By December 1999 NGOs had become sufficiently trendy to reach the pages of Newsweek. Robert Samuelson, reporting on a study by Jeffrey Berry (The New Liberalism: The Rising Power of Citizen Groups), suggested that “citizens” lobbies, another form of NGOs, “wield power in influencing Washington’s agenda and shaping its news.” Indeed, Berry offered convincing evidence that liberal “citizens” lobbies had more clout than their conservative counterparts and the special interest groups that clog the corridors of Congress. Modern telecommunications has virtually eliminated the insuperable barrier to effective political action once faced by advocacy organizations with scarce resources and limited membership. In the 1960s a radical colleague used to say “whoever controls the mimeograph machine, controls the revolution.” Since then, copy machines, fax, email, and, most recently, the Internet have vastly enhanced the ability of INGOs to organize and mobilize their members on a global scale.

While there is some ambiguity about what qualifies as an NGO, Iriye provides a useful definition. He describes them as “voluntary and open (non-secret) associations of individuals outside the formal apparatus (central and local governments, police and armed forces, legislative and judicial bodies, etc.) that are neither for profit nor engage in political activities as their primary objective.” That would rule out the secret fraternities like the Masons or KKK, businesses, and political parties. Within that broad definition two categories seem to exist. One would include international organizations with common interests: educational, professional, and religious associations, sports federations such as the International Olympic Committee, and industrial trade groups. Advocacy groups or what Keck and Sikkink call transnational advocacy networks and Smith, Chatfield, and Pagnucco label transnational social movements (TSMO) constitute the second category that interests these authors. They agree that among advocacy groups human rights encompass the largest numbers, the environmental sector has grown most rapidly, and Esperanto has declined most significantly. Other major advocacy INGO categories include ethnic unity and the rights of indigenous peoples, world order, international law, peace, women’s rights, and development. While the United States is a leader in the formation of NGOs and INGOs, the phenomenon is truly international in scope.

Despite varying purposes, a broad consensus links these five books. The authors show a marked sympathy to advocacy INGOs and approve their generally liberal and reformist agendas. Beyond that they agree that on the global scene INGOs have existed since the early nineteenth century, have increased in numbers since World War II, have exploded in numbers and membership during the 1990s, have grown fastest outside the North Atlantic community, have developed widespread networks and effective advocacy strategies, have influenced policy at both the national and international levels, and, above all, have made a difference. Within that consensus the books fall into two camps with Activists beyond Borders somewhere in the middle. The Leverings and William Korey take a primarily historical approach to their subjects. They are far more concerned with specific issues (respectively, the Neptune Group’s role in promoting the Law of the Seas treaty and the role of NGOs in the application of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) than with theories of international behavior. In making the role of NGOs concrete they provide the kind of particularity that historians may find missing in the more theoretical arguments that Boli and Thomas and Smith, Chatfield, and Pagnucco construct.

Both Korey and the Leverings might be forgiven the sympathetic, at times almost adulatory, tone that creeps into their writing. These books are, after all, reflections on lifetimes of dedicated advocacy. And in both cases the authors can point to evidence of substantial achievements on the part of the NGOs involved. Most historians will recognize Ralph Levering as a diplomatic historian at Davidson College who has published a number of works on public opinion and U.S. foreign policy. Citizen Action for Global Change is, however, more a memoir than a diplomatic history. Aside from Levering’s introductory chapter and conclusion the authorial voice for the book is that of his mother, Miriam Levering.

