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Examines the role of the US in international financial institutions with particular reference to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Describes the extraordinary influence of the US on these institutions as a function of both formal means (e.g., US financial contributions) and informal practices and conventions that have developed over time, with the informal mechanisms of influence often being more important than the formal ones. However, it is also argued that, notwithstanding the weight of US influence, it would be inaccurate to consider the World Bank and the IMF as mere instruments of US power and policy, and that their remaining credibility and legitimacy rest in part on their ability to create some political distance between themselves and their most powerful state patron. US domestic political conditions are also important. Within the country, the division of authority between Executive and Congress sometimes enhances and at other times constrains US influence; the effective exercise of US power also requires interlocutors in host governments who share the technical mind‐set and ideological predispositions of the US and international financial institutions. The different sections of the chapter: analyse the formal and informal structures of power in the World Bank and IMF; look at the US in relation to the financing, lending decisions, staffing and management of these institutions; and discuss formal power structures and informal exercises of influence.

Provides a broad discussion of the methodological, conceptual, and theoretical issues faced by international relations and accounts for its main debates and transitions from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’. Old international relations, in realism, faced a changing global order. However, limitations can be transcended if modifications are made, liberal institutions analysed, the impact of international institutions considered, and subjectivity acknowledged. Although international relations has been humbled with the inability to predict complex events, theories with reduced expectations can successfully transcend the limitations of realism.

This chapter takes a broad look at the impact exerted by international economic and political pressures on patterns of government and governance in Europe. It assesses the degree to which, as a consequence of the end of the Cold War and of the forces of globalization, these pressures are changing, and considers the implications of such change. It is argued in the first section of the chapter that the profound impact of the external environment on the character of the European state has been all too evident, despite the internalist tendencies of so much comparativist scholarship; moreover, West European states continue to confront several external challenges to the stability that has, since the Second World War, characterized their half of the Old Continent. The first challenge comes from the continued development of the very forces of liberalization that have played such an important role in Europe's recent past, changes that, for the sake of convenience, can be categorized under the heading of ‘globalization’; the second section examines some of the major aspects of the globalization debate as it relates to the European state, but takes a sceptical viewpoint. The second challenge comes from the changes in the international political system (the emergence of the United States as the single superpower; the collapse of the Soviet Union; the changing character of the security problems facing Europe); an emphasis on these changes can be found most prominently in the writings of US neo–realists who asserted that the end of the Cold War would inevitably result in Europe returning to its geopolitical and conflictual ‘historic norm’. In the third section it is shown why such extreme predictions have been proved wrong but nevertheless argues that the neo–realist emphasis on the international political system is, in a fundamental sense, correct.

Woods's chapter focuses primarily on procedural justice within the international financial institutions. She argues that the procedures adopted by these institutions are central to the debate about global economic justice, and thus it is essential to explore how these bodies make decisions and implement them. Her conclusions suggest that, notwithstanding recent and important reforms, the institutions still suffer from weaknesses in representation and accountability. Unless these bodies attend to these deficiencies, the range and scope of their activities should be circumscribed.

Ch. 5 outlined an argument for a justice‐based general conception of what might be called internal political legitimacy: the conditions under which the exercise of political power within a political entity's own borders is morally justified. This conception of internal political legitimacy is used in Ch. 6 as a component of an account of recognitional legitimacy (also called international legitimacy). The concept of recognitional legitimacy plays a central role in international legal institutions and international affairs, where states, governments, and insurgency movements may all be recognized or not recognized as legitimate by individual states, groups of states, or regional or international organizations. The primary focus of this chapter is recognitional legitimacy as applied to states—i.e. on the judgement that a particular entity should or should not be recognized as a member in good standing of the system of states, with all the rights, powers, liberties, and immunities that go with that status; the guiding idea of the approach is that recognition is an act with serious moral implications and, as such, ought to be governed by rules that are themselves morally justifiable. The three sections of the chapter are: The Concept of Recognitional Legitimacy; II. Justifying the Justice‐Based Theory of Recognitional Legitimacy; and III. Legitimacy of States Versus Legitimacy of Governments.

