A View of Global Governance From an "Invisible Man"

Abstract

Invisible Governance: International Secretariats in Global Politics. By John Mathiason. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2007. 288 pp., $24.95 (ISBN: 978-1-56549-220-2). In Invisible Governance: International Secretariats in Global Politics, John Mathiason details the often overlooked role played by the secretariats of international organizations—the important but often “invisible” public servants of the global community. Having served in the UN Secretariat from 1971 to 1996, Mathiason is well placed to address his concern about the limited number of insider accounts of the secretariat in action. However, Invisible Governance is not a discussion of Mathiason's personal experiences, like Brian Urquhart's (1987) A Life in Peace and War . Rather, Invisible Governance is an effort to address the lack of attention to international secretariats by international relations scholars generally. Mathiason laments the lack of attention to public administration in the international organization literature (although he cites Barnett and Finnemore 2004 as one of the exceptions), and he seeks to fill that void. Moreover, he takes international relations theory in general to task, arguing that “Much of the dominant international-relations theory lacks a place for international secretariats, and observers who are conditioned by that theory will not find them important” (p. 6). Mathiason concludes that “a return to the functionalist approach is probably the best way to explain what secretariats do” (p. 18), and he uses this argument as the rationale for organizing the majority of Invisible Governance around a discussion of five functions. These functions—regime creation, mobilization of information, norm enforcement, direct service provision, and internal management—are outlined in the opening chapter (pp. 18–23), and the engagement of the secretariat in these functions is detailed in chapters 4 through 11. Although the structure of Invisible Governance thus reflects a functionalist approach, the exact theoretical basis for and implications of this approach are tenuous. Mathiason claims that realism and functionalism are “essentially [the] two competing theoretical trends that constitute alternative views of the nature of international …