Why Ir Needs Legitimacy

Why IR Needs Legitimacy: A Rejoinder JENS STEFFEK Universit¨at Bremen, Germany

Introduction Currently there is hardly an essay on international or global governance that does not at least mention the issue of legitimacy. The frequent appeal to such an elusive and contested concept calls for critical reflection. In fact I considered my recent article in EJIR as an attempt at such conceptual reflection and clarification — apart from presenting my personal approach to the topic. Shane Mulligan’s critical questions and remarks show that there is a continuing need for debate about the concept of legitimacy and the way we use this term. In his critical approach, Mulligan seems to go further than I did. While in my article I only asked what we mean when we speak of legitimacy beyond the state, Mulligan goes further to discuss the consequences that our discursive practice might have in the real world of international relations. I share his view that social science is not just a passive observer of international relations but also part of the reality that it seeks to describe — in particular when it comes to its role as a source of critical or affirmative argument about the legitimacy of governance. Yet although I am sympathetic to many questions Mulligan raises I disagree with most of the answers he proposes. In this rejoinder I wish to address the following points — first, I will discuss some specific objections against my theory of discursive legitimation in international governance that Mulligan raises. In particular I will refute his claim that an empirical approach to the study of legitimacy beliefs is not feasible. I will then take issue with him over his insinuation that the ‘migration’ of legitimacy discourse into IR scholarship will lead to a rather uncritical justification of existing structures of global governance. I share his concern that at least some of the ‘legitimacy talk’ in IR tends to simply reproduce the self-legitimating arguments that international organizations European Journal of International Relations Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications and ECPR-European Consortium for Political Research, Vol. 10(3): 485–490 [DOI: 10.1177/1354066104045545]

European Journal of International Relations 10(3) use. Yet I claim that my approach to legitimacy, focusing on justification and contestation in political and media discourse, is fit to avoid that trap. It can capture both the self-legitimation strategies of international organizations and the challenges brought to them by state actors or global civil society. In fact, I developed my approach precisely for mapping such conflicts.

Why an Empirical Approach to Legitimacy is Possible A good deal of Mulligan’s critical remarks revolve around the question whether an empirical, ‘Weberian’, approach to legitimacy is possible at all, and his answer is an outright ‘No’. To substantiate this claim Mulligan argues that I have unduly applied Habermasian social theory to the field of international relations. Under the conditions of international policy-making, Mulligan states, the characteristics of Habermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’ are not present. In a similar vein he claims that in international affairs there is no ‘common lifeworld’ which according to Habermas is a background condition of and prerequisite for deliberative democracy. In my article, however, I never claimed that international politics takes place under such conditions and, as I will show in the following paragraphs, my argument does not require such heroic assumptions.1 One can argue that international governance is, in practice, legitimated through discourse, without saying that this discourse takes place under ideal conditions. My starting question in the EJIR article was a sociological one — how do people in modern societies come to believe that a system of governance is legitimate? The answer I propose is the following — I suppose that people shape their attitude towards governance mainly on the basis of reasons (and not, e.g., on the basis of religious sentiments). Individuals are confronted with reasons for or against supporting a system of governance; they weigh these reasons and if they find the ‘Pros’ convincing they will develop a sense of obligation towards the respective political system. If they do not find them convincing people are prone to oppose the system in words and deeds, publicly or privately. I assume that the reasons people have to support governance are not developed in solitude, but emerge through a process of intersubjective communication, that is, through discourse. Hence I believe that legitimacy-creating beliefs are conveyed through political and media debate, that the carriers of these reasons are arguments, and that therefore discourse is the right proxy to study processes of legitimation and delegitimation. To say that discourse is a mechanism of belief formation does not prejudice under what ideal or non-ideal conditions it takes place. Neither does it predict whether the empirical tendency will be towards successful legitimation or towards a de-legitimation of a given governance regime. 486

