Conceptualising hegemonic legitimacy

Review of International Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 113-149

  Rapkin, David P ^a   Braaten, Dan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67749108057     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210509008353     Document Type: Article

References (127)

1. Robert Kagan, 'America's Crisis of Legitimacy', Foreign Affairs, 83 (2004), p. 67.
2. Kagan, 'America's Crisis of Legitimacy', pp. 67, 68.
3. Edward C. Luck, 'The United States, International Organizations, and the Quest for Legitimacy', in Stewart Patrick and Shepard Forman (eds), Multilateralism and US Foreign Policy (Boulder, CO: Rienner, 2002), p. 47.
4. The most comprehensive, in-depth treatment is provided by Ian Clark, Legitimacy in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
5. For other recent works on international legitimacy see the special issues of the journals, Review of International Studies, 31 (2005)
6. and International Politics, 44 (2007)
7. reprinted as a book, David Armstrong, Theo Farrell, and Bice Maiguashca (eds), Force and Legitimacy in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005);.
8. The former focuses on legitimacy and the use of force, the latter on crises of legitimacy. Also very useful is the exchange between Kagan, 'America's Crisis of Legitimacy', and Kagan, 'A Matter of Record: Security, Not Law, Established American Legitimacy', Foreign Affairs, 84 (2005), pp. 170-3;
9. and Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, 'Sources of American Legitimacy', Foreign Affairs (2004), pp. 18-32,
10. and Tucker and Hendrickson, 'The Flip Side of the Record: The Commitment to Law Is Key to US Legitimacy', Foreign Affairs, 84 (2005), pp. 139-41.
11. Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edn (London: Blackwell, 1968), nos 65-75.
13. For a useful discussion of Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances, see Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 71-3, 89-91.
14. David Collier and James E. Mahon, Jr, 'Conceptual 'Stretching' Revisited: Adapting Categories in Comparative Analysis', American Political Science Review, 87 (December 1993), pp. 845-55, and;
15. Goertz, Social Science Concepts.
16. Richard M. Merelman, 'Learning and Legitimacy', American Political Science Review, 60 (1966), pp. 548-61;
17. Thomas M. Franck, 'Legitimacy in the International System', American Journal of International Law, 82 (1988), pp. 705-59;
18. Ian Hurd, 'Legitimacy and Authority in International Politics', International Organization, 53 (1999), pp. 379-408.
19. Giovanni Sartori, 'Guidelines for Concept Analysis', in Giovanni Sartori (ed.), Social Science Concepts (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1984), pp. 15-85.
20. The substitutability of multiple constitutive meanings, not all of which are 'necessary', is far from common social scientific practice. It is not unique, however, to the FRC approach. In the context of formulating 'substantive requirements for the legitimacy of global governance institutions', Allen Buchanan and Robert O. Keohane, 'The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions', Ethics and International Affairs, 20 (2006), p. 424, recognise that, 'there might be extraordinary circumstances in which an institution would fail to satisfy one or two of them, yet still be reasonably regarded as legitimate. They further suggest that their 'three substantive requirements are best thought of as what Rawls calls 'counting principles': the more of them an institution satisfies, and the higher the degree to which it satisfies them, the stronger its claim to legitimacy.'
21. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 415-16.
22. Sartori, 'Guidelines for Concept Analysis'.
23. Goertz, Social Science Concepts, p. 10.
24. Although not concerned with denotation per se, Hurd provides a fascinating study of how a single action - the US invasion of Iraq - triggered legitimacy crises at three levels of denotation. First, by attempting to justify the invasion in terms of a right to preventive use of force against the alleged Iraqi threat without demonstrating that the threat was imminent, the US created a crisis of legitimacy of the existing norms on preemptive/preventive war. Second, by taking action widely perceived to be outside of prevailing rules and norms, the US created a crisis in the legitimacy of its own hegemonic power. Third, the invasion also risked a crisis of legitimacy in, 'the basic constitution of the international system, from a hegemonic order to something else', Ian Hurd, 'Breaking and Making Norms: American Revisionism and Crises of Legitimacy', International Politics, 44 (2007), p. 206.
