UNESCO and World Politics: Engaging In International Relations
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UNESCO and World Politics: Engaging In International Relations
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Overview
The concept of engaging—becoming involved or more involved in a continuing international relationship—permits the author to focus on levels and timing of participation as well as on the participants' motives. Drawing on extensive interviews and on published and unpublished material, his study traces UNESCO's formation and evolution from 1941 to 1972. He considers different forms of engagement, conditions of their effectiveness, and the important role played by political leaders. The concept of engaging provides new insight into several significant questions. How and with what domestic consequences do actors respond to the challenges of an international organization? Why and how do executive managers induce closer engagement in their institutions? Professor Sewell's innovative approach is applicable to the study of all types of intergovernmental organizations.
Originally published in 1975.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691617824 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1610 |
| Pages: | 404 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 3.10(d) |
Read an Excerpt
UNESCO and World Politics
Engaging In International Relations
By James Patrick Sewell
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1975 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05659-3
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
If we understood why it remains so difficult to organize ourselves for realizing common benefits, we might grasp what must be done simply to continue our terrestrial existence. This study's underlying concern is whether, how, and by whom existing global relationships might be reordered or improved. The inquiry focuses upon a series of developments within our organizing world.
To learn why intergovernmental organizations function so poorly, we must investigate how they function actually. By this means we can fathom the conditions for their effectiveness. In this study, lessons reveal themselves by the variance between someone's theory and someone else's experience. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (Unesco) offers suitable though hardly singular cases in point.
The notion of engaging is our chief claim to innovation. "Engaging" is a way of conceiving international relations that encourages us to begin with individuals and to follow them through small and larger groupings toward global configurations. This approach must be seen in relation to the concern that lends it meaning: the problem of finding requisites for an order more conducive to security, well-being, and dignity than our present world.
A HISTORY OF FALTERING IMPROVISATION
The quest for conditions of effective intergovernmental organization appears not to have been a problem defined in ancient times. Greek observers bequeathed to Western political thought a basic unit, the polity, and thereby a limiting framework for thinking about matters political. But the Greeks did not grapple seriously with the problem of world order despite their fleeting confederation and evanescent Pan-Hellenism. Nor did the Romans, who for a time managed peoples in a great territorial expanse with some practical success. Various observers might mark at later times and other places the first consideration of how to achieve efficacious relationships among political units. Examples include parleys among the Iroquois nations; the Confederation of thirteen American states, notably the Federalist essayists' critical commentaries upon it; experiments of the Hanseatic League; and the intercantonal relationships which became Switzerland. Our problem might have been pondered early in the nineteenth century during the contrivance of international arrangements to enhance Rhine navigation, or later in the same century during the proliferation of private transnational associations and public international unions. But few were the contemporaneous students of early experiments in organizing internationally, and slight is their contribution to an alleviation of our problem.
The ineffectuality of the League of Nations prompted a widely held explanation that was tersely animated by J. N. Ding. His cartoon pictures the League as a three wheeled fire engine whose crew necessarily cannot attend the call of duty. Uncle Sam reposes upon the missing part and recalls that "we told you it wouldn't work!" A Soviet commentator later ascribed League failure to similar conditions conceived upon a more general plane: "the absence from the Council table for fourteen years of a representative of the Soviet Union and for twenty years of one from the United States"; "the conception of the League as an entity independent of its members, which permitted 'an evasion of responsibility for political decisions by various governments (chiefly the prewar governments of Great Britain and France)'"; and "the exclusion of the cardinal security problems from Council jurisdiction because the Great Powers chose to settle them through other agencies." Here clear lessons were asserted, but they continued to lack convincing formulation.
Nor does the problem of unavailing international organization yet seem headed for a conclusive solution. Official bewilderment impelled the trouble-shooting mission of a Western diplomat, who later reported that investigating a United Nations specialized agency was much like competing in a gigantic shell game. Another diplomat wanted increased international commitments of resources for his low-income country, so he voted for expanded economic development programs in his organization's plenary assembly. Yet he complained afterward that this resolution would mean little or nothing beyond its adoption. Men of current affairs, too, find it hard to make intergovernmental organizations produce what they wish.
