Abstract
The years immediately preceding the First World War witnessed the development of a significant body of literature claiming to establish a ‘science of internationalism’. This article draws attention to the importance of this literature, especially in relation to understanding the roles of non-governmental organizations in world politics. It elaborates the ways in which this literature sheds light on issues that have become central to 21st-century debates, including the characteristics, influence and legitimacy of non-governmental organizations in international relations. Among the principal authors discussed in the article are Paul Otlet, Henri La Fontaine and Alfred Fried, whose role in the development of international theory has previously received insufficient attention. The article concludes with an evaluation of potential lessons to be drawn from the experience of the early 20th-century ‘science of internationalism’.
Introduction
The notion that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are significant actors in world politics has become one of the hallmarks of post-Cold War international relations scholarship and teaching (Mingst and Arreguin-Toft, 2013: 233–240; Price, 2003). The growing literature on NGOs in world politics has been concerned with many aspects, including, among others, NGOs’ defining characteristics (Willetts, 2011), how NGOs influence international decision-making (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998) and how intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) interact with NGOs (Ruhlman, 2015; Tallberg et al., 2013). Further concerns have included NGOs’ status in international law (Charnovitz, 2006), how the growing reach and influence of NGOs may be explained (Matthews, 1997; Scholte, 2000), and the role of NGOs in bringing about a more peaceful world (Kaldor, 2003). Recent literature has laid special emphasis on the sources of legitimacy of NGOs (Nasiritousi et al., 2015; Steffek and Hahn, 2010), and a common concern has been how NGOs should seek to enhance the effectiveness and legitimacy of their activities (Schmitz et al., 2012). Such concerns are far from new. As this article will show, each of these aspects of NGOs’ roles in world politics was addressed by the ‘science of internationalism’ developed by Alfred Fried, Henri La Fontaine and Paul Otlet before the First World War, the pertinence of which to contemporary debates on NGOs in world politics has been almost entirely overlooked in post-Cold War international relations scholarship.
Despite their extensive history (Davies, 2014), it remains common for introductory textbooks to claim that NGOs are ‘“new” forces in international politics’ (Ahmed and Potter, 2006: ix). As Götz (2008: 238) argues, it is not NGOs that are of recent origin, but the term that is used to describe them, which entered common discourse with the drafting of Article 71 of the United Nations Charter in 1945, and that displaced previous terms such as ‘free international associations’ or ‘private international organizations’. It is partly on account of this mid-20th-century change of terminology that writings on NGOs since this date have largely neglected the earlier literature on ‘private international organizations’.
The 21st-century literature on NGOs in world politics has commonly drawn from classical scholarship, but rather than turning to the early 20th-century ‘science of internationalism’, it has looked instead to the writings on civil society and associations of authors such as Ferguson, Tocqueville, Hegel and Gramsci (Kaldor, 2003: 15–21). This choice is surprising given that in these writings, as Anheier, Glasius and Kaldor (2001: 16) argue, ‘civil society was primarily thought of as a national concept’. The literature on private international associations preceding the First World War, on the other hand, placed its primary focus specifically on international rather than domestic actors.
The neglect in the contemporary literature on NGOs in world politics of the early ‘science of internationalism’ is all the more surprising given the considerable influence of this literature in its day. For instance, two of the three principal authors explored in this article, Alfred Fried and Henri La Fontaine, were Nobel Peace Prize winners, while the other, Paul Otlet, has since been acclaimed as the intellectual progenitor of the Internet (Wright, 2014). Furthermore, as Wilson (2003: 223) has argued, these authors were to have a profound influence on later international relations theorists, including Leonard Woolf. The institution that these authors co-founded, the Union of International Associations (UIA), remains to this day the leading data repository on NGOs, with its Yearbook of International Organizations being the source of first resort for statistical analyses of NGOs (Boli and Thomas, 1999; Smith and Wiest, 2012).
In recent years, there has been growing interest in international relations theory preceding the First World War (for instance, Ashworth, 2014; Bell, 2014; Long and Schmidt, 2005). However, although the significance of topics now recognized as ‘global governance’ to debates in this period has been recognized (Jahn, 2013: 18), recent literature on international relations theory in the opening years of the 20th century has commonly overlooked the role of private international associations in that theory. Furthermore, there has been a tendency in this literature to concentrate primarily on authors located in Great Britain and the US, in preference to the authors operating in continental Europe discussed in this article, despite the influence of the latter upon some of the former (as noted by Wilson, 2003: 223). Although historically informed studies of internationalism have been growing in number (for instance, Holbraad, 2003; Macciò, 2015), the contributions of the authors considered in this article have tended to be omitted.
