Reciprocity and International Organizations Law

Reciprocity is considered a basic concept of the decentralized international legal order, which unlike domestic legal orders does not have a superior authority. As such, the concept of reciprocity is a useful tool in analyzing the evolution of international law as driven by tit-for-tat or quid pro quo legal commitments. Such quid pro quo legal relations reflect “specific reciprocity,” implying conditional and equivalent conduct by two or more actors. As this chapter will illustrate, international organizations challenge this classic understanding of reciprocity in international relations. International organizations are founded based on specific reciprocal legal commitments, typically in the form of an international agreement, which is governed by the law of treaties. The underpinning ordering principle of international organizations is the (sovereign) equality of their member states and organizations. At the same time, however, international organizations are created to fulfill a shared (public) purpose. Instead of yielding specifically identifiable and immediate benefits for particular members, the internal institutional dynamics of international organizations rather reveal a more “diffuse” form of reciprocity: after joining an international organization, each member will contribute to and benefit from compliance with the organization’s overall purpose and the rules that flow from it. Against this background, this chapter seeks to explore the fundamental question of whether and how much reciprocity is present in the law of international organizations. While specifically reciprocal obligations account for the creation of international organizations on the international plane, diffuse reciprocity explains how international organizations operate internally as constituted legal orders in the relations between their member states. The law of international organizations is thus characterized by an interplay between the external reciprocity between the contracting parties to the constituent instrument, and the internal reciprocity between the organization and its members.