JIOS Journal Issue

Journal of

International Organizations Studies

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 1, MARCH 2012

Journal of

International Organizations Studies

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 1, MARCH 2012

Journal of International Organizations Studies (JIOS) The Journal of International Organizations Studies is the peer-reviewed journal of the United Nations Studies Association (UNSA), published in cooperation with the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies at Brigham Young University. JIOS provides a forum for scholars who work on international organizations in a variety of disciplines. The journal aims to provide a window into the state of the art of research on international governmental organizations, supporting innovative approaches and interdisciplinary dialog. The journal’s mission is to explore new grounds and transcend the traditional perspective of international organizations as merely the sum of its members and their policies.

Details on Submission and Review JIOS is published twice annually, in March and September, online and print-on-demand. Submission deadline for the September issue is 1 May each year and for the March issue is 1 November of the previous year. JIOS publishes three types of articles: • Research papers (8,000–10,000 words, including footnotes and references) • Insider’s View (3,000–7,000, including footnotes and references): contributions from practitioners illuminating the inner workings of international organizations.

• Reviews of literature, disciplinary approaches or panels/workshops/conferences (single book reviews, panel or workshop reviews: 800–1,200 words, multiple book or subject reviews: 2,000–3,000, including footnotes and references) Please send submissions to editors@journal-iostudies.org. For submissions and formatting guidelines, please see http://www.journal-iostudies.org/content/how-submit-your-paper. All papers will be reviewed by two–three external reviewers and then either accepted, rejected, or returned to the author(s) with the invitation to make minor corrections or revise and resubmit (medium to major changes). The final decision on acceptance of submissions rests solely with the editors.

Contact Information

UN Studies Association, c/o coconets, Hannoversche Str. 2, 10115 Berlin, Germany David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies Brigham Young University, Provo UT 84602, USA E-mail: editors@journal-iostudies.org Web: http://www.journal-iostudies.org ISSN 2191-2556 (print)

ISSN 2191-2564 (online)

©2012 All rights reserved.

EDITORS EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

Kirsten Haack, Northumbria University; John Mathiason, Syracuse University REVIEW EDITOR

Klaas Dykmann, Roskilde University INSIDER’S VIEW EDITOR

Nicola Contessi, Université Laval MANAGING EDITOR

Cory Leonard, Brigham Young University EDITORIAL BOARD

Christopher Ankersen, Royal Military College of Canada

Ina Klein, University of Osnabrück

Malte Brosig, University of the Witwatersrand

Jonathan Koppell, Yale University

Donald C.F. Daniel, Georgetown University

Henrike Paepcke, DIAS/UN Studies Association

Klaas Dykmann, Roskilde University

Slawomir Redo, UN Office on Drugs and Crime

Martin S. Edwards, Seton Hall University

Tamara Shockley, Independent Researcher

Dirk Growe, Global Policy Forum Europe

Jonathan R. Strand, University of Nevada

Julia Harfensteller, University of Bremen

Markus Thiel, Florida International University

Ian Hurd, Northwestern University

Andrew Williams, University of St. Andrews

Adam Kamradt-Scott, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Table of Contents

Author Details................................................................................................................... 3 EDITORIAL The Emergence and Change of International Organizations John Mathiason and Kirsten Haack ................................................................................... 5 STUDYING INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS Applying Contingency Theory to International Organizations: The Case of European Integration Armağan Emre Çakır .......................................................................................................... 7 Correcting the Imbalance of the World Heritage List: Did the UNESCO Strategy Work?

Lasse Steiner and Bruno S. Frey ...................................................................................... 25 The Evolution of International Cooperation in Climate Science Spencer R. Weart .............................................................................................................. 41 INSIDER’S VIEW Human Rights in the UN System Since the Demise of the Three Pillars Approach Dorota Gierycz .................................................................................................................. 60 REVIEWS Monitoring Compliance: Practice and Procedure at a UN Human Rights Expert Body René J. Rouwette ............................................................................................................... 71 Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism by Michael Barnett Davide Rodogno ................................................................................................................ 74 On the Origins of the United Nations: When and How did it Begin?

Klaas Dykmann ................................................................................................................. 79

Author Details ˘ Emre Çakır is an assistant professor at the European Union Institute of Marmara Armagan University, Istanbul. Çakır is the chairperson of the Department of Politics and International Relations of the European Union. His research focuses on international relations theories and theories of European integration. He has applied the Gestalt perception to international relations for the first time and is the author of the first Turkish book on theories of political integration.

Bruno S. Frey is a professor of economics at the University of Zurich and Distinguished Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Warwick. Frey is the author of over six hundred articles in professional journals and books and belongs to the “Most Highly Cited Researchers” (ISI Web of Knowledge). He has received several honorary doctorates in economics, and he is, among others, a Distinguished Fellow of the Association for Cultural Economics. Frey seeks to extend economics beyond the standard neoclassics by including insights from other disciplines, including political science, psychology, and sociology.

Dorota Gierycz has had a long and distinguished career in international law and international affairs, peacekeeping, conflict resolution, and human rights. Gierycz worked at the United Nations, serving in senior positions at its headquarters both in Vienna and New York and on numerous assignments around the world, including peace missions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, and Liberia, as director of the Human Rights and Protection Section. She has authored numerous academic articles and teaches worldwide. She is currently associated as a professor with Webster University and the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna and the European Peace University (EPU) in Stadtschlaining, Austria, as well as with the Center for International Human Rights/John Jay College/CUNY. She received an MA in law and a PhD in political science and lives in Vienna and New York.

Davide Rodogno is an associate professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Rodogno has recently published Against Massacre, The history of humanitarian interventions in the Ottoman Empire (1815–1914) (Princeton University Press, 2011). He currently works on a research project tentatively entitled From Relief to Rehabilitation: The history of humanitarian actions and programs during the interwar period.

He is co-editor with Heide Fehrenbach of a book project on humanitarian photography.

René J. Rouwette is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University. In Rouwette’s current research, he focuses on the European Union in the Human Rights Commission and Council.

Lasse Steiner is a research economist at Professor Bruno S. Frey’s Chair of Economic Policy and Non-Market Economics at the University of Zurich. Steiner’s main area of expertise is the economics of arts and culture. In particular, his research covers the politico-economic aspects of the UNESCO World Heritage List, the price-setting mechanism in museums, and the relationship of the arts and happiness.

Spencer R. Weart, originally trained as a physicist, is a noted historian specializing in the history of modern physics and geophysics. Until Weart’s retirement in 2009, he was director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in College Park, Maryland in the U.S., and he continues to be affiliated with the center. Over a distinguished career, he has written a large number of books and articles. His most recent book is the Discovery of Global Warming (2003, revised edition, 2008, translations in five languages), which is a condensed version of his extensive and widely used scholarly web site on the history of climate change research.

Klaas Dykmann, historian and political scientist, is an associate professor for global studies at the University of Roskilde in Denmark. Dykmann’s interests in research and teaching have

been international organizations and global governance, international human rights, Latin America, and foreign relations of the European Union. He has conducted field research and taught in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, India, and South Africa, and published articles and books in English, German, Spanish, French, and Polish.

EDITORIAL The Emergence and Change of International Organizations

by John Mathiason and Kirsten Haack The emergence of international organizations as part of an increasingly important international public sector provides challenges for scholars, researchers, and practitioners alike. Different disciplines can provide new insights into what is happening in the world as international organizations take on new and increasing functions. This edition of JIOS provides examples of innovative work in organization theory, history, and field experience.

Spencer Weart, a noted historian of science, applies his analysis to the role of international organizations in addressing the problem of climate change. The process was long and somewhat complex but instructive. It is also not very well known. While much of the current focus lies on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Weart’s analysis shows how that unique institution evolved. While the IPCC is formally intergovernmental, in practice it is an unusual combination of scientists—not all of them governmental—and governments.

Weart shows how this cooperation evolved, including the critical role of the International Council for Science (ICSU)—a nongovernmental organization with a global membership of national scientific bodies—and two international organizations, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme (that not coincidentally provide the secretariat for the IPCC). He documents the way a scientific consensus emerged over a series of meetings. While he does not say so directly, obtaining a consensus from scientists is equivalent to herding cats, but the process of connecting epistemic communities with international organizations is instructive. This will be followed up in JIOS next year with an issue dedicated to the current international organizations addressing climate change.

The EU is a case of an international organization that has undergone a significant transformation over time. To an extent, it is now a combination of traditional state-based international organization and a sovereign government, since under the Maastricht Treaty, sovereign functions have been delegated to it by the EU’s members. Understanding the underlying reasons for this evolution are addressed by Turkish scholar Armağan Emre Çakır in his analysis of how contingency theory—a concept from larger organization theory—can help explain the process by which the EU has evolved. He shows how three aspects, policy determinism, contingency determinism, and the more recent SARFIT model, can each explain variance.

From a historical perspective, his note that some of these aspects reinforce the functionalism originally proposed by David Mitrany at the dawn of the UN is of interest. Clearly, the use of analytical modes that were originally developed in other contexts can help illuminate the current and future growth of the international public sector.

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Klaas Dykmann’s reviews of two books dealing with the origin of the UN adds to Weart’s and Cakir’s articles, by looking at how historians can illuminate the organization’s formation.

To an extent he proves the philosopher Santayana’s dictum, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The two books by Mark Mazower and Dan Plesch provide alternative, and somewhat new, interpretations of the factors underlying the UN that can provide a more nuanced interpretation of the origins of the organization.

The area of human rights or, more precisely, the role of international organizations in enforcing agreed norms, is the subject of several components of this issue. Dorota Gierycz’ Insider’s View brings the perspective of a scholar who has also been a practitioner in the field of human rights. Gierycz spent the early part of her UN career in the Division for the Advancement of Women, concerned with developing international norms and standards. She then went to three field missions for the UN where she was concerned with implementation of human rights norms. Her essay on “Human Rights in the UN System since the Demise of the Three Pillars Approach” reflects that experience. She describes the evolution of the machinery and concludes that it is still a work in progress. René Rouwette’s review of Yogesh Tyagi’s study of the Human Rights Committee (the expert body that oversees compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) notes how the book describes the procedures followed by that body and points out in its final chapter how it brings out exciting new academic questions.

Continuing the focus of the issue on history, Davide Rodogno’s review of Michael Barnett’s Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism addresses one of the areas of greatest growth in the international public sector: humanitarian operations, referring to disasters that can either be natural or man-made. The review notes that Barnett describes three stages, of which the first was the longest. This reflects the fact that international humanitarian response has been growing rapidly. In his review, Rodogno finds some weaknesses and suggests further lines for historical analysis.

Finally, Steiner and Frey’s article “Correcting the Imbalance of the World Heritage List: Did the UNESCO Strategy Work?” touches on another aspect of international organizations, namely accountability. Within the international system, there is an emphasis on results-based management, but one of the weaknesses of the approach is ensuring evaluation of whether results have been achieved. While many organizations undertake or outsource evaluations of programs and projects, academic researchers have been less prone to do so. Steiner’s and Frey’s analysis, therefore, is highly welcome. Their focus is on the world heritage list, one of UNESCO’s success stories, and by undertaking a comparative analysis of the list over time, they determined whether UNESCO’s objective of increased diversity has actually been achieved. Steiner and Frey use content analysis (by coding the countries on the list) that permits a quantitative picture of the list’s development over time. Content analysis is an under-utilized technique in studies of international organization, but here it is used to good effect to determine the extent to which UNESCO has been successful in expanding the world heritage list.

The articles in this issue of JIOS thus show several approaches that can elucidate the growth and management of international organizations by seeing them in their historical context and by using concepts and research techniques drawn from a variety of disciplines.

STUDYING INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS Applying Contingency Theory to International Organizations: The Case of European Integration

by Armağan Emre Çakır, European Union Institute, Marmara University This article presents the first application of contingency theory, a branch of managerial organizational studies, to the study of international organizations. It takes the EU as its case study, presents it as an organization, and sheds light on the relationship between the structure of this organization and certain contingencies such as environment, size, strategy, and technology.

Introduction The universal applicability of the concept of organization is a tempting and recurring theme in social sciences. For example, Clegg, a sociologist and organizational theorist, contends: Today, no one can pretend to understand the human condition that does not understand the organizations in which it is constituted, constrained, and transformed. Organization studies should be at the core of the study of the human condition, because without such subject matter . . . we would have nothing of any consequence to discuss (Clegg, 2002, xvii).

However, “The relation between general organization theory and the study of international organization has largely been one of mutual neglect” (Jönsson, 1986:39). This article hopes to make a modest contribution to remedying this neglect by applying a branch of managerial organizational studies (OS), contingency theory (CT), to the study of international organizations.

In the modern sense, OS appeared in the 1940s and branched off into specialized areas.

It is a convention to divide OS into two main branches: organizational behavior (OB) and organizational theory (OT). The former examines individual and group actions in organizations, while the latter takes up organizations as a whole.

Table 1: Branches of Organizational Studies BRANCH

LEVEL

SUBJECT

ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

Micro Level

Individual and group dynamics in organizations

ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY

Macro Level

Organizations as a whole, their adaptation processes, strategies and structures

The vast majority of the OS literature remained within the confines of management studies.

By the 1960s, political scientists had started to discuss intraorganizational power relations and decision making in governmental organizations (Starbuck, 2005:174), but this promising start did not lead to a political school of thought in OS. The few references to politics remained singular and idiosyncratic (i.e., Böhm, 2006:3). OS scholars with an interest in politics have usually had a predilection for decision-making discourse with an emphasis on motivations, strategies, and choices, and this brought them closer to the OB branch (i.e., Moe, 1991).

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Studies from OB have already appeared in the EU studies literature (i.e., Egeberg, 2001– 02). However, it seems that none of the perspectives of OT have been applied to the European integration phenomenon yet. It is an interesting coincidence that, just as the scholars of EU studies, OT scholars disagree on the nature of their subject matter; in the face of the sheer size and complexity of the organization phenomenon, they use the same metaphor of “the blind men and the elephant” (Hatch, 1997:7) to describe their predicament, as Puchala (1972) did in the field of European studies. This problem of relativity in the ontology of the concept of organization in OT also appears to be an advantage in the sense that it may be worth exploring the possibilities of employing this concept in different fields (such as EU studies) other than managerial studies.

Several perspectives are included under the OT umbrella (see Astley and Van de Ven, 1983). CT belongs to the organizational design (OD) perspective. OD is based on the claim that the effectiveness of an organization depends on the fit between the organization’s components and changes in the environment. Especially with its SARFIT (Structural Adaptation to Regain Fit) model, CT seems to have the potential to be employed in the field of politics in general and in studying international organizations in particular. The present article endeavors to demonstrate this potential. The following title introduces CT as it is employed in managerial studies. Finally, CT is applied to the case of European integration.

Contingency Theory CT is based on the idea that a fit between certain components of a managerial organization and certain contingencies will improve that organization’s performance. Among these, the structure of the organization is perhaps most frequently related to contingencies. For this reason, the term “contingency theory” usually refers to “structural contingency theory.” The contingencies usually related to the structure of the organization are environment, organizational size, strategy, and technology. CT assumes that each of these contingencies necessitates the existence of certain characteristics in the structure. When the structure of an organization bears those characteristics for the contingency in question, this means that there is a fit. This fit is supposed to increase the performance of the organization. The structural characteristics these contingencies necessitate are as follows: Environment The rate of technological and market change in the environment of the organization is an important factor in whether the structure of the organization is mechanistic (hierarchical) or organic (participatory). In mechanistic structures, the task of the organization is divided into specialized roles, the occupants of which depend on their subordinates that retain the knowledge and information; in organic structures, members collaborate in fluid and ad hoc ways.

Stable environments fit mechanistic structures, since hierarchies are more efficient for routine operations. In unstable environments, organic structures are more suitable, since knowledge and information are required from the lower levels for innovation.

Table 2a: Cases of fit and misfit between the environment contingency and the hierarchy characteristic of the structure HIERARCHY CHARACTERISTIC OF THE STRUCTURE Mechanistic (Hierarchical) Organic (Participatory)

ENVIRONMENT CONTINGENCY Stable

Unstable

FIT

MISFIT

MISFIT

FIT

Derived from Donaldson (2001:2–3 and 2006:22).

Size The size of the organization affects the degree of bureaucracy in that organization. Bureaucratic structures fit large organizations. In large organizations, operations and administration

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are repetitive. A decision-making procedure based on rules brings efficiency and cost effectiveness. Small organizations, in contrast, need unbureaucratic, simple structures that are centralized and not rule governed.

Table 2b: Cases of fit and misfit between the size contingency and the bureaucracy characteristic of the structure BUREAUCRACY CHARACTERISTIC OF THE STRUCTURE Bureaucratic Unbureaucratic

SIZE CONTINGENCY Large

Small

FIT

MISFIT

MISFIT

FIT

Derived from Donaldson (2001:2–3 and 2006:22).

Strategy A functional structure based on the existence of such departments as production and marketing fits an undiversified strategy. In this case, the organization can specialize in a variety of products or services. In contrast, an organization that follows a diversified strategy should prefer a divisional structure, each division being responsible for one product or service. If new products or services are introduced and assigned to the new divisions in this process, the process is called “epigenesis.” If the original products or services are attached to the new divisions, the process is named “differentiation” (Etzioni, 1963:408–09. See also Cutler, 2006).

Table 2c: Cases of fit and misfit between the strategy contingency and the divisionalisation characteristic of the structure DIVISIONALISATION CHARACTERISTIC OF THE STRUCTURE

STRATEGY CONTINGENCY Diversified

Undiversified

Divisional

FIT

MISFIT

Functional

MISFIT

FIT

Derived from Donaldson (2001:2–3 and 2006:22).

Technology A mechanistic (hierarchical) structure fits routine technological processes, and an organic (participatory) structure fits non-routine processes.

Table 2d: Cases of fit and misfit between the technology contingency and the hierarchy characteristic of the structure HIERARCHY CHARACTERISTIC OF THE STRUCTURE Mechanistic (Hierarchical) Organic (Participatory)

TECHNOLOGY CONTINGENCY Routine

Non-routine

FIT

MISFIT

MISFIT

FIT

Derived from Donaldson (2001:2–3 and 2006:22).

There are two classical models in CT (see Hrebiniak and Joyce, 1985, for an alternative framework based on four models). These two models are the policy determinism (or the maximum choice) model and the contingency determinism (or the minimum choice) model.

The policy determinism model (see, for example, Child, 1972) is based on the idea that the structural adaptation of an organization is determined by the policies pursued by the dominant coalition in the organization, together with minimal effects from contingencies.

The dominant coalition is the group with power over the organization (Donaldson, 1987:20).

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The policies formulated by the dominant coalition aim at, among other concerns, capturing a fit between the structure of the organization and the contingencies. It is sometimes possible for the dominant coalition to change the contingencies themselves.

The contingency determinism model (i.e., Hannan and Freeman, 1977), however, maintains that the structural adaptation is determined for the most part by the pressures exerted by certain contingencies. Here, the contingency factors shape the organizational structure directly and one-sidedly.

SARFIT, a third and alternative model within CT, has been elaborated by Donaldson since the second half of the 1980s. Like contingency determinism, SARFIT is based on the primacy of the contingency factors with minimal influence from policies. However, SARFIT identifies an alternating series of fit and misfit between the structure and the contingencies, and thus a continuous process of adaptation. The element of adaptation in CT should not lead the reader to think that CT is based on the adaptive systems approach. CT is not a systemic model; it examines how individual components contribute to fit. The adaptive systems approach was already applied to European integration as early as 1970 by Lindberg and Scheingold (1970).

Table 3: Summarizes the characteristics of the three models of CT MODELS Policy Determinism

ASPECT

Ultimate cause of structure

Contingency Determinism

SARFIT

Contingencies and preferences of dominant coalition

Contingencies

Contingencies

Immediate cause of structural change

Misfit and preferences of dominant coalition

Change in contingencies

Misfit of structure to contingencies

Effect of misfit on structural adjustment to regain fit moderated by environmental illiberality

Considerable

Not applicable

Considerable

Structure adjusted to contingencies or contingencies adjusted to structure

No concept of fit

Structure adjusted to contingencies

High

Nil

Limited

Response to pressure regain fit Degree of choice by dominant coalition Adapted from Donaldson (1987, 20)

The following section examines in more detail the three models presented in Table 3, and applies them to the case of European integration.

CT Applied to European Integration Unconventional tools may open up new possibilities for European studies. Manners argues that “contemporary European studies requires convincing cross-disciplinary narratives for the health and well-being of both European area studies and the contributing disciplines” (Manners, 2003:68). Manners’ argument resonates with that of Tsoukalis:

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The process of integration by itself defies the rigid boundaries which have become established between different disciplines, such as politics, economics, and history. . . . Integration theory has run into the ground, probably because we have been slow in realizing that this new and complex phenomenon could not be studied by our conventional tools of analysis (Tsoukalis, 1980:215).

CT may be one of the novel and “convincing cross-disciplinary narratives” in European studies. To be able to apply CT to European integration, we first have to redefine the basic concepts of CT for the case of the EU. Organization The definition of the concept of organization in the CT literature is comprehensive and flexible enough to apply to the EU phenomenon: “An organization . . . is any social system that comprises the coordinated action of two or more people toward attaining an objective.

Organizations are purposeful systems” (Donaldson, 1985:7). It is not difficult to see the EU as a social system. This system has been transformed radically from its initial state introduced by the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951 and continued its life as a conglomerate with the addition of the European Economic Community (EEC) and European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM), before reaching its current form as the EU. As an organization, it comprises the coordinated action of not only many individuals but also of a multitude of entities ranging from its own institutions to member states or transnational bodies. Depending on one’s theoretical perspective, several possible objectives may be conceived for this organization, such as serving the economic and commercial interests of the member states (the Liberal Intergovernmentalist view) or its transformation into a pseudo-federal state (the Federalist view). All these objectives remain within the scope of CT’s definition of organization.

Structure The institutional structure of the EU contains all the structural characteristics described by CT. An emphasis on such intergovernmental institutions as the Council of Ministers or the European Council with their members that depend on the knowledge of their subordinates will highlight the organic (participatory) characteristics. In contrast, focusing on the European Commission (many of its members have specialized roles) will emphasize the mechanistic (hierarchical) characteristics. Drawing attention to the infamously cumbersome administrative mechanisms of the European Commission will bring its bureaucratic characteristics to the fore. An emphasis on the initial institutional structure of the EEC, which was dedicated to the sole aim of creating and maintaining an economic community where each institution had a complementary function to that of another, will render the functional characteristics more visible. On the other hand, accentuating the creation of new bodies or systems with specific functions for the new dimensions added to the EU in later years, such as the directorate-general for home affairs or European System of Central Banks, will bring divisional characteristics to the fore. According to CT, the structure of the EU is shaped by either the dominant coalition or contingencies. The influence and characteristics of other institutions of the EU, such as the Court of Justice or the European Parliament (EP), are not considered essential by CT. Dominant Coalition Dominant coalition refers to those who have the potential to determine organizational goals and to change its structural characteristics. Depending on the term in question, as well as on one’s theoretical perspective, the dominant coalition may comprise various individuals, groups, or institutions such as the founding fathers, presidents of the European Commission, and unique configurations such as the Convention on the Future of Europe. Even non-European actors such as the U.S. that, from time to time, become influential in shaping the organizational structure of Europe as well as on contingencies (for an advanced theoretical examination of

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the concept of “exogenous, demand creating actor” influencing regional integration (Alker, 1973:344–56).

Strategy The initial strategy of creating and maintaining an economic community, which has been the main driving force behind European integration, is an undiversified strategy. Adding new dimensions to this initial strategy in such fields as foreign and security policy or justice and home affairs is considered strategic diversification.

Technology Technology is the production, knowledge, and usage of the methods, processes, or systems employed by the EU as an organization.

Environment In the case of European integration, the environment refers to the social, economic, and security conditions at the continental and global level.

Size Size refers to the geographical coverage of the EU, as well as the scope of the competences of the EU. Performance Performance is the recognized accomplishments of the EU in the areas that fall into its domain of competences.

In the case of European integration, CT is grounded on the assumption that a fit between certain components of the EU as an organization, such as structure, strategy, or technology, and certain contingencies, such as the EU’s size and environment, has had and will continue to have considerable influence on its performance.

