The View of Old and New Powers on the Legitimacy of International Institutions

International institutions as a site of political authority

The traditional, Westphalian notion of sovereignty (Krasner, 1988) emphasised the principle of non-intervention into domestic affairs and – closely related – the consensus principle for agreements among states. Sovereignty involved three norms: first, that the ruler of a state exercises sole authority over the territory of that state; second, that all states are judicially equal; and third, that state parties are not subject to any law to which they do not consent. In this view, international institutions are considered as instruments of the territorial state, without possessing a political authority in their own right (Kahler, 2004).

The past two to three decades, however, have brought changes that undermined Westphalian sovereignty and can be described as the supranationalisation of international institutions. Supranationalisation describes a process in which international institutions develop procedures that contradict the consensus principle and the principle of non-intervention. International institutions have authority when states recognise, in principle or in practice, their ability to make binding decisions on matters relating to a state's domestic jurisdiction, even if those decisions are contrary to a state's own policies and preferences (Cooper et al., 2008, p. 505). Supranationalisation thus leads to political authority beyond the state.

A preliminary indication of supranationalisation is the simple increase in the number of concluded international agreements, covering more and more issue areas. The number of official multilateral agreements countersigned at the UN has grown from 942 in 1969 to 6,154 in 2010 (see UN Treaty Collection, 2010). ¹ In addition, international institutions have begun to exercise authority at different phases of the policy cycle. In the negotiation or decision phase, we can observe an increase in majoritarian decision-making in international institutions. Majoritarian decision-making increases the ability of international institutions to act, by cancelling the vetoes of individual states and overcoming blockades. Today, roughly two-thirds of all international organisations with the participation of at least one great power have the possibility to decide by majority (see Blake and Payton, 2008).

Monitoring and verification of international rules are, likewise, increasingly carried out by actors who are not directly under the control of states. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other independent monitoring organisations increasingly provide information on compliance. Their use has grown as international norms have begun to regulate activities within the boundaries of sovereign territories. In 1948 only 50 NGOs were accredited by ECOSOC; by 2009 this number had reached 3,287 (see ECOSOC, 2009). ² A further significant increase has been in the number of international judicial bodies that adjudicate disputes between parties over rule interpretation. The establishment of court-like proceedings is one possibility for dealing with such problems. In 1960, there were worldwide only 27 quasi-judicial bodies; by 2004, this number had grown to 97 (see PICT, 2009). ³ There is a concomitant interest that these decisions are arrived at legitimately.

Concerning rule enforcement, we can observe an increased readiness to levy material sanctions against violators. Especially since 1989, cases of gross violation of human rights have increasingly been responded to with military force and economic sanctions (Binder, 2009, p. 340). In some cases (like Kosovo or East Timor) the United Nations even set up transitional administrations with far-reaching executive, legislative and judicial powers (Caplan, 2004). Similarly, the World Bank has increasingly employed conditional loans – that is, loans that are tied to the recipient state having fulfilled certain conditions (Mosley, Harrigan and Toye, 1995). Finally, other actors have begun to compete with states in the field of policy evaluation and related agenda setting. Again, international secretariats and transnational NGOs have increasingly taken up these functions. In conjunction with this tendency, so-called knowledge bodies affiliated with the secretariats of international organisations, such as the International Panel for Climate Change, have gained in importance. The normative pressure resulting from the authority of such knowledge bodies and agenda-setting actors weakens the ability of individual governments to oppose international norm development processes.

Overall, a dense network of international institutions of unprecedented quantity and quality has developed in recent decades. Many of these new institutions are far more intrusive than conventional international institutions. Given the extent of the intrusion of these new international institutions into the affairs of national societies, the notion of delegated, and therefore controlled, agency no longer holds. At least in some issue areas, the global level has achieved a certain degree of authority and has thus partially replaced the consensus principle of the traditional international system. Global governance, however, is a political order that is different from that of the state. The political authority that needs to be legitimated is one that lacks a monopoly on the legitimate use of force and is, in addition, highly fragmented and susceptible to manipulation. The political authority of international institutions makes it increasingly difficult for states that wish to appear legitimate to ignore them, and this increases states' interest in shaping the global governance order. The question then arises of how such a horizontally organised and heavily fragmented political order can be legitimated.

