Introduction: Towards a Global History of International Organization

Abstract

In November 2010 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced a realignment of its quota shares. The new list of IMF’s ten largest shareholders, the world’s leading economies, reveals considerable changes: China now ranks third among the most powerful nations economically. Moreover, a number of “dynamic emerging markets and developing countries” have entered the magic list, with India as the prime example. With this decision, an international organization active in the sensitive part of global economy with an impact on the daily life of millions of people draws conclusions from the new situation quicker than the Western nation states probably would. Presenting Asia and Europe in shifting positions, the IMF, together with many other IGOs and NGOs, has shaped the narrative of transition and change for the twenty-first century. Within the thrilling intellectual atmosphere of the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” at Heidelberg University a research project has been initiated to develop an understanding of international organizations from both a global and a historical perspective. Taking as a starting point an investigation of missing histories of Asian networks within scholarly research on international organizations, an international workshop has brought together scholars from Asian and Western scientific communities. The result, a collection of contributions aiming to overcome Eurocentric patterns of analysis, will hopefully inspire a continuous debate on the global history of international organizations, a topic that has remained a blind spot in scholarly research until now. Although the contributions come from different disciplines and methodologies, historical development, the building of historicities, and the invention of tradition build an important explanatory framework for the contributions presented in this volume. Taking the view that internationally organized movements, organizations, and networks matter in almost all fields of political and social life in civil societies and states, this approach avoids going into their different institutional and legal appearances. By contrast, this volume risks understanding international organizations as a self-declared form of interaction across borders that produces footprints and patterns characteristic of the time frame concerned. Their multifunctionality, their power to translate national attitudes into transboundary concepts, and their role as information hubs has not only surfaced in the past continuously but has also shaped post-war situations considerably. Access to today’s post-cold-war arrangements on a global scale might lead us therefore to another post-war situation at the end of World War I, when global governance addressed forms of networking and fears of their use in a long-lasting way.