The Success and Failure of International Organizations

Failures in International Cooperation - From the Spectacular to the Everyday Failures of organisations for beyond-the-state cooperation, including their demise, are prominent in world history. When the League of Nations failed to prevent the outbreak of World War II, for instance, it was considered to be malfunctioning and collapsed shortly after the war, dissolving itself in 1947. Similarly, external political shocks, such as the Sino-US rapprochement in 1972 and the conclusion of the Cold War in 1989, led some regional organisations, such as the Asia-Pacific Council and the Warsaw Pact Organisation to become dysfunctional or irrelevant, resulting in their rapid collapse. But not all international arrangements fail or fail so spectacularly and not all failures result in a wholesale replacement of existing organisational arrangements. How these lesser failures occur, how they can be conceptualised, and what their occurrence foreshadows for regional arrangements are the subjects of this article. Better understanding of the nature of failures at this level, the reasons for their variation.