The Leverings deal with two major issues conventional diplomatic histories have largely ignored – the role of NGOs (as exemplified by the Neptune Group) in shaping U.S. and international policy and the United Nations Conference of the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS III). UNCLOS III lasted nine years from December 1973 until December 1982 and produced a treaty that, with some revision, became international law in 1994. Throughout that period Miriam Levering and her husband Sam worked tirelessly to promote what they saw as a vital step toward “strengthening the rule of law worldwide” (p. 19). The issue they addressed was a potentially divisive one for the international community. UNCLOS I and UNCLOS II had failed to establish limits on coastal states’ control of offshore mining. Nor had they set rules for deep seabed mining. The prospect of capturing the mineral wealth of the ocean floors threatened to set off a frenzy among nations. The Leverings entered the fray in 1970 as Congress debated the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources bill that promoted a nationalistic approach favored by the U.S. mining lobby. Such a bill, the Leverings feared, would undermine international negotiations to achieve an equitable solution. The 1994 treaty to a large extent vindicated the twenty years the Leverings spent pursuing their quest.

The insider’s perspective that is the appeal of this book also proves to be a limitation. We learn that the Neptune Group “was not an organization,” but rather a label UNCLOS III participants gave to a collection of NGO representatives. These advocates offered programs, lobbied at the conference, and jointly published a newspaper called Neptune. Miriam’s memoir closely follows the crusade to realize the international goals of those NGOs led by her Ocean Education Project, the United Methodist Law of the Sea Project, and Sam’s lobbying organization, the United States Committee for the Oceans. Despite a clear-headed appraisal of the NGOs – their strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures – the details of their efforts begin to blur some of the larger issues at stake. By the end it is difficult to tell exactly what had been won and lost.

In the conclusion, Ralph Levering focuses not on the implications of the treaty so much as on the lessons NGOs could learn from this experience. Chief among those is one that many systems theorists might find hard to accept: “that ordinary people such as the Leverings and their associates...can contribute significantly to human betterment” (p. 164). “Contribute,” yes; “significantly,” maybe. Without a more extensive analysis of what the Neptune Group actually accomplished the level of their contribution remains speculative. To be fair, Levering’s introduction places both the Law of the Sea treaty and the Neptune Group in a larger context. And I think most readers will agree that his admiration for his parents is well merited. The existence of such honorable people frees the rest of us to concentrate more on our private lives, knowing that dedicated servants of the public good like Sam and Miriam Levering are out there fighting on our behalf.

A similar note of admiration informs William Korey’s analysis of the role of NGOs in making the Universal Declaration of Human Rights an effective instrument of world governance. For Korey, as with so many liberal internationalists of his generation, the story begins with Eleanor Roosevelt and her role in promoting the declaration as a “moral manifesto.” To NGOs fell the task of transforming a largely symbolic statement of principle into “‘customary international law’ that carried a veritable obligatory standard” (p. 2). That is the story Korey sets out to tell. Along the way we meet the enemy, not only the dictators, jailers, and juntas who abuse human rights, but also realist theorists of international relations like Hans Morganthau who insisted on “the impossibility of enforcing the universal application of human rights” or the practitioners of realpolitik like Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon who rejected human rights “as a factor serving American international interests” (p. 7). To Korey’s credit he concentrates on making the case for the Declaration and the efficacy of NGOs in applying it, rather than battling the realists.

The breadth of Korey’s study is impressive. After treating the adoption of the declaration, he examines how in the 1970s the Soviet Union orchestrated an assault on NGOs in order to silence them in the United Nations and to curry favor among the Arab nations. The underlying issue was the fate of Soviet Jews. In the wake of this attack many INGOs turned away from the UN as a human rights arena and directed their efforts toward the world media. Beyond the problem of Soviet Jews, Korey addresses the fight over apartheid in South Africa, the transformation of the anti-slavery movement into opposition to child labor abuses, the human rights abuses in Chile and Argentina, Andrei Sakharov’s human rights protests in the Soviet Union, Amnesty International and its campaign against torture, the Genocide Treaties, the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 and its role in undermining the Soviet empire, and a range of NGO human rights activities extending into the 1990s.

