Defining Statehood: Exclusion from Universal Organizations

• In Event: New Frontiers in the Study of International Organizations

Abstract

Membership in international organizations represents one form of recognition that provides a basis for sovereignty. As a consequence, the accession process empowers gatekeeping by powerful states over not only benefits provided by the organization but also status in the international system. Even organizations that aspire to universal principles and open membership incorporate accession procedures that enable exclusion. The use of accession to exclude states lies at the center of IGOs role as discriminatory clubs.

This paper compares the role of de facto autonomy, power, and political relations on entry into international organizations. I argue that entry into universal organizations relies on positive relations between states and not simply the capacity to participate in the cooperative endeavor. The empirical analysis includes three levels. First, I present an original dataset on accession procedures of international organizations. This reveals the range of exclusion mechanisms across organizations and differentiates among those international organizations with charter principles supporting an inclusive mandate. Second, focusing on the subset of inclusive organizations, I analyze the correlation between political relations and accession. Measures of political relations include positive cooperation recorded in event count data, senior official visits, and foreign aid. Third, I present case studies of several prominent examples of exclusion to evaluate the process of rejecting their bid for membership with attention to the influence of changes in political relations. The longstanding controversy over membership in the United Nations for North and South Korea was only resolved with their simultaneous admission in 1991 at the end of the Cold War. Taiwan serves as the extreme example of a high-performing state that has been widely excluded from IGOs on basis of its conflict with China rather than any concern about compliance. Yet even here, recognition as an observer has been conditional on the political orientation of the Taiwanese government toward China. The votes to approve recognition for Palestine in some IGOs and its rejection in others reveal divisions along political lines irrespective of the qualifications of Palestine to join any particular organization. Variation across IGOs for these cases helps to illuminate the trade-offs between efficiency for cooperation and reconciliation of sovereignty conflicts. Through allowing politics to determine membership, international organizations bias the definition of who is a state.

Author

• Christina Davis, Harvard University