“We must understand the impetus for the creation of international organisations. Ironically, the answer begins with understanding what most think of as an ideology diametrically opposed to the very existence of international institutions: nationalism”

Nationalism very crudely understood is an ideology whose core principle is national self-determination. Nationalism emerged in the 17th century, began shaping the world in the 18th century, and became the dominant political ideology in the 19th and 20th centuries. Nationalism is the idea that unique groups of people exist, and the political legitimacy of a state flows from governing a territory for the individuals of that group.

Nationalism became a dominant political force only after it was fused with another 18th-century ideology: classical liberalism. One of the basic tenets of classical liberalism is that human beings are endowed with certain inalienable rights simply by being human. The state exists to preserve the liberty of the individual, and the state’s ability to preserve and defend that liberty gives the state its legitimacy. In exchange for this protection, citizens of the nation-state forfeit some degree of freedom to the sovereign.

There is a tendency to think that ideology drives geopolitics, but usually it is the other way around. Nationalism and liberalism did not emerge in a vacuum. They emerged in the context of advances in technology that transformed human life.

Advances in transportation allowed once i mpassable distances to be traversed relatively easily. Advances in agricultural technology meant more food could be grown without needing to have ten children to till the fields. Advances in communication helped stitch the world together in ways that had never been possible in human history. The Industrial Revolution brought huge numbers of young men and women into the factory workforce in rapidly growing cities. The sclerotic bureaucracies of hulking monarchies often could not respond fast enough to the demands of their once pliant subjects.

At that point, things began to change. The old political structures were either reformed or discarded. Nationalism fused with liberalism, and across Europe, proto-liberal democracies began to emerge, states that ruled with at least a modicum of the consent of the governed. Liberalism helped supply popular legitimacy. Nationalism helped provide the loyalty necessary for these new governments to manage a rapidly transforming world. Average individuals could no longer expect to live their entire lives in the same village as their family, and as national economies became more intertwined, different groups of people came into contact with other groups of people and began to define their identities by their language, values and culture.

Nationalism is a particularistic ideology. It is concerned with the well-being of a well-defined group of people; it is not in and of itself interested in the well-being of all people. But nationalism was colored by its encounter with liberalism, which was and remains a universalistic ideology, one that believes in the basic rights of all individuals. Nationalism began to cast a wider net. It subsumed larger groups than the family or the tribe had ever done before. (Some of those groups, like the Catalans or the Scottish, never were completely subsumed. Others, like the Castilians or Bretons, assimilated more completely.)

And so new nation-states were created. Out of the ashes of the Napoleonic wars, Germany unified in 1871. Out of several disparate city-states and principalities, a unified Italy emerged in the same year.

What is often forgotten, however, is that while all this nationalist fervor was happening, international organisations were emerging too. The world’s oldest extant international organisation is the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine. Most people remember the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as the conference in which the victors against Napoleon crafted a political settlement designed to ensure peace on the European continent. But it was also at the Congress of Vienna that the CCNR was created, and tasked with implementing freedom of navigation on the Rhine River. Over the course of several decades, the CCNR reduced tolls, set up rules for navigation, and held meetings and conferences in support of its efforts. At various points in the past two centuries, the CCNR has been politicised, and during major wars even stopped functioning, but the CCNR still exists to this day, continuing its work in support of

There is an important cycle here: international organisations of real efficacy always seem to emerge after a major conflict. After World War I, the victors tried to banish the scourge of war by creating the League of Nations. It failed, though for a time the League of Nations played an important role in shaping global politics.

After World War II, the victors tried to use the same strategy once more and created the United Nations. The impulse to create international organisations comes from the same impulse that creates nation-states. The difference is that internationalists hope the circle can be expanded ever wider – that it might be possible to create a global nation. It is not surprising that the universalist i mpulse to protect the rights of all individuals is strongest after terrible wars, and that the victors invest so much of their own powers into attempting to create structures that prevent future wars (or, put more cynically, secure the victors’ position). What all of this tells us is that international organisations emerged from the same ideological current as the nation-state. The main difference between them is that international organisations emphasise the innate rights of the individual, and the nation-state emphasises the government’s responsibility to the nation.

For better or worse, nation-states rule the world today. So powerful are nation-states that they use international organisations for their own purposes. Think of the U.S. and the Soviet Union dueling at the U.N. Security Council, fighting a Cold War while simultaneously pledging faithful membership in an organisation whose purpose is the maintenance of international peace and security. Or China and Russia using their place on the Security Council today to project more power than they actually have.

International organisations can matter when they are the product of the shared, mutual interests of like-minded states. And multilateral free trade agreements can matter when they codify economic realities that are beneficial for the parties involved. Occasionally this happens in some organisations, like the European Union from 1991-2008, or the League of Nations immediately after World War I.

But overall, international organisations and most other multilateral groups are slaves to nation-states and tools of great powers. Once created, they often take on lives of their own, limping along by virtue of inertia and bureaucracy’s survival instinct. This can give them the appearance of being supremely important. But more often than not, they are coopted by the interests of their member states. The key to analysing them is not to take their statements too seriously, and to keep your eyes on who is pulling the strings.