In the following section, the three models of CT, namely policy determinism, contingency determinism, and SARFIT are first explained in their original form. Second, a hypothesis is developed for each of them in relation to their application to the European integration phenomenon.

Third, selected cases from European integration are presented to support that hypothesis.

Policy Determinism Etzioni (1963) was one of the first authors who theorized on organizations, the structure altered by a dominant coalition in response to certain contingencies. The contingency he took into consideration was size although he did not name it as such or categorize it as a contingency explicitly (p. 415). He did not include the concept of fit in his analysis either.

Although Etzioni examined international organizations and had many references to the EEC in this work, the policy determinism model of CT had to wait for managerial theorists to develop in full.

Almost a decade later, Child (1972:13) suggested that senior executives in a firm may have the discretion to influence the structure of their organization to a considerable extent. He elaborated on the theme of a strong organization whose potential makes it possible to absorb the negative effects of the misfit between structure and contingencies, and whose executives have a large leeway. The main aim of the executives, in this context, is to adjust the structure to the contingencies. If possible, the executives could also adjust the contingencies to the structure of their organization. This view was later developed to include, besides the senior executives, the whole board of directors, investors/shareholders, and other stakeholders from employees to communities.

The following hypothesis may be put forward as an application of the policy determinism model to the case of European integration.

Hypothesis I—When the dominant coalition identifies a misfit between the governance structure of the EU and contingencies, a structural change is realized in the short term as result of

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the preferences of the dominant coalition as well as the misfit. In the long term, contingencies and the preferences of the dominant coalition give the structure its ultimate form.

In the context of international relations, the policy determinism model is the depiction of those infrequent cases where policy makers are able to adjust the structure of their organization to contingencies, or contingencies to the structure of the organization. It is difficult to explain the whole of the process of European integration by using this model, because there has not been a single dominant coalition with total power over the integration process. In some critical periods of the history of European integration, there were some misfits the respective dominant coalition could identify and was powerful enough to act accordingly. Thus, it is more suitable to speak of an “issue-specific power” (see Jönsson, 1981:296) wielded by the dominant coalition. For example, the post-war restructuring of Europe, with the initiation of European integration itself, was the creation of an organizational structure on the continent that would fit the new contingencies. There were a few contingency factors in the minds of the dominant coalition that contributed to the establishment of the European Communities.

The opposition between France and Germany was an important contingency factor for Jean Monnet: “His proposition to pool Franco-German coal and steel industries was specifically addressed to the German problem. For him, the immediately critical issue in the spring of 1950 was . . . the revival of a Germany whose allegiance to the West, and to France in particular, continued to be in the balance” (Schwabe, 2001:24).

The Schuman Declaration formulated by Monnet includes the following: “The coming together of the nations of Europe requires the elimination of the age-old opposition of France and Germany. Any action taken must in the first place concern these two countries” (European Commission, 2008).

The Soviet threat was also an important factor: The creation of Cominform in 1947, the Prague coup in 1948, and the Berlin blockade in 1949 were alarming developments.

Interestingly, the U.S. was included in the dominant coalition. With the initiation of the European Recovery Program in 1947, the environment contingency was changed, and with the establishment of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the organizational structure of the continent was redefined. The Soviet Union was an important source of military and ideological threat, a part of the environment contingency rather than a member of the dominant coalition: [T]he perceived Communist threat was an important but not the only motivating force behind America’s endorsement of a unified Europe. The other motif . . . independently of, although not unrelated to, the Cold War was the American aim to contain a renascent Germany. It was this purpose . . . that determined the American long-term option for a supranational structure for an integrated Europe after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany (Schwabe, 2001:18).

The change in the value of Germany, as a contingency factor in the eyes of both France and the U.S., from hostility to cooperation must have been facilitated by Germany’s own outlook for the future. It is highly probable that Adenauer thought the Schuman Plan would rehabilitate the economy, restore the country’s legitimacy in the eyes of the world, strengthen its alliances, and end the allied administration of the Ruhr district. However, as the policy determinism model suggests, a change in the value of the contingencies usually necessitates power on the part of policy-makers. In Germany’s case, this powerful policy-maker figure was once again the U.S.: [The initialing of the Schuman Plan on 19 March 1951] would not have been possible without U.S. pressure. . . . When the Germans balked, U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy threatened that if the Germans scuttled the Schuman Plan, he would impose even tougher anti-cartel measures. That did it. A European newsman covering the ceremony said: “If Europe is ever unified in our lifetime, it will be because of Washington—or Moscow” (Time, 1951).

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The Pleven Plan devised in 1950 by René Pleven, French premier at the time, can be cited as another characteristic example of policy determinism. In response to environmental contingencies, the plan proposed “the creation . . . of a European army tied to political institutions of a united Europe”: The French Government believed, if the coal and steel plan succeeded, people would become more used to the idea of a European Community before the extremely delicate issue of common defense was approached. World events leave it no option. Therefore, confident as it is that Europe’s destiny lies in peace and convinced that all the peoples of Europe need a sense of collective security, the French Government proposes to resolve this issue by the same methods and in the same spirit (European Navigator, 2008).

The plan led to the signing of a treaty among West Germany, France, Italy, and the Benelux countries in 1952. This treaty would create a European Defence Community (EDC). However, “in its insistence that members surrender sovereignty over all of their armed forces in Europe in pursuit of fusion complète, the EDC Treaty represented a fundamental departure from the original Pleven Plan” (Ruane, 2000:15). The treaty was abandoned when it failed to obtain ratification in the French Parliament. The treaty had been prepared on the assumption that a supranational structure was better than an intergovernmental one in coping with the unstable atmosphere of the time. As indicated in Table 2a, the CT view posits that hierarchical structures fit stable environments. Thus, had the EDC been established, there would have been a misfit between its supranational/hierarchical structure and the unstable environment; its abandonment is therefore understandable from the CT perspective.

In the next decade, the Hague Summit of 1969 attempted to achieve a fit between the strategy contingency (diversification) and the divisionalization characteristic of the structure; the community had started using economic instruments for foreign policy purposes in the 1960s, and a foreign policy dimension had been added de facto to the agenda of the community. Now, a new procedure, which would later become the European Political Cooperation, was initiated to control this dimension. Since the foreign conduct of policy was already in the agenda of the community, this process was not an epigenesis but a differentiation.

In the following years, influential presidents of the European Commission, such as Delors, implemented some important structural reforms. In his two consecutive terms as European Commission president, a radical and large-scale restructuration project was realized.

He favored a diversified strategy with new initiatives such as a monetary union, a common foreign and security policy, and cooperation in justice and home affairs. These dimensions were necessitated by the changing socioeconomic contingencies that required a stronger role for the community in economic and political terms after a period of dormancy in the 1970s. To fit this diversified strategy, a divisional structure based on the European System of Central Banks was established, and the three-pillar structure of the Maastricht Treaty was introduced. In this structure, the creation of the Justice and Home Affairs was an epigenetic process.

The European Council can be an illustrative case for the board of directors configuration of the managerial version of policy determinism. For example, the communiqué of the meeting of Heads of State or Government of the Member States at The Hague (1 and 2 December 1969) states: [the Heads of State or Government and the Ministers for Foreign Affairs of the Member States of the European Communities] were unanimous in their opinion that by reason of the progress made, the Community has now arrived at a turning point in its history. Over and above the technical and legal sides of the problems involved, . . . entry upon the final stage of the Common Market . . . means paving the way for a united Europe capable of assuming its responsibilities in the world of tomorrow and of making a contribution commensurate with its traditions and its mission (Hill and Smith, 2000:72).

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The communiqué also informs us that the heads of state and of government decided to “instruct the Ministers of Foreign Affairs to study the best way of achieving progress in the matter of political unification” (Hill,Smith, 2000:74). Whereas the entry upon the final stage of the Common Market was an elaboration on the original functional structure of the community, considerations on political unification is understood as an attempt to proceed with a diversified strategy and a suitable structure.

Contingency Determinism Several writers (see, for example, Burns and Stalker, 1961; Chandler, 1962; Woodward, 1965; Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967; and Blau, 1972) have claimed that changes in contingencies give rise to a set of pressures to which the structure must adapt in the long run. In this process, as the role of policy making or choice is minimized the organization has no other option but to adopt centralized or bureaucratic structures that lack participatory or democratic features (Donaldson, 1987:2; 2001:9; and 132). Contingency determinism is the definition of extreme situations where contingencies directly and solely determine the structure, and the concepts of fit and misfit remain irrelevant.

Regarding the case of European integration, the contingency determinism model may be expressed in the following hypothesis.

Hypothesis II—The main factors that bring about structural changes in European integration are contingencies. The preferences of the dominant coalition have a minimal effect, and the concepts of “fit” and “misfit” remain irrelevant. The effect of the contingencies increases the relative importance of the centralized and bureaucratic elements in the structure of the EU. The contingency determinism model is the opposite pole of the policy determinism model; whereas policy determinism sees European integration as steered by the dominant coalition, contingency determinism depicts a Europe that drifts along the river of contingencies with those at the helm having almost no control over the course. Again, it would be far-fetched to claim that the whole process of European integration has been due to contingencies. However, it is possible to see the weight of contingencies more in some periods than in others. For instance, a plausible argument may be made that the environment contingency was substantially influential in the formative years of the European Communities. The textbook narrative of the origins of European integration highlights the influence of such factors as the insecure atmosphere, the need for economic restructuration, and the Soviet threat in the post-World War. The idea of the technology contingency having an influence on European integration is not new. Mitrany’s (1943; 1948; 1965; 197; 1975) functionalist approach is an early example of this.

He foresees a new world order composed of a web of transnational institutions. Each of these institutions is specialized in a function such as railway transportation or shipping. The key point here is that the nature of the function determines the structure of the institutions as well as the necessary action and powers. There is no predetermined scheme or political decision-making machinery in the system; everything is determined by a contingency: technology.

Here we discover a cardinal virtue of the functional method—what one might call the virtue of technical self-determination. The functional dimensions . . . determine themselves.

In a like manner the function determines its appropriate organs. It also reveals through practice the nature of the action required under the given conditions, and in that the powers needed by the respective authority (Mitrany, 1966:72–3).

Farrell and Héritier confirm the importance of technology as an important contingency in functionalist integration. They refer to technological contingencies as external factors: “Under . . . [Mitrany’s] account, integration occurs because of external factors (the technical nature of the problems being solved) rather than an internal dynamic within the regional organisation” (Farrell and Héritier, 2005:274).

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Although Mitrany saw drastic differences between functionalism and the method of European integration, he was sympathetic to the ECSC and the European Atomic Energy Community. In his opinion, especially in the case of the ECSC, functional solutions were created to problems with a geographical scope (Taylor, 1993:20–1). As the CT expected, the routine functions of the ECSC gave rise to an organizational structure whose core consisted of the high authority that was mechanistic (hierarchical) rather than organic (participatory).

In conformity with the expectations of contingency determinism, functionalism foresees a centralized and technocratic structure. Functionalists interpret integration as “the gradual triumph of the rational and the technocratic over the political” (Pentland, 1981:551).

Milward’s interpretation of the formative years of European integration may be a third example of the contingency determinism model. Milward contends “the origins and early evolution of the European Community (EC) were relative and contingent rather than expressive of fundamental principles which might be universal and timeless. Accordingly, the EC came into existence not as part of any grand design” (Burgess, 2000:56–7). In his opinion, the EC came into existence to cope with certain historically specific and well-defined economic and political problems and, those problems once resolved, there would be no further momentum from the national interest towards any further stage of economic or political integration. . . . The process of integration is neither a thread woven into the fabric of Europe’s political destiny nor one woven into the destiny of all highly developed capitalist nation-states (Milward, 1984:493).

Milward’s issue-specific approach fulfills CT’s expectation of a fit between a diversified strategy and a divisional structure. The scope of integration achieved in the ECSC was not enough to cope with the problems in Europe at the beginning of the 1950s. Other sectors of the economy, besides coal and steel, had to be addressed as well. This meant a need for diversification, which in turn necessitated a epigenetic divisionalization brought by the establishment of the EEC and EURATOM. SARFIT The SARFIT model, developed by Donaldson (1987; 200; 2006) is an alternative to the policy determinism and contingency determinism models. This model departs from the enigmatic phenomenon of an organization moving from fit to misfit. The policy determinism and the contingency determinism models of CT are based on a cybernetic understanding of organizations that focuses on deficit reduction; once an organization moves from misfit to fit it is expected to stay there. If the organization falls into misfit again, these two models cannot explain this situation.

[I]n the SARFIT view, fit and misfit are each temporary states that alternate with each other.

An organization in fit tends to expand into misfit, which provokes structural adaptation into fit, which then leads to further expansion into misfit. This cycle repeats itself over time. As the organization moves between fit and misfit so it has resultant higher and lower performance, respectively. Each phase of moving into misfit produces incremental increases in contingency (e.g., size). And each phase of moving into fit produces incremental increases in structure. Thereby, these increments accumulate over time and so tend to eventually produce growth from being a small, local and undiversified organization to being a larger, geographically widespread, and diversified organization (Donaldson, 2006:21).

In explaining the evolving structure of the EU, the SARFIT model is preferable to policy determinism and contingency determinism; whilst the other two models can shed light only on certain periods from the history of the EU, SARFIT can interpret the whole of the integration process.

The section below applies the SARFIT model to European integration for the environment, size, and strategy contingencies (the technology contingency is omitted because of space limitations).

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Hypothesis IIIa—The structure of the EU is initially in fit with the environment; when the environment is unstable, the structure is organic (participatory), and when the environment is stable, the structure is mechanistic (hierarchical). This fit has a positive effect on the performance of the EU, and surplus resources from the fit-based higher performance engender an expansion in the form of geographical enlargement as well as an increase in the scope of the competences of the EU. The expansion means an increase in the value of size as a contingency variable leading the EU into misfit with its existing structure. Mainly under the effect of the contingencies and with a limited discretion by the ruling elite, the structure of the EU achieves a fit with the contingencies once again.

The still-unstable environment of the aftermath of World War II necessitated an organic (participatory) structure in Europe. Indeed, the first five years of the post-war period in Europe were marked with several rounds of intergovernmental negotiations, and with the establishment of the OEEC and NATO, which were intergovernmental organizations. As peace and stability were established relatively firmly at the beginning of the 1950s, the technical need for the reconstruction and development of Europe pressed for the establishment of a mechanistic (hierarchical) structure. Indeed, in 1951 two supranational authorities emerged in Europe: NATO developed a supranational authority with the formation of SHAPE, and the ECSC was established with its high authority (Etzioni, 1963:413). In itself, the high authority was divided into specialized directorates-general, where high-level officials depended on their subordinates who retained the knowledge and information. With the help of the unique structures of the ECSC and EEC in which the high authority/the commission played a major role, the economic reconstruction of Europe was accomplished—despite some vicissitudes. For example, the period of inactivity in the 1970s and the momentum gained with the Hallstein Commission (1958–67), which confirmed the primacy of European law and which consolidated the Common Agricultural Policy, continued with the Delors Commission (1985–94). However, the commission’s role began to change in the early 2000s. In 2003, Nugent described this situation as follows: In recent years, the Commission appears to have been a less effective institution than it was in the mid-to-late 1980s when it was leading the march to complete the internal market and was championing such initiatives as EMU and the social dimension. . . . It has become, it is claimed, too reactive in exercising its responsibilities, reactive to the pressures of the many interests to which it is subject, reactive to the immediacy of events, and above all reactive to the increasing number of instructions it receives from the Council of Ministers and the European Council (Nugent, 2003:148).

The instructions from the Council of Ministers and the European Council were indications of a structure becoming more organic (participatory/intergovernmental) once again. The commission was the victim of its own success: by performing its functions effectively, the commission had contributed much to the realization of the economic integration of Europe. Among other things, this made the EU a center of attraction for the Central and Eastern European countries.

Now there was a misfit between the organic structure and the stable environment: the massive and problematic fifth enlargement destabilized the environment once more. This created a second misfit with the hierarchical structure and renewed the need for the intergovernmental negotiations for the comprehensive enlargement project.

Hypotheis IIIb—The structure of the EU is initially in fit with its small (in terms of geographical coverage and its scope of the competences) size, and its structure is unbureaucratic. This fit has a positive effect on the performance of the EU, and surplus resources from the fit-based higher performance entailed an expansion in the form of geographical enlargement as well as an increase in the scope of the competences of the EU. The expansion means an increase in the value of size as a contingency variable leading the EU into misfit with its existing structure.

Mainly under the effect of the contingencies and with limited discretion by the ruling elite, the structure of the EU achieves a fit with the contingencies once again.

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The relationship between the size contingency and the bureaucratic characteristic of the structure is exemplified by focusing on the European Commission and its regulation of the internal market. In accordance with the assumptions of the SARFIT model, when the EEC was small, a centralized unbureaucratic structure was more suitable. The commission engineered the internal market on a day-to-day basis by abolishing national rules, policing the emerging single market, and setting minimum standards for those areas affected by deregulation (Christiansen, 2001:101). As the internal market expanded, there occurred a misfit between the size and the unbureaucratic structure of the community.

[B]y the early 1980s, it became clear that the attempt to harmonize a continuously expanding body of national rules was bound to fail. To overcome the limitations of the old approach that had been based exclusively on harmonization, the 1985 white paper on the completion of the internal market introduced [among other things] the principle of mutual recognition (Majone, 2000).

Under this principle, member states had to allow trade in goods once these goods had been licensed for trade in another member state. This meant a rule-based or bureaucratic structure, and brought about a new fit with the new value of the size contingency.

A second example to support this hypothesis is the bureaucratization of the foreign policy dimension of the EU. Between 1970 and 1990, the core of the bureaucratic machinery working for foreign policy coordination was the Political Committee (PoCo), consisting of political directors, who met on a monthly basis in the capital of the presidency. PoCo meetings were prepared by the various specialized working groups based in Brussels and by junior diplomats, known as the European Correspondents, based in the ministries of foreign affairs. There also was a small, dedicated unit in the Directorate-General External Relations (DGE) of the Council Secretariat, which supported the work of the presidency, as well as a few officials in the European Commission. However, the size of this bureaucracy soon proved to be inadequate.

Following the establishment of the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) in 1999, several units and practices were introduced at supranational, intergovernmental, and national levels as well as in the chain of command. For instance, a Crisis Management Planning Directorate was established within Directorate-General External Relations, and the Political and Security Committee was formed as an intergovernmental body (Vanhoonacker et al., 2010:7–8, 12). With the establishment of the European External Action Service on 1 December 2010, the foreign policy dimension acquired its own dedicated bureaucracy.

Hypothesis IIIc—The initial functional structure of the EU is in fit with its undiversified strategy. This fit has a positive effect on the performance of the EU, and surplus resources from the fit-based higher performance bring forth a diversification in its strategy. A misfit occurs between this new value of the strategy contingency and the functional structure. Mainly under the effect of the contingencies and with limited discretion by the ruling elite, the value of the structure of the EU is changed from functional to divisional. The EU achieves a fit once again.

The relationship between the strategy contingency and the divisionalization characteristic of the structure dictates that a divisional structure fits a diversified strategy whereas a functional structure fits an undiversified strategy. The tailor-made functional structure of the EEC remained in fit with the undiversified strategy of realizing economic integration. The surplus resources from the fit-based higher performance in economic integration produced expansion.

Thanks to this expansion, as mentioned above, the community started using the following economic instruments for foreign policy purposes as early as the 1960s. These measures included such measures as conclusion of trade or cooperation agreements or imposition of embargoes or boycotts (Smith 2003:60).

Now, there was an emerging foreign policy besides the existing economic policy. This diversification in the strategy contingency led to a misfit with the functional structure. The resulting poor performance of the EEC in foreign policy in comparison to that of the other

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major actors in world politics and relative to its own economic performance gave rise to the criticism that it was an economic giant but political dwarf. The EEC attempted to regain its fit by adjusting its structure to this new value of contingency: in an environment externally conditioned by the end of the Cold War and German unification, the three-pillar structure was introduced with the Treaty on European Union (TEU) in 1992; and the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) constituted the second pillar. As explained above, since foreign policy was already in the agenda of the EU before the creation of the CFSP pillar, this was not an epigenetic process but differentiation.

The surplus resources from the fit-based, higher performance in economic integration caused another fit-misfit cycle in the strategy contingency. The initial success of the EEC attracted a considerable amount of immigration from non-members. The number of foreign workers in nine European countries rose from 2.5 million to 5.4 million between 1960 and 1970 and peaked at 6.3 million in 1973 (Hansen, 1993). Jennissen’s analyses (2004) suggest that the main determinant of this increase in immigration is indeed economic performance.

This was a new value of the contingency and led to a misfit with the relatively functional structure of the community that was constructed to deal with economic issues. To cope with immigration, the community resorted to a divisionalization in its structure. The Ad Hoc Group on Immigration was established in 1986. Subsequently, immigration issues were included in the third pillar created by the TEU in 1992, and transferred to the first pillar by the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997. As expected by SARFIT, while the EU gets larger and geographically more widespread, it also becomes more divisional. In line with this expectation, with the Lisbon Treaty signed in 2007, a long-term presidency status was created for the European Council, and a High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy was appointed. The EU’s bill of rights, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, was also binding by the treaty. We may expect that if the EU continues to enlarge geographically and to assume new roles further divisionalization will become inevitable.

Conclusion and Discussion CT models can serve as frameworks to analyze entities that bear organizational characteristics in international relations. The European integration phenomenon proves to be an illustrative case in this framework. To assess the prospective place of CT in the international organizations literature, the following sections compare CT with relevant theories and fundamental concepts, focus on CT as a tool to assess the validity of certain theories or approaches, and assess the overall contribution of the CT to the study of international organizations.

Comparing CT with Relevant Theories and Fundamental Concepts When applied to the field of international politics, CT appears to be closely related to certain fundamental debates and theories: THE AGENCY-STRUCTURE DEBATE

This debate centers on the primacy of either structure or agency in the social sciences. In this debate, with the exception of the pure form of policy determinism model, CT stands closer to the camp that believes in the determinative power of the structure (see Table 3); international structure corresponds to the global level of the environment contingency. However, there are substantial issues in CT that remain outside the agency-structure debate. 1) International structure is only half of one of the contingencies (that is the environment contingency) of the CT. The other half (the continental environment) as well as the other contingencies (size, strategy, technology) remain outside the concept of international structure. 2) CT goes beyond determining the primacy of agency or international structure, and tries to relate some structural characteristics (divisionalization, bureaucracy, and hierarchy) of the agency (here the EU) to contingencies. 3) In the agency-structure debate, the structure of the international system mainly imposes behavioral modifications on agencies. Modifications in the structure of

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the agency are not considered. This is the case even in neorealism where the influence of the international system on states is a key factor. Some constructivist studies are exceptions to this (i.e., Finnemore 1996).

HISTORICAL INSTITUTIONALISM

At first sight, CT is seen as akin to historical institutionalism (HI) in the sense that they both examine and try to identify patterns of large-scale and long-term changes. However, HI and CT differ on a number of grounds. 1) In HI, the institution in question is influenced by exogenous factors such as interstate competition or economic crises. In CT, besides exogenous factors, the organization is also influenced by other contingencies, such as size, strategy, and technology. 2) In some cases, HI studies are long narratives that sacrifice theoretical parsimony.

It sometimes becomes difficult to identify the causal relationships hidden in those narratives.

CT, however, puts forward concise models and falsifiable statements.

NEOFUNCTIONALISM

The SARFIT model of CT and NF bear a resemblance. However, there also are three essential differences between the two. 1) In both, there are mechanisms that enlarge the size of the entity in question and increase its powers. However, these mechanisms are different in the two cases. In NF these mechanisms are positive spillover, transfer of domestic allegiances and technocratic automaticity. In SARFIT, on the other hand, the fit-misfit cycle is at work. 2) Neofunctionalism does not specify an end product for the European integration process, and it is not clear whether there will emerge a federal state, a sui generis structure, or another outcome.

SARFIT predicts that the EU will become a diversified organization with an increasing rate of bureaucratization. 3) The external dimension is left out of the Neofunctionalist formula. In this account, European integration proceeds with its own internal dynamics. The environment contingency in CT, on the other hand, includes the international political environment together with the environment in the continent.

