Acknowledgements
More than a decade has passed since I decided to write a book that would explore the connection between international organizations and bureaucratic modernity. The start of the project coincided with a move to the Political Science Department at Technische Universität Darmstadt, where colleagues greeted it with great interest. I am particularly grateful to Arthur Benz, Hubert Heinelt, Leonie Holthaus, Dirk Jörke, Markus Lederer, Peter Niesen, and Veith Selk for sharing their thoughts with me on many occasions. I also had the good fortune that my appointment came with the status of principle investigator in the Cluster of Excellence ‘The Formation of Normative Orders’ at Goethe University Frankfurt/ Main. I not only learned a lot from this interdisciplinary group of excellent scholars directed by Rainer Forst and Klaus Günther, but generous financial support from the Cluster and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) also made sure I had enough freedom to pursue the research that led to this book.
I am also grateful to a good number of institutions that hosted me as a visiting scholar while this book project was underway. The Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, the Center for German and European Studies at the University of Montréal, the Max-Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, the University of Pavia, and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin not only provided office space but also many opportunities to present and discuss my work. I completed the manuscript in the academic year 2019/20 with the help of a fellowship at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen. With its diverse and remarkably open-minded group of scholars, the centre was a perfect environment for such an endeavour.
The argument that unfolds in this book was presented, as a whole or in part, in seminars at the Erik-Castrén-Institute in Helsinki, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internationals, the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, the University of Edinburgh Law School, the University of Gießen, the University of Melbourne, the University of Speyer, and the University of Stuttgart. I am hugely indebted to some colleagues who engaged with my project at length: Alex Grigorescu, Kate Hecht, Cathrine Holst, Vincent Lagendijk, Sebastian Schindler and Christine Unrau went out of their way to read the entire manuscript and share their thoughts with me; and Nick Onuf read more than one version of most chapters, and followed this book project over the years with unfailing enthusiasm and kindness. I also received very helpful comments from Francesca Antonini, Luke
Ashworth, Michael Bauer, Duncan Bell, Armin von Bogdandy, Mlada Bukovansky, Klaus Dingwerth, Katja Freistein, Frank Gadinger, Matthias Goldmann, Christian Joerges, Wolfram Kaiser, Cathleen Kantner, Jan Klabbers, Fritz Kratochwil, Ron Krebs, Nico Krisch, Ned Lebow, Laurence McFalls, Elizabeth Mendenhall, Eric Montpetit, Craig N. Murphy, Vincent Pouliot, Sigrid Quack, Katharina Rietzler, Or Rosenboim, Jan Aart Scholte, Hagen Schulz-Forberg, Jean-Philippe Thérien, Peter Wilson, and Michael Zürn.
Last not least, I would like to thank my dedicated student assistants who not only helped with technicalities but also discussed with me the ideas I had about transnational technocracy. My thanks go to Andrea Blättler, Maéva Clement, Tobias Heinze, Usama Ibrahim, Marieke Knußmann, Christian Ried, Vera Rogova, and Anne Schilling. Yannick Laßhof was of invaluable help in the last stages of the project, in particular with formatting the manuscript and compiling the bibliography. Thanks are due also to Dominic Byatt at Oxford University Press and the anonymous reviewers who provided important suggestions. Needless to say, the responsibility for all remaining errors in this book is my own. I would not have managed to complete this long-term project without all the love and support I received from Maria Paola, Iolanda, and Anita. I dedicate this book to them.
Introduction
This book is about the evolution of the idea that international relations should be managed by experts, bureaucrats, and lawyers, rather than by politicians or diplomats. This technocratic approach has been a persistent theme in writings about International Relations (IR), both academic and policy-oriented, since the late 19th century. As I will argue in this book, it forms a tradition of international thought that we should call technocratic internationalism, promising to transform violent and unpredictable international politics into rational, orderly, and competent public administration. Embedded in a programmatic account of the virtues of specialized, ‘functional’ international organizations (IOs), technocratic internationalism was also politically influential. It had an impact on the creation of the League of Nations, the functional branches of the United Nations (UN) system and the European integration project.
My historical inquiry shows how the technocratic tradition of international thought unfolded in four phases that were closely related to domestic processes of modernization and rationalization. The pioneering phase lasted from the Congress of Vienna to the First World War. In these years, philosophers, law scholars, and early social scientists began to combine internationalism and ideals of expert governance. Between the two world wars, a utopian period followed that was marked by visions of technocratic international organizations that would have overcome the principle of territoriality. In the third phase, from the 1940s to the 1960s, technocracy became the dominant paradigm of international institution-building. That paradigm began to disintegrate from the 1970s onwards, but some core elements remain today.
This book is mainly about the past, but in important ways it prompts reflections about the present. The COVID-19 pandemic once again underscored the need for policies based on scientific advice and for international coordination. Controversies over measures against the spread of the virus brought the relationship between science and politics sharply back into focus. In many countries, the pandemic met with a right-wing populism that defies scientific expertise and multilateral agreements. Countries governed by populists, the United States, Great Britain, and Brazil prominently among them, recorded disproportional numbers of COVID-19 related deaths and saw their political leaders falling ill. The anti-intellectualism and anti-internationalism of populist leaders are intimately related, and the following quote can illustrate how.
