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Democratization and transnationalization are two fundamental trends in the evolution of international affairs today. They come together in the neglected phenomenon of international parliaments and inter-parliamentary associations, which, for the sake of brevity, I group together as international parliamentary institutions (IPIs). The academic literature pays almost no attention to IPIs. Some recent research confirms that the European Parliament (EP) is significant not only for the political and economic life of citizens of its member states, but also for the conduct of international affairs in Europe at large.[1] To demonstrate this point, one need only mention the EP's forcing of the resignation of Jacques Santer and the entire European Commission in March 1999. The European Commission's attention to environmental questions as an aspect of international security in Central and Eastern Europe derives from an impulse first provided by the EP and embodied in its legislation. To observers, it is obvious that the EP has affected important choices along the road of the European Union's development. It has even constructed a good number of the road signs. For example, the Treaty of Maastricht developed out of a series of proposals presented to the EP by a caucus of its members in 1984.
The significance of IPIs is wide-ranging and growing. The EP is only the best-known example. There are nearly two dozen such international institutions in the world today, with varying scopes and responsibilities. Scepticism over the efficacy of IPIs is no longer justified; a blanket dismissal cannot be defended. IPIs introduce national elites from countries that are not yet fully democratized to ranges of views
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and perspectives, particularly from democratic oppositions in other regimes. IPIs have also given birth to a new form of diplomacy called parliamentary diplomacy.[2] This represents today, from both an analytical and a practical standpoint, an important middle ground between the traditional level of interstate diplomacy and the new level of transnational co-operation among grassroots non-governmental organizations (NGOs). IPIs are developing into an important societal mechanism for oversight on traditional executive-based diplomacy. IPIs also establish ongoing transnational relationships that restrain old power politics where civil society and NGOs are underdeveloped and politically constrained. In such a manner they prepare a middle ground for interstate co-operation.
This chapter analyses the emergence of IPIs – a type of institution that has been in existence for half a century but has recently started to proliferate. The chapter uses IPIs as a vehicle for discussing the nature of the emerging international system and how this affects the institutions structuring the current international order. The first section of the chapter offers a brief explanation of why neither 'world public opinion' nor 'global civil society' adequately describes the impact of world society on world politics. The second section explains why the intersection of the concepts 'complexity' and 'world society' accurately characterizes the new international environment. It also outlines briefly what this means for the level, scope, and scale of analysis of international affairs. The third section surveys parliamentary and quasi-parliamentary institutions in world politics as well as defining and offering a typology of IPIs. The fourth section discusses how to assess their institutional development. For this purpose, it synthesizes two seemingly contradictory frameworks (functional and epigenetic), showing them to be complementary. It traces the development of the EP according to this framework in order to illustrate its aptness. Finally, the conclusion reflects on the implications of IPIs for the evolution and design of future international orders.
Two concepts that have in the past helped us understand the impact of transnational social life and action on international politics are world public opinion and global civil society. However, neither of them is adequate for either theoretical conceptualization or policy guidance in the twenty-first century.
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The concept of 'world public opinion' was an early and crude term designed to help us assess the impact of public opinion on the conduct of international affairs. The term was poorly defined. It often referred to the expressed opinion of governments, either capitalist or communist, without reference to the populations of the states concerned. Other times it referred to the collective opinion of editorial writers of leading newspapers. In the eyes of some observers, especially during the heyday of the Nonaligned Movement, resolutions of the UN General Assembly became a referent for world public opinion.
This ambiguity reproduces the same misconceptions that were characteristic of early attempts, a century ago, to study domestic public opinion. Those projects used what was then the most obvious source of expression from the public – the journalistic press. Newspapers, it was understood, revealed the opinions of social classes and estates. However, the dominant social and political philosophy of the time assumed that these classes and estates were created by the state. Even this school of thought was marked by an absence of any theory of the press that integrated the media system analytically with the political system or with society at large.
The meaning of the concept of 'public opinion' depends on how one defines the political community and how that community is represented.[3] A systematic theory of the press finally emerged not in Western Europe but rather in Central Europe, where the nationality question revealed the poverty of such distinctions as the simple dichotomy, in nineteenth-century France, between le pouvoir and l'opinion. In nineteenth-century central Europe, accelerated social mobilization, accompanied by rapid urbanization and a jump in literacy rates, impelled the creation of parliamentary regimes and the extension of suffrage in conditions where the tension between republicanism and monarchical principles did not have the luxury of time to be resolved. The rise of the nationality question in central Europe forced the issue of state–society relations. In social science, this development was formulated analytically as the question of the influence of public opinion on government policy.
In response, German social scientists attempted to establish a science that they called Zeitungswissenschaft, about newspapers and other journalistic media. The German sociologist Max Weber, the first person to treat the press as a component of the social system, made the previ-
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ously unknown distinction between 'newspaper opinion' and 'public opinion.' In the first decade of the twentieth century, and against the dominant view, he argued that public opinion is not a given and that the study of its formation was legitimate.[4] Indeed, Vladimir Lenin's conviction that publishing his party-revolutionary newspaper Iskra was equivalent to creating public opinion, rather than influencing it, merely reflects the era's general lack of knowledge about public opinion. Only in the 1920s was the historian Wilhelm Mommsen able to conclude that the press of any era represents only a portion of public opinion.[5]
Today, there is still no comprehensive theory of how the press is related to society, and the growth of electronic communication complicates systematic analysis. The rapidity and proliferation of messages today gives much mass communication the quality of rumour.[6] Communication strategies today run the risk of being seen as no more than propaganda. The notion of world public opinion has become so problematic that one rarely hears it invoked anymore. References to 'global civil society' are the heritage left to us by the passing of world public opinion.