This Introduction offers a background to the global governance of migration. It argues that although there is no coherent UN-based multilateral framework regulating states' responses to migration, this is not to say that there is no global migration governance. Rather, global migration governance can be characterized by a fragmented tapestry of institutions at the bilateral, regional, inter-regional, and multilateral levels, which vary according to different types of migration. The Introduction provides a conceptual framework that can be applied to understand (a) what, institutionally, global migration governance is; (b) why, politically, it exists in the way that it does; (c) how, normatively, one can ground claims about ‘better’ global migration governance.

The response of an incoming government to past crimes and gross violations of human rights depends primarily on a combination of domestic political, military and socioeconomic factors. However, international influences and institutions play an increasing role in shaping and affecting these processes. International efforts are in turn shaped partly by the perceived success or failure of domestic attempts to deal with the past. This chapter focuses on three areas in which these mutual influences manifest themselves: first, it examines the impact of international and transnational activity on the work of national courts, truth commissions, reparation schemes and political discourses about the past; second, it looks at the possibility of simultaneous actions in multiple arenas, since transnational justice also takes the form of legal actions brought in the national courts of one country against civil or criminal defendants based in another; the third area of influence discussed is the creation of new international institutions for accountability, although the extent to which these international efforts have influenced political or social reconstruction within societies is still unclear. The different sections of the chapter are: Introduction; Human Rights Institutions and Norms; Transnational Justice: The Pinochet Precedent; International Justice: The ‘Ad Hoc’ Tribunals and the ICC (International Criminal Court); and Conclusion.

Describes the influence of the international institutions in shaping democratic consolidation and economic reform in the Czech Republic as a case study of an East European state that strongly wished to join those institutions. The chapter traces the changing nature of international influence on the consolidation of Czech democracy as the polity passed through four stages. The first was characterized by profound yet diffuse influence. In the second stage, Western influence was delimited by two factors: (1) ‘homemade’ reform by Prime Minister Václav Klaus, a mix of Czech provincialism, free market ideology, and political pragmatism; and (2) insufficient pressure of NATO and the EU to compel reforms. The third stage saw increased EU criticism of economic performance, corruption, and racism. The fourth stage was characterized by the weakening of the EU membership argument for difficult reforms. Overall, the Czech case shows that the conditionality of the EU depends on a certain tension between confidence in securing membership and fear of suffering rejection due to inadequate reform.

This chapter assesses the evolution of international standard setting in financial markets by examining the characteristics of the various international bodies, such as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the International Organization of Securities Commissions, that are involved in international standard setting. Topics discussed include international financial institutions, supervisory structures for financial conglomerates, the Financial Action Task Force, and financial crises from the 1990s and onwards.

The Bretton Woods Institutions and the WTO are the preeminent international institutions devoted to managing international economic relations. This mandate puts them squarely in the center of the debate concerning development, inequality, and global justice. While the normative analysis of the WTO is gaining momentum, the systematic normative evaluation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is comparatively less developed. This chapter contributes to that nascent inquiry. How might global justice criteria apply to the ideology and operations of the Bank and Fund? Political theory offers an abundance of perspectives from which to conduct such an analysis; this chapter focuses on Rawls's theory of justice as fairness adapted to international institutions by the author in connection with the WTO and extend it to the remaining “legs” of the Bretton Woods “stool”. It asks what difference it would make for the Bank and Fund if an explicit global justice framework informed their international lending activities.

The purpose is to trace and assess the ways in which the US has used multilateral institutions/organizations (both those international institutions/organizations of which it is a member and those regional institutions/organizations of which it is not) and multilateralism itself to pursue its interests on the African continent. The emergence of a noticeable multilateral dimension to American policy towards Africa is situated against two backgrounds: the first (Sect. 1 of the chapter) deals with the general features of American policy towards Africa since the Second World War and the role that multilateralism in general has played in that; the second (Sect. 2) deals with the rise of multilateralism (and multilateral regional institutions/organizations) on the African continent as a process that has a dynamic of its own. This perspective on Africa as an agent, and not simply as an object, of US policy is important for maintaining a critical perspective on the successes but also the contradictions and failures of US policy towards Africa. The final two sections offer a detailed description and evaluation of the dimensions of multilateralism in post‐cold‐war US policy, and, in particular, the Clinton era, which, in many respects, encapsulates much of what is right and wrong with US policy towards the continent. The evaluation made and the general assumptions used to approach the theme of US policy towards Africa are informed by a broadly neo‐Gramscian appraisal of the hegemonic function of the US in the current global political and economic order, and of the place of multilateralism within that hegemonic function.

