measuring legitimacy

What is “An Economy of Legitmacy”

Legitimacy is a fabled, ethereal thing. It is not exclusively democratic (monarchs enjoy legitimacy too, as to dictators), it’s not confined to the nation state (local government, NGOs, corporations, and international organisations also enjoy it), and it most certainly not constant. Legitimacy ebbs and flows, as a measure of the confidence of a people in its government, and also, increasingly, as a measure of the international community’s acceptance of a government as the legitimate representatives of a nation state. It is a relative thing – different people will see their government as more or less legitimate due to their personal beliefs and politics. Representative democracy tries to address minority opinion, but the basic liberal democratic structure suffers still from what Tocqueville called ‘the tyranny of the majority‘. Different international actors will infuse a government with legitimacy in its representations on the international stage. So Russia will continue to recognise and support Assad’s Syria, while Britain expels her diplomats. Legitimacy then is currency, a ‘good’ for the personas of international relations, nations states. It should be measurable (I’m hoping to find some research showing how it can be measured, or else do the work myself), and it should be comparable. There should be investments that can be made in order to build legitimacy, such as in institutions. Wars may increase or reduce legitimacy. All of these pieces need to be modelled.

international community, kissinger, monarchy, syria

What do Syria and the British Monarchy have in Common? Legitimacy Crises!

The coincidence of the Syrian crisis with the Jubilee Celebrations in the UK for the 50th anniversary of their Queen’s accession to the throne may appear at first instance to be entirely separate news items in a pretty busy news schedule.  But underneath each story is a crisis of legitimacy, and attempts by key protagonists – Bashir Al-Assad in the first instance, and Queen Elizabeth in the second – to maintain their weakining legitimacy.  Henry Kissinger waded into the Syria crisis with a strongly worded criticism of US policy in the crisis. With an argument rooted all the way back in The Treaty of Westphalia, Kissinger railed against the default interventionism that has characterised the Arab Spring as breaking with centuries of – essentially – respect for national sovereignty.  Of course one could argue that the proxy wars of the Cold War and more recent interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan – and even in Yemen, Somalia, and Kosovo – pre-dated the Arab Spring and clearly established an option of pragmatic interventionism, moral hazard be damned.

The integrity of the state, the sanctity of its sovereignty, and quite literally the neck of Syria’s leader, are all on the line.  A question arises about where the state itself gets its legitimacy.  While Assad held recent elections, it appears pretty clear that those elections did little to legitimise his position.  The opposition and self-proclaimed oppressed people within Syria are looking to the International Community to intervene and protect their human rights.  Now, when we legitimise a political institution, we offer up our freedom to that institution so that it will secure our individual rights and freedoms.  If the oppressed peoples of Syria are looking to the international community to secure their rights, and if interventionalism (humanitarian or otherwise) has become a default position, are we witnessing a transition of sovereignty and / or legitimacy to “The International Community”?

Meanwhile, closer to home, the sun is stubbornly refusing to make an appearance in London for the pomp of the Jubilee.  Quite literally, it is raining on their parade.  As if the British weather wasn’t enough, Poly Toynbee decided to have a pop at the Royal Family, as she is wont to do.  Her assault is more wide ranging than that – she attacks that fading vision of Britishness, a decrepit and anachronistic national identity that bears no resemblance to who the British actually are.  Perhaps the legitimacy of the State is not undermined by the extraordinary edifice that is the Monarchy; it is more tourist attraction / museum piece than something that geniunely represents Britain.  But its position is increasingly detached from the State, and one suspects that the next accession could well be strained.