INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION AND FIELD OPERATIONS

The constant, even frenetic, operation of several hundred international institutions of diverse models has so seeped into international relations that it is both taken for granted and regarded as an essential element by national governments. Even though few persons anywhere, and these sometimes reluctantly, pay much attention to this ceaseless, beneficially intended activity, it nevertheless concerns the general welfare and relates with special intensity to the poorer parts of the world.

Promotion of the general welfare — the provision of varied services to the people of the world — in one way or another now preoccupies most of the personnel and takes the lion's share of the finances of most of the broad membership intergovernmental organizations. Although this activity has unexpectedly burgeoned, it nevertheless links with older ideas about the functions of international organizations. In fact, the general welfare services derive for the most part from organizations cast in a rather conventional mold, familiar to all concerned with relations among states since the creation of the League of Nations.

Such international institutions represent attempts to bind their members, the states of the world, to conduct some of their affairs in regular, specified ways. These legally binding commitments shape the expectations that each government has about the behavior of others. Thus a universal standard for judging the behavior and intentions of governments is built up. Constructing standards requires implicit or explicit specification of desirable behavior and interpretations of rules so that governments can guide themselves. The institutions embody and develop processes intended to generate the consent of governments to new or improved policies which will be generally executed. Some of these policies are intended to promote the general welfare and belong to a yet broader, perpetual pressure toward international cooperation. International institutions radiate a general hope, too often forlorn but never abandoned for the long term, of helping to organize the mutual affairs of governments so as to prevent war, adjust conflict, and approach international governing.

This conventional perspective on international organization does not exclude field operations, which are a part of this study, but neither does it necessarily include them. It could be argued that attention to the general welfare, including economic development and social change, creates conditions necessary for organizing cooperative, problem-solving behavior among governments. If field operations are necessary to the promotion of the general welfare, then they are a positive step toward effective international cooperation.

Another perspective is offered by the Functionalist approach to international organization, which emphasizes practical, down-to-earth cooperation. Symbolic commitment to standards has little place in this view, but field operations fit it perfectly. In a sense, the development of field operations by international organizations bridges the differences that have developed among those who think of relations among governments as having a primarily negotiating and bargaining character and those who would abandon such approaches in favor of concrete, directly perceptible benefits.

Both of these perspectives have a global, supragovernmental tone or even bias. Another perspective more closely approaches that of the national capitals. It shows the complex of international organizations and their hedgerows of intertwining recommendations and programs in a different light. The goals of general welfare and orderly relationships remain the same. But the deliberative organs offer the national governments a vast series of opportunities to attempt to manipulate the international structures for their own benefit, however that is interpreted. Yet from this perspective, membership in international organizations has its costs; pressures on a government grow out of such participation and issues are raised, sometimes on the symbolic level, sometimes very practically, to which a government must respond.

Manipulative efforts directed outward by national governments into international bodies are extremely well-documented. Even quite casual readers of daily newspapers can learn about, for example, Egypt's attempt to use the United Nations to secure withdrawal of Israel from captured territories. Furthermore, some manipulation has an almost comforting parliamentary tone, whatever the outcome, for the unmistakable votes of majorities and minorities are registered. The influence exercised by the United States in wide-membership international bodies during the first decade after the Second World War is one illustration of this manipulation. Another can be found in the ability of the Afro-Asian nations to move the General Assembly to ever stronger resolutions to counter the policy of apartheid in South Africa. Again, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) were created primarily to serve the interests of poor countries.

If manipulative attempts, especially at the symbolic level, can be treated as easily recognizable, the reaction of governments to efforts of international organizations to set behavioral patterns through recommendations, urgings, demands, and rewards is far less well understood. Because much of this reactive process necessarily takes place within and around government bureaucracies, it easily becomes and remains obscure. Moreover, it necessarily differs from government to government, depending upon organizational forms and practices, political leaders and their views, and a host of other particular factors. Yet an obvious purpose for the existence of international organizations, whatever the perspective from which they are viewed, is precisely to induce reactions from member governments. Reactions of governments which result from stimulation by the activity of international organizations may be seen as the exercise of influence by those organizations.

This study relates to the generalized flow of influence from international institutions to and from member governments, but it can cover only part of the entire range of such influence. It deals with a subject matter typical of world institutions which reflect in varied proportions all of the perspectives discussed here. These are institutions which can solemnly declare a Second Development Decade after a first one scarcely triumphed in reaching for its goals. These are also institutions which can create a far-reaching administrative network and finance budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars for assistance to national economic development programs. The study centers on the manner in which international organizations work with member governments in efforts to improve the general welfare. In particular, it deals with those specialized programs that have a distinctly novel character in the development of international institutions; these are programs that depend on field operations that reach directly into member countries. Such operations have become characteristic of international institutions which are directed by their members to attempt to provide services for economic development and social change.