As Hurrell (2001: 493–494) has argued, the study of international relations has often suffered from ‘relentless presentism’, and better engagement with history can help shed light on how concepts developed, how contemporary debates were considered in earlier contexts and how the contrasts between past and present understandings may be instructive on contemporary concerns. In this article, through the evaluation of the work of Fried, Otlet and La Fontaine, each of these roles of a historical perspective are elaborated in relation to the study of NGOs in world politics. In respect of the development of concepts, this article considers how in the period preceding the First World War, understandings that have endured to the present day were shaped of the distinguishing characteristics and bases of legitimacy of public and private international organizations. With respect to the evaluation of contemporary debates in an earlier context, the article considers how early 20th-century work explored the ways in which NGOs and IGOs interact, how NGOs pioneer norms, the factors explaining NGOs’ growth, the legal status of NGOs, and how NGOs may enhance their effectiveness and legitimacy. In considering these aspects, the article shows continuities between the pre-war work and contemporary discussions, such as in identifying the norm entrepreneurship role of NGOs. However, the article also reveals significant contrasts with present-day literature, especially in relation to the role of hierarchy and centralization in addressing the effectiveness and legitimacy of NGOs. As the concluding sections elaborate, these contrasts shed light on the potential pitfalls that present-day literature should avoid in addressing NGO effectiveness and legitimacy.
Turning to the literature on private international associations from before the First World War is therefore valuable not only because it provides context for understanding the evolution of ontological issues such as regarding the boundaries between the public and the private in global governance, but also because it helps us to understand moral questions concerning the accountability and legitimacy of NGOs. As DeMars and Dijkzeul (2015: 3) note, in the present day, ‘more observers are questioning the presumptive legitimacy accorded to NGOs, which claim to hold states and other actors to account while their own accountability remains elusive’. This article will show that the handling of this issue in the early 20th-century ‘science of internationalism’ reveals the limitations of approaches that emphasize hierarchical structures and centralized organization, which neglect management of a plurality of perspectives, and which fail to address the concerns of unrepresented groups.
After surveying the many strands of internationalist theory that developed in the years immediately preceding the First World War, this article introduces the three leading authors considered in this article — Fried, Otlet and La Fontaine — and what they meant by a ‘science of internationalism’. The article proceeds to discuss multiple ways in which core aspects of the analysis of the roles of NGOs in world politics central to 21st-century debates were explored in their thought, including NGOs’ defining features, influence, interactions with IGOs, legal status and legitimacy. The article concludes by revealing the limitations of their work and the relevance of these limitations to contemporary concerns, especially with respect to the structure and legitimacy of NGOs in world politics: the need to go beyond strictly hierarchical and centralized structures, and the need to address the concerns of diverse perspectives and unrepresented constituencies, are emphasized.
Internationalism preceding the First World War
As De Carvalho, Leira and Hobson (2011: 748) have argued, the academic study of international relations did not begin with a ‘big bang’ in 1919. In the years leading up to the First World War, a diverse body of literature sought to deepen understanding of international relations, with internationalism — alongside imperialism — constituting one of the predominant themes (Long and Schmidt, 2005: 9).
Internationalism has been defined as ‘the ideology of international bonding’ (Holbraad, 2003: 1) or ‘the idea that we both are and should be part of a broader community than that of the nation or the state’ (Halliday, 1988: 187). In recent work, a wide range of forms of internationalism have been disaggregated, with liberal approaches emphasizing the benefits of international integration being contrasted with hegemonic perspectives stressing the asymmetries in international cooperation and revolutionary approaches promoting the potential of the international arena for facilitating revolutionary change (Halliday, 1988: 194). Within liberal internationalism, economic, political, socio-educational, legal-organizational, humanitarian and integrationist perspectives have been identified, with each perspective emphasizing different agendas, such as free trade, non-intervention, democracy, international law, human rights and regional integration (Holbraad, 2003: 8–9).
A common feature of liberal internationalist thought has been the promotion of international reforms as a means towards international peace (Ceadel, 1987: 110). The nature of the reforms to be promoted, however, has varied considerably between authors from different perspectives. One of the most commonly repeated typologies contrasts commercial, republican, institutional and sociological perspectives, which promote the advancement of peace through reforms facilitating free trade, democracy, international regimes and transnational interactions, respectively (Baldwin, 1993: 4; Lamy, 2011: 122).
In the years preceding the First World War, alternative typologies of internationalisms were put forward (Van Acker and Somsen, 2012: 1398–1399). At this time, internationalisms were commonly seen to be associated with particular sectors within society, such as socialists, Catholics and businessmen. One prominent Dutch internationalist, Pieter Eijkman (1908: 2), therefore disaggregated three internationalisms based on the German flag: ‘gold’ economic internationalism promoted by businessmen; ‘red’ socialist internationalism; and ‘black’ clerical internationalism (Somsen, 2014: 217).
Paul Otlet (1908: 12), on the other hand, drew distinctions closer to contemporary typologies providing contrasting solutions to the problem of war: a pacifist perspective promoting disarmament; a juridical perspective promoting international law; an inter-parliamentarian perspective promoting arbitration; and a socialist perspective promoting the demise of capitalism (Van Acker and Somsen, 2012: 1399).
