The uses of legitimacy in international relations

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 349-375

  Mulligan, Shane P ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

^b NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33645312663     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298060340021801     Document Type: Article

References (130)

1. Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics (London, 1950), 150.
2. A summary bibliography would include Thomas Franck, The Power of Legitimacy Among Nations (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);
3. Jean-Marc Coicaud and Veijo Heiskanen, eds., The Legitimacy of International Organizations (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2001);
4. Jens Steffek, 'The Legitimation of International Governance: A Discourse Approach', European Journal of International Relations 9, no. 2 (2003): 287-313;
5. Daniel Bodansky, 'The Legitimacy of International Governance: A Coming Challenge for International Environmental Law?', American Journal of International Law 93, no. 2 (1999): 596-624;
6. Ian Clark, Legitimacy in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). The literature on the legitimacy concerns of Europe is so extensive as to make any list hopelessly inadequate.
7. This was a fairly common interpretation of Bush's'irrelevance' speech to the UN of 12 September 2002. For instance, Christian Brose, Assistant Editor of The National Interest, interpreted Bush as saying that 'if the U.N. does not act in accordance with its founding principles to subdue the Iraqi threat, it thereby forfeits any legitimacy to which it may once have laid claim'. The National Review Online, (13 September 2002,) [http://www.nationalreview.com/symposium/symposium091302.asp].
8. See also Robert Toulemon, 'Reforming the United Nations', Futuribles 298 (June 2004): 51-68;
9. Clark, Legitimacy in International Society, 203-4;
10. William J. Durch, 'Picking Up the Peaces: The UN's Evolving Postconflict Roles', The Washington Quarterly 26, no. 4 (2003): 195-210, offers a far more optimistic view on the UN's legitimacy.
11. This literature is of course expanding rapidly. See, inter alia, Adam Roberts, 'Law and the Use of Force after Iraq', Survival 45, no. 2 (2003): 31-56;
12. Mark Beeson, 'American Hegemony: The View from Australia', SAIS Review 23, no.2 (2003): 113-31;
13. and Andrea Kathryn Talentino, 'US Intervention in Iraq and the Future of the Normative Order', Contemporary Security Policy 25, no. 2 (2004): 312-38.
14. Robert Kagan, 'America's Crisis of Legitimacy', Foreign Affairs 83, no. 2 (2004): 65-87, observes how the actions of the lone superpower have seriously undermined its own legitimacy.
15. Stephen Zunes, 'Foreign Policy by Catharsis: The Failure of U.S. Policy toward Iraq', Arab Studies Quarterly 23, no. 4 (2001): 69-86, seems to have seen it coming.
16. Ghassan Atiyyah, 'Dealing with Saddam or His Clone', Middle East Policy 7, no 4 (2000): 144-8.
17. See, for example, Ian Hurd, 'Legitimacy and Authority in International Politics', International Organization 53, no. 2 (1999): 381. Other examples will arise throughout this article.
18. Karen T. Litfin, 'Sovereignty in World Ecopolitics', Mershon International Studies Review 41 (1997): 167-204.
19. Hurd, 'Legitimacy and Authority in International Politics'.
20. Martin Wight, 'International Legitimacy', in Systems of States, ed. Hedley Bull (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977), 153-73.
21. Ian Clark, 'Another "Double Movement": The Great Transformation after the Cold War?', Review of International Studies 27, Special Issue (2001): 237-56.
22. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), § II.13.
23. For instance Jonathan Fox, 'The influence of Religious Legitimacy on Grievance Formation by Ethno-Religious Minorities', Journal of Peace Research 36, no. 3 (1999): 289-307.
24. Raymond Geuss, 'Nietzsche and Genealogy', European Journal of Philosophy 2, no. 3 (1994): 274-92.
25. Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume II, ed. James B. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press), 378.
26. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), §§ 65-88.
27. Quentin Skinner, 'Rhetoric and Conceptual Change', Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 3 (1999): 62.
28. For an introduction to the use of Skinner's work in IR see Duncan S.A. Bell, 'Language, Legitimacy and the Project of Critique', Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27, no. 3 (2002).
29. Arnold I. Davidson, 'Structures and Strategies of Discourse: Remarks towards a History of Foucault's Philosophy of Language', in, Foucault and his Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1-17: 5.
30. Skinner and Foucault are closely compared in James Tully, 'The Pen is a Mighty Sword', in, Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, eds. James Tully and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 7-25.
