International bureaucracies

Secretarial work

Bureaucracies grow faster than they can be pruned

EnlargeA floating secretariat has its advantages

CONNOISSEURS of diplomatic rarities face a treat in July 2011: the closure of an international organisation. The Western European Union, set up in 1948, was a cold war spine-stiffener. It was mildly important when the then European Economic Community was just a small common market. The Brussels-based outfit has a staff of 65 and an annual budget of €13.4m ($16.5m). It has been an anachronism for decades, and trying to shut down since 2000. With it will go a parallel outfit, the Paris-based “European Security and Defence Assembly” of the member states’ parliamentarians, which has a budget of €6m and a staff of 30.

Both bodies will go to a nearly empty graveyard. Setting up international organisations requires only a political decision and some taxpayers’ money. They may not make progress, but they do provide process: so long as meetings happen, they create a sense that at least something is being done. Closing international organisations down is more difficult, involving fiddly decisions on pensions and redundancies. Officials are adept at finding reasons for postponement and in providing useful sinecures to their political backers. Wikipedia lists only 22 defunct international outfits, and many of those are not dead but renamed or merged. One (the League of Corinth) went in 322BC.

It is easy to find further candidates for abolition. The Geneva-based United Nations Economic Commission for Europe was set up in 1947 to co-ordinate reconstruction in shattered post-war Europe. Its 220 staff members spend a $50m budget on tasks such as providing “consumers with guarantees of safety and quality through the establishment of norms and standards”. Many might think the EU already does that pretty thoroughly.

The cost of such outfits is not only financial. However tedious their activities, member countries cannot afford to ignore their meetings or budgets. Doing that ties up scarce time and people. This is a particular burden for smaller and poorer countries, who find their competent, multilingual officials either overburdened or, worse, tempted away by the high salaries and undemanding duties of international bureaucracy.

But the trend is towards more, not less. Next month the Community of Democracies, a Clinton-era ginger group for governments and campaigners, is relaunching at a big summit in the Polish city of Cracow, with strong backing from America’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. It dwindled to near-insignificance during the Bush administration: does anyone remember the Santiago Commitment of 2005 or the Bamako Consensus of 2007?

But Poland, eager to make its mark as a diplomatic heavyweight, has provided a permanent office in Warsaw. Under Lithuania’s presidency it gained a parliamentary assembly this year. That means lots more meetings, travel and papers.

Last week Finland’s foreign minister, Alexander Stubb, said that the Arctic Council, a once-sleepy forum for the governments of countries near the North Pole, needed to become a proper organisation with a permanent secretariat. Unsurprisingly, he suggested that this be located in northern Finland.