Course Module 17: The United States and International Organizations

What are institutions? What is the difference between institutions and organizations? What are some examples of institutions in domestic and international politics?

-        Institutions: rules of the game that shape how states interact, formal rules like in treaties and unstated norms that are widely understood (human devised constraints that structure incentives & interaction)

o   Domestic: don’t speed, don’t steal, win majority electoral votes to become president

o   International: sovereignty, chemical weapons taboo

-        Organizations: formal intergovt bodies that possess agency (capability to make decisions & issue directives)

Understand, explain, and give examples of how international institutions shape international politics through the following mechanisms: a) guiding behavior and shaping expectations; b) providing information about state interests and incentives to comply; c) allocating and generating power for states.

-        Guiding behavior/shaping expectations:

o   Tell states what they can/cannot do

o   Provide clues to what international community defines as appropriate/inappropriate

o   Designed to minimize conflict

-        Provide info about state interests & incentives to comply

o   Info of how states might act

o   How to define appropriate/inappropriate behavior

o   Monitoring compliance

-        Allocating & generating power for states

o   States that lead institutions have agenda setting power

o   Membership boots legitimacy in credibility/stability of a state

o   Resource access to states that need to rebuild/stabilize economies

How does U.S. membership in international organizations like the UN, NATO, and WTO demonstrate the ability of international institutions to solve a fundamental problem of international politics – to create and preserve coercive power and, at the same time, constrain that same power?

-        Real tension: might need to gain legitimacy for policy, secure additional support to implement but…

-        Requires some surrender of sovereignty or authority of elected officials in US to set country’s policies

-        Trump has “America First” mentality, prioritizing US sovereignty & rejecting multilateralism organizations as a whole

o   Thinks they are inefficient and puts other people’s needs before the US

o   Believes they undermine US govt authority

Describe the tradeoffs associated with participation in international organizations and national sovereignty.

-        Principal agent relationships: countries, the principals, create international organizations, the agents, to solve complex problems but risk losing some control over how those organizations behave

-        Delegation: States delegate authority to IO address global challenges more effectively

-        Autonomy: In order to function, IOs need some independence (agency slack), but can lead to agency drift (diverge from assigned task) or shirk (agent puts less effort into delegated task)

o   Too much autonomy risks principals losing control

o   Too much control from the principals undermines IO’s legitimacy or effectiveness

What are the two main political bodies of the UN? How can they confer legitimacy? Which states have the most power within these political bodies?

-        General assembly: every member state, rarely a consensus

o   Confer legitimacy when states can secure broad support for some action   

-        Security council: 5 permanent members w/ veto power (US, UK, China, Russia, France), 10 rotating

o   Needs to find consensus before it can act, oversee international system

Why does the United States participate in the United Nations and often abide by its decisions when it could just ignore it instead (because it possesses much greater military capacity than the UN)?

-        Capacity to bestow political legitimacy from the global community on some set of foreign policies

o   Reduce the costs of implementing some action (face less resistance or pick up new coalition partners that contribute to its execution)

-        US is key player because of security council seat

-        UN reflects global public opinion, easier to gain allies if support

-        Domestic public more likely to support policies that have UN approval

According to the reading (Section 21.2), what is interstate cooperation? What are some of the primary impediments state face when trying to reach cooperative settlements with each other?

-        Countries trying to implement solutions to international problems

-        Number of actors and variation in their interests impedes easy solutions to internatl problems

-        Outside parties have distributional stake (decisions have implications for them as well)

-        Turn to forms of global governance to mitigate negative externalities for joint solution/rules

o   Streamlines state interactions to manage inc complexity or make them more efficient

o   Multilateral governance reduces transaction costs (decide on gen set of rules & principles that govern their repeated interactions)

According to the reading (Sections 21.2, 21.3, 21.4), what are the incentives for global governance through international institutions? How are efforts at global governance confronted by the collective action problem? Once international agreements are established, what types of problems of compliance and enforcement do international organizations face?

-        Collective action problem: everyone agrees on benefits of common goal, but few incentives for individual actor to pay costs of achieving that goal

o   Multilateral governance structures give incentives to contribute to public good (rules, either penalties or inducements to follow through on specified contribution)

o   Problem of distributing burden of collective goods (w/in & b/n states)

o   Problems of enforcement in event of noncompliance

-        Group of states for enforcement still has collective action problem

o   Costly to impose costs on noncomplying states, govts may disagree as to appropriate course of action

o   Identifying noncompliance is also a political judgment

-        Global governance body prevents single state from taking it upon themself to deploy costly enforcement without consent of other members

What are the Cold War origins of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)? What did Lord Ismay mean when he said the goal of NATO was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”?

•  NATO formed in 1949 during Cold War to counter Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact

• Provide security for Western Europe against possibility of Soviet military attack

• Cold War expanded NATO’s mission & membership, adding newly independent former Soviet countries and participate in military op in Kosovo/Afghanistan

• Gen Lord Ismay (NATO first secretary gen) 3 Goals for NATO

  •  Protection against potential Soviet conventional & nuclear attack on Europe

  • Binding mechanism on the US military power

    • American-led alliance system, provided necessary hegemon for collective security arrangement

    • Forced US to act multilaterally & not unilaterally, can’t abandon Europe  

    • Take European allies into account when formulating foreign policy & military intervention considerations

•  Constraining German foreign policy to preserve peace among (democratic members)

What are the two main dilemmas facing NATO and how has the Trump administration addressed these dilemmas?

-        1) European Shirking in NATO on making the sacrifices to provide the soldiers for their own defense \

o   Trump criticizes non-US members not spending enough on defense (proportion of GDP)

-        2) US is a reluctant hegemon

o   Resist larger economic costs of leading western alliance

o   Costs of IO like NATO outweigh the benefits US receives

o   Accuse US allies of freeriding on US goodwill & military power

o   Trump natl security advisers expect to try to withdraw if second term in office