31. Though Tully there insists that '[t]he similarity between the two thinkers should not be overstressed' (p. 291n.), he has more recently brought them together again as representative of a broadly 'practical, critical and historical approach' to political theory; see Tully, 'Political Philosophy as a Critical Activity', Political Theory 30, no. 4 (2002): 533-55.
32. Michel Foucault, 'Two Lectures', in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge, MA, London: The MIT Press, 1994), 17-46: 33.
33. Quoted in Erich Heller, 'Ludwig Wittgenstein - Unphilosophical Notes', Encounter 13 (September 1959): 47.
34. We might also note that Nietzsche had, in his own way, pre-empted him: 'Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement... there stands valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life.' Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil § I.3, in, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), 201.
35. This aspect of Nietzsche's thought is well developed in Tracey B. Strong, 'Language and Nihilism: Nietzsche's Critique of Epistemology', in, Language and Politics, ed. Michael J. Shapiro (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984),81-107.
36. This paragraph derives largely from Quentin Skinner, 'Language and Social Change', in, Meaning and Context, eds. Tully and Skinner 121-3.
37. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), § 522.
38. Tully, 'Political Philosophy', 535.
39. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, § I.14.
40. The etymological summary is compiled from W.W. Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910);
41. Calvert Watkins, 'Indo-European Roots', appended to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd ed. (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 2094-134;
42. Carl Darling Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages: A Contribution to the History of Ideas (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1949, rptd in paperback, 1988), 1180-1;
43. The OED; Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 848-9;
44. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
45. Donald R. Kelley, The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 3.
46. Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 391.
47. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, § III.9.
48. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997), § 9.
49. I am not trying to claim that this normativity is strictly obeyed in practice, for we bend and break the rules all the time. Nietzsche would agree: 'we present-day men live in a very immoral age' (Daybreak, § 9). 'Kings' are challenged, and occasionally deposed, and customs change. My point is simply that legitimacy remains a key tool, and thus an important stake, in such contests.
50. Benveniste, Indo-European Language, 307-13;
51. Watkins, 'Indo-European Roots', 2121-2.
52. H.F. Jolowicz, Historical Introduction to the Study of Roman Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 4-5, refers to the time preceding the Twelve Tables (c. 449 BCE) as 'the period of conjecture' for Roman legal historians.
53. T. J. Cornell, The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000-264 BC) (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 233.
54. David Beetham, 'Legitimacy', in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig, (London: Routledge, 1998), vol. V, 538.
55. There are only two appearances of 'legit' in Leviathan. The first is Latin, where 'ecclesia legitima' is immediately translated as 'a lawful Church' (Ch. XXXIX); the second refers to 'what children are legitimate; and consequently, of the right of succession to hereditary kingdoms' (Ch. XLVII). Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: 1651) Electronic text by ebooksΑdelaide (2004), online [http://etext.library.adelaide.edu. au/h/hobbes/thomas/h681/] (accessed June 2005).
56. John Locke, An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government (London: 1764 [1690]). Electronic text by ebooksΑdelaide (2004), online [http://etext.library.adelaide.edu. au/1/locke/john/181s/] (accessed June 2005).
57. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (P.F. Collier & Son, 1910). Electronic text by ebooksΑdelaide (2004), online [http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/h/hume/david/h92e/] (accessed June 2005).
58. Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh, 1776). Electronic text by ebooksΑdelaide (2004), online [http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/s/s64w/] (accessed June 2005).
59. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, 3rd edition (London: Printed for J.S. Jordan, 1791). Electronic text by ebooksΑdelaide (2004), online [http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/p147r/] (accessed June 2005).
60. By contrast, in J.S. Mill's On Liberty the term appears 22 times: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (P.F. Collier & Son, 1909). Electronic version by ebooksΑdelaide (2004), online [http:// etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john§uart/m645o/] (accessed June 2005).
61. And as anywhere, there were exceptions. Perhaps the first references to a distinctly evaluative, rather than genealogical, sense of 'legitimate government' occurs in French literature in the late sixteenth century, and in dictionaries of the early eighteenth, as noted in Arthur Isak Applbaum, 'Legitimacy in a Bastard Kingdom', presented in the 'General Aspects of Law' seminar at the University of California, Berkeley, 21 November 2003; online [http://www.law.berkeley.edu/cenpro/kadish/ applbaum-berkeley.pdf], 19-20 (retrieved March 2004). Yet in England this development was much delayed.
