Findings: power in relationships
We have suggested that our approach can enrich the realist tradition by
revealing overlooked power relationships in transnational networks. We
have argued that NGO partnering with heterogeneous actors leads to
veiled relations of power in the network. However, McMahon and
Dijkzeul both highlight the lack of NGO power to achieve their mandated normative missions. Reinalda sees NGOs as dependent and
ancillary gadflies around the more powerful states and IGOs that states
create. Yet, both Balboa and Hertel emphasize that in the last 20–30
years more public goods have been shifted from state provision to
provision by market and civil society (meaning NGOs in practice). So,
where is the power of NGOs?
A paradox is at play in the color revolutions, DeMars shows, in
which NATO is a weak agent whose bombs failed to unseat Milosevic
in 1999, while at the same time NATO exerts strong structural power.
The latter is expressed indirectly, as a force to inspire democracy activists with the ideals of democracy and human rights, and attract them
with the promises of security and prosperity.
Bob Reinalda analyzes the co-evolutionary expansion of both NGOs
and IGOs from a comparative, historical perspective since the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century. This long
historical view reveals clearly that the affinity for IGO creation by the
governments of Britain and the United States is paralleled by an affinity for NGO generation by the societies of the same countries. Reinalda fruitfully combines liberal, realist and constructivist approaches by
focusing on international institutions; on the power plays between states,
IGOs, NGOs and other actors in the international arena; and on the
norms and ideas that led to changes in the functioning of these actors.
Reinalda explains that states, IGOs and NGOs have “co-evolved” by
constituting networks in which they instrumentalize each other to realize their different goals. Implicitly, he acknowledges how much social
change IGOs and NGOs have wrought, often in opposition to states—
and against all odds—as in the antislavery campaign and promotion of
human rights and democracy. The cumulative effects of NGO action
over more than two centuries are more impressive in retrospect than
their frequent setbacks.