Alongside the promise of international cooperation lies a growing concern regarding
the potential overreach of international organizations (IO). Scholars and policy-makers
alike wonder how transnational actors can constrain IOs and ensure they are legitimate
and accountable in our system of global governance. At the heart of this dilemma is
the potential abuse or misuse of institutional power; yet these crucial concerns become
even more pronounced during and after emergency rule. In Emergency Powers of International
Organizations: Between Normalization and Containment, Christian Kreuder-Sonnen asks
how and why some IOs extend emergency powers to become quotidian rule while other
IOs draw down and regulate these emergency powers. Much of what we know about IOs
centers on the procedures and norms that define routine collective policy. Yet this
book makes a persuasive argument that the crisis politics of IOs can delineate the
conditions under which IOs expand their mandates or maintain the status quo. Kreuder-Sonnen
posits that rhetorical arguments about the legitimacy of the IO’s authority are at
the heart of understanding when IO emergency powers will become normalized or subject
to constitution-like checks. A convincing set of six cases of emergency rule at the
United Nations, European Union, and World Health Organization provide the empirical
testing ground for the convincing “authority leap” argument regarding when we will
see ratcheting up or rollbacks of emergency powers in IOs.
It is worth underscoring that this is not a general book about how IOs operate during
emergencies. Instead, it is laser focused on understanding how and when IOs expand
beyond their constitutional mandate to extend emergency powers into part of the IO’s
commonplace processes. Kreuder-Sonnen calls IO emergency measures that have become
normalized over time “ratchet effects.” For example, immediately following 9/11, the
UN Security Council passed Resolution 1373 (2001), outlining that international terrorism
was a threat to international peace and security and criminalizing terrorism-supporting
activities. In doing so, the Security Council essentially ruled by decree rather than
leaning on a consent-based tradition that respects the sovereign equality of each
state. By setting new rules, the Security Council assumed the role of global legislator,
which changed the constitutional authority structure laid out in the UN Charter.
But Kreuder-Sonnen is equally interested in understanding the conditions under which
IOs rollback these emergency powers: when do IOs reverse the powers they assumed during
emergencies and constrain them through new legal constraints? For example, the H1N1
“swine flu” in 2009 prompted the World Health Organization to declare a global pandemic,
triggering advance purchase agreements of drugs from pharmaceutical companies. When
the swine flu turned out to be relatively mild, critics lambasted the WHO’s lack of
transparency and corporate overreach. These accusations prompted the WHO to accept
procedural containments of its emergency powers and new rules regarding conflicts
of interest. With the WHO now at the heart of the 2020 Covid-19 crisis, understanding
how it extends or curtails emergency powers is no doubt critical. Kreuder-Sonnen underscores
that past analyses of IO emergency powers have focused on individual cases as “singular
scandals,” but this book is influential because it creates a common framework for
understanding IO exceptionalism as a class of events that are comparable across institutional
settings. With much IO literature demarcated along issue area lines, he makes a convincing
case that the expansion or retraction of emergency powers is a common concern across
IOs.
Kreuder-Sonnen’s argument centers on sociological institutionalism. While he acknowledges
that power (realism) and IO design (institutionalism) are important in understanding
the normalization (or not) of an IO’s emergency powers, he argues that one cannot
understand ratchet and rollback effects without considering legitimacy. When coalitions
can use rhetorical leverage to argue the IO’s emergency authority is commensurate
with the challenge, they can legitimize the normalization of emergency rule. On the
other hand, if contentious actors use convincing arguments to delegitimize emergency
powers, then IOs will be forced to contain exceptional practices that intrude on states’
and citizens’ rights.
In explaining how variance in the distribution of rhetorical power leads to ratchets
and rollbacks, Kreuder-Sonnen first leans on theories of domestic politics and emergency
rule. Since almost all states have faced extraordinary circumstances that lead the
executive branch to invoke discretionary rather than ordinary rule of law, he takes
domestic theories to the international setting. In doing so, the book is framed to
focus on how IOs handle (and learn from) standout historical moments to define their
successes and failures. These domestic parallels are a welcome addition to the international
organization literature. Nonetheless, he recognizes where the domestic analogy falls
short—states can back emergency rule with the use of force while IOs lack similar
enforcement capabilities—but this is counterintuitively what makes Kreuder-Sonnen’s
study so important. Even lacking the use of force, some IOs still expand their powers
during exceptional times. They normalize emergency powers, he argues, by building
on their authority to get states to defer to their rules. This highlights the Janus-faced
nature of IO authority: while it helps IOs successfully govern, it can also result
in overreach.
Kreuder-Sonnen also leans on the concept of proportionality from just war theory to
understand the threshold between legitimation (a ratchet) and delegitimation (a rollback).
