No Defenseless Scapegoats! Blame Avoidance Strategies of International Organizations

Abstract

How do international organizations (IOs) respond to their member states’ blame attributions? Research often depicts IOs as good scapegoats for their member states when IO policies fail because they do not have to and are unable and unwilling to defend themselves. On the contrary, we argue that IO representatives try to prevent IOs from taking the blame for failed policies in public. IOs are thus not passive blame takers, but active blame avoiders. In some cases, they are willing to ignore the attribution of blame by their member states, but in other cases they try to blur their own responsibility or even attack the member states. To explain this, we develop a theory of blame avoidance by IOs according to which the authority of an IO determines which blame avoidance strategy its representatives adopt. Depending on whether the authority an IO exercises is intergovernmental, supranational or hybrid in the respective policy field, it will react to blame attributions from its member states through strategies of ignoring, blurring or attacking. We demonstrate the plausibility of our theory by means of a media content analysis of the European Commission’s responsibility attributions for three contested EU migration policies. We thereby contribute to a better understanding of IOs’ blame avoidance strategies.