Legitimating Global Governance in a Post-National World

The chapter summarizes and reflects upon the core findings of our study. Compared to the 1970s and 1980s, how have the norms and values that underpin the justification, appraisal, and critique of international organizations shifted in the post-1990 world? The chapter argues that legitimacy standards of the national constellation are increasingly complemented by the legitimacy standards of the ‘post-national constellation’. While the legitimacy standards of the national constellation emphasize state sovereignty, functional cooperation, and non-coerciveness, the legitimacy standards of the post-national constellation conceptualize individuals as rights holders and are guided by a cosmopolitan ideal of inclusive global governance. More specifically, the case studies reveal a rise of people-based legitimation norms and a rise of procedural legitimacy standards. As the study shows, the politicization of expanded international authority is one