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Hello, goodbye: When do states withdraw from international organizations?

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Abstract

Under what conditions do states withdraw from intergovernmental organizations (IGOs)? Recent events such as Brexit, the US withdrawal from UNESCO, and US threats to withdraw from NAFTA, NATO, and the World Trade Organization have triggered widespread concern because they appear to signify a backlash against international organizations. Some observers attribute this recent surge to increasing nationalism. But does this explanation hold up as a more general explanation for IGO withdrawals across time and space? Despite many studies of why states join IGOs, we know surprisingly little about when and why states exit IGOs. We use research on IGO accession to derive potential explanations for IGO withdrawal related to domestic politics, IGO characteristics, and geo-politics. We quantitatively test these potential explanations for withdrawal using an original dataset of 493 IGOs since 1945, documenting about 200 cases of withdrawal. We find that nationalism is not the key driver of IGO withdrawals in the past. Instead, we show that geo-political factors – such as preference divergence and contagion – are the main factors linked to IGO withdrawals, followed by democracy levels in the country and organization. These findings have important implications for research on the vitality of international organizations, compliance, and the liberal world order.

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Notes

  1. Abbott and Snidal 1998.

  2. Hirschman 1970.

  3. See https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/u-s-and-israel-officially-withdraw-from-unesco. Accessed March 12, 2019.

  4. See https://dailycoffeenews.com/2018/04/03/the-united-states-is-withdrawing-from-the-international-coffee-agreement/. Accessed March 12, 2019.

  5. If one looks beyond withdrawals from formal IGOs, the pattern of recent US withdrawals looks even starker, including withdrawals from treaties (that are not IGOs because they do not include Secretariats), informal agreements, and emanations such as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Iran Nuclear Deal), Paris Climate Accord, UN Human Rights Council, and the Transpacific Partnership.

  6. Pevehouse et al. 2004.

  7. Snyder 2019: 54.

  8. Foa 2016.

  9. Blyth 2017. See also Fukuyama (2016) where he argues a “new populist-nationalist internationale has appeared.”

  10. Holsti 1992.

  11. Leeds and Savun 2007.

  12. Ikenberry 2018; Kagan 2017.

  13. Downs et al. 1996.

  14. See, for example, Abbott and Snidal 2000; Simmons 2000; Keohane 1984.

  15. See, for example, Pevehouse 2002.

  16. Bearce and Bondanella 2007.

  17. Pevehouse et al. 2019. In the conclusion we suggest ways that this IGO definition might matter, and possibilities for future research to examine exits from other forms of international cooperation.

  18. Authors’ calculation based on original data.

  19. Authors’ calculation based on Marshall and Marshall 2017; and Maoz et al. 2018.

  20. There is no data source to cover a sufficient number of COW IGOs to test this idea across a wide range of IOs. DESTA contains data on treaty flexibility provisions but these are mostly bilateral treaties, not IGOs. Koremenos (2016) contains just a sample and small fraction of our set of IGOs.

  21. Helfer 2006; Hill 1982.

  22. Aust 2013.

  23. Rosendorff and Milner 2001.

  24. McCall Smith 2000.

  25. Hirschman’s (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty also provides an informative framework for understanding the various choices states face.

  26. See Gray 2018 on “zombie” organizations.

  27. Membership withdrawal might be considered ‘the final straw.’ This paper does not address instances when a state engages in less significant departures such as no longer participating in the IGO’s work or meetings, withdrawing from IGO projects or conferences, withholding IGO contributions, or lowering the diplomatic rank of meeting attendees (see Online Appendix for examples). Likewise, withdrawal from treaties unrelated to IGOs are not included in this study (see Penney 2002).

  28. See, for example, Wagner (2000) for an overview of bargaining theory and Walter (2009) on civil wars.

  29. Chayes and Chayes (1991: 316) also remind us that we should not expect withdrawals often.

  30. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/06/21/the-increasingly-popular-exit-option-for-global-governance/?utm_term=.8163e5dde510. Accessed July 2, 2017.

