A Harder Case: Intergovernmental Organizations

The above notwithstanding, my conception of group agents is permissive—more permissive than other prominent conceptions (for example, the conceptions of French (1984), whose “corporations” have unchanging policies; List and Pettit (2011), whose “group agents” exclude dictatorial groups; and Rovane (1998), whose “group persons” must have a unifying project).

The group has different beliefs and desires, and processes them differently, than the members. This is what makes its beliefs and desires distinctively group-level. For example, Laura might prefer sushi for lunch, but upon learning the preferences of the others, partake in the consensus over burgers. We can even imagine that all members aim to please all others, but all are wrong about what the others want, so they end up using conversation-based consensus to go some­where none of them wants to go.

Finally, the enactment of the pizza-for-lunch decision requires that members act (by walking to the pizza place). These actions are attributable to the group in the following sense: the explanation of why any one of the individuals is walking to the pizza place requires referring to the fact that she’s a committed member of a group that has decided to have pizza for lunch. She goes to the pizza place for lunch, but this action also partly constitutes the group’s action of going there for lunch. The same considerations that led us to classify the UK as an agent also lead us to classify our beach-going group of friends as an agent.

I emphasize this application because it has implications for international politics. Specifically, collective moral agency extends to some groups in international politics whose decision­making processes involve informal diplomatic wrangling, power-play, self-interest on the part of members, and case-by-case bargaining amongst members. This includes some intergovern­mental organizations (IGOs).³

An IGO is a group created by agreement between states, whose members are the states who made the agreement (or organs of those states), where that founding agreement determines the group’s aims and operations (Union of International Associations 2015; ILC 2011: 2). Additionally, an IGO has a permanent secretariat, staff, and/or headquarters.⁴ The IGO’s continued identity depends upon temporal continuity in the broad structure of the secretariat, the staff relations, and the headquarter operations. This doesn’t mean that a new IGO comes into existence every time there are changes in which individuals make up the IGO, but that suffi­ciently significant changes in the role structure would lead to a change in identity.

IGOs might aim to be maximally inclusive, such as the United Nations (UN) or International Criminal Police Organization. Or they might select members regionally (e.g., the African Union or the European Union), or historically or politically (e.g., the Commonwealth or the Francophonie). IGOs are hugely diverse—even more diverse than states. In what follows, I’ll focus on those in the UN system, alongside the clearest cases of IGO agents, such as NATO, the European Union, or the World Bank. My aim is to show that at least some IGOs are moral agents, not that all are.⁵

In considering the possibility that IGOs are moral agents, one should not be concerned that the members of IGOs are collective agents. Any group with its own decision-making procedure is an agent that can make decisions, have goals, and perform tasks distinctly from its members. Some of these decisions, goals, and tasks might involve membership in a supra-group agent. This reveals the possibility of many levels of “nested” agency: the US State Department is a member of the United States, which is a member of the Security Council, which is a member⁶ of the UN, and so on.

Are IGOs agents? They have members, which are agents (in this case, states). In joining the IGO, each member explicitly agrees to abide by the procedure’s decisions (or at least, to abide by most of them: states can enter “reservations” when signing treaties, but when the reservations arise they can be treated in the way lawbreakers were in the above discussion of states). The members are given roles by the procedure, usually in the form of rights and duties listed in the IGO’s founding and subsequent treaties. These membership-based rights include a right for the member to have influence over the collective’s decisions, under the procedure. Yet the IGO’s decision-making procedure is different from the procedure any one member uses when deciding for itself—often, an IGO’s procedure is “negotiation and consensus amongst members.” The IGO’s decision-making procedure chooses actions the IGO will perform, member roles jointly sufficient for those actions, and an allocation of these roles amongst members.

