TOPIC (Dec.

7, 2020)
-How the State emerged
-The State and International
Organizations
-The State in a global community
 How the State emerged?
Doctrinal controversies and the disputed international status of Kosovo
and Palestine suggest that it is difficult for us international lawyers to
know with any certainty when a new State has emerged in the
international community. The contention here is that we should look to
systems theory thinking—specifically complexity theory—to make sense of
the law on statehood. Systems theory directs us to conceptualize the State
in terms of patterns of communications adopted by law and politics actors
and institutions and applied to subjects. Complexity tells us that these
patterns develop without any central controller or guiding hand and that
they exist only as a consequence of the framing of law and politics
communications by a third party observer. The argument developed in this
article is that these insights can provide the intellectual “scaffold” around
which we can build our model of the international law on statehood.

The Emergence of New States in International Law: The Insights from

Complexity Theory
Steven Wheatley
Chinese Journal of International Law, Volume 15, Issue 3, September 2016,
Pages 579–606, https://doi.org/10.1093/chinesejil/jmw006
How the State emerged?
How the State emerged?
How the State emerged?
 Introduction: The State and
International Organizations
The traditional literature in international relations
begins with, and focuses on, states. From a political
perspective, states have power, both military and
economic, that other institutions or individuals do not.
From a legal perspective, states are sovereign. In
international law, states are recognized as actors; other
institutions (or, for that matter, individuals) are not.
And yet, international organizations (IOs) are attracting
increasing attention, both positive and negative. They
are also increasingly becoming a focus of study by
political scientists. This book is an introduction to the
study of IOs in the field of international relations. It
looks at the different ways in which IOs are studied, and
then applies these different modes of study to a variety
of specific issue areas and cases.
 Introduction: The State and
International Organizations
“International organizations” are understood in this book to be inclusive
intergovernmental organizations. Intergovernmental organizations, as
opposed to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and corporations, are
organizations that are created by agreement among states rather than by
private individuals. Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and the General
Motors Corporation all operate across national boundaries, but they were
not created by governments.
These NGOs and transnational corporations (TNCs) are integral parts of the
international political system, but they are not IOs. The United Nations (UN),
the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO), and the World Bank,
however, were all created by treaties signed by states and are thus
intergovernmental institutions. This book is about the latter group. Some
IOs are created by other IOs rather than by states directly. These are often
referred to as “emanations,” and they still count as IOs because their
members are sovereign states: even though they were created by other IOs,
they are ultimately answerable to their member states.
 Introduction: The State and
International Organizations
Inclusive organizations are those that all
interested parties can join, whereas exclusive
organizations are those designed specifically to
exclude some countries. The most common
example of an exclusive intergovernmental
organization is the military alliance. Military
alliances are exclusive because some countries
are inevitably kept out of them; that is the
point of alliances. They are organizations
designed to protect those in the group from
those outside it. As
 Introduction: The State and
International Organizations
such, military alliances, for example, the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO), are not covered in depth in this
book. In contrast, even though the UN deals with security
issues, it is an inclusive organization because all states can
join it. Rather than defending states in the UN from those
outside it, the UN is designed to protect its members from
other members who break the rules. It should be noted here
that regional organizations can be inclusive even if only
members of the region can join, as long as the organization is
focused inward and is not intended to work against those
outside the region. An organization such as the European
Union (EU) is in a middle ground between inclusive and
exclusive organizations; in principle, all the countries of
Europe can become members, but only after extensive
negotiation with, and approvably, existing members.
 Introduction: The State and
International Organizations
Restricting the discussion to inclusive
intergovernmental organizations may seem at first to
be too restrictive, but doing so still leaves us with tens
of thousands of organizations to look at and allows us
to focus on the specific attributes of those organizations
as a class. And these organizations cover a wide scope,
in a number of ways. They can have anywhere from 2 to
more than 200 member states (the UN, at the time of
writing, has 193 members). They can have budgets
anywhere from the tens of thousands of dollars per
year to the tens of billions. Some employ one staff
member, others have thousands of people on the
payroll. Some are relatively anonymous, with only
people who work within the same arcane issue-area
having heard of them; others, such as
the UN or the World Bank, are household names.
 Introduction: The State and
International Organizations
Finally, IOs cover a huge range of issue-areas. Some deal
with issues of peace and security, others with human
rights or international economic or environmental
issues, and yet others with the coordination of
international aviation or broadcast standards. In fact,
there are few areas of contemporary life in which there
are no IOs creating rules, monitoring behavior, or
promoting cooperation.
Where does the study of IOs fit into the international
relations literature? The traditional study of
international relations focused, and much of the field
still focuses, on relations among states.
 The State and International Organizations
Other forms of organization, whether
intergovernmental or nongovernmental, do not figure
prominently in this view of global politics. The past two
decades have seen the development of a field called
global governance, which looks at the way in which
global interactions are regulated. From this perspective,
the source of governance is not assumed a priori, but is
a question to be asked. Global governance as a field of
study looks not only at formal mechanisms of
government, but also at “governance without
government,” 2 patterns of regulation of global activity
that do not come from specific authoritative sources.
International organization as a field of study fits
somewhere between traditional international relations
 The State and International Organizations
It remains more focused on states than much of the
global governance literature, inasmuch as IOs are
intergovernmental and participate in formal modes of
governance. But it captures elements of that
governance that can elude the focus in the traditional
international relations literature on states alone.

What about the institutions themselves? Do IOs

matter? What are their effects on international
relations?