  31. Author’s interview with US-based IWC expert, July 2018.

  32. See https://www.ecotourism.org.au/news/australias-withdrawal-from-the-uns-world-tourism-organisation/. Accessed 17 October 2018.

  33. Most states still pay their IGO dues during notice and wait periods before they have officially withdrawn. This has important implications for international cooperation and compliance.

  34. Beigbeder 1979.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Shukla 2018.

  37. Shukla 2018

  38. See Farrell and Newman 2017

  39. See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/18/england-eu-referendum-brexit. Accessed 17 October 2018.

  40. Walt (2016).

  41. See also overviews in Hobolt and de Vries 2016; Kuo and Naoi 2015.

  42. 2016 Gallup survey; 2016 poll by the Pew Research Center.

  43. See online appendix for coding details.

  44. See online appendix for examples of cases in each of the category and for coding criteria.

  45. http://www.voanews.com/content/gambia-withdraws-from-the-commonwealth/1761959.html. Accessed 22 May 2018.

  46. von Borzyskowski and Vabulas forthcoming.

  47. For example, in the Oxford Handbook of International Organizations (Cogan et al. 2016), none of the 55 chapters focuses on the dissolution of IGOs, although Pevehouse and von Borzyskowski (2016) mention exit in the overview chapter.

  48. While this is a productive way forward, we recognize potential limitations of leaning heavily on accession theories: some studies find that alliance termination contrasts with formation (Leeds and Savun 2007; Orbell et al. 1984) and European disintegration is not simply “integration in reverse.” See Jones 2018; Schneider 2017.

  49. Putnam 1988.

  50. Simmons and Danner 2010; Pevehouse 2002; Donno 2010; Mansfield and Pevehouse 2006.

  51. McGillivray and Smith 2000; Fearon 1997; Smith 1995, 1998. It is worth noting, however, that most of these reputational arguments come from the crisis bargaining literature – not from research on cooperation. C.f. Kertzer and Brutger 2016.

  52. Kaoutzanis et al. 2016.

  53. Milner and Tingley 2011.

  54. Predictions are not clear with regard to the right-left dimension of government change. Isolationist parties tend to be right-leaning in the US and Europe; left-leaning in Latin America; and of unclear leanings in Africa and Asia.

  55. Gaubatz 1996; Leeds 1999; Lipson 2003; Martin 2000; Morgan and Campbell 1991.

  56. Milner and Tingley 2011.

  57. See Copelovitch and Pevehouse, this Issue.

  58. See Haftel and Thompson (2018) on a similar logic explaining that states renegotiate treaties when they are not functioning as they had hoped.

  59. Keohane 1984.

  60. Abbott and Snidal 1998.

  61. Hirschman 1970.

  62. Leeds and Savun 2007.

  63. Pevehouse 2002.

  64. Boehmer et al. 2004; Karreth and Tir 2012.

  65. See Haftendorn et al. (1999) on a similar logic with regard to the institutionalization of alliances. On the other hand, states may be more likely to withdraw from highly institutionalized IGOs that have established too much independent agency or established a ‘runaway bureaucracy’ that stands apart from states’ original intent.

  66. See Davis and Wilf (2017) on geopolitical preferences affecting economic organization membership.

  67. Downs et al. 1996; Jupille et al. 2013; Gray et al. Forthcoming.

  68. Simmons 2000.

  69. Ikenberry 2000; Stone 2011.

  70. Gruber 2000.

  71. Organski’s 1964; Carr 1964.

  72. Olson 1965.

  73. Ikenberry 2000.

  74. EU disintegration literature have also noted a potential contagion effect. See Walter 2018.

  75. Pacheco 2012.

  76. The availability of two domestic politics variables limits the timeframe in the domestic politics model to 1975–2014.

