ABSTRACT
Like Huntington, we begin with the proposition that transnational relations are increasingly significant in world politics. But we reach very different conclusions about the roles of international organizations. Before making that argument systematically in the remainder of this paper, we
must briefly deal with the issue of how transnational relations should be defined. Huntington defines “transnational organizations” as organizations sharing three characteristics: they are large bureaucracies; they perform specialized functions; and they do so across international boundaries. He explicitly includes governmental entities, such as the United States Agency for International Development (AID) or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and intergovernmental entities such as the World Bank, along with nongovernmental organizations such as multinational enterprises, the Ford Foundation, and the Roman Catholic Church. Although this definition has the virtue of pointing out similarities between governmental and nongovernmental bureaucracies operating across national boundaries, it obscures the differences. Some of Huntington’s observations are clearly meant to apply only to nongovernmental organizations. He argues, for instance, that “The operations of transnational organizations . . . usually do not have political motivations in the sense of being designed to affect the balance of power within the local society.”3 But this hardly applies to the Agency for International Development or the Central Intelligence Agency, both of which he designates as “transnational.” He contends, on the basis of literature about multinational enterprises, that personnel arrangements of transnational organizationsmove toward dispersed nationality patterns, in which country subdivisions are primarily managed by local personnel; yet no evidence is presented that this is true for AID or the CIA, much less for the Strategic Air Command – another “transnational” organization by Huntington’s definition. Furthermore, the trends over time seem to diverge, and when Huntington discusses these trends, he finds himself distinguishing between “U.S. Government-controlled transnational organizations” and private groups.4
