Are international organizations like the Bank for International Settlements unable to die?

International Organizations seem to be immortal or at least long-lived. In this paper several factors which may be responsible for this fact are put forward and then analyzed by studying the empirical case of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which has now survived for seventy-eight years all threats to its existence. This is the more surprising since it was heavily attacked by the government of the most powerful country of the world, the USA for some years. This country demanded the dissolution of the BIS at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 as a precondition for allowing nations to join the planned International Monetary Fund. Before this the Bank was also able to master the crisis resulting from the demise of the gold (exchange) standard and the end of the German reparation payments agreed on in the Dawes and Young Plans, both consequences of the Great Depression. The Bank even survived the events of the Second World War threatening it, and reacted creatively to the crisis posed by the founding of the European Monetary Union. It is shown that all suspected factors favoring the survival of international organizations were present in the case of the BIS.     

A general constitutional possibility theorem

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem shows that there exist no transitive social preferences in nonoligarchic societies for all possible profiles of individual preference orderings. Similarly, a generalization of Sen's Theorem of the Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal implies under the same conditions that non-Pareto-optimal outcomes may be present in the resulting cyclical preference relations. This essay changes the customary perspective. It demonstrates that, for any profile of individual preferences, we can always find a nonoligarchic assignment of rights to different subsets of society, to decide between pairs of outcomes, together with adequate decision rules, which escapes these problems. This assignment of rights can be a purely liberal one even for each profile, but not one in which everybody participates in all decisions and which uses simple or qualified-majority voting (Total Direct Democracy). The adequate purely liberal constitution, on the other hand, may imply an oligarchy if too few outcomes are present.     

An Alternative Constitutional Treaty for the European Union

We propose an alternativeto the Constitutional Treaty drafted by theEuropean Convention. Our proposaleffectively limits the domain of governmentat the Union level. It takes the incentivesof the European public actors into account.We propose a second chamber of EuropeanParliament composed of delegates of theparliaments of the member states and asecond court composed of delegates of thehighest courts of the member states. Theseinstitutions will be the guardians of thesubsidiarity principle. The principle ofthe separation of powers is implemented byabolishing the Commission's monopoly oflegislative initiative and by curtailingthe Council's legislative role. Treatyamendments will not be drafted by aninter-governmental conference but by aninter-parliamentary conference. We proposeto change the method of financing andintroduce referenda.     

Ideocracy and Totalitarianism: A Formal Analysis Incorporating Ideology

In the present paper it is shown how totalitarianregimes can arise or be averted depending on theconditions described by the parameters and the initialvalues of the system. The main reason for theevolution of totalitarian regimes is the presence ofbelievers who are convinced that others have to beconverted to the supreme values of their ideology fortheir well-being and, possibly, that there existinconvertible enemies of their creed whose presence isobnoxious to them and to the absolute truths of theirideology. Believers are thus prepared to spendresources on winning new converts and to win thesecular power of the state. Whether they succeed inthis endeavour depends on the costs of converting newbelievers and on the amount of resources they areprepared to spend for this purpose, given theiravailable incomes and their propensity to consume.Their chances to succeed are greater if a crisisoccurs, an event which is usually outside of theircontrol. Once secular power has been secured, theresources of the state can be used to win moreconverts, to drive into exile or to killinconvertibles and to try to reach the imperialisticaims implied by the ideology. If the latter is not thecase, the regime may turn into a mature ideocracyafter having reached its domestic aims. This would forinstance be the case, if all inconvertibles had beenremoved and all the other population been converted. Inthis case no further terror and (or) repressionscharacteristic of totalitarian regimes are required. If the ideology implies ambitious imperialistic aims,for instance the conversion of all people on earth(except for inconvertibles) or the domination of thewhole globe by the believers, it is highly probablethat these aims cannot be reached. As a consequenceeither a war is lost and leads to the removal of thetotalitarian regime, or the ends have to be adapted tomaintain the credibility of the ideology. But then thetotalitarian state may again turn into a matureideocracy, if the ideology has been reinterpreted toremove its unrealistic imperialistic aims. Or thechange of the ideology weakens the regime in a waythat it loses its proselytizing character altogether,and turns into an ordinary autocratic regime.