Anya Palkowski

Legitimizing Global Governance Institutions

Democratic Theory and Practice | Professor William Smith | Chinese University of Hong Kong | 2011

Faced with the turbulent transition from national to international governance, theorists are often forced to reevaluate the parameters of governance itself, to weigh the benefits of global rule of law against the diminishing of the nation-state, and to improve the acceptability of international institutions.

Following the argument’s many dimensions, we first examine the claim that the sovereignty and relevance of the democratic nation-state is put at risk by the development of supranational organizations. Overall we find that though this concern is evidenced by numerous instances of national policies being overturned by the decisions of economic or political international organizations, the conviction that a loss of state sovereignty is particularly detrimental to the fair and reasoned operation of world politics may be misplaced; instead, it is possible that the sovereignty of nation-states, many of which are “themselves undemocratic or lack other qualities necessary for state legitimacy,”[1] is of less importance than the global adoption of an acceptable standard for solving supranational issues.

Thus, the issue lies not in protecting the sovereignty of nation-states against all decisions made by supranational institutions, but instead in ensuring that the standards of international decisionmaking – democratically or not – are such that the legitimacy of their rulings may offset the harm done by removing a certain degree of agency from democratic nation-states. Though the economically and culturally diverse international community may not be adequately prepared to front the logistical costs of a fully democratic United Nations, there is little doubt that it can benefit from the economic and security-based benefits that an international organization brings to developing and developed nations alike. Thus an adequate mechanism of governance, policymaking and transparency in international authority remains one of international relations’ most important puzzles.

As decreed by the 1945 International Tribunal at Nuremburg, “when international rules that protect basic humanitarian values are in conflict with state laws, every individual must transgress the state laws.”[2] A decisionmaking organization regularly producing policies that affect a large number of nations is thus theoretically able to prevail over the policies arrived at by the legitimate democratic processes of individual nations, a notion of great agitation to proponents either of state autonomy or the territorial claim of sovereignty. Though the fact of globalization itself has effectively complicated the idea of isolated state governance with “the intersection of national, regional, and international economic forces,”[3] this concern is not without merit: what is the good of democracy, one might ask, if the good and legitimate results of that system exist only to be overturned by a higher power?

Here we can offer an interesting counterpoint: though generous with condemnation of the international effect on sovereignty, the academic community has seldom envisioned that international organizations could directly benefit democracy in the state. To this effect, some international organization and complex interdependence theorists propose that “national elections and other forms of political representation often contain serious biases and flaws, which international institutions can help correct.”[4] This suggests that the loss of democratic state agency becomes a benefit when the underlying democratic injustices perpetuated thereby are prevented by the (ideally) equalizing authority of an international organization.

Neither of these possibilities is necessarily true. Many fears for the inviolability of the nation-state seem to originate from the projected ability of international organizations to exercise real punitive control over their member states. However, in the current state of power balances between national and international governments, it is clear that even punitive institutions like the International Criminal Court do not yet have the “teeth” to become truly authoritative global players. The ICC’s founding document, for example, outlines no ability to override or exercise power over individual national governments, indicating that the court’s very ability to take on a case depends on the national court’s being “unwilling or unable genuinely to carry out the investigation or prosecution.”[5] This is not the only case of prioritization of national interest above international authority: “even in the European Union, the world’s most ambitious international institution, around 90% of lawmaking remains under national control.”[6] As membership in organizations is voluntary, some countries may be deeply affected by international policies while “regional or national forces might well remain supreme”[7] in others.

We must also be wary of placing state autonomy on an undeservedly high pedestal, especially given the morally illegitimate operations of many modern nation-states. It is common to ascribe functional legitimacy based on territoriality alone to states that do not adhere to human rights standards: in fact, as a result of their immunity to supranational punitive action, many countries are revealed by the scrutiny of NGOs like Amnesty International or the International Center for Transitional Justice to engage in violent human rights abuses and systematic negligence of the basic needs of citizenry. In a recent example of this tendency, the fallout from a 2009 conflict between the Sri Lankan military and an insurgent liberation army remained wholly unaccountable to international rule of law; the Sri Lankan government “dismissed all reports of war crimes by its forces and rejected calls for an international inquiry, while failing to hold any credible, independent investigations of its own,”[8] shielded from inquiry by the ascribed sanctity of its own sovereignty. Given that such violations of legitimacy occur even under the public eye, it seems anathema to ideas of human rights and distributive justice to assert that nationally determined standards of suppression of dissent or disregard for civilian life should take precedent over the equalizing rulings of international regulations that have been deliberatively affirmed and arrived at by a majority of member states.