  77. Pevehouse et al. 2019.

  78. Donno et al. 2015; Poast and Urpelainen 2013.

  79. Pevehouse et al. 2019.

  80. Since the data cover 265 of the 493 organizations, which lowers the sample size of IO-state-years by about a quarter, we also run robustness tests without this variable.

  81. Lall (2017) provides data for a total of 53 international bodies (organizations, programs, and funds); 18 of them are IGOs.

  82. See for example State Dept 1997: 6.

  83. von Borzyskowski 2019.

  84. Koremenos et al. 2001; Koremenos 2016.

  85. We scale the CINC score change (multiplying it by 100) to keep coefficients on a similar scale, which eases readability of coefficients.

  86. We also account for economic power with variables for GDP growth. See Appendix Table A3.

  87. Barnett and Finnemore 1999.

  88. Beck et al. 1998; Carter and Signorino 2010.

  89. King and Zeng 2001.

  90. Charnovitz 2017.

  91. This is also based on DPI data and its nationalism and vote share variables for the executive, government, and opposition. We replicated Table 1 model 1; replicating model 4 yields quite similar results.

  92. We use data from Hawkins and Kaltwasser 2017; Huber and Schimpf 2016; Houle and Kenny 2018; Huber and Ruth 2017.

  93. We do not include this variable in the main analysis because it is only available since 1960, which restricts the sample size and temporal coverage across models.

  94. Iacus et al. 2012. We use five cutpoints for polity and growth, and one cutpoint for government orientation change. The balanced dataset has a multivariate L1 distance of 0.65, far from perfect imbalance of 1. Using the generated CEM weights, the p value of the bivariate rare events logit estimate is 0.8 and of the multivariate rare events logit (including controls to further improve balance) is 0.7.

  95. Gray 2013.

  96. C.f. Imber 1989.

  97. Ikenberry 2000; Stone 2011; Johnson 2014. Powerful states, however, might be more likely to threaten to withdraw (because they have appealing go-it-alone options).

  98. Helfer 2005; Koremenos and Nau 2010. See also Rosendorff and Milner 2001, Kucik and Reinhardt 2008, and Pelc 2009 for how exit clauses may disadvantage the withdrawing state.

  99. Details provided in the Online Appendix.

  100. We source human rights data from Gibney et al. 2013; polity2 data from Marshall et al. 2010; coup data from Marshall and Marshall 2012; government harassment of opposition from Hyde and Marinov 2011, and data on unacceptable election quality or major election problems from Kelley 2010, 4–5. A 2+ point reduction in human rights or Polity2 indexes is large enough to eliminate measurement errors (which could occur as a result of one- point fluctuations that might reasonably occur on a year-to-year basis) and small enough to capture real-world events (where a two-point drop has been enough to trigger discussions about institutional sanctions). The 2+ point reduction also means that we are agnostic about where the country is on the democracy scale.

  101. Vabulas and Snidal 2013.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Xinyuan Dai, Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, Christian Rau, Henning Schmidtke, Duncan Snidal, Alexander Thompson, Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir, Alexander Tokhi, Stefanie Walter, as well as conference participants at MPSA, PEIO, the Global Governance group at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), and three anonymous reviewers for useful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. We also thank Richard Saunders for excellent research assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

    Inken von Borzyskowski

  2. Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA, USA

    Felicity Vabulas

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  1. Inken von Borzyskowski
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  2. Felicity Vabulas
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Correspondence to Felicity Vabulas.

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The dataset in this RIO article on membership withdrawals and the dataset in our ISQ article on membership suspensions (2019) are also companion datasets to the COW IGO data (Pevehouse et al. 2019). On the COW website (http://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets), we provide code files for R and Stata, which can be run to adjust the COW dataset for IGO membership exits and interruptions. If you use the data and/or correction code, please reference both the RIO and ISQ articles.

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von Borzyskowski, I., Vabulas, F. Hello, goodbye: When do states withdraw from international organizations?. Rev Int Organ 14, 335–366 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-019-09352-2

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