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Crisis management in international organisations: the League of Nations’ response to early challenges

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... Once launched, political turnover in member states can run IO commitments off track (Gray & Kucik, 2017;Grieco et al., 2009). Furthermore, IOs can fall into inertia (Genschel, 1997) and decline (Bunte et al., 2022;Debre & Dijkstra, 2021 or, conversely, survive early challenges only to fail subsequently (Hirschmann, 2023). In other words, IOs -like firms, agencies, and countless other organizations in both the public and private sphere 3 -regularly confront existential challenges to which they must react in the interest of survival. ...
... For every heady beginning, member-state retrenchment and contestation can emerge later down the line (Chaudoin, 2014). The terrain of international cooperation is complex, and conditions both within and across IOs can shift dramatically even within a few years of the organization's founding (Hirschmann, 2023). Furthermore, "efficient" design cannot insulate IOs from inertia and death: even prominent IOs such as the UN and its various agencies, the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and NATO, have experienced moments of decline and have even been on the brink of dissolution (McCalla, 1996). ...
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International organizations’ lives often extend far beyond the moment of their initial contracting. How IOs do adapt to shifting circumstances in their member states global geopolitical changes, and even internal dynamics within the IO itself? This special issue on the life cycle of international cooperation explores the ebbs and flows of the IOs that underpin the international system. Firm theory, organizational sociology, and agency theory all have incorporated life cycles perspectives into the study of organizations, but IR has yet to fully harness these frameworks. A life cycles approach centers on, first, incorporating the IO itself as the core unit of analysis and, second, the dynamic processes within IOs — including life stages such as false starts, consolidation, inertia, growth, revitalization, death, and succession. Incorporating these dynamic processes into our understanding of IOs reminds us that historically, IOs have always experienced periods of both flourishing and faltering. Grasping the mechanisms that drive these changes is indispensable for a thorough understanding of the international system’s vitality and resilience. Articles in this issue explore the durability of IOs in the face of crises; the measures that IOs deploy to legitimize their existence; the role of individual leaders’ rhetoric in IO vitality; the tradeoffs that member states face between pulling the plug on an IO versus creating a new institution; the effect of member-state IO withdrawal on the international system overall; and the mass public’s perceptions of such withdrawals.
... Each of these IOs, including their member states, makes subjective assessments about the threat and urgency of a crisis. They do so based on different standards and criteria, shaped by their mandate, geographical orientation, organisational culture, preference constellation among its members, past experiences and prior planning (Billings et al., 1980;Boin et al., 2005;Hirschmann, 2024). For instance, the Ebola virus disease outbreak only really attracted international attention once the WHO declared it a PHEIC and the UNSC decided to call it a threat to international peace and security (Kamradt-Scott, 2016). ...
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This article investigates the formative staffing practices of the League of Nations Secretariat. Drawing on the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, it argues that core traits of the League's institutional capacity and identity was produced through the institutionalization of recruitment practices in the League's formative years from 1919 to 1923. Through an exploration of early negotiations and practices of staffing, we show how the League built and balanced legitimacy, by combining a clearly international make-up of the League Secretariat with acute sensitivity to state interests, and autonomy, by defending the Secretary-General's exclusive prerogative of staffing, in a way that has been defining for the trajectory of international organizations (IOs) until today. The article thus turns to the institutional landscape where the individual and its surroundings meet: through the daily staffing practices of the Secretariat, it explores how an institution came to be, function and assert its influence as an autonomous and legitimate diplomatic agent in a broader international field. As such, the article, as an innovative contribution to the field, argues that international historians should connect thorough institutional investigations with elements of the ‘cultural turn’ in International History, in order to properly engage with and understand IOs as diplomatic actors.
