International Organizations and Disparities of Power
It has been argued that political arrangements of all kinds and at both the national and international levels are constrained by the relative power of different participants. The United Nations Security Council acknowledged this by giving a veto to the world's first five nuclear weapons states (the United States, Soviet Union, France, Great Britain, and China) (Bennett & Oliver, 2002). This essay will consider the question of how in a general sense, disparities of power have affected international organizations, including the United Nations (UN), and while in light of these disparities and their effects, a variety of international organizations continue to flourish.
Regional as well as international organizations have typically developed out of the recognition that few states have historically been able to go it alone in the world. Economic development has always required stable international relations to protect trading partners and sources of raw materials. States have also found that they must work together to survive threats from hostile countries (Rubenstein, 1989). This was as true when the ancient Spartans created the Peloponnesian League as it was when Woodrow Wilson called upon the world to create the League of Nations after World War I (Cartledge, 2003).
The multi-state organizations that have been created over time have not rivaled, threatened, or superceded the sovereignty of individual states. To succeed, however, they require long-term commitments of cooperation which theoretically emerge from the sense of mutual dependency that most states possess. Additionally, both weaker and stronger states see international organizations as capable of lending them legitimacy while simultaneously protecting their resources from others. Thus, as Bennett and Oliver (2002) have noted, the development of international organizations is very much the artifact of...