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“Most Reasonable for Humanity”: Legitimation Beyond the State

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Abstract

Legal and political philosophers of a normative bent face an uphill struggle in keeping themes of global justice and cosmopolitan governance, at the forefront of their disciplinary debate, given the perceived urgency of confronting, at the domestic level, the populist upsurge in mature democracies and “democratizing societies” alike. In this paper, these two levels of analysis—national and transnational—mutually enrich one another through a reflection on the ground of legitimacy. In the first section (“Perfectionism Redux”), (a) neo-perfectionist approaches to the legitimation of transnational authority (rooted in Kantian or Hegelian notions, or in some natural law conception of human rights) and (b) public reason approaches rooted in the paradigm of “political liberalism” will be contrasted. In the second section (“From Balance to Separation of Powers”), a non-perfectionist and normative conception of the legitimacy of transnational authorities will be derived from Rawls’s “liberal principle of legitimacy” (renamed “legitimation by constitution by F. Michelman) and the difference with the application of the same principle at the domestic level will be elucidated. In the third section (“Legitimacy and the Flourishing of Humanity: Buchanan and Keohane on Global Institutions”), on the basis of such conception, one of the most complete and influential approaches to the legitimacy of transnational authorities—i.e., the “Complex Standard of Legitimacy” expounded by A. Buchanan and R. Keohane in “The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions”—will be critically assessed.

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Notes

  1. See Walzer (2004), 178–179.

  2. See Rawls (2005) and Rawls (1999); see Habermas (1992), transl. by William Rehg (1996), translated, edited, and with an introduction by Pensky (2001); (2006).

  3. See Beitz (1979) and (1999), 269–296; Pogge (2008), 168–195 and (2010). See also Caney (2005).

  4. See Held (1995); Archibugi (2008); see also Archibugi and Held (eds), (1995).

  5. Bohman (2004), 336–352, and (2007); Laborde (2010), 48–69 and Pettit (2010), 70–94.

  6. Scheuerman (2014), 419–441.

  7. For the argument on the inevitability of the rise of a world state, see Wendt (2003), 491–542. For an argument concerning its desirability, see Wendt (2015).

  8. See Michelman (2003) and, more recently, Michelman (2015). For an insightful reconstruction of the nuances of what is meant by “constitution” in Rawls’s liberal principle of legitimacy, see Michelman (2018).

  9. The term “perfectionism” is used here as a synonym for the comprehensive quality of a conception of justice and its attendant notion of legitimacy. In that sense, its meaning is broader than the one associated by Rawls with perfectionism as a specific moral view in A theory of justice (325–332). Rather, it encompasses all the teleological conceptions that, regardless of the value(s) they posit as supreme, understand justice and legitimacy (qua standard for assessing the merits of institutions) as the maximal possible realization of that supreme value (see ibidem, 24–25). A “perfectionist” view of justice and legitimacy is then understood generically as the opposite of a “political-liberal” conception of justice and legitimacy, though it may take many specific forms. See also Quong (2011), 26–30.

  10. See Dworkin (2011), 332–344 and Griffin (2008) and the interesting collection by Crisp (2014).

  11. Pogge (2008), 54. Caney (2005), a similar way can be found of proceeding from “universal moral values” to principles of justice that specify what human rights follow from these antecedent moral entitlements (25–96). Caney then moves on to spell out distributive entitlements are required by justice on a global scale (102–140), to then finally derive an argument in favor of a specific “kind of world order” from these considerations (148–182). For an original attempt to avoid perfectionism and actually bypass both perfectionist and agreement-based conceptions of human rights, see Beitz’s “practical conception of human rights,” aimed at reconstructing the implicit meaning of human rights within the practice of international political interaction as carried out by the relevant actors, in Beitz (2009), 102–121. Beitz’s conception, however, falls short of articulating an understanding of the normativity of human rights (a point substantially conceded in ibid., 115). For one of the most interesting “political” approaches to human rights, and critique of the perfectionist approaches (based on the so-called “Mirror View”), see Buchanan (2013), 50–84.

  12. Habermas (2011), 296.

  13. See, for example, Held (1995), 232–233 and Archibugi (2008), 86–87.

  14. Bohman (2007), 173.

  15. Ibidem, 115.

  16. Ibidem, 120.

  17. Rawls (2005), 217.

  18. Kant (1957), 100.

  19. For useful commentaries on this issue, see Pettit (2006), 38–55, and Tan (2006), 76–94.

  20. Habermas (2012), 35.

  21. See Franzius (2010), 42 and Bogdandy (2003), 38.

  22. Habermas (2012), 38.

  23. Ibidem, 41.

  24. Ibidem, 42.

  25. Perju (2018), 32.

  26. Ibidem, 43.

  27. Kumm (2016), 14, 3, 704.

  28. Ibidem, 706.

  29. Ibidem, 708.

  30. Ibidem, 709.

  31. Ibidem, 706–707.

  32. See Rawls (1999), 68–70.

  33. On this point, see also Buchanan’s defense of the legitimacy of transnational orders and institutions as independent of democratic credentials, and best accounted for by his notion of “meta-coordination,” very close to public reason, in Buchanan (2013), 178–180. For an insightful appraisal of Buchanan’s proposal from the perspective of a discourse-theory of legitimacy, see Ingram (2018), 231 and 273.