Sources of legitimacy

If international institutions exercise political authority, they must appeal to some notion of legitimacy in order to remain effective. Authority needs legitimacy if it is to avoid appearing arbitrary. The growing need to legitimate international institutions is evidenced by the unwillingness of national publics, parliaments and transnational civil society to accept without further ado the outcomes of major international negotiations as urgently necessary achievements of international co-operation. The outcome of international negotiations is no longer welcomed merely because a result has been attained. The ‘right of justification’ (Forst, 2007) is now demanded of international institutions. It is called for by numerous, so-called anti-globalisation groups, such as Attac. It is also evident in the resistance organised at the national level against the undermining of democratic sovereignty, for example in referenda on European integration. Rising powers also critique, and dissent from, intrusive international institutions as a means of prolongation of Western dominance (Zürn and Ecker-Ehrhardt, 2010).

Can this growing demand for legitimation be met? What makes a political order or institution justifiable to its members? In general, the content of the rules produced by political authorities must be justifiable in terms of common interests and fairness based on shared beliefs. The shared beliefs relevant to legitimacy refer mainly to the question about the type and sources of justifications of the order, and the policies developed within this order. Obviously, these belief systems vary immensely across space, time and different types of political authority (Beetham, 1991, ch. 3).

In any case, the underlying purpose of any such justification is an appeal to the common interest of the collective. Even historical justifications of authority were based on the idea that the exercise of power within a given collective is in the common interest and cannot be reduced to the interests of the power-holders. In modernity, the interpretation of common interest has changed towards a more procedural understanding: ‘legitimation through procedure’ (Luhmann, 1969). At the same time, the legitimacy of political orders also depends on a related notion of fairness, which incorporates an aspect of legitimation through outcome. The procedure thus must serve the common good and be fair by remaining impartial to different particularistic points of view and interests. Therefore, in modernity justifications for a legitimate political order point to decision-making procedures that are considered to serve the common interest and be fair. Impartiality is thus the implicit common denominator of all those sources of legitimacy (Zürn, forthcoming).

Six justifications or sources of political orders and their policies are of special relevance in modernity:

Whether these elements of legitimacy can be translated beyond nominally sovereign communities and into international politics is a critical question for the legitimacy of international institutions.

Legitimation and great power preferences

The normative validity of a political order and its policies is bound to the beliefs of those who are the addressees of decisions. The principles of and justifications for a political order must therefore resonate with social beliefs. In this sense, the belief in legitimacy is an integral part of the concept of legitimacy. Although the absence of overt violence or explicit dissent is sometimes taken to be an indicator of a legitimate order (Cox, 1983), this does not suffice because the absence of dissent could be a result of suppression, bribery or lack of opportunities to mobilise against a given order. Assessing the belief in legitimacy thus requires positive indication. Taking part in decision-making processes and the presence of belief systems that are in accordance with the justifications for order and policies are good indications for the belief in legitimacy. To what extent then is the exercise of political authority by international institutions legitimated? Which sources of legitimacy are of special importance? How does this differ with respect to international institutions and the countries considered in this issue?

Many would argue that, with the recent thrust of economic and cultural globalisation, the principles and justifications for legitimacy of political orders in general converge globally. This claim is not as far-fetched as that of Francis Fukuyama (1989) declaring the ‘end of history’ and lack of any challenge to the Western model of representative democracy as the normative role model. As John Meyer and colleagues argue (Meyer, Boli and Thomas, 1987; Meyer and Jepperson, 2000), it suffices to point to a process of diffusion of Western rationality that is based on progress and formal equality. As part of this diffusion process, the belief in scientific rationality, the rationality of law and Western-style political institutions that include the people to some extent in the decision-making processes have spread around the world and made political institutions much more similar than one would expect from cultural or purely functional accounts. The logical extension of this argument is that there seems to be a universal understanding that political authority has to tap the modern sources of legitimacy. In this account, the six mentioned sources of justification – expertise, imagined community, rights, accountability, participation and public discourse – diffuse as well.

However, while in Western democracies the sources of legitimacy are considered equally important, in large parts of the world – especially in Asia – greater emphasis is given to the output side of legitimacy, including some basic notions of accountability and legality. One-party states or de facto one-party states characterised the political regimes of East Asia for much of the post-war era. Participation and public discourse have not been the primary sources of legitimacy for these regimes. The Liberal Democratic Party ruled Japan for nearly 40 years until 1993 and emphasised output legitimacy and expertise. The ruling elements of the Chinese Communist Party that emerged after Mao and the Gang of Four have staked their legitimacy in strictly output-oriented terms such as growth, stability and appeals to nationalism. Russia's recovery since Yeltsin has been under governments similarly committed to output legitimacies in the form of nationalism and stability. Discourse around a democratic deficit in the European Union highlight that this political project too is rooted in output forms of legitimacy. This is however different from the cases of the emerging Southern democracies such as India, Brazil and South Africa, where input legitimacies are more highly emphasised.

