Institutional Legitimacy

Our current understanding of the idea of legitimacy is deeply connected to the peculiarly modern political institution of the nation-state. But questions of legitimacy have moved beyond the state. It is now common to examine the legitimacy of institutions such as the European Union, international courts, international human rights institutions, or those focused on specific issues, like the World Trade Organization or particular transnational non-governmental organizations. As our traditional state-centric understanding of legitimacy is applied to these new modes of governance and new varieties of institutions, however, it is becoming increasingly strained. The concepts and standards developed in response to the problems of a much less globalized, much more Westphalian world may be inadequate for the contemporary context. Theorists have responded to this tension in two general ways. One strategy is to take a traditional state-centric understanding of political legitimacy and modify it as little as possible when applying it to the wide variety of international institutions. The other strategy is to posit a novel notion of political legitimacy that is distinct from state legitimacy and applies to some set of international institutions. The point of this article is to suggest that a third, more revisionary strategy should be pursued: begin at a higher level of generality with the question of institutional legitimacy. I argue for an underlying notion of legitimacy that applies to all institutions, political or otherwise. Understanding this underlying notion will illuminate the more particular case of political institutions in all their variety. My aims here are primarily exploratory; I intend to open up new avenues for theorizing without claiming to have fully stepped down those paths. My hope is that a new approach to the question of legitimacy will not only be useful for the burgeoning concern with international institutions but will also force us to revise our understanding of what it means for states to be legitimate. Whether that hope will be realized is a question for further down the line. In section I, I argue for a practical approach to legitimacy, showing that it captures a type of moral standing that allows people to coordinate their practical responses to institutions and institutional demands. I conclude that legitimacy must capture an institution’s right to function without coercive interference. This leads me to analyze legitimacy by analogy to i