The concept of 'global civil society' is equally problematic. For Hegel, civil society mediated the relations that the family had with the state and hence referred to, among other things, economic exchanges and the market. Given this history of the concept, it is remarkable that many references today to global civil society ignore economic activity, whether of individuals or of multinational corporations.[7] This contemporary connotation of 'global civil society' is a result of the way in which 'civil society' was reintroduced in the 1980s to analyse political transitions from authoritarian rule. It referred to the power arising from the political association of people living in societies that were undergoing political transformation in South America, South Africa, Southern and Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, without reference to economic activity.
Thus the dominant conception of civil society refers to the ensemble of political associations mediating between the individual and the state. Evident shortcomings in this concept nevertheless encourage us to consider alternatives. The term 'NGO' seems inappropriate because many NGOs in transitional countries have been fronts for, or spon-
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sored by, governments. The term 'private voluntary organization' has entered into currency, but these organizations have often been sponsored by individuals pursuing private agendas and private economic interests. The term 'third sector' has evolved to reflect activity that falls under the aegis neither of the state nor of private enterprise (including criminal organizations and the Mafia).
Some writers have argued that the definition of global civil society ought to include economic activity, as it did when the term first developed.[8] They see civil society as an overarching social form that dominates both states and individuals; they emphasize transnational economic activity as the principal characteristic of this social form. Yet if the former view of global civil society ignores transnational economic activity, then this latter view tends too much to ignore and minimize transnational political activity. However, recent speculations about and explorations of 'transnational democracy' make it clear that such considerations are non-trivial.[9] An Archimedean point is necessary, capable of equilibrating these two overemphases. This is provided by a new approach called 'complex world society.'
The idea of complex world society combines the world society approach with the insights of complexity science. Complexity science is a new way of looking at physical, biological, and social phenomena. A complex system is a system having multiple interacting components, the overall behaviour of which cannot be inferred from the behaviour of its components. Complexity is not complicatedness, or overdetermination, or a multiplication of explanatory variables.[10] Complexity science offers an innovative perspective on the evolution of the interna-tional system and on the behaviours of actors within it.
The emergence today of an interconnected global civilization and multiple centres of power in world politics manifests complexity. Recent developments in international relations theory have sought to take this complexity into account.[11] Much complexity-based work recently has been in the field of agent-based modelling, and this is insightful. However, complexity is not merely a set of new implements to be added to
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existing theoretical toolkits. Using its insights does not require computer programming or even quantitative analysis. The complexity of present-day international politics has implications for the level, for the scope, and for the scale of analysis. The phenomenon of IPIs illustrates how current developments in world politics manifest complexity in all three of these aspects.
Complexity science offers us a means of understanding levels of analysis and helps us to reconstruct analytically the international political system. Questions about the level of analysis draw attention to the issue of emergence. Emergence is the evolution of new (qualitative) phenomena through a system's interaction with its environment. IPIs are an example of such emergent phenomena. The multiplication of issue-areas in international politics and security manifests such emergence. The whole growth of questions about deterritorialized aspects of international politics does so as well. Emergence invokes questions about the dependence of a system on its parts and the interdependence and specialization of these parts. Studying the parts in isolation no longer works. Changes in one part may affect other parts and the behaviour of the system as a whole. Increased academic interest in 'counterfactuals' demonstrates how important this aspect of complexity is.[12]
Issues about the scope of the analysis draw attention to a category of questions concerning stability and change. This category subsumes adaptation, pattern formation, and evolution. As such, it draws attention to issues of learning, including organizational learning. It also balances issues of emergence, such as transnational networks concerned with non-territorial issues, with equally important territorial aspects of the post–Cold War world, such as establishment of regional international systems. While such systems today are more autonomous of the global political system than they were during the Cold War, they have grown stronger and more interrelated. These include not only regional international subsystems (for example, Europe and Southeast Asia), but also international littoral subsystems (such as the Pacific Rim, the Baltic, and the Caspian). The proliferation of regional IPIs is an aspect of this phenomenon. The territorial aspects of world politics today thereby lead us to treat the global political system and its components as complex adaptive systems.[13]
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Scale of analysis draws attention to self-organization, which arises from the fact that under conditions of complexity fine scales influence large-scale behaviour. To understand complex systems therefore requires multi-scale descriptions. The degree of complexity that is apparent to an observer also depends on the scale at which the system is described. For example, one requirement of complexity is to establish correlation between large and small scales. This reduces the overall smaller-scale complexity. This is happening every day in world politics. International regions that self-organize as emergent multilateral networks are an example. Among other things, they produce IPIs. Self-organizing regions are characteristic of the current international transition and the new system to which it will give way. This provides the ground to introduce the complexity concept of self-organized criticality.[14]
I use the term 'institution' here, as clarified by Sidney Tarrow, to mean 'established and routinized relations among states and non-state actors in the international system whose competence in recognized sectors of activity is governed by agreed-upon norms and regulations.' Tarrow also sees a hierarchy of international institutions, 'starting at the lowest level [with] occasional contacts between states, succeeded by conventions, treaties, and regimes, and capped by sustained international institutions.'[15]
On this basis, three categories of international institutions attract attention – societal, executive, and parliamentary. We can designate transnational advocacy networks[16] and transnational social movements as part of a category of international societal institutions. On that basis, we may consider traditional international organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as international executive institutions, since it is the executives of national governments that are signatories and members.