Against this background, one would expect universal but differentiated notions about the appropriate sources of the legitimation of international institutions from new and old powers. Bearing this in mind, we identify five propositions about the prospects for the legitimacy of international institutions today.

1. To the extent that international institutions begin to exercise authority, even the technocratic justification of measures by international institutions becomes challenged. Resistance and public contestedness increase in turn.

The Bretton Woods institutions face challenges both from new powers and from broader changes that undermine their legitimacy in terms of efficiency, participation and even technocratic knowledge. For many in the developing world, these institutions have become identified with principles associated with market-driven poverty and even state breakdown (Vale, 1995), and much of the public contestedness of international institutions came in the form of ‘bread riots’ during the 1980s. What were once seen as technocratic interventions by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to restore economic fundamentals based on impartial expertise are now widely seen as having aggravated economic difficulties and implemented policies favourable to Washington. Most new powers have sought as much autonomy as possible from the IMF by setting up regional equivalents or simply stockpiling foreign reserves (Ikenberry and Wright, 2008, p. 19). While paying off IMF loans as quickly as possible has been made possible by economic growth, it has been pursued also to avoid conditionality. Claiming an impartial expertise or advisory function cannot provide a sufficient basis for legitimacy.

2. International institutions have trouble activating the resources of legitimacy mainly due to the suspicion that they serve Western interests and thus violate the principle of impartiality.

Given the scheme developed here, it can be shown that the legitimacy of international institutions exercising authority is by no means self-evident. All of the six types of justification for political authority are to some extent problematic when it comes to the international level. Expertise, for example, is not accepted by all concerned societies to the same extent; when it is used on the international level it is seen by many to emanate from pro-Western bias. Whereas reference to individual rights may work to some degree, it is also considered by some to be a partial, biased – Western – concept. Moreover, decision-makers in international institutions are neither individually nor collectively accountable in electoral terms. In legal terms, accountability is at least not sufficiently developed. Therefore, accountability mechanisms can hardly contribute to ameliorating the suspicion of Western bias.

Moreover, broad societal participation and representation in international decision-making is institutionally hardly developed. It takes place mainly informally via NGOs, interest groups and multinational corporations, and in so doing it further increases the general suspicion of Western bias. Public debates over international issues across borders are extremely rare. Finally, while the construction of an insider-outsider distinction can foster a sense of imagined community at a regional level (as for example indicated in some justifications of the strengthening of the EU; see Whitman, 2010, in this issue), this source of legitimacy is unable to be exploited by those international institutions with a global reach. Moreover, to the extent that the implementation of international rules is uneven – powerful states can and do skirt the rules if they are inconvenient – even the principle of legality is undermined (Zangl and Zürn, 2003). There are many perceptions of bias that can undermine the legitimacy of international institutions in the eyes of at least some beholders.

3. The tension between the increasing political authority of international institutions and the principle of non-intervention is exacerbated by the rise of new powers.

The United States is the power most likely to favour intrusive interventionism by the UN Security Council, which was demonstrated throughout the 1990s in the Middle East and the Balkans (Ikenberry and Wright, 2008). Russia and China, on the other hand, have consistently opposed violations of traditional sovereignty, except, as in the Afghan case, when it served to legitimise their own actions against opponents they associated with a ‘war on terror’. US-led interventions without a UN mandate have meant that international institutions have been associated with selective rather than impartial application of the rules. The identification of international institutions with the interests of Western states undermines their legitimacy and reinforces the scepticism of many states discussed in this issue towards the authority of international institutions and new norms of liberal interventionism and majoritarian decision-making. A suspicion of liberal interventionism is evident in Russia's relations with a NATO that has engaged in interventions without UN approval, and in China and South Africa's reluctance to transfer human rights issues to the purview of the UN Security Council (see further Breslin, 2010; Jordaan, 2010; Tsygankov, 2010, all in this issue).

Most rising powers see the UN General Assembly and its related institutions as more legitimate and representative because they adhere to a one state, one vote procedure, and therefore restrict the ability of Western countries to dominate the agenda or to get their own way. In contrast to the European Union, new powers tend to favour national sovereignty as the primary norm of international society.

4. The widely accepted need for strong international institutions combined with the general difficulty of tapping the sources of legitimacy for international institutions leads to a common but inconsistent demand: a more equal distribution of influence in international institutions, but special rights for one's own country.

An explicit double standard towards international institutions is most clearly illustrated by the US. The US reserves for itself the right to intervene to uphold its vision of international order or enforce the decisions of international institutions, while such decisions relating to itself are overruled by a strong emphasis on American sovereignty. Through the 1990s the US often expressed rhetorical support for new human rights regimes, humanitarian operations, new international legal institutions and environmental conventions, but failed to ratify them and continued not to pay its full UN dues (Murphy, 2000, p. 800). The George W. Bush presidency saw an even greater departure from participation in international institutions and a general questioning of their legitimacy.