CT as Tool to Assess the Validity of Certain Theories or Approaches If and when a certain theory makes reference to relations between such organizational components as “structure” or “strategy” and such contingencies as environment or size, CT may serve as a touchstone to assess the validity of that reference. Mitrany’s functionalism, discussed above, passes this test since its claim of emergence of a hierarchical structure under the effect of routine technological tasks is in accordance with the expectations of CT. So does the approach of Milward to the first years of European integration when it assumes a fit between a diversified strategy and a divisional structure. However, the variant of structural realism formulated by Mearsheimer, for example, would have problems in this regard. Mearsheimer asserts that in the post-war years “the cooperation among the Western democracies”—which we may interpret as a new structural configuration—was due to an environmental contingency: the Cold War (Mearsheimer, 1990). At first, Mearsheimer’s reading of the emergence of the EC seems in harmony with the contingency determinism model. The EC, as a new structural value in Europe emerged mainly under the effect of the environment contingency. However, if the post-Cold War period had been as stable as Mearsheimer claims, the EU would have adopted a mechanistic (hierarchical) structure in the field of foreign and security policy. Yet, the foreign and security policy dimension remained intergovernmental in the post-Cold War period.

Contribution of the CT to the Study of International Organizations CT may bring new opportunities to organizational studies. First, CT sheds light on the relationship between certain components of organizations such as structure, and certain contingencies such as environment, size, strategy, or technology. As such, analyzing the EU in particular or international organizations in general by using CT opens up new dimensions. For example, the following excerpt from a 2007 article may not have special importance at first glance:

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EU diplomats have characterized the style of current Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso as “presidential,” with Barroso personally steering Brussels’ most important policy dossiers such as energy and the EU Constitution. But the real winner of influence in the post-enlargement Commission is not Barroso himself but the Commission’s civil servants apparatus (Beunderman, 2007).

However, a rereading of the same excerpt under the light of CT (in particular, the SARFIT model) reveals that the increase in the value of the size contingency brought about by the fifth enlargement had positive effects on the independence and actorness of the EU. The new value of the environment contingency led the commission to adopt a hierarchical structure rather than one of choice by the dominant coalition (see Table 3). The increase in the size of the EU also brought about an increase in the powers of Eurocrats.

Secondly, CT offers falsifiable hypotheses. It claims that a fit between the structure of an organization and certain contingencies will lead to an increase in the performance of that organization. In particular, the SARFIT model asserts that organizations go through cycles. If all these cycles are completed, with the expected series of fits and misfits between the structure of the organization and contingencies, the organization is expected to become a large, geographically widespread and diversified organization with an increasing rate of bureaucratization.

These claims of CT seem to have been validated by a limited number of cases presented here and can be tested across further cases in other works.

Thirdly, as indicated above, CT may serve to assess the validity of theories that refer to relations between such organizational components as structure, strategy, or technology, and such contingencies as environment or size. In this vein, this article has assessed the federalist founding fathers thesis, functionalist theory, and the approaches of Milward and Mearsheimer.

Fourthly, with the application of management approaches, some concepts in politics and international relations acquire novel meanings. An illustration of this is the interpretation of the “participation” concept by CT. In evaluating the relationship between the environment contingency and structure, it claims that in unstable environments, participatory structures are fitting since knowledge and information is required from the lower levels for innovation. This pragmatic approach emphasizes the technical side of participation and relegates democratic reasons to a secondary position.

Finally, when applied to the field of international relations, CT is a powerful policy-relevant theory (George 1993; Nincic and Lepgold 2000; Walt 2005; Nye Jr. 2008). In addition to contributing to our understanding of organizations, CT (especially the policy determinism and SARFIT models) defines certain courses of action that will supposedly increase the performance of organizations. In the case of European integration, since the so-called community method described in social-scientific terms by Neofunctionalism (Rosamond 2000:51), no theory has attempted to explain and predict the integration process while giving a recipe for governance of the European integration process. CT promises policy-makers that if they keep the structure of the EU in harmony with contingencies, the performance of the EU will improve. As a negative example, it is worth remembering the EDC Treaty that aimed at creating a defense policy with a supranational (hierarchical) structure that would have not been in fit with the unstable atmosphere of the 1950s.

In cases where contingencies shape the structure unilaterally, CT informs the policy makers of the possible structural outcomes and other consequences. This may be attributed to the fact that CT was born as a management theory and is therefore inherently pragmatic.

Further Research CT was initially developed for business firms that are simpler and of much smaller scale compared to the EU. Due to the colossal size and infamously complicated nature of the EU, CT’s explanatory and predictive power remains limited in some respects. In particular, practical concerns impose a certain degree of reductionism in the policy determinism model. This model attributes a central importance to the European Council, the Council of

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Ministers, and the European Commission, whereas the influence of the EP is seen as less important. However, there are convincing arguments on the agenda-setting powers of the EP (Tsebelis, 1994 and 1996). In some historic cases such as the Single European Act, the EP had a substantial influence (Moravcsik, 1991:22). In a similar vein, domestic electoral or party politics or public opinion in member states are not the primary concern of the CT. As Schimmelfennig (2010:53) notes, these concepts need to be addressed more in theoretical approaches to the European integration in the future. Otherwise, integration theory will not go beyond the elite level.

As indicated in the policy determinism section above, in managerial CT the scope of the dominant coalition has gradually been expanded with further studies to include other actors besides the senior executives. Perhaps, future research on CT may formulate a more comprehensive definition of the concept of dominant coalition for international organizations as well.

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Correcting the Imbalance of the World Heritage List: Did the UNESCO Strategy Work?1

by Lasse Steiner, University of Zurich and Bruno S. Frey, University of Warwick/University of Zurich/Center for Research in Economics, Management, and the Arts—Switzerland The official intention of the UNESCO World Heritage List is to protect the global heritage.

However, the imbalance of the distribution of world heritage sites according to countries and continents is striking. Consequently, the World Heritage Committee launched the global strategy for a balanced, representative, and credible world heritage list in 1994. To date, there have not been any empirical analyses conducted to study the impact of this strategy. This paper shows that the imbalance did not decrease but rather increased over time, thus reflecting the inability of the Global Strategy to achieve a more balanced distribution of sites.

The UNESCO World Heritage List The UNESCO world heritage list (hereafter “list”) is generally considered an excellent contribution to saving the globe’s common history in the form of cultural monuments and landscapes worth preserving. The origin of the list dates back to the 1920s, when the League of Nations became aware of the growing threat to the cultural and natural heritage of our planet. In 1959, UNESCO launched a spectacular and successful international campaign to save the Abu Simbel temples in the Nile Valley. In 1966, UNESCO also spearheaded an international campaign to save Venice after disastrous floods threatened the survival of the city. To institutionalize these efforts, the General Conference of UNESCO adopted the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage at its seventeenth session in Paris in November 1972. The convention “seeks to encourage the identification, protection, and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity.”2 To date, 187 state parties have ratified this convention, and the list currently has 911 world heritage sites (hereafter “sites”), 704 (or 77 percent) of which relate to culture; 180 to nature; and twenty-seven of which are mixed, combining cultural and natural heritage.3 The list has become very popular and many regard it as “the most effective international legal instrument for the protection of the cultural and natural heritage” (Strasser, 2002, p. 215).

Accompanying the increasing popularity of the list, a large social science literature on world heritage and the UNESCO program has emerged. Some studies analyze in-depth why cultural heritage should be preserved. It is argued that the past is important to understanding and 1. For helpful suggestions, we are indebted to Trine Bille, Reto Cueni, Axel Dreher, Peter Egger, Paolo Pamini, and James Vreeland. We thank the participants of the PEIO conference 2011 and of the ACEI conference 2011, where an earlier version was presented. Further, we are thankful to Maurizio Galli for the support provided in data handling.

2. http://whc.unesco.org/en/about, accessed 20 January 2011 3. Data is after the thirty-fourth ordinary session of the World Heritage Committee, held in Brasília, 25 July–3 August 2010. Only two sites have been delisted since the implementation of the list. UNESCO, world heritage list, http://whc.unesco.org/en/list, accessed 20 January 2011.

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appreciating the present, and the past is an important part of the identity of a nation, region, or local unit, as well as of the people living therein (Alan Peacock, Rizzo, 2008). Several noteworthy contributions in cultural economics try to capture the impact of heritage sites on individual utility, as well as on the utility of preserving the past for future generations (Klamer, Throsby, 2000; Alan Peacock, 1978; Alan Peacock, Rizzo, 2008). Other studies concentrate on more specific aspects, such as the consequences for tourism of being included in the list. It has been demonstrated that once sites are placed on the list, they experience a significant increase in tourists.

While this is welcome for firms offering tourist services, hotels and restaurants in particular, there is some concern that too many tourists may negatively affect the heritage sites (Cochrane, Tapper, 2006; Anna Leask, Yeoman; Tunney, 2005). While it is clear that more people visit these sites that now belong to the “common heritage of mankind,” it is unclear whether, and to what extent, there is substitution from other nonlisted heritage sites.

The impact on tourism and prestige gained from site nomination are factors that incentivize applications, potentially distort the process of designation, and contribute to the imbalance of the list (Cleere, 2006; Harrison, Hitchcock, 2005; Millar, 2006). For example, the large share of sites in Europe (see below) raises the question of whether the sites selected for the list adequately reflect the common heritage of mankind (Byrne, 1991). Recent studies empirically analyze the determinants of getting on the list. They show that political and economic factors unrelated to the value of heritage have an impact on the composition of the list (Bertacchini, Saccone, 2011; Frey, Pamini, Steiner, 2011).

We focus on the highly unequal distribution of sites according to countries and continents. Although 46 percent of the sites are in Europe, only 9 percent are in Africa. Only ten countries have a large number of twenty sites or more, whereas, on the other hand, thirty-eight member countries of the convention have no sites at all. This imbalance of sites according to continents and countries has been present from the beginning, and it has become a subject of major concern within the World Heritage Commission, the World Heritage Centre, UNESCO, and other organizations. The director of the World Heritage Centre, Francesco Bandarin, even went so far as to call the world heritage list “a catastrophic success” (Henley, 2001).

As a reaction to this imbalance, in 1994, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee started the global strategy for a balanced, representative, and credible world heritage list (hereafter “global strategy”),4 which intends to raise the share of non-European sites on the list. Despite this explicit new strategy and intended strong action, “the immediate success of these efforts is questionable” (Strasser 2002, p. 226).

This paper analyzes the unbalanced representation of continents and countries on the world heritage list. We further address the question of whether the international organization UNESCO is effective in achieving the goal of its own formally ratified resolution. In particular, we test whether the global strategy has reached its goal of reducing the inequality in the distribution of sites.

In order to lay the groundwork, Section II discusses the process of selecting sites and introduces the political actors involved in the nomination process. The existing literature usually discusses the strategy for a more balanced list and the strategy’s outcome without referring to empirical evidence. This paper fills the gap by presenting statistics on the highly unequal distribution of sites across countries and continents (Section III). The Gini coefficient as a measure of the inequality in the distribution of sites across the world is increasing over time, depicting an increasing concentration of sites in a few countries. Further, we analyze the global strategy’s objectives of reducing the imbalance between cultural and natural sites as well as reducing the share of sites located in Europe and more developed countries.

The results suggest that the imbalance of the list has not decreased after the introduction 4. http://whc.unesco.org/en/globalstrategy accessed on 26 January 2011

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of the global strategy; if anything, it has increased further (Section IV). We briefly discuss previous attempts to reform the list (Section V) and Section VI concludes.

Selection Aspects of the World Heritage List Nomination Process The advisory bodies to the World Heritage Committee used a somewhat ad hoc method to determine the sites to be initially included on the list. The convention’s criterion of “outstanding value to humanity” is noble but proved to be almost impossible to define clearly. An important development has been the establishment of ten criteria for inclusion in the list, which are specified in detail in the Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention (UNESCO, 2005). Nominated sites must meet at least one of the ten criteria, which are applied in connection with three comprehensive aspects: uniqueness, historical authenticity, and integrity. Six criteria refer to “cultural” and four to “natural” sites. The former must “represent a masterpiece of human creative genius” (Criterion i). The latter should “contain superlative natural phenomena or areas of exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance” (Criterion vii). If a site meets at least one cultural and one natural criterion, the property’s classification is a mixed site.

The list is composed by three different bodies: the state parties that nominate the sites, the two advisory boards that evaluate and propose the sites for inscription, and the committee that formally decides on inclusion in the list. The World Heritage Committee meets once a year and consists of representatives from twenty-one of the member countries. The general assembly elects the members of the convention for terms of up to six years. The intention of the convention is an equitable representation of the world’s regions and cultures on the committee (UNESCO, 2005, Art. 8 [2]). However, the convention nowhere specifies the means to achieve this goal. The committee is the final decision-making body whose responsibilities include the World Heritage list, the list of World Heritage in Danger, administering the World Heritage Fund, and deciding on financial assistance. Member governments must propose the sites to be included on the list.

Mayors, district governments, or heritage experts may only make proposals for inclusion on a tentative list. The World Heritage Convention differs from many other international conventions because all substantive powers are designated to the committee and not the general assembly. The Heritage Committee is advised by the International Council on Museums and sites (ICOMOS) for cultural sites, by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for natural sites, and by the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM). It has been claimed, “the scrutiny of these systems by the two Advisory Boards is now rigorous” (Cleere, 2006:xxii).

International Organization Research The central task of the World Heritage Convention is to protect the global public goods of “world cultural and natural heritage” and at the same time to achieve some measure of representatives among continents and countries. This task links up closely to various topics analyzed in international organizations research.

The list is compiled by an organization within UNESCO, the World Heritage Center in Paris.

It is supported by the World Heritage Committee, which is in turn advised by several councils.

The goal is to safeguard and preserve a global public good, the heritage of mankind. This closely links to research in the theory of international organizations. The role of international organizations in the provision of global collective goods or global commons, the respective international cooperation, international regimes and international institutions are examined, for example, by Keohane (2003), Koremenos, Lipson, and Snidal (2001). These studies point out both the necessities and the difficulties of providing public goods in a global context. As long as there is no world government with effective sanctioning power, the provision of global public goods such as preserving mankind’s common heritage is uncertain and unstable. In the case of heritage, many

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nations make a strong effort toward having their national heritage sites put on the list, as they can derive substantial commercial benefit as well as prestige from such listings. However, the question is whether the resulting list really presents a balanced picture of world heritage. This question is a central aspect of this paper’s analysis.

International organizations are not necessarily working as intended but may be dysfunctional in regards to the official purpose (Grant and Keohane, 2005; Martinez-Diaz, 2009). The incentives that actors in these organizations face may lead them to pursue their own interests, or the interests of pressure groups, rather than the official goal of the organization (Peterson, 2010); Carpenter, (2007) in the context of advocacy frameworks and civil society). This is an imminent danger in an organization such as the World Heritage Center, which does not have to report to the UNESCO General Assembly. Even if it had to, there would still be strong forces inducing the decision makers to deviate from the organization’s official goal.

The political influence of the national representatives in international organizations has been the subject of studies by, for example, Oatley and Yackee (2004) and Dreher, Sturm, and Vreeland (2009). They demonstrate that the career patterns of the national representatives significantly influence their behavior. As long as they are part of the national civil service and aspire to rise in its ranks, they have an incentive to put the interests of their own country first.

For the case of world heritage, it has been empirically shown, indeed, that factors unrelated to the value of heritage, such as membership on the UN Security Council, have a systematic impact on the composition of the List (Frey, Pamini, and Steiner, 2011).

Political Economy of the World Heritage List From the point of view of political economy, it may be argued that the selection of the sites is questionable, because it is subject to rent-seeking by experts and politicians (Buchanan, 1980; Frey, 1984; Frey, et al., 2011). Politicians in their respective countries and expert representatives on the advisory groups ICOMOS and IUCN strongly influence the selecting of cultural and natural sites for the list. In most cases, the committee follows the experts’ recommendations. Technical experts rely on their knowledge as art historians and conservators, but this “concept . . . has never been the object of a truly operational definition” (Musitelli, 2002:329).

Some scholars go so far as to question the legitimacy of the list. Meskell (2002) argues that the concept of “world heritage” is flawed by the fact that it privileges an idea originating in the West, which requires an attitude toward material culture that is distinctly European. Affluent countries seem to have benefited most from the convention. According to a Report of the World Commission on Culture and Development, the list “was conceived, supported, and nurtured by the industrially developed societies, reflecting concern for a type of heritage that was highly valued in those countries” (Olmland, 1997). Moreover, many countries do not have the necessary conservation infrastructure that allows them to prepare nominations for the list at a sufficiently sustained pace to improve its representativeness (Strasser, 2002: 226–27). According to the convention, the state parties must identify and delineate the property (UNESCO, 2005, Art. 3); in addition, they must ensure the identification, protection, conservation, presentation, and transmission to future generations (UNESCO, 2005, Art. 4). These requirements put a heavy burden on countries wishing to put a site on the list. In order to avoid a negative decision, state parties often withdraw a nomination if the committee or its bureau is likely to decide unfavorably.

Being on the list is highly desired by many as it brings prominence and monetary revenue. The attention of donors and for-profit firms is attracted, and there is a positive relationship between the number of sites and the number of tourist arrivals per country (Lazzarotti, 2000; Yang, Lin, Han, 2009). One may even speak of a “heritage industry” (Johnson, Thomas, 1995). Indeed, inclusion on the list is considered to be a great honor for the respective nation and, accordingly, gets much attention by the press, radio, and TV (Van der Aa, 2005).

It has been highly politicized as many political and bureaucratic representatives of countries consider it a worthwhile goal from which they personally profit. Consequently, the selec-

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tion is subject to political pressure, and it is not solely determined by the ten official criteria deemed to be “objective.” Although the goal of the whole project is to protect sites of central importance for humanity, national interests dominate global interest: “The rhetoric is global: the practice is national” (Ashworth, Van der Aa, 2006:148). Some countries try more actively to secure sites to be included on the list. Twenty-one nations participating in the convention have a seat on the World Heritage Committee. However, these members nominated more than 30 percent of the listed sites between 1978 and 2004 (Van der Aa, 2005:81). This relationship was confirmed by econometric estimations of Bertacchini and Saccone (2011). They find a clear, positive, and statistically significant correlation of membership in the committee and the number of listed sites. One example of a questionable selection occurred in 1997 when ten Italian sites were included to the list all at once, and the committee chair at that time was a compatriot. In addition, the location within the country where the committee holds its annual meeting seems to have an impact on the number and kind of nominations. Indeed, the 1997 meeting was held in Naples, Italy (Cleere, 1998). Francesco Bandarin, director of the World Heritage Centre, acknowledges, “Inscription has become a political issue. It is about prestige, publicity, and economic development” (Henley, 2001).

Distribution of Sites The distribution of sites on the list across continents is highly unequal, with 47 percent of the sites being in Europe.5 The European predominance is larger for cultural sites (54 percent) than for natural sites (22 percent). In contrast, Sub-Saharan Africa has less than 9 percent of all sites, and Arabian countries have 7 percent. The Americas and Asia-Pacific are better represented with 17 percent and 20 percent, respectively (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 The World Heritage List according to Types of Heritage and Continents 2009 500 450 400 350 300 250 Mixed Natural Cultural

200 150 100 50 0

Africa

Americas

Asia & Pacific

Arabia

Europe

Note: 21 Heritage Sites go across two countries each, one site goes across 10 countries. This and all further tables count sites as many times as the number of countries involved. We do not count the Old City of Jerusalem (ID 48), because it is associated with no country. Sites given to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia are still counted under Serbia, although they now are listed under Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Slovenia. Itchan Kala (ID 543) is counted under Russia, because in 1990 Uzbekistan still was part of it. We do not count the Bialowieza Forest (ID 33) for Belarus, because in 1979 neither Belarus nor the USSR was in the World Heritage Convention. We do not count the Historic Center of Rome (ID 91) for the Holy, See, because in 1980 it was not yet a member of the World Heritage Convention.

Source: based on http://whc.unesco.org/en/list (accessed on August 30, 2010).

The distribution of sites across countries is also highly skewed. If we look at the world, we see that some countries have a large number of sites; others have a few sites, and a considerable number have none. Only ten countries have twenty sites (a large number) or more. On the other hand, there are thirty-eight countries with no sites at all. Some of these countries have been part 5. Continents follow the UN definition.

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of the convention for a long time.6 As a measure of statistical dispersion a Gini coefficient of 0.55 in 2009 reflects the highly unequal distribution. A completely equal distribution (each country has the same number of sites or a Gini coefficient of 0) could be supported by the argument that every country should have the same importance with respect to its contribution to the heritage of humankind. This point of view emphasizes that every country should be of equal worth to an international organization, such as the UN and its agency UNESCO. This applies to culture in its broadest definition but also to nature; each country can be considered to have aspects of cultural and natural sites worth preserving. This particular point of view refrains from any attempt to compare the sites between countries. Clearly, this is an extreme position because it does not take into account the size of a country as measured by population or geographical extension.

A second position considering the relevant unit of the list is the size of the population per country rather than countries as such. This point of view seems to be most appropriate with respect to cultural sites. Each person of the world may be taken to have the same capacity to produce cultural goods. These goods may be of extremely different types and forms and would certainly not correspond to what are sometimes called high cultures, such as those of classical Egypt, Greece, or Rome. However, the cultural production may have occurred far back in the past when the population size was quite different from that of today. This historical population size varies from country to country; therefore, we focus on sites according to present population size. Taking the distribution according to the population as a reference, Europe is still on top with fifty-two sites per 100 million persons followed by the Arabian countries, the Americas, and Sub-Saharan Africa with twenty-three, eighteen, and eleven sites per 100 million inhabitants, respectively. The Asia–Pacific region has much less, five per 100 million inhabitants.

A third approach is a balance distribution that relates to the country’s size as measured by area in square kilometers. The larger a country is, the more likely it is to find some site worth including on the list. This argument seems to be more convincing for natural sites. Most likely, a large country has more different landscapes than does a small one, some of which may fit the UNESCO criteria. The distribution of sites per square kilometer is also clearly headed by Europe with nineteen sites per million square kilometers, whereas all other continents possess between four and five (see Frey, Pamini, 2010).

The imbalances in the list according to continents and countries have been present from the very beginning. Inequality does not necessarily mean, of course, that the selection is incorrect. However, a strongly unequal selection may indicate that inappropriate aspects play a role.

UNESCO accepts this point, and the imbalance has become a subject of major concern within the World Heritage Commission and Centre, UNESCO, and beyond.

Impact of the UNESCO Global Strategy In 1994, twenty-two years after the adoption of the convention, UNESCO determined the list lacked balance in the type of inscribed properties and in the geographical areas of the world represented. “Among the 410 properties, 304 were cultural sites and only ninety were natural and sixteen mixed, while the vast majority is located in developed regions of the world, notably in Europe.”7 Three objective criteria for a more balanced list are available: the distribution according to cultural and natural sites, the distribution according to a country’s development, and the distribution according to continents. The operational guidelines stipulate in several propositions that a balance in the number of cultural and natural sites should be achieved (UNESCO, 2005, paras. 6, 15, and 58). Concerning the distribution of sites, we focus on successful inscriptions on the list instead of applications. If more applications are made by European countries (whether they have more potential sites or better resources to apply), more European coun6.For example, Guyana since 1977 or Monaco since 1978; however, larger countries such as Jamaica (since 1983) or countries with an important heritage, like Bhutan (since 2001) with its Djongs, have been disregarded.

7. http://whc.unesco.org/en/globalstrategy accessed on 26 January 2011

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tries will be represented than countries from other continents. However, state parties often withdraw a nomination if there is a chance that the decision might be negative, leading to a distorted selection.8 To avoid such biases, we do not follow this approach but rather analyze only successful applications.

UNESCO further observed an imbalance with respect to the character of sites. A global study carried out by ICOMOS from 1987 to 1993 suggested that, in Europe, historic towns, religious monuments associated with Christianity, historical periods, and “elitist” architecture (in relation to vernacular) were all overrepresented on the world heritage list; whereas, all living cultures —especially traditional cultures —were underrepresented.

To support the global strategy in achieving greater balance, UNESCO intended to encourage countries to become state parties to the convention, to prepare tentative lists, and to advance the nominations of properties from categories and regions currently not well represented on the list. UNESCO intends to raise the share of non-European sites as well as the share of living cultures included on the list.