International Organization as Technocratic Utopia. Jens Steffek, Oxford University Press. © Jens Steffek 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845573.003.0001
In June 2016, Michael Gove, a leading campaigner for a British exit from the European Union (EU), asserted in a television interview that ‘people of this country have had enough of experts with organizations from acronyms [sic] saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong’.1 He said this in response to the interviewer citing a long list of organizations, national and international, that had estimated the considerable costs of Brexit. The interviewer, Faisal Islam, greeted the utterance with amused disbelief, and the pro-European part of the British press ridiculed Gove’s anti-expert quote for days. Yet as a seasoned spin doctor and populist, Gove knew exactly what he was saying. He targeted the legitimacy of technocratic organizations—IOs figuring prominently among them—that claim to be competent and impartial managers of political problems. Gove insinuated that such organizations were neither particularly competent nor impartial.
In his campaign against an EU depicted as technocratic, elitist, and detached, Gove was able to draw on a reservoir of critical arguments against international governance that had built up for decades. First symptoms that IOs were experiencing a crisis of popular legitimacy had been visible in the 1990s, when social movements took to the streets against global economic multilaterals, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank. In the EU, referendum results on new integration treaties seemed to suggest that citizens were much less enthusiastic about the integration project than most politicians, but also political scientists, had assumed.
Scholars have analysed this crisis of internationalism, the increasing politicization of IOs and the return of an assertive nationalism at length.2 What these studies tend to overlook, however, is the solid popular support that IOs continue to enjoy. Amidst all the rhetoric of crisis and decline, EU citizens continue to show more trust in the supranational Union than in their national government or parliament.3 Despite Donald Trump’s attacks on multilateralism and IOs, American citizens still have more confidence in the UN than in their domestic government
1 Interview with Faisal Islam of Sky News on 3 June 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=GGgiGtJk7MA (at 1:05, last accessed 27 February 2020).
2 Eric Posner, ‘Liberal Internationalism and the Populist Backlash’, University of Chicago Public Law & Legal Theory Paper Series, No. 606 (2017); G. John Ikenberry, ‘The End of Liberal International Order?’, International Affairs, 94 (2018): pp. 7–23; Erik Voeten, ‘Populism and Backlashes against International Courts’, Perspectives on Politics, 18 (2020), pp. 407–22. For interest in (self-)legitimation practices of IOs, see Dominik Zaum, ‘International Organizations, Legitimacy, and Legitimation’, in Legitimating International Organizations, edited by Dominik Zaum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 3–25; Jennifer Gronau and Henning Schmidtke, ‘The Quest for Legitimacy in World Politics – International Institutions’ Legitimation Strategies’, Review of International Studies, 42 (2016): pp. 535–57.
3 See trends since 2004 in https://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinionmobile/index.cfm/ Survey/getSurveyDetail/surveyKy/2255 (question 6a; accessed 13 March 2020).
or Congress.4 This indicates that citizens’ attitudes towards non-elected and openly unpolitical organizations, including IOs, are probably more complex than the diagnosis of a legitimation crisis suggests. There must be something about IOs, some quality that people appreciate in them, and it might be related precisely to the fact that they are in important respects different from national governments or political parties.
Survey-based social research has shown that citizens have a weakness for depoliticized, unelected and largely unaccountable organizations as long as these can plausibly claim to be catering to the public interest in an impartial fashion. They also show an aversion to open conflict and controversy, haggling and bargaining—in other words, what ‘politics’ is commonly believed to be about. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse called this a preference for ‘stealth democracy’, where decisions are made by unelected specialists, largely outside of the public’s view. Stealth democracy finds support because ‘people tend to believe that all political solutions driven by a concern for the general welfare (rather than special interests) are more or less acceptable, or at least not worth arguing about.’5 Recent research has shown that citizens value competence and a problem-solving capacity in governance beyond the state.6 If this is so, the unpolitical and expert-driven character of IOs may not be a problem to resolve but an asset to capitalize on. Technocracy, it seems, still has its supporters.
Technocratic internationalism
In this book, I seek to understand the technocratic strand of international thought in the context of modernization theory. Drawing on the seminal work of Max Weber, I argue that the ‘organization’ of international relations through bureaucratization; formalization and the turn to scientific expertise should be interpreted as part of a more encompassing process of societal rationalization, which first the Western industrialized countries and successively most other regions of the world embarked upon. This process of rationalization was not driven by technical necessity alone, however. It was not inevitable. Rationalization
4 Of US respondents, 43.2 per cent said they have ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in the UN, as opposed to 33.1 per cent for the US government and 14.8 per cent for the parliament (World Values Survey 2017–20: Results for the USA (2017), Questions 71, 73, 83; Christian W. Haerpfer et al., eds., ‘World Values Survey: Round Seven—Country-Pooled Datafile’ (Madrid/Vienna: JD Systems Institute & WVSA Secretariat, 2020), doi.org/10.14281/18241.1).
5 John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs about How Government Should Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 9.