62. William Hazlitt noted in 1818 that this '"Fine word, Legitimate!"... is not written in our annals in the years 1688, in 1715, or 1745. It was not sterling then... Has it become so since?' (quoted in Stuart Semmel, 'British Radicals and "Legitimacy": Napoleon in the Mirror of History', Past and Present no. 167 [2000]: 140). According to Semmel, '[t]he introduction of "legitimacy" into British political discourse seems to have been directly connected to the peculiar case of Napoleon' (Semmel, 'Napoleon', 146). Again, however, this is not without exception; the first English translations of Hobbes' de Cive translated the Latin legitimus as 'legitimate'; though whether this would have been entirely comprehensible to his more vulgar contemporaries remains an open question.
63. This was the essence of Edmund's argument against Harold in Shakespeare's King Lear, as Applbaum, 'Legitimacy in a Bastard Kingdom', discusses at some length.
64. The details of the conceptual changes that took place in this period remain open to much research and debate. On legitimacy in particular, see Semmel, 'Napoleon';
65. Applbaum, 'Legitimacy in a Bastard Kingdom';
66. Stephen Holmes, 'Two Concepts of Legitimacy: France after the Revolution', Political Theory 10, no. 2 (1982): 165-83;
67. Clark, Legitimacy in International Society, offers a splendid assessment of the changing face(s) of legitimacy among the European powers in this period.
68. A number of commentators have insisted that Carr and Bull were surely talking about legitimacy questions, even if they didn't use the word. As with Hobbes and Locke, we want to use the term to describe their arguments; that we do, despite that they themselves did not, is precisely the shift I am speaking of.
69. 'International Organizations: Summary of Activities', International Organization 5, no. 1 (1951): 105-6.
70. Wight, 'International Legitimacy', 153.
71. Inis L. Claude, Jr., 'Collective Legitimization as a Political Function of the United Nations', International Organization 20, no. 3 (1966): 367.
72. Claude, 'Collective Legitimization', 368.
73. Claude, 'Collective Legitimization', 369.
74. Let us recall that Hobbes himself referred to the Sovereign as a 'Mortall God' in Leviathan, Ch XVII.
75. Henry Kissinger, A World Restored (London: Victor Gollancz, 1977), 1.
76. Clark, Legitimacy in International Society, 247.
77. Kissinger, A World Restored, 172.
78. Kissinger, A World Restored, 172; emphasis added.
79. This point is often made with regard to the WTO, and will be explored further below.
80. Ernst Haas, When Knowledge is Power: Three Models of Change in International Organizations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 87.
81. Similarly, Clark (Legitimacy in International Society, 105) sees Kissinger's 'legitimacy' as little more than 'the product of many states pursuing their own self-interests', and thus questions the appropriateness of this use of the term. Cf. Bodansky, 'The Legitimacy of International Governance'. One might of course argue that, based on the social contract, a state's own interests are in fact its only legitimate pursuit. While somewhat out of fashion among many IR scholars, the isolationist argument may well be defensible in liberal political thought.
82. See, for example, Allen Buchanan, 'The Internal Legitimacy of Humanitarian Intervention', Journal of Political Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1999): 71-87.
83. Hurd, 'Legitimacy and Authority in International Politics', 382.
84. David D. Caron, 'The Legitimacy of the Collective Authority of the Security Council', American Journal of International Law 87, no. 4 (1993): 557.
85. Bodansky, 'The Legitimacy of International Governance', 602n.
86. Indeed, this deliberate pursuit of unreason puts a Habermasian quest for international legitimation in a double bind. See Shane Mulligan, 'Questioning (the Question of) Legitimacy in IR: A Reply to Steffek', European Journal of International Relations 10, no. 3 (2004): 475-84.
87. As in Litfin, 'Sovereignty in World Ecopolitics';
88. Steffek, 'The Legitimation of International Governance'.
89. Hannah Finichel Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 284-5.
90. An excellent examination of the importance of training in Wittgenstein's thought is José Medina, The Unity of Wittgenstein's Philosophy: Necessity, Intelligibility, and Normativity (State University of New York Press, 2002), esp. 141-94. 1 am grateful to Jim Tully for directing me to this reference.
91. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, 'A Lecture on Ethics', The Philosophical Review 74, no. 1 (1965): 3-12.
92. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 206.
93. Max Weber, 'Politics as a Vocation', in, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948), 80.
94. The point on the synonymy of legitimacy and order is well put in Robert F. Grafstein, 'The Failure of Weber's Conception of Legitimacy: Its Causes and Implications', The Journal of Politics 43, no. 2 (1981): 456-72.