The notion of international parliamentary institutions (IPIs) as a phenomenon to be analysed appears natural in this context. Indeed, to these three categories we may further add hybrid types of parliamentary–societal, parliamentary–executive, and executive–societal international institutions.[17] The following discussion summarizes these reflections.
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International executive institutions. Traditional international executive organizations are mostly of this category, with national political executives determining national representation and policy. Cox and Jacobson differentiate them according to their membership and purpose[18] – specifically, by whether their membership is restricted or universal and by whether they were created for a specific issue or for a general purpose.
International parliamentary institutions. This category is the focus of the present chapter. Its scope is clarified below.
International societal institutions. Restricted-membership specific-purpose institutions of this category include NGOs and transnational advocacy networks. Restricted-membership general-purpose organizations of this category are theoretically possible, but none exists. The recent UN initiative for a Millennium People's Assembly attempted to convoke such a universal general-purpose body for a single meeting. Its logistical and political problems make evident the associated questions of representation.
Mixed international executive–societal institutions. A universal organization of this type does not exist. Theoretically, restricted-membership organizations of this type may be created ad hoc; in practice, they mainly exist indirectly through IPIs, set up to address issues of representation.
Mixed international parliamentary–executive institutions. The universal general-purpose organization in this category would be an institution bringing together the UN General Assembly and the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU). Universal specific-purpose organizations here are theoretically possible, but their function is assumed by implementation of the series of co-operation agreements signed in the last several years by the IPU with many of the UN family's specialized agencies. Restricted-membership general-purpose organizations of this type exist as formations incorporating IPI participation. One example is the system uniting the Nordic Council with the Nordic Council of Ministers. Another is the Baltic Council, which unites the Baltic Assembly with the national executives of its member states. Restricted-member-
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ship specific-purpose organizations of this type are usually components of organizations such as the Baltic Council.
Mixed international parliamentary–societal institutions. Technically, the parliamentary component here must be IPI-based. In practice, if the parliamentary components are national, then the parliamentary–societal institution is transnational rather than international, although the embedded inter-parliamentary component is still transgovernmental.[19]
Approaches to international studies that were developed over the past fifty years are now limited by the concerns of the Cold War: bilateralism, crisis bargaining, and territorialized national security. These traditional approaches are not necessarily the best vehicles to carry one across the terrain of post–Cold War world politics. New approaches that treat non-state actors and non-traditional security issues as central have proliferated. Although distinctions among superpowers, great powers, and regional powers have not disappeared, middle-range and lower-level phenomena have become objects of study, increasingly seen as dominant forces in an international system that now self-organizes. IPIs reflect the importance of supranational regions that are today enjoying greater autonomy, having been relieved of Cold War superpower conflict.
A working definition of an IPI may consider it as an international institution:
Different IPIs come from varying political origins, and their respec-
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tive founding documents establish them as having different demarcations of authority. For example, the Parliamentary Assembly of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO – PA, until recently called the North Atlantic Assembly, or NAA) has no formal statutory relations with NATO. It was created to assist harmonization of legislation across member states and to facilitate opinion formation among parliamentarians and their constituents. The NATO – PA example also demonstrates how the authority of IPIs is often limited: its founding documents explicitly exclude any possibility of supranationality.
The development of the Baltic Assembly provides a contrast to that of the former NAA. In 1989 people living in the Baltic republics in the old Soviet Union, inspired by the Baltic entente of the interwar period, formed a transnational social organization that they called a new Baltic Entente. This body found itself represented among established political parties in the region as well as among the new political parties that sprang up at the time. When these parties became governing and opposition parties as the Soviet Union collapsed, the Baltic Entente social organization found itself represented in new national parliaments.
In due course the parliaments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania institutionalized an interparliamentary Baltic Assembly. Today that body has formal powers to make recommendations to member governments on a whole range of issues. It also has the responsibility to determine whether recommendations are followed, although it cannot enforce compliance. The Baltic Assembly is not unique in its origins and responsibilities; the Central American Parliament and the Andean Parliament are comparable. The Central American Parliament is already directly elected, and the Andean Parliament will soon be.
There are many types of international parliamentary formations on the international scene. A gradation of parliamentariness is useful in analysing the range of such organizations. In descending order of parliamentariness, one can identify the following types of international parliamentary formations (formations, because not all of them are institutions).