6 Brilé Anderson, Thomas Bernauer, and Aya Kachi, ‘Does International Pooling of Authority Affect the Perceived Legitimacy of Global Governance?’, The Review of International Organizations, 14 (2019): pp. 661–83; Lisa M. Dellmuth, Jan Aart Scholte, and Jonas Tallberg, ‘Institutional Sources of Legitimacy for International Organisations: Beyond Procedure versus Performance’, Review of International Studies, 45 (2019): pp. 627–46.
always had its champions: men and women who pursued an agenda of political and social reform, and formulated justifications to sell it. This book is concerned with the technocratic thought of these ideational entrepreneurs. Their common objective was ‘to move as many political and social decisions as possible into the realm of administrative decision making where they can be refined and processed in technical terms’.7
To characterize this intellectual attitude, I use the term ‘technocratic internationalism’. This is my heuristic tool to render a specific tradition of thinking about international relations visible, and to bring together authors and writings from different historical periods. ‘Internationalism’ represents a preference for international cooperation and institutions. ‘Technocratic’ derives from two ancient Greek words, téchne and kratos Téchne denotes a practically applicable kind of knowledge, a ‘how to’-knowledge that helps us make or do things. It was sometimes associated with the skills of craftsmen but also used in a much broader sense, including practically useful types of ‘scientific’ knowledge.8 Kratos means power or rule. But the composite word ‘technocracy’ as representing ‘the rule of experts’ did not exist in ancient Greece, and it is a 20th-century neologism. The promise of technocracy also is a particularly modern one: to rationalize politics and society through the systematic use of scientific evidence and technical expertise. Robert Putnam called technocracy a ‘mentality’, a set of interrelated beliefs.9 In a similar vein, Frank Fischer found that technocracy ‘is fundamentally an intellectual ethos and world-view. In political terms, it is a “meta-phenomenon” geared more to the shape or form of government than a specific content per se.’10
In the social sciences, the debate about technocratic governance and its legitimation has focused on national institutions and policies. Few authors have analysed international institutions through that lens, and even fewer the strand of international thought that justifies them.11 In this regard, one of IR’s major shortcomings is its ‘relentless presentism’, as Andrew Hurrell once put it.12 Even if
7 Frank Fischer, Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise (Newbury Park: Sage, 1990), p. 43.
8 On the term téchne, see Richard Parry, ‘Episteme and Techne’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Fall Edition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), http:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/episteme-techne/ (last accessed 21 November 2020).
9 Robert D. Putnam, ‘Elite Transformation in Advanced Industrial Societies: An Empirical Assessment of the Theory of Technocracy’, Comparative Political Studies, 10 (1977): pp. 383–412, at p. 388.
10 Fischer, Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise, p. 21; emphasis in the original.
11 William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Frank Fischer, Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Eduardo Dargent, Democracy and Technocracy in Latin America: The Experts Running Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Christian Rauh, A Responsive Technocracy? EU Politicisation and the Consumer Policies of the European Commission (Colchester: ECPR Press, 2016).
12 Andrew Hurrell, ‘Keeping History, Law and Political Philosophy Firmly within the English School’, Review of International Studies, 27 (2001): pp. 489–94, at p. 489.
that presentism still pervades the positivist mainstream of the discipline, an increasing number of IR scholars, mostly based in Europe, Canada, and Australia, are recovering the history of international thought.13 Studying the history of the discipline is no longer perceived as an act of intellectual navel-gazing. It is increasingly acknowledged that
[t]he social sciences stand at the nexus of power and knowledge in the modern world. Universities and other research institutions have generated, incubated and helped to disseminate forms of knowledge, and programmes for social and political action, that have played a fundamental role in shaping the world in which we live. Global politics during the twentieth century and into our own times cannot be understood adequately without taking into account this dimension of human activity.14
While more IR scholars have become interested in history in recent years, more historians have turned to what is now usually called international or global history. Historical studies of international organizations and internationalism have proliferated.15 There is a fertile intellectual trading zone now between these two disciplines and this book is situated in it.
To write an intellectual history of technocratic thought in IR with a longue durée perspective is an ambitious undertaking, as so many authors and contributions may seem relevant. It is therefore crucial to spell out the limitations of the exercise. First of all, the focus here is on public IOs as technocratic utopias. My account does not cover the countless transnational professional associations of engineers, scientists, statisticians, or artists, even if they are also a typically modern phenomenon. Nor do I study transnational social movements or
13 Lucian M. Ashworth, A History of International Thought: From the Origins of the Modern State to Academic International Relations (London: Routledge, 2014); David Long and Brian C. Schmidt, eds., Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Torbjørn L. Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Thomas R. Davies, ‘Understanding Non-Governmental Organizations in World Politics: The Promise and Pitfalls of the Early “Science of Internationalism”’, European Journal of International Relations, 23 (2017): pp. 884–905.
14 Duncan Bell, ‘Writing the World: Disciplinary History and Beyond’, International Affairs, 85 (2009): pp. 3–22, at p. 22.
15 Particularly important for this study are Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, eds., The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (London: Oxford University Press, 2001); Madeleine Herren-Oesch, ed., Networking the International System: Global Histories of International Organizations (Cham: Springer, 2014); Martin Kohlrausch and Helmuth Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise: Innovators, Organizers, Networkers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Maria Paula Diogo and Dirk van Laak, Europeans Globalizing: Mapping, Exploiting, Exchanging (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Johan Schot and Vincent Lagendijk, ‘Technocratic Internationalism in the Interwar Years: Building Europe on Motorways and Electricity Networks’, Journal of Modern European History, 6 (2008): pp. 196–217.
non-governmental organizations (NGOs). All these private transnational associations and advocacy groups were and still are influential in creating a ‘world culture’ permeated by formal institutions, scientific expertise, and technical standards.16 In this book, however, I concentrate on blueprints for public institutions with political authority to make rules, and hence governing international relations in the narrower sense of the term.