Commentators in the opening years of the 20th century were often struck by the rich variety of international activities that had developed by this time, with approximately 400 private international associations estimated to be operational by 1911 (Otlet and La Fontaine, 1912c: 32). Most of these organizations were headquartered in European cities such as London, Paris and Brussels, and many of them survive to the present day. They had expanded particularly rapidly since 1870, in a period broadly coinciding with the era of ‘new imperialism’, the second industrial revolution and the establishment of a range of specialist sectoral intergovernmental bodies, but no ‘general association of nations’ (Boli and Thomas, 1999; Davies, 2014). The rich array of international associational life at the onset of the 20th century — including public as well as private international organizations — led Paul Reinsch (1911: 4), in his landmark work on public international unions, to assert that ‘cosmopolitanism is no longer a castle in the air, but it has become incorporated in numerous associations and unions world-wide in their co-operation’, and Norman Angell (1911: 188), in his famous book The Great Illusion, to claim that ‘In a thousand respects association cuts across State boundaries, which are purely conventional, and renders the biological division of mankind into independent and warring States a scientific ineptitude’.
The diversity of international associations that had developed by the beginning of the second decade of the 20th century was so great that it may be argued that as many as 21 different forms of internationalism were represented among them, each form of internationalism promoting a different variety of international reform as a means towards the promotion of a more peaceful world. These are summarized in Table 1, which is based on the author’s analysis of the objectives of the international NGOs operational in the period preceding the First World War listed in the Annuaires of the Union of International Associations. Each of the organizations listed in Table 1 included as a component of their objectives the promotion of international peace by the mechanism indicated in the table. For the authors considered in this article — Fried, Otlet and La Fontaine — it was the combined efforts of these associations that contributed towards a more peaceful world.
Twenty-one internationalisms that had developed by 1911.
Note: This is not an exhaustive list; not all of the organizations listed here were still in existence in 1911.
Given this context of multiple internationalisms put forward by multiple international associations in the years preceding the First World War, it is unsurprising that efforts were made to advance the scientific study of this phenomenon at that time. It is this ‘science of internationalism’, announced in an article by Alfred Fried five years before the onset of the First World War, that is the focus of this article.
The ‘scientists of internationalism’
The principal ‘scientists of internationalism’ explored in this article — Alfred Fried, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine — were among the most influential international figures of their time, a status recognized in a growing body of transnational historical research (Laqua, 2013; Rayward, 2014; Rodogno et al., 2015). Yet, with the exception of the occasional reference to their work in the context of other authors such as Angell and Woolf (Knutsen, 2013: 23; Wilson, 2003: 223), they remain almost unknown in the theory of international relations. While the significance of science to early 20th-century internationalism has been recognized (Fritz, 2005), the application of a ‘science of internationalism’ to the study of private international associations in this period has, up to now, been neglected in the study of international relations.
The first — and most sophisticated — of the three principal ‘scientists of internationalism’ explored in this article was Alfred Fried, an Austrian Jewish pacifist renowned for his role in establishing the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft and for editing Die Friedenswarte, described by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee as ‘the best journal in the peace movement’ (Laqua, 2014: 182). Fried spearheaded the scientific study of public and private international associations by launching the Annuaires de la Vie Internationale in 1905, which sought to become ‘a reliable and complete guide to international life’, an international directory surveying official and private international congresses and organizations (Fried, 1905: vii–viii).
In 1907, Fried chose to collaborate with the other two principal ‘scientists of internationalism’ studied in this article — the Belgian founders of the International Institute of Bibliography, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine — in the production of an expanded version of the Annuaires de la Vie Internationale (Laqua, 2014: 186). In 1912, these volumes were joined by Otlet and La Fontaine’s journal, La Vie Internationale, which aimed ‘to follow in its many aspects, the vast movement of ideas, facts and organizations which constitute international life’ (Otlet and La Fontaine, 1912a: 5). Through these and the other early publications of their Union of International Associations, Otlet and La Fontaine pursued an ambitious approach to the role of public and private international associations in world politics, which extended beyond Fried’s more cautious perspective.
Despite their differences, Fried, Otlet and La Fontaine shared an approach to world politics that placed international organizations — both intergovernmental and non-governmental — at the centre of their work. In the study of peace movements (Chickering, 1975; Cortright, 2008; Van den Dungen, 1977), Fried has become known for his promotion of ‘scientific pacifism’, which he distinguished from a ‘dilletantist pacifist’ perspective in its consideration of peace as the result of a ‘natural process’ rather than an ideal to be constructed (Fried, 1916: 16). In outlining the ‘science of internationalism’, Fried (1909: 24) emphasized the importance of a ‘natural logic’ underpinning the evolution of international organizations, drawing analogies with evolutionary biology. Fried, Otlet and La Fontaine described political institutions, including states and international organizations, as ‘organisms’, and much of their work was dedicated to taxonomy (UIA, 1912).