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The foregoing list serves to demonstrate the problems inherent in analysing such a diverse phenomenon as IPIs in world society. It is still useful to draw on distinctions between general and specific purpose and between universal and restricted membership.[20] This chapter focuses on regionally based, general-purpose, restricted-membership IPIs. Then experience points to their eventual role in developing a broader regional participation in global governance. In Europe, a large number of IPIs have been formed in the last decade. The Baltic Assembly, the Central European Initiative, and the Organization for Black Sea Economic Cooperation all provide for regular institutionalized interparliamentary co-operation. Initiatives to establish and promote IPIs have been under way for some time in Asia and Africa, where several already exist. Today, there are nearly two dozen IPIs throughout the world, of which half were formed in the last twelve years.
Figure 6.1 provides a more comprehensive view, outlining a classification of existing international parliamentary formations, including IPIs. Among restricted-membership, general-purpose international parliamentary formations it distinguishes between regional and linguistically bases. The shaded box meets the definition of IPIs.
The brevity of this analysis, and the policy concern with global governance that informs the conclusions below, make its necessary to exclude IPIs that are not geographically based (see Figure 6.1). Thus this analysis does not include the Inter-parliamentary Union, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, or the Association internation-
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ale des Parlementaires de Langue française. For the same reason it omits the new Islamic Inter-parliamentary Union (more formally, Parliamentary Union of the Organization of the Islamic Conference), which has yet to hold its first regular meeting. This analysis also excludes dormant IPIs such as the Nordic Inter-Parliamentary Union, formed in 1907 but inactive since 1957. Table 6.1 shows that IPIs have become a regular fixture in international politics. It also reports the total number of country memberships, confirming the increasing trend in participation.
Table 6.2 illustrates how the rates of formation of IPIs have varied across supranational regions and systems. It is convenient to distinguish three international systems – the Cold War system, from 1947 until 1973; the system of multilateral interdependence, from 1974 to 1991; and, the current international transition, beginning in 1992. Table 6.2 also illustrates an increase in number of IPIs formed under each of the three systems. There is an apparent acceleration in the rate of IPI formation: about one every four and a half years during the Cold War; one every three years under multilateral interdependence; and more than one a year under the international transition. Also it is clear that, during the Cold War, IPIs formed principally in the Atlantic and/or European regions, whereas in the current period most have formed in either Latin American or Eurasia.
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We can identify four types of IPIs: Congress, Assembly, Parliament, and Legislature. These types refer to stages of institutional development, not to the specific names that individual IPIs may have. The three transitions between succeeding pairs of types may be referred to as initiation, takeoff, and spillover. After we examine the types, we consider the details of the transition phases.
Congress. When various national parliaments, or members of them, come together in a meeting, we call this a Congress. A Congress does not require a permanent secretariat. For a Congress to move to the next level of development means passing through stage of initiation.
Assembly. The next level of development is Assembly. An Assembly is not merely a single gathering, as is a Congress, but rather represents its participants' recognition of a common situation that motivates them to meet so on a regular, even if uninstitutionalized, basis. Having come together more than once, they are able to take common decisions and perhaps move in a common direction. An Assembly may function quite well with a limited secretariat or some form of informal institutional continuity. On that basis, the nascent institution may choose to enter the takeoff stage of development. However, a simple series of confer-
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ences that has not established an autonomous secretariat is less likely to have the momentum and drive to succeed in developing itself further.
Parliament. The etymological root of the word parliament signifies 'a place where there is talk.' Historically, a national parliament did not necessarily enjoy the right, obligation, or power to propose laws, let alone discuss or ratify them. Similarly, the Russian Duma derives its name from the Russian verb 'to think.' The regular functioning of a Parliament sets the foundation for possible, but not inevitable, creation of a Legislature. The path by which a Parliament evolves into a Legislature is called spillover.
Legislature. The Latin root of the word 'legislature' means not to make laws, but to carry laws. The distinction is important. The Roman Senate legislated when it carried or placed a law that it had approved before the people in the Forum for their approval. In a representative democracy today, people have delegated this task of approval to their national political executives. An IPI of the Legislature type deliberates with some juridical or statutory authority, proposes laws for approval by member states, and may assist in implementation and oversight, should member states adopt recommended laws.
There is a simple way to conceive of the progression of an IPI through these levels, using the standard structural-functional typology of domestic interest groups.[21] Before the level of Congress, there is no organized interest group at all, or what is called an anomic interest group. The Congress level is a non-associational interest group: the membership of a potential IPI is defined by geography (or other categorical attribute). The level of Assembly is like an associational group, the sort of voluntary social or political organization typical of domestic society. The levels of Parliament and Legislature are both institutional groups; the difference is that the latter has relative international juridical autonomy.
It is useful to develop a comprehensive framework for evaluating the growth and decline of IPIs. Such a framework may contribute to an understanding of the evolving arrangements of global governance by helping to determine what leads some IPIs to respond to demands
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imposed on them by the international environment and why others do not. The skeleton of four developmental levels sketched above is epigenetically inspired. This means that it recognizes that subsequent levels of development are conditioned by the accumulated experience of earlier levels.
The four-level typology focuses not on established functions of IPIs, but rather on new functions for growth. It draws on a framework sketched by Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist who criticized the structural-functional perspective that was popular among social scientists thirty years ago.[22] Etzioni adopted what he called an epigenetic approach, treating institutions, and international communities in particular, in an organic, almost biological, fashion. ('Epigenesis' refers to emergence into existence through successive stages of maturation.) His key concepts, as they may be applied to IPIs and other international institutions, are set out in Table 6.3.
