Disenchantment and renewal

This chapter shows how the tide turned against technocratic internationalism in the 1970s and 1980s. The first section describes a general backlash against bureaucracy as an organizational form that also affected international organizations. Thomas G. Weiss’s criticism of the United Nations and their bureaucracy serves as a key work to illustrate the shifting perception. The chapter then discusses the return of the state and intergovernmentalism in international theory. A new generation of liberal-internationalist literature, influenced by economics and rational choice theory, put the emphasis on actors’ behaviour, on political will, and on the conditions under which international cooperation was negotiated. Few authors now seemed to believe that objective problem pressure alone would induce international cooperation. Yet other elements of the functionalist account remained almost unquestioned. This is illustrated with the emergent literature on global environmental problems, to be tackled by new international ‘regimes’, which became a new field for expert-driven, de-politicized governance. Technocratic ideas about public planning were still present on the left of the political spectrum. The partisans of a New International Economic Order suggested global administrative bodies should manage and re-distribute the world’s resources, such as the minerals of the deep seabed.