Although Fried (1909: 24) described the ‘science of internationalism’ as interrogating the causal processes as well as the ‘essence and scope’ of internationalism, his approach and that of Otlet and La Fontaine did not involve the rigorous hypothesis-testing characteristic of later ‘scientific’ approaches to the study of international relations. Nevertheless, Fried (1916: 16) was keen to claim a contrast between an empirical-analytical focus in his ‘scientific pacifism’ and a more exclusively normative and programmatic perspective in earlier pacifisms, which he described as ‘utopian’.
Fritz (2005: 143) has noted that other internationalist writers of the era, such as Hobson and Reinsch, shared an outlook emphasizing the contributions of scientific cooperation to technological progress and international integration, and this was a perspective also shared by Otlet, La Fontaine and Fried. For instance, Fried (1909: 26) claimed that ‘science as a whole works unconsciously in an international manner’, promoting progress towards a more integrated world through the international congresses, publications and associations that scientists had developed.
In turning to evolutionary biology as a model for their ‘science of internationalism’, Fried, Otlet and La Fontaine built on the earlier work of Jacques Novicow (1901), which outlined the purportedly natural evolution of human societies towards global intergovernmental federation. In respect of their treatment of the evolution of IGOs as analogous to the development of higher organisms in biological science, their work may therefore be considered to be unoriginal (Chickering, 1975: 101–102; Laqua, 2014: 183). However, in their consideration specifically of private international organizations, their work extended significantly beyond that of other writers in this period.
While Fried, Otlet and La Fontaine advanced more fully than any other authors in their time the ‘scientific’ study of private international associations, it should be noted that they were not unique. For example, Otlet and La Fontaine built on the work of Cyrille van Overbergh, founder of the Belgian Sociological Society, whose 1907 study L’Association Internationale (Van Overbergh, 1907) provided some conceptual and analytical foundations for Otlet and La Fontaine’s later studies. At the same time, in the Netherlands, Eijkman (1910, 1911) emulated the methods of Otlet and La Fontaine in narrower studies of medical and scientific international associations.
These authors were keen to distinguish their ‘scientific’ internationalism focused on associations from alternative internationalisms put forward by groups such as socialists and pacifists (Eijkman, 1908: 1–2; Otlet, 1908: 12–13). Eijkman liked to describe his internationalism as ‘colourless’ since associations could represent any ideology (Eijkman, 1908: 2), while Otlet and Van Overbergh described the internationalism of associations with which they were concerned as ‘the highest and most fruitful’ (Van Overbergh, 1907: 4; see also Otlet, 1908: 23). However, the perspective on the role of NGOs in world affairs put forward by these authors was, as this article will show, far from neutral, and reveals that traditional portrayals of Otlet and La Fontaine as ‘peacemakers’ ‘devoted to justice’ (Gillen, 2010, 2012) need to be reconsidered.
NGOs in the early ‘science of internationalism’
Although Fried, Otlet and La Fontaine dedicated much of their attention to the study of IGOs and not only NGOs, it was in the particular consideration given to non-governmental actors that their work was especially noteworthy for going beyond the writings of contemporaries such as Reinsch, who concentrated primarily on the intergovernmental sector and whose work has more commonly been recognized in international relations literature. Given their role in the creation of an international NGO comprised of and dedicated to serving the interests of international NGOs — the Union of International Associations — Fried, Otlet and La Fontaine produced studies that are especially valuable for their consideration of core aspects of NGOs in world politics that have become central to 21st-century analysis. These included the defining features of NGOs, their interactions with IGOs, the factors explaining their growth, their legal status and their legitimacy. The following paragraphs will unpack each of these aspects in turn.
Defining characteristics of NGOs
Although the early 20th-century ‘scientists of internationalism’ did not use the term ‘NGO’, the distinction between public and private international organizations was one that they were keen to specify. In one of the earliest works to draw the contrast, Van Overbergh (1907: 4–5, 8) distinguished between ‘official’ (i.e. governmental) and ‘free’ (i.e. non-governmental) international associations, characterized by international composition, being open to members in multiple countries and having general and non-profit-making objectives and a permanent organization. These defining characteristics — such as the emphasis on non-profit objectives — were adopted by Fried, Otlet and La Fontaine, and remain influential to this day in understandings of what constitutes groups subsequently referred to as NGOs, with profit-making transnational corporations excluded from consideration (Willetts, 2011: 9). Eijkman (1910: 2) was particularly vehement that profit-making establishments ‘cannot ever be considered to be included’.
In the present day, it is common to make a tripartite distinction among international organizations, comprising: (1) IGOs consisting of states; (2) NGOs possessing non-state members; and (3) ‘hybrid international organizations’ with a membership of both states and non-state actors (Willetts, 2011: 4, 64, 73). Building on Van Overbergh’s work, Otlet (1909: 46) and Fried (1909: 27–28) anticipated this typology when they drew a contrast between ‘official’ organizations set up by governments, ‘private’ (or ‘free’) institutions set up independently of governments and a third category of ‘mixed’ organizations combining governmental and non-governmental involvement.
