The Current Column

Reforming International Institutions: From Wishful Thinking To Reality

Hulsman, John C.
The Current Column (2009)

Bonn: German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) (The current column of 20 April 2009)

Bonn, 20 April 2009. For my sins, I am forced to attend a good many international conferences every year. Typically, they tend to blend into one amorphous mass of boredom, interspersed with sometimes-exotic locations and first-rate dinners. The standard speakers tend to divide into two categories. The first sort are hell-bent on telling you (in excruciating detail) how smart they are, how well they know the subject at hand, as though by taking up masses of your time their can bludgeon one’s critical facilities into submission. The second group are missionaries, true believers, who never to bother to let empirical facts get in the way of their pseudo-scientific theories. These common conference diseases are especially pronounced among those who toil at reforming international institutions; a worthy goal, but one that often feels like going to the dentist.

So I was very pleasantly surprised to attend the German Development Institute’s recent conference on ‘Global Governance,’ which can best be defined as getting the world to effectively deal with policy problems that effect us all. While Bonn isn’t all that exotic (and I had to leave before dinner), the conference was that rarest of things-one that I will remember.
While there were certainly a few people there who loved to hear their own voices, and while others were on a mission to wish away the world as it is, in favor of some leftist grad school paradise, a large portion of the attendees (who came from Germany, the US, India, China, Indonesia, Mexico, Egypt, and South Africa) seemed to have moved far beyond this. We quickly began talking about ‘What works,’ rather than ‘What we should do in a perfect world.’ Given that, whatever one’s opinion of them, today’s international institutions, a vital tool to be used in the pursuit of global governance, are in bad shape indeed, the discussion, for once, could not have been more timely.

But even the rare good conference tends to recede from the mind about a week after its over, as rarely are there takeaways from even good meetings that either stand the test of time (moving beyond the banality that we must work together more), or can be laid out in practical policy terms. Again, this meeting was very different. There were 4 primary conclusions from the gathering, that if implemented-dare I say it-just might change the world for the better over time.

1. Nation-states will still form the basis of the international order, and must be worked with as a primary political building block of international institutions.

We are not about to enter a golden age (from the point of view of either EU or International Civil Servants) where states abolish themselves, or give up their prerogatives. This is especially true as the rising powers (such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China), much as older great powers, such as the US, do not wish to conform to the EU’s ideal of sharing vast amounts of their sovereignty. The nation-state, for good and ill, is alive and well as the primary political unit of the international system. If you don’t believe this, just ask the Chinese, Russians, and Indians, if they wish to cede significant amounts of their power to the UN, or a regional organization.

2. As this is true, for states to commit to international solutions involving international institutions, where their freedom of maneuver may be slightly hampered, they must be convinced that doing so is in their national interests.

Saying we should just do ‘what is right,’ doesn’t (and shouldn’t) pass the laugh test with national decision-makers who are in positions of power where they must think of the needs of their people first, the international community second. If international activists cannot explain and persuade decision-makers that going along with a specific global initiative makes sense for the people of his/her country, by definition that initiative deserves to fail. But it can be done. A Mexican colleague of mine at the meeting did just this for advocating an American push for a post-Kyoto protocol. Matter-of-factly, he said, “America can pay something like 1 percent of GDP now, or ten times this amount later, after there has been an environmental cataclysm.’ This is an argument that, far from being the usual airy-fairy demand from unaccountable international bureaucrats that the US give up its interests and get in line with their agenda, would resonate in the halls of power in Washington.

3. For international institutions to work in the future, they must observe, and not wish away, power realities.

Why does the UN Security Council not work very well? Simply because it enshrines the power structure of 1945, and not 2009. Why do, in Britain, France, and Russia, have three seats on the council, while the world’s second and fourth largest economies (Japan and Germany), have no permanent representation there? The simple reason is that they lost World War II, which makes no sense at all sixty years on. Nor is the UN the only culprit. The voting weights of the IMF have left the Benelux countries with a greater say than economically vital China. This kind of madness cannot go on. As an Indian colleague of mine at the conference and I agreed, rather quickly, international institutions must give over far more of a say to the rising powers if global governance is to have a future. Also, other vehicles such as the G20, which does include the rising powers in its membership on equal terms, must be pressed to have a greater role. We need to have institutions to have the right people in the room; the one’s who have the wherewithal to solve the most vexing problems of the age.

4. In return for power sharing, there must be greater burden sharing from the rising powers.

In return China’s voting weight rising to reflect its importance in the present order, it must do a great deal more over time to become a genuine stakeholder and guarantor of that order. For example, a great deal of the IMF’s new and needed re-capitalization should come from Beijing. Across the board the link between greater power sharing and greater burden sharing should be made absolutely explicit. With a Europe and America in various forms of decline, this binding of the new powers to international institutions is both politically and practically necessary if they are to have the heft needed to solve the world’s knottiest problems.

To put it mildly, assessments such as this are not the norm. Perhaps the old false moralism that has so poisoned the debate over these issues is being replaced by a different form of morality, first offered by the Anglo-Irish philosopher and parliamentarian, Edmund Burke: Take make the world better we must first see it as it is, warts and all.


Dr. John C. Hulsman is President and Co-founder of John C. Hulsman Enterprises (www.john-hulsman.com), a consulting firm which offers expertise for both businesses and governments in the analysis of international relations and American politics. He recently published his fourth book, The Godfather Doctrine: A Foreign Policy Parable, co-authored with A. Wess Mitchell, and published by Princeton University Press.