Second, this book does not claim that it can replace grand narratives about the history of international thought, such as Brian Schmidt’s Political Discourse of Anarchy. It is confined to the technocratic variety of international theory. My historical account is also overtly and self-consciously Eurocentric.17 The institutions and mentalities of technocratic modernity first emerged in Europe and North America, and from there were exported (not least by IOs) to other regions of the world. I do not address the pathologies of the instruments and practices of technocratic modernization in the global South. The spread of norms and modes of (self-)governance, the failures of technocratic ‘development’ and local resistance against it, they all have been documented by anthropologists and historians more qualified to do so than I am.18 What I will document, however, are the important colonial and imperial legacies in the genesis of technocratic international thought, which often went unnoticed in the past. My account will show how notions of ‘rational’ colonial administration influenced early blueprints for IOs, and how colonial legacies permeated discourses of global economic planning and development.
Over the course of the 20th century, technocratic ideas appeared frequently in writings on politics and public administration, but also in academic and policyoriented treatises on international affairs. Rationalization in this context appears as a global project. Technocratic internationalism has come in various contexts and vocabularies, and with different doctrinal labels attached. In the field of IR theory, ‘functionalism’ probably is the best-known term to catch the essence of
16 John Boli and George M. Thomas, eds., Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Sidney Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
17 An influential critique of the Western-centric tradition in writing international theory is John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Brieg Powel, ‘Blinkered Learning, Blinkered Theory: How Histories in Textbooks Parochialize IR’, International Studies Review, 22 (2020): pp. 957–82.
18 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Tania Murray Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
this style of thinking.19 Functionalism, as I will show in Chapters 5 and 6, never was just an academic utopia but one pursued by practitioners as well.20 It provided a recipe for building international institutions.
It is worth recalling in this context that before the Second World War there was hardly a distinction between academic reflection on IOs and political advocacy in their favour. A striking example is the publications by League of Nations officials. During the crisis of international organization in the 1930s and 1940s, they wrote a plethora of books and pamphlets to defend international collaboration.21 IOs produced, and indeed continue to reproduce, justifications for their own existence. The lasting impact of the technocratic tradition is still visible today whenever IOs present themselves as unpolitical, rules-bound, competent, and objective managers of global problems whose existence is beyond dispute, hailing ‘the gradual triumph of the rational and the technocratic over the political’.22
For a long time, the orthodox IR literature had little to say about the technocratic legitimacy of IOs and its sources, because it was not assumed that such institutions had any independent power or authority in need of legitimation. On the contrary, IOs were usually conceived as mere instruments of the states that acted ‘through’ them. According to that view, governments opportunistically create IOs to reduce the transaction costs of their cooperation or, in a realist reading, to smoothly exercise hegemonic power.23 The background foil for those debates was the classic imagery of the international system as an anarchical and conflict-prone environment populated by self-interested states. That anarchy framing left little room for any non-state actor with authority in need of legitimation, leading to a prevalent image of IOs as strangely abstract mechanisms of inter-state cooperation.
19 Regarding IOs, functionalism is the name of a legal doctrine as well as a particular branch of IR theory associated mainly with it David Mitrany, A Working Peace System (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966); see also Lucian M. Ashworth and David Long, eds., New Perspectives on International Functionalism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). For a perspective from law, see Jan Klabbers, ‘The Emergence of Functionalism in International Institutional Law: Colonial Inspirations’, European Journal of International Law, 25 (2014): pp. 645–75.
20 David Kennedy, ‘The International Style in Postwar Law and Policy’, Utah Law Review, 1994 (1994): pp. 7–103, at p. 10.
21 See Salvador De Madariaga, The World’s Design (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938); Egon F. Ranshofen-Wertheimer, The International Secretariat: A Great Experiment in International Administration (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1945); Frank Boudreau, ‘International Civil Service: The Secretariat of the League of Nations’, in Pioneers in World Order: An American Appraisal of the League, edited by Harriet Eager Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), pp. 76–86.
22 Charles Pentland, ‘Political Theories of European Integration: Between Science and Ideology’, in The European Communities in Action, edited by Dominik Lasok and Panayotis Soldatos (Brussels: Bruylant, 1981), pp. 545–69, p. 551.
23 For a debate on this, see Kenneth W. Abbott and Duncan Snidal, ‘Why States Act through Formal International Organizations’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 42 (1998): pp. 3–32; Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 86–8.
Questions of legitimacy came back in once a new generation of scholars began to reject the notion that IOs were just handmaidens of powerful states and began to treat them as living bureaucracies.24 Many of these scholars (though not all) can be characterized as social constructivists, paying much more attention to the role of ideas in international relations. They also increasingly referred to organizational sociology and Max Weber’s work in particular.25 In their empirical research, these scholars looked at IO secretariats, civil servants, and the dynamics of internal bureaucratic politics.26 This new interest in bureaucracies and their personnel situated IOs within a wider class of social phenomena, thus linking back to an older IR literature that had already understood IOs as bureaucracies.27
Genuinely new, however, was an interest in questions of organizational legitimacy, understood as ‘a subjective quality, relational between actor and institution, and defined by the actor’s perception of the institution’.28 The overarching question was why, how, and under what conditions IOs would be able to influence other actors in the international system, in particular states.29 The explanandum here was power or influence, and the framing essentially actorcentred. By recovering the phenomenon of bureaucratic legitimacy, constructivist IR scholars thus opened up a new avenue for academic research on IOs. Yet they did not walk down that road very far when they simply took it for granted that bureaucratic organizations must have some ‘legal-rational’ appeal that resonated with their global audience. They failed to ask how it happened that people came to believe in the virtues of global bureaucracies in the first place. This is what I do in this book.