Inequality over Time The global strategy is intended to lower the imbalance, increase the representativeness, and reduce European dominance. The time has come to empirically evaluate the outcome of the global strategy.

A first indicator of the imbalance is the Gini coefficient as a measure of statistical dispersion. As seen in Figure 2, the Gini coefficient of the distribution of sites across countries has risen almost monotonously over time from 0.34 in 1979 to 0.55 in 2009. The distribution of sites is increasingly concentrated in countries that already have many sites. The calculation does not include countries with no sites, to avoid biases by countries that become members of the convention and start with no sites. Another way to reduce the bias produced by new member countries is to include countries with no sites but only if they have been members of the convention for at least two years. The minimum amount of time the committee needs to decide on a nomination is twelve Figure 2 Dispersion of World Heritage Sites according to Countries 1979–2009 0.7

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8. Furthermore, data on applications available on the UNESCO homepage is incomplete.

2005

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Standard Deviation

Gini-Coefficient

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Gini with 0 SD without 0 SD with 0

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months (Aanna Leask, Fyall, 2001). When including the zero observations, the Gini coefficient is higher; it increased from 0.52 in 1984 to 0.65 in 2009. However, it is increasing less strongly than the Gini coefficient that does not include countries without sites.9 Another measure of dispersion is the standard deviation of the number of sites per country. The standard deviation has risen from around 2.0 to 7.6 with the mean increasing from 1.2 to 4.9 sites per country in the same period. Here the different calculation methods have little effect on the results. Both dispersion measures suggest the new global strategy clearly did not help to reduce the inequality of the distribution among countries, i.e., relatively fewer countries obtain a larger share of sites over time.

The number of sites on the list has continuously grown over time. On average, about thirty properties have been added to the list each year. The growth rate has even accelerated, from twenty-six sites per year from 1978 to 1994 to thirty-six sites per year afterward. The e-list now contains over 900 sites. As shown in Figure 1, today, the European countries hold almost half of all sites. This European dominance was one of the reasons for launching the global strategy. Surprisingly, the number of new European sites per year exhibited a strong increase after 1990, which lasted until the year 2000. Even recently, the European countries have been granted more additional sites in almost every year than have all the other continents.

Consequently, the share of total sites belonging to Europe rose even after the introduction of the global strategy (see Figure 3).

As argued above, the relevant unit for consideration on the list could be the size of the population or area per country. Figure 4 shows the number of total sites per one million square kilometers for each continent.

Figure 3 Share of Total Sites per Continent 1990–2009 0.5

0.4 %Europe %Americas

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%Africa 0.1

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9. The decrease in the beginning can be explained by the many countries that had no sites when the convention was launched but soon obtained at least some sites.

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Figure 4 Number of Sites per Area and Continent 1990–2007 20

Europe 15

America Asia Pacific 10

Arabia Africa 5

0

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

Europe by far has the most sites per area, and Europe’s number of sites compared to all other continents is increasing over time. Here, we show the development after 1990 when the last major change of the area occurred after the USSR joined the convention in 1988.

It is also the most relevant time range for our analyses. There are no indications that the introduction of the global strategy in 1994 had any effect. The European countries also lead the distribution of sites per person. As shown in Figure 5, in 2007, the European continent had about fifty sites per 100 million persons, whereas all other continents ranged between five and twenty-three sites per 100 million persons.

Distribution According to Cultural and Natural sites The distribution of sites according to cultural and natural sites is very unequal. Today 77 percent of the sites are cultural and only 20 percent are natural. This imbalance clearly favors the Figure 5 Number of Sites according to Population and Continent 1990–2007 60

50

Europe America

40

Asia Pacific Arabia

30

Africa 20

10

0

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

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European countries, which are more successful in obtaining cultural sites than are countries from other continents. The operational guidelines stipulate an equal distribution of cultural and natural sites should be achieved (UNESCO, 2005). In 1980, the U.S. delegate to the committee suggested establishing a working group on the balance of cultural and natural sites (Strasser, 2002). One goal of the global strategy is to approximate the share of these two types of sites. Figure 6 depicts the development of the number of cultural, natural, and mixed sites.

Although the number of mixed sites has increased the least, the number of cultural sites has increased much faster than the number of natural sites. In relative terms, the ratio of cultural to natural sites tends to increase monotonously over time. This reflects an increasing share of cultural sites—even after the introduction of the global strategy.

Figure 6 Development of Number of Cultural, Natural, and Mixed Sites 1990–2009 800

4

700 3.5

500 400

3

300 200

2.5

Ratio Cultural/Natural

Number of Sites

600

Cultural

Natural

Mixed

Ratio Cultural/Natural

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

0

1990

100 2

Simultaneous Analysis of the Impact of the UNESCO Strategy The next step is to investigate the impact of the global strategy on the distribution of sites by simultaneously controlling for different factors. Here, we focus on two factors explicitly mentioned in the global strategy: the European predominance and the impact of the development level of a country on the number of sites.

First, we perform cross-section regressions to estimate the impact of the continents and GDP per capita (1,000 USD per capita) as a measure for economic development. The dependent variable is the total number of sites a country had before the global strategy (1993) and the number it had fourteen years later (2007). Because the number of sites is a count variable, we use negative binomial regressions to estimate the partial correlations.10 We control for the factors introduced above: area (one million square kilometers), as a proxy for natural potential, and population (100 million persons), as a proxy for cultural production potential. As a technical control variable, we add the number of years that a country has been part of the convention, limiting its potential to get sites (tenure). Table 1 shows the estimated coefficients for the years 1993 and 2007 and for the new sites obtained in the period between 1993 and 2007.

10. For count data, one can also estimate Poisson regression models. In our case, these models lead to qualitatively and quantitatively very similar results. In Stata, count data models can be compared with the “countfit” command. A comparison of the mean differences, the sum of the Pearson statistic, and the AIC and BIC statistics suggest applying negative binomial regressions to our data. Thus, we only show the results of these estimations.

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Table 1: Determinants of World Heritage List Inclusion

AREA POPULATION TENURE GDPPC AFRICA AMERICA ASIA-PACIFIC ARABIA EUROPE Constant Observations

sites per country 1993 (1) 0.0803** (2.083) 0.165** (2.275) 0.130*** (7.150) 0.00858 (0.676) -1.284*** (-4.272) -0.933*** (-3.477) -0.565* (-1.939) -0.999*** (-2.911) (reference continent) -0.0930 (-0.357) 127

sites per country 2007 (2) 0.0887** (2.511) 0.184*** (3.041) 0.0839*** (8.147) 0.0212*** (2.738) -1.283*** (-5.479) -0.965*** (-4.416) -0.805*** (-3.744) -1.084*** (-3.591)

Growth of sites per country 1993–2007 (3) 0.0950** -2.035 0.191** -2.46 0.0411*** -3.255 0.0296*** -2.933 -1.324*** (-4.412) -0.956*** (-3.398) -0.942*** (-3.476) -1.554*** (-3.500)

-0.145 (-0.550) 166

0.173 (0.546) 166

Note: Cross-section estimations. z-statistics in parentheses: *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1

Although the coefficients of area and population remain similar, the coefficient for tenure decreases, which reflects the increasing number of countries in the convention. The more years a country has been a member of the convention, the more sites it obtains. This relationship was less strong in 2007 than in 1993 because of new member countries with more recent tenure obtaining sites.

With Europe as a reference category, the coefficients of most continent dummies have not changed in a statistically significant way between 1993 and 2007. Even when controlling for the size of a country and tenure in the convention, non-European continents did not catch up with Europe in terms of the number of sites. The only continent that shows a significant change is Asia–Pacific but in the unintended direction; countries on this continent obtained even fewer sites compared to Europe than before the global strategy was started. The size of the coefficients can be interpreted by computing the exponent of the estimated coefficient to get the so-called incidence rate ratio (IRR), which indicates the factor change in the expected count of sites for a unit increase in the independent variable. In column 2, the African countries have, for instance, an IRR = e-1.283 = 0.277. This means that being located in Africa is accompanied with a relative decrease of the expected number of sites of IRR – 1 = -72.3 percent compared to the European countries.

Moreover, the global strategy is intended to increase the share of sites in less developed regions. When GDP per capita is used as a measure for economic development, the estimated coefficients reveal that the global strategy also failed with respect to this objective. Although in 1993, before the introduction of the global strategy, the coefficient of GDP per capita was not statistically significantly correlated with the number of sites, fourteen years later the correlation was positive and significant. More developed countries obtained more sites after the introduction of the global strategy. An increase in GDP per capita by 1,000 USD leads to a relative increase

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of 2.14 percent in the expected number of sites. We also estimate the impact of the determinants mentioned above only for the sites obtained after 1993. The results in Table 1, column 3, support our previous results.

In a second step, we test for a structural break by using the panel structure of the data and introducing a global strategy dummy taking the value one after 1993. Interaction effects of the global strategy dummy and the determinants reveal whether the slope of these determinants changed after 1993, which would be an indicator for the success of the global strategy. Again, we use the total number of sites of a country up to a certain year as the dependent variable with panel data structure and random effects.11 In the basic setting without interaction effects, the results from the cross-section estimations hold (see Table 2, column 4).

In Table 2, column 5, we introduce interaction effects. The global strategy dummy is positive and significant. Sites are almost never delisted, so the stock is increasing continuously after 1993. The interaction coefficient of the global strategy and tenure is negative and statistically significant, which indicates that after the global strategy was introduced the relationship of tenure and total sites is less positive than before (but still positive in absolute terms). This reflects the increasing number of member countries. Because the growth of the list is limited, more countries induce a slower increase of the stock per country. The interaction term of strategy and GDP per capita is positive and strongly significant. After the global strategy was introduced, the sites distribution became increasingly biased toward the more developed countries. The interaction effects with the continent dummies of Africa, the Americas, and the Arabian countries are significant and negative. The sites distribution became increasingly biased toward European countries after the global strategy was introduced.

A somewhat different approach is to use the new sites per year a country gets as a dependent variable. These estimations of the flow of sites confirm our previous results (see Table 2, column 6). The only difference is the negative coefficient of tenure. Countries that have been members for a longer time obtain fewer sites per year. However, in this specification, the only significant interaction-term coefficient is the one of the global strategy and tenure (see Table 2, column 7). This coefficient is positive and significant, indicating that after the global strategy was introduced the more tenured countries obtained relatively more sites than did countries with lower tenure. This is contradictory to UNESCOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s aim to support countries that recently joined the convention.

Overall, our results indicate that the global strategy did not help to increase the balance and representativeness of the list with respect to continents and development. If anything, the distribution of sites has become even more biased, considering the objectives set by UNESCO. Reforming the List Some of the shortcomings of the list have been noticed by the convention, and proposals for reform have been discussed. One shortcoming is the unbalanced distribution of sites, which was the aim of the Global Strategy, as discussed above. UNESCO intends to increase the representativeness of the list but struggles to find appropriate criteria (e.g., chronological periods, cultural criteria, or regional distribution). However, underrepresented state parties are encouraged to apply to change the composition of the list. Considering the imbalance of the list, UNESCO has developed a priority system, which prefers state parties with no sites.

Moreover, the number of sites per country and year is limited to one, in an effort to decrease the imbalance (Strasser, 2002). However, these measures have not had a significant effect so far. In addition, Van der Aa (2005) proposes opening the nomination process; every country, organization, or individual should be allowed to nominate sites. Many more sites would be nominated, so the selection process within a country would probably be less biased. However, the evaluation by the committee would have to be much stricter.

11. The total number of sites in year t is correlated with the number of sites in year t-1. However, the Random Effects model permits serial correlation in the model error.

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Table 2: Testing for a Structural Break in 1994—Panel Estimations of Stock and Flow Determinants sites up to year t

sites up to year t

sites per year

sites per year

(4) 0.207*** (2.787)

(5) 0.230*** (2.858)

(6) 0.125*** (4.102)

(7) 0.141*** (4.073)

POPULATION

0.0805** (2.572)

0.0622 (1.108)

0.149*** (3.386)

0.120** (1.982)

TENURE

0.0588*** (33.92)

0.121*** (29.12)

-0.0157*** (-2.769)

-0.0377*** (-2.625)

GDPPC

0.0129** (2.364)

-0.00971 (-1.057)

0.0231*** (3.122)

0.0197 (1.470)

AFRICA

-1.374*** (-4.878)

-1.312*** (-4.280)

-1.118*** (-5.318)

-0.891*** (-2.879)

AMERICA

-1.047*** (-3.425)

-1.081*** (-3.299)

-0.724*** (-3.788)

-0.498** (-1.990)

ASIA-PACIFIC

-0.946*** (-3.264)

-0.967*** (-3.139)

-0.891*** (-4.531)

-0.642** (-2.171)

ARABIA

-0.959*** (-2.668)

-0.981** (-2.558)

-0.989*** (-3.985)

-0.675** (-1.982)

EUROPE

(reference continent)

VARIABLES AREA

STRATEGY

0.924*** (12.50)

-0.00749 (-0.0312)

Strat*Area

0.00211 (0.249)

-0.0266 (-1.064)

Strat*Pop

0.00622 (0.428)

0.0364 (0.819)

Strat*Tenure

-0.0757*** (-18.63)

0.0278* (1.759)

Strat*Gdppc

0.00956*** (2.689)

0.00302 (0.252)

Strat*Africa

-0.350*** (-4.261)

-0.378 (-1.118)

Strat*America

-0.134** (-2.005)

-0.409 (-1.641)

Strat*Asia

-0.0968 (-1.237)

-0.371 (-1.230)

Strat*Arabia

-0.164* (-1.948)

-0.545 (-1.375)

Constant Observations

17.01 (0.145)

16.91 (0.139)

-0.246 (-1.266)

-0.228 (-0.883)

3,458

3,458

3,458

3,458

Number of id

176

176

176

176

Log likelihood

-5339

-5116

-1818

-1813

Notes (Table 2) : Dependent variable (4) & (5): Accumulated total number of sites of per country up to year t.

Dependent variable (6) & (7): Total number of new sites per Country in year t.

Random effects estimates 1978–2007. z-statistics in parentheses: *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1

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A second major shortcoming is that the number of sites on the list has continuously grown over time. The convention does not set a numerical limit for the list, and this overextension of the list imposes problems whereby the committee has to monitor the state of conservation and management of the sites (Benhamou, 1996). Imposing a time restriction or making a reevaluation after a certain time obligatory would mitigate this problem because these changes simplify the delisting of sites. This sunset clause is successfully applied within the European Diploma for Protected Areas. The convention discussed this proposal, but it received little support. In 2003, a maximum number of total new sites per year (thirty) were introduced.

Another suggestion for reform is to introduce an overall maximum number of sites. Doing so would solve the problem of overextension. Monitoring the sites would be facilitated significantly. Sites would be listed according to their quality but also according to their state of maintenance. Compared to the actual situation, a competition for the best protection would arise in order to be listed (Frey, Steiner, 2011).

Conclusion The effort of UNESCO through the World Heritage Commission to establish a world heritage list containing the most treasured sites of humanityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s culture and landscapes constitutes a great step forward toward preserving one of the most important global public goods on our planet.

The list now contains more than nine hundred sites, and its number has been steadily increasing since its establishment almost forty years ago.

The selection of sites, however, is questionable. It is subject to rent-seeking, not only by the national interests pursued by politicians and bureaucrats but also by the commercial heritage industry. To mitigate the high imbalance of the list in 1994, UNESCO launched the global strategy for a balanced, representative, and credible world heritage list. Three of the main goals mentioned by the global strategy were lowering the overrepresentation of developed countries and the European continent and increasing the share of natural compared to cultural sites.

Although there is some literature about the global strategy and the unequal distribution of sites, there is a lack of empirical evidence evaluating the development of the imbalance, the impact of the global strategy, and, therewith, the effectiveness of this particular international organization to achieve a more balanced distribution. This paper intends to fill this gap. Surprisingly, all indicators suggest the list has become, if anything, even more imbalanced since the global strategy was introduced. The share of cultural to natural sites has continued to increase, exacerbating the goal of a balanced distribution of these categories.

The Gini coefficient reveals the distribution of sites is now more concentrated than ever. The number of sites in Europe compared to other continents continued to increase after 1993.

Moreover, economically more developed countries obtained relatively more sites. Furthermore, in contrast to the intention of the global strategy, countries with more tenure obtain relatively more sites per year. Possible measures to lower the imbalance of the list include limiting the number of sites per country and year or opening the nominations to everyone until the imbalance is reduced.

The positive effects of the list on global heritage protection cannot be doubted. However, the striking imbalance of the list reflects a biased nomination process. It is very likely that not all sites deserving this label are a part of the list. The fact that the decision makers of UNESCO itself realized the unequal distribution and launched the global strategy supports this view.

However, as we show empirically, the global strategy was not successful in reducing European predominance. This paper intends to attract attention to the persisting imbalance of the list, and it can serve as a starting point for further discussion about possible reforms to protect our global heritage.

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The Evolution of International Cooperation in Climate Science

by Spencer R. Weart, American Institute of Physics International regimes in the scientific sphere have been surprisingly successful in arriving at a consensus on 1) reliable factual statements about the world and 2) clear, actionable advice to policy-makers. The history leading to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) exemplifies how this success relies upon the norms, rules, and procedures the scientific community has developed since the seventeenth century. By the very nature of climate, scientists had to study it across national boundaries. Already in the nineteenth century, meteorologists formed occasional international collaborations and simple coordinating bodies. From the 1950s onward, these expanded into elaborately organized global research programs involving thousands of experts. The programs chiefly studied daily weather, but when research pointed to the possibility of global warming, it raised scientific questions that could only be addressed through international cooperative studies and policy questions that demanded international negotiations. When governments formed the IPCC, geoscientists based it upon the social systems developed in their earlier cooperative efforts.

The constitution of the IPCC looked like a recipe for paralysis and perhaps was intended to be. The governments promoting the panel had grown wary of demands for sweeping policy changes from self-appointed bodies of scientists; a body governed by official government representatives could be relied on to avoid radical environmentalist sentiments. The IPCC’s reports to policy-makers would require a consensus of essentially every competent climate scientist plus the unanimous consensus of political appointees from all the participating nations.

As might be expected, the IPCC’s earliest summary pronouncements were beaten into a mush of weasel-worded statements that called only for more research.

By 2001, the panel had turned its procedural restraints into a virtue: Whatever it did manage to say would have unimpeachable authority. In the teeth of opposition from the fossil fuels industry—the greatest concentration of economic power the world had ever seen—the IPCC issued what is arguably the single most important policy advice any body has ever given. If the world economy continued its trajectory, the IPCC declared, before the end of the century climate change would probably bring severe harm to many nations and quite possibly global catastrophe. It was a call for nothing less than a wholesale restructuring of the world’s economies and ways of living.1 1. For general history of these developments see Weart (2008) and the much larger online version Weart (2010).

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Whether or not governments paid heed, in fulfilling its declared purpose of providing advice, the IPCC has rightly been considered a remarkable success. Taking this as an example, we may set two criteria for the effectiveness of an international regime in the scientific sphere. Does it arrive at a consensus on frank, clear, objective, and significant statements about the nature of the world? (For example, human emissions of greenhouse gases will raise global temperatures by a few degrees in the coming century.) And through these statements, does it implicitly or explicitly set an agenda for policy negotiations and action, with a clear statement of the desirable outcome or outcomes? (For example, nations severely restrict their emissions of greenhouse gases.) Whether the advice is followed will depend on social, ideological, political, and economic forces far beyond the scope of the particular regime; thus, regime effectiveness must be judged by the clarity and forcefulness of the advice rather than whether it is ultimately followed.

The IPCC, although exceptional in the scope of its mission and effort, is not unique in its methods and outcome. In particular, a requirement for consensus, and the procedures and norms that make it workable, are found in the decision-making of many other international regimes that employ scientific research to address environmental problems. As a survey by Breitmeier et al.

(2006, 231–32) showed, these regimes have been more effective than many would expect. What made this possible? The answer lies in a fact already noted by international relations scholars: The IPCC worked in accord with “the rules, norms, and procedures that govern science at large” (Skodvin, 2000, 157). The purpose of the present paper is to explore just what this meant, by describing the historical process that brought it about.

First Efforts to Coordinate Climate Research Meteorologists of different nationalities had long cooperated in the loose informal fashion traditional for all scientists, reading one another’s publications and visiting one another’s universities. Already for nearly a century they had been reaching beyond that. As a leading meteorologist later remarked: “One of the unique charms of geophysical science is its global imperative” (Smagorinsky, 1970, 25). In blunt practical terms, you can’t predict the weather if you don’t know what’s happening beyond your national borders.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, meteorologists got together in a series of international congresses, which led to the creation in 1879 of an International Meteorological Organization. Run mainly by the directors of national weather services, the organization encouraged the spread of meteorological stations and the exchange of weather data. It made ceaseless efforts at standardization—there was limited value in exchanging data when different nations measured the temperature, for example, at different times of day. Since the organization had no official status in any nation and depended on voluntary and haphazard contributions, its efforts were often ignored. By the 1930s the leaders recognized their effort needed some sort of official status with governments, and they began to explore possible mechanisms (Edwards, 2010, 51–9).

Meanwhile, scientists who were interested in climate also met one another, along with specialists concerned with many other subjects of geophysical research, in an International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, which was established in 1919. It became known as IUGG—one of the first of countless acronyms that would infest everything geophysical and international. Specialties relevant to climate included meteorology, oceanography, and

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volcanology, each represented within IUGG by a semi-autonomous association. There were a number of similar unions that fostered cooperation among national academies and scientific societies, sponsoring a variety of committees and occasional grand international congresses, gathered under the umbrella of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). IUGG, along with an association of astronomers, was the first of these unions. Geophysicists needed international cooperation for their research more than most other scientists did (Greenaway, 1996, 48–50, passim). And oceanographers’ research expeditions could scarcely function without permission to resupply at foreign ports.

IUGG, with other groups in ICSU, organized sporadic programs of coordinated observations. The leading example was an International Polar Year (1932–33), carried out in cooperation with the International Meteorological Organization. Scientists arranged all these matters among themselves, involving diplomats only where absolutely necessary. In making their arrangements, they relied on a heritage of principles and practices for collaboration that the scientists had learned in the course of their education and socialization into the scientific community: Joint use of experimental facilities, discussion based on reason and data, respect for leaders who had established their credentials through important scientific publications, and so forth, all established during the nineteenth century or earlier.

None of these organizations did much to advance research on climate. Up through the mid-twentieth century, climatology was mainly a study of regional phenomena. The climate in a given region was believed to be set by the sunlight at the particular latitude, along with the configuration of nearby mountain ranges and ocean currents, with the rest of the planet scarcely involved. However, climatology textbooks did feature diagrams of the entire globe, divided into climate zones by temperature and rainfall. Hopes for a fundamental science of climate pushed climatologists toward a global perspective, as they drew on data compiled by people of many nationalities.

World War II greatly increased the demand for international cooperation in science and not only toward military ends. Some of those who worked for cooperation hoped to bind peoples together by invoking interests that transcended the self-serving nationalism that had brought so much horror and death. When the Cold War began, it only strengthened the movement. If tens of millions had recently been slaughtered, nuclear arms could slay hundreds of millions. Creating areas where cooperation could flourish seemed essential. Science, with its long tradition of internationalism, offered some of the best opportunities.

Fostering transnational scientific links became an explicit policy for many of the world’s democratic governments, not least the United States. It was not just that gathering knowledge gave a handy excuse for creating international organizations. Beyond that, the ideals and methods of scientists, their open communication, and their reliance on objective facts and consensus rather than command would reinforce the ideals and methods of democracy. As political scientist Clark Miller (2001, 171, passim) has explained, American foreign policymakers believed the scientific enterprise was “intertwined with the pursuit of a free, stable, and prosperous world order.” Scientists themselves were still more strongly committed to the virtues of cooperation. For some, like oceanographers, international exchanges of information were simply indispensable for the pursuit of their studies. To many, the free

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association of colleagues across national boundaries meant yet more: It meant advancing the causes of universal truth and world peace (e.g., Hamblin 2002, 14).

