ON INTEGRATING THE TEACHING OF THE ROLE OF IGOs
IN THE CREATION/EVOLUTION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
IN THE UNDERGRADUATE CURRICULUM

The study of IGOs in an undergraduate international relations course almost invariably invites at least one classroom skeptic to pose the question (in more or less the following terms): "If IGOs have little or no capacity to coercively enforce their rules and decisions, what good are those rules and decisions?" The question certainly has merit. If the instructor is true to the task of getting students to understand that force is not the sole arbiter of relations among States, it is a question that must be analyzed and answered.

The answer to this question presents a convenient opportunity to introduce the importance of voluntary compliance in establishing the legitimacy and the authoritativeness of rules of law.[1] Necessarily, it would seem, the answer must be based upon the a priori consideration of three additional questions which I refer to as the "who, how, why" questions. They are: who makes the laws? How, i.e. by what processes, are the laws made? And, why are the laws made? Given the politically decentralized nature of the international system and the vast economic and political inequalities among the States within this system, the "why" question seems to be the key one in terms of understanding why States have chosen to voluntarily comply with rules of International Law.[2] By stating the "what" of the matter without quickly answering the "why" question, there is little hope of answering the initial "what good ..." question in a manner that satisfactorily explains the utility of creating IGOs.

The proper answer to the "why" question is as follows: without laws, the international system is reduced to anarchy whereby the only significant value is force. Even the most powerful nations would face the constant danger of being engulfed by alliances of the weaker ones.[3] Therefore, there is a common interest among all States in the establishment of minimum standards of order - causing the vast majority of their interactions to occur nonviolently. However much of "a lowest common denominator" this shared interest might be, it does serve as a basis for permitting the States to exercise their sovereignty in pursuits other than constant preparation for war - a contributing factor to the demise of earlier systems.

Having established order within the international system as the common interest among a community of States, the next task is to propose to the students that no single State - regardless of its capacity to inflict punishment upon other States - will be accepted by others as vested with any kind of rule-making authority to which all are obliged to comply. States B, C, and D's compliance with any rules pronounced by State A would thus be tantamount to renouncing their national sovereignties - defined in this context as the freedom to decide for themselves what international rules they would prefer to follow or apply. If their sovereignty is thus renounced, then the notion of some common interest to animate international agreement has no meaning. Whatever the "international rules of law," if they can in fact be called rules of law, would then emerge as the products of coercively induced rather than voluntarily produced compliance.

The creation and evolution of rules of international law must be a common enterprise of all States. Common interests can only be so as a consequence of a common enterprise identifying them. The recognition of the necessity of common enterprise is precisely what has led to the creation of IGOs, and to their use as the primary mechanism for the creation and evolution of the rules of International Law. Because IGOs are the creations of the common enterprise of States, their decisions and their contributions in terms of the creation and evolution of International Law thus incorporate the approval of those States due to their shared interests. That IGOs have so little capacity to enforce rules of International Law can be understood as the consequence of the continued reluctance of States to surrender the requisite degree of their sovereignty to the IGO. There is a persistent fear that, given too much enforcement capacity, an IGO could evolve into a distinct "superstate" able to induce compliance coercively. On the other hand, the proliferation of IGOs that has occurred since World War II suggests a recognition among States that their common interests are more closely shared in a number of endeavors.

Returning to the original question posed by our classroom skeptic, an answer may now be proposed. The "what good" served by those rules formulated and decisions taken by IGOs lies in the following fact: because IGOs are the result of the common enterprise of the member States and therefore expressive of their common interests, IGOs are more likely (than any alternative decision making structure in a Westphalian international system[4]) to be vested with the authoritativeness and legitimacy necessary to obtain voluntary State cooperation and compliance.

Footnotes

[2] Characterization of the international system as politically decentralized is certainly not a novel idea. A particularly good discussion of the implications in international relations is to be found in Lynn H. Miller, Global Order (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985). Chapters 4 and 5 are especially noteworthy.

[3] This is, of course, the Hobbesian order, which is the proposed condition from which humankind seeks to escape.

[4] See Global Order, cited in note 2 above.