Christina L. Davis’ book, Discriminatory Clubs: The Geopolitics of International Organizations, is both a broad and detailed examination of the question of how a core set of states in individual international organizations (IOs) choose their members. This question is an offshoot of a rich literature going back decades that asks why states join IOs, by delving into the specific issue of why a group of states might admit some member states and not others. As the title suggests, her central argument is that IOs are, in fact, discriminatory clubs of states containing a core of states that are geopolitically aligned with shared yet diffuse security interests. This alignment then “shapes who wants to join an organization, whether they are accepted into the club, and the price of entry” (p. 2).
She approaches this from a variety of angles. Chapter 2 develops and tests a theory of membership that examines provisions in IO charters. Davis uses descriptive statistics drawn from the Correlates of War (COW) International Organizations Dataset 3.0 to underscore the club-like nature of IOs in that IOs tend to have discretionary rules that give their member states flexibility on whom to admit. Club-style membership design allows powerful member states to use “bargaining leverage and informal influence” (p. 57) as a means to shape who can join.
Chapter 3, coauthored with Tyler Pratt, draws on the COW IO dataset to examine membership patterns in a set of over 200 international economic organizations between 1949 and 2014, finding evidence of geopolitical alignment in 44% of membership decisions and showing that security ties are also prevalent in economic organizations. Chapter 4, coauthored with Meredith Wilf, turns to a history of how accession has worked in the case of the GATT/WTO, observing that the formal rules of accession for both GATT and WTO are discretionary, which makes geopolitical discrimination easier. This chapter also creates a new dataset based on GATT/WTO applications and membership negotiations to measure geopolitical alignment among members using United Nations voting patterns. The analysis shows the impact of geopolitics on the choice of members, why and which rivals are excluded, and the speed of the accession process. Chapter 5 offers a case study of the OECD as a discriminatory club, showing a correlation between UN General Assembly voting and OECD membership. Yet, this chapter makes an argument that goes beyond shared security interests, as it brings in the importance of membership as a proxy for status and an association with “the most exclusive club of ‘the West’” (p. 125).
Chapter 6 presents a case study of Japan’s experience in approaching IO membership. Japan, as Davis argues, often prioritized political relationships and status-seeking in making decisions about joining IOs. She also found that in some cases economic interests on both sides (either of major member states or of Japan) can outweigh geopolitical alignment. With this, the chapter recognizes that the book’s central argument cannot predict every outcome. The remaining chapters explore club politics in regional organizations, which Davis argues is a hard test of her theory because the main criterion for membership is geography. However, she observes that regional organizations do not make their geographic boundaries clear. She finds geography was not determinative and the correlation between security interests and membership remained strong.
Chapter 8 takes on the case of universal organizations, such as the United Nations, which are supposed to allow any state to join. Here, the argument implicitly shifts the criteria for what makes an IO discriminatory compared with the rest of the book, as the objects of discrimination in this chapter are applicants that are not universally recognized as sovereign states, such as Taiwan and Palestine. The politics of discrimination are important in these cases, as there is a “wide range of entities that may or may not be deemed to be states, depending on who makes the decision” (p. 314). She points out that “statehood” is not always objective, and sovereignty can be ambiguous (p. 319). The chapter also examines the rare occasion in which states can be kicked out of an IO. The book’s final chapter explores the implications of IOs as discriminatory clubs that favor allies. Here, she concludes that geopolitical alignment may be “one prominent criterion, but it is not at the exclusion of other factors” (p. 388). This recognition of nuance makes sense given the richness of the findings of the individual book chapters, but it is not well aligned with the narrower arguments presented at the beginning of the book.
Although Davis’ argument looks broadly and carefully across many IOs, it is still worth considering that the theory cannot explain the membership of an important new IO, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), created by China as its first major foray into leading an IO with global membership. Explaining this would be important as it is a case where shared security interests did not form a basis for economic cooperation. The 57 founding AIIB members who signed its articles of agreement in December 2015 included a number of major donor countries and others that are clearly not geopolitically aligned with China on security issues. Among these were the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and India. Today, the AIIB has the second largest MDB membership behind the World Bank, with 110 approved members. While the security alignment hypothesis may contribute to explaining why the United States and Japan refused to join the AIIB, it cannot explain why AIIB membership is open to any country that was a member of the World Bank Group’s International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), or the Japanese-led Asian Development Bank (ADB).
Despite failing to explain every case, Davis’ book will spur a wide-ranging debate within the scholarly community and contribute in important new ways to existing research on IO membership.