While Korey is a widely published author, he is more a partisan than an academic and, as such, often chooses advocacy over analysis. That proves to be a weakness of the book. He shares with many Jewish NGOs and liberal internationalists the determination to make real the post-Holocaust slogan, “Never Again!” The book makes the case that NGOs have provided, in Eleanor Roosevelt’s words, a “curious grapevine” that has spread to the international community word of human rights abuses even in closed societies. In addition to “fact finding” and “information-gathering” Korey suggests that NGOs have a less widely known, but equally critical function, in establishing international standards.

Other scholars will be grateful to Korey for bringing so much material together. What they will learn from it is another matter. Much of the presentation is reportorial, laying out the whos, whats, whys, and wheres. When Korey does interpret, his advocacy limits his objectivity. On the touchy issue of “Asian values,” for example, he is summarily dismissive. In the 1990s some southeast Asian leaders challenged both the validity and the “universality” of the Human Rights Declaration. They suggested that human rights should not be defined solely as “individual political and civil rights,” because “economic rights, cultural rights, social rights are just as important” (p. 469). It did not help the cause of the ASEAN group that a number of its members, Myanmar and Indonesia in particular, had sorry records on human rights.

All the same, Korey’s condemnation suggests the Eurocentrism that, in part, triggered the ASEAN challenge. In a thinly veiled allusion to the Holocaust, Korey writes, “The assault carried with it some ugly overtones that echoed themes utterly rejected by the international community after World War II” (p. 469). That is, of course, the community of liberal political leaders and human rights NGOs, not the community of Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Deng Xiaoping, and the legions of dictators and colonels who have adopted quite another standard. Korey understands the discrepancy, but he is so committed to his liberal western tradition that he does not accord the ASEAN perspective the hearing it may deserve. Nor does he recognize the complicity of Western business leaders in constructing the ASEAN argument. It first emerged in the 1980s when western bankers promoted the Asian tigers as bastions of a new global capitalism. As recently as the winter of 2000 the president of Time Warner embraced Asian values at a Shanghai business summit.

In contrast to Korey’s politicized agenda, Smith, Chatfield, and Pagnucco have a pedagogical purpose. They designed their book as a text for advanced undergraduate and graduate study in international relations. Their subject is a special category of INGOs or what they describe as transnational social movement organizations (TSMO) that affect both governmental and intergovernmental decision making. As such the editors are not simply interested in issues like peace, disarmament, human rights, and environmental protection, but more in the process by which nonstate actors have assumed a prominent role on an increasingly complex world stage. Hence, the concrete case studies such as “the 1980s Freeze Campaign” or Ralph Levering’s essay on “The Neptune Group” support theoretical arguments rather than historical interpretation.

The book is organized into three major sections – an introduction to and definition of TSMOs, nine individually authored case studies, and a discussion of theory. The editors’ most telling point is, perhaps, that it is no longer adequate to treat social movements as national phenomena. They have become increasingly transnational. While most historians will readily accept that conclusion and will find the case studies useful, they may be put off by the preoccupation with theory and occasional lapses into jargon. So we have the following sentence, “Strategic framing processes, activist identities, mobilizing structures, political opportunity structures, and repertoires of contention are orienting concepts now routinely employed to explain the timing, spatial and social location, and successes of citizens’ collective efforts to bring about social change” (p. 243). Huh? The book does take pains to explain each term, but there must be a more direct way to make the same point.

Constructing World Culture is the more compelling of the two theoretical treatments. Certainly, it is the most intellectually rich and challenging of all these books. Again, the strategy is a mixture of theory and case studies that include the environment, women’s rights, Esperanto, the International Red Cross, world polity, population control, development, and science associations. Historians will most likely find the case studies too schematic to serve as useful historical explanations. One possible exception is the chapter on standardization. The authors of this chapter offer a fascinating discussion of a topic of such consequences it is amazing that historians pay so little attention to it. Ask yourself, “Why does a U.S. credit card work in Europe?” After all, you can’t plug a U.S. appliance into a European outlet. “International standards determine credit card thickness (0.76 mm),” the authors explain. They go on to make the larger point that standardization helps reveal “the constitution of world authority, world-cultural conceptions of human purposes, and the limits of coercive power in a decentralized global polity” (p. 170).