95. See also Rosemary T. O'Kane, 'Against Legitimacy', Political Studies 41 (1993): 471-87.
96. The exception, of course, is when, by tone or punctuation, one puts 'legitimacy' in inverted commas. But this is to speak of a 'legitimacy' which is not really legitimate. And while we do sometimes make this move in our language games, it marks an exception, one we might designate as 'scepticism'. Yet there is limited room for such an attitude within scholarly analysis; the culture does not allow it.
97. Similarly, Clark sees legitimacy as a confluence of normative principles which are themselves in continuous contestation for dominance. Struggles over legitimacy, in his view, tend to result in the dominance of one or another principle. Clark, Legitimacy in International Society, esp. 166-7.
98. See David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, eds., Global Governance and Public Accountability, Government and Opposition 39, no. 2, Special Issue (2004);
99. Alasdair Roberts, 'A Partial Revolution: The Diplomatic Ethos and Transparency in Intergovernmental Organizations', Public Administration Review 64, no. 4 (2004): 410-24.
100. Bodansky, 'The Legitimacy of International Governance', 596;
101. we also find the phrase in James Mayall, 'Democracy and International Society', International Affairs 76 (2000): 61-75;
102. and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., 'Globalization's Democratic Deficit', Foreign Affairs 80, no. 4 (2001): 2-6.
103. Michael Zürn, 'Global Governance and Legitimacy Problems', Government and Opposition 39, no. 2 (2004): 260-87;
104. cf. J. H. H. Weiler, 'The Transformation of Europe', in The Constitution of Europe: 'Do the New Clothes Have an Emperor?' and Other Essays on European Integration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 80-1.
105. Steffek, 'The Legitimation of International Governance';
106. also Thomas Risse, 'Global Governance and Communicative Action', Government and Opposition 39, no. 2 (2004): 288-313.
107. Ilan Kapoor, 'Deliberative democracy and the WTO', Review of International Political Economy 11, no. 3 (2004): 522-41;
108. M. Bronckers, 'Better Rules for the New Millennium: A Warning against Undemocratic Developments in the WTO', Journal of International Economic Law 2, no. 4 (1999).
109. Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann, 'The WTO Constitution and Human Rights', Journal of International Economic Law 3 (2000): 12;
110. cited in Robert Howse and Kalypso Nicolaidis, 'Enhancing WTO Legitimacy: Constitutionalization or Global Subsidiarity?', Governance 16, no. 1 (2003): 81.
111. Applbaum, 'Legitimacy in a Bastard Kingdom';
112. Robert Howse, 'The Legitimacy of the World Trade Organization', in Coicaud and Heiskanen, The Legitimacy of International Organizations, 355-407.
113. Steffek, 'The Legitimation of International Governance'.
114. Chris Brown, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 2-3.
115. Beetham, 'Legitimacy', 541.
116. James Tully, 'Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy', in, The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, ed. Cressida J. Heyes (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 17-42.
117. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), § 166.
118. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, § 142.
119. Surely we can see this 'normative appeal' of rules themselves in notions like 'the rule of law' and constitutionalism generally. For a fascinating historical overview of legitimacy understood in terms of constitutionality, and its relevance for the international setting, see Philip Allott, 'Intergovernmental Societies and the Idea of Constitutionalism', in The Legitimacy of International Organizations, eds. Coicaud and Heiskanen, 69-103.
120. This point is examined at length in Mulligan, 'Questioning (the Question of) Legitimacy'.
121. Hannah Pitkin, 'Obligation and Consent - II', The American Political Science Review 60, no. 1 (1966): 44.
122. Howse, 'The Legitimacy of the World Trade Organization', 396.
123. Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', 378.
124. I appreciate one reviewer's concerns on this point, and agree that it calls for further consideration. Steffek, in 'The Legitimation of International Governance', suggests we could address the distinction by looking at the WTO in terms of Weber's notion of 'bureaucratic' legitimation.
125. For an extension of this argument in terms of 'authority' more generally, see Peter Winch, 'How is Political Authority Possible?', Philosophical Investigations 25, no. 1 (2002): 20-32.
126. See also Jacques Derrida, 'Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation of Authority"', in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 3-67.
127. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), § 58.
128. An explicit comparison on the EU and the WTO is in Howse and Nicolaidis, 'Enhancing WTO Legitimacy', esp. 83-6.
129. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), 17-19.
130. Russell L. Hanson, 'Democracy' in, Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, eds. Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 68-89.