The rising powers often articulate a desire to strengthen aspects of international institutions with an egalitarian redistribution of political decision-making authority, while at the same time championing their own case for special representation (see Jordaan, 2010; Sotero, 2010; Wagner, 2010, all in this issue). This is most clearly visible in the co-ordinated campaign by Germany, Japan, Brazil and India for permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). The approach of each of the rising non-Western powers with regard to the G7 and the so-called Heiligendamm Process is for greater inclusion, but cynics would argue only to the extent of getting each country ‘in the door’ (see Dobson, 2010; Wagner, 2010, both in this issue). Rising powers tend to equate a more equitable multilateralism with their own relative elevation (Nel and Stephen, 2010, p. 72).

5. The importance of international institutions for managing globalisation accompanied by a shift in the global distribution of power leads to appeals for greater accountability and participation in international institutions by new or rising powers.

This is most clearly visible in the formal intergovernmental institutions such as the UN and Bretton Woods institutions. The participatory legitimacy of the Bretton Woods institutions has always been tempered by their plutocratic voting systems, which also serve to enforce a de facto US veto because of the requirement of an 85 per cent majority. In 2010 China and India increased their voting rights at the World Bank, while those of the developing world as a whole have reached nearly half at 47.19 per cent (see World Bank, 2010). ⁴ One of the prime foreign policy initiatives of India, Brazil and South Africa, the IBSA trilateral development forum, was established to increase the say of these countries in multilateral institutions and to promote restructuring in favour of developing countries. The word ‘participation’ appears frequently in IBSA communiqués (IBSA Trilateral Forum, 2003 and 2008). This is, of course, related to the IBSA states’ Security Council membership bid, which is opposed by new and old powers of the P5, and to the shift of political capital from the G7 to the G20 as the prime forum for economic policy co-ordination (see Dobson, 2010, in this issue).

While the substance of the global trading regime is criticised by many new powers, especially from the South, for its imbalanced liberalisation, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has escaped the degree of legitimacy crisis as sociated with the Bretton Woods institutions. Despite calls for greater say in the agenda-setting phase and Green Room by new powers, the WTO's decision-making principle insulates it from a direct questioning of its participatory legitimacy, while its Dispute Settlement Mechanism, although overwhelmingly used by wealthy and technically capable parties, ensures a level of rights legitimacy. The Doha Round of negotiations, however, has stagnated in part because of the stronger bargaining position of the group of 20 developing nations under the leadership of India and Brazil, and illustrates a preference for no deal over a perceived illegitimate deal. This indicates that greater attention to participatory and accountability legitimacy is a key goal of rising powers.

Conclusions

A changing global balance of power has coincided with an increase in the authority of international institutions and a concomitant requirement for them to mobilise the sources of legitimacy. Most international institutions were created by Western powers, sometimes before developing countries had emerged from colonialism. These institutions will have to respond to the rise of new powers that have a claim for greater influence based on both efficiency and legitimacy grounds. Moreover, some of these new powers have traditions of political authority and legitimation that are different from the experience of the established democratic states. They also emphasise different justifications for political authority at an international level.

The ensuing emphasis on the principle of non-intervention by almost all new powers and the US thus seems to be a huge obstacle for further strengthening of international institutions and making global governance more effective. A closer look, however, reveals significant ambiguities. One the one hand, most newly emerging powers, sometimes including China, often demand more international regulation and stronger international institutions as, for instance, indicated by the positions taken with respect to the economic and financial crisis in the G20 negotiations. The emerging powers do not aim to overhaul the existing international institutions; rather, they want to be co-opted and to reform them from the inside. On the other hand, there is an ongoing suspicion that stronger international institutions are instruments of Western dominance and help to prolong an unequal distribution of benefits. This tension explains the widespread emphasis on broader and more equal state participation as a prerequisite for stronger international institutions. With more balanced influence in international institutions, the major obstacle to tapping additional sources of modern legitimacy may get smaller. To the extent that international institutions are seen less as instruments of Western domination, there seems be a broader basis for legitimating political authority beyond the state through expertise, improved mechanisms of accountability, and legalisation. The demand for more societal participation, however, does not rank as the newly emerging powers' highest priority. Such demands stem from (mainly Western) NGOs and thus will play out to some extent independent of the relations between new and old state powers. The double demand of newly emerging powers for more equal state participation and NGOs for more societal involvement in international decision-making, however, may come together in redesigning international institutions so that the authority they exercise may increasingly become more legitimate.