The tribulations of UNESCO

Abstract

Largely a twentieth century phenomenon, presently numbering some 250, public international organizations promise to be still more numerous by century's end. An institutionalized response to the stresses and strains of a world becoming ever more compressed, they have been fashioned with some ingenuity as new actors in the international system. Yet at best they are a piecemeal reaction, still in the trial-anderror stage, seeking to thread their way within the interstices of the territorial authority of states. It is a tortuous passage. Strategies vary, depending on the purpose to be served and on organizational design. Thus, in pursuit of economic goals, the European Community and the International Monetary Fund are to an extent supranational. Both judicial and legislative strategy are available to the former, while the latter is an administrative body regulatory in character. Also economic in purpose, the World Bank-a rich institution-wields discretionary benefits with potent effect on the borrower. Compared to the foregoing institutions, tenuous though their grasp is on the world, UNESCO is far less favorably positioned. True, UNESCO's technical assistance is a form of the discretionary benefit and, like a World Bank loan, affords leverage on the recipient-but with less disciplinary effect, for UNESCO lacks not only the Bank's resources but the latter's capability to act on the basis of tangible criteria. Judicial and regulatory strategies are foreign to UNESCO's purposes, while legislation is available to it only through the cumbersome vehicle of the multilateral treaty-subject to ratification by its signatories.