votes in IOs and that only states
participate in multilateral decision-making, multilateralism reinforces the role of the state. In other words, rather than undermining sovereignty, the multilateralist system is creating a new kind of sovereignty.
A good example of the tension between the internationalist and the universalist impulses in the creation of IOs can be found in the European Union (EU). The EU is an IO whose members share a common market for international trade and common legislation on a wide variety of issues ranging from social policy to environmental
policy. The EU also has its own legal institutions and is developing its own foreign policy and military capability. This makes the EU the most wide-ranging and comprehensive IO. It has twenty-five members from throughout Europe, including ten countries from central and eastern Europe and the Mediterranean that became members in May of 2004.
There are three central bodies that participate in making EU policy and legislation. The first is the European Commission, which is a bureaucracy made up of commissioners who come from all the member countries, but who are meant to represent the EU rather than the country that appointed them. The second is the European Parliament, which is made up of members directly elected by the populations of the member countries. Conversely, the third body, the Council of Ministers, is made up of national politicians whose job is to represent their countries in making EU policy. The Commission and the Parliament can be seen as exercises in universalism. They are pan-European bodies that are supposed to both represent and develop a pan-European political consciousness. The Council, on the other hand, is more straightforwardly internationalist. It is an intergovernmental body in which participants representing individual countries act in the name of member governments to promote the national interest of those countries. The evolution of the EU, and its current politics, reflects this institutional compromise between a universalist EU and an internationalist EU. Either way, members of the EU have given up broad swathes of their decision-making autonomy—they are committed to enact regulations decided upon at the EU level. But individual states remain much more important actors in the Council, where they are directly involved in decision-making, than they are in the Commission and Parliament, where they are not.27
Globalization and Democracy
There are two ways to look at the realist, internationalist, and universalist traditions. One way is as descriptions of what is actually happening in the world of IOs. Each tradition allows us to look at an institution from a different perspective and thereby learn different things about it. Looking, for example, at the WTO, an internationalist lens allows us to observe the ways in which states are cooperating for their collective benefit. A realist lens allows us to observe the ways in which the more powerful states can achieve rules closer to their interests than to the interests of weaker states. A universalist lens allows us to observe the ways in which the WTO as an organization, and the idea of a rules-based trade system as a norm, are replacing states as the locus of real decision-making in issues of international trade. The balance among these three perspectives may well differ from organization to organization. Some IOs, for example, might offer greater scope for power politics than others, and some might engage in more universalist, rather than intergovernmental, decision-making than others. But we can address this balance empirically, by studying individual IOs and what they do. This balance will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.
The other way to look at the three traditions is normatively. Looked at this way, each tradition describes not the way in which IOs do work, but the way in which they should work. Realists believe that the state should represent the interests of its citizens rather than pursue a global common good. Universalists often see direct
global governance, rather than a competitive state system, as an ultimate goal. And to internationalists, a society of states regulated by IOs combines the best of both the realist and the universalist traditions.
Whether or not any one of these traditions provides a more accurate description of contemporary international politics than the other two is open to empirical argument But these traditions can also be used normatively, as sources of moral arguments about what international politics should look like. One illustrative line of moral argumentation concerns the relationship between IOs and democracy. The effects of IOs on democratic governance are important parts of both the anti- and proglobalization arguments, and a different perspective on these effects is offered by each of the three traditions. None of these perspectives is inherently more or less
right than the others, and all provide perspectives worth considering.
Realism
There is a tendency to see the realist tradition as amoral, as simply a practical acceptance of the reality of power politics. But there is a democratic argument to be made for retaining state autonomy in matters of decision-making. Allowing nationstates to make their own rules allows different cultures to govern themselves as they see fit. Autonomy also fosters competition among states for better governance. (World government, its critics might argue, is no more than a lowest common denominator, and encounters little pressure to improve.)28 Under the heading of
the realist tradition here could be included nationalists, both cultural and economic, who feel that the role of the state is to represent the interests of its citizens and of its culture. If the state defers to a global good while other states pursue their own interests, then the state, and its citizens, lose.
