1. Taylor Marino
PLS364
Bodea
December 7th
, 2014
The Importance of International Organizations and International Law
The last century has seen the birth of major international institutions like the United
Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Health Organization. International
law, in an interest for cooperation, has also come out of this new globalization, as
organizations like the U.N. create laws such as they did in the Convention Against Torture.
With the rise of international laws and international organizations also comes the rise of
questions such as: Do such international organizations and international laws really have any
importance in the world? Some theorists argue that these organizations and laws are just the
brainchild of central, influential states—without the states to back them up, there would be no
international organizations or international law. Essentially, the argument they make is that
international law and international organizations do no matter in the reality of the world
because, in the end, states will do what they want when it is best for them. In times of
economic prosperity, they may cooperate more with law but in times when their economies
are bad they do not cooperate as well. But is this really the case: that realism is the trump
card in the political world? I would argue that there are instances of where international law
and international organizations are autonomous. In my paper, I will argue that international
organizations and international laws do have a say in the world and on states. For my
argument I will use examples of institutions and laws like the International Monetary Fund,
the Convention Against Torture, and the European Monetary Union with help from theories
like liberal institutionalism and constructivism.
We are living in an increasingly interconnected world, where nations and
international organizations have the power to intervene in the affairs of other states when the
conditions of that state are not suitable. This is shown by the birth of the United Nations,
which consists of many organizations designed to interact with the policies of states. For
example, the Convention Against Torture was adopted by the UN General Assembly in the
winter of 1984, and fully established as a law in 1987. The Convention Against Torture was
established to combat human rights abuses in the form of torture and cruel abuse by nations
against their citizens. Eighty-one states of the United Nations have signed the treaty to this
date. But does that mean that the states that signed the Convention Against Torture will
necessarily cooperate? I argue that there are reasons to believe that states do cooperate with
such sweeping international laws as the CAT. On page 267 in Beth Simmons’ book
Mobilizing for Human Rights, she states that there are three types of regime experiences:
stable democracies, unstable and never democratic nations, and states who reside in the
middle of the two extremes. In terms of the CAT, some states like the U.S., a stable
democracy, may have ratified it because they already comply with the standards established
under the CAT’s requirements. But there are other states that would come to ratify the CAT
that did so without already following the statutes of the CAT. It is in countries that do not
already follow the law and are on the line between a stable democracy and unstable-never-
democracy that we can see big impacts of ratifying laws like the Convention Against Torture
and that are portrayers of the theory of constructivism. In Chile, the Convention Against
Torture was ratified in 1988 by the junta, who were the ruling party of the time led by
Pinochet. The CAT was ratified because Pinochet was trying to increase his chances of being
re-elected again and he did not think that he would be prosecuted if he signed it into law
(Simmons, 291). But, this would prove to be his undoing: Pinochet would be extradited from
London and charged for his crimes against humanity because the CAT improved Chile’s

2. court system from one that was primarily influenced by the junta to one that was for the
people. Chile’s Appeals Court, acting on the CAT, established many laws, which were good
for the people and improved their circumstances. One of these laws was the ability of normal
people to take members of the military to court, improving their laws on prosecuting
criminals, and limiting the amnesty of foreigners who have committed crimes (Simmons,
295). In the CAT, we can see some clear lines of an international law in which there is an
effect. But, do international organizations matter?
In a realists view, international organizations do not matter because the only things
that matters are the big players in the world like states. In reality, and rejecting realism,
international organizations are these big players because they are not attached to states and
thus have autonomy. International organizations have autonomy because, like the argument
in Barnett and Finnemore’s book Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global
Politics, we can determine that international organizations are bureaucracies. Barnett and
Finnemore make three cases for how international organizations are autonomous on page 16:
because of authority from delegation processes, moral claims, and expertise. The authority
from delegation processes means that states have authority because states put them in that
authority. Moral claims refers to how international organizations represent “a widely shared
set of principles” rather than a state’s objective. And then expertise is that the international
organization specializes in an area of knowledge, and states defer to them because of their
expertise. We can see bureaucracy and principles of liberal institutionalism with the
International Monetary Fund. The IMF, created in 1944, was primarily meant to provide
states with help in balance-of-payments and as a moderator of exchange rates. Now, the
IMF’s duties have extended far beyond that of its original intent: the IMF can now
discriminate on lending states money for their balance of payments deficits and can establish
requirements on “conditions the borrower must meet” (Barnett and Finnemore, 50). Yet, the
IMF does not simply serve the state’s objectives: the reports they release on economy do not
discriminate countries or focus primarily on one country and are meant to be overarching.
The most important source of autonomy for the IMF and other international organizations is
their expertise. In the past, the IMF has made a lot of errors in how it should structure and
work. Still they exist, and the question here is: why? This is because the IMF was put in the
authority of regulating economics through balance of payments, though its expanded, and is a
primary procurer of such knowledge (Barnett and Finnemore, 52). Under these
circumstances, international organizations are bureaucracies set apart from the government.
Does this necessarily mean that we need international organizations and international law?
In this increasingly globally interdependent world, we must converge on ideas with
other states more. This can be helped through the use of international law and international
organizations. In The Currency of Ideas: Monetary Politics in the European Union,the
author McNamara writes of the convergence of Europe under the Economic and Monetary
Union. She argues that the EMU came about because of the failure of Keynesian policies
established by the Bretton Woods System, which gave states “shared causal beliefs” to agree
on (Mcnamara, 17). Keynesian policies worked under the theory of very little capital
mobilization, but by the 1970s to the 1980s, the amount of capital mobilization in the world
exceeded the capital controls meant to stop capital mobilization. With the U.S. residing on
capital autonomy, the European states of far smaller economies than that of the U.S. had to
come to a conclusion: to choose between capital autonomy or fixed exchange rates, as having
both of these things and the capital mobilization would be bad in terms of the Holy Trinity.
At the end of WWII, Europe had already been pondering the thought of a monetary union—
and so they decided upon choosing fixed exchange rates over capital autonomy. This was not
simply because of Keynesian policies: policies like the Snake and the Common Agricultural

3. Policy, both of which ended badly, and the prevalence of German economic ideas
(McNamara, 104). And so the EMU was born out of the idea of constructivism and liberal
institutionalism in the 1990s. This was not merely cooperation as Europe’s states saw the
need to come together to strengthen their economies from fluctuations and to avoid past
principles, which was on the mind of all their policy makers. They all now depend on each
other state under the authoritative umbrella of the EMU because of a united idea: for
economic stability.
In closing, in agreement to what many people think I believe that international
organizations and international law is effective and matter. Though sometimes they may fail
on quite large scales, such as in reacting the Rwandan genocide, such organizations and laws
aforementioned are still around and have not been dissolved. If they did not have an impact,
nor authority and expertise they would not exist because they would have failed in their
goals. Even when international organizations and international laws stray from their original
intent at creation, they are still deferred to by states. IOs and ILs can produce bad results
sometimes, but I believe that as long as they exist and work under the conditions of their
moral authority they can also bring good too. States no longer can ignore the events in other
states, and international law and organizations can bring light to those events and help states
to act. I see a fairly bright view and future of international laws and international
organizations in interacting with our world on the political, social, and economic scale