Understanding non-governmental organizations in world politics: The promise and pitfalls of the early ‘science of internationalism’
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066116679243 |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| Author | Thomas Richard Davies |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116679243
European Journal of
International Relations
2017, Vol. 23(4) 884 –905
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066116679243
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Understanding non-
governmental organizations
in world politics: The promise
and pitfalls of the early
‘science of internationalism’
Thomas Richard Davies
City, University of London, UK
Abstract
The years immediately preceding the First World War witnessed the development
of a significant body of literature claiming to establish a ‘science of internationalism’.
This article draws attention to the importance of this literature, especially in relation
to understanding the roles of non-governmental organizations in world politics. It
elaborates the ways in which this literature sheds light on issues that have become
central to 21st-century debates, including the characteristics, influence and legitimacy of
non-governmental organizations in international relations. Among the principal authors
discussed in the article are Paul Otlet, Henri La Fontaine and Alfred Fried, whose role in
the development of international theory has previously received insufficient attention.
The article concludes with an evaluation of potential lessons to be drawn from the
experience of the early 20th-century ‘science of internationalism’.
Keywords
Global governance, internationalism, non-governmental organizations, world
government
Introduction
The notion that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are significant actors in world
politics has become one of the hallmarks of post-Cold War international relations scholar-
ship and teaching (Mingst and Arreguin-Toft, 2013: 233–240; Price, 2003). The growing
Corresponding author:
Thomas Richard Davies, City, University of London, London, EC1V 0HB, UK.
Email: thomas.davies.1@city.ac.uk
679243EJT0010.1177/1354066116679243European Journal of International RelationsDavies
research-article2016
Article
Davies 885
literature on NGOs in world politics has been concerned with many aspects, including,
among others, NGOs’ defining characteristics (Willetts, 2011), how NGOs influence
international decision-making (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998) and how intergovern-
mental organizations (IGOs) interact with NGOs (Ruhlman, 2015; Tallberg et al., 2013).
Further concerns have included NGOs’ status in international law (Charnovitz, 2006),
how the growing reach and influence of NGOs may be explained (Matthews, 1997;
Scholte, 2000), and the role of NGOs in bringing about a more peaceful world (Kaldor,
2003). Recent literature has laid special emphasis on the sources of legitimacy of NGOs
(Nasiritousi et al., 2015; Steffek and Hahn, 2010), and a common concern has been how
NGOs should seek to enhance the effectiveness and legitimacy of their activities (Schmitz
et al., 2012). Such concerns are far from new. As this article will show, each of these
aspects of NGOs’ roles in world politics was addressed by the ‘science of international-
ism’ developed by Alfred Fried, Henri La Fontaine and Paul Otlet before the First World
War, the pertinence of which to contemporary debates on NGOs in world politics has been
almost entirely overlooked in post-Cold War international relations scholarship.
Despite their extensive history (Davies, 2014), it remains common for introductory
textbooks to claim that NGOs are ‘“new” forces in international politics’ (Ahmed and
Potter, 2006: ix). As Götz (2008: 238) argues, it is not NGOs that are of recent origin, but
the term that is used to describe them, which entered common discourse with the drafting
of Article 71 of the United Nations Charter in 1945, and that displaced previous terms
such as ‘free international associations’ or ‘private international organizations’. It is
partly on account of this mid-20th-century change of terminology that writings on NGOs
since this date have largely neglected the earlier literature on ‘private international
organizations’.
The 21st-century literature on NGOs in world politics has commonly drawn from
classical scholarship, but rather than turning to the early 20th-century ‘science of inter-
nationalism’, it has looked instead to the writings on civil society and associations of
authors such as Ferguson, Tocqueville, Hegel and Gramsci (Kaldor, 2003: 15–21). This
choice is surprising given that in these writings, as Anheier, Glasius and Kaldor (2001:
16) argue, ‘civil society was primarily thought of as a national concept’. The literature on
private international associations preceding the First World War, on the other hand,
placed its primary focus specifically on international rather than domestic actors.
The neglect in the contemporary literature on NGOs in world politics of the early ‘sci-
ence of internationalism’ is all the more surprising given the considerable influence of
this literature in its day. For instance, two of the three principal authors explored in this
article, Alfred Fried and Henri La Fontaine, were Nobel Peace Prize winners, while the
other, Paul Otlet, has since been acclaimed as the intellectual progenitor of the Internet
(Wright, 2014). Furthermore, as Wilson (2003: 223) has argued, these authors were to
have a profound influence on later international relations theorists, including Leonard
Woolf. The institution that these authors co-founded, the Union of International
Associations (UIA), remains to this day the leading data repository on NGOs, with its
Yearbook of International Organizations being the source of first resort for statistical
analyses of NGOs (Boli and Thomas, 1999; Smith and Wiest, 2012).
In recent years, there has been growing interest in international relations theory pre-
ceding the First World War (for instance, Ashworth, 2014; Bell, 2014; Long and Schmidt,
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