  34. See Rawls (1999), 80.

  35. The identification of which human rights are “human rights proper” that have priority over state sovereignty is one of the weakest points in The Law of People. It burst the “political” credentials of the paradigm—in that human rights are said to be binding also for peoples who are not parties to the Society of Peoples and thus never subscribed to them. On the idea of a Second Declaration of Fundamental Human Rights as more responsive to the new historical function expected to be exerted by a declaration of human rights in the post-1989 world and as more in line with the paradigm of political liberalism, see Ferrara (2012), 173–187.

  36. For a more extended version of this argument, see Ferrara (2014), 105–108.

  37. In his “Introduction to the Paperback Edition,” Rawls explicitly acknowledges that while he continues to consider justice as fairness as the most reasonable view of justice “for us,” it is not to be denied that “other conceptions also satisfy the definition of a liberal conception” and thus that within a contemporary pluralistic society there co-exist not only several rival comprehensive conceptions of the good, but also “different and incompatible liberal political conceptions,” Rawls (2005), xlvii.

  38. For an interesting public-reason approach to the legitimacy of authority and coercion “in a world of states,” see Gaus (2011), 470–479.

  39. Rawls (1980), 88, 519. A similar view can be found in Rawls (2005), 28.

  40. Buchanan and Keohane (2006), 405–437.

  41. Ibidem, 417–418.

  42. Ibidem, 419–424.

  43. Interestingly, Buchanan and Keohane observe that “most global governance institutions... include mechanisms for accountability,” but that often these are “morally inadequate,” for example because they make an institution like the World Bank accountable mostly to the main donor countries, and not enough to the rest of the affected participants (see ibidem, 426). What is then needed, they conclude, is not accountability per se, but “the right sort of accountability” (ibidem). For this purpose, they distinguish “narrow accountability” (which does not include provisions for contestation of its own terms) and a broader version of it, which includes “provisions for revising existing standards of accountability” (ibidem, 427). On the relation of accountability to the legitimacy of structures of governance, see also Ferrara (2014), 178

  44. Buchanan and Keohane (2006), 427 point out that “transparency by itself is inadequate.” Understood narrowly as mere availability of information concerning the operation of the institution, it cannot even ensure “narrow accountability”. Broader accountability, designed to include provisions for revising its own operative standards, is going to require a “broad transparency,” with relevant information not just available, but available “at reasonable cost,” in a format properly understandable and directed to the addressees of accountability-reports as well as to those “who may contest the terms of accountability” (ibidem, 427). Most importantly, Buchanan and Keohane argue that “if national legislatures are to retain their relevance ... they must be able to review the policies of global governance institutions. For legislatures to have information essential to performing these functions, they need a flow of information from transnational civil society” (ibidem, 431).

  45. Ibidem, 432.

  46. Ibidem, 432–433.

  47. Ibidem, 435.

  48. Ibidem, 436.

  49. Ibidem, 436.

  50. Keohane (2015), 345.

  51. Ibidem, 350.

  52. Ibidem, 350.

  53. See ibidem (2018), 269 and 305–308. On the subsequent remarkable adjustments operated by the EU judiciary, see Riccardi (2018), 1–14.

  54. Keohane (2015), 352.

  55. Ibidem, 352.

  56. Ibidem, 353.

  57. See Wendt (2015), 2.

  58. Mead (1974), 154–55. On this point, see also Ferrara (2008), 144.

  59. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, founded in 1967, includes Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia.

  60. The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation was founded in 1985 among Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

  61. The African Union was founded in Addis Ababa in 2001. It includes Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina–Faso, Burundi, Cameroun, Cap Vert, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, RD Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, and Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

  62. The Union of South American Nations, founded in 2008, includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Surinam, Uruguay, Venezuela and Mexico and Panama as observers.

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Acknowledgements

Earlier drafts were presented in 2018 at the Workshops “The Legitimacy of Transnational Orders: The Idea of a World State”, held at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy, Boston College, and “Hegemony in the International Order”, Luigi Sturzo Institute, Rome. Thanks are due to the organizers, Vlad Perju and Claudio Corradetti, and to the participants for their feedback.

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    Alessandro Ferrara

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Ferrara, A. “Most Reasonable for Humanity”: Legitimation Beyond the State. Jus Cogens 1, 111–128 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42439-019-00001-1

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