LEVELS OF PERPLEXITY AND AN APPROACH FOR SURMOUNTING THEM
International organizations' charters proclaim a better future for mankind; yet, unavoidably, their human participants live in this world. Often their stated concern is Man. Always they are manned by individuals with different predispositions in different roles who relate to each other, to mundane circumstance, and to policy choices in differing ways. Since upon our planet "wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed," declares the Preamble to Unesco's Constitution. "Just give me the quarterly data on actual expenditures; that's all I need to know what's going on," says a worldly veteran of the same institution.
Such discrepancies bother us. We are troubled by the apparent failure of intergovernmental institutions to work as we expect, and puzzled by the lack of satisfying explanation of how they actually work. Yet the orientation for a trek through such unfamiliar thickets remains a forbidding task. We need a guiding concept. Several criteria of such a concept suggest themselves.
Our concept should be identified with the study of politics in the global milieu; at the same time, it should make possible the adaptation of pertinent insights drawn from the study of politics in other realms. This concept ought to dispose its user to locate organized intergovernmental relations firmly within the context of world politics instead of treating such institutions as if they were capable of isolation. Hence its application might integrate the lines of scholarly inquiry now separated by customary designation either as international politics or as international organization.
Again, the concept should induce an observer to move between the traditional vantage point that makes him equate international relations with the foreign policy of his home nation-state, and the newer perspective that leads him to envisage international relations in terms of global systems comprising many interrelated actors. This dual view would stimulate discernment of the intentions, strategies, and tactics of other actors as they interact with his own governmental or nongovernmental leaders.
A leading concept ought to aid other operations by the analyst. It should serve as predicate for subject actors who are sometimes identified as actual persons and at other times regarded as abstractions such as nation-states or transnational associations. Since the concept would pertain to actors rather than to intergovernmental institutions, it would permit the student to cross an academic divide between "regional" and "universal" organizations by enabling him to follow his subject actors into either or both of these sorts of international relationships. Indeed, it might convince him to reckon with pertinent extra-organizational behavior by actors. Thus he could apply the concept not only to a specific organization but across a wider range of global phenomena. Ultimately it should enable him to cast his findings within a larger setting. Then conclusions might illuminate the world of today and qualify our glimpses of a world of tomorrow.
THE NOTION OF ENGAGING
Just such a guiding idea may be fashioned around the term "engaging." "Engaging" means becoming involved or more involved in a continuing international relationship. To engage is to implicate, or implicate further, oneself — and thus quite possibly to entangle one's larger political unit — in an enduring foreign affair. Actors engage by interlocking with other actors in situations that persist over a period of time. The coupling of actors within intergovernmental organizations is the form of engagement that holds primary interest for us here.
Most conspicuous as a threshold of engaging within intergovernmental organizations is membership by the nation-states, or consultative status by the nongovernmental organizations ( NGOs ), for which persons-in-roles act. This test of formal affiliation also distinguishes actors in the world at large from participants, the manifestations of actors within intergovernmental institutions.
But engaging includes levels of implication both below and above the threshold of formal association. Disengaging and not engaging by actors are germane; so too are steps by participants over the threshold — that is, inside inter-governmental organizations. The picture of a threshold should remind us that although "engaging" may seem to name a unilinear process, actual instances are likely to move in two directions, rather than one, along a ladder of involvement. Major planes of engagement can be summed as follows:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Engaging borrows from obligation, but it conveys more than the vows undertaken when joining an intergovernmental organization. Our concept owes something to participation, as in a political campaign, although it stresses sustained relationships rather than transient behavior. Engaging is dedicated to persevering patterns, not to momentary action devoid of appreciable consequences.
Critically, engaging accommodates elements of "chance" that impinge upon an actor. Fate implants long-enduring conditions, both inanimate and animate, that shape international relations. It also appears to bestow more immediate circumstances that affect the making of foreign policy decisions. Within a world of significant interdependency, one's supposed fortune seems often to ride on others' actions — that is, upon actors as the agents of chance. Intergovernmental institutions may make more predictable certain behavior by their participants. But the situations we shall encounter sometimes subject organizational participants to challenges quite unexpected by them; and participants' responses to such challenges, in turn, precipitate unexpected challenges for others. We are little helped in abolishing the category of chance by bare assertions that social scientists need only a better theory or perhaps a world-wide Walden II. The residuum of mystery in human affairs can be reduced by exacting investigation conducted within appropriate frameworks. It is not to be eliminated.