Given the apparent novelty of their subject of research, much of the early ‘scientific’ study of international associations was dedicated to the basic tasks of categorization. Otlet (1909: 65–69), for instance, disaggregated 11 different purposes of international organizations: scientific research, scientific organization, professional interest, propaganda, public utility, social and political action, economic organization, ethics/religion, forming relationships, information exchange, and solidarity. However, the early 20th-century ‘science of internationalism’ also spoke to deeper analytical themes that have become central to recent analyses of NGOs’ place in world politics. In some cases, this work anticipated key aspects of contemporary debates in the study of international relations, while, in other cases, this work is significant for the very different approaches taken to those in the present day, as the subsequent sections of this article will reveal.
Interactions between NGOs and IGOs
The early scientists of internationalism did not merely distinguish between intergovernmental and non-governmental international organizations; they also explored the interactions among these institutions, which have become a significant component of the contemporary study of global governance. As Steffek and Hahn (2010: 10) argue, NGOs ‘function as “transmission belts” between the transnational citizenry and the sites of intergovernmental policymaking’. In one of the earliest treatments of the subject, Otlet (1909: 47) noted the way in which private international organizations would serve as what today would be termed ‘norm entrepreneurs’ (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998) by pioneering international standards and campaigning for their adoption by governments. The example Otlet (1909: 47) used was the International Bureau for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, which successfully promoted an international agreement on the traffic of women that attracted the signatures of a dozen states, including Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia, in 1904 (Limoncelli, 2010).
In contemporary global governance, it is common to note the role of NGOs not only in pioneering new norms, but also in the process of securing the adherence of additional states to international standards and in facilitating the internalization of international norms in states’ practices (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998: 895). A century ago, Otlet (1909: 47–48) used the example of the International Literary and Artistic Association and its relationship with the intergovernmental intellectual property institutions at Berne to illustrate how private international associations would ‘prepare extensions to conventions and secure new state signatories’ to them, as well as assisting and monitoring their work.
Otlet was not the only author to explore the relations between private and public international organizations preceding the First World War. For example, Reinsch (1911: 167) noted how intergovernmental bodies would sometimes turn to private institutions for information, although he viewed this information as ‘limited, partial, and in many ways inadequate’. This anticipates more recent literature that has noted the functional demand for NGO resources among intergovernmental institutions, among other factors driving their relations (Ruhlman, 2015; Tallberg et al., 2013). Reinsch (1911: 146) further remarked that private international organizations could afford to take greater risks and to promote more ambitious objectives than states, which had to ‘regard every interest from the point of view of national organization’.
Explaining the growth of NGOs
In a similar manner to post-Cold War claims with respect to the ‘rise’ of transnational civil society (Florini, 2000), at the onset of the 20th century it appeared to some authors writing at the time that private international organizations had become ‘infinitely numerous’ and were a ‘new, interesting and serious’ development, constituting even ‘a kind of “international self-government”’ (Kazansky, 1902: 355). For Fried (1907: 36), ‘private internationality’ was significantly ‘further reaching’ than that of governments, and he claimed that by 1907, ‘there are very few branches of knowledge, of trade, of labour, of art, etc. the representatives of which have not combined internationally’. The explanations that were put forward for the growth of private international associations in literature from this period merit further attention.
In post-Cold War literature, explanations put forward for the rise of transnational civil society have often concentrated on the context of globalization, involving ‘mutually reinforcing impulses of global thinking, certain turns in capitalist development, technological innovations, and enabling regulations’ (Scholte, 2000: 240). Rather than ‘globalization’, Otlet and La Fontaine (1912b: 29) referred to ‘the era of globality’ to describe the context of the multiplying international associations that they witnessed, a term initially put forward by Belgian sociologist Guillaume de Greef (Van Acker, 2014: 157). For Otlet and La Fontaine (1912b: 29–30), this context of ‘globality’ included global thinking (‘une pensée mondiale’), an ‘economy that has become global in all sectors of work, industry, commerce and finance’, as well as technological developments, including global communications, and an international political context shaped by public international unions.
