13 Dissolution and succession: The transmigration of the soul of international organizations Ramses A. Wessel SOUL SEARCHING Perhaps the ultimate question to judge the autonomous existence of interna- tional organizations is whether member states can simply dissolve an interna- tional organization – or replace it by another one – once its services are no longer considered necessary. From the perspective of states creating interna- tional organizations to perform certain functions they cannot or do not wish to perform themselves, one would argue that organizations are primarily tools in the hands of their member states; and, once no longer needed or appropriate, tools obviously lose their relevance. In fact, it is this approach that would seem to have been dominant during most of the life and times of international orga- nizations (Klabbers, Chapter 1 of this book, and 2005a: 151–181). After all, since the attribution of powers principle remains at the heart of our under- standing of international organizations, the latter must wait for whatever table scraps national governments decide to leave them, if they do at all. It would be too easy to contend that the alternative, constitutional, perspec- tive would focus more on – what Germans would refer to as – the ‘Eigendynamik’ of international organizations and, hence, would draw our attention to their autonomy (Collins and White, 2011). In fact, as shown in the first chapter of this book, constitutionalism, albeit from a normative rather than a pragmatic angle, also purports to control the activities of international organizations. One could argue that, while functionalism keeps international organizations in the hands of their member states, constitutionalism places them under the control of values. On the other hand, one could equally contend that the ‘functional necessity’ approach provides more autonomy to interna- tional organizations since it allows for the organization to act once this is necessary to attain its objectives. And, to make things even more complicated, it would probably be acceptable to argue that ‘constitutionalism’ endows inter- national organizations with more competences than they would have on the basis of attributed, or even implied, powers. The constitutional development of an international organization may be an ‘autonomous’ process and there 342