Steffek: Why IR Needs Legitimacy In as much as I refer to J¨urgen Habermas, I only do this to highlight the discursive character of legitimation. Mulligan’s argument in fact seems to conflate the normative and the descriptive content that coexists in Habermas’s social theory when he argues that we cannot ‘posit a distinctly “empirical” legitimacy deriving from Habermas’s clearly normative arguments’ (Mulligan, 2004: 480). Yet not all arguments in the work of J¨urgen Habermas are normative in nature. To give an example, the (sometimes counterfactual) supposition that other speakers mean what they say is a pragmatic precondition for successful communication, not just a Habermasian ought.2 Only in a second step, after exploring the pragmatics of communication, does Habermas identify certain institutional conditions that facilitate reaching political agreement through argumentation. And only in a third step does Habermas advance the normative claim that in designing or reforming political institutions we should strive towards such institutional conditions. However, this brief reply is certainly not the right place to engage in an exegesis of Habermasian social theory. Let us return to the role of discourse in the legitimation of international governance.

Why the Study of Legitimacy Beliefs is Possible With regard to my ideas about the genesis of legitimacy in international affairs, Mulligan criticizes an unclear relationship between political or diplomatic consensus and citizens’ consensus. Here he is indeed revealing a gap in my argument with regard to different spheres of communication. Negotiation among politicians about international institutions is quite different from wider public discourse, and only public discourse can reach citizens as the ultimate addressees of legitimacy. As far as intergovernmental negotiation is concerned I accept Mulligan’s call for caution. The fact that arguments are made in these negotiations should not make us believe that these are always the main motivating force behind agreement. However, it is interesting to note that the mere fact that a certain norm or principle was adopted by broad international consensus lends particular strength to it. When, for example, the United Nations has agreed on a norm by consensus, this constitutes a supreme potential for its justification. In regarding UN approval of a norm as a justificatory resource we routinely assume that there has been, indeed, a reasoned consensus among delegates and not some bargaining compromise. We seem to instinctively (and again, sometimes counterfactually) assume that approval of a norm also implies approval of its prescriptive content. By means of being a supreme resource of justification, consensus at the intergovernmental level can facilitate adherence to a norm also among citizens. 487

European Journal of International Relations 10(3) A second line of Mulligan’s criticism touches upon the question whether average citizens can have something like legitimacy beliefs at all and if, consequently, we can inquire into them. It echoes David Beetham’s idea that average people might not understand legitimacy well enough to hold any beliefs of this sort (1991: 13). People might in fact not understand Beetham’s or Mulligan’s or my own academic jargon — and still have legitimacy beliefs. I take it to be a perfectly acceptable and sufficient reasoning to find a political system cruel, oppressive or unjust, and therefore illegitimate. It is equally sufficient to find that the system has fair procedures, generates just distribution, respects the law, allows free speech, and to therefore think that it deserves to be supported and the laws made by it deserve to be obeyed. If we find that people make connections of the ‘therefore’-type between value judgements and their support for a system of governance we see legitimacy at work. I fail to see why it should be impossible to investigate such reasons for political support empirically. Now, how can we come to know about such legitimacy beliefs? We might study discourse, as I suggested in EJIR, but we could also use surveys with a specifically designed questionnaire to inquire into the reasons for regime support (not just the overall level of support that, for example, the Eurobarometer seeks to measure). Such surveys would provide us with firsthand information on people’s legitimacy-related beliefs. In formulating such a survey it would certainly be ridiculous to ask average people Mulligan’s question — ‘Do you hold the WTO in such regard that you feel its dictates are morally binding?’ (2004: 478). In fact, very few surveys in social science can formulate their questionnaire in highly abstract, academic terms. Take as an example the concept of xenophobia. One normally would not ask in questionnaires, ‘Do you hold xenophobic attitudes?’; but would rather ask questions such as, ‘Do you think that migrants are a threat to public order?’ Consequently we should approach legitimacy indirectly via possible reasons or motives for legitimacy beliefs. We might use the three categories for the evaluation of governance regimes that I suggested — scope and issues of governance, fairness of rule-making procedures and justice of outcomes. Questions could be — ‘Do you think that the WTO is right in promoting free trade? Do you think that the WTO respects citizens’ concerns in rule-making? Do you think that the WTO works for the benefit of everybody? Do you think that the WTO contributes to a just world order?’ With regard to specific citizen beliefs about international institutions, Mulligan is asking whether the absence of overt protest against international organizations indicates that they are regarded as legitimate. Is, in other words, a ‘permissive consensus’ enough? I think that this can be said for 488

Steffek: Why IR Needs Legitimacy organizations such as the EU, the UN or the WTO that enjoy some public visibility. However, in the case of organizations that are completely removed from public attention and that only experts have ever heard of, Mulligan is certainly right. In the complete absence of public debate about an institution of governance, citizens cannot form any legitimacy beliefs pertaining to that institution.