Article
The Second Hague Conference of 1907 is widely regarded as a turning point in the evolution of international society. Constructivist and English School accounts, in particular, highlight the active role played by Latin American delegates in advocating the principles of sovereign equality and nonintervention. I argue that this common interpretation erroneously relies on a retrospective reading of the “norm entrepreneurship” of Latin American states. Rather than aiming to transform the hierarchical international order of the time, foreign policy elites from Latin America sought to use the conference as a platform for increasing their countries’ status. Because of their comparative lack of resources, smaller powers will often try to pursue status through diplomacy and the use of international law, and their status gains in multilateral settings depend on the acquiescence of higher-ranked states. This explains both the diplomatic posturing of Latin American delegates at The Hague and their failure to make substantive status gains.
Article
What explains the design and development of funding rules at international organizations? I investigate this question in the context of the United Nations system, which has undergone a dramatic shift in financing. Long associated with mandatory contributions, the United Nations increasingly relies on voluntary resources earmarked by individual donors. Previous studies have investigated the financing puzzle from a behavioral perspective and have found that wealthy donors use voluntary funding to rein in costs and constrain international organization programs. Providing an alternative theoretical approach, I investigate the financing puzzle from an institutional design perspective. I provide original United Nations funding rule data to demonstrate that it is not only funding practices, but also underlying funding rules, that have changed over time. I theorize how states with favorable views of the United Nations that sought to expand its activities — rather than those that desired to constrain it — had incentives to introduce funding rules that offered more flexibility and control to donors. I test the argument with a longitudinal case study of funding rule design and change at United Nations economic development institutions. The article expands the institutional design literature by integrating funding rules as a consequential design component and provides a novel explanation for changes in United Nations financing.
Book
This work posits that, over the past two centuries, democratic norms have spread from domestic politics to intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Grigorescu explores how norms shaped IGO decision-making rules such as those driving state participation, voting, access to information, and the role of NGOs and transnational parliaments. The study emphasizes the role of ‘normative pressures’ (the interaction between norm strength and the degree to which the status quo strays from norm prescriptions). Using primary and secondary sources to assess the plausibility of its arguments across two centuries and two dozen IGOs, the study focuses on developments in the League of Nations, the International Labor Organization, the United Nations, the World Bank, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization.
Article
This book is first and foremost a history of ruling-class diplomacy, but other factors are not ignored: the Bolsheviks, the Turks, and the insurgencies in Europe. This book provides detailed narrative and cogent analysis of the all that happened in Paris in 1919 and all that came out of it, with the aftermath of the peace process and the difficulty of avoiding war for twenty years. This book falls into two parts. Part 1 shows how the peacemakers and their successors dealt with the problems of a shattered Europe. The war had fundamentally altered both the internal structures of many of the European states and transformed the traditional order. The book shows that the management of the European state system in the decade after 1919, while in some ways resembling that of the past, assumed a shape that distinguished it both from the pre-war decades and the post-1933 period. Part II covers the 'hinge years' 1929 to 1933. These were the years in which many of the experiments in internationalism came to be tested and their weakness revealed. Many o the difficulties stemmed from the enveloping economic depression. The way was open to the movements towards étatism, autarcy, virulent nationalism, and expansionism which characterized the post-1933 European scene. The events of these years were critical to both Hitler's challenge to the European status quo and the reactions of the European statesmen to his assault on what remained of an international system.
Article
Analyses of crisis situations have proceeded without a complete understanding of the concept of crisis. A new model of crisis perception is developed and compared to Hermann's three-variable model (surprise, short decision time, threat to valued goals). The new model includes a triggering event, which is compared to some standard. The resulting discrepancy is assessed as a crisis based on the probability of loss, the value of loss, and the extent of time pressure. Threat is not in the model because it encompasses probability and value of loss. Planning, which leads to specific responses, is differentiated from surprise, which reduces the general impact of the event through the process of emotional inoculation. Three specific predictions derived from the proposed model are confirmed by data from 177 industrial and educational organizations that experienced curtailments of natural gas allocations during the winter of 1976-1977.