Just as teleological arguments underpin present-day arguments concerning the ‘inevitability’ of a world state (Wendt, 2003), there was a strongly teleological aspect to work on the evolution of international organizations in the early 20th century (Duras, 1908; Van Acker, 2014). Even no less a figure than Kaiser Wilhelm II argued in 1904 that ‘gradually the solidarity among nations of civilized countries makes undoubted progress in different fields … that these fields are extended … and that the solidarity is, unnoticed but irresistibly, introduced into the programme of Statesmen’ (quoted in Fried, 1907: 36). The ‘scientists of internationalism’, Fried, Otlet and La Fontaine, applied a similar perspective to explaining the development of the private international associations that, by 1907, Fried (1907: 36) described as ‘innumerable’. Fried (1911: 17; 1909: 24) argued that international associations had developed through ‘a natural process’ in an ‘ascending line’ from the formation by the earliest humans of families and tribes, through to the formation of states and, in turn, international associations. The evolution of human organization was summarized by Otlet and La Fontaine in Figure 1, with an endpoint termed ‘the civilised community of all the world’, the composition of which, including subnational and supranational entities in addition to states, was similar to that now considered under the heading of ‘global governance’ (Harman and Williams, 2013: 3; Weiss and Wilkinson, 2014: 4).
‘Progressive extension of social structures’.
The legal status of NGOs
The growing significance of NGOs in contemporary international politics has led a number of 21st-century authors to consider their status in international law (Charnovitz, 2006; Lindblom, 2005). A vital problem is considered to be their lack of international legal personality (Charnovitz, 2006), although Willetts (2011: 83) has noted the significance of United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) consultative arrangements with NGOs in conferring to these institutions a form of international legal status.
The status of private international organizations in international law was also one of the key issues of concern for the early 20th-century ‘scientists of internationalism’. For Otlet (1909: 72), it was necessary to address the issue that ‘neither in national legislation nor international law do appropriate legal provisions for international associations exist’. He and La Fontaine made this a leading issue for discussion at the first world congress of international organizations that they convened in 1910, to which most of the principal NGOs of the period sent representatives, as did many governments. The first resolution of this congress advocated the creation of an intergovernmental convention providing a ‘supernational statute’ so that private international organizations could be established on an international basis rather than having to be registered as an association in the country in which they were headquartered (UIA, 1911a: 825). As the President of the Institute of International Law argued, ‘international associations do not wish to be German, or French, or Belgian … or to rely on any national law subject to modification’ (UIA, 1911b: 1054). The criteria considered at the congress for eligibility to be established on this ‘supernational’ basis (UIA, 1911b: 1074–1075) were later to be crucial to NGO recognition under the consultative status procedures of ECOSOC, such as having an international membership, being organized on a not-for-profit basis and being established for scientific or public interest purposes (Willetts, 2011: 8–10).
NGOs’ legitimacy
The legal status of NGOs comprises one part among many in contemporary discussions of these organizations’ legitimacy (Mariaga, 2002). Evaluations of legitimacy extending beyond regulatory aspects have often focused on the role of moral legitimacy, based on values, and social legitimacy, centred on representation (Vedder, 2007). With respect to the latter, among the most common arguments in contemporary literature on NGOs in global governance is that NGOs may play a critical role in addressing the ‘democratic deficit’ at the global level by representing constituencies that governments may be unable or unwilling to represent (Mercer, 2002: 8; Nasiritousi et al., 2015: 5).
While Otlet (1909: 140) noted the significance to a private international association of its ‘moral authority derived as a result of its actions’, he was more interested in representational aspects of legitimacy, drawing a contrast between the constituencies represented by states and those represented by private international associations. For Otlet (1909: 35), ‘states correspond to no more than the grouping of interests on a territorial basis and, in large part, an ethnic base’, whereas ‘an alternative basis of representation, the importance of which increases with the progress of civilization, is that of professional economic and scientific specialism’, combined within each state in national societies, and increasingly united in international associations formed by these national units. This anticipates the present-day distinction noted by Bartelson (2014: 41), by which ‘non-state actors typically do not claim authority over portions of space but over distinct functional domains or issue areas’.
Figure 2, published by Otlet and La Fontaine in 1912, illustrates the representation of contrasting interests at the international level in their early 20th-century model. At the bottom of the diagram is the representation of territorial interests by states (labelled B), and the representation of functional and specialist interests by associations is depicted at the top (labelled A). These, in turn, form the public and private international associations in the middle of the diagram, the interactions among which (labelled C) form what Otlet and La Fontaine termed the ‘civilised community coordinating interests and relations of international life on the double basis of territorial boundaries [i.e. states in IGOs] and economic, intellectual and social functions [i.e. private international associations]’ (UIA, 1912: 25–26).
‘The organization of international life’.
The pitfalls of the early ‘science of internationalism’
It would appear from the foregoing discussion that the early 20th-century ‘scientists of internationalism’ were remarkably prescient in their contributions to understanding the place of NGOs in world politics: they provided distinguishing characteristics of private international organizations and criteria for their international recognition that continue into contemporary practice; they disaggregated factors explaining the growing influence of these organizations that, in the present day, underpin approaches to globalization; and they unpacked the relationship between public and private international organizations that anticipated contemporary discussions of global governance, including a valuable distinction between the sources of authority and legitimacy of governmental and non-governmental actors.
