International Organizations and the Foundations of Global Governance

International Organizations and the Foundations of Global Governance

THE ANTECEDENTS FOR CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS and global governance lie in early efforts by political communities to establish norms and rules for interacting with their neighbors. The Greek city-states sought to establish permanent protective alliances to address conflict issues and follow established rules. The Hanseatic League, twelve hundreds to fourteen hundreds, was formed to facilitate trade and the interaction among a group of Northern European cities on the Baltic and North Seas. Similarly, the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, the Papal States, and the city-states of Florence, Venice, and Milan established a system for regularizing diplomacy and commercial interaction in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Many of these early practices persisted as the contemporary state system evolved, providing some foundation for the later development of more institutionalized forms of governance.

The State System and Its Weaknesses: The Process of International Organization

International relations scholars date the contemporary state system from sixteen forty-eight, when the Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War. Although most of the more than one hundred articles of the treaty dealt with allocating the spoils of war, other provisions proved groundbreaking. Articles sixty-four, sixty-five, and sixty-seven established several key principles of a new state system: territorial sovereignty; the right of the state, prince or ruler, to choose its religion and determine its own domestic policies; and the prohibition of interference from supranational authorities like the Catholic Church or Holy Roman Empire. The treaty marked the end of rule by religious authority in Europe and the emergence of secular states. With secular authority came the principle of the territorial integrity of states that were legally equal and sovereign participants in the international system.

Sovereignty was and remains the core concept in this state system. As French philosopher Jean Bodin, fifteen thirty to fifteen ninety-six, put it, sovereignty is “the distinguishing mark of the sovereign that he cannot in any way be subject to the commands of another, for it is he who makes law for the subject, abrogates law already made, and amends obsolete law.” Although there is no supreme arbiter among states, Bodin acknowledged that sovereignty may be limited by divine law or natural law, by the type of regime, or even by promises to the people.

During this period, Hugo Grotius, the early Dutch legal scholar discussed in Chapter two, rejected the concept that states have complete freedom to do whatever they wish. Thus, even in the seventeenth century, the meaning of state sovereignty was contested. More recently, Stephen Krasner has argued: "The actual content of sovereignty, the scope of authority that states can exercise, has always been contested. The basic organizing principle of sovereignty-exclusive control over territory-has been persistently challenged by the creation of new institutional forms that better meet specific national needs." Although breaches of sovereignty occur continuously through treaties, contracts, coercion, and imposition, Krasner asserts that there is no alternative conception of international system organization. Other scholars, such as James Rosenau see states as vulnerable to demands from below-decentralizing tendencies, including domestic constituencies and nonstate actors-and from above, including globalization processes and international organizations. They have to contend with a variety of new actors and processes that confound and constrain them, limiting authority and challenging the notion of state sovereignty, and hence the state system based on that principle. Noting shifting interpretations of sovereignty in the nineteen nineties, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated in his nineteen ninety-nine annual address to the UN General Assembly, "State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined by the forces of globalization and international cooperation." Kalevi Holsti, however, has pointed out, that "state capacity in the contemporary world varies greatly from the very weak to the very strong. But that does not make them less or more sovereign."

One significant indicator of the continuing importance of sovereignty is the importance that states attach to borders not just as "jurisdictional divisions," according to Beth Simmons, but as "institutions of governance." She notes how much more important border security and states' physical presence at borders have become in many parts of the world; how much more of the world's population now lives near border crossings; and how much borders matter with regard to legal and illicit movement of goods, people, terrorists, and traffickers. In short, Simmons argues, "Governing borders has become a complex matter," one for which there is limited public international law and increasingly dense state practice.