25. Jens Steffeck, 'The Legitimation of International Governance: A Discourse Approach', European Journal of International Relations, 9 (2003), p. 57.
26. See Christian Reus-Smit, 'International Crises of Legitimacy', International Politics, 44 (2007), p. 164 for the idea of a 'social constituency of legitimation, the actual social grouping in which legitimacy is sought, ordained, or both'.
27. For the notion of 'recognitional legitimacy', see Allen Buchanan, 'Recognitional Legitimacy and the State System', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 28, 1 (1999), pp. 46-78.
28. See Mlada Bukovansky, Legitimacy and Power Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) for the transformation of political legitimacy that accompanied the shift from monarchical to popular sovereignty brought about by the American and French revolutions.
29. Hurd, 'Legitimacy and Authority';
30. Buchanan and Keohane, 'The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions;
31. 'John-Marc Coicaud and Veijo Heiskanen (eds), The Legitimacy of International Organizations (New York: UN University Press, 2001);
32. Leonard Seabrooke, 'Legitimacy Gaps in the World Economy: Explaining the Sources of the IMF's Legitimacy Crisis', International Politics, 44 (March/May 2007), pp. 250-68.
33. G. C. A. Junne, 'International Organizations in a Period of Globalization: New (Problems of) Legitimacy', in Coicaud and Heiskanen (eds), The Legitimacy of International Organizations (2001), p. 191. Similar issues arise in consideration of the legitimacy of international regimes, which may not entail formal organisations.
34. See, for example, Robyn Eckersley, 'Ambushed: The Kyoto Protocol, the Bush Administration's Climate Policy and the Erosion of Legitimacy', International Politics, 44 (2007), pp. 306-24.
35. For an excellent treatment of how international legitimacy relates to the older conception of international society and the emergent phenomena of world society, see Ian Clark, International Legitimacy and World Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
36. Henry Kissinger, American Foreign Policy (New York: W. W. Norton 1977), p. 145.
37. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton).
38. For a seminal work in the modern Gramscian approach to international legitimacy (usually cast in terms of consent) and its application to hegemony, see Robert Cox, Production, Power and World Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
39. The liberal approach has been most thoroughly developed in the work of G. John Ikenberry, 'Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Persistence of American Postwar Order', International Security, 23 (1998-99), pp. 43-78;
40. Ikenberry, After Victory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2001),
41. and; Ikenberry and Charles A. Kupchan, 'The Legitimation of Hegemonic Power', in David P. Rapkin (ed.), World Leadership and Hegemony (Boulder, CO: Rienner, 1990), pp. 49-69.
42. For a conceptual survey of hegemony, including the importance of legitimacy, see David P. Rapkin, 'The Contested Concept of Hegemonic Leadership', in Rapkin (ed.), World Leadership and Hegemony, pp. 1-19.
43. See David P. Rapkin, 'Empire and Its Discontents', New Political Economy, 10 (2005) for the argument that the United States exercised a largely legitimate form of hegemony for much of the post-World War period, but more recently has discounted or discarded altogether legitimacy concerns in a bid for a kind of empire.
44. Hurd, 'Breaking and Making Norms';
45. Rapkin, 'Empire and Its Discontents', and;
46. Bruce Cronin, 'The Paradox of Hegemony: America's Ambiguous Relationship with the United Nations', European Journal of International Relations, 7 (2001), pp. 103-30.
47. The differences between international legitimacy and hegemonic legitimacy are straddled by the phrase, 'US foreign policy legitimacy', as used by Shirley V. Scott and Olivia Ambler, 'Does Legality Really Matter? Accounting for the Decline in US Foreign Policy Legitimacy Following the 2003 Invasion of Iraq', European Journal of International Relations, 13 (2007), pp. 67-87;
48. and by Nayef Samhat and Rodger A. Payne, 'American Foreign Policy Legitimacy and the Global Public Sphere', Peace Review, 18 (2007), pp. 251-9.
49. Samhat and Payne, 'American Foreign Policy Legitimacy', p. 252.
50. John G. Ruggie, 'Reconstituting the Global Public Domain - Issues, Actors, and Practices', European Journal of International Relations, 10 (2004), p. 509.