However, a fuller consideration of the analysis of the role of private international associations in world politics in the writings of the early ‘scientists of internationalism’ reveals significant problems that are pertinent to contemporary debates. As the concluding section will highlight, these problems are especially relevant to contemporary discussions of the authority and legitimacy of NGOs that have drawn attention to the societal constituencies that NGOs can claim to represent (Schmitz et al., 2012; Steffek and Hahn, 2010: 10).
A closer inspection of the understanding of the nature of authority and representation of private international organizations in the early 20th-century ‘science of internationalism’, for example, reveals a fundamentally hierarchical approach to this issue. Otlet (1909: 140–141), for instance, argued that, ‘in general’, the authority of private international associations was ‘uncontested’, stemming in part ‘from being the only organization dedicated to international interests’ in its field, with each organization’s annual congress forming the arena within which its authority is recognized, and its constitution being the instrument ‘determining the exercise of its authority’. When discussing the issue of who should be entitled to vote in discussions, Otlet (1909: 54) highlighted the importance of enlightened leadership by sectoral experts, noting the practice of exclusion of non-specialists from decision-making in the examples he cited.
In addition to the problem of hierarchy in this work, there was also excessive faith in the utility of ever-greater centralization. For Otlet and La Fontaine, the world in 1914 was confronted with a ‘vast and continuous movement’ promoting ‘the unification of methods and international agreements on all subjects, wherever possible and desirable’ (UIA, 1914a: 5). According to this perspective, the existence of multiple private international organizations working in isolation was inefficient, and a ‘natural consequence’ of these institutions’ work was to consider how ‘they form parts of a larger whole, which embraces the entire social functions of mankind’ (UIA, 1914a: 6). As they depicted in Figure 3, it was necessary from this perspective to address the inefficiency of multiple uncoordinated NGOs by establishing ‘a world center … to extend and coordinate international cooperation in all the sciences, technical and social activities’, and ‘harmonizing [the] … program and … work’ of existing NGOs (UIA, 1914a: 7). This was to be achieved through the ‘organization of the representation of all the [private] international associations in a federated body’ (UIA, 1914a: 7). It was anticipated that for each sector of human activity, there would be a single private international organization federating ‘the interests of its specialism throughout the world’, and these institutions, in turn, would establish a global confederation of NGOs. All IGOs were anticipated to form a parallel global intergovernmental federation of IGOs. The two projected global bodies, one intergovernmental and the other non-governmental, were expected to ‘realise the equilibrium of the forces’ through representing territorial and sectoral interests, respectively, as depicted in Figure 2 (UIA, 1914b: vii).
‘Relations between the organisms’.
Although these ideas may sound somewhat ambitious, they received widespread approval among internationalists in the years preceding the First World War. Nearly all of the principal international NGOs of the period agreed to take part in the two world congresses of international associations organized by Otlet and La Fontaine to promote the realization of these objectives. The idea was particularly popular in the international peace movement, with the Universal Peace Congress of 1908 passing a resolution promoting ‘international federation of all intellectual and economic interests of humanity’ (UIA, 1912: 27–28). According to Schuster (1907), an ‘organization of organizations’ had the potential to limit the prospects for conflict between rival bodies. However, rival bodies were established to promote the unification of NGOs in a single centre: at the same time as Otlet and La Fontaine established their Union of International Associations in Brussels, Eijkman and Horrix (1907: 3) created a Foundation for the Promotion of Internationalism with the intention of establishing ‘a powerful universal organization’ that would ‘take the place of all the … individual efforts’ of particular NGOs ‘in order to take in hand in a powerful international manner all those interests that require international treatment’.
It should be noted that internationalists of the pre-First World War era varied in the degree of centralization envisaged in their analyses of international organization. Fried (1909: 23, 25), for instance, was keen to stress that in his perspective, internationalism envisaged not ‘a single world state encompassing the entirety of humanity’, but rather ‘the federation of interests of certain groups within states or certain interests of states themselves’ in NGOs and IGOs, respectively. This, Fried (1909: 25) believed, would contribute towards rather than detract from the vitality of states through the contribution made by the cumulative work of international organizations to general well-being.
As Herren (2000) has argued, the promotion of internationalism in the years preceding the First World War served particularly well the interests of states otherwise marginal in international relations, particularly neutral states such as Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands, which hosted many of the principal IGOs and NGOs of the period. The ambitious proposals of authors such as Otlet, La Fontaine and Eijkman therefore need to be considered in the context of the promotion of plans for rival ‘world capitals’ in Brussels and the Hague in this era (Van Acker and Somsen, 2012).
