international organizational responses to problems not amenable to state level
resolution. This is at one level the same for all states, including the USA, although
international organizations are usually more important to smaller than larger
players, even though it is larger players rather than the smaller players that get to
set and steer the agenda of the organizations.
The principal question about the role of international organizations as vehicles
of global governance (economic and political) pertains to the quantity and quality
of this governance in an era where we have an overdeveloped global economy and
an underdeveloped global polity. There is a strong disconnect between governance
seen as eVective and eYcient collective action problem solving in a given issue area
on the one hand and governance as a system of accountability and representation
within international organization on the other. It is this that leads to the debate
about the ‘‘legitimacy deWcits’’ in major international organizations.
The UN and EU, and international organizations in general, share this problem.
The UN has problems of eVectiveness and eYciency in the delivery of global public
policy and of legitimacy. The EU has less of a problem with delivery but it also has a
major legitimacy problem within European civil society (Bellamy 2005 ). The
disjuncture between securing legitimation from the bottom up and eVective and
eYcient administration from the top down in international organizations is
captured in the distinction between input legitimacy and output legitimacy (Keo-
hane 2004 ; Grant and Keohane 2005 ). This challenges the all too easy assumption
that multilateral international organizations will inevitably remain key actors in
global governance in the twenty-Wrst century. We tend to forget that multilateral-
ism as a foreign policy tool was always a modest endeavor and, as Keohane notes,
‘‘a social construction of the twentieth century’’ that holds less sway at the
beginning of the twenty-Wrst. This is a key issue for international organization.
Without this balance the rational, stable, and harmonious development of an
accountable and acceptable system of regulation at the global level will not be
possible.
5 Conclusion
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
So where do we stand? In the early twenty-Wrst century the theory and practice of
international organization is subsumed within wider scholarship on international
institutions and regimes seen as sets of international rules and norms principally,
but not exclusively, for states. An intellectual contest exists between those who see
international cooperation as rationalist and rational, but limited, and those who
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