Thus the four-level typology indicates how IPIs grow from one phase of development to another. We can deepen it by taking into account (following the complexity-based need for multi-scale analysis) not just an epigenetic account of how they grow but also a functional account of how they survive. Klaus Hüfner and Jens Naumann furnish
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a functional taxonomy of the activities of international organizations,[23] which was further elaborated by Harold Jacobson.[24] It emphasizes the creation of structures designed to accomplish two kinds of functions – internal and external. Table 6.4 summarizes the distinctions between them. This chapter focuses on internal functions, because success in performing them is crucial to an organization's survival through its initial stages of development.
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Setting epigenetic and functional taxonomies against one another helps us bring forth questions for empirical investigation and helps us analyse information concerning the development of international institutions, specifically IPIs. This chapter lays out the conceptual framework for that exercise, which allows us to analyse the internal functions of an international institution as they relate to the three stages of development as identified in the epigenetic taxonomy. Moreover, it allows us to investigate the correlation between the external functions of an international institution and the locus of power and performance categories identified in the epigenetic taxonomy.
The functional taxonomy distinguishes between internal and external functions. The multiplication of internal functions can be seen as responses to challenges in the growth of an IPI. Success in meeting such challenges represents a passing from one level of evolution to another. IPIs establish internal functions in the following sequence:
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Thus only IPIs that successfully perform initial internal functions have an opportunity to move on to later ones. Historically, IPIs must first evolve internal functions that allow them stable instutional relationships with their constituent member states. They then may engage the external environment. The last of these functions, operational activities, owns autonomously, undertaken with reference to the physical and institutional environment. In this idealized sequence, operational activities represent the spillover from the development of internal functions to the fulfilment of external ones.
The first phase in the development of an IPI is the establishment of a Congress. The completion of the initiation phase transforms a Congress into an Assembly. During this stage the IPI takes on informational and normative activities, both of which are internal functions. Once these two internal functions have developed, an Assembly has the opportunity to enter takeoff. Takeoff and the development of a Parliament require the successful establishment of rule-creating and rule-supervisory activities. A Parliament may acquire international juridical autonomy and evolve into a Legislature by completing the transitional spillover phase. During spillover, IPIs take on operational activities, specifically in reference to their interaction with other international organizations. The following scheme expands this logic in detail.
Initiation: from Congress to Assembly. A Congress does not need a permanent secretariat. However, if a permanent secretariat is set up, its initial activities generally are informational and normative. Informational activities involve the distribution of information to member states and to other international organizations. Normative activities involve the setting of meeting agendas, fixing the legal status of the secretariat under domestic or international law, determining the distribution of budgetary contributions, and answering questions of employment and the nationality of employees. Institutionalizing normative activities by an emergent secretariat creates the potential for a further deepening of the activities of the secretariat and of the IPI overall. Initiation is accomplished when an IPI has regularized the internal functions of informational and normative activities.
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Takeoff: from Assembly to Parliament. Following the initiation phase, an assembly may face new challenges. Its newly institutionalized secretariat may feel the need to engage in rule-creating activities. These may involve no more than devising parliamentary rules of order so as to provide a means of orderly conduct in the Assembly during its meetings. However, these rule-creating activities are sufficient to produce a qualitative evolution in the IPI. Rule creation involves and builds on the regularization of the normative activities that began during initiation. Such activities become possible only following the establishment of the IPI's juridical personality under international law, the definition of its status in the country where its seat is located, and the confirmation of any relevant founding documents of the IPI itself. An IPI that undertakes rule-creating activities enters the phase of takeoff. Once such rules are created, it becomes necessary to administer and verify their execution as well as to evaluate their appropriateness. Administering, verifying, and evaluating involve rule-supervisory activities. Just as engaging in normative activities is required to move from congress to assembly, so undertaking rule-supervisory activities opens the way to the establishment of a parliament.
Spillover: from Parliament to Legislature. When a Parliament engages in operational activities, then the IPI can be said to have entered the spillover transition phase. Operational activities of IPI secretariats include not only programmatic activities arising from rule creation and supervision but also other undertakings generated from the deliberations of parliament. These activities often stem from demands arising from both the IPI's internal and its external environments. When the IPI begins to propose laws for adoption by member states, the transformation to a Legislature is completed.
Table 6.5 depicts the foregoing framework. The typology is a template for the possible evolution of IPIs and demonstrates the utility of combining the functionalist and epigenetic frameworks. When combined, the two approaches point the way towards a systematic comparative taxonomy of the stages of IPI development. This discussion does not suggest that all IPIs have the means of becoming a Legislature, or even that they would seek to do so. Some, such as the NATO – PA, are limited by their founding documents, which explicitly prohibit them from taking on certain internal and external functions.
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The framework in Table 6.5 makes sense of the chronology of the institutional development of the European Parliament. If we use it to track the European Parliament's epigenesis, we observe the following:
Pre-Congress and Congress. The pre-Congress event of the European Parliament's development is the first meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in Sep-
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tember 1952. The Treaty of Rome established the European Parliament's status as a Congress in March 1957, following the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC).
