I nternational organizations are a familiar—as well as worthy, dull, and sometimes faintly annoying—part of the twenty-first-century’s geopolitical landscape. How strange, then, to recall the gigantic aspirations of their twentieth-century creators. Describing the Bretton Woods conference, which led to the IMF and World Bank (and foreshadowed the UN and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis described its goal as nothing less than to “prevent any new war”—and still more dramatically, to eliminate the causes of war by a combination of international law, economic integration, safeguards against Depression-style trade protectionism, and a security council of great-power members, who would be willing to stand united against new aggressor powers.

These ambitions were a bit much. War has not been prevented, nor have the causes of potential wars disappeared. And at 65 years of age, the post-war international organizations more often get complaints and abuse than applause. Some comes from the right, directed most often against the UN. Left-wing activists admire the UN, but often pour into the streets in protest any time the WTO, the IMF, or the World Bank comes to town. And nobody seems to think the financial institutions work as they should.

But in most cases the record is better than we think. The UN has hardly abolished war, but it has done more than most of us realize—smoothing out arguments, creating consensus, and enforcing agreements on a wide array of issues, from training a Haitian police force to allocating radio spectrum space, conducting vaccination campaigns in Guinea, and monitoring sanctions on Iran. The very existence of a standing forum where countries can debate and sometimes settle differences is a world-historical achievement. Likewise, the economic institutions are imperfect—the IMF has needed an update for two decades—but they nonetheless provide loans to poor countries that need them, keep trade flowing in crisis, and define basic goals for labor policy. And perhaps the founders’ highest aspirations weren’t wholly naïve: Whatever the connection may be, the post-World War II years have been the longest period of unbroken peace among great powers in the historical record.

Their real failure is elsewhere—not in politics or economics, but environmental policy. Here the problem is not that institutions are antiquated and need an update; nor that they make decisions that the right or left doesn’t like. It’s that they do not exist. The closest approximation to an international environmental institution, the United Nations Environmental Programme, is structurally unable to resolve disputes or even enforce existing agreements, and it has only a modest ability to facilitate negotiations on new issues. Major environmental problems therefore go unaddressed, and existing environmental agreements often fail. And bad as they are today, the problems with international environmental policy will take on genuinely global dimensions in the next decade. Should the world’s scientists and diplomats succeed later this year in designing a Copenhagen Process agreement capable of limiting greenhouse emissions and slowing or halting climate change, they are likely to find the existing institutions and law too weak to make it work.

If international environmental policy—both the climate-change agreement and its smaller predecessors—are to succeed, governments need to think about institutions as well as policy. We need an international institution capable of organizing today’s miscellany of multilateral environmental agreements and the climate-change treaty into a coherent body of policy and law, one that can ensure countries understand their obligations, ensure compliance, and so ensure that environmental agreements achieve their goals. Without such an institution, the gains of Copenhagen are likely to be fleeting.

International Organizations

Multilateralism in any major field, be it politics, finance, trade, labor, or development, has four concepts at its heart. First, countries will be more effective acting together—whether they hope to prevent conflicts, take advantage of shared interests, or meet common threats—than acting apart. Second, they act together more easily in crisis and stress when they have worked together for years on mundane matters. Third, acting together is easiest when it rests on agreed rules and procedures. And finally, these rules are more often respected when they are overseen by strong, impartial institutions than when each government is free to determine the others’ compliance.

None of these concepts is hard-wired into the minds of nations. Rather, it’s the opposite: Most countries like autonomy for themselves and rules for everyone else. But most have also accepted the role international organizations have come to play in policy as inevitable. The oldest, in fact, have succeeded so well that today we barely notice them. These are the nineteenth-century institutions created by Victorian diplomats and governments, such as the International Telecommunications Union, founded in 1865, which ensured telegraph compatibility and survives today in the UN to avoid snarls in submarine cables. An international conference in 1875 standardized weights and measures, using the French-designed metric system; another in 1884 defined today’s international time zones and dateline, balancing France’s metric triumph by using Britain’s Greenwich Mean Time to synchronize the world’s clocks. And though many believe today’s WTO created global patent and copyright rules, agreements on these intellectual property rights concepts date to 1883 and 1886.

The most visible organizations, though different in many respects, share three characteristics. First, each oversees negotiations and agreements on a particular issue: the UN for diplomacy, security, and war; the World Bank and International Monetary Fund for development and financial stability; the International Labor Organization for labor standards; the WTO (an updated version of the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) for negotiations and disputes over trade, defined expansively to include investment, services exchange, intellectual property, and subsidies as well as quotas, tariffs, and anti-dumping laws. Second, each has a structure designed to guarantee independence from and impartiality toward its members, including funding by mandatory membership dues rather than voluntary contributions, an independent staff, and a chief officer drawn from high-profile politics rather than bureaucracies. And third, each has a unique dispute mechanism. Each, with the partial exception of the ILO, has a way to deal with violations of agreements, and failures of implementation due to incapacity. The UN Security Council backs its resolutions with the threat of military force, the World Bank and IMF have real money to lend or deny, and the WTO’s quasi-judicial dispute panels hear cases and let the victorious members enforce their judgments through sanctions. Despite their successes, these organizations have limits. They are not substitutes for national governments, but ways to facilitate consensus and effective action by governments. The most cleverly designed organization cannot replace accord on fundamental interests and goals. During the Cold War, western and communist governments viewed one another as mortal rivals, and the UN Security Council became unworkable. And even with basically compatible interests and goals, the institution’s procedures must find an uneasy balance between legitimacy and realistic reflection of power.

International organizations struggle when small and weak countries see them as tools meant to legitimate decisions taken by big powers. The financial institutions—especially the IMF—are particularly vulnerable to this charge, since big rich countries provide their money and upper management while small poor countries get the loans. International organizations erode when they do not adapt to changes in real-world power. Here again the financial institutions run into trouble, retaining voting structures and appointments of top officials which assume the U.S. and Europe are still the sole centers of financial power, while emerging Asia—China in particular, but also South Korea and India—has attained great financial power. And international organizations fail completely when they base all decisions purely on numerical counts without regard to power. In this case, the big powers see them facilitating numerical mobbing by small-country governments hoping to extract concessions. This is why the American public tends to ignore the UN General Assembly.

No single formula can overcome all these shortcomings. The WTO, despite its troubles with the anti-globalization movement, is probably the best-designed of the group. Its difficulty in concluding the Doha Round of trade negotiations is well-publicized, reflecting the difficulty institutions have when their leading members are divided over complex and sensitive matters like agricultural reform. But this is hardly its only job. The WTO is quite successful in overseeing the implementation of its 20 existing trade agreements and in settling the dozens of disputes that arise among its members each year, including China’s compliance with industrial-subsidy rules, the legality of European agricultural policy, and Brazilian intellectual-property rights law. The organization’s dispute settlement bodies have heard arguments on 396 disputes and reached judgments that, almost all the time, the unhappy trade partners accept. And about every three years, each member of the WTO gets a grilling by the entire organization on its trade policies generally and compliance with agreements in particular.