Limited Cooperation: The U.S. Congress And The U.N.

The paradigm of structuralism in the theory of internationalism overlooks the important actors such as domestic politics and international institutions. International institutions face the challenges of aggregating consensus and acquiring supports from states. Power, legitimacy, national interests, and international democracy are the important variables relating to the interaction between domestics and international institutions.This dissertation chooses the cooperation relationship between US Congress and the UN as the research object. It focuses on the analysis of two cases of the UN peacekeeping operations and the UN reform basing on the development process of the relationship between the US Congress and the UN. It mainly adopts the theory of international institutions and the method of text explaining, tries to understand the role of the US Congress in the relationship between the US and the UN, and deepens the understanding of the influences, limitations, and reform of the UN in global affairs. Based on the above, it draws the following basic arguments.The US Congress has the power basis including financial supports, treaty ratification, official ratification, and preference shaping, to influence the relationship between the US and the UN. The US Congress influences greatly the formation, charter making, reform, peacekeeping operations, and financing of the UN. Exceptionalism, conservatism, divided government, partisanship and bureaucratic interests are the main domestic factors influencing the attitude of the US Congress towards the UN. The power status of the US offers the US Congress the privilege to treat the UN with instrumentalism attitude. The belief of conservatism induces the skepticism attitude towards the UN. The complex of conservatism encourages the US Congress to reshape the UN according to its own ideas. The parochial concerns of US Congress about the US sovereignty and national interests cast a shadow on the relationship.The UN enjoys the advantages such as legitimacy, burden sharing, confirmation of the great power status, and formation of global norms, which makes it difficult to get substantial influence by the voices within the US Congress insisting to remove the US from the UN. The difficulties of the UN in its peacekeeping operations, financial operation, and reform make it clear that the UN still needs to eliminate its members' qualms by deepening its reform. The goal of the UN reform should be constructing an effective, democratic, and accountable global institution.