There are three key empirical arguments against this realist perspective on the morality and democratic legitimacy of power politics. The first is that because of power disparities among states, only the interests of those who happen to live in powerful states determine international outcomes. Realism thus looks very different from the perspective of the United States than it does from the perspective of the Central African Republic. The second is that as the issues facing states are increasingly global in nature, global rather than national solutions are needed. Attempts to deal with issues such as climate change, air traffic control, or the international financial architecture through purely national policy are futile. The third argument against the realist perspective that state decision-making autonomy is preferable to collective decision-making is that competition among states can do much more harm than good. Competition can lead to stable balances of power, and it can lead to policy innovation. But it can also lead to hostility and war, in a way that multilateral or universalist cooperation are unlikely to.29
Internationalism
The moral claim made in this context by proponents of an internationalist perspective is that a multilateralist state system is more democratic than a competitive state system. Because multilateralism is a process in which all concerned states can participate, both the more powerful ones and the weaker ones, it allows all peoples
to be represented in the making of international rules. In IOs such as the UN General Assembly (GA), this equal representation is formalized by a one-country, one-vote system. To the extent that the trend internationally is for more states to become democratic, the link between representative government at the domestic level and representative government at the international level is even stronger. International organizations then become representative bodies of states, which are themselves representative bodies of citizens. As is the case with domestic legislatures, decisions are made by elected representatives of the people
This internationalist perspective is itself, however, open to criticism. Where internationalists see democratic representation, some critics see decision-making behind closed doors by an international elite. Others see the process of negotiation leading up to the creation of IOs and the modification of their rules as an exercise in the finding of lowest common denominators that often please no one. Universalists see negotiations among states as favoring existing national elites, and as freezing out the institutions of international civil society, such as NGOs. Antiglobalization protestors at meetings of the WTO or of the international financial institutions (IFIs, primarily the IMF and World Bank) indeed attack these multilateral negotiating forums from both perspectives; economic nationalists argue that these IOs need tighter rules or no rules, while universalists demand more direct participation for NGOs that represent human rights or environmental issues.
Universalism
Universalists argue that it is only through the direct representation of global civil society that international relations can become more democratic. As such, any effort to improve direct representation by separating IOs from direct control by member states is a positive development. At present, the two most common ways of ensuring
that this happens are increasing the autonomy of IOs and increasing NGO participation in them.
But both independent IO decision-making and NGO participation can also be criticized as antidemocratic. Nongovernmental organizations may well be expressions of global civil society, but they are not elected, and they represent the interests of their members, not of the population at large. Critics of NGO participation in IOs also point out that NGO membership is disproportionately biased toward middle-class, white citizens of Western states. In this sense, NGOs can be criticized as being neocolonial, as a mechanism for reintroducing rule by the West over the
South through nonmilitary means.30 Independent IO decision-making can similarly be criticized as being neocolonial, because the secretariats of IOs tend to be made up of “professionals,” people trained in Western techniques for managing their issue-areas.31 Even if they are acting from the best of intentions, they may
focus on what they think they should do rather than what the population at large wants them to do.
Conclusion
Most of this book looks at IOs at the micro level, at the workings of particular IOs and their effects within their issue-areas. This chapter, focusing on the sovereignty/ globalization distinction, looks at the macro level, at the effects of IOs in general, and individual IOs in particular, on patterns of global governance in general. Of the four distinctions discussed in the introduction, that between sovereignty and globalization is the only one that focuses broadly on the effects of IOs on governance patterns, rather than on governance outcomes within particular issueareas. This broad focus provides both an opportunity and a potential pitfall. The pitfall is getting stuck at the general level. This can be seen in some discussions about globalization: arguments that globalization is good or bad miss the complexity of the issue. The distinction between sovereignty and globalization is nonetheless both a good starting point for discussions of IOs, and something worth keeping in mind when looking at IOs at the micro level. In particular, it is worth asking, as one looks at the effectiveness of an IO in dealing with a particular issue-area, does this present a good model of the way the world should be governed
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