Not only is the sovereignty of the state not as inviolable as many theorists believe, but supranational organizations may in fact be crippled by a respect for sovereignty that, irrespective of cultural differences, seems to be universal. This is a direct challenge to the posited benefits of international organizations – a good that member states implicitly acknowledge by the very creation of institutions like the United Nations or European Union. Understanding the problem conversely depends on weighting the real and tangible benefits of international organizations more heavily than the nation-state’s right to exercise complete authority in its own jurisdiction:

This imbalance is evidenced by modern examples such as the global response to brutal suppression of insurgencies in Libya and Egypt, exemplifying the tensions between a majority-supported enforcement of and protection of human rights abroad versus the societally validated policy of non-involvement. Foreign policy towards the Middle East, regarding entrenched dictators in particular, shows us how the enforcement of punishment against visible human rights violations is made difficult by adherence to the sovereign authority of even a self-selected leader who, despite sporadic involvement in the United Nations has remained largely unresponsive to attempts at global governance. Thus, perhaps even more perturbing than the alleged freedom of international organizations to overturn national law and policy, the globally determined human rights standards of international organizations may be set back by their obligations to the right of individual governments to define their own behavior within national boundaries.

It takes only an overview of the boons offered to the world by international organizations to conclude that they could be worth the sacrifice of some measure of state autonomy. Institutions like the UN and EU were first pioneered, and continue to proliferate, because there are global problems that require the attention and authority of an international standard of rule: “human rights protection, financial and regulatory policy, nuclear proliferation,”[9] environmental initiatives and other security concerns not least among them. International organizations facilitate large-scale cooperation, communication and provide a force to regulate the conduct of many individual nation-states. Economic policies like the adoption of the euro enabled the European Union to coordinate and stabilize the bank, interest and insurance activities of many of its member states; it goes without saying that the economic success of one region brings those benefits to the world economy in turn. Thus the question becomes whether or not international organizations can, even without a fully democratic standard, reach fair and helpful decisions, thus justifying their priority over the authority of individual nation-states.

This is not to suggest that a loss of sovereignty is a completely negligible tradeoff: it is still important that local matters, such as infrastructure, budgeting or election of leaders, retain their democratic nature. However, given the arguments against its supreme importance as a standard of politics, I suggest that the loss of sovereignty in individual nation-states might be made acceptable, or at least easier to bear, by the insurance that decisions made by international organizations are conducted fairly, with proper representation, and with appropriate opportunity for input from the affected community – however expansive and logistically difficult to analyze that community may seem to be. This brings us to our next puzzle: how to most effectively increase the quality of international organizations that are now either ineffective or imbalanced.

The barriers to democratic reform are clear, and the most troublesome of them concerns the scope of the population represented. Were the unit of democratic participation to increase in size, “the capacity of the citizen to participate effectively in governing would be diminished.”[10] Modern democracy in the nation-state already finds itself inescapably crippled by the range of opinions encountered within its voting populace; thus it is only natural to assume that as the volume of people represented by a government grows, so too does its moral and logical dissonance. Even in the case that a majority decision can been reached, that decision carries “potentially life-and-death consequences for large numbers of people, many of whom might have no democratic stake in the decision-making process,”[11] and thus truly desirable results “must lie within some generally agreed on boundaries as to rights, liberties, minimal standards of justice, and so on.”[12] The democratic standard is also complicated by “the tendency of democratic states to disregard the legitimate interests of foreigners;”[13] per this reasoning, it is impossible for the average citizen to choose the greater good over self-interest or be conditioned to consider the fate of those distant or unknown to them. Thus, even were there to be a reliable method of consulting the public on transnational policies, the results would be neither well-informed nor collectively beneficial.

Democracy has long been considered the “gold standard for legitimacy” by much of the developed world.[14] However, we must also realize that the democratic ideal has become compounded with a number of institutions and overly specific requirements that lend themselves extraordinarily badly to global governance institutions, and indeed may be impossible to uphold given Robert Dahl’s well-founded worries about the difficulties posed by the scale of global democracy.