Why the Study of Legitimacy is Not Apologetic In the last section of his comments Mulligan explores what I would call the ‘apologetic effects’ that the increasing migration of legitimacy into international relations thinking might have. His idea is, if I understand it correctly, that we reaffirm existing structures of power once we even ponder whether they might be legitimate, and thus, normatively privileged. He suggests that talking about legitimacy in IR ‘further commits our inquiry to this discourse, to this form of reasoning which must seek the justification of domination, the right of rule, the legitimacy of law.’ (2004: 483). I agree with Mulligan insofar as we always should watch out for the roads not taken that our choice for a specific concept precludes. Yet I fail to understand why the recent boom in academic legitimacy debate should inevitably lead to a predominance of ‘juridical approaches’ that just take up dominant selflegitimation strategies of international organizations. The approach to legitimacy I proposed does not aim to declare current global governance arrangements legitimate. On the contrary, through the empirical analysis of discursive challenges to this system of governance we learn about alternative perspectives. We might even detect and denounce instances in which power holders seek to suppress or marginalize alternative voices. Analysing legitimacy conflicts therefore is in and of itself an emancipatory enterprise. In fact, by raising the question of legitimacy the discipline of IR seems to be getting more critical towards international governance. It breaks with the traditional, truly legalistic, vision that international organizations are instituted by Treaties concluded between state governments and ratified by national parliaments, and are ipso facto legitimate. It equally breaks with the regime literature’s focus on the effectiveness of global governance. In fact, international distribution, development concerns, human rights and social welfare, etc. have become major issues for global governance studies. Many authors who write on the legitimacy of international organizations and their policies ask precisely those questions that go beyond a legalistic approach. I confine myself to name just the widely read and cited work of Ngaire Woods (2003) and David Held (2003) here. My impression is that by exploring the manifold dimensions of legitimacy we are overcoming a legalistic bias in the study of 489

European Journal of International Relations 10(3) international governance. Therefore, the question of legitimacy should retain its prominent place on the IR agenda. Notes 1. My theory of discursive legitimation is not intended to be a normative one. However, I am currently exploring possible normative portents of deliberation for global governance elsewhere with a colleague (Nanz and Steffek, 2004). There our aim in fact is to assess under what conditions enhanced deliberation can become an asset for the democratic quality of international governance arrangements. Some of our concerns are quite similar to Mulligan’s, e.g. that there is unequal opportunity for influencing discourse, that states can ignore the concerns of disadvantaged groups of stakeholders, etc. 2. To support his argument Mulligan mentions the double meaning of the German term ‘Verst¨andigung’ that Habermas uses frequently and that can mean both a successful communication of meaning and an agreement — quite like ‘understanding’ in English can mean both comprehension and agreement. It has been pointed out, however, that ‘Verst¨andigung’ as comprehension is a prerequisite for strategic communication as well, and therefore cannot carry normative connotations (Greve, 1999).

References Beetham, David (1991) The Legitimation of Power. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Greve, Jens (1999) ‘Sprache, Kommunikation und Strategie in der Theorie von J¨urgen Habermas’, K¨olner Zeitschrift f¨ur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 51(2): 232–59. Held, David (2003) ‘From Executive to Cosmopolitan Multilateralism’, in David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi (eds) Taming Globalization, pp. 160–86. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mulligan, Shane (2004) ‘Questioning (the Question of) Legitimacy in IR: A Reply to Jens Steffeck’, European Journal of International Relations 10(3): 475–84. Nanz, Patrizia and Jens Steffek (2004) ‘Global Governance, Participation and the Public Sphere’, Government and Opposition 39(2): 314–35. Woods, Ngaire (2003) ‘Holding Intergovernmental Institutions to Account’, Ethics and International Affairs 17(1): 69–80.

490