My Analysis of Barnett/Finnemore's "The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations
Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore use a constructivist approach to analyze the effectiveness of international organizations. The main argument made by the authors is that IOs stray away from their intended purpose and exercise autonomy from states’ interests in ways that were not originally anticipated. More specifically, they seek to analyze if international organizations complete their intended tasks and why they have “pathological” behaviors. As bureaucracies, they make rules but also label and categories states and even people. Using a constructivist approach, they analyze the dysfunctional behavior of IOs and their tendency to channel their power into directions independent from individual states’ desires.
Their approach is to; first, offer a different view of the power of IOs and its effects on world politics. Second, their perspective offers a basis for treating IOs as autonomous actors which challenges the statist thought that prevails in international relations today. Third, their perspective is different from realists and neoliberal institutionalists in assessing the desirability of IOs. They follow Alexander Wendt in the pursuit of how the world is situated as such with the characteristics that it has. They pursue more than just a description but the ability to hypothesize and reach real conclusions.
Theoretical approaches to organizations consist of two broad strands. One is economic and based in rationality and efficiency as well as concerned with markets instead of hierarchies or organizations. To them, the environment lacks social rules, culture or actors beyond those who comprise the organization. The second is sociological and focused on legitimacy and power, specifically with utility-maximization and competition. Realists and neoliberals disagree about the effects of anarchy, relative versus absolute gains and cheating but they both agree that IOs play a part in furthering state interests because, why else would they exist in the first place? Many scholars view IOs as a shell in which states impose their will on rather than agents working for mutual results. Barnett and Finnemore acknowledge that IOs are constrained by states but argue that they are not merely passive mechanism without their own agenda. They also state that the regimes concepts as consistent in treating IOs as structure and not agents. This is significant because IOs act as constraints to states’ self-interests and control information which affects the structure of communication and organization.
They discuss principle-agent analysis as studying IOs as agents to states, which are the principles. They point out that the problem with applying this analysis is seeing the difference between what agents want and what principles want. According to them, both realists and liberals view IOs as vehicles of states. Their solution is using various strands of sociological theory to see the goals of IOs and whether or not they differ from states’. They state that IOs can have separate agendas from states because of the legitimacy of the legal authority they have and their control over technical expertise and information.
Using Weber’s study of bureaucracies they say that sources of autonomy and authority for IOs come from being bureaucracies, which states view as rational, legitimate and good. This is a new concept because people have looked to individual leaders in the past as authority. They use UN peacekeepers as an example of autonomy because they work as neutral (third) parties to implement Security Council resolutions. The second basis of autonomy and authority comes from control over information and expertise. From this power, IOs are able to classify, fix meanings, and create new norms and actors in the international community. They classify information by moving people among social categories or making up new categories, according to Don Handelman. They fix meanings by labeling boundaries and parameters of acceptable action. Diffusion of norms occurs as values and norms are spread throughout the international community.
Bureaucracies are notorious for being inefficient and unresponsive as well as making policies that are irrational. There have been counter-measures by scholars of the U.S. bureaucracy to identify and fix these problems and scholars have been studying in-depth how these policies come about but have lacked extensive research into IOs, possibly because they presume that IOs have better responses. Barnett and Finnemore judge IO’s dysfunction by their publicly proclaimed mission, or whether or not they do what they say they will do. They categorize theories into two dimensions: (1) whether they find the dysfunction inside or outside of the IO and (2) whether they trace the causes to material or cultural “forces”[1]. Though, according to Graham Allison, bureaucracies are the product of politics and thus work through deal-making and bargaining. Additionally, according to the world polity model, IOs are dysfunctional because their practices reflect symbolic legitimacy instead of efficiency and world polity has contradictions that make it difficult to function. Lastly, organizations create an internal culture that causes dysfunction.
Barnett and Finnemore identify five mechanisms in bureaucratic culture that causes dysfunction and include: irrationality of rationalization, universalism, and normalization of deviance, organizational insulation, and cultural contestation. The first three, according to the authors, are defining parts of bureaucracy and are expected to be present in all bureaucracies to a certain degree. This information is probabilistic and depends on empirical conditions.
The main argument made by the two authors is that many IOs stray away from their intended purpose and exercise autonomy from states’ interests in ways that were not originally anticipated. The title itself lays out that IOs can form pathologies in which their behavior deviates from what is expected. Specifically, the authors use arguments by Weber regarding bureaucracy and institutionalism to argue that IOs channel their power in particular directions, separate from their originally intended purpose. They do this by creating and defining actors, interests, and different types of political organization. Additionally, the authors acknowledge that IOs are the products of states and because of that they are a bit constrained by states interests but not entirely.
One major critique that I found after reading this article is that the authors fail to point out that any large body of people will be inefficient. They attribute inefficiency to bureaucracy because of the culture but don’t state how difficult it is to work with that many people no matter how efficient they are. It is not necessarily a culture that is created in a bureaucracy rather than merely the limits of working in such a large arena with so many people. That is not a culture but a symptom of bureaucracy. They fail to cross analyze different types of bureaucracies and what types of cultures arise in each. For instance, whether or not the same inefficiencies arise in the European Union as ones that do in the Arab League. The significance of that would be to determine what inefficiencies occur and don’t occur in each IO which would allow for proper changes to be made by individually assessing the problems.
Second, I feel that the authors simplify the beliefs of neoliberal institutionalists and neorealists by minimizing the argument to simply being whether or not IOs matter in international politics. They state that IOs do more than just facilitate cooperation, which is apparently all that neoliberal institutionalists believe they do, and state how they create actors and responsibilities, and give meaning and normative value. As we read a couple of weeks ago from Keohane and Martin, “Institutionalist theory should be highly applicable to security issues because its argument revolves around the role of institutions in providing information.”[2] That is just one example of how IOs contribute more than just measures of cooperation.
Barnett and Finnemore analyze through a constructivist point of view which I found very interesting and helpful because it is not as polarized as neorealists and neoliberal institutionalists. Constructivism is particularly helpful when studying norms or deviations from norms, in this case, because it seeks to find what causes the deviations. This view looks at culture, politics, states’ power, and the inner workings of the IO to determine how these factors play into the mechanisms of the IOs, and in turn, how the IOs affect culture, politics, and states’ behavior. If they analyzed IOs through either a neorealist or neoliberal institutionalist perspective, then they would be held back by the assumptions that those perspectives hold.
Barnett and Finnemore acknowledge the successes of IOs but are concerned with why international relations scholars have failed to be so critical of the inefficiencies, which they attribute to the theoretical perspectives of scholars. They use constructivist theory to analyze why IOs behave the way they do and what their purpose is in general. By doing this they treat IOs as significant actors that have meaningful effects on the world. Using a constructivist method allows, ironically, for a more realistic view of IOs than neorealism or neoliberal institutionalism. This is why I believe that their research is very interesting and even necessary to modern studies of international relations.
[1] Barnett, Michael and Finnemore. Martha. Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations, 716
[2] Keohane, Martin. The Promise of Institutionalist Theory, 43. Source: International Security, Vol. 20, No. 1 pp. 39-51, Published by: The MIT Press, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2539214
