Whereas institutions have been a major focus of political science, the realist view of international relations has assumed that anarchy is the dominant feature of international relations. The concept of institutions, however, is far from clear and simple. “Institutions” have been mentioned in a variety of meanings by different authors. In recent studies of international relations, the concept has been stretched to informal institutions such as regimes, sovereignty and balance of power. Because of the informalization of the concept, institutions have become a more relevant analytical concept for students of international relations, but at the cost of obscuring the concept itself.
In order to access the actual level of institutionalization in today's international relations, this paper first introduces a typology of institutions. The three criteria of the typology here are, the level of formalization of institutionalization, domain of institutionalization, and scope of institutionalization. It can be assumed that formal multilateral institutionalization in the field of security is the most demanding type of institutionalization. This article, therefore, focuses on this type of institutionalization with hope that this would allow us to estimate the overall level of institutionalization in the international society today.
This article then introduces three sets of time-series data. By examining these data, we can observe that in recent years, multilateral security treaties have increased in number whereas multilateral arrangements started with functional cooperation and then became important in economic areas. Thus, the data suggests that international relations have been “institutionalized” in an impressive fashion today.
Several hypotheses are presented to explain the above findings. One is the continued increase in the density of international exchanges, which creates a stronger demand for an ordering of the exchanges through institutionalization. Second is convergence of international norms particularly after the Cold War. Third is an easier access to infrastructure for international institutions resulting from lower communication costs. Fourth is the dynamic self-multiplication of institutions.
The above hypotheses suggest diminishing differences between internal and international politics. This author, however, doubts whether such internalization of international politics can go as far as tight institutionalization of international politics comparable to domestic politics. In addition to imperfection of the international society, in comparison to national societies, the very structure of international relations, namely its two layered structure consisting of national and international levels, will continue to limit the institutionalization of international relations.
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