The study of influence in any social framework has long been the subject of criticism which monotonously points out the vagueness of the concept, the difficulties in making it operational for research, and the problems in measuring it. It is admittedly difficult to specify when influence, in the sense of inducing a reaction that otherwise might not have taken place, has been exercised. But this is a difficulty that applies frequently to inquiry into any kind of social phenomena: they are complex, frequently obscure, and often involve activity directed to different ends by the engaged parties. Yet it is obvious that international institutions are intended to have relations that cause behavioral reactions in governments. It is just as obvious that the causal impetus may range in intensity from the mildest sort of implied suggestion through various kinds of rewards to direct, forceful coercion. In matters of the general welfare, the causal impetus involves perceived self-interest on the part of governments (including their engaged component parts, e.g., specialized bureaucracies) and rewards for engaging in specific activities which supposedly accord with that self-interest. In this sense, the aim of international institutions is to influence governmental behavior. Evidence of such influence may be found in the manner in which governments and their personnel react to recommendations and policies emanating from international institutions and to possibilities for achieving direct benefits in programmatic form. Such reactions are commonplace in governmental circles. Furthermore, it is conceivable that some programs offered or actually operated by international institutions cause governments to react by attempting to influence the nature of the programs themselves. They may attempt to manipulate the international institutions, i.e., to influence them. It is with such varieties of influence, in concrete instances, that this study is concerned.

The Inquiry

From highly tentative overtures a quarter of a century ago to more intense activity to promote the general welfare, the international community appears to have defined a largely new mode of cooperation — field operations mounted by international institutions of global scope. Because of its novelty, its growth, its potential, and its limitations, it is worth asking how this mode works. This study will attempt to provide some description of recent operations in a framework restricted enough so that considerable and perhaps vivid detail can be presented.

Second, the inquiry will seek to determine what, if any, explicit ideas guide contemporary activities in the field. Much of the output of the deliberative organs of international organizations consists of urging member governments to follow one course in preference to another: thus, the United Nations urges member governments not to lose sight of the social consequences of economic change; and governments are urged to remain aware of social effects in preference to treating them with indifference. It might be assumed that personnel furnished by the UN system for field work would be guided by such recommendations and that governments would be enlightened by them. But is there evidence of such doctrinal penetration? What conclusions can be drawn from such evidence?

Third, if field administrative structures are created in member countries by the international organizations to which they belong, it could be expected that their operations would give a distinct tone to the policies of the recipient governments. This hypothesis will be tested as far as possible.

Fourth, if international organizations create administrative apparatus that works in different countries, it could be expected that the mode of operation is similar in each location. This hypothesis will be tested in three countries. An attempt will be made to account for any differences that occur.

Finally, some focal points of activity provide better possibilities for observation than would be found in simply broad description. One of these points is the office of Resident Representative. It is hypothesized that the Resident Representative develops a crucial relationship with the host government and that he sets a distinctive mode of operation which shapes the pattern of influence.

Extension of Influential Relationships

An end product of the sprawling network of international organizations and a principal object of their programs comprises services for governments on their own territories. This obviously contrasts with the earlier pattern of centralized services, such as statistical collations, which governments were free to use as general resources. Among the services now provided are technical advice, training, high level administrative personnel, and loans. One way or another, closely or distantly, these services are intended to relate to economic development and concomitant social change deliberately promoted by recipient governments.

Because economic development is the very stuff of politics — the kernel of crucial decisions — in many less developed countries (LDCs) the work of international organizations necessarily and increasingly touches on controversial and delicate national issues. To make recommendations about the organization of an educational system, to arm a minister of transport with arguments for extending a road network that competes for capital funds with a weapons-seeking defense ministry, to urge population control on a people who for the first time in the memory of the oldest man enjoy reasonably good health is to become involved in politics. True, the involvement is not partisan in the sense of taking part in an election, or as definite as would be the formal and real power to make final, authoritative, general decisions. Furthermore, formally and, so far, ultimately, the recipient government retains all powers of final decision on joint ventures and has complete freedom to accept or reject advice or loans.

Yet it is a fact — one that is characteristic of international institutions one third of a century after the formation of the United Nations — that in a large number of countries, governmental decisions for the first time in history take into account advice proffered by personnel formally representing neither private interests nor the government for whose benefit they work. These officials, employed by international organizations, operate within or (more frequently) parallel to national civil services and have access to the full range of technical working papers pertaining to the issues in their purview. Some of them take up only highly defined problems, such as the rate of flow of water in a river at various seasons over a number of years, and produce characteristically specialized reports. But some of the advisers have mandates broad enough to match such titles as "Economic Adviser to the Government" and have direct and frequent access to responsible ministers at the top of government.

Furthermore, governments increasingly seek advisers, sometimes at the suggestion of international organization representatives, for the purpose of preparing a request for assistance on a larger scale or for a loan from one of the international financial organizations. It is ever more common to find a team of experts, sent by the UN Development Program (UNDP) or a regional UN economic commission, hard at work on plans for a training institute or a pilot plant. The counsel offered by such advisers, it might be assumed, necessarily strives to meet the standards believed appropriate for the organization from which future aid is to be sought. In this sense, a government receives outside advice in order to build into its own information and decision-making structures the standards of outside organizations. Such incorporation of international standards may take place in a scarcely conscious manner or may be quite deliberate and explicit. This line of reasoning leads to the proposition that, by seeking and receiving aid from international organizations, governments of LDCs introduce substantive advice and advisory personnel which influence their own domestic political processes. In fact, this manifestation of international organization penetrates deeper into the domestic process than was expected or earlier experienced.

A corollary of this proposition holds that the conceptions of sovereignty enshrined in the constitutional instruments of international organizations — and perhaps most strikingly in the case of the United Nations — do not precisely conform to the reality of operational programs. The time-honored principle that each government absolutely controls its policies with regard to other governments permeates these constitutional instruments, and probably also the conceptions of international cooperation held by many diplomatic personnel. In the formal, legal sense, the members of international organizations are states equal to one another in legal capacity. All have reserved domestic jurisdictions which, if the concept has any meaning, are capable of definition.