The Initiation to Assembly. At this stage the demands and supports from the European Parliament's environment were fairly routine, so the development to the level of Assembly passed easily. The inaugural meeting in March 1957 was quickly followed by informational and normative activities, which sparked the stage of initiation. The European Parliament, having acquired a secretariat and a nominal international juridical personality, reached the level of Assembly by 1958.
The Takeoff to Parliament. The EP proceeded swiftly to establish rule creating and supervising activities. However, with respect to rule-supervisory activities, it encountered significant resistance from other institutions of the regional integration organization. It easily supervised the rules that it had created to govern its own activities, but it was not until 1970 that the EP achieved regular consultation with member states concerning budgetary matters for the whole of the EEC. This institutional performance was, however, eventually successful, and a new equilibrium emerged between the European Parliament and its institutional environment. Anticipation of the first wave of the EEC's enlargement provided the necessary jolt to help break the logjam that inhibited the European Parliament's institutional development. Still it did not attain the level of Parliament until nearly a decade later. Although the Treaty of Rome provided in 1957 for the EP to oversee the organization's executive, this did not actually begin happening in an effective way until after the first direct election of the European Parliament by the member states' electorates in June 1979. Until then, members of the European Parliament had been chosen by member states' own national parliaments. The European Parliament's willingness and ability to oversee other institutions mark its attainment of the level of Parliament.
The Spillover to Legislature. Operational activities at this level refer not only to the European Parliament's relations with external bodies that were part of the European communities system, but also to its participation in Europe's foreign affairs. The European Parliament began to participate in an operational way following the elaboration of the Common Foreign and Security Policy in 1983. This event sparked the
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stage of spillover. A fully fledged Legislature finally emerged with the legitimization of the European Parliament's authority over other bodies of the integration organization, following the signing of the European Parliament's Single European Act of 1986, which improved procedures and introduced regular legislative co-operation between the European Parliament and the European Council.
It is the European Parliament's trail-blazing that encourages other IPIs to emulate it or to learn the lessons of its experience. IPIs from around the world arise from different political and social needs, have different demarcations of authority as spelled out in their founding documents, and have different statuses under international law. The European Parliament was motivated and set into place by states working together first within a nascent integration organization, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). The European Parliament's qualities derive from its origin as an ECSC body. Its capacity to force the resignation in 1999 of the European Commission headed by Jacques Santer has its origins in the desire of the national governments that formed the ECSC to be able to oust that organization's administration. The ECSC in turn was unique because it was a manifestation of sector-specific international integration, which subsequently became illegal under the rules of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). So while the development of the European Parliament to its present stage is the result of idiosyncratic factors, its uniqueness is almost an accident.
The European Parliament's experience nevertheless lends itself as a template from which other IPIs at various stages of development can learn. It is fair to say that there is no issue or task that any IPI will confront that does not have some strong if not direct analogy with some aspect of the European Parliament's experience. This is not to suggest that other IPIs will follow the same path. If IPIs are a part of regional integration organizations, their relations with the executive of those organizations and with member states will influence their evolution. Most Latin American IPIs seek to provide a forum for co-operation among members of national parliaments. These IPIs remain unrelated to international security organizations including the Organization of American States, which, just in 2000, created an associated IPI, although they are part of regional economic integration organizations. Even so, regional organizations have begun to expand into such issue-areas as conflict resolution and biodiversity.
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Let me begin to conclude this chapter by offering a remark on the designation 'multiple centres of power,' which has lately animated much thinking. The opposite of a state-centric system may be not a multi-centric system but rather, properly speaking, a state-eccentric system. This term aptly describes the present-day situation. States have been dethroned from their centrality, yet they retain considerable significance. It is difficult to designate the international system except by reference to what we no longer have. Complexity science tells us that states that attempt to function in the old way, that refuse to learn lessons from their new environment, and that continue to act like institutions instead of transmuting their diplomatic activity into a networked form are in for a hard time.
The arrival of new information technologies has changed the international environment. As recently as two decades ago, the exchange of information required face-to-face meetings in order to ensure follow-through. The distribution of information often required a secretariat; and the supervision of joint action required the establishment of a separate office. Today this activity can be done via the internet, where the only co-ordinating institutions would be the shared software through which participants exchange information and a network of data transmissions. As a result, it has become more problematic to identify international institutions. Today we may ask whether an electronic mailing list is an institution. After all, it has an archive physically located on a computer drive and a nominal secretariat of at least one person.
None of this should be surprising, given the tenets of complexity science. Moreover, the activity of a formal international institution today is more likely to be underestimated than overestimated. Traditional research methods cannot account for all the transactions and flows among participants in an IPI. Thus we may attribute states' divergent policy outputs to conflicting interests, when in fact they may result from an undetected yet co-ordinated division of labour.