This chapter presents a theoretical framework for the EU’s passive leverage, defined as the traction that the EU has on the domestic politics of credible candidate states merely by virtue of its existence and its usual conduct. Passive leverage includes the political and economic benefits of EU membership, the costs of exclusion, and the way that the EU treats non-member states. The force of the EU’s passive leverage explains why the governments of virtually all credible future EU member states declare EU membership as their foremost foreign policy goal.

In recent years there has been a proliferation of international rules, laws, and institutional forms in world politics. Some policy makers, a fair number of international relations scholars, and many international lawyers posit that these trends will lead to more rule-based outcomes in world politics. This chapter suggests a contrary position: institutional thickness paradoxically weakens global governance structures. Institutional proliferation erodes the causal pathways through which regimes ostensibly strengthen international cooperation. After a certain point, therefore, the proliferation of regimes shifts global governance from rule-based outcomes to power-based outcomes. To demonstrate these effects, the chapter examines two cases: the aftermath of the 2001 Doha Declaration on intellectual property rights and public health, and recent efforts to create a WMD interdiction regime that permits the boarding of ships on the high seas. These cases show that state power can break down “viscosity” within global governance structures.

Especially in poorer countries and regions, international financial institutions (multilateral, bilateral, and increasingly international NGOs) have been important in financing the implementation of the pro-poor ideas, policies, and structures described in previous chapters. They have attempted to make their aid more effective – and since the 1990s more pro-poor – by attaching policy conditions to their aid, which is achieved through a combination of liberalization, good governance, and commitment to poverty reduction. This idea forms the basis of the Washington institutions’ Poverty Reduction Strategy documents. However, as this chapter shows, what really matters in practice is not adherence to formal conditionality but trust between international financial institutions and recipients; and this is determined more by personal relationships than by technical performance criteria. In spite of this personalization of the aid relationship, this chapter finds that aid does influence policy (for example, the level of the PPE and PPI indices developed in Chapters 5 and 6) and thereby, in the poorer countries, plays a significant part in reducing poverty. Indonesia, Ghana, Uganda, and Bolivia, and outside the study’s sample also Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India, would have had totally different poverty trajectories in the absence of support from the international financial institutions.

Over the past 15 years, the field of international relations has produced a great deal of work on international cooperation and international institutions. This work has immediate relevance for conceptualizing a new era and a new approach to international development cooperation. Once we understand development cooperation as a problem of providing global public goods, our attention is immediately drawn to the problems of strategic interaction and opportunistic behavior that confront states as they attempt to cooperate in the pursuit of mutually beneficial goals. Drawing on public goods models and related concerns, the literature on international cooperation identifies strategic problems that states must overcome if they are to cooperate effectively – and how international organizations can facilitate state efforts to cooperate, primarily through the provision of information. This chapter summarizes the central claims of political science about the conditions for international cooperation and the roles of international organizations and nonstate actors in helping states achieve the benefits of cooperation. It concludes that the most useful functions of international organizations involve the provision of information about state preferences and behavior – particularly about standards and causal knowledge.

Although international institutions are a ubiquitous feature of international life, little is known about their trajectories of change. This chapter attempts to address this lacuna by examining processes of change in international institutions, in particular the subset of international institutions known as intergovernmental organisations. The purpose of this chapter is not to develop a general theory of change in international institutions but rather to develop limited generalisations about causal mechanisms and their consequences. It first examines the rationale and purposes of international organisations before one can ask how and why particular types of organisations change, and why they exist in the first place. It then examines the trajectories of change in international organisations by posing three, interrelated, questions. The chapter concludes by examining some normative aspects of change in the context of global governance distinguishing between the feasible and the desirable.