Debating legitimacy transnationally
In: Global discourse: an interdisciplinary journal of current affairs and applied contemporary thought, Band 6, Heft 3, S. 330-346
ISSN: 2043-7897
As modes and institutions of governance proliferate beyond the state, legitimacy has become a key concept for assessing, supporting or contesting not only the domestic but also the international political order. Often, however, it tends to be used as an umbrella term encompassing different standards of evaluation. How we are to understand legitimacy beyond the state systemically and to relate the different discussions on legitimacy to each other or to the legitimacy of our political order in its entirety are questions yet to be answered.
Against this background, I aim to systematise the underlying issues and questions discussed in contemporary politics and in academic debates by means of a relational conception of political legitimacy. This conception stresses the importance of a constructive relation between institutions and those subject to them, i.e. between objects and subjects of legitimacy. They form the frame of the norms and processes, implied in conceptions of legitimacy. By foregrounding this relation, it becomes visible that debates on norms and processes, which transcend the state, implicate uncertainties, if not struggles about the subjects and objects of legitimacy. Thus, making explicit and discussing openly who the subjects of legitimacy are and how they are or should be related to the objects of legitimacy constitutes a jurisdictional challenge. This is a challenge we have to face if we accept and apply legitimacy as a valid standard for transnational politics. In addition, determining the subject of legitimacy constitutes a conceptual and political challenge, which becomes especially relevant when debating legitimacy transnationally. While both challenges call for broadening and deepening our understanding of legitimate political orders as well as legitimate second-order decisions, the latter, in particular, constitutes a meta-jurisdictional task when thinking about and debating the legitimacy of political orders.