An increasingly popular minimalist view is that self-interested states seeking international rule of law should strive for an international regime not completely synonymous with democracy at the domestic level but “based on democratic principles and mechanisms.”[15] In this case, democracy must become fluid as our definitions of its proper recipients change; in the context of a rapidly expanding array of global, rather than national, concerns, democracy may become merely a mechanism by which the specific needs of represented groups may be fairly considered while also providing for the public good. The features of this mechanism may reasonably include “a free press and media, an active civil society, and institutions to check abuses of power by administrative agencies and elected officials,”[16] as well as effective methods for “ongoing contestation and critical revision of their goals.”[17] Responsiveness to the demands of member states by means of a requirement for state consent prevent exploitation of smaller states will ensure that international institutions will not, as some skeptics fear, always “lie below any reasonable threshold of democracy.”[18]

A possible solution to the lack of political discourse leading up to an important decision is the adoption of deliberative methods at the global level, a process involving the creation of national rather than subnational deliberative groups. It then falls to the organization itself to arrange these publics on public funding and amend scale-related issues where the populace summated by a single mini-public of limited size and membership grows too large and diverse to be properly represented.

The democratic culture of many international organizations originates in the historical political practices of its member states; thus the public’s ability to meaningfully affect the direction of global policy should be less difficult a challenge than it currently poses to non-democratic states attempting to become democratic through deliberative processes. However, despite this advantage, there is presently neither the expectation nor the precedent for an authoritative governance system to adopt the suggestions proposed by even the best-organized deliberative mini-publics. However, leveraging the power of public opinion through the continued inquiry of an active civil society may aid mini-publics in receiving due consideration for their deliberations.

The onus for achieving this type of transparency is on external sources like non-governmental organizations and news outlets. The role of these NGOs has come under harsh criticism by realists claiming that “we have gone overboard in our enthusiasm for nonstate actors” and that “NGOS and corporations will not eliminate poverty, fix global warming, or halt the slaughter in Darfur.”[19] Perhaps not, but we must remember that their role is not to themselves eliminate global problems but to maintain linkages to institutions in order to create a “transnational civil society channel of accountability.”[20] Positioned in society as the harshest critics of international institutions, these NGOs must capitalize on the power of public opinion and use their resources to give governmental agents “significant incentives to refrain from behavior that will attract damning criticism.”[21] Through this network a transnational civil society may also realize its secondary purpose: to create a precedent for bottom-up input into international organizations and act as a “basis… on which to build a more systematic transnational democratic future.”[22]

Even in an imperfect democratic model, international bureaucracies should strive for “multilateral representation and the constitution of international regimes.”[23] The current international power structure, populated by actors that “embrace fixed roles and oppose any global democratic means for dealing with most of the problems generated by globalization,”[24] ensures an unequal distribution of power among the states likely to be involved in a United Nations. Of the current UN Security Council, “the five permanent members, with their vetoes and many special privileges… arouse widespread criticism as a self-appointed oligarchy.”[25] This power imbalance directly precludes principles of equality that are central even to a less stringent standard of democratic legitimacy, giving us another condition for the acceptance of international institutions: whereas international organizations are now “permissive and subservient to power politics,”[26] greater democratic accountability requires that they evolve to more multilateral ideals. Though inequalities in wealth between countries will continue to abound without restriction, those with overwhelming authority in international organizations must be forced, either by deteriorating superpower status or the increased demand for power checks by an active civil society, to relinquish their preeminence and embrace the idea of an international society without decisional omnipotence.

International relations scholars have long been skeptical of the idea of full participatory transnational democracy. Even in its current implementation in many developed countries, participatory democracy is not completely inclusive, which should speak volumes about its predicted efficiency, or lack thereof, in a global context. We should not hope to stumble upon a way to eliminate the problems of moral disagreement or permanent minorities that are inherent in democratic practice; what we can do instead is fathom ways in which civilian populaces may exercise the greatest possible control over the direction of foreign policy. Apart from a deliberative process to aggregate the views of as many involved parties as possible, this could be achieved through the adoption of a selective process for diplomats and foreign representatives. Foreign policy can be conducted through election and accountability: ideally, “citizens in democratic societies can reward or punish their governments for the decisions they take in international organizations”[27] as they do in modern democratic societies with elected local officials.

While it is tempting to think that “large-scale international action depends on the resources and goodwill of the permanent members” of the UN Security Council[28] – and thus to entrust the future of international politics to the benevolent guardianship of world superpowers – the above range of legitimizing options available to us should make it obvious that while full realization of the democratic ideal may be out of reach, there are still a number of legitimizing measures one can take to increase the acceptability of international institutions. Thus we can conclude that the likely path of international politics is characterized by “a shift away from a purely state-centred international system of ‘high politics’ to new and novel forms of geo-governance”[29] involving multilateral deference to smaller states, increased monitoring by NGOs and revised methods of selection for foreign officials. The international community may be best served by taking the diminishment of sovereignty and state autonomy as a necessary product of the global economic and political linkages that define the evolving international mindset, and to devote its efforts instead to the further legitimization and ever-changing revision of the goals, methods and targeted community of international organizations.