Study of the global atmosphere seemed a natural place to start. In 1947, a world meteorological convention, arranged in Washington, D.C., explicitly made the meteorological enterprise an “intergovernmental” affair—that is, one to which each nation appointed an official representative. In 1951, the International Meteorological Organization was succeeded by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), an association of national weather services. The WMO soon became an agency of the United Nations. That gave meteorological groups access to important organizational and financial support and brought them a new authority and stature.

All the organizational work for weather prediction did little to connect the scattered specialists in diverse fields who took an interest in climate change. A better chance came in the mid 1950s, when a small band of scientists got together to push international cooperation to a higher level in all areas of geophysics. They aimed to coordinate their data gathering and— no less important—to persuade their governments to spend an extra billion or so dollars on research. The result was the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–58.

IGY with its unprecedented funding was energized by a mixture of altruistic hopes and hard practical goals. Scientists expected in the first place to advance their collective knowledge and their individual careers. The government officials, who supplied the money, while not indifferent to pure scientific discovery, expected the new knowledge would have civilian and military applications. The U.S. and Soviet governments further hoped to win practical advantages in their Cold War competition. It is a moot question whether, in a more tranquil world, governments would have spent so much to learn about seawater and air around the globe. For whatever motives, the result was a coordinated effort involving several thousand scientists from sixty-seven nations (Needell, 2000, ch. 11; Greenaway, 1996, ch. 12).

Climate change ranked low on the list of IGY priorities. IGY’s official reports scarcely noticed many meteorological subjects, for example computer modeling. With such a big sum of new money, there was bound to be something for topics that happened to be related to climate. Highly important work was done under IGY auspices on projects from drilling cores of ancient ice to measuring the level of carbon dioxide gas (CO2) in the atmosphere. No less important, the task of spending all that IGY money appropriately pushed meteorologists, oceanographers, and other earth scientists to coordinate their work, at both the national and international levels, to an extent that had been sadly missing until then. The field of geophysics rose to a new level of strength and cohesion as an international community. This community as a whole constituted a sort of rudimentary international regime. For its effectiveness, it not only relied on procedures long established in the scientific community but was also busily engaged in elaborating and codifying procedures for its specific needs.

The effort still fell far short of gathering the kind of data from around the globe that would be needed to understand the atmosphere well. For example, even at the peak of IGY there was only one station reporting upper-level winds for a swath of the South Pacific Ocean fifty degrees wide—one-seventh of the earth’s circumference (Lorenz, 1967, 26, 33, 90–91, ch. 5). The lack of data posed insuperable problems for atmospheric scientists, in particular

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those who hoped to build computer models that could show a realistic climate, or even just predict weather a few days ahead.

Conversations among mid-level officials, and a 1961 report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, brought the problem to the attention of the U.S. government.

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 1961, President John F. Kennedy called for “cooperative efforts between all nations in weather prediction and eventually in weather control.” The president mentioned that one result would be “a better understanding of the processes that determine the system of world climate,” but the primary goal he offered was the traditional one, improved weather predictions (Edwards, 2010, 223; Kennedy, 1961).

The first step would be worldwide gathering and exchange of data. WMO eagerly took up the proposal, quickly organizing a world weather watch using the new satellites as well as traditional balloons and so forth. The watch has continued down to the present as the core WMO activity. It has served weather forecasters everywhere, scarcely impeded by the Cold War and other international conflicts—a striking demonstration of how science can transcend nationalism (even if the original motives included a strong nationalist component).

Among the most important, and most obscure, jobs of the meteorologists was to agree on standards for exchanging data: How many times a day should a station measure the wind, for example, and at what times, and exactly how? As the historian of science Edwards (2004, 2010) has pointed out, imposing standards meant overcoming formidable obstacles, ranging from perceived national interests and diverging legal requirements to the cost of new instrumentation and sheer bureaucratic inertia. The standardization gradually achieved by the world weather watch capped more than a century of difficult negotiations and formed the seldom appreciated but essential foundation for everything that the world’s scientists would eventually be able to say about climate change. A simple statement like, “2010 was globally the warmest year on record” hid within it the lifework of hundreds of specialists and hundreds of thousands of meticulous observers.

The world weather watch and WMO had reached the status of an international regime.

Indeed, they are paradigmatic of such regimes, prominent among the examples that Ruggie (1975: 570–72) gave in his classic paper on the need to restructure international institutions to deal with the ever greater scope of scientific and technological developments. In defining the term “international regime [as] a set of mutual expectations, rules and regulations, plans, organizational energies, and financial commitments, which have been accepted by a group of states,” Ruggie highlighted the system of national weather bureaus exercising their capabilities “in accordance with a collectively defined and agreed-to plan and implementation program.”

WMO was effective because it did tie together preexisting national systems by negotiating consensual technical standards and guidelines for communication. As Edwards pointed out, “It marked the successful transfer of standard-setting and coordinating powers from national weather services to a permanent, globalist intergovernmental organization . . . a genuinely global infrastructure.” What made for this success in binding the national agencies was not a hierarchical authoritarian control, but norms for behavior and rules of procedure that already had been worked out within the scientific community (Edwards, 2010, 242, 250). The elaborate structure of committees, making their decisions largely by consensus, and the exchanges of increasingly

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standardized data could never have functioned if scientists had not long been familiar with such committees and exchanges in their everyday work at their home institutions, down to the individual university department or government agency.

Meanwhile ICSU, determined not to be left out, decided to join WMO in organizing global meteorological research. As a union of independent, mostly academic, scientific groups, ICSU often took a different view of affairs than WMO, a UN-administered confederation of governmental agencies. Their negotiations were ponderous and sometimes frustrating.

Nevertheless, in 1967 the two organizations managed to set up a Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP). The program’s primary goal was better weather forecasting, but the organizers, with an eye on the steadily rising curve of atmospheric CO2, meant to study climate too.

The organization was inevitably complex. An international committee of scientists would set policy, helped by a small full-time planning staff in Geneva. Panels of specialists would design individual projects, while boards of government representatives would arrange for funding and other support. Also necessary was an additional layer: national panels to guide the participation by each individual nation (for the U.S., the group was appointed by the National Academy of Sciences).

Already by 1973 the observing system for GARP and the world weather watch was in place, seven satellites—four of them built by the U.S.—and one each by the SU, the European Space Agency, and Japan. Evidently the organizational complexities were not a hindrance but an advantage, at least in the hands of people who knew how to work the system (Edwards, 2004; Fleagle, 2001, 57, 97; Perry, 1975, 661; Conway, 2008).

The chair of GARP’s organizing committee during its crucial formative years (1964–71) was Swedish meteorologist, Bert Bolin. He had started his career working in Chicago on the arcane mathematics of atmospheric circulation and won a high reputation by devising equations for weather prediction computers in Princeton and back in Stockholm. As the importance of the greenhouse effect came into view, he became an expert on the chemical and biological operations of CO2. Yet it was less for his wide-ranging scientific savvy that Bolin was chosen to organize GARP than for his unusual ability to communicate and inspire people. It helped that he was based in traditionally neutral Sweden, but it was more important that, as one colleague put it, Bolin was “a brilliant and honest scientist, who listened to and respected diverse views.” Self-effacing and soft-spoken, as Bolin developed his diplomatic skills, he would become the mainstay of international climate organizing efforts, culminating in his service as the first chair of the IPCC from 1988 to 1997.2 For the purposes of this article, Bolin may be seen as a living embodiment of the long-standing norms of the scientific community, in particular, a commitment to seeking consensus through extended, fact-based, rational discussion.

Among Bolin’s difficult tasks was getting people not only from different countries but from different geophysics fields to find a common language. The central activity of GARP was coordinating international research projects, which gathered specialized sets of data on a global scale, complementing the routine record-keeping of the world weather watch. The 2. The key organizing committee was the Committee on Atmospheric Sciences; Bolin became chair of GARP itself in 1967. See Bolin (2007, 20–23). Short biographies and obituaries of Bolin may be found on the Internet; the quote is from Watson (2008).

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process was never straightforward. Great heaps of raw data are meaningless in themselves but must be standardized by elaborate processing using methods that are themselves subject to lengthy discussion and negotiation (Edwards, 2010).

Although GARP included research on climate, it was aimed more at meteorology. Global climate, one scientist recalled “was considered a very subordinate field compared with synoptic forecasting, atmospheric research, and so forth.” Some even questioned whether WMO should work in climatology at all (Taba, 1991, 106). In the late 1960s, an environmental movement was everywhere on the rise, and officials could no longer ignore global changes. As a first step in 1969, WMO’s commission for climatology established a working group on climate forecasts. Meanwhile, WMO passed a resolution calling for global monitoring of climate and atmospheric pollutants, including CO2. Climate was also among the many topics addressed by a Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE), established by ICSU officials in 1969 as an international framework for collecting environmental data and for related research. The SCOPE committee, aware of the CO2 greenhouse problem, promoted the first extensive studies of how carbon passes through bio-geochemical systems (Greenaway, 1996, 1761–82).

Approaches to Policy Advice Climate scientists met one another in an increasing number of scientific meetings, from cozy workshops to swarming conferences. Such meetings had a long heritage in more narrow scientific disciplines. They could be carried to a successful conclusion—such as the traditional issuance of some sort of consensus statement at the close—only because scientists already understood, from generations of experience, effective ways to organize and conduct such meetings.

The first significant conferences where scientists discussed climate change included the topic as just one of several “Global Effects of Environmental Pollution,” to quote the title of a two-day symposium held in Dallas, Texas in 1968 (Singer, 1970). This pathbreaking symposium was followed by a month-long “Study of Critical Environmental Problems” (SCEP) organized at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. All but one of the participants at MIT were residents of the U.S., and some felt that environmental issues demanded a more multinational approach, particularly to meet the need for standardized global research programs. This led directly to a second, more comprehensive gathering of experts from fourteen nations in Stockholm in 1971, funded by an assortment of private and government sources. The Stockholm meeting focused specifically on climate change—a “Study of Man’s Impact on Climate,” SMIC (Barrett and Landsberg, 1975, 16; SCEP, 1970; Matthews et al., 1971; Wilson and Matthews, 1971). Breaking away from the environmental movement’s usual local and regional concerns to focus on global problems, the lengthy SCEP and SMIC meetings were “bonding experiences as well as opportunities for scientific exchange” (Edwards 2010, 361).

The exhaustive SMIC discussions failed to work out a consensus: Some scientists believed greenhouse gases were warming the earth, others suspected pollution from particles was cooling it. Nevertheless, all agreed in issuing a report with stern warnings about the risk of severe climate change. The climate could shift dangerously “in the next hundred

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years,” the scientists declared, and “as a result of man’s activities” (Wilson and Matthews, 1971, 125–29). What should be done? Like almost all scientists at the time, SMIC experts mainly called for more research, to determine how serious the problem really was. They recommended a major international program to monitor the environment, much larger and better integrated than the scattered efforts of the time, as well as more research with computer models and so forth.

The SMIC meeting had been organized specifically to prepare for a pioneering UN conference on the human environment that was held the following year, again in Stockholm.

The SMIC Report was “required reading” for the delegates (Kellogg and Schneider, 1974, 121; see Kellogg, 1987 and for government-level negotiations in general, Brenton, 1994).

Heeding the report’s recommendations, along with voices from many directions calling attention to other global problems, the UN conference set in motion a vigorous new United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). From this point forward, gathering data and other research on the climate was a concern—although only one among many—of the UN’s environmental activities (Hart and Victor, 1993, 662; Fleagle, 1994, 174).

Meanwhile, the GARP committee set up a series of internationally coordinated large-scale observations of the oceans and atmosphere. As usual, the main goal was improved short-term weather prediction, but as usual, the findings could also be useful for climate studies. The pilot project was named the GARP Atlantic Tropical Experiment (GATE, an acronym containing an acronym). The aim of the exercise was to understand the enormous transport of moisture and heat from tropical oceans into the atmosphere wherever cumulus clouds billowed up. As one participant boasted, GATE was “the largest and most complex international scientific undertaking yet attempted.” In summer 1974, a dozen aircraft and forty research ships from twenty nations made measurements across a large swath of the tropical Atlantic Ocean, along with a satellite launched specially to linger overhead (Robinson, 1967; Fleagle, 1994, 170–73; GARP, 1975; Perry, 1975, quote at 663). Increasingly in such studies, not only would one find teams from different nations cooperating, but also the individual members within a single team might come from a half dozen nations. This was possible, of course, because of the traditional norms and procedures of international exchange (in particular, studying and teaching at foreign universities) that had prevailed among scientists for centuries.

Meanwhile, the world public’s climate anxieties were jumping higher as savage droughts and other weather disasters struck several important regions. The WMO secretarygeneral took note in 1975 of “the many references to the possible impacts of climatic changes on world food production and other human activities at various international meetings,” including both a special session of the UN General Assembly and a World Food Conference in 1974. WMO resolved to take the lead in this newly prominent field, organizing an increased number of conferences and working groups on climate change.

GARP planners decided to give additional stress to climate research, making what one leader called a “belated, though earnest, and sincere” effort to bring in oceanographers and polar researchers (WMO, 1975, ix; Perry, 1975, 66–7).

If we pause to consider the state of affairs in the early 1970s, we see a rudimentary international regime in climate studies, comprised of components of various intergovernmental

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organizations, ad hoc conferences, and research programs such as GATE. From various platforms this regime was already making a consensus statement about the nature of the world: Climate change caused by humans might be a serious problem for the future. However tentative and vague, this consensus led to a consensus on clear policy advice: More money and organizational effort should be devoted to climate research. That advice did not infringe on established political or economic interests, and it was taken up with little controversy.

Through all this, climate scientists had little direct access to policy-makers. If they convinced their contacts among lower-level officials that climate change posed a risk, these officials themselves had scant influence with the higher reaches of their governments. The best opportunities lay elsewhere. As one scholar commented, “national research had in many countries a better chance of influencing international policy than domestic policy” (Nolin, 1999, 138). By the mid 1970s, when science officials in various countries became so concerned about climate change that they began to contemplate policy actions, they found sympathetic ears among officials in UN organizations. One notable example was Robert M. White, who in his position as head of the U.S. weather bureau, and afterward of the agency responsible for all government meteorology and oceanography (NOAA), was his nation’s official representative to WMO. Already in the early 1960s, Bob White had been one of the founders of the world weather watch. Now in all his official capacities he pressed for cooperative research on climate change, using American government commitments to influence WMO and vice versa.

Scientists’ demands for action led to a 1978 International Workshop on Climate Issues, held under WMO and ICSU auspices in Vienna, where the participants organized a pioneering World Climate Conference. Their mode of organization was crucial, setting a standard for many later efforts. Participation was by invitation, mostly scientists and some government officials. Well in advance, the conference organizers commissioned a set of review papers inspecting the state of climate science. These were circulated, discussed, and revised. Then more than three hundred experts from more than fifty countries convened in Geneva in 1979 to examine the review papers and recommend conclusions. The experts’ views were diverse, and they managed to reach a consensus only that there was a “serious concern that the continued expansion of man’s activities”—including in particular emissions of CO2— “may cause significant extended regional and even global changes of climate.” Effects might become visible by the end of the century, so governments should start preparing for “significant social and technological readjustments” along with sponsoring more research (WMO, 1979, 1–2). This cautious statement about an eventual “possibility” was scarcely news, and it caught little attention.

Conferences and other international bodies shied away from any statement that might seem partisan. Scientific societies since their outset (in particular, the foundation of the Royal Society of London in the seventeenth century) had explicitly held themselves apart from politics. This tradition was doubly strong in international science associations, which could not hope to keep cooperation going if they published anything but facts that all agreed upon. Every word of key statements was negotiated, sometimes at great length.

When journalists at a press conference after SCOPE issued a report asked a leader of the work what he thought governments should do, he replied, “They should read the report.”

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When the journalists said, “Okay, but what next?” he replied, “They should read it again” (Greenaway, 1996, 179, quoting F. Warner).

The most influential work of those who attended the 1978 Vienna conference was structural.

Besides organizing the 1979 Geneva meeting, they called for a climate program established in its own right, to replace the miscellaneous collection of uncoordinated “meteorological” studies. The government representatives in WMO and the scientific leaders in ICSU took the advice and in 1979 launched a World Climate Programme (WCP) with various branches.

These branches included groups that coordinated routine global data-gathering, plus a World Climate Research Programme (WCRP).

WCRP was the successor to the portion of GARP that had been concerned with climate change. It inherited GARP’s organization and logistics, including WMO administrative support plus its own small staff, and an independent scientific planning committee (Thompson et al., 2001; Jäger, 1992, iii; Fleagle, 1994, 176; Lanchbery and Victor, 1995, 31). As in GARP, the new organization’s main task was planning complex international research projects. For example, under WCRP an International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project collected streams of raw data from the weather satellites of several nations, channeling the data through a variety of government and university groups for processing and analysis. The vast data sets were stored in a central archive, managed by a U.S. government agency.

Up to this point, the U.S. had dominated climate discussions (as it dominated most scientific affairs), while the rest of the world’s advanced nations were digging out of the ruins of the World War II. But now that the other economies and research establishments had recovered, international exchanges became crucial. The driving force, as one observer remarked, was “a small group of ‘entrepreneurs,’ who promoted what they viewed as global rather than national interests.” Blurring the distinction between government officials and nongovernmental actors, they organized a series of quasi-official international meetings, which were increasingly influential (Bodansky, 1997, quote at section 4.1.6). Some of the meetings were formally sponsored by WMO others by ICSU or UNEP. The most important initiative was a series of invitational meetings for meteorologists sponsored by all three organizations, with particular impetus from UNEP’s farsighted director, the Egyptian Mostafa Tolba. Beginning in 1980, the meetings gathered scientists for intense discussions in Villach, a quiet town in the Austrian Alps. A historic turning point was the 1985 Villach conference, where experts from twenty-nine countries both rich and poor, representing a variety of widely separated fields, exchanged knowledge and argued over ideas. By the end of the meeting, they had formed a prototype of an international climate science community—a community with a firm consensus. From their review of the evidence that had accumulated in the past half-dozen years, the Villach scientists agreed that greenhouse gases could warm the earth by several degrees, with grave consequences. And this was not a matter for some future century, the harm would begin within their own lifetimes.3 It was Bolin who wrote the five-hundred-page report of the Villach conference, quietly translating the group’s scientific findings into a bold warning: “In the first half of the next century a rise of global mean temperature could occur which is greater than any in man’s 3. On Villach see Franz (1997), quote (by J.P. Bruce) at 16; see also Pearce (2005), Pearce (2010, 34–7).”Statement by the UNEP/WMO/ ICSU International Conference,” preface to Bolin et al. (1986, xx–xxi).

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history.” As usual, the scientists called for more research. The report also took a more activist stance than scientists had normally taken. Brought together as individual researchers in their personal capacities, with no official governmental responsibilities, they felt free to respond to the alarming conclusions that emerged from their discussions. In their concluding statement, the Villach group pointed out that governments made many policies (building dams and dikes, managing farmlands and forests, etc.) under the assumption that the climate would be the same in the future as in the past. That was no longer a sound approach. Indeed, the prospect of climate change demanded more than a passive response. Pointing out “the rate and degree of future warming could be profoundly affected by governmental policies,” the Villach report called on governments to consider positive actions, even a “global convention” to prevent too much global warming. Climate science, in short, was no longer just a matter for scientists (Bolin et al., 1986, xx–xxi).

The press took no notice, but Bolin, Tolba, and others made sure that the Villach recommendations came to the attention of the international scientific leadership. As a practical result, in 1986, WMO, UNEP, and ICSU jointly established an Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases (AGGG). It was a small, elite committee of experts. For funding and advice, it relied largely on individual scientists and environmental organizations that were already advocating policies to restrain climate change. AGGG organized international workshops and promoted studies, aiming eventually to stimulate further world conferences. In particular, a workshop in Bellagio, Italy, in 1987 included among its two dozen participants not only scientists but politicians and policy experts. They took a first stab at policy by proposing a target: The world should not warm up faster than 0.1degree Celsius per decade. Some of those present began to lay plans for a major conference to be held the following year in Toronto (Agrawala, 1999a, 1999b).

Sponsored by UNEP and WMO plus the government of Canada, the 1988 “World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security,” nicknamed the Toronto Conference, was another meeting by invitation dominated by scientist experts, not official government representatives, who would have had a much harder time reaching a consensus (there were a few ministers among the threehundred attendees, but most countries were represented by relatively junior people with no authority). The participants were further emboldened by a conference held in Montreal in 1987 that had succeeded in negotiating a protocol for restricting emissions harmful to the planet’s protective ozone layer. The Toronto Conference’s report concluded that changes in the atmosphere due to human pollution “represent a major threat to international security and are already having harmful consequences over many parts of the globe.” For the first time, a group of prestigious scientists called on the world’s governments to set strict, specific targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Immediate action was needed, they said, to negotiate an “international framework convention” as a condition for national legislation. That was the Montreal Protocol model: Set targets internationally, and let governments come up with their own policies to meet the targets. Some participants did not wish to step beyond strictly scientific findings into the realm of politics, but the conference set these hesitations aside: Their report declared that by 2005 the world should push its emissions some 20 percent below the 1988 level. Observers hailed the setting of this goal as a major accomplishment, if only as

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a marker to judge how governments responded (it would turn out that in 2005 the world’s emissions were well above the 1988 level).4 These UN-sponsored efforts were only one strand, although the central one, in a tangle of national, bilateral, and multinational initiatives, governmental and nongovernmental (see e.g., Pomerance, 1989, 265–67). Countless organizations were now seeking to be part of the climate action. Of course, none of this work was actually done by abstract “organizations.” It was made to happen by a few human beings. Among these Bert Bolin was the indispensable man, chairing meetings, editing reports, and promoting the establishment of panels.

The Research Enterprise Transformed While some scientists and officials tentatively proposed policy changes, many more were pushing for better international research projects. Although ICSU’s SCOPE program had produced some useful work, such as reports on the global carbon cycle, that was barely a beginning (Bolin et al., 1979; Bolin, 1981). WCRP’s work was likewise useful, but as an organization under the supervision of WMO (which is to say, the heads of national weather services), WCRP was naturally preoccupied with meteorology. All this was too narrow for the scientists who were taking up the new “climate system” approach, which was building connections among geophysics, chemistry, and biology. They decided they needed a new administrative body.

Spurred especially by U.S. scientists acting through their National Academy of Sciences, around 1983, various organizations came together under ICSU to develop the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP). Starting up in 1986, IGBP built its own large structure of committees, panels, and working groups (National Academy of Sciences, 1986; International Council of Scientific Unions, 1986; Fleagle, 1994, 195). The drawback, as one climate scientist pointed out, was a feeling that “an IGBP should be in the business of measuring or modeling everything at once from the mantle of the earth to the center of the sun!” Pressed to study many immediate environmental concerns, IGBP did not put climate change high on its list of priorities (Bolin, 2007, 39; quote: Schneider, 1987, 215).

WCRP remained active in its sphere, launching international collaborations in meteorology and related oceanography. Like IGBP and other international scientific programs, WCRP had no significant funds of its own. It was a locus of panels, workshops, draft reports, and above all, negotiations. Scientists would hammer out an agreement on the research topics that should get the most attention over the next five or ten years, and who should study which problem in collaboration with whom. The scientists would then go back to their respective governments, backed by the international consensus, to beg for funds for the specific projects.

In each case one of the organizers’ first tasks was to find a meaningful and pronounceable acronym—a mode of naming emblematic of organizations with distinct if transient identities, stuck together from independent components. The first great effort had been what is sometimes called the largest scientific experiment ever conducted: The First GARP Global Experiment, FGGE (pronounced “figgy”). During 1978 to 1979, large numbers of aircraft, drifting buoys, ships, balloons, and satellites made observations with the participation of some 140 nations. It took several years to process the data, but the result was standardized weather numbers covering 4. WMO (1989); Lanchbery and Victor (1995, 31–2); Bolin (2007, 48); Jäger (1992, v); Agrawala (1999b,115–16).

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the entire globe in a uniform grid through the course of an entire year—exactly what computer teams needed as a reality check for their climate models (Edwards, 2010, 244–46, 250).