IPIs catalyse the self-generation of NGOs and inter-NGO networks. Not only have IPIs launched initiatives that have created NGO networks, but more than one IPI has been launched by NGO networks. NGO networks include many non-IPI parliamentary formations: semi-
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formal parliamentary groupings in the EP associated with different factions; interest groups in which parliamentarians from more than one country participate; and transnational advocacy groups that focus their activity on IPIs. Recent research identifies the European Union as a catalyst for the formation and aggregation of transnational interests by institutions in complex world society.[25]
The implication of all this for global governance, accountability, and the management of transnational problems is that institutional design by itself will provide no final answers. That is the case because what must be managed is no longer institutions but instead networks. This is not to say that attempts at the design of international institutions should be abandoned, but only to suggest that their subsequent redesign will become necessary sooner than we think. In such an environment, the more an institution acts like a network, the more successful it will be. Consequently we should think about international order not in static terms of security and co-operation, but rather in dynamic terms of co-operative security, which seeks to make change predictable and to keep change transparent so as to build confidence and minimize perceived threat.[26]
Events of late in Kosovo and East Timor are only the most recent reminders that countries care about what is happening in their regions. This being so, it becomes realistic after the end of the Cold War to foresee the participation of regional integration organizations in global governance. In present circumstances, the difficult part is to figure out how to link regional concerns with a global structure, because chapter 8 of the UN Charter is too rigid for contemporary purposes. So, what might be the role of IPIs in a global governance system that integrates and co-ordinates the activities of regional organizations with one another yet does so without imposing imperative mandates?
One thing that IPIs can do is to decrease the 'democratic deficit.' Representative bodies are a forum for ensuring democratic accountability. Traditionally, they can do so in at least three ways. First, they may secure comments from social and interest groups about issues under consideration. Second, they may perform investigative studies. Third, the representatives may be decision makers chosen and dismissed by
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the people. In the developmental typology elaborated above, Assemblies can perform the first of these tasks; Parliaments, the first two; and Legislatures, all three.
IPIs can do still more than that. Let us adopt Albert Hirschman's now-classic distinction among exit, voice, and loyalty.[27] An Assembly can promote moves towards regional confidence building, leading to cooperative security. Specifically, it discourages exit. This is also important for the initiation stage. A Parliament can bring new issues onto the international agenda and influence how that agenda is set. In other words, it not only discourages exit but also encourages voice. This is also crucial for the takeoff stage. Finally, a Legislature is able not only to prevent things from happening but also to make things happen. As such, it not only encourages voice but also engenders loyalty. This is also essential if the spillover stage is to be successful.
The second purpose that IPIs can serve, even at the Assembly stage, is to promote co-operative security. From a communication standpoint, IPIs have a record of being a useful forum for discussing regional issues and the linkages between these issues and global affairs on the one hand and national affairs on the other.
Again, the example of Europe is instructive. In addition to the EP, the Benelux countries have had a trilateral interparliamentary body since the 1950s to address questions of their own separate trilateral integration organization. The Nordic Council existed for years before any of the Scandinavian countries became members of the European Union, and it continues to operate on its own regional level today. Add to this complex network a pre-existing Assembly of the West European Union and the NATO – PA. It should be evident that there are enough spheres of responsibility in complex world society to justify a proliferation of integration organizations with overlapping memberships and interparliamentary bodies.
Already one sees instances where regional IPIs co-ordinate interregional consultation and consolidate interregional co-operation. A forerunner is the established relationship between the Baltic Assembly and the Nordic Council. The remarkable aspect of this inter-IPI co-operation is that the regional integration organization has a mixed parliamentary–executive makeup, which increases the efficacy of transgovernmental co-ordination on environmental and educational issues. Increasing education encourages deeper exchanges at all levels of soci-
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ety, enhancing cross-border understanding and working constructively with differences.
It is important that the emergence of a global network of IPIs not be regarded as representing a geographical division of labour, in which one IPI is associated with a specific regional integration organization. This would risk establishment of segmented pillars encompassing regional groupings that have no contact with one another and where interaction occurs only at the level of the executives that manage affairs on behalf of their regions. Any notion of a design for global governance that includes regional integration organizations and their IPIs should not divide the world into regions, each to be administered by a designated single institution.
It is no longer the case that all IPIs have an origin in co-operation among national elites. The history of the Baltic Assembly and the Central American Parliament illustrate the roots of IPIs in transnational social movements. There are, and will be, many different types of successful IPIs, at different levels of development, with different origins and different paths to different kinds of success. IPIs in the future will be able to establish co-operation more easily with other IPIs and with other international organizations. In a complex world society that is more networked than hierarchical, new types of IPIs may accumulate more functions and encourage the creation of new international structures that mediate relations between member states and themselves. The networked nature of the emerging international order will facilitate this.
This chapter draws on papers presented not only to the Multiple Centres of Power team in Victoria, B.C., in May 1999, but also to the 94th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association Boston in, September 1998 and to the Fourth Conference of the European Sociological Association in Amsterdam in August 1999. In addition to acknowledging the members of the team, especially Gordon Smith and Daniel Wolfish, I wish to thank Karen Shepard, Ivaylo Grouev, Ramine Shaw and the World Society Foundation; as well as Chadwick Alger, Zachary Irwin, Harold Jacobson, Anthony Judge, Deborah Larson, Robert Miller, David O'Brien, M.J. Peterson, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Sidney Tarrow, and R.B.J. Walker.
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[Note 1]. George Tsebelis, 'The Power of the European Parliament as a Conditional Agenda Setter,' American Political Science Review 88, no. 1 (1994): 128–42; George Tsebelis and Amie Kreppel, 'The History of Conditional Agenda Setting in European Integration,' European Journal of Political Research 33, no. 1 (1998): 41–71.