24 Alastair Iain Johnston, ‘Treating International Institutions as Social Environments’, International Studies Quarterly, 45 (2001): pp. 487–515; Tana Johnson, Organizational Progeny: Why Governments Are Losing Control over the Proliferating Structures of Global Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
25 Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Ian Hurd, ‘Legitimacy and Authority in International Politics’, International Organization, 53 (1999): pp. 379–408; Ian Hurd, After Anarchy: Legitimacy and Power in the United Nations Security Council (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
26 For an overview, see Jörn Ege and Michael W. Bauer, ‘International Bureaucracies from a Public Administration and International Relations Perspective’, in Routledge Handbook of International Organization, edited by Bob Reinalda (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 135–49, at pp. 140–1; John Mathiason, Invisible Governance: International Secretariats in Global Politics (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2007).
27 Inis Claude, Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization, 3rd ed. (New York: Random House, 1964); Ernst B. Haas, Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International Organization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964); Robert W. Cox and Harold K. Jacobson, eds., The Anatomy of Influence: Decision Making in International Organization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); Clive Archer, International Organization (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983).
28 Hurd, ‘Legitimacy and Authority’, p. 381.
29 Barnett and Finnemore, Rules for the World, pp. 20–1; Hurd, After Anarchy, pp. 18–19; Ege and Bauer, ‘International Bureaucracies’, pp. 138–9.
The plan of the book
This book starts (Chapter 1) with the concept of technocratic internationalism and the ideal of rationalization to set the stage for the historical inquiry that follows. An interest in governance through expert administration directs us to Max Weber’s classic account of modernization as rationalization. Rationalization is associated with the advance of explicit rules, formal procedure, technical expertise, and disciplined communication in governing modern societies. As is well-known, Weber admired the efficiency and predictability, the sheer functionality, of new forms of governance by the Menschenmaschine, the human machinery of bureaucracy. Weber’s positive judgements of bureaucratic modernization went far beyond efficiency gains. An important aspect, but often overlooked, is the elimination of despotism (Willkür in German) through bureaucratization, on which Weber commented approvingly. Unlike the monarch and the tyrant, modern organizations gave reasons for their actions and were constrained by law.
Max Weber was a theorist of modernity but not an advocate of modernization. When we compare his historical-sociological and his political writings we find the tensions and ambivalences in the project of modernity. Whatever its functional advantages, Weber feared bureaucratic modernization because it eroded individual liberty and suffocated creativity through the formal regulation of all aspects of life. Bureaucratic thinking denied the necessity of political competition, conflict, and struggle over values. This criticism of de-politicization became a major theme of critical social theory in the 20th century, and I will return to it repeatedly throughout the book. Thus, Chapter 1 delivers a conceptual background foil for my historical inquiry by pointing out the nature but also the internal tensions and ambiguities of technocratic modernity. Not least, I explain the nature of my own inquiry, the construction of an intellectual tradition across various historical periods, and the selection of writings included in this book.
In Chapter 2, I begin my historical survey, and show how technocratic and internationalist strands of political thought first became intertwined. Historically, IOs as we know them today appeared in 19th-century Europe. That was a time when public administration was expanded and professionalized in all industrialized countries and their colonies. It was also the time when philosophers such as Saint-Simon, Comte, and Hegel started praising the virtues of modern public administration. Henri de Saint-Simon, whose very original work is rarely considered pertinent in IR, not only delivered an elaborate defence of technocratic government but also advocated international political integration through a European parliament of experts. He tabled this proposal at the time of the Congress of Vienna, where, incidentally, the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine was founded, which is usually considered the first modern IO.
Later in the 19th century, a number of French-speaking theorists, mainly lawyers and ‘scientific pacifists’, called for technical organizations to manage international affairs, taking the telecommunications sector as a blueprint. An equally important but largely forgotten root of technocratic modernity was colonial administration. An author in whose life and work this connection is particularly visible is the American political scientist Paul S. Reinsch, one of the first academic scholars of IOs. Reinsch was a student of colonial administration before venturing into the field of IR, taking stock of the 19th-century ‘international public unions’ and their activities. In Reinsch’s work, we see the contours of a new normative vision of international expert administration, a veritable technocratic utopia, emerge from his empirical studies. These studies emphasized the promise of bringing expertise and reason to international governance of technical tasks, for the benefit of citizens.
These writings were pioneer contributions to an emergent field of ‘international organization studies, with a new generation of scholar-professionals taking over after the First World War. Two chapters of this book are devoted to the ideas that accompanied the first great move to international institutions. In many ways, the inter-war years were the heyday of technocratic utopias with an international dimension. I roughly divide these utopias by ideological affiliation. Chapter 3 focuses on the liberal context and the Anglophone world. I show how plans for technocratic IOs were influenced by real-world experiments with international (or rather inter-allied) administration during the Great War. A second source of inspiration was the rise of the functional theory of the state and its critique of territorial sovereignty, which by analogy facilitated the perception that IOs could take over entire political tasks from states. This figure of thought is prominent in works of a left-liberal group of British authors, represented here by Leonard Woolf, G. D. H. Cole, and David Mitrany.
Yet within the same ideological family there were also more pragmatic and, in some ways, conservative visions of transnational administration. I discuss the ideas of the British diplomat and League official, James Arthur Salter, and of Pittman B. Potter, arguably the most important American IO scholar of the inter-war generation. Both favoured the de-politicization of international governance and put a premium on the rationality of experts. Especially Salter idealized the international civil service and the work of independent expert bodies. These authors, however, did not want IOs to undermine the sovereignty of the nation-state. They rather envisaged close inter-administrative alliances among independent countries.
