What Role for International Organizations in the Promotion of Community Interests? : Reflections on the ideology of Functionalism

Abstract

This chapter examines the role of international organizations in promoting community interests. It describes ways in which international organizations contribute to formulating, maintaining, and enhancing community interests. Organizations can contribute to the community interest by serving as a platform for its formulation; through coercion of member states or others; by developing ideas and consensus concerning the community interest; and by relying on the ideology of functionalism. The notion of community interest does not exist in isolation from particular projects, and by definition assumes someone pouring meaning into it. Although this might seem a bad thing, it is not necessarily so. The term ideology is best seen as a methodological device for exposing aspects of reality that otherwise would remain hidden. The point is to recognize international organizations for what they are: Someone’s political project, dressed up in terms of the community interest and operated by the ideology of functionalist thought.