Regional organizations aren’t created equal

One of the notable features of the Libya diplomacy has been the array of regional and other multinational organizations or clubs involved. The Arab League, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the African Union, the G-8, the European Union, and NATO have all had their say. Unsurprisingly given their different memberships, they’ve ended up saying quite different things. The African Union explicitly rejected outside intervention in Libya, while the Arab League famously asked for a United Nations-sanctioned no-fly zone, a request that was critical in building support for the fateful UN resolution.

In theory, it’s clear why the blessing of a multinational group matters; it suggests that intervention is being undertaken on behalf of some collectivity, perhaps even the international community as a whole. At the very least, an organization’s ok helps ensure that intervention is not merely the product of narrow national interest. And so advocates of intervention leapt on the Arab League’s call for a no-fly zone as a sign that the region supported action.

It should be apparent that the proliferation of regional bodies and multinational clubs has generated new possibilities for "forum shopping" by would-be intervening powers, who can hunt and peck to find a regional organization willing to bestow legitimacy on action they want to take. This isn’t a new dynamic of course. During the 1950s and 1960s, when the Security Council was paralyzed by the Soviet veto, the United States often sought Organization of American States approval for its interventions in Latin America. For most of the Korean War, the West worked through the pliant and veto-free General Assembly rather than the blocked Security Council.

But the proliferation of regional organizations makes it critical to assess their relative value as dispensers of legitimacy. For those outside the region, the Arab League support appeared to be a permission slip, almost as if the country’s extended family was looking out for its best intersts.  The unstated–and largely unexamined–assumption is that other Arab states have Libya’s best interests at heart. But the Arab League’s credentials–and particularly relative to the African Union–got very little attention in the public debate. How representative is the organization? How democratic? How respectful of human rights? It’s worth getting in the habit of asking these critical questions about regional organizations.  After all, it’s not hard to imagine the Shanghai Cooperation Organization offering its blessing for an intervention that doesn’t look very humanitarian at all.