Valuing International Organizations

Abstract

International organizations, from the United Nations to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, affect all our lives. The principles they live by represent, at least in part, the principles all of us live by. Many researchers have pontificated about these principles, lacking hard data, evidence and solid legal arguments. How can any electorate, or diplomatic class, help define the principles that guide our constellation of international organizations without a hard analysis of those principles? Not to be confused with the financial valuation of an international organization, Valuing International Organizations quantifies international organizations’ affiliation with particular principles in their constitutions or founding treaties, like cooperation, peace and equality. This book starts by taking a quantitative survey of the leading textbooks on international organizations law, distilling the major principles they identify. Next, this book constructs a simple index of the number of times these international organizations’ constitutive charters, treaties and legal documents mention these principles, which collectively are referred to as constitutions notwithstanding the variability in their actual titles. With statistical analysis of the database, this book shows the deep patterns present in the way international organizations’ constitutions refer to these principles. Using legal analysis, this book shows how these patterns reflect the evolution of deeper legal doctrines and jurisprudential traditions within international organizations. The data paints a mosaic of legal principles spanning across these organizations. Like Sandro Botticelli’s and Piero del Pollaiolo’s personification of fortitude and temperance in the Seven Virtues, as shown on the cover of this book, this book exquisitely depicts the international organizations’ values through elaborate network representations, radar charters, k-clusters analyses and scatter plots, among others, in addition to legal analysis. Principles like cooperation, representation and communication often appear together. However, divide these organizations into groups – like regional versus universal organizations – and a kaleidoscope of different patterns in these principles emerges. In the kaleidoscope, the reader clearly can see distinct groupings of organizations and principles. These groupings signal their own legal philosophies, here called “tracks.” When looking at the way principles appear in combination, the book observes the primary importance of executive staffing. Never before has any study empirically documented the importance of such staff as a driver of international law, even though some researchers including Anne-Marie Slaughter have theorized about the importance of staff networks in international law generally. With data pointing the way, many new – and seemingly contradictory – interpretations of international organizations law emerge. For example, an international organization declaring its autonomy often does so by encouraging representativeness among its member states and within its ranks. Having a mandate to promote peace may help bolster an organization’s autonomy. However, such a mandate may fall sterile without the equality between member states needed to make such peace possible. Moreover, it is impossible to understand the authority or autonomy of international civil servants without first understanding that communication enables such authority and autonomy, and that the ability to make recommendations renders that authority and autonomy valuable. Valuing International Organizations provides a map of international organizations’ principles and values, as well as a healthy start towards fully understanding that map.