THE HUMAN FACTOR
"Engaging" is tendered as a way to look at international life, not as the name of a mechanism to be observed functioning out in a remote environment. This process might appear to be propelled by impersonal forces, but its outcomes depend upon the mediation of personal actions. Engaging begins when someone in a position to act perceives an international situation and chooses to regard it either as opportunity or as threat. And though the process may acquire some properties of automaticity — an apparent momentum of its own — engaging continues at the sufferance of persons in positions to determine their own actions and thereby to shape the acts of their political units.
Let us take as the point of departure the saying, "Nature abhors a vacuum." Instead of using this aphorism to dismiss an international event, the student of engaging asks further questions. Who is playing the part of nature? Under what conditions did this person or persons come to perceive a vacuum and to abhor it? Why did he or they respond by this means rather than by another? What ramifications for the subject actor and for others will follow from this specific response? Thus, for instance, if we were studying the Soviet engagement in Cuba so dramatically upgraded with missiles in 1962, we would examine not merely choices reached during the international crisis period, but also antecedent and subsequent developments. We might want to look with new eyes at the early Castro quest in several quarters for foreign support; at the U.S. presidential debates of 1960 between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy, and the results of this election; at the Bay of Pigs decision and its aftermath; at the continuing pressure by members of the U.S. domestic opposition, including presidential aspirants, for a proper climax to the next American operation; at the Castro-Khrushchev decision to install missiles; at the "thirteen days"; at the Soviet build-up of nuclear weaponry; at the limited test ban agreement of 1963; at the political demise of Khrushchev ( and possibly the death of Kennedy at the hands of a man who once fancied himself an agent of Castro); at the Johnson administration's response to a Dominican Republic challenge deemed analogous to the Cuban threat; at subsequent steps toward Soviet-U.S. condominium.
Our inquiry supports an inference that choosing when, where, and how much to engage is conditioned by one's peculiar views. These views include personal interpretations of the past, the present, and the future; of organization insiders and outsiders; and of the stakes and costs, broadly conceived, of participating. The choice to engage may be affected by an opportunity to participate at the outset in organizing a sector of international life, or by the threat of remaining excluded from an established institution. A participant's evolving intentions help to explain the status of his engaging or disengaging. Participation in intergovernmental organizations does not eliminate crossed values or conflicting actions, but our discoveries highlight participants' divergent intentions and disparate styles of behavior. We will see that participants do not feel categorically decisive as much as relatively interested in or indifferent about possible institutional outcomes. To conceive of human participants as possessing discrepant visions and volatile intentions does not diminish our :findings. But it does compel us to struggle with an authentic problem rather than allowing us to manipulate a foregone conclusion.
ENGAGING IN THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY
In contemplating why engaging occurs, we must anticipate a subtle blend of factors. Our concepts are a most imperfect stand-in for the re-creation of experience. Let us consider some of the impulses that brought Britain to the threshold of participation in the European Community.
During early negotiations with European governments, British spokesmen showed their reluctance to participate in a strong economic arrangement with political overtones. Yet from the beginning individual Britons dissented from this policy, and changing circumstances engendered some public support for closer British association with the continental enterprise. The European Free Trade Association (EFTA) was plagued by the unwillingness of participants to follow through on collective decisions bearing upon potent domestic interests within Britain and elsewhere. In 1961, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who harbored deep though somewhat private feelings about the necessity of preventing another European war, assumed a public stance on behalf of Britain's inclusion in the new Europe. Yet he acted "by disguising his strategic choice as a commercial deal," thus stimulating the spokesmen for specific interests to react according to calculations of private costs and gains. With the help of Edward Heath and a few other Conservative members of Parliament, Macmillan was able to carry his party. Despite tacit support by some back-bench members of the Opposition, Labour's commitment to British entry came only later under Harold Wilson and quite conditionally, as it proved in the light of subsequent events.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from UNESCO and World Politics by James Patrick Sewell. Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Acknowledgments, pg. vii
- Contents, pg. ix
- List of Figures and Tables, pg. x
- 1. Introduction, pg. 1
- 2. Seed and Circumstance (1941-1945), pg. 33
- 3. Opportunities Unlimited (1945-1949), pg. 71
- 4. Facing "Reality" (1949-1960), pg. 137
- 5. Regeneration? (1960-1972), pg. 199
- 6. Political Leadership by Executive Managers, pg. 279
- 7. Responses by Actors, pg. 304
- 8. Toward a Multilateral Future?, pg. 339
- Appendix: A Note on Scope and Methods, pg. 357
- Index, pg. 365