ABSTRACT
The first set of questions that I shall raise concerns what I call the functionalist explanation of international institutions. Stemming from David Mitrany's work in the 1940s,3 this theory explains the emergence of international institutions as a result of a pragmatic necessity to serve concrete functions relating, for example, to trade, postal services, or regulation of rivers. This explanation has remained theoretically dominant in international affairs for over fifty years.4 The central proposition of this theory is that institutions are born and expand due to top-down policy decisions that correlate with the functional needs of international society. This theory does not recognize grassroots
transformation its political effects. remain relevant tion deficient international legal scholarship continues to reiterate this apolitical and technical image of the BWIs, it remains trapped in functionalism. 5
The second set of questions relates to the particular place of international institutions vis-a.-vis the ThIrd World. In some ways, international institutions and the Third World are like Siamese twins: One can not even imagine them as separate from one another because development, human rights, environmental, and other institutions operate mostly in the Third World. As the Third World decolonized and entered international society in the middle of the century, international institutions were truly becoming consolidated in a wave of pragmatism. Despite this temporal coincidence, leading accounts of international institutions say nothing about the influence that the Third World may have had on their evolution or vice versa.6 In this view, institutions evolve due to their own functionalist logic, while grand politics of decolonization and developmtont takes place elsewhere. Indeed, to the extent that the Third World -is discussed as an entity in relation to institutions, it is criticized for politicizing them and preventing their effective operation.? The failure of Third World resistance to achieve its objectives-such as the New International Economic Order (NIEO) proposals of the 1970s at the United Nations-is explained away by the unrealistic radicalism of its proposals.s I propose to question these suppositionsxegarding the role of the Third World in the expansion and consolidadon of international institutions. I do this by examining' key elements in the discourse of development, which has been the central governing discourse of the Third World in the post-World War II period, and by highlighting moments of local resistance from the Third World that are not captured in traditional international law narratives about the Third World.