Other important examples of projects that gathered data internationally were the Tropical Ocean and Global Atmosphere Programme (TOGA), the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE), and the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS, which surveyed the carbon in the world’s oceans). Scheduled to run through the mid 1990s, these were complex institutions, coordinating the work of hundreds of scientists and support staff from a variety of institutions in dozens of nations under the auspices of WCRP. Climate theory, as embodied in ever more elaborate supercomputer models, was not exempt from these trends. Now that there were uniform bodies of real-world data, it was possible to compare how well different models performed in their attempts at simulating the climate. One pioneering effort, completed in 1989, brought together twenty team leaders at thirteen institutions—each with its own computer model—in seven nations from Canada to China (Cess et al., 1989, 890). (A subsequent effort in the early 1990s involved more than twice as many models.) The crucial product of this and similar efforts would be a paper of a few pages in a leading journal such as Nature or Science. Each of the authors, twenty in this case, had to sign off on the article, so there were intense negotiations over wording.

Once consensus was achieved, the paper still had to win approval from peer reviewers and editors, which usually entailed additional negotiations over wording. For most such projects the result was not, as so often in documents that required a consensus of diplomats, a cloud of ambiguous generalities, it was a tightly worded array of definite statements, ranging from specific to general.

The success of such publications in reaching definite factual conclusions was the essential foundation for any later success that international bodies might achieve in arriving at general factual statements and policy advice. (The IPCC’s reports, in particular, would explicitly stand upon thousands of footnoted references to the scientific literature.) Of course, all this relied utterly on the principles and practices of peer review that had been developed by editors of scientific journals and their communities, mainly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but with continued discussion and refinements down to the present day.

Projects with multiple contributors were becoming common in all the sciences, a consequence of the increasing specialization within each discipline plus increasing value in making connections between disciplines.5 Versatile scientists like Bert Bolin, who had mastered fields ranging from the mathematics of atmospheric circulation to the geochemistry of CO2, were a vanishing breed. In one large historical bibliography of climate science (Weart, 2010), nearly all the papers written before 1940 were published under a single name and only a few were the work of two authors. Of papers written in the 1980s, fewer than half had one author. Many of the rest had more than two, and a paper listing, say, seven authors was no longer extraordinary. The trend would continue through the 1990s as single-author papers became increasingly rare.

Some of the projects were explicitly interdisciplinary. For example, in the late 1970s, specialists in computer modeling got together with paleontologists—one could hardly imagine 5. For a variety of studies of multi-institutional scientific collaborations and their governance see the reports of the American Institute of Physics Center for History of Physics, online http://www.aip.org/history/publications.html.

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two types of scientific discipline that were more unlike—to test whether the models were robust enough to simulate a climate different from the present one. The Cooperative Holocene Mapping Project (COHMAP) expanded through the 1980s, recruiting a variety of domestic and foreign collaborators. Some of them would devote most of their research careers to the project. Typical of such projects, all the collaborators would convene from time to time in large assemblies run on republican principles. These principles were not entirely “democratic” in the sense of universal equality: Equal rights in decision-making were restricted to an elite group of acknowledged leaders. These leaders would gather in smaller meetings, “Often hosted in home settings where conversations were unhurried and brainstorming was lively” (Webb, 2007, 107).

In these face-to-face meetings as well as in countless interactions through mail, telephone, and publications, computer models confronted paleontological data in a continual dialogue, each discrepancy forcing one side or the other to go back and do better. Ultimately, the modelers produced a good simulation of the global climate data that the paleontologists worked up for a warm period eight thousand years ago.

Two scientists described the developments of the 1980s as a “revolution” in the social structure of climate science. The field was propelled to a new level not only by great improvements in scientific tools such as computers and satellites but equally by great improvements in international networking thanks to cheap air travel and telecommunications. “Huge teams of highly skilled people can review each other’s work, perform integrated assessments, and generate ideas” far better than the mostly isolated individuals of earlier decades, they pointed out. “A steady diet of fresh scientific perspectives helps to maintain regular doses of funding, helped in turn by an endless round of conferences” (O’Riordan and Jäger, 1996, 2).

Climate research nevertheless remained, comparatively, quite a small field of science.

Whereas any substantial sub-field of physics or chemistry counted its professionals in the thousands, the scientists dedicated full-time to research on the geophysics of climate change in the 1980s numbered only a few hundred worldwide.6 Since these climate scientists were divided among a great variety of fields, any given subject could muster only a handful of true experts. They knew each other well, by reputation and often personally.

What role could the small international climate science community play among the mighty political and economic forces that were coming to bear on climate policy? The existing scientific organizations, however well-crafted to coordinate research projects, seemed incapable of taking a stand in policy debates. As one knowledgeable observer put it, “Because WCRP was seen as largely the vehicle of physical scientists, while IGBP was viewed largely as the vehicle of scientists active in biogeochemical cycles, and because both WCRP and IGBP were seen as scientific research programs, neither seemed to afford the venue that could generate the necessary confidence in the scientific and policy communities” (Fleagle, 1994, 179). Events like the Toronto Conference were all very well, but a report issued after a brief meeting could not command much respect. And it did not commit any particular group to following up systematically.

The Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases (AGGG) set up in 1986 had served well in keeping the issue in the forefront through activities like the Toronto Conference. However, 6. Estimate of 200 to 300: Gee (1989). The IPCC study published in 1995, aiming at comprehensive international inclusion extending into the biological sciences and impact studies, had about five hundred “authors” plus more than five hundred “reviewers” who submitted suggestions.

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the group lacked the official status and connections that could give their recommendations force. Besides, they had little money to spend on studies. AGGG’s reliance on a few private foundations and its connections with outspoken environmentalists raised suspicions that the group’s recommendations were partisan. An even more fundamental drawback was the group’s structure. It was a tiny elite committee. This model had worked well for a century but was now rendered obsolete by the scope of the climate problem. As one policy expert explained, “Climate change spans an enormous array of disciplines, each with their own competing schools of thought. . . . Seven experts, even with impeccable credentials, . . . could not credibly serve as mouthpieces of all these communities” (Agrawala, 1999a, 166, see also Agrawala, 1999b).

Policy-makers concerned about climate looked for a way to supersede AGGG with a new kind of institution. The principal impetus came from the U.S. government, where the Environmental Protection Agency, the State Department, and others were pushing for an international convention to restrict greenhouse gases. Conservatives in the administration of President Ronald Reagan might have been expected to oppose the creation of a new and prestigious body to address climate change (the Department of Energy, which had its own climate studies underway, was particularly resistant). But the conservatives feared still more the strong environmentalist pronouncements that independent bodies of scientists were increasingly likely to issue, as seen at Villach and Toronto. The U.S. administration along with some other governments were also wary of control by WMO or any other body that was part of the UN structure. Better to form a new, fully independent group under the direct control of representatives appointed by each nation (Bolin, 2007, 47; Agrawala, 1999b, 176–77; Pearce, 2010, 38).

Responding to pressure from the U.S. and others, in 1988 WMO and UNEP collaborated in creating the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. AGGG was not formally abolished, but within two years that small body ceased to meet, as most of the world’s climate scientists were drawn into IPCC’s processes. IPCC was neither a strictly scientific nor a strictly political body but a unique hybrid. The political representatives, by virtue of the consensus rule, would hold veto power over every word of the summaries that were the essential product for policy-makers. But the scientists, represented by the lead authors of their reports, would also hold an effective veto by virtue of their prestige and unimpeachable expertise. Once a consensus was forged among all parties, it would not be questioned by any well-constituted and representative political or scientific body.

International Regimes and Democracy The roots of IPCC’s strength reached very deep. Most people were scarcely aware that IPCC, and virtually every other international initiative discussed here, relied on a key historical development: The worldwide advance of democracy. It is too easy to overlook the obvious fact that international organizations govern themselves in a republican fashion, with vigorous free debate among all members and votes in councils of elite leaders. Often, as in IPCC, decisions among the dozens or hundreds of elite leaders are made by a negotiated consensus in a spirit of equality, of mutual accommodation, and of commitment to the community process—all of which are seldom celebrated, but essential, components of the republican political culture

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(Weart, 1998, 61). Note also that majority voting is normally important in this political culture, but in many cases consensus is even more important.

It is an important historical fact that such international regimes have been created chiefly by governments that felt comfortable with such mechanisms at home, that is, democratic governments. Nations like Nazi Germany, Communist China, and the former SU did little to create international organizations (aside from front groups under their own thumb), and often participated in them awkwardly. Happily, in the second half of the twentieth century, nations under democratic governance became globally predominant. That encouraged the proliferation of international institutions that were democratic, or at any rate elite-based republican, exerting an ever stronger influence in world affairs (Weart, 1998, 262–67). The democratization of international relationships was the foundation upon which IPCC took its stand. If the world had been governed mainly by monarchies and tyrannies, where norms for decision-making were based strictly on power and hierarchy, such an institution could never have been created, let alone heeded.

These developments were visible in all areas of human endeavor, but often came first in science, internationally and democratically minded since its origins. Indeed, the procedures and norms of the scientific community are historically inextricable from the development of a cosmopolitan, egalitarian civil society (Nyhart and Broman, 2002). From the seventeenth century forward, a community of savants flourished in Europe and across the Atlantic, men and a few women who wrote letters to one another for public discussion, frequently on scientific subjects—a community named, for good reason, the “Republic of Letters.” And from the seventeenth century forward, it was scientists more than anyone who met as equals in specialized clubs and societies, often with foreign associates present. Week-by-week they hammered out rational understandings as they sought agreement on the validity of the latest theories and experiments. This spirit was taken up in the enlightenment salons, freemason lodges, and other venues where scientists and foreigners were welcomed and honored. These institutions played a central role in the wildfire spread of republicanism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Jacob, 2006, 41–4, 134; Jacob, 1991). In negotiating pronouncements on climate, scientists did not so much borrow procedures from modern democracy as collect on a loan they had made centuries earlier.

It worked both ways. The international organization of climate studies helped fulfill some of the hopes of those who, in the aftermath of World War II, had worked to build an open and cooperative world order. If IPCC was the outstanding example, in other areas, ranging from disease control to fisheries, panels of scientists were becoming a new voice in world affairs (Miller, 2001, esp. 212–13). Independent of nationalities, they wielded increasing power by claiming dominion over views about the actual state of the world— shaping perceptions of reality itself. Such a transnational scientific influence on policy matched dreams held by liberals since the eighteenth century. It awoke corresponding suspicions in the enemies of liberalism.

Looking back over this long history, we see a trajectory toward a greater willingness and ability to agree upon frank, objective, and significant factual statements, leading to clear policy advice that was explicit in the agenda to be pursued and the desirable outcome. This

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was success in terms of the purposes for which the regime was created. The success was made possible by the appropriation and arduous refinement and development of norms, rules, and procedures that originated in the larger scientific community, with deep connections to the principles and practices of republican governance.

In scope and potential consequence, nothing remotely like the IPCC ever existed before.

The founders of the International Meteorological Organization, farsighted though they were, could scarcely have imagined such a development. If the trajectory can be extended a few decades ahead, much that now seems out of the question might be negotiated into action.

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Bolin, Bert (2007). A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change: The Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Breitmeier, Helmut, Oran R. Young, and Michael Zürn (2006). Analyzing International Environmental Regimes: From Case Study to Database. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Gee, Henry (1989). “Government Must Spend,” Nature 342, 468.

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Hamblin, Jacob Darwin (2002). “The Navy’s ‘Sophisticated’ Pursuit of Science: Undersea Warfare, the Limits of Internationalism, and the Utility of Basic Research, 1945–56,” Isis 93, 1–27.

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International Council of Scientific Unions (1986). The International Geosphere Biosphere Programme: A Study of Global Change. Paris: ICSU. Jacob, Margaret C. (1991). Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jacob, Margaret C. (2006). Strangers Nowhere in the World. The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jäger, Jill (1992). “From Conference to Conference,” Climatic Change 20, iii–vii.

Kellogg, William W. (1987). “Mankind’s Impact on Climate: The Evolution of an Awareness,” Climatic Change 10, 113–36.

Kellogg, William W., and Stephen H. Schneider (1974). “Climate Stabilization: For Better or for Worse?”

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Kennedy, John F. (1961). Address before the General Assembly of the United Nations, 25 September 1961, online at http://www.jfklibrary.org/HistoricalResources/Archives/ReferenceDesk/Speeches/JFK/003P OF03UnitedNations09251961.htm.

Lanchbery, John and David Victor (1995). “The Role of Science in the Global Climate Negotiations,” in Helge Bergesen and Georg Parmann (Eds.), Green Globe Yearbook of International Cooperation on Environment and Development 1995 (pp. 29–39). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lorenz, Edward N. (1967). The Nature and Theory of the General Circulation of the Atmosphere. Geneva: World Meteorological Organization.

Matthews, William H., William W. Kellogg, and G. D. Robinson (Eds.) (1971). Man’s Impact on the Climate [Study of Critical Environmental Problems (SCEP) Report]. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Miller, Clark A. (2001). “Scientific Internationalism in American Foreign Policy: The Case of Meteorology, 1947–58,” in Clark A. Miller and Paul N. Edwards (Eds.), Changing the Atmosphere. Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (pp. 167–217). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

National Academy of Sciences (1986). Global Change in the Geosphere-Biosphere. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences.

Needell, Allan A. (2000). Science, Cold War and the American State. Lloyd V. Berkner and the Balance of Professional Ideals. Amsterdam, New York: Harwood Academic.

Nolin, Jan (1999). “Global Policy and National Research: The International Shaping of Climate Research in Four European Union Countries,” Minerva 37, 125–40.

Nyhart, Lynn K., and Thomas H. Broman (Eds.) (2002). Science and Civil Society (Osiris 2nd Ser.,17).

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O’Riordan, Tim, and Jill Jäger (1996). “The History of Climate Change Science and Politics,” in Tim O’Riordan and Jill Jäger (Eds.), Politics of Climate Change: A European Perspective (pp. 1–31).

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Pearce, Fred (2010). The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming. London: Guardian Books/Random House).

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Schneider, Stephen H. (1987). “An International Program on ‘Global Change’: Can It Endure?,” Climatic Change 10, 211–18.

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105-17). Madison, WI: Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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INSIDER’S VIEW Human Rights in the UN System Since the Demise of the Three Pillars Approach

by Dorota Gierycz, Webster University/CUNY/EPU1 During my UN career, working for gender analysis, human rights, and peace keeping offices, I often came across the contradiction between security demands and human rights requirements in the policies and practice of the organization. Recently, with the emergence of the concept of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), and its first official application in Libya, the issue is becoming particularly pressing. What is the role and place of the “human rights machinery” within the UN in implementing the concept and contributing to the protection of civilians?

How does the rights-based approach affect the Security Council’s debate and decisions. The article attempts to address some of these queries.

By exposing the weaknesses of the UN system and its inability to protect civilians against gross human rights violations, the tragedies of Srebrenica and Rwanda generated a discussion on how to prevent similar atrocities in the future. From my position as chief of the Gender Analysis Section in the Division for the Advancement of Women at the UN secretariat in New York, I followed, with horror, those events which entailed unprecedented gender-based violence, and observed the efforts of former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to mobilize the governments to undertake the steps necessary to protect effectively populations against such atrocities (United Nations 1999a, 1999b). The debate focused on two main questions: 1. How to protect populations against genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity if their own governments are not willing or not able to do so? How to prevent future Rwandas and Srebrenicas?

2. What kind of reform should be undertaken to ensure the UN, particularly its human rights machinery, lives up to expectations and fulfils its statutory role?

The first issue revolved around the interpretation of the concept of sovereignty (Deng et al. 1996, Annan 1999). What are the limits of state’s sovereignty vis-à-vis its own populations; or rather, what are the protection obligations of the international community, UN in particular, if the state is unable or unwilling to fulfil its protection obligations, or when it is violating them actively?

The second issue generated a discussion on the gap between the relative weight of human rights and security within the UN system. While the Security Council (SC) was tasked with 1. The opinions expressed in this article are solely of the author and are not necessarily shared in whole or in part by the United Nations Organization.

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addressing the threats to international peace and security, it was less clear what it should do about gross violations of human rights if they are not directly threatening to world peace, as was the case, for example, of Rwanda.

Although this was never officially admitted, “inside the UN walls” the sentiment was that member states perceived the events in the small African country as “local” and, therefore, not threatening to international peace and security. Thus, SC remained divided, unable and unwilling to make any decision. The key players feared that any decisive action might lead to sending their ground troops and the memories of the fate of American soldiers during the operation in Somalia were still fresh and discouraging. Although some human rights reports from Rwanda could have been used as an early warning or a call for action, the two realms of human rights and security remained separate2.

It was known at the UN and in the diplomatic community that Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who spearheaded these debates, felt morally responsible for the tragedies in Srebrenica and Rwanda that had occurred under his watch as the UN under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations.

With regard to sovereignty, I remember how strongly he supported various efforts aimed at reinterpreting the concept and creating a new mechanism to ensure the accountability of states to their citizens and the responsibility of the international community. I observed the conclusion of this debate at the UN World Summit in 2005 in New York which culminated with the adoption of the concept of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) by resolution A/60/1 of the UN General Assembly, by consensus on 24 October 2005. Although the result of a political compromise, the document contains provisions on the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity (para. 138–9)3. It explicitly states that each individual state has the responsibility to protect its populations from these atrocities, and that such protection entails prevention and the exercise of responsibility. The text further spells out obligations of the international community to “help states to exercise this responsibility” (para. 138) through the UN, using peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VII of the Charter, or collective action, in a timely and decisive manner through the Security Council, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations (para. 139). The provisions of the World Summit regarding the responsibility to protect were reaffirmed in UN Security Council resolutions 1674 (28 April 2006) on the protection of civilians in armed conflict and 1706 (31 August 2006).

2. The Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Arbitrary and Summary Executions alerted the international community to the forthcoming genocide in Rwanda (1993), albeit unsuccessfully.

3. United Nations (2005b) 2005 World Outcome, A/RES/60/1, 16 September.

Para. 138: Each individual state has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it. The international community should, as appropriate, encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility and support the UN in establishing an early warning capacity. Para. 139: The international community, through the UN, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian, and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VII of the Charter, to help to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to helping states build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.

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With regard to the second issue, Kofi Annan presented the idea of “three pillars” on which the work of the UN should be based. In his report “In larger freedom: towards development, security, and human rights for all” (A/59/2005), Annan stated that development, security, and human rights (i.e., the three pillars) are all imperative, interdependent, and mutually reinforcing, and that “we will not enjoy development without security, we will not enjoy security without development, and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights” (United Nations 2005a, para. 17). The report called for high level and sustainable UN engagement in human rights; a more active role for the high commissioner for human rights in the deliberations of the Security Council and of the proposed peace-building commission; and the incorporation of human rights into decision-making and discussion throughout the work of the organization (United Nations 2005a, para.144).

In my view, the “three pillar” concept constituted an unprecedented attempt to integrate human rights into the work of the UN on an equal footing with security and development and to provide the human rights machinery with conditions for operating in the mainstream of the UN activities, in close correlation with the Security Council. If implemented, that concept could have created the conditions for a consolidated, systemic UN approach to human rights in all their dimensions and included enacting of the provisions on the R2P. However, this was strongly opposed by the supporters of the traditional concept of “security,” perceived as the top priority for the organization, as well as the opponents of the protection of human rights and the perception that they are necessary for ensuring lasting peace. Indeed, the concept encountered firm resistance from some member states as well as some entities in the UN system fearing the loss of their traditional “turfs,” and so it was never formally considered.

UN Reform and the UN Human Rights Machinery Although the concept of “three pillars” has gradually faded away, some parts of the human rights machinery have benefited from some of its principles and have been considerably strengthened in the process of UN reform.

Some of the newly established entities do in fact bear the legacy of its philosophy. The Commission on Human Rights was converted into the Human Rights Council (HRC) in 2006, with a slightly revised mandate; the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (HCHR) gained more visible role and the activities of his/her office (OHCHR) were extended to the UN peace operations and field offices.

For many years, in my contacts with the then Commission on Human Rights (CHR) and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva, I have heard complaints from member states, human rights NGOs, and the public about the politicization of the commission’s work and selective targeting or praising of states. The east–west divide, replaced in the early nineties by the north–south divide has not made the work of the commission any easier. Moreover, a number of states with poor human rights records, including Libya (which ironically served as chair in 2003), Sudan, and Sierra Leone, had at various times been members of the CHR, which undermined its credibility. This concern was reflected in the report of the UN’s “High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change” stating:

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Standard-setting to reinforce human rights cannot be performed by states that lack a demonstrated commitment to their promotion and protection. We are concerned that in recent years states have sought membership . . . not to strengthen human rights but to protect themselves against criticism. (United Nations, 2004).

In addition to having elections that made it possible for human rights violators to come on board, the body came under further criticism for its short annual meeting times, too numerous membership, its inability to call emergency sessions and respond to gross human rights violations, and its overall inefficiency (Lauren 2007, Alston 2006, Annan 2005).

It is difficult to assess the impact of the reform on the performance of the human rights machinery. Though I do believe that would require a comprehensive evaluation by an independent board, here I outline some elements of my personal, insiderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s opinion on this matter.

The Human Rights Council (HRC) In establishing HRC in June 2006, as the successor to the Commission on Human Rights, the General Assembly (Resolution A/60/251, 15 March 2006) mandated the council to serve as the forum for dialogue on human rights protection and promotion with the primary task of preventing human rights violations and responding to human rights emergencies, with additional monitoring and advisory functions (see Ramcharan 2008).

What has changed in HRCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work in comparison to its predecessor? It should be clear that some elements of continuity remained, such as the critical role in establishing human rights standards4 and the overall substance of the complaints procedure.5 Moreover, HRC continued to make use of special procedures: Ad hoc mandates given to individuals or working groups to study cases and patterns of rights abuses. Special procedures, with both thematic mandates looking at categories of rights (for example, torture, summary executions) and country-specific mandates (i.e., Liberia) constitute another opportunity to bring to the attention of the council gross violations of human rights or thematic areas of structured discrimination and violence. The special rapporteurs, in particular in such areas as torture, extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, and violence against women, are particularly well placed to assess the facts on the ground and suggest means of prevention or action. Special procedures allow for mandate holders to visit the countries, engage in dialogue with respective governments, make public statements on the issues, collect data, request factfinding on the ground, denounce violators, and demand an emergency session of the council.

The shortcoming of the procedure is that the country visits require an invitation, or at least consent of the host country, and the council has the last word in appointments of special rapporteurs and extension of their mandates. Thus, those who antagonize the member states have low chances for being reappointed. That, however, is the shortcoming of all elective governmental bodies, including HRC and the human rights treaty bodies.

4. Since its establishment in 1946, the CHRâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most notable achievements were the elaboration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948); the International Covenant on Economic, Social and, Cultural Rights (CESCR, 1966); and the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights (CPCR, 1966); which together with the two Optional Protocols to the CCPR constitute the International Bill of Human Rights. It also played important role in assisting in elaboration of other human rights treaties and supporting their monitoring mechanisms.

5. The commission implemented mechanisms to allow for the discussion of human rights violations. The 1,235 procedure allowed for public discussion of a pattern of rights violations in a state, while the 1,503 mechanism gave an avenue for individuals and NGOs to make confidential (though not anonymous) complaints about patterns of rights abuses in a particular country or region.

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However, HRC differs from its predecessor in various ways, which I find to have both positive and negative effects: First, the time allocated to its work was significantly expanded to no fewer than three sessions per year for a total duration of no less than ten weeks (para. 10), with the possibility of holding special sessions in addition, if supported by one-third of the council’s membership.

Second, its membership was slightly reduced from fifty-three to forty-seven. Although its members are elected by secret ballot, directly by the GA’s majority vote, the strict distribution of the number of seats among all regional groups leaves to their discretion, whose candidacy they put forward for voting. That, in my view, along with the lack of tangible criteria of what human rights record is required from the candidate-states, does not ensure a qualitative change in the composition of HRC, compared to its predecessor. Since its creation in 2006, such countries as Libya, Egypt, Sri Lanka, and Saudi Arabia were and/or are its members.

The only requirement stated in the GA res. 60/251 in this respect is the reference that in electing council’s members their contribution to the protection and promotion of human rights and their voluntary pledges should be taken into account; further, if the member of HRC commits “gross systemic violations of human rights” (para. 8) the GA can by the same procedure suspend it from the council. To the credit of the council, this provision has been applied to Libya by the adoption of a precedent-setting resolution A/HRC/Res/S-15/1, on 25 February 2011.

