Sunday, March 25, 2007

Thoughts occassioned reading Iriye's "Global Community"

I have been reading Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World by Akira Iriye.

He argues that intergovernmental organizations and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are essentially 20th century social phenomena, and now form a complex institutional network. This network is obviously important, but has been relatively little studied.

In terms of intergovernmental organizations, Iriye notes that:
  • There was just one in the year 1800.
  • There were 11 in existence in the year 1900.
  • The number declined from 13 to 9 during World War I.
  • The number had increased to 31 by 1930.
  • There were several thousand in the year 2000.
Starting from a low number in 1900, tens of thousands of international non-governmental organizations were created in the 20th century, with some 30,000 operating at the end of the century.

Iriye argues that the creation of these international organization is related to globalization. I agree. As countries came to interact more often and on more important matters, there was a need to institutionalize systems to manage their interactions. Imperial colonialism was seen (by the colonies) as an inadequate institutional framework, as was Communism by 1990, and international markets have become the dominant institution in gobalization. The network of intergovernmental organizations (and of bilateral treaties and multilateral conventions) helps to regulate the interactions, and international civil society (composed of these international non-governmental organizations) has developed to complement the for-profit private sector approaches institutionalized in multinational corporations and international markets.

Of course, all of this has been made possible by the growth of the transportation and communications infrastructure, which in turn has been made possible by technological advances. In transportation the internal combustion engine has made possible fleets of ships, trucks and airplanes. National highway systems interconnect within continents as sea and air routes interconnect the continents. The telegraph has been replaced by telephone, radio, television, and satellite, microwave and fiber optic networks. International transportation and communications, on a global scale, have become not only fast and available, but cheaper than would have been thought possible a century ago.

Iriye makes a really important point, almost as a throw-away. The new technology-based infrastructures not only allowed the development of the these international institutions, but they also revolutionized the nature of the nation state. The United States of 2000 was very different than that of 1900, and many of those differences depended on the huge expansion of the transportation and communications infrastructure. I would add that the infrastructure development also encouraged and was necessitated by the growth of regional institutions, ranging from the European Union, to the North American Free Trade Association, to ASEAN.

The 20th century also saw the triumph of industrialization in the North, the development of newly industrialized nations from the South, and the movement into post-industrial information economies in the North. These too involved revolutionary institutional changes, based on technological advances in automation through mechanization of manufacturing (and of other economic activities) and "informatization" with the advent of advances in information and communications technologies.

Without the increase in productivity, there would have been neither the growth of supply nor demand that stimulated economic globalization. Nor would there have been the economic freedom for so many people in the world to spend more time in education and participating in civil society organizations. Indeed, it would have been hard for a simpler and poorer world to support the hundreds of thousands of people working in intergovernmental organizations and international NGOs. These industrial and information revolutions also contributed (in my view) to the growth of the nation state, of regional institutions, and of global institutions such as the networks of intergovernmental organizations and NGOs.

New problems call for new solutions. The new global transportation and communications infrastructure and the industrial and information revolutions as they progressed in the 20th century changed the world. In a posting last week I mentioned the distinctions among
  • the natural world (studied in the natural science),
  • the social world (studied in the social sciences), and
  • the man-built world (of technological systems).
The three are clearly interrelated. Society builds technological systems to expand control of nature, but in the process not only is nature transformed, so too is society.

Iraye makes the point that the social transformations engendered in the last century are intuitively antagonistic. The strengthening of the nation state is a response to the same changes in technological systems as the growth or regional and global institutions. I would add to his point that these international institutions include not only the network of intergovernmental organizations and international civil society, but also the strengthening of global markets.

Yeats wrote "Things fall apart: the center can not hold." The situation here seems to be "Things come together: the centers get still stronger."

No comments: