Legitimacy beyond the state: institutional purposes and contextual constraints (original) (raw)
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Legitimacy in International Law and International Relations
Interdisciplinary Perspective on International Law and International Relations: The State of the art, eds. by Jeffrey Dunoff and Mark Pollack, 2012
Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of interest, both among international lawyers and international relations scholars, in the legitimacy of international institutions. The issue of international legitimacy raises many important questions. Conceptually, what do we mean by “legitimacy” and what is its relation to other concepts such as legality, authority, obedience, power, self-interest, morality and justice? Normatively, what standards should we use to assess the legitimacy of international institutions? Descriptively, what standards do different actors (government officials, international bureaucrats, civil society groups, and business) actually use in assessing the legitimacy of international institutions? Finally, causally, what factors explain the creation of institutions with normative legitimacy, wha factors explain why institutions are accepted as legitimate, and how much practical difference do beliefs about legitimacy make -- for example, for the effectiveness and stability of an institution? This paper surveys the international law and international relations literatures on these issues. Despite many areas of convergence between the IL and IR literatures on legitimacy, there are also important differences. International relations scholars focus on the legitimacy of international institutions rather than of international law. Although many international lawyers share this institutional orientation, some have attempted to develop a more specific theory of legal legitimacy, based on internal qualities of the legal system (for example, whether rules are clear, prospective, and public, and whether they were adopted in conformity with the legal system’s secondary rules about norm creation), rather than on the political process by which the rules were produced or their substantive outcomes. This concern with what Lon Fuller called the internal morality of the law, has no counterpart among political scientists, who have shown little interest in the legitimacy of international law as such.
The Concept of Legitimacy in International Law
Legitimacy in International Law, eds. by Rudiger Wolfrum , 2008
Remarks at a workshop on Legitimacy in International Law held in June 2006 at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. The paper analyzes the relationship of legitimacy to legality and to self-interest; argues that much of the writing on legitimacy fails to distinguish adequately between normative and sociological legitimacy; observes that legitimacy is among the class of concepts that we can define with more confidence negatively than positively; and recommends analyzing the problem of legitimacy in a more differentiated, contextual way, focusing on how much authority an institution exercises, the nature of the issues it exercises authority over, and the type of authority it exercises.
Global Governance and Legitimacy Problems
Government and Opposition, 2004
Whereas traditional institutions used to be seen as an international complement to a dominantly national paradigm, today's international institutions are an expression of political denationalization. The new international institutions are much more intrusive into national societies than the traditional ones. They increasingly contain supranational and transnational features and thus undermine the consensus principle of international cooperation. When society and political actors begin to comprehend this change, they begin to reflect on the features of a legitimate and effective political order beyond national borders. As a result, denationalization becomes reflexive and thus politicized. At the same time, the politicization of international politics harbours the potential for resistance to political denationalization, which increases the need – both from a normative and descriptive perspective – for the legitimation of such international institutions.
The Shifting Boundaries of Legitimacy in International Law
Nordic Journal of International Law , 2018
Legitimacy has become a central concern in international law. This article analyses an important aspect of the concept, namely the often presumed link between legitimacy and the stability of institutions and norms. The explanatory role of legitimacy hinges on the descriptive elements attributed to legitimacy because, only by fixing those elements, a causal link can be established. The article contends that due to its conceptual features legitimacy cannot be circumscribed descriptively, making the tracing of its relationship to the stability of institutions and norms in the international legal order an intractable task. The article suggests that international lawyers should embrace the open-ended nature of legitimacy and focus on its dynamic dimension: legitimation. Legitimacy is treated as a rhetorical tool whereby actors try to pursue certain courses of action. The importance of legitimacy then lies in its employment for the shaping of perceptions with regard to how institutions ought to be.
Tying Legitimacy to Political Power: Graded Legitimacy Standards for International Institutions.
European Journal of Political Theory, 2019
International institutions have become increasingly important not only in the relations between states, but also for individuals. When are these institutions legitimate? The legitimacy standards for international institutions are predominantly either minimal or democratic and cannot capture the large variety of international institutions. This paper develops an autonomy-based conception of legitimacy based on the justification of political power that is applicable to both international and domestic institutions. Political power as rule-setting is a particular normative threat to the personal and political autonomy of its subjects. The more political power an institution exercises, the more demanding the legitimacy standards it needs to fulfill in order to be legitimate. The paper argues that an increase in the four dimensions of political power (scope, domain sensitivity, applicability, and impact) raises the legitimacy burden for the institution. Finally, graded legitimacy standards are proposed. These are sensitive to the differences between international institutions in respect of their levels of political power, i.e. level of competences. In contrast to minimal or democratic legitimacy standards, the paper suggests that different standards of accountability, participation, and human rights have to be fulfilled according to the institution’s level of political power.
Legitimacy in Global Governance: International, Transnational and Private Institutions Compared
Swiss Political Science Review, 2012
How to generate legitimate forms of governance beyond the nation state is often considered a central question in contemporary world politics (Moravcsik 2004: 336). To proceed in theory-building, scholars need to systematically assign the theory-driven assumptions on legitimate forms of governance beyond the nation-state with the various, already observable, forms of global governance. This article aims to conduct a comparative appraisal of the legitimatory quality of different patterns of governance by applying a framework of indicators for their assessment. The indicators are selected from the scholarly debate within International Relations on the legitimacy of global governance arrangements and structured by a multi-dimensional concept of legitimacy (input-, throughput-and output-dimension). This framework is then applied to international, transnational and private forms of global governance in three policy fields in order to show how each of them try to produce and maintain legitimacy, which strategies they apply and in how they interact with their stakeholders.
The Legitimacy and Legitimation of International Organizations: Introduction and Framework
While legitimacy dynamics are paramount in global governance, they have been insufficiently recognized, conceptualized, and explained in standard accounts of international cooperation. This special issue aims to spearhead the empirical study of legitimacy and legitimation in global governance. It addresses the overarching question of when, how, and why international organizations (IOs) gain, sustain, and lose legitimacy in world politics. It engages with this question comparatively, mapping and explaining patterns in legitimacy and legitimation across multiple dimensions. In this introduction, we first conceptualize legitimacy as the belief that an IO’s authority is appropriately exercised, and legitimation and delegitimation as processes of justification and contestation intended to shape such beliefs. We then theorize sources of variation in legitimation processes and legitimacy beliefs, with a particular focus on the authority, procedures, and performances of IOs. Finally, we describe the methods used to empirically study legitimacy and legitimation, and preview the articles of the special issue in the context of the broader research problems they address.
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Discusses recent efforts among theorists of world politics to defend a supposed concept of international legitimacy. Reviews claims that legitimacy is either primarily an empirically verifiable condition or a normative one, and finds both claims unjustified. Argues that the "concept" of legitimacy is a completely incoherent idea-it is defended only through association with a wide range of more established social concepts, the result being that there is very little evidence that the concept itself has anything distinctive about it. Given this situation, it is misguided to persist in attempting to use such a fundamentally confused and tautological idea as an explanation for anything. Explanations offered on the basis of confused ideas are themselves bound to be confused. "Legitimacy" should be left behind in favour of concepts that are more substantial and more important to analysis and theorization of world politics.
In this article, which focuses on different concepts of state-building and legitimacy as used in the mainstream International Relations (IR) literature, I suggest that recent debates may be categorized in a two-by-two matrix. The axes concern the choice between a normative or a sociological perspective on the one hand, and a focus on state institutions or on society on the other. The article identifies an empiricist-sociological approach. Still, the almost exclusive reliance on an ontology of entities and their attributes hampers foci on relations as constituting both “insides” and “outsides” in state-building, and on legitimacy as important in its own right as ongoing public contestations. In a concluding section, I explore the purchase of a relational sociology for future studies of legitimacy in state-building.
Sources of Legitimacy in Global Governance
Outlines of global transformations: politics, economics, law, 2019
The ideas in this article have developed largely through my participation since 2016 in the Legitimacy in Global Governance (LegGov) programme, with generous funding from the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Grant M15-0048:1). The arguments presented here draw upon (although also extend and in some respects deviate from) earlier collective LegGov work, particularly in Jonas Tallberg, Karin Bäckstrand and Jan Aart Scholte (eds), Legitimacy in Global Governance: Sources, Processes, and Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). My thanks to LegGov colleagues and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful feedback on earlier drafts of the article.