Third, the council’s increased ability to respond to gross human rights violations constitutes its major and unprecedented achievement. That, however, would not be possible without strong leadership of the UNHCHR, assisted by the office with staff spread across the globe.

Lastly, was the introduction of a Universal Periodic Review (UPR), which was rightly considered an important positive change in the work of HRC. Because the main criticism levied against CHR had been its politicization and lack of clear criteria of membership and performance, it was unsurprising that one of the first acts of the Human Rights Council was to establish a mechanism that would allow for a more objective, comprehensive review of the human rights situation in all UN states called the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). The review takes place every four years according to the following procedure.

The country under review submits its report; other “stakeholders,” including NGOs and other member states, provide relevant information to be summarized by the office of the high commissioner for human rights in a ten-page report. Subsequently, the UPR working group, consisting of the HRC members, engages in a dialogue with the country under review, other UN member states who choose to attend the review, and other speakers, including NGOs and members of the secretariat, eligible to attend the meeting. A troika of three states selected from HRC by the drawing of lots serve as rapporteurs who manage the review session (limited to three hours, the first portion of which is reserved for the state under review to make its presentation) and prepare the outcome document that includes a series of recommendations to the state under review. The state has the opportunity to accept or reject the recommendations; the recommendations and the responses are to be included in the final report (OHCHR, 2008).

Although UPR is generally considered the biggest achievement of the reform, the results seem to be mixed, and we should not rush to judgment. On the positive side, it could be noted

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that all countries have gone, by now, through the review and that it provided comprehensive material on all aspects of human rights in these countries creating solid bases for the comprehensive discussion. Some countries have taken the process seriously, while others have been less concerned or tried to manipulate it. Such practices as mobilizing friendly speakers and “regional” solidarity, submission of reports of government-friendly NGOs, and attempts to suppress regime critics have been observed (Sweeney and Saito 2009). Thus, certain aspects of UPR reminded me of the practice in the Commission on Human Rights. For example, China rejected out of hand most recommendations and admitted almost no areas of concern in the country report (Human Rights Watch 2009). China also demanded that the recommendations and comments rejected by the state under review should not be included in the final report. On the other hand, the U.S., under the administration of President Obama, accepted most of them and opened up the outcome of the review to a broad, civil-society-led discussion. During the review of Tunisia under the “old” regime, out of sixty-five statements, fifty were favorable and made mainly by African and Middle-East countries while the most critical observations of the human rights situation in the UK were made by non-Western countries (Abebe 2009: 19–20). Both Russia and Libya received some positive comments on their reports, praising their commitment to the review requirements. The statements, however, overlooked the grave, although distinct violations of human rights in both countries. In the case of Russia, most states seemed to “overlook” the ongoing gross human rights violations in the North Caucasus that had begun in the 1990s; as regards Libya, HRC drastically reversed its assessment later on, by recommending suspension of their membership in February 2011.

Although UPR provides a nondiscriminatory venue to “blame and shame” for human rights violations and some of the sessions were very tense, I am not sure if it had any tangible impact on the countries with oppressive human rights systems. They seem to protect successfully their domestic sphere from the international scrutiny. It is to be seen to what extent the second review can be built on the outcomes of the first one; deepen the focus on the weaknesses which had emerged and follow on the declared plans and promises of states, to check if they were fulfilled in four years; and, above all, to ensure that final reports include full records of the debate.

The Role of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and that Office (OHCHR) The post and office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (HCHR) was established

by GA Res. 48/141 in 1993. The mandate of HCHR and the office has not changed since then but has been substantively strengthened through a number of internal decisions in the context of the UN reform:6 The size and budget of the office was significantly increased; human rights field presence was established in all UN peace missions in conflict and post-conflict countries and in all UNDP offices (currently UN integrated field offices). I saw in these changes, which rescue the main spirit of Kofi Annan’s efforts to create a “three pillar” system, a reflection of the former secretary-general’s view that had the work of the organization been better coordinated and its presence in the field stronger in the nineties, the massacres of Srebrenica 6. Its mandate focused on the promotion and protection of human rights throughout the world and prevention of human rights violations; human rights education and their mainstreaming throughout the UN system; monitoring human rights situation world-wide and reporting thereon to the HRC and GA; and, in some situations to the SC (i.e., as briefings by HCHR on the human rights situation in countries under SC consideration; outcomes of special inquiries, like the recent one on Syria). The office also acted as the secretariat of CHR (now HRC).

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and Rwanda could have been prevented, and his conviction of the need for a greater human rights field presence during times of crisis to provide timely information to UN bodies so they could prepare a crisis response.

The position of the UNHCHR became more visible and significant due to its increased exposure to the global media, and raising sensitivity of the public to the human rights abuses and larger participation of the civil society in various human rights activities worldwide, including monitoring of the UN bodies. Governments of countries with relatively democratic systems have to take into account the views of their electorates; other countries want to refrain from being publically blamed and shamed. All these factors open the opportunities for HCHR to ensure a higher profile of the office, broader outreach to mass media and the civil society and, consequently, more flexibility and independence. Moreover, as HCHR members were elected directly by the general assembly, they were less susceptible to the direct pressures of the great powers.

The new demands and opportunities had impact on the quality of the candidates appointed to the job. When I recall the first two HCHRs, both men, coming from the governmental structure and UN bureaucracy respectively, Ayola Lasso of Ecuador, and Ibrimah Fall, a UN high ranking official, and the three women with strong legal backgrounds and leadership qualities who succeeded them, I am amazed by the difference in the visibility, style, and the ability to make a mark on the work of the human rights machinery by the latter. Moreover, I remember the occasions when female HCHRs took strong stands on the issues, disregarding the risks of antagonizing some governments and other power brokers.

Mary Robinson (1997–2002), a former president of Ireland, was a strong advocate of the human rights of women, equal rights for gay and lesbian, and historical and legal reassessment of all human rights violations related to the slavery. She also dared to speak up against gross human rights violations in Chechnya by Russia, as one of a few voices at the international arena and, for sure, the only one at the UN. Louise Arbour of Canada (2004–08), a former chief prosecutor for ICTFY, strongly advocated the “three pillar” concept and accountability for all through ending impunity for past and ongoing human rights violations. She also created a rapid response unit in her office to step up efforts to ensure timely and systematic response to human rights violations requiring urgent action (UNHCHR 2001). I know from my field experience, that such priorities were not welcomed by supporters of compromises with local warlords and the advocates of the priority of the peace process over justice. Also unpopular among the local authorities and some heads of UN field offices was her demand for public reporting on the human rights situation in various states where human rights offices were located.

The role of the current HCHR, Navi Pillay of South Africa, a former judge of ICC and ICT for Rwanda, became particularly visible during the “Arab Spring.” She supported strongly, although not always successfully, independent investigations into the gross human rights violations in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain, and made numerous interventions thereon to HRC and the Security Council. She also made her voice heard requesting inquiry into the disturbing circumstances of Colonel Khadafy’s death, unlike some Western diplomats who claimed that he “got what he deserved.”

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REPORTING FROM THE FIELD ON HUMAN RIGHTS SITUATIONS

The issue of reporting on human rights situation deserves, in my view, a broader reflection.

During the term of Louise Arbour as UNHCHR, and in accordance with the secretary-general’s policy committee decision 2005/24 on human rights in integrated missions, human rights components in DPKO integrated peace missions began thorough periodic and thematic public reporting on the human rights situation in host countries. These reports, shared with local authorities and the public were often launched at press conferences. If the head of the UN peace mission feared that a given report could negatively affect his/her relation with the host country, the reports were issued under the name of UNHCHR. There were also many discussions as to the format of such reports, often too bulky, not sufficiently analytical, and always perceived as objectionable by the host country.

As the director of the Human Rights Section at the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) and representative of UNHCHR in Liberia (2004–07), I was responsible for such reports. Although they addressed all aspects of the human rights situation in the country in a given period, they excluded, to my dismay, the alleged human rights violations and misconduct by the members of the international community, including the UN staff. These incidents, although committed by a very small percentage of the staff (mainly military and policemen), were highly visible and deeply resented by the local population. There was the sense of prevailing impunity and double standard, as the alleged perpetrators have been quickly sent home, with no tangible consequences, due legal process open to the victims, or any form of legally defined retribution or properly assessed compensation. Although the cases of misconduct and human rights violations by UN staff were not part of the mandate of UN human rights field offices but various parts of the mission’s administration (the code of conduct unit, the office of personnel, and offices of various contingents’ commanders), and were subject to different reporting lines, much less visible, this issue affected the credibility of UN reporting in some countries and made my role even more difficult.

With time, OHCHR redefined the format of public reports, making them shorter, more concise and analytical, focussing on the issues rather than individuals (i.e., ministers, or other individuals/institutions on the ground) responsible, thus less irritating to the local authorities.

It remains to be seen if these reports had any practical impact on the development of human rights in the country. I also wonder if their content has been used in the relevant SC debates or as an element of the early warning system.

HUMAN RIGHTS ENTITIES AND THE “ONE UN”

Another change introduced in the context of UN reform is the “one UN” policy aimed at consolidating UN field presence in the country under common leadership of a UN resident coordinator (humanitarian coordinator in DPKO peace-keeping missions). Currently, OHCHR is represented in all UN peace missions and fifty-four country teams. Some mandates, in particular in the DPKO integrated missions, are very comprehensive and include, in addition to reporting, some aspects of transitional justice, support to victims of human rights violations, training, and advocacy. While the concept of one UN country team has numerous advantages (consolidation of resources, better coordination of work among various agencies, reduction of overlaps), its impact on the protection and promotion of human rights should be carefully

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assessed. I know, for example, that in post-conflict countries, the cases involving human rights abuses by influential politicians, often create a tension between the human rights officers’ attempts to end impunity and the UN political leadership’s to refrain from antagonizing local authorities and promoting the peace process. On the other hand, I am also aware of cases in which the work of human rights units benefited from support by the political leadership of the UN in the field, as high-level involvement with the local authorities paved the way for accepting otherwise unpopular findings or actions. Thus, the role of human rights officers and units in the framework of “one UN” should be revisited to bridge better between the two areas of security and human rights.

The Arab Spring as a Test for the New UN Human Rights Machinery One of the critical questions defining the credibility of the UN, including its human rights machinery, is how the system responds to gross violations of human rights. In my opinion, the record is mixed but improving.

While it seems that in the first years of its existence HRC had not been able to address gross human rights violations efficiently (for example, in the case of Darfur), it has revived and sharpened its focus since the beginning of the “Arab Spring.” Not only has it managed to call a special session to discuss the situation in Libya, condemning the atrocities committed on her citizens, but, in view of the lack of positive respond from Libya, HRC called for Libya’s suspension from the council. The GA acted accordingly and Libya was suspended on 25 February 2011, without a vote and by consensus (A/HRC/Res/S-15). The High Commissioner for Human Rights (HCHR) also reported on the alleged gross human rights violations by the Libyan authorities to SC and emphasized the need to protect civilians. Subsequently, UNSC adopted resolution 1973 (17 March 2011) which, invoking the R2P principle, led to a military action by NATO. The UN human rights machinery has been less successful in the case of Syria, but it has been persistent in its efforts pressuring SC. HRC held two special sessions in April and August 2011, drawing attention to the violation by Syria of its protection obligations, due to ongoing gross violations of human rights of its citizens. It also appointed a fact-finding mission that concluded that the scale of violations amounts to crimes against humanity.7 HCHR briefed SC members of these outcomes, calling for their referral to ICC. However, as SC had not taken any decisive action, HRC established another Commission of Inquiry in August to investigate crimes against humanity in Syria. The new commission reiterated conclusions of the previous report and transmitted a preliminary report to all relevant UN bodies, including SC, in December 2011 (United Nations 2012).8 Still, SC has not decided on any action due to the opposition of its two permanent members, Russia and China. The traditional security and sovereignty concerns once more prevented the action aimed at protection of human lives.

Despite the efforts of HCHR and some delegations, encouraged by the pressure from the public, HRC failed to take a comparable action in the cases on Bahrain and Yemen. Although the atrocities are similar, the initiatives met the opposition from a number of countries, 7. As Syria had refused the team access to the country, the report was based on a variety of other sources. See Report on the Fact-Finding Mission on Syria pursuant to HRC res. S-16/1 of 29 April 2011.

8. The final report will be presented in March 2012.

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including the United States. Like SC, HRC is a political body, and its actions are dependent on and limited by the will of the member states.

Conclusions and Recommendations Mediating between the two elements of the UN’s dual focus on peace and security has proven a difficult balancing act, reflecting what some perceive as competing rather than complementary agendas. Moreover, the practical test offered by the Arab revolutions of 2011–12 has returned mixed results. Five years after the major reform of the UN human rights machinery, it is time to take stock of how the system performs, to analyze if and to what extent it fulfils the expectations of the reform, and, foremost, whether it contributes to the improved protection and promotion of human rights worldwide.

Such evaluation, in my view, should concentrate on selected critical issues only, such as: 1. The role of the human rights machinery in preventing and addressing gross human rights violations: • What is the interrelationship between SC and HRC and how does it manifest in times of crisis? How can the human rights machinery quickly alert UNSC? How can the connection between the two councils be further facilitated and strengthened, including improved access of HCHR? • What is the role of the human rights machinery, HRC and HCHR in particular, in the R2P related cases: The assessment of the situation in the country, participation in the decisive SC deliberations, presence on the ground during and after the intervention?

• What is the role of special procedures in this respect?

2. Changes in the work of HRC compared to CHR, with special emphasis on: • Its membership and current criteria of election. Can more coherent criteria be introduced?

• UPR, after completion of the first cycle of reviews (four years, 174 countries)—its shortcoming and advantages and the way forward.

3. The role of human rights offices/officers in the field in the context of “one UN” (peacemissions and RCs offices): • Their mandate, place, role, budget, and reporting lines in the country office.

• Reporting its quality, independence, addressees, and impact on the host country.

• Practical possibilities and ways of addressing politically controversial issues (for example, high level corruption, abuse, and impunity).

REFERENCES Abebe, Allehone Mulugeta (2009) “Of Shaming and Bargaining: African States and the Universal Periodic Review of the United Nations Human Rights Council,” Human Rights Law Review 9 (1): 1–35.

Alston, Philip (2006) “Reconceiving the UN human rights regime: challenges confronting the new Human Rights Council,” Melbourne Journal of International Law 7 (1).

Annan, Kofi (1999) “Two Concepts of Sovereignty,” The Economist, 18 September.

Annan, Kofi (2005) In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All, New York: United Nations.

Deng, Francis M., Sadikiel Kimaro, Terrance Lyons and Donald Rotchild, eds. (1996) Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa. Washington, D.C., Brookings Institution Press.

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Human Rights Watch (2009) “UN: Nations Show True Colors at Rights Review,” 13 February, online: <http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/02/13/un-nations-show-true-colors-rights-review>.

Lauren, Paul G. (2007) “‘To Preserve and Build on its Achievements and to Redress its Shortcomings’: The Journey from the Commission on Human Rights to the Human Rights Council,” Human Rights Quarterly 29 (2): 307–45.

OHCHR, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (2008) Basic Facts about the UPR, online: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/UPR/ Pages/BasicFacts.aspx.

Ramcharan, Bertrand G. (2008) Contemporary Human Rights Ideas, Global Institutions, London: Routledge.

Sweeney, Gareth and Yuri Saito (2009) “An NGO Assessment of the New Mechanisms of the UN Human Rights Council,” Human Rights Law Review 9 (2): 203–23.

United Nations (1999a) Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to the General Assembly resolution A/53/55: The Fall of Srebrenica, A/54/549, 15 November.

United Nations (1999b) Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, S/1999/1257, 16 December.

United Nations (2001) Annual report of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, A/26/36, 28 September.

United Nations (2004) A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A/59/565, 17 November.

United Nations (2005a) In larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All, Report of the Secretary General, A/59/2005, 25 March.

United Nations (2005) 2005 World Summit Outcome, A/RES/60/1, 16 September.

United Nations (2012) Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, A/HRC/S-17/2/Add.1, 23 November.

REVIEWS Monitoring Compliance: Practice and Procedure at a UN Human Rights Expert Body

by René Rouwette, Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) Tyagi, Yogesh (2011) The UN Human Rights Committee: Practice and Procedure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-11593-3 In his book the United Nations Human Rights Committee: Practice and Procedure, international law professor Yogesh Tyagi gives an extensive and thought provoking overview of practices and procedures of the Human Rights Committee; this expert body within the UN is established to monitor the compliance of the state parties with the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Tyagi offers the reader over eight hundred pages of plain text, almost one hundred pages of annexes, and chapters related to the three official supervisory procedures of the Human Rights Committee entitled “the reporting procedure,” “the inter-state communication procedure,” and “the individual complaint procedure.”

Far too often, and without good reason, the Human Rights Committee has been neglected by academics; even more, it has been confused with the political Human Rights Commission or its successor the Human Rights Council. In fact, academic literature on the Human Rights Committee is fragmented in the sense that authors typically deal with one aspect of the body, either its procedures or its outcome documents. On top of that, existing academic books and articles are typically written from the perspective of an international legal scholar. Whereas traditionally, political scientists and historians have focused merely on practical work and functioning, international legal scholars in publications like this have quite often preferred to rely on their understanding of procedure. Interestingly, over the last years cross-fertilization has become more popular. Legal scholars include in their analysis political dynamics and effectiveness, while a new movement within the social sciences has appropriately reemphasized the importance of institutional design. With respect to the Human Rights Committee, a more comprehensive interdisciplinary approach would be very welcome.

Despite claims in the introduction that this book only deals with procedural aspects of the Human Rights Committee, it makes an attempt to give us the comprehensiveness we need. In the last chapter on limitations and effectiveness, the author deals with many individual complaints cases from the Dutch Social Security Cases of the 1980s via the Korean Trade Union Leader case of the 1990s, to the Belgian Terrorist Suspect case of 2009. Tyagi analyzes the relationship between procedural questions and individual cases as well as the interesting human rights characteristics of the cases.

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Yet, if one focuses on effectiveness, as is done in the last pages of the book, a more elaborate, structured, and empirical approach would have been beneficial—an approach that focused extensively on the effectiveness of the Human Rights Committee within the UN and the international legal framework, as well as on the effectiveness within states. Only a thorough analysis can explain when and why states comply with treaty bodies.

Exciting new academic questions are brought up in the last chapter. They are touched upon only briefly, but offer great perspectives for a second edition of the book. One example is the way the European convention on human rights is treated by each actor involved in the treaty body process. Even more interesting is the way the systems and procedures interrelate and collide, and the way different actors comply with, use, and bend the procedures in relation to the substance of human rights law and human rights violations and the composition of the treaty body. Tyagi’s comment that Roger Errera (France), Bernhard Graefrath (German Democratic Republic), Torkel Opsahl (Norway), and Christian Tomuschat (Federal Republic of Germany) played a remarkable role in the Human Rights Committee in comparison to their successors begs for more information, research, and in-depth analysis of the (confidential) internal treaty body consultation, as well as the identification of more Human Rights Committee key figures. New streams in historical research, history-based political science, and legal philosophy have focused on the role of international legal experts in judicial and quasi-judicial bodies, and a forum like the Human Rights Committee would be an interesting case study for this.

An element of a more thorough analysis on effectiveness for the second edition of the book could focus on the number of times the Human Rights Committee’s dialogues and outcome documents have been an inspiration for discussion by civil servants within the ministries, parliaments, media, NGOs, and civil society organizations, and courts of a particular state party. With this, it is interesting and relevant to analyze in which context these discussions took place. Interestingly, following the number of times a state has been referred to by Tyagi in his book as “a state under supervision of the Human Rights Committee,” the selfproclaimed human rights pioneering state of the Netherlands would provide a perfect case for a pilot study on the effectiveness of the work of the committee.

In the end, Tyagi succeeds in addressing the target groups he mentions in the introduction.

The book is extremely useful for people who deal with the committee for professional reasons such as lawyers, state party officials, NGOs/CSOs, and UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights staff. Moreover, the book is published in time to assist those who are involved in the review of the treaty bodies, which is now going on within the UN. However, the book is less appealing for those academics in need of a general UN or international organizations theory, historical context, or a more academically/analytically focused approach to the work of the committee. Reading the sections of this book carefully, Tyagi does provide the reader with a lot of analysis next to description; however, a general narrative or leitmotif is lacking.

REFERENCES Balding, Christopher and Daniel Wehrenfennig (2011) “Theorizing International Organizations. An Organizational Theory of International Institutions,” Journal of International Organizations Studies 2 (1): 7–27.

Boerefijn, Ineke (1999) The Reporting Procedure under the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: Practice and Procedure of the Human Rights Committee, Antwerp, Groningen, and Oxford: Intersentia.

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Boyle, Kevin (2009) New Institutions for Human Rights Protection, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Buyse, Antoine (forthcoming) “Does Strasbourg Echo in Geneva: The Influence of ECHR Anti-Torture Case-law on the United Nations Human Rights Committee,” Irish Human Rights Law Review.

Hathaway, Oona (2002) “Do human rights treaties make a difference?” The Yale Law Journal 111 (8): 1,935–2,042.

Koskenniemi, Martti (2011) Histories of International Law: Dealing with Eurocentrism, Inaugural Lecture Utrecht University.

Krommendijk, Jasper (forthcoming) “The effectiveness of non-judicial mechanisms for the implementation of human rights,” Human Rights and Legal Discourse.

Madsen, Mikael R. (2007) “From Cold War Instrument to Supreme European Court of Human Rights at the Crossroads of International and National Law and Politics,” Law and Social Inquiry 32 (1): 137–59.

McGoldrick, Dominic (1991) The Human Rights Committee. Its role in the Development of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism by Michael Barnett

by Davide Rodogno, The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva Barnett, Michael (2011) Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ISBN 978-0-8014-4713-6 Empire of Humanity is, to my knowledge, the first attempt to include the history of humanitarianism in a single-authored, single-volume book. This is a very courageous effort and the author, political scientist Michael Barnett, should be commended. Barnett has facilitated immensely the task of the current as well as the next generation of scholars, historian and non-historians, as he provided them with a starting point. En passant it is worth noting that if a political scientist felt the need to write such a book, it is largely because historians (myself included) have not been up to the task.

As any other historian, a book covering two centuries of Western humanitarianism in less than three hundred pages intrigued me. I was curious to see if such a tour de force could be accomplished in a consistent and coherent way. In fact, the reader quickly finds out that Barnett’s book deals with a number of topics related to humanitarianism and its history: Humanitarian as an ideology, as a profession; humanitarianism and its relation with the state and various international systems; humanitarianism and religion (Christianity) and faith-based organizations; the history of humanitarian organizations. In his introduction and in a public conference at the Elliot School of International Affairs on 5 April 2011, Barnett admitted that his book is like humanitarianism: It began fairly modest, and it expanded beyond his wildest dreams.1 This statement reveals how Barnett perceives the history of humanitarianism as well as the ambition of Barnett’s research. Contrary to the allegedly self-expanding nature of humanitarianism, this review leaves aside Barnett’s analysis of moral, ethical, and other normative statements and focuses on the historical analysis.2 The fact that the author places terms like “Empire” next to “humanity” and “humanitarianism” undoubtedly renders the title provocative. Barnett argues that “humanitarianism more closely resembles empire than many of its defenders might like, but because it is an emancipatory project, this accusation does not fit quite as well as many of its harshest critics suggest” (p. 8). The reader then finds out that Barnett has not written a history of humanitarianism since the late eighteenth century, but a history of Anglo-American humanitarianism since the Abolitionist campaign. The book claims to be global and transnational, although what Barnett often means by global is a broad level of analysis. Transnational it might be, because 1. Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism, http://media.elliott.gwu.edu/video/208 (latest access on 23 January 2012).

2. Readers curious to know more about the ethical and philosophical arguments mentioned in the conclusion, can consult a review article published on the Nation by David Rieff. It is very clear Barnett has left Rieff unconvinced (Rieff, David (2011) “The Wrong Moral Revolution: On Michael Barnett,” the Nation, 24 October 2011, available online, http://www.thenation.com/article/163800/wrong-moralrevolution-michael-barnett (latest access on January 23, 2012).