A further characteristic shared in internationalist writings on NGOs in world politics in the opening years of the 20th century was a belief that these institutions embodied ‘the highest representation of worldly interests and civilization’ (UIA, 1914b: xliv, emphasis added). For Otlet (1909: 141), NGOs represented the culmination of the ‘general march of civilization towards unification, simplification, integration, concentration, comparative study, exchange of products and services, solidarity, and representation of interests’. Otlet (1909: 31–32) claimed that NGOs were ‘born of the great fact of the expansion of mankind throughout the world and the resulting need for agreement, unification and cooperation’, following in a line from the Greek conquest of Asia Minor, the Roman conquest of Greece, the unification of medieval Europe by the Roman Catholic Church and the European wars of revolution and empire subsequently. Despite this presentation of the evolution of NGOs in terms of what they perceived to be the culmination of a linear path of progress of ‘Western civilization’, the early ‘scientists of internationalism’ should be distinguished from other authors at the time that presented schemes for world federation based on racial lines (Bell, 2014). Otlet and La Fontaine (1912b: 32) emphasized what they termed ‘the spirit of polycivilisation’, with NGOs ‘uniting all that is good and non-contradictory of each particular civilization’. Nevertheless, it is clear that their vision of ‘universal civilization’ was extremely Eurocentric, with all their historical reference points stemming from the European experience. Western-centrism in scholarship on NGOs in world politics is a problem that has persisted in much of the more recent literature on the subject, as Bettiza and Dionigi (2015: 629) have noted.
The aspirations of the early ‘scientists of internationalism’ for a universal ‘civilised community’ of states united in one global federation and NGOs united in a confederation were to be brought to an abrupt halt with the German invasion of Belgium in 1914. This turn of events seems to have come as a surprise to the leaders of international associations of the time, who were preoccupied with planning for the anticipated third world congress of international associations to be held in San Francisco in 1915, which was never to take place: as Lyons (1963: 369) argued, they demonstrated ‘a remoteness from reality which is almost inexplicable in view of what we know to have been the state of Europe at that time’.
Conclusion: A warning from history?
Although the First World War put an end to plans for global confederation of international NGOs, the ideas of the early ‘scientists of internationalism’ were to be influential in proposals for the subsequent peace settlement. Leonard Woolf’s (1916: 164–176) treatise on international government, for instance, drew substantially on their work in outlining the role of international NGOs in his scheme for post-war settlement. Woolf (1916: 166–167) set the trend emulated by most subsequent authors on private international associations, and later NGOs, by taking forward the defining characteristics of these institutions developed by Overbergh, Fried, Otlet and La Fontaine; Woolf also pioneered the now-commonplace practice of using their data on NGO numbers to justify assertions in respect of their scale. Furthermore, as this article has shown, their analysis of issues such as interactions between public and private international organizations, the legal status of NGOs, and explanations of growing NGO influence anticipated several features of contemporary discussions of global governance. The subsequent League of Nations Covenant was even to echo Otlet and La Fontaine’s proposals for inter-organizational unification in Article 24’s provision for the placing of existing international organizations under the direction of the League.
Nevertheless, as this article has also shown, there were considerable limitations to the analysis of the place of NGOs in world politics in the early ‘science of internationalism’. Their analysis was, as argued in the previous section, characterized by excessive faith in the benefits of ever-greater centralization, unification and hierarchical organization. Insufficient attention was paid to the problem of how to manage differences within, between and beyond territorial and sectoral interests. Although, in the present day, there has been a growing emphasis on non-hierarchical forms of civil society mobilization, there persists into the contemporary era the vulnerability of many international NGOs to a similar critique of being ‘global, hierarchical organizations … [that] stifle diversity and discipline dissent’ (Hopgood, 2013: 113–114).
In order to overcome the problems of the early ‘science of internationalism’, it is important to address effectively the issues that the early 20th-century authors on private international associations failed adequately to consider. Issues of representation, authority and legitimacy — which have become of growing interest in 21st-century work (Schmitz et al., 2012) — need to be given far more careful treatment than was evinced in the writings of Otlet and La Fontaine.
As this article has shown, Otlet and La Fontaine’s federalist proposal for a world organization uniting one NGO per sector left limited scope for pluralism of perspectives, and did little to address those not represented in any association. In Otlet and La Fontaine’s account, issues of representation were presented in terms of a rather crude contrast between two different forms of interest representation: territorial interests in the case of states, and sectoral interests in the case of NGOs. Although Otlet (1909: 34, 55) considered the possibility of universal, collective and plural suffrage among international association members and transferred to the international level Tocquevillian arguments concerning the role of associations in balancing state power, the importance of democracy is underplayed in Otlet and La Fontaine’s account of interest representation, an issue later authors such as Zimmern were to take steps to address (Davies, 2012).
The key question of ‘How and under what conditions should NGOs take the interests of non-members into account?’ (Steffek and Hahn, 2010: 263) is one that the early science of internationalism regrettably overlooked. Rather than elaborating on mechanisms for accountability and transparency, there was a tendency among early 20th-century institutional internationalists to place their faith simply in the enlightened leadership of sectoral experts (Otlet, 1909: 54). The growing attention in post-Cold War work on NGOs to issues of democracy, accountability and legitimacy in NGOs’ practices would therefore appear to be addressing a crucial deficit in the earlier literature.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.