In Chapter 4, I turn to instances of technocratic internationalism that emerged from a non-liberal context. I focus on the writings of Francis Delaisi, a French syndicalist, and Giuseppe De Michelis, a high-ranking Italian diplomat of the fascist era. In the 1930s, both presented schemes for steering the global economy
through international expert organizations. De Michelis suggested transferring corporativism, the socio-economic doctrine of Italian fascism, to a global level. The coordinating role of the state would have been taken over by an extraordinarily powerful IO able to allocate resources across borders. Delaisi devised a scheme of transnational public works to revitalize the European economy after the Great Depression, widely known at the time as the ‘Delaisi-plan’. Such nonliberal varieties of technocratic internationalism emphasized the need for scientific planning but also strong public authority in implementing international cooperation.
Ideals of a planned economy continued to influence visions of international order during the Second World War, which I discuss in Chapter 5. E. H. Carr’s proposals for a ‘European Planning Authority’ and a ‘Bank of Europe’ took up themes from the non-liberal varieties of inter-war internationalism. Strangely, Carr just a few years earlier had attacked all sorts of world order utopias and advocated a power-political ‘realism’. Stranger still is the case of Hans J. Morgenthau, whose Scientific Man versus Power Politics ranks among the most anti-technocratic pamphlets ever written in the discipline of IR, and yet Morgenthau became an admirer of David Mitrany’s wartime Working Peace System, the manifesto of technocratic internationalism par excellence, and warmly suggested it as a blueprint for international organization in the face of the Cold War tensions. This extraordinary episode needs to be seen in the context of a robust consensus on the feasibility and desirability of expert governance in the 1940s. As I will show, technocratic beliefs were also widespread in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s US administration that projected the American ‘New Deal’ and its independent expert agencies to the international level.
With the end of the Second World War came another great move towards the formation of international institutions, globally and in Europe. Most of these were designed along functional lines, with limited and rather technical tasks. Chapter 6 is devoted to this heyday of the technocratic IO, in the 1950s and 1960s. It analyses, respectively, the contributions of IO practitioners and IO scholars, now two increasingly divided branches of the field of IO. I look at IO officials who used the technocratic ‘recipe’ for building and strengthening their organizations. An important figure was C. Wilfred Jenks, an international lawyer and long-term International Labour Organization (ILO) civil servant who established a ‘welfarist’ perspective with technical IOs devoted to the well-being of individuals. Along the way, he adapted technocratic internationalism to the new language of development and human rights. The Indian diplomat B. R. Sen, who in 1956 took over leadership of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) felt that he had a mission to keep ‘political’ influences out of FAO’s work and to liaise with external experts and NGOs instead. In the European Economic Community (EEC), Walter Hallstein, as the first (1958) president of its Commission, worked
to strengthen this technocratic body by building up a professional supranational civil service. Hallstein’s vision of an expert bureaucracy was not grounded in grand theorizing; instead it was eminently practical.
In academic IR, by contrast, programmatic advocacy for international organizations gave way to more analytical and comparative perspectives. Political scientists, most notably Ernst B. Haas and his collaborators, attempted to convert wartime functionalism into an empirical-analytical theory of international integration, edging away from the prescriptive stance of Mitrany’s writings. The technocratic-utopian legacy now became enshrined in the teleological character of the ‘neo-functionalist’ theorizing that made some enthusiastic assumptions about the rationality and popular appeal of governance by functional IOs.
Chapter 7 examines the increasingly critical attitude towards technocratic international organization that gained the upper hand in the 1970s and in many ways echoed criticism of domestic bureaucracies. New ideas of public management, inspired by private sector practices, eroded traditional ideals of hierarchical administration. In the field of IR, doubts mounted as to whether technocratic IOs were the appropriate tools for tackling the imposing global challenges. The early work of Thomas G. Weiss, to this day an eminent scholar of the UN system, emblematically represents the increasing awareness of the limits and pitfalls of technocratic organization.
As I also show in this chapter, such criticism of the bureaucratic form did not imply that scholars and practitioners abandoned the project of rationalizing international relations, nor did they turn away from experts or expertise. I give two examples to illustrate this. The first is provided by the literature on global environmental problems, increasingly felt in these years, which became a new field for applying visions of expert-driven, de-politicized governance in the 1980s and 1990s. Second, proponents of a ‘New International Economic Order’ (NIEO) envisaged global administrative bodies that would manage and redistribute the globe’s resources. The international administration of the deep seabed, a proposal that I discuss, shows the technocratic character of the NIEO idea when put into practice. An international authority of technical experts was foreseen here as guardian of this global public interest, managing seabed mining to make sure that developing countries received a fair share of the resources.
Results and conclusions
In the Conclusion, I summarize and analyse the findings of the historical survey. I distinguish varieties of technocratic internationalism, chronologically but also analytically. It emerges that technocratic internationalism was not a coherent, pyramidal body of political thought, in which seminal contributions pile on top of each other to reach ever new heights of sophistication. Rather, it appears as a sequence of variations over some constant themes, a loose tradition of thought
marked by recurrent descriptions of the problématique connected to certain types of institutional proposals.