What’s more, the procedures of at least some (perhaps not all) IGOs permit members to bring morally good reasons to bear on the IGO’s decisions. This permission—even encouragement—is implicit in the general actions described above: “maintaining peace and security” and “facilitating cooperation” require concern for the interests and perspectives of multiple agents. Indeed, many IGOs were set up specifically to bear retrospective or pro­spective responsibility. Consider, for example, the IGOs that are charged with enforcing various declarations, conventions, and covenants—such as the UN’s Human Rights Committee, its Commission on Human Rights, its Human Rights Council, or the International Criminal Court. The moral outcomes at which these documents aim could not be produced if not for the relevant IGO, because each member state requires assurance that other member states will do their bit toward the moral outcome—otherwise, any state’s performance of its own tasks would be inefficacious. What’s more, no single state could have a prospective responsibility to, say, progressively realize the fulfillment of everyone’s human rights—because no single state could do that (Collins 2016). Analogously, we can imagine a friendship group in which no member can, on his or her own, afford to buy enough pizza for the whole group. So if there is a prospective responsibility to produce the collective-level outcome (whether human rights or pizza), it had better be an intention held by the collective itself (whether IGO or friendship group)—on pain of violating the principle that “ought” implies “can.” Once a rele­vant IGO is in place, there is an over-arching procedure that can organize states towards such collectively-attainable outcomes—and so, can bear prospective responsibility for doing so (and retrospective responsibility for not doing so).

This idea—that some IGOs are moral agents—accords with a growing consensus amongst international relations scholars. Kjell Engelbrekt (2015) points to the ease with which the Security Council’s structure enables it to shirk its responsibilities. Anthony Lang, Jr., (2003) argues that the Security Council bore retrospective responsibility for the fall of Srebrenica, via its construction of “safe havens” that were not protected. Lang argues that (1) the structure of the Security Council—more so than the actions of any individual members—led to safe haven resolutions, and (2) the culture of the UN led commanders to make mistakes. Michael Barnett (2003) similarly argues that the UN’s “cultural landscape” played a crucial role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The point to appreciate when considering these arguments is that the UN’s structure, constructions, and cultural landscape are group-level features—they are not just the aggre­gation of the features of its members.

Similar arguments concern IGOs other than the UN. For example, Paul Cornish and Frances V. Harbour (2003: 121—3) argue that NATO undertook prospective responsibility to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. More broadly, Desmond McNeill and Asuncion Lera St. Clair (2009) analyzed the financial clout, economic expertise, delegated authority, and moral authority of various intergovernmental organizations: the UN Development Programme, the World Bank, UNESCO, and the Inter-American Development Bank. Their analysis took the starting point that “international organizations have a [prospective] responsibility to ameliorate poverty, [and] they also have a [prospective] responsibility to rise above the states that created them—should this be necessary in order to achieve their purpose” (McNeill and St.

Yet this analysis will be contentious. Surely, one might think, IGOs are run by their members (states). So IGOs can make only the decisions that states permit. Yes, IGOs can and sometimes do provide “warrants,” “approval” or “legitimacy” to states’ actions (as Harbour 2004: 67 argues in defense of their status as moral agents). But they are not the ones executing the actions and their instructions are not always authoritative. Thus James Crawford asserts that, “[u]nlike states, international organizations do not possess general competence: they may only exercise those

powers expressly or impliedly bestowed upon them” (2012: 184) and Chris Brown argues that Security Council authorizations are

not the exercise of discriminating moral judgment by the council acting as a collective body, but... the operation of political judgments based on calculations of interest.... [m] uch of the time, because of the veto [powers of the five permanent members], they [the UN and Security Council] will simply be unable to act.

(2001: 92)

We should therefore be skeptical of IGOs' agency—let alone their moral agency. Or so the thought goes.

Other IR scholars make more circumscribed, but still pessimistic, remarks about IGOs' agency. Kenneth Abbott and Duncan Snidal (2009) suggest that IGOs have independent cap­acities only insofar as the IGO can bring in third parties (such as NGOs or private actors) to act as intermediaries between IGOs and those actors (usually states) that IGOs wish to influence. Similarly, Frances Harbour (2004) looked at six cases of humanitarian intervention and found that in none did states base their decisions on IGOs' evaluations. And Gareth Evans points out, “[s]tates remain, for better or worse, and will be for the foreseeable future, the primary actors in international affairs. Intergovernmental organizations can only decide if their member states agree and can only act if their member states deliver.” (2008: 196).