[Note 2]. Victor-Yves Ghébali, The Conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union on European Cooperation and Security, 1973–1991: The Contribution of Parliamentary Diplomacy to East-West Détente (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1993); 'Parliamentary Diplomacy,' special issue of Romanian Journal of International Affairs, 1, no. 3 (1995).
[Note 3]. See Jürgen Habermas's 1962 view, 'On the Concept of Public Opinion,' in Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 236–50.
[Note 4]. Hanno Hardt, Social Theories of the Press: Early German and American Perspectives (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979), 171–73.
[Note 5]. Ibid., 155.
[Note 6]. There are four characteristics of rumour: it is topical, it almost always deals with events or personalities, it has a well-identified protagonist, and it is circulated in an environment lacking standards of evidence. Gordon Allport and Leo Postman, The Psychology of Rumor (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1947), ix–xi.
[Note 7]. For example, see Michael Walzer, ed., Toward a Global Civil Society (New York: Berghahn Book, 1997); compare Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).
[Note 8]. Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994). Compare Niklas Luhmann, 'Globalization or World Society: How to Conceive of Modern Society?' International Review of Sociology 7, no. 1 (March 1997): 67–80.
[Note 9]. Daniele Archibugi and David Held, eds., Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); Danielle Archibugi, David Held, and Martin Köhler, eds., Re-Imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999); John S. Dryzek, 'Transnational Democracy,' Journal of Political Philosophy 7, no. 1 (March 1999): 30–51; David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).
[Note 10]. Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems (London: Routledge, 1998).
[Note 11]. For example, James N. Rosenau, Along the Domestic–Foreign Frontier: Explor-
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ing Governance in a Turbulent World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
[Note 12]. Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
[Note 13]. John Holland, Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity (New York: Perseus Books, 1996).
[Note 14]. Per Bak, How Nature Works: The Science of Self-organized Complexity (New York: Copernicus, 1996).
[Note 15]. Sidney Tarrow, 'Does Internationalization Make Agents Freer – or Weaker?,' paper presented to the American Sociological Association, August 1999. Cited by permission.
[Note 16]. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Thomas Risse-Kappen, ed., Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures and International Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Peter Waterman, Globalisation, Social Movements and the New Internationalisms (London: Cassell, 1998).
[Note 17]. In fact, to be exhaustive, we should include a further category of 'international juridical organizations,' as well as its three two-way mixed types. As none of these involves IPIs, however, for present purposes these are pursued no further. (Here, the three-way and four-way mixed types are assimilated to the hybrid IPI types.) On international co-operation among courts, see, among others, Lawrence R. Helfer and Anne-Marie Slaughter, 'Toward a Theory of Effective Supranational Adjudication,' Yale Law Journal 107, no. 2 (November 1997): 273–391; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, 'A Typology of Transjudicial Communication,' University of Richmond Law Review 29, no. 1 (1995), reprinted in Thomas M. Franck and Gregory H. Fox eds., International Law Decisions in National Courts (Irvington, NY: Transnational Publishers, 1996).
[Note 18]. Robert Cox and Harold K. Jacobson, eds., The Anatomy of Influence: Decision-making in International Organization (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973).
[Note 19]. For the transnational–international distinction, see Samuel P. Huntington, 'Transnational Organization in World Politics,' World Politics 25, no. 3 (April 1973): 333–68. For transgovernmentalism, see Anne-Marie Slaughter, 'The Real New World Order,' Foreign Affairs 76, no. 5 (September/October 1997): 183–97.
[Note 20]. Cox and Jacobson, eds., The Anatomy of Influence.
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[Note 21]. Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell Jr, Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), 75–8.
[Note 22]. Amitai Etzioni, 'The Epigenesis of Political Communities at the International Level,' American Journal of Sociology, 68 (1963): 407–21, reprinted in James N. Rosenau, ed.,International Politics and Foreign Policy, revised edition (New York: Free Press, 1969), 346–58.
[Note 23]. Klaus Hüfner and Jens Naumann, eds., The United Nations System: International Bibliography (Munich: Verlag Dokumentation, 1976–present). This publication began in 1976 and continues with regular instalments.
[Note 24]. Harold K. Jacobson, Networks of Interdependence: International Organizations and the Global Political System, second edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984).
[Note 25]. Tanja A. Börzel, 'What's So Special about Policy Networks? An Exploration of the Concept and Its Usefulness in Studying European Governance,' European Integration online Papers 1, no. 16: <http://eiop.or.at/eiop/texte/1997-016a.htm>, accessed 9 April 2000; Doug Imig and Sidney Tarrow, 'From Strike to Eurostrike: The Europeanization of Social Movements and the Development of a Euro-Polity,' Working Paper No. 97-10 (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 1997).
[Note 26]. For an elaboration of the distinction, see Robert M. Cutler, 'Cooperative Energy Security in the Caspian Region: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Development?' Global Governance 5, no. 2 (April–June 1999): 252–3.
[Note 27]. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).
Dr. Robert M. Cutler [ website — email ] was educated at MIT and The University of Michigan, where he earned a Ph.D. in Political Science, and has specialized and consulted in the international affairs of Europe, Russia, and Eurasia since the late 1970s. He has held research and teaching positions at major universities in the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, and Russia, and contributed to leading policy reviews and academic journals as well as the print and electronic mass media in three languages.
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