51. Samhat and Payne, 'American Foreign Policy Legitimacy', p. 259.
52. Andrew Hurrell, 'Legitimacy and the Use of Force: Can the Circle Be Squared?', Review of International Studies, 31 (2005), p. 24.
53. Martha Finnemore, 'Fights About Rules: The Role of Efficacy and Power in Changing Multilateralism', Review of International Studies, 31 (2005), p. 205.
54. Clark, Legitimacy in International Society, p. 13.
55. We expect basic level definitions will travel the furthest across time, space, and other denotations, for example IOs or NGOs; secondary characteristics less so, and; indicator-level definitions to be the least generalisable.
56. Clark, Legitimacy in International Society.
57. See also Bukovansky, Legitimacy and Power Politics, pp. 39-40 for a related view of hegemony as a 'legitimacy contest'.
58. For a useful discussion of delegitimation as a strategy of opposition, see Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power (New York: Norton, 2005), pp. 160-78.
59. Mark Suchman, 'Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches', Academy of Management Review, 20 (1995), p. 575.
60. Hurd, 'Legitimacy and Authority', p. 381.
61. Nossel, 'Going Legit', p. 30.
62. Reus-Smit, 'International Crises', p. 159.
63. Hurd, 'Legitimacy and Authority', frames this sense of legitimacy - rules or actors that deserve to be followed - with two other motivations for compliant behaviour, coercion and self-interest, to form a three-part Weberian categorisation of 'modes of social control'.
64. Clark, Legitimacy in International Society, pp. 162-3.
65. For this distinction, as well as a broader conceptual overview, see George J. Graham, 'Consensus', in Giovanni Sartori (ed.), Social Science Concepts: A Systematic Analysis (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1984), pp. 89-124.
66. For another thorough treatment of consent and consensus, see P. H. Partridge, Consent and Consensus (London: Macmillan, 1971).
67. See David Beetham, The Legitimation of Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), p. 95 for discussion of what he terms the 'expressive modes of consent . . . whereby the subordinate demonstrate their commitment to a regime by voluntary actions supportive of its policies'.
68. Lea Brilmayer, American Hegemony (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 108.
69. Joseph Joffe, Uberpower (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 207.
70. Graham, 'Consensus', p. 93, points out that that acquiescence is among the dictionary definitions of the noun consent.
71. Brilmayer, American Hegemony, pp. 66-7;
72. see chapters 4-6, provides an extensive overview of consent theory from a legal standpoint, including hypothetical consent as well as the contemporaneous and ex ante varieties. Though not using the term 'consent', Hurd, 'Legitimacy and Authority', p. 398, makes a similar distinction in his discussion of the legitimacy of IGOs: actors may proceed on a case-by-case basis and consider legitimacy 'at each decision point' (that is, insist on contemporaneous consent) or become habitual 'rule-following agents' (that is, provide ex ante consent). These distinctions correspond in their main contours to that between specific and diffuse legitimacy made by Gary Coglianese, 'Globalization and the Design of International Institutions', in Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and John D. Donahue (eds), Governance in a Globalizing World (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2000), p. 312.
73. Nathan Gardels, in 'The Rise and Fall of America's Soft Power', New Perspectives Quarterly, Winter (2005), p. 12, applies this distinction to the contemporary US case: '[T]he legitimacy of American action in the world today can no longer be assumed. It must be earned each and every time for the foreseeable future'.
74. Or 'pool of consent' in Partridge's terms, Consent and Consensus, p. 27. With reference to the cognate concept, 'moral capital', John Kane, The Politics of Moral Capital (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) p. 27, speaks of leaders building a 'repository of trust'.
75. Clark, Legitimacy in International Society, p. 3.
76. Kane, The Politics of Moral Capital, p. 10.
77. Nossel, 'Going Legit', p. 30.
78. Franck, 'Legitimacy in the International System', p. 711.
79. Ikenberry, 'Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Persistence of American Postwar Order', and Ikenberry, After Victory.