Article
Recent analyses of interwar International Relations (IR) have argued that there was no realist–idealist debate, and that there is no evidence of a distinct idealist paradigm. Less work has been done on realism in the interwar period. This article analyses the thought of one particular early 20th-century realist: Halford J. Mackinder. A product of the development of political geography, and a major influence on American strategic studies, Mackinder is best known for his Heartland thesis, which has been interpreted as environmental determinism. Yet, Mackinder’s realism is a complex mix of geopolitical analysis and the influence of ideas on human action. His concepts of organizer and idealist foreign policy ideal types pre-date Carr’s realist–utopian distinction by two decades, while his interpretation of the realities of international politics is at odds with Morgenthau’s realism. A closer analysis of Mackinder’s realism (1) underscores the links between geopolitics and realist strategic studies; (2) demonstrates the diversity of realist approaches in interwar IR; and (3) shows that it was possible to be a realist and also support the League of Nations. There are limits to Mackinder’s usefulness to 21st-century IR, but an understanding of his brand of realism is necessary for a fuller understanding of the development of realism as a 20th-century school of thought.
Article
International Organization, no longer the exclusive preserve of dreamers and idealists, is now, for better or for worse, one of the palpable realities of world politics. Whether we choose to consider it our best hope or a snare and a delusion or something in between, we are compelled to reckon with its effects, one of which is the foreseeable cost of non-participation in it. Its characteristic features – public debate, parliamentary procedures and resolution, majorities and voting blocs – all have become instruments of undeniable and indeed often painful efficacy in international relations. A review conference for the purpose of evaluating the experience of the first ten years of Charter operations is scheduled for 1955. Meanwhile, institutional developments within the framework of the Charter occur constantly, and call for policy decisions based on a profound understanding of how this or that change is likely to affect the international scene. In this situation, the publication of the first comprehensive history of the League of Nations must be considered a significant event.
Book
Crisis management has become a defining feature of contemporary governance. In times of crisis, communities and members of organizations expect their leaders to minimize the impact of the crisis at hand, while critics and bureaucratic competitors try to seize the moment to blame incumbent rulers and their policies. In this extreme environment, policy makers must somehow establish a sense of normality, and foster collective learning from the crisis experience. In this uniquely comprehensive analysis, the authors examine how leaders deal with the strategic challenges they face, the political risks and opportunities they encounter, the errors they make, the pitfalls they need to avoid, and the paths away from crisis they may pursue. This book is grounded in over a decade of collaborative, cross-national case study research, and offers an invaluable multidisciplinary perspective. This is an original and important contribution from experts in public policy and international security.
Article
Do international organizations really do what their creators intend them to do? In the past century the number of international organizations (IOs) has increased exponentially, and we have a variety of vigorous theories to explain why they have been created. Most of these theories explain IO creation as a response to problems of incomplete information, transaction costs, and other barriers to Pareto efficiency and welfare improvement for their members. Research owing from these theories, however, has paid little attention to how IOs actually behave after they are created. Closer scrutiny would reveal that many IOs stray from the efficiency goals these theories impute and that many IOs exercise power autonomously in ways unintended and unanticipated by states at their creation. Understanding how this is so requires a reconsideration of IOs and what they do.
Colonialism and the Birth of International Institutions: Sovereignty, Economy, and the Mandate System of the League of Nations
  • Antony Anghie
  • Anghie Antony
Office without Power: Secretary-General Sir Eric Drummond 1919-1933
  • James Barros
  • Barros James
Foreword: The League of Nations Decentred
  • Kathryn Greenman
  • Ntina Tzouvala
  • Greenman Kathryn
Chapter 43: Organizational Culture.” In Oxford Handbook of International Organizations
  • Stephen C Nelson
  • Catherine Weaver
  • Nelson Stephen C.
The International Secretariat. A Great Experiment in International Administration
  • Ranshofen-Wertheimer
  • F Egon
  • Ranshofen-Wertheimer Egon F.