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the author focuses on a particular variety of humanitarianism whose actions were undertaken beyond national borders. However, Barnett often overlooks the national and local history of humanitarianism. And, clearly, humanitarianism in Europe and in Northern America did not emerge, thrive, or fail identically. Moreover, defining U.S. humanitarianism as imperial, at least before the war against Spain at the end of the nineteenth century and the occupation of Cuba and the Philippines, would have benefitted from further explanation. For instance, the humanitarian endeavors of white U.S.-Americans with respect to “Negro Education” could in fact be defined as imperial, though they are not mentioned in this book. The reader is left wondering about the connections between humanitarianism and charity, voluntary associations, welfare, and educational programs set up and active at the national level and the “empire of humanity,” as well as the reasons why humanitarianism went transnational at various ages in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Perhaps, the author should have clarified that he intended to focus on Western or Anglo-Saxon humanitarianism of the transnational or international variety, admitting that other forms of humanitarianism, even within the West, never trespassed national frontiers. There was nothing ineluctable about the expansion of humanitarianism as an ideology, a profession, or a movement. In fact, in English and in French, the adjective “humanitarian” maintained a negative connotation for almost the entire nineteenth century. In the early 1800s, Wilberforce and his abolitionist Clapham Sects were derisively labeled, “the saints” by fellow Britons. As far as the English language is concerned, “humanitarianism” was rarely used before the 1900s, even by those who, by today’s standards, were performing humanitarian actions.

As any historian dealing with the longue-durée, Barnett pays attention to the ruptures and continuities. The more Barnett learned, he writes, the more convinced he became that the 1990s were hardly unprecedented—indeed they contained some well established patterns (p. 5).

Humanitarianism was not a wholly private affair before the 1990s. At that time, no longer satisfied with keeping alive the “well-fed dead” and feeling obligated to help traumatized societies find peace and justice, many aid agencies embraced post-conflict reconstruction, human rights, development, democracy promotion, and peace-building. In the 1990s, humanitarian organizations ventured into the formerly taboo territory of politics, whereby they cooperated and coordinated with intervening states. In doing so, moments of destruction were treated as opportunities for political change and adopted functions that had once been the exclusive preserve of governments. This story, Barnett convincingly argues, despite the historical amnesia of humanitarian practitioners, was not new.

Unfortunately, despite having put forward such a promising argument, he pays less attention to the inherent tensions and unintended consequences of the ideas and actions that individuals, groups of people, or institutions sought to impose on foreign peoples and communities living beyond national borders.

It is worth noting that Barnett’s analysis of paternalism could have offered a fruitful link between national and transnational humanitarianism. He defines paternalism as the interference with a person’s liberty of action justified by reasons referring exclusively to the welfare, good, happiness, needs, interests, or values of the person whose liberty is being violated. Humanitarian action is dedicated to helping others, and it frequently does so without soliciting the desires of those perceived to be in need. If Barnett had conducted a systematic exploration of paternalism

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in the various “humanitarian ages” included in the book, it could have represented the thread of a promising and persuasive longue durée analysis. Especially because he convincingly argues that paternalism did not disappear with the beginning of the twentieth century or with decolonization. Unfortunately, as is the case with some of the other themes, issues, and analyses addressed, paternalism is dealt with unevenly.

Barnett argues that three ages of humanitarianism have taken place one after the other.

He does not explain why a new “age” came into being and what persisted from the previous into the new age. I have several reservations regarding what Barnett has identified as the first age, the age of “imperial humanitarianism,” encompassing the late eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War. The author does not explain why this lengthy period has been encompassed in a single age. What did Wilberforce and his contemporaries have in common with Phil-Armenian groups3? What did the latter have in common with Nansen and the League of Nations? And what did Nansen have in common with CARE or Oxfam? Barnett does not explain that the perceptions held by the Britons and Russians of humanitarianism were not necessarily identical. He does not mention that, not surprisingly, Leopold II King of Belgium and E. Morel and Roger Casement defined themselves as humanitarians and allegedly acted on behalf of Congolese populations. He does not mention Islamic charities that were active beyond national and imperial borders as well as Jewish humanitarian and philanthropic organizations active in Europe and beyond, since—at least—the early nineteenth century.

The second age, “neo humanitarianism,” spans from the end of the Second World War to the end of the Cold War. It is hard to grasp how and why this age is less “imperial” than the previous one. Although European empires collapsed and died, Western humanitarianism continued to thrive through nongovernmental and governmental organizations and alongside the humanitarianism of the Soviet and/or Communist brand. This is an aspect that is overlooked by the author. In Barnett’s book, the third age of “liberal humanitarianism” goes from the end of the Cold War to the present day. As far as Great Britain and the U.S. are concerned, this age is as liberal as the first “age.” However, Barnett explains, once again, that after 1990 humanitarians began considering how to build peace after war and slipped into building states. Unfortunately, he has not studied the undertakings and programs of several humanitarian groups that had similar ambitions during the late nineteenth century, within European colonial territories and beyond them, such as the multilateral interventions and territorial occupations of Ottoman Crete and Macedonian provinces. As far as the interwar period is concerned, Barnett overlooks the work and ideology of European organizations such as Save the Children as well as organizations such as the American Near East Relief (later renamed the Near East Foundation). This organization set up rehabilitation and reconstruction programs and focused on educational programs that were intended to “educate” the future leaders of that region of the world to enhance peace and international cooperation.

Barnett emphasizes the differences between “alchemical” and “emergency,” which seems to represent the trait-d’union between the three ages. He argues that the principles, nature, methods, objectives, scopes, and actions of various humanitarian groups, during the three 3. Phil-Armenian or Pro-Armenia organizations were advocacy groups acting nationally or transnationally on behalf of Ottoman Armenian populations. The reason why these groups were referred to as Phil- or Pro-Armenian is related to another very well known movement: The Phil-Hellenic movement that had been active since the 1810s in various European countries and in the U.S. on behalf of the Ottoman Greeks.

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ages can be divided into these two categories. The emergency type of humanitarian limits itself to saving lives at risk, whereas the alchemical kind adds a desire to remove the causes of suffering. The tension between these types of organization is, per se, a topic of at least another monograph. Barnett could have provided his readers with examples of when, since the nineteenth century, emergency turned (or did not turn) into alchemical humanitarianism. Had Barnett chosen to expand his research on this front, he could have explained how development and modernization became intertwined in doctrines of anticommunism during the Cold War. He would have certainly noted that ante-litteram “development” predated the Cold War period and were undertaken by several U.S. (and some European) organizations on a large scale. These organizations, as well as their European counterparts put forward a well-known discourse on “modernization”—admittedly articulated in several forms. Anti-communism also played a role during the interwar period, which goes unnoticed in this book even if many humanitarian programs of the 1920s and the 1930s, including the settlement of refugees and needy population far away from urban centers were enhanced with the aim of keeping pauper populations away from Communism.

Barnett’s efforts to explain why humanitarianism emerged at the end of the eighteenth century (Chapter Two) are laudable. He relies on a solid historiography and has made a sensible synthesis. Unfortunately, his focus on the intellectual history of humanitarianism, its religious and enlightenment roots, and in general humanitarian thought disappears in the following chapters and is replaced by a focus on the history of humanitarian actions and of humanitarian actors (mainly organizations). As to the generalizations concerning the slave trade and the early nineteenth century, what is true about British humanitarianism is not necessarily true for many other European countries. Hence, if the objective of the book were to write a history of international Western humanitarianism, it would have been appropriate to compare and contrasts various countries.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC, Chapter Four) is Barnett’s archetypical example of “emergency humanitarianism.” Although this is a solid chapter, it does not expand on the reasons of the successes and failures of ICRC with respect to so many other alchemical organizations. This chapter also marks the transition from intellectual history to the history of humanitarian organizations. Chapter Six presents an institutional history of various NGOs. The criteria of selection should have been explained in more detail. Nonetheless, the aim successfully highlights some of the fundamental tensions in the relationship between NGOs and sovereign-states and the increasing role of the state since 1919 and more particularly after 1939. Barnett also explores the differences, similarities, and tensions between faith-based and secular organizations, including the competition for resources, which would become one of the crucial problems determining the survival or the death of NGOs after 1990. Chapters eight to ten cover the period from the end of the Cold War through to the present. Barnett’s attention shifts toward humanitarian intervention—a topic that has hardly been dealt with in historical perspective. It would have been better to engage with this topic in the introduction, and avoid devoting a chapter, which does not do justice to such a complex issue.

Barnett’s book shows how important it is for social scientists to discuss topics such as “humanitarianism” and how the work of a historian could be enriched by the insights,

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conceptualizations, and reflections of political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists (and vice versa). Among the weaknesses of the volume, the unevenness of his structure and a number of thematic and chronological choices need to be mentioned. Ruptures and continuities between these three alleged “ages” of humanitarianism are not consistently pinpointed. Barnett ended up writing the history of self-proclaimed humanitarian actors, such as NGOs. This book resembles more a history of some (a selected few, some secular and some faith-based, generally Anglo-Saxon) humanitarian organizations. The book floats in a limbo where operational—humanitarian and imperial—projects of the nineteenth century are ignored, and an intellectual history approach is forgotten for the twentieth century. Finally, Barnett’s claim that humanitarianism’s history is modern international history is debatable. At most, humanitarianism is an intriguing feature in modern international history, one that should be critically examined from a pluri-disciplinary perspective.

On the Origins of the United Nations: When and How Did it Begin?

by Klaas Dykmann, Roskilde University Mazower, Mark (2009). No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-69113521-2 Plesch, Dan (2011). America, Hitler, and the UN: How the Allies Won World War II and Forged A Peace, London: I.B. Tauris & Co., ISBN: 978-1-848-85308-9 The mainstream narrative of the United Nations has long been that its creation in 1945 was an almost revolutionary act that constituted a seminal answer to the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust and must be seen as an unprecedented universal (even though U.S.-led) attempt to achieve world peace and guarantee human rights (see Amrith and Sluga 2008). In this context, the positive accounts on the UN’s history in recent years seem to be due to the “New World Order” proclaimed by former U.S. President George H.W. Bush and the intellectual reaction to Goerge W. Bush’s unilateralism in order to show that the UN does matter (Mazower 2009: 5). Apparently, however, not only historians, also international relations (IR) scholars failed to appropriately address the complex nature of the ideas and ideologies constituting the basis of the UN (Mazower 2009: 9).

The British historians Mark Mazower and Dan Plesch have initiated interesting debates about the origins and thus, implicitly, the very nature of the United Nations organization.

Here, two main questions shall guide us: To what extent do we have to contest the narrative that the creation of the United Nations in 1945 constituted a radical shift in world history?

And secondly, did the UN rather perpetuate colonial ideas or was it, in contrast, designed to end colonialism?

While Plesch argues that 1942 was the birth date of the United Nations, Mazower observes some continuity since the early twentieth century and the League of Nations.

Both authors approach the subject quite differently: Dan Plesch provides an archive-based narrative of a UN already established during the war, and Mazower illustrates the ideological origins of the organization with the intellectual setting of its leading figures. Mazower looks at specific persons he considers as key figures: The South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, the English internationalist Sir Alfred Zimmern, the Jewish emigrants Joseph Schechtman and Raphael Lemkin, and last but not least the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In contrast to Mazower, who in comparison rather tends to neglect the most obvious documents and meetings, Plesch focuses very much on the Atlantic Charter (1941), the talks at Dumbarton Oaks (1944), as well as the conferences in Yalta and San Francisco (1945) that led finally to the establishment of the United Nations organization.

According to Plesch, the “wartime UN” has largely been forgotten, because “it needed a new start in 1945, a UN born out of the ‘ashes of war’” (Plesch 2011: 8). The political climate in the United States changed in the late 1940s, when it had become inopportune to argue that the

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U.S., the British, and the Soviets had been planning the UN together (Plesch 2011: 9). Nonetheless, it was on 28 December 1941 when Roosevelt came up with the idea to use “United Nations” instead of Associated Powers to depict the alliance fighting Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Japan (Plesch 2011: 32). Already in early 1942, Roosevelt and Churchill made military and political plans. While the former were naturally held as secrets, the political arrangements “had a vital public dimension in rallying domestic and international support for the war effort” (Plesch 2011: 31). The assessment of a contemporary advocate of the UN supports Plesch’s thesis: “The Declaration of the United Nations [of 1942, K.D.] . . . brought the United Nations into being” (Straight 1943: 62).1 After Roosevelt had led political “celebrations” internationally, “The ideas of the United Nations became embedded in wartime civilian culture, especially in the USA” (Plesch 2011: 31). The outlook of the wartime “United Nations” was debated mostly between the U.S., the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. Once, it was accepted, military communiqués and official statements in the U.S. and Great Britain frequently referred to the United Nations (Plesch 2011: 32, 36, 40ff). Plesch stresses the discussions between Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill with regard to a new post-war world order, based on the British–U.S. American Atlantic Charter of 1941. The idea emerged that these three great powers should, together with China, manage world affairs as the “four policemen” (Plesch 2011: 82). Plesch further regards the focus of wartime United Nations initiatives (food, relief, health care etc.) on the social, economic, and humanitarian dimensions as proof for the United Nations’ encompassing approach to global security and global governance within World War II (Plesch 2011: 87/88).

With regard to Plesch’s argument that the creation of the UN can be dated back to 1942, we must ask: Is it appropriate to consider this “wartime UN” as much more than a public relations invention to guarantee public support? Some argue that it was rather the success of the propaganda strategy to label the Allies, led by the U.S., Britain, and the USSR, as “United Nations” to support their cause morally (Mawdsley 2012). This was deemed necessary by Roosevelt to convince the isolationists and the public in the U.S., particularly with regard to the Lend-Lease agreement, with which the U.S. supported the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, China, and other Allies with material. The important question seems to be the level of institutionalization and perspective beyond the war-related public relations and public diplomacy dimension of the “United Nations” notion. And there were institutions: The better known was certainly the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA, founded in 1943 by forty-four nations), but also the London-based UN War Crimes Commission (also created in 1943 by seventeen countries) is worth mentioning. The author emphasizes that “as part of the cooperative process under the United Nations framework, the UN War Crimes Commission and the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, both internationally staffed and funded, were up and running in 1943. They began to turn the political rhetoric of the United Nations about the postwar world into something tangible that the public could relate to” (Plesch 2011: 99). So we could argue that besides the wartime rhetoric tool, the United Nations also seemed to have been embedded in an institutional framework. This is an important aspect, although I tend to interpret these institutions as 1. Michael Straight, a US citizen who served in the Air Force during World War II, then became editor of The New Republican, but was also a KGB informant, expressed Plesch’s main arguments already in 1943: the UN was founded in 1942 and it should support decolonisation and human rights. Maybe a Mazower-style analysis of persons like Straight may have enriched Plesch’s book further.

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temporary, as these central wartime agencies, once the UN was created in 1945, ceased to exist in their own right.

Another aspect that can be mentioned against the wartime UN is actually presented by the author himself. Plesch admits that the idea of a general United Nations organization for the coordination of military and economic matters encountered resistance from the United States, Great Britain, and the USSR until shortly before the end of the war: Until late in the war, the idea of making a general organization of the United Nations to coordinate military and economic affairs was resisted by the Big Three. Roosevelt regarded it as creating an unnecessary target for his opponents at home and did not publicly endorse the idea until after D-Day had succeeded. Churchill was more concerned with US-UK bilateral agreements, and sought to elevate Australia and Canada as auxiliaries of the Empire and arrange regional rather than global structures. Stalin, having given strong support to the League of Nations, was now more concerned to secure a territorial buffer zone against further attacks from Germany” (Plesch 2011: 166).

So, again, was the tale of the “United Nations” before 1945 rather a propaganda success story than the birth of the United Nations Organization? Plesch certainly has a point, although to date back the UN as we know it to 1942 would be a bit too adventurous. The planning of the United Nations Organization certainly can be traced back to 1942, but then also the ideas of the League of Nations must be considered as ideological background for the UN—and this is what Mark Mazower does.

In his introduction, Mazower sharply analyzes the deficiencies and blind spots of existing accounts on the UN’s origins as mixed motivations that had rather been neglected and international cooperation as such taken for granted as something basically positive: Their guiding assumption seems to be that the emergence of some kind of global community is not only desirable but inevitable, whether through the acts of states, or non-state actors, or perhaps through the work of international organizations themselves, staffed by impartial and high-minded civil servants (Mazower 2009: 5) (see Iriye 2002).

Mazower’s main argument is that in contrast to repeated laudations of the UN as the only authentic world organization with idealistic goals (and, on the other hand, categorical repudiations and assessments of the overall failure of the United Nations), the UN’s origins trace back to old-fashioned national and great power interests and imperial motives, but then developed in a different direction as its mostly Western creators had anticipated. Mazower manages magnificently to exemplify his narrative of the UN as a creature of U.S. global power ambitions and particularly British colonial interests. He does so by examining the convictions and motives that drove Jan Smuts and internationalist Sir Alfred Zimmern (both had already played a significant role in designing the League of Nations) in the UN’s establishment, supplemented by the impact Mazower attributes to the Indian independence hero and first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru with regard to the unexpected non-Western orientation.

Mazower challenges two important interpretations of the UN’s history: He concludes that the UN was not so different from the League of Nations and that it was not, as often assumed, a mostly U.S. American enterprise only (see, for example, Schlesinger 2003). Both theses are supported by a closer look at the relationship between empires—with the British empire in

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particular—and connected ideas of global order, and the respective intellectual origin of the League of Nations and the UN (Mazower 2009: 14). Also, Plesch discusses briefly Churchill’s “flirt” with the idea of an Anglo-Saxon world empire (Plesch 2011: 165). In contrast to other authors who certainly acknowledge some heritage of the League in the UN (see, for instance, Kennedy 2006, or MacKenzie 2010: 53), Mazower goes further and identifies a clear continuity between the two institutions.

Mazower’s first two chapters deal with Jan Smuts and Alfred Zimmern, with which the author illustrates the ideological roots of colonialism and the racist belief in the superiority of the white man as essential aspects of the internationalism that inspired the League’s foundation. It seems contradictory that Smuts, who spoke on behalf of equal rights in the UN context, increasingly followed a more racist line in his South African Apartheid regime. But from a contemporary reading of internationalism, it was not such a paradox, argues Mazower. Smuts and Zimmern envisioned the British Commonwealth—and then the League as a variation of it—as the institution with which the (white) civilization should be spread throughout the world.

Plesch takes a very different stand on the question whether the UN was a new form of empire. While World War II historians have long paid little attention to colonial repression, it is obvious that European colonialism based on the conviction of European supremacy, which also found expression in the subjugation of African–Americans in the United States.

Therefore, in Plesch’s opinion, Roosevelt’s resolve to apply the Atlantic Charter principles worldwide—including the right to self-determination—was volatile in colonial nations and in the U.S. itself: Roosevelt’s anti-colonial policy did not outlast him and it is not properly acknowledged.

The main achievements were the promotion of an Asian nation, China, to great power status and the inclusion of India as a separate country in the Declaration of January 1942 and in the wartime UN conferences (Plesch 2011: 88).

In Plesch’s view, the missing set-up of a schedule for the end of British and French colonies was the main lost opportunity, although Roosevelt tried to push it (Plesch 2011: 89/90).

Roosevelt came up with a plan that envisioned several regional commissions with representatives of the colonizers and the colonized to deal with the independence process—but it did not convince Churchill. Plesch concludes that “the post-war world would well have been more peaceful and prosperous had this declaration been pursued as Roosevelt intended” and judges Roosevelt’s declaration as a vision of the “end of empire,” which would have included fixed dates (Plesch 2011: 90/91). At the same time, it meant a radical shift that China was elevated as one of the four big powers: “Back at the time of the creation of the League of Nations, the white nations had refused to include language on racial equality, humiliating delegates from Japan and elsewhere” (Plesch 2011: 89). Plesch thus regards China’s elevation and the plan for a scheduled end of colonies as the reinforcement of “the antiimperial origins of the UN” and explicitly distances this narrative from Mark Mazower’s interpretation of the UN’s ideological basis. However, as Plesch continues, after his death, Roosevelt’s anti-colonial ideas and economic policies to endorse the “developing world” soon became obsolete when President Truman took office (Plesch 2011: 91). Plesch thus

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strengthens the argument that the United Nations was designed to become a major anticolonial force—unlike Mark Mazower.

Mazower’s book questions the all too uncritical Western belief in the UN as a truly universal and global caretaker that despite a Western dominance at its origins pursued international goals for the best of all. Mazower presents how this belief was anchored in a perpetuated civilizing mission of the colonial powers and now also the United States. It was then Jawaharlal Nehru and increasing anti-colonialism that challenged the UN’s colonial heritage—to the surprise of the Western powers. Nehru turned the UN into an anticolonial forum that nevertheless then converted into a defender of national sovereignty again. Here one of the decisive differences between the league and the UN comes into play: The UN gave the “great powers” much more say, even a de-facto veto right, so all rhetoric praise of human rights protection, for instance, seemed in reality nothing more than lip service as these big countries did not imagine to be subject to any meddling in their domestic affairs. This sacrosanct principle of sovereignty then became important again and was revived with the entry of all the newly independent countries that turned the UN—at least the General Assembly—into a Third World forum rather than a great power concert.

While the “Eleanor-Roosevelt narrative” that human rights at the UN were mainly a consequence of the war cruelties and the Holocaust in particular, has already been appropriately demystified (see, for instance, Normand/Zaidi 2008), both authors shed some new light on the issue. Mazower looks at two Jewish emigrants, Raphael Lemkin and Joseph Schechtman, and thereby shows the transition from the league’s minority rights system to the rather loosely defined right of self-determination of peoples in the UN. While Mazower convincingly illustrates the role of these activists in the making of universal rights, Plesch demonstrates that the United Nations War Criminals Commission (UNWCC, created in 1943) merits more attention and could possibly be seen as more important than even the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials on the way to the establishment of the International Criminal Court. He describes the UNWCC as the “main legal response to Nazi crimes during the war” that laid the groundwork for the Nuremberg trials. It further implicitly seems to prove that the Allies were aware of the Holocaust (The Jewish Chronicle 2011). UNWCC, with a secretariat in London, was promoted mostly by smaller countries that had been invaded by Germany, as well as by civil society and some “principled” officials from the U.S. and British governments but less so by the great powers (Plesch 2011: 101, 102, 116).

Here, Mazower is more skeptical about the “troubled history” of UNWCC as it seemed unlikely that the great powers would promote an international criminal law (Mazower 2009: 127).

In conclusion, while Plesch argues that the UN was planned already in 1942, Mazower would identify its ideological roots in the League of Nations and the British desire to perpetuate empire. Thus, Mazower argues that the UN’s creation stood for a continuation of colonialism by other means that ended surprisingly with the action taken by Nehru and his allies later on. In contrast, Plesch interprets the UN as designed to terminate colonialism and eventually only Roosevelt’s death prevented it to set exact dates to “end empire.”

In sum, these are very inspiring books, which not only show that common narratives of the UN are too simplistic and often idealistic, but also in more general terms, how the general study of international organizations can also benefit from historical accounts.

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REFERENCES Amrith, Sunil and Glenda Sluga (2008) “New Histories of the United Nations,” Journal of World History 19 (3): 251–274.

Iriye, Akira (2002) Global Community. The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Kennedy, Paul (2006) The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations, New York: Vintage Books.

MacKenzie, David (2010) A World Beyond Borders: An Introduction to the History of International Organizations, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Mawdsley, Evan (2012) “Book review: America, Hitler and the UN: How the Allies Won World War II and Forged a Peace”, http://www.historyextra.com/book-review/america-hitler-and-un-how-allieswon-world-war-ii-and-forged-peace, accessed 14 February 2012.

Mazower, Mark (2009) No Enchanted Palace. The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Normand, Roger and Sarah Zaidi (2008) Human Rights at the UN. The Political History of Universal Justice, Bloomington (IN): Indiana University Press.

Plesch, Dan (2011) America, Hitler and the UN: How the Allies Won World War II and Forged A Peace.

London: I.B. Tauris.

Schlesinger, Stephen C. (2003) Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations. A Story of Superpowers, Secret Agents, Wartime Allies and Enemies and Their Quest for a Peaceful World Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Straight, Michael (1943) Make this the Last War: The Future of the United Nations, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. The Jewish Chronicle, January 28, 2011, http://www.thejc.com/lifestyle/the-simon-round-interview/44389/ interview-dan-plesch, accessed on February 9, 2012.