Clearly, IGOs' moral agency is constrained: IGOs rely on members to enact the IGOs' decisions; members sometimes resist bringing morally good reasons as inputs to IGOs' decisions; IGOs are set up by members; and IGOs cannot act in any and all circumstances. How much of a problem is this for IGOs' capacity to bear responsibility? Not much of one. After all, individ­uals also face these constraints: individuals rely on their later temporal parts to enact present decisions; individuals have recalcitrant desires that sometimes prevent moral considerations from being considered by the individual (even if the individual would overall prefer to be moral); individuals are set up (raised) by other individuals; individuals cannot act in many circumstances. So if these constraints must be overcome in order for an entity to be a moral agent, then we jettison individual moral agency.

Perhaps one thinks that individuals don't face these constraints to the extent that, or in the way that, IGOs do. Even if that's right, it's still true that all collective agents face exactly these constraints. So if we jettison IGO moral agency, then we jettison all collective moral agency. One might accept this, and reason via modus tollens: given that IGOs are not collective agents, perhaps there are no collective agents—whether IGOs, states, beachgoers, or anything else. But this neglects three important facts about (some) IGOs' capacities. These capacities together demonstrate that IGOs are not problematically tethered to their parent-states, and therefore that they don't face the kinds of constraints that would warrant skepticism about their agency, and therefore that we needn't use their lack of agency as a premise in an argument against collective agency in general.

First, IGOs often make possible the multilateral coordination that is necessary for states to reliably bring about moral states of affairs. Often, IGOs do this by acting as fora within which states can coordinate their actions. For example, IGOs might intentionally provide states with the physical and administrative apparatuses states need to provide each other with the requisite assurance that they will φ if others φ. The fact that IGOs intentionally opt to offer such apparatuses points towards a special capacity of IGOs: the capacity to encourage and facili­tate states' use of IGOs' apparatuses in this way. This is a matter of IGOs guiding and managing states, not vice versa.

Second, such inter-state coordination will sometimes require that IGOs don’t just intention­ally provide the forum for decision-making, but that IGOs are the decision-maker itself. Again, these are situations where the IGO guides states, rather than vice versa. Some outcomes require that multiple states agree on how they will decide, before the time for decision comes. This is more than just an agreement on a particular decision: it is the setting up of a group decision­making procedure to which they are all committed, which will come into effect under conditions on which they all agree, which will be used to make many future particular decisions. The use of such a procedure is the IGO making a decision. This is particularly clear in majoritarian IGOs, such as the Security Council and the World Health Organization.

Third, any given state cannot be guaranteed that the IGO will make the decision the state wants it to make. The quotations above suggest that each state is more powerful than the IGO. In fact, states together determine the scope of IGOs’ powers. The power of any one state—even a powerful state like the United States—is weaker than that of the IGO, within the IGOs’ scope of decision-making. Powerful states can of course “veto” certain IGO decisions (notori­ously those of the Security Council), but they still are not guaranteed to have their preferred action permitted (Grigorescu 2007: 296-7; Steffek 2010; Woods 2003). IGOs’ decision-making procedures are a result of complex and lengthy negotiations between members, with the result that members are often required to perform actions that they would not perform in the absence of the IGO (as demonstrated by Harbour’s (2003) discussion of compromise in IGOs). The capacity to make decisions and distribute roles against the will of any one state gives an IGO a decision-making capacity that is distinct from the sum of members’ capacities—and, once again, shows that (in some contexts) states are tethered to IGOs, not vice versa.

This is important, since holding an IGO responsible as a collective agent—in either the pro­spective or retrospective sense—is not the same as holding responsible the sum of the states that happen to constitute that IGO. This distinction is not always appreciated in international polit­ical practice. For example, the UN’s 1999 report on the fall of Srebrenica asserted that

The international community as a whole must accept its share of [retrospective] responsibility for allowing this tragic course of events by its prolonged refusal to use force in the early stages of the war. This responsibility is shared by the Security Council, and Contact Group and other Governments [...] as well as by the United Nations Secretariat and the mission in the field.

(United Nations 1999: par. 501)

My analysis suggests that the Security Council, Contact Group, and United Nations Secretariat are all candidates for responsibility—prospective and retrospective. But the “international com­munity as a whole”—understood as a collection of states and not identified specifically with the UN (or the UN General Assembly)—is not a moral agent.⁹ To hold this informal group respon­sible is not the same as holding particular IGOs responsible. I take up such informal groups over the next two sections.

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