After all, what organizations enforce world standards? IGOs (international government organizations) like the World Trade Organization do have some judicial or coercive authority. In the realm of standards the International Standards Organization (ISO), founded in Geneva in 1947, is the leading body in the area of industrial production. That is why photographic film has an ISO rating. Today, some 100 nations participate in the work of the ISO, but it is a small organization with a staff of just 155. In addition to the ISO some 100 national organizations participate in creating the standards that affect most of the people in the world. As the ISO put it, standards should create “improved health, safety and environmental protection and reduction of waste,” as well as “enhanced product quality and reliability at a reduced price” (p. 181). The authors argue such guidelines are determined neither by narrow technical considerations nor national interests. Rather they reflect enlightened rationality. Where standards do not exist, as with digital television formats, the market faces great uncertainty. Or think of the cost of having both left- and right-hand drive automobiles. Nations comply with standards, not because they are coerced, but because they can thereby more readily participate in global markets.

The editors have a larger point to make. They argue that INGOs and IGOs “employ limited resources to make rules, set standards, propagate principles, and broadly represent ’humanity’ vis-à-vis states and other actors” (p. 14). They go beyond that to suggest that traditional international relations theory with its exclusive focus on transnational corporations and nation state actors “in networks of economic, political, and military power” fails to appreciate the impact of INGOs on the world system. In their analysis, INGOs “help shape and define world culture as a distinct level of social reality” (pp. 5–6). Scholars who ignore INGOs or exclusively do state centric-policy analysis are missing a crucial explanatory mechanism.

Like all the other authors, Keck and Sikkink believe that INGOs, while having historical precedents, have become something new under the sun. They argue that “advocacy networks are helping to transform the practice of national sovereignty” (p. 2). Two aspects make NGOs new and different in ways that scholars have been slow to recognize. First is motivation. Advocacy groups tend to operate from principle rather than material or professional concerns. They seek to go beyond policy change to inspire new values. Second is impact. International relations scholars do not expect such nontraditional actors to affect political processes and outcomes. Keck and Sikkink argue that they do, even when their efforts fail.

What makes this book appealing is the balance between theory and case studies. Keck and Sikkink provide an overview that shares many of the perspectives of both Transnational Social Movements and Global Change and Constructing World Culture. They, too, see NGOs as a key factor in the emergence of a global polity that functions outside the system of nation states. Where they are stronger is in the case studies. Their exploration of the historical background along with case studies of INGOs dealing with human rights, the environment, and violence against women have the kind of particularity and scope that make the book useful, especially as a text for courses on contemporary international relations.

Collectively, these books offer diplomatic historians an exciting new perspective. NGOs have indisputably become part of the world political equation. That was most apparent in Seattle during the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization. Policymakers may have found the demonstrators disruptive and annoying, but they could not ignore them, their constituents, or the issues they raised. Nor should diplomatic historians ignore them. Clearly NGOs have made a difference and nation state frames of analysis no longer adequately explain policy formation.

Yet, despite the growing visibility of NGOs, some large questions remain unanswered. First, how deeply has the INGO world culture penetrated national cultures? Is it possible that these groups appeal to cosmopolitan minorities who have more in common with each other than with their fellow nationals? Second, how much difference do NGOs really make? Are we not inclined to notice them and possibly exaggerate their influence because we are sympathetic to their causes? Certainly that seems to be the case in these books. Seldom do the authors subject NGOs or their tactics to skeptical analysis. Might they not ask if genocide is less likely to occur, women to be victimized, or war to be averted because of the new world polity? After Stockholm and Rio how much safer are the rain forests from destruction? Until we have a more systematic way to measure the influence of NGOs on international and national politics, their role in the new global order remains unclear.