The more that key coalitions argue that IO emergency powers are justified as proportionate—adhering
to standards of necessity, functionality, and costs—the likelier they will become
entrenched. On the other hand, the more that key critics contest IO emergency powers
as disproportionate, the likelier these exceptional processes will be confined. Wars
are perhaps the supreme emergency in international relations, so using just war theory
to understand emergency rule in IOs is both logical and effective. Kreuder-Sonnen’s
use of the contentious politics literature (Tilly and Tarrow 2006)—because IO exceptionalism
can trigger conflict from distributional effects—rounds out a cross-disciplinary approach
to the research. This makes the book essential reading for broad audiences that care
about how institutions form checks and balances before and after exceptional times.
The richness of Emergency Powers is bound to raise important questions. One of the
biggest challenges in problematizing ratchet effects is that, from another lens, they
may just be considered reforms. If augmentation of power sticks after emergency rule,
is this just because normal procedures to handle emergencies were not satisfactory?
This is a very different view than thinking IOs overextend undelegated powers and
subsequently curtail states’ sovereignty. Another challenge is that one could argue
that the theory simply says that incremental changes will stick but massive changes
will not. In some respects, this seems obvious. But looked at differently, these conclusions
raise the concern that over time, we may see largescale emergency powers become entrenched
in IOs not through one fell swoop but instead from a series of back-to-back incremental
moves. This critique may then heighten the importance of the book: if we worry about
abuses from emergency rule, then we should be particularly concerned that piecemeal
changes might escape scrutiny but lead to systemic overhauls.
At its core, Emergency Powers argues that rhetorical power is necessary for either
the pro-ratchet or pro-rollback coalition to assert its preferred outcome. Readers
may therefore wonder when actors will have rhetorical power but not institutional
power because the consent or acquiescence of the most powerful states is likely key.
Is the ability to extend emergency powers, then, just another example of powerful
states tightly controlling IOs? In some respects, this is disheartening because it
shows that the weak are at the mercy of the powerful perhaps when they are most vulnerable.
Yet from another angle, the mediating force of state power mitigates the concern that
IOs can easily become runaway bureaucracies.
While one of the strongest aspects of the book is its domestic analogy, readers may
want to push more on this foundation. It creates, for example, a strong normative
angle because in the domestic context, emergency powers are constitutionally deviant.
This means that Kreuder-Sonnen is also concerned with overreach because domestic emergency
rule can result in the government constraining the rights of citizens. However, if
an IO has “earned” more authority, it is worth considering whether it is problematic
for the IO to use its authority to do more. Many IOs are set up to provide citizens’
rights through safety nets during times of emergency. For example, the IMF’s “lender
of last resort” status acknowledges that its role is to be powerful in the case of
emergencies. Moreover, in the 2008 financial crisis, Mario Draghi affirmed that the
European Central Bank (ECB) could do “whatever it takes” to restore financial stability
in European member states1 and many observers regarded its far-reaching powers to
act in extraordinary times as beneficial (and essential) to global macroeconomic stability.
Follow on work should consider how we know when an IO’s exceptional powers are being
used “for the good” versus when they are power grabs with a dissatisfying, undemocratic
underbelly. IO exceptionalism may not always produce net losers.
Another important question is the “dogs that don’t bark.” While Kreuder-Sonnen is
right to worry about IOs overstepping their mandates, the public just as often cries
out for IOs to do more to step up during emergencies. Indeed, in the concluding remarks,
the author acknowledges that “the problem is not the excess but a growing lack of
IO authority” (p. 207). So when do IOs not ratchet up in the first place but instead
block cooperative solutions during times of crisis? When do IOs fail to invoke emergency
powers that might be necessary to govern the global commons? A promising extension
of the book could systematically investigate the precise conditions under which IO
exceptionalism does not materialize. Relatedly, future research could derive a comprehensive
bank of cases when IOs face the possibility of using emergency powers, when they use
them, and when they end up falling short. This sort of comprehensive data would help
readers grapple with generalizability as well as time-variant patterns (whether the
use of IO emergency powers is increasing, and if so, why). Moreover, this would help
link to the conditions under which IOs develop mechanisms to check their unwanted
side-effects, which Heupel et al. (2018) call an “authority-legitimation mechanism.”
Last, scholars of IO crisis-handling might look at emergency powers in the context
of rising informality in global governance rather than just in formal IOs such as
the UN, EU, and WHO. If there really are few times when states normalize emergency
powers in IOs, then perhaps we need to better understand how states use alternate
forums such as informal IOs to expand power in times of crisis (Vabulas and Snidal
2020). If we worry about the accountability and transparency challenges of emergency
powers in formal IOs, we might be especially concerned with how informal IOs with
fewer regulations handle these crucial concerns.
In sum, Emergency Powers of International Organizations makes an important contribution
to understanding how and when IOs expand and retract the exceptional power they create
in times of crisis. But Kreuder-Sonnen’s most important contribution is to bring theoretical
and empirical heft to the explanatory power of political rhetoric (Goddard and Krebs
2015) in international relations as well as the independent effect of IO legitimacy
in global governance (Tallberg and Zürn 2019).