The Growth of International Nongovernmental Organization in the Twentieth Century

International Organization

Volumn 25, Issue 3, 1971, Pages 420-442

  Skjelsbaek, Kjell ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84971954272     PISSN: 00208183     EISSN: 15315088     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020818300026230     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. See the Yearbook of International Organizations, p. 13. Characteristics of organizations and processes in some of the particular fields are discussed by the authors in parts 2 and III of this volume.
2. The functions of the IATA are interestingly described by Robert L. Thornton in this volume; the essay by Robert W. Cox in this volume deals with problems of international trade unions.
3. The Union of International Associations in Brussels is itself an interesting transnational actor. It was founded in 1907 to serve as a documentation center on international governmental and nongovernmental organizations, their activities and meetings. The UIA also works to promote research in the same field and to publicize studies. I have found its publications very useful and appreciate the time spent by its staff in consultation with me.
4. “Any international organization which is not established by inter-governmental agreement shall be considered as a non-governmental organization. ” ECGSOC Resolution 288 (10), February 27, 1950.
5. There are several additional differences between the lists that can be briefly mentioned. The UIA excludes bilateral organizations, of which there appear to be few, organizations in which one national delegation is completely dominant through the budget or by means of the voting arrangements, and ephemeral organizations established to organize a single international meeting. It also excludes organizations without a formal structure. Moreover, universities, colleges, churches, and religious missions fall outside the scope of the UIA. On the other hand, the UIA definition includes some organizations that are formally subunits of others if they act relatively independently and elect their own officers. Thus, eleven international trade union secretariats of the WFTU as well as the WFTU itself are included. Profit-making organizations are, of course, excluded.
6. EEC business and professional groups have been studied by Jean Meynaud and Dusan Sidjanski; see Groupes de pression et cooperation europeenne (Paris: Centre d’etudes des relations internationales, 1967); and Les Groupes de pression dans la Communaute europeenne (2 vols.; Montreal: Universite de Montreal, 1969).
7. None of the tables from UIA publications appears in its original form since I have split and regrouped the data.
8. The representative quality of the returned questionnaires turned out to be very high; see Kjell Skjelsbaek, “Peace and the Systems of International Organizations” (Magister’s thesis, University of Oslo, 1970), chapter 3.
9. Data for figure 1 is derived from Speeckaert, p. 1.
10. S. Skjelsbaek, “Peace and the Systems of International Organizations,” chapter 4, p. 7.
11. Sixty-one percent of the organizations surveyed expected to gain new national branches in the future in spite of the small likelihood of a corresponding increase in the number of nation-states and territories.
12. The organizations were classified as regional on the basis of their names. I have tried this procedure myself and found it very difficult. There is a basic confusion about the term region. The UIA does not distinguish between region and continent which makes it hard to place Arab organizations or NGOs with members from Western Europe and North America only. Moreover, the name of an organization may be misleading, and it may have one or two members from other regions. Israel, for example, is represented in some European organizations. The blurred lines between regions may be annoying to the researcher, but they may be functional for other purposes. Cf., the discussion about the peace relevance of NGOs, section V of this essay.
13. Staff and budget indicators are, of course, closely related—the gamma correlation equals.88. Missing data represents a difficult problem since many organizations, particularly the smaller ones, are loath to report the size of their staffs and budgets. But since these are probably the same organizations every year, the general trends shown may be reliable even though the particular means may be incorrect.
14. The mean number of national representations is different for the different categories of organizations. In general the means are lowest in those areas that are most relevant for politics. Commercial NGOs have, for example, about fifteen representations on an average which is half the mean number of countries represented in sports organizations.
15. For details see Kjell Skjelsbaek, “Development of the Systems of International Organisations: A Diachronic Study,” Proceedings oj the International Peace Research Association Third General Confer ence (IPRA Studies in Peace Research) (3 vols.; Assen, the Netherlands: Royal Van Gorcum, 1970), Vol. 2, pp. 90-136
16. “Peace and the Systems of International Organizations,” chapter 4, p. 25.
17. Corresponding IGO figures show an increase from 1.5 percent in 1956 to 18.0 percent in 1966 for Black Africa; see Skjelsbaek, “Peace and the Systems of International Organizations,” chapter 4, p. 3.
18. Pearson’s correlation between an index of economic development and the number of representations in NGOs was.64 in 1964; cf., Skjelsbaek, “Peace and the Systems of International Organizations,” chapter 5, p. 26.
19. A list of countries ranked according to the number of NGOs in which they are represented gives a good indication of this, but, after dividing by the size of their population, the tendency stands out much more clearly. The six countries that have most NGO representations per million inhabitants are: I) Israel, 2) Norway, 3) Switzerland, 4) Denmark, 5) Finland, and 6) New Zealand. Countries with less than one million people have been excluded.
20. In addition, there may be many regional NGOs with members exclusively from nation-states that are in the process of forming a political union. The best example is the high number of business and professional groups within the EEC. I have reserved the term “local international organization” for bodies that intentionally limit their domain geographically but not in accordance with the borders of a prospective political union. The Mediterranean Social Sciences Research Council (MSSRC), for example, is a local NGO.
21. Most organizations in these fields were not only more “developed” in their membership composition but also more Western on the East-West political dimension
22. Skjelsbaek, “Peace and the Systems of International Organizations,” chapter 5, p. 20.
23. Only seventeen countries have gross national products greater than the annual output of General Motors Corporation
24. see Jonathan F. Galloway, “Worldwide Corporations and International Integration: The Case of INTELSAT,” International Organization, Summer 1970 (Vol. 24, No. 3), table 2, p. 511.
25. I do not mean primarily “high politics.” Most of these organizations operate in other fields and their possible influence on “high politics” is mainly indirect but not, a priori, negligible.
26. Many of the ideas in this section are the result of several seminar discussions directed by Johan Galtung at the International Peace Research Institute.
27. Conversely, some IGOs may feel that NGOs are too afraid of losing their independence to be willing to participate in joint programs.
28. Johan Galtung, “Non-Terri to rial Actors and the Problem of Peace” (Revision of a paper delivered at the World Order Models Conference, Northfield, Massachusetts, June 18–24, 1969), pp. 23–24.
29. See also G. Modelski, “The Corporation in World Society,” The Year Book, of World Affairs, 1968 (London: Stevens & Sons [under the auspices of the London Institute of World Affairs], 1968), pp. 64–79.
30. Cf., David Mitrany, A Working Peace System; An Argument for the Functional Development of International Organization (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966). When Mitrany introduced this kind of argument, he was thinking of functional IGOs. A counterargument is that such a world structure for many purposes will be ineffective and give rise to serious problems of coordination. Some states will be involved in some functional agencies while others will not and may even be supporting competing ones. Agencies in related functional fields may quarrel over the lines between their respective areas of responsibility.
31. The multilateral setting of international organizations forces national delegations to have direct and indirect contacts with representatives from countries they ordinarily avoid interaction with, but sometimes exclusions and withdrawals take place. Several attempts to exclude countries from IGOs are well known. My own data gives reason to believe that such cases are very rare in NGOs.
32. Europe was chosen because the continent is relatively homogeneous in terms of economic and technological development, the distances are short, and the East-West conflict is the only overriding, political conflict dimension. An extended discussion is found in Skjelsbaek, “Peace and the Systems of International Organizations,” chapter 5, pp. 31–34.
33. On the other hand, in less developed regions there seems to be a closer coupling between general rank and amount of involvement in NGOs. The single best indicator of general rank, in my mind, is gross national product. However, the hypothesis about regional differences with regard to this relationship has not been carefully tested.