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Transnational Organizations in World Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Samuel P. Huntington
Samuel P. Huntington
Affiliation:
Government and Associate Director of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.
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Extract

These twelve organizations appear to have little in common. They are public and private, national and international, profit-making and charitable, religious and secular, civil and military, and, depending on one's perspective, benign and nefarious. Yet they do share three characteristics. First, each is a relatively large, hierarchically organized, centrally directed bureaucracy. Second, each performs a set of relatively limited, specialized, and, in some sense, technical functions: gathering intelligence, investing money, transmitting messages, promoting sales, producing copper, delivering bombs, saving souls. Third, each organization performs its functions across one or more international boundaries and, insofar as is possible, in relative disregard of those boundaries.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , April 1973 , pp. 334 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1973

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References

2 See Diana Crane, “Transnational Networks in Basic Science,” ibid., 245–46; Robert L. Thornton, ”Governments and Airlines,” ibid., 193, 196.

3 Kjell Skjelsbaek, “The Growth of International Non-governmental Organization in the Twentieth Century,” ibid., 77.

4 See, for instance, Crane, (fn. 2), 245–46Google Scholar; Vernon, Raymond, Sovereignty at Bay (New York 1971), 95–96.Google Scholar

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7 Just as states like New Jersey and Delaware provided tax and other advantages to companies which located their headquarters within the state, some European countries offer comparable concessions. American corporations thus set up Tax-Haven Companies in countries where “after negotiations with the government, taxes are either greatly reduced for the company or completely eliminated.” In the words of the Rey Commission report for the European Economic Community:

“The THC is a company that is not, as a rule, intended to fulfil a useful economic or financial function, but simply to allow its parent company to reduce to a minimum its overall tax burden.

“The idea is to establish the company's official headquarters in a place where foreign income is partially or completely tax-free and to increase artificially the charges against production or distribution subsidiaries, so as to enable the THC to increase its revenue from various services, such as licencing, consultant work, and interest on loans, which it provides to the subsidiaries.

“These THC, set up most frequently in the small neutral countries that specialize in them, enable American firms to make conscious use of loopholes or contradictions in the tax legislation of the various European countries.”

Quoted in Le Monde (Weekly Selection), July 1, 1970, p. 5.

8 Rolfe, Sidney E., “The International Corporation in Perspective,” in Rolfe, and Damm, Walter E., eds., The Multinational Corporation in the World Economy (New York 1970), 12.Google Scholar

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