Analytically, we can see that technocratic internationalism was constructed around a stylized distinction between politics and administration, which proved to be relatively stable over time. This stylized distinction can be understood as a Weberian ideal type, accentuating the features of these two modes of governance. This ideal-typical contrast can be described as follows. While politicians are driven by ideology, personal ambition and material interests, experts have a professional inclination towards problem-solving. Accordingly, politicians interact through bargaining and horse-trading, whereas experts follow a logic of reason-giving and persuasion. Politicians seek rent for their constituency, or even for themselves, whereas experts are interested in efficient problem-solving and measurable progress. In an international setting, politicians are chiefly oriented towards national interests and accountable to national constituencies. Experts working in or with IOs, in contrast, are oriented to a global public good and remain accountable mainly to their peers.
The argument in favour of experts being better able to deliver effective solutions for transnational problems is grounded in a number of sometimes tacit assumptions. The first and maybe most fundamental assumption is that politics is by necessity less rational than expert administration. Politicians supposedly work with a focus on the interests articulated by their constituencies, lobbies, and parties. Administrative experts’ ‘global point of view’, in contrast, is the result of a thought experiment that can be performed individually or in conversation with peers. In that experiment, experts deduce whether a matter is of global public interest from the assumed (rather than articulated) interests of citizens.
As mentioned above, these are ideal-typical descriptions, and of course authors focus on different aspects: some highlight the merits of formal bureaucratic structures; others, the public use of scientific expertise; still others, deliberation among experts. What unites them is the hope that power politics and opportunistic rentseeking of states will give way to rule-based decision-making, based on scientific evidence, and catering to the public interests of a transnational community.
The historical evidence also shows that praise for expert administration has not been associated with any distinct political ideology. Modern instruments for rationalizing government have been used in liberal market economies as well as in socialist state planning and fascist totalitarianism. That the same technocratic tools could equally be used for creating international administrative structures was obvious to internationalists of otherwise very different political affiliations. The modernization-theoretical framing may also help us understand a seeming paradox in current academic thinking and public commentary about IOs: that these organizations can appear powerless and yet too powerful at the same time.
IOs seem conspicuously powerless when they are unable to guarantee state compliance with internationally agreed norms. We can call this the ‘realist’ line of criticism formulated by figures such as E. H. Carr, Hans J. Morgenthau, and John
Herz during the crisis of international organization in the 1940s. Realists contend that bureaucratic modernization (quite like collective security) is prone to failure under conditions of international anarchy, and that it would be naïve to think that IOs could simply suspend the eternal laws of power politics. Importantly, many realist critics of international organization did not dispute the desirability of modernizing international relations in principle, but rather the feasibility of such a project under conditions of anarchy.
This is quite different from the position of critics who regard IOs as being too powerful. They charge IOs with undermining domestic democracy and selfdetermination. Compared to the well-established realist critique, this second line of criticism is relatively recent in relation to IOs. However, as a criticism of bureaucracy or ‘big government’ it has a considerably long history in domestic political discourse and social theory. In fact, Max Weber anticipated it a hundred years ago when he complained that bureaucratic government endangered individual creativity, spontaneity, and self-determination, and prevented political change.
In my conclusions, I suggest that current resistance to IOs and calls for the renationalization of political competences needs to be seen in this context, and understood as a backlash against the impositions of modernity and the oppressive side of rationalization and formalization. Such disenchantment with bureaucratic modernity has long been seen in many industrialized countries and in recent decades it has spread to include IOs. Thus, a broad modernization-theoretical perspective can shed light on this growing scepticism and on the current legitimacy crisis with regards to public, technocratic IO as an institutional form. It is not just manifest ‘pathologies of IOs’ that have brought about this disenchantment but also the very successes of the universal rationalization project.
To conclude this Introduction, let me summarize the three contributions I wish to make with this book. The first is to deliver a comprehensive intellectual history of technocratic internationalism, covering two centuries and diverse ideological contexts. Second, I hope to show that systematic engagement with the technocratic legacy can contribute to a better understanding of current challenges to international governance. Progressive calls for transnational democracy and public accountability of IOs, but also populist campaigns for a re-nationalization of politics, can be understood as critical countermovements to the project of technocratic governance. Criticism of transnational technocracy has had its domestic precedents and equivalents. Realizing these parallels will contextualize current debates over IOs more broadly in social and political theory. Finally, awareness of these connections and parallels can help us overcome the disciplinary isolation of IR and foster dialogue with the neighbouring disciplines of public administration, sociology, history, and law.
1 Technocratic internationalism
This chapter is dedicated to the guiding concept of the book and its grounding in social theory. As sociologist Karl Mannheim observed, ‘[t]he fundamental tendency of all bureaucratic thought is to turn all problems of politics into problems of administration’.1 This book takes Mannheim’s insight to the transnational level and carves out a distinctly modern mode of international thought that has idealized the rule of experts and administrators across borders. The six history-focused chapters that form the bulk of this book will document various sources and trajectories of this type of international thought. ‘Technocratic internationalism’ is the term used to assemble the contributions under one conceptual roof.
In the first part of the chapter, I clarify the status of such an analytical concept as common denominator in a study that focuses on common themes in literatures from very diverse intellectual ambits. I will also define in this chapter what exactly I mean by technocratic internationalism, why this term has been chosen, and why, in my view, it makes sense to explore the intellectual history of International Relations (IR) with the help of this concept. In the last part of the chapter, I will address two methodological challenges that are typically affecting longue durée studies of political ideas: the ex post construction of an intellectual tradition and the selection of authors and writings that are allotted to it.