80. Ibid., p. 45.
81. Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, 'Realism, Structural Liberalism, and the Western Order', in Ethan B. Kapstein and Michael Mastanduno (eds), Unipolar Politics (Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 111.
82. Tucker and Hendrickson, 'Sources of American Legitimacy', p. 22.
83. Beetham, The Legitimation of Power, p. 93.
84. Deudney and Ikenberry, 'Realism', p. 111.
85. Ikenberry, After Victory, pp. 40-1.
86. See Tucker and Hendrickson, 'Sources of American Legitimacy', pp. 19-21, for a brief but useful discussion of the (uneven) emphasis on international law in the postwar period.
87. Ikenberry and Kupchan, 'The Legitimation of Hegemonic Power', pp. 52-53.
88. Hurd, 'Legitimacy and Authority', p. 381.
89. Nossel, 'Going Legit', p. 34.
90. Fritz W. Scharpf, Governing in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
91. Scharpf, Governing in Europe, p. 11.
92. See Finnemore, 'Fights About Rules', pp. 199-203, for a discussion of effectiveness and the legitimacy of using force.
93. See also Ian Clark, International Legitimacy and World Society, pp. 329-330, for a general discussion of the relationship between legitimacy and effectiveness.
94. See, for example, Tucker and Hendrickson, 'Sources of American Legitimacy', p. 23, for a discussion of 'Washington's success in preserving peace and prosperity within the community of advanced industrialised democracies'.
95. 'The Legitimacy of the Collective Authority of the Security Council', American Journal of International Law, 87 (1993), p. 562. Caron goes on to add: 'It is ultimately the process, however, that may allow participants who are somewhat distrustful of one another to believe in and support the organization'.
96. Rapkin, 'The Contested Concept of Hegemonic Leadership'.
97. Joseph S. Nye, The Paradox of American Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 143-4.
98. Finnemore, 'Fights About Rules', p. 188.
99. An exception is Daniel Bodansky, 'The Legitimacy of International Governance: A Coming Challenge for International Environmental Law?' The American Journal of International Law, 93:3 (July, 1999), p. 612.
100. Hurrell, 'Legitimacy and the Use of Force', p. 22.
101. Jurgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1979),
102. and Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1988).
103. For explicit attempts to introduce communicative action reasoning and deliberative processes to questions of international legitimacy, see Steffek, 'The Legitimation of International Governance';
104. Jennifer Mitzen, 'Reading Habermas in Anarchy: Multilateral Diplomacy and Global Public Spheres', American Political Science Review, 99 (2005), pp. 401-17;
105. and Corneliu Bjola, 'Legitimating the Use of Force in International Politics: A Communicative Action Perspective', European Journal of International Relations, 11 (2005), pp. 266-303.
106. Two prominent applications of the legitimacy concept to the recent American case can easily be fit into the FRC dimensions we have specified. Each application presents a four-part definition and thus is more complex than most approaches to international legitimacy. Tucker and Hendrickson, 'Sources of American Legitimacy', identify four 'pillars' of US legitimacy in the post-World War II period: (1) adherence to international law; (2) consensual modes of decision-making; (3) moderation in policy, and; (4) success in preserving peace and prosperity. Note that the first two of these fall into the Process1 category, the third reflects strategic restraint (Process2) and the last is an example of outcome legitimacy. The substantive dimension is not included in their conceptualisation. Walt, Taming American Power, pp. 160-78, lists four possible sources of international legitimacy: (1) conformity with established procedures, allows others to participate in the decision-making process; (2) positive consequences, broadly beneficial for others; (3) conformity with moral norms, and (4) consistency with the 'natural' order, which equates to a belief that the US deserves its position of primacy. Note that the first clearly fits in the Process1 category; the second taps outcome legitimacy, and; 'conformity with moral norms' reflects substantive legitimacy. 'Consistency with the natural order' seems to reduce to acceptance of the US position at the top of the international hierarchy. This meaning doesn't conform to any of the secondary characteristics we have covered, though it might be interpreted as a basis for acquiescence (as a weak form of consent).
107. Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS Commission on Smart Power. (Washington, DC: CSIS Press, 2007), p. 19. Democracy promotion thus can have some unwanted consequences for the legitimacy-seeking hegemon: 'the expansion of a free citizenry through the spread of democratisation can further raise the threshold of legitimacy for the United States', Samhat and Rodger Payne, 'American Foreign Policy Legitimacy', p. 252. As democratisation, and thereby also systematic surveys of citizens' preferences, diffuse more widely, governments may find their latitude to support unpopular US policies increasingly constrained, even when they are otherwise inclined to do so. Consider in this regard Turkey's refusal, in the face of strong domestic opposition, to allow the US to launch its invasion of Iraq from Turkish territory. Note also the recent election in Australia, where the incumbent Howard (Liberal-National) government ignored at its own peril public opposition to the country's alignment with the US on the war in Iraq and ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, only to engender a backlash which resulted in the election of the Rudd (Labour) opposition.
108. Ronald Brownstein, 'Court of Public Opinion Becomes Key Battleground', Los Angeles Times (13 March 2003).
109. Kagan, 'America's Crisis of Legitimacy', p. 66.
110. Fukuyama Francis, 'The West May Be Coming Apart', The Straits Times (10 August 2002).
111. 'Interview with Gerhard Schroder: 'Traces of Terror', New York Times (5 September 2002). A recurrent theme in James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans (New York: Viking, 2004), p. 115, is that the first Bush administration's, 'underlying assumption was that the United States should not and need not reach accommodation with any other of the world's major powers.' This attitude has been manifest in different contexts, for instance, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer complained about US treatment of its principal allies: 'Alliance partners are not satellites', an obvious reference to Soviet treatment of East European states during the cold war;
112. cited in Steven Erlanger, 'A Nation Challenged: The Allies; German joins Europe's Cry that The US Won't Consult', New York Times (13 February 2002). Suffice it to say, such a stance is hardly conducive to building or maintaining legitimacy.
113. Cited in Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, 'International Relations Theory and the Case against Unilateralism', Perspectives on Politics, 3 (2005), p. 519.
114. Fred Barnes, 'A President in Full', Weekly Standard (11 February 2002), pp. 14-15.
115. Fareed Zakaria, 'The Arrogant Empire', Newsweek (24 March 2003), p. 29.
116. Anne Applebaum, 'Collateral Damage', Washington Post (20 November), A17. Indeed, the Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, complained in 2004 that he had been, 'misled with the information on WMD'. Cited in Heraldo Munoz, A Solitary War: A Diplomat's Chronicle of the Iraq War and its Lessons (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing 2008), p. 216.
117. Beetham, The Legitimation of Power, p. 20.
118. John Marc Coicaud, 'Conclusion: International Organizations, the Evolution of International Politics, and Legitimacy', in Coicaud and Heiskanen (eds), The Legitimacy of International Organizations, p. 538.
119. Clark, Legitimacy in International Society, p. 252.
120. Beetham, The Legitimation of Power, pp. 19-20.
121. Richard N. Haass, The Opportunity (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), p. 177.
122. How then to specify the sufficiency criteria for our three-level definition of international legitimacy? If we have three secondary-level dimensions (substantive, process, and outcome legitimacy) that are substitutable for one another, does each of the three suffice by itself (that is, one of three present)? Or is it the presence of any two of three that result in legitimacy? These issues are complicated by the fact that, as pointed out in the above paragraph, all of the dimensions can be present or absence in degree. With these considerations in mind, we tentatively suggest the following set of sufficiency criteria: (1) mixed evidence, but net positive in all three dimensions, or; (2) one dimension net negative or absent, but the other two are at least moderately positive, or (3) two dimensions not present or net negative, but the other is strongly positive.
123. John Bolton, 'Address to the Federalist Society', National Lawyers Convention (13 November 2003), pp. 1-24.
124. Nossel, 'Going Legit', p. 30.
125. Kagan, 'America's Legitimacy Problem'.
126. Eliot A. Cohen,'History and the Hyperpower', Foreign Affairs, 83 (July/August 2004), p. 59.
127. See also the discussion in Fred Hiatt, 'Obstinate Orthodoxy', Washington Post (31 March 2003), p. A13.