Part III Forms of Organization, Ch.7 Supranational Organizations

Subject(s):

Collective security — Membership of international organizations — Resolutions of international organizations — International organizations, practice and procedure

This chapter analyzes the legitimacy of supranational organizations (SNOs). Taking the European Union (EU) as the leading exemplar of the type, an SNO can exercise a whole range of rulemaking, adjudication, and enforcement powers with a comparatively high degree of independence from intergovernmental or national control, at least within the scope of authority delegated to the supranational level. However, as the Eurozone crisis has demonstrated, Europe still depends on the strongly legitimated institutions of outright ‘government’ at the national level. Institutions of supranational ‘governance’, exercising delegated power in a delegated, administrative sense, are simply not yet equal to that task.