The notion of ‘technocratic internationalism’ is, first of all, a heuristic tool. I use it in this book to render a certain tradition of thinking about international relations visible, simply by giving it a name and suggesting that writings from different historical periods have enough traits in common to form such a tradition. Technocratic internationalism is a concept introduced ex post for analytical purposes. None of the authors that I study in subsequent chapters of this book identified with such a tradition. At the same time, I cannot claim to have invented the concept. In recent years, historians used the term technocratic internationalism when inquiring into the role of technology and expertise in international cooperation and regional integration. Wolfram Kaiser and Johan Schot argued that ‘from the mid-nineteenth century onwards experts began to add a new layer to the existing political and economic order—a set of ideas, practices,
1 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1954), p. 105.
2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845573.003.0002
and institutions which formed the patterns of technocratic internationalism’.2 Historiography brought to light persons and institutions that planned connecting countries through motorways, railways, and electricity networks. In this context, technocratic internationalism was used to capture the ‘background ideology’ that animated such projects.3
These historical studies are mainly focused on Europe and, even more specifically, on the technologies used to unite the continent. I agree that all those lofty visions and concrete plans, often suggested by engineers, are well-described as a form of technocratic internationalism and represented an important part of the internationalist movement. Importantly, this literature draws attention to how networks, both material and inter-personal, came to characterize modernity. In this book, I use technocratic internationalism in a slightly different fashion, however. My conception is at the same time narrower and broader than the one suggested by Kaiser, Lagendijk, and Schot. It is narrower in that, for me, internationalism is a programmatic intellectual attitude that comes in various historical forms.4 Institutions and networks are studied only to the extent required for the contextualization of ideas.
My conceptualization is broader than one centring on engineering and infrastructure in that it gives more weight to the aspect of kratein in technocratic. Technocracy implies that people with certain competences and expertise, the téchne, should come to rule a society. The arguably purest and most radical formulation of this idea was tabled in the early 1930s by Technocracy Inc., a shortlived American utopian movement. The revolutionary plan of its eccentric founder, Howard Scott, was to abolish politics and capitalism completely and to hand the management of American society to experts, who would rule the country through the distribution of energy units.5 Technocratic internationalism is a considerably less radical concept. It refers to a programmatic intellectual attitude that combines two elements of reform: cooperation across borders and expert rule. The latter aspect distinguishes it from other types of visionary
2 Wolfram Kaiser and Johan Schot, Writing the Rules for Europe: Experts, Cartels, and International Organizations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 25.
3 Johan Schot and Vincent Lagendijk, ‘Technocratic Internationalism in the Interwar Years. Building Europe on Motorways and Electricity Networks’, Journal of Modern European History, 6 (2008): pp. 196–217, at p. 198; Martin Schiefelbusch and Hans-Liudger Dienel, eds., Linking Networks: The Formation of Common Standards and Visions for Infrastructure Development (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Martin Kohlrausch and Helmuth Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise: Innovators, Organizers, Networkers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Frank Schipper, Driving Europe: Building Europe on Roads in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2008).
4 For the concept of internationalism, see Warren F. Kuehl, ‘Concepts of Internationalism in History’, Peace & Change, 11 (1986): pp. 1–10.
5 For contemporary statements, see Howard Scott et al., Introduction to Technocracy (New York: John Day, 1933); Harold Loeb, Life in a Technocracy. What It Might Be Like (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996 [1933]); Stuart Chase, Technocracy: An Interpretation (New York: John Day, 1933). For a contextualization, see William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
internationalism, such as collective security schemes, a global revolution of the working class, world state utopias, or continental federations. I will argue in Chapter 2 that technocratic internationalism emerged during the ‘long nineteenth century’, when transnational expert rule became perceived to be both feasible and desirable.
To grasp the appeal of de-politicized expert governance at an international level, we need to explore the intellectual foundations of modernity, its link to the ‘Enlightenment project’, and its inherent promise of rationalization. In the next section of this chapter, I explore technocratic internationalism with the help of modernization theory in general, and with Max Weber’s account of the Fachbürokratie in particular. Such a grounding in classical social theory can help us understand a key promise of technocratic internationalism, which is the rationalization of international relations. Max Weber’s ‘concept of the march of technical rationality in the world, the rise of a bureaucratic elite, and the relationship between bureaucracy and ideology exemplified all the principal elements of the technocratic image’.6 While pre-modern societies also knew forms of public administration, the Fachbürokratie is marked by a particular combination of practically applicable expertise, a formalization of procedures, and a hierarchical form of internal organization. It is a key feature of the modern age.7 Accordingly, any attempt to understand the appeal of technocratic governance should start from there.
Modernization as rationalization
If in the social sciences there are not only master questions but also master concepts, modernity and modernization are certainly among them. Modernization is usually imagined as a unique structural transformation that ushered in an era in which literally everything became new and distinct.8 Despite the centrality of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’ on the research agenda of the social sciences, these terms are notoriously fuzzy. In the 16th century, when the word ‘modern’ first appeared in English, its meaning was straightforward.9 There was little doubt if a person or thing was truly modern, because modern just meant pertaining to the present. In everyday language, the word modern has largely kept that original meaning of something up to date, or fashionable.
6 John G. Gunnell, ‘The Technocratic Image and the Theory of Technocracy’, Technology and Culture, 23 (1982): pp. 392–416, at p. 395.
7 Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), p. 234.
8 On the cult of the new beginning, see Nikolas Kompridis, ‘The Idea of a New Beginning: A Romantic Source of Normativity and Freedom’, in Philosophical Romanticism, edited by Nikolas Kompridis (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), pp. 32–59.
9 On first appearance of term modern, see http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/modern
