“It took the European Commission 15 years to allow the sale of excessively curved bananas and cucumbers in EU member states; military coordination is slightly more complex”

In the modern world, relations between states operate at two levels. The first is the bilateral level. The U.S. and China, for instance, don’t see eye to eye on issues like Taiwan, the South China Sea, or how to denuclearise the Korean Peninsula. Their representatives communicate with each other to try to address their disagreements.

The second is the multilateral level. For example, the United Nations passes a resolution placing economic sanctions on North Korea. Most of the U.N.’s 193 member states do not themselves have a problem with North Korea, but they go along with the sanctions because the U.N. says so.

Many point out that nationalism is rising as an ideological force in the world today. That would suggest that bilateral relations between states are the most important part of understanding the world, since nationalists prefer to work directly with other states rather than have their interests muddled by a multilateral bureaucracy. But it is also true that multilateralism is alive and well. In fact, if you consider some of the major headlines from this past weeks, you might get the impression that the development of new international organisations and new free trade pacts are driving global events.

On November 10, officials from 11 countries announced that they had a preliminary agreement on the core elements of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for TransPacific Partnership, which means the saga of the TPP has now become the CPTPP.

Also on November 10, officials from Central Asia’s five countries signed a Programme on Mutual Cooperation, one of the stated goals of which is to encourage cooperation with the U.N., the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, to name a few.

On November 11, on the sidelines of an Association of Southeast Asian Nations and East Asia summit, officials from the U.S., Japan, India and Australia resuscitated the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. The Quad is an emerging multilateral grouping drawn together to resist China’s influence in Asia, though just what the Quad is, isn’t yet clear. Is it an alliance? A multilateral organisation? A communication forum?

On November 12, Saudi Arabia convened an extraordinary session of the Arab League to discuss Iran’s “destructive meddling” in the region.

Not to be outdone, on November 13, ministers from 23 European countries signed a joint notice on Permanent Structured Cooperation, which aims to boost military coordination between the military forces of the signatories.

None of these headlines are actually that important. The CPTPP faces the same problems that the TPP faced and no longer features access to the U.S. market as a centrepiece. Before it can be transformative, it has to be passed, and that is hardly a sure thing. Central Asian states saying they are going to cooperate with an alphabet soup of international organisations just means that we will read more press releases about cooperation in the coming year. ASEAN’s member states don’t agree on most things, the ill-defined Quad collapsed once before and may very well again, and the Arab League has extraordinary summits with ordinary results all the time. It took the European Commission 15 years to allow the sale of excessively curved bananas and cucumbers in EU member states; military coordination is slightly more complex.

There are many who believe in the potential efficacy and power of international groupings, but actually finding an example of one that transformed the world is very difficult. That’s because power in the international political system does not rest in the hands of international organisations. States imbue international organisations with power if it serves their strategic ends, but more often than not, such organisations are fairly impotent.

Even the most vaunted and mighty of the world’s international organisations, like the United Nations, have a fairly checkered history when it comes to defending the causes they were created to defend. International organisations in and of themselves are not transformative. They are products, not drivers, of geopolitics. We can make a similar argument for free trade pacts, which are only as effective as states’ willingness and ability to enforce them. Sometimes they can be hugely important, the European Economic Community or NAFTA being prime examples. But even the most consequential free trade pacts don’t emerge out of the ether. They reflect reality rather than define it.

And yet, international organisations do exist, which raises important questions. If history is replete with so many failed international organisations, why do they continue to pop up all over the place? And, more important, are there circumstances in which international organisations really do matter, and should be taken as seriously as whether the U.S.