1.2 Origin and Development of International Organization

The stages' ladder: (i) the administrative unions of the 19th century — the Rhine Commission (1815), the International Telegraph Union (1865, today's ITU) and the Universal Postal Union (1874): technical cooperation's first bureaucracies; (ii) the Hague Conferences (1899, 1907 — the codification-and-peace congresses; the Permanent Court of Arbitration's birth); (iii) the League of Nations (1919/1920 — the first general political organisation; the Covenant; the permanent court; the unanimity rule and the absent powers' weaknesses); (iv) the United Nations (1945 — the Charter; the two-worlds experience correcting the League: great-power executive, weighted voting in the councils, the specialised family); (v) the post-1945 explosion — the specialised agencies, the regional organisations (EU, OAS, OAU/AU, ASEAN, SAARC), the economic institutions, and today's dense lattice of treaty bodies, courts and regimes (climate, trade, health, cyber). The development's arc: from conference to institution; from the state's diplomatic servant to the system's governance organ.