GIORGIO CARNEVALI

L'organizzazione internazionale: prospettive teoriche a confronto

N. 3/1986

Summary — No doubt that the international organizations (IGOs) have grown at a rapid rate in recent years. But what is their role in the contemporary international system? In this article six perspectives on international organization are examined. At one extreme there is realism, for which international organization is almost irrelevant in the struggle for power among nations. At the other extreme there is the idealistic perspective which maintains that international institutions provide the conditions conducive to high levels of cooperation among states. If not at the extremes, nevertheless the historic-structuralist perspective and functionalism are also opposed. Historic-structuralism follows realism in the persuasion that international institutions are irrelevant in determining world politics. Functionalism, on the other hand, argues that regional organizations and low politics organizations, knitting together the nations in a web of interdependence, increase international cohesion and cooperation. Finally the article tries to give an account of two other perspectives: dialectical-structuralism and liberal-internationalism. They both share the opinion that international organization can be regarded as the process of institutionalization of world hegemony; but, as to the first perspective, the purpose is to point out how international organization may become instrument for the articulation of a counter-hegemonic set of values, as to the latter on the contrary, the stress is on thinking and conceptualizing those particular institutionalized modes of multilateral collaboration (that is to say international regimes) which seem adequate to restore American world hegemony. Moreover liberal-internationalists suggest that international organizations would be thought as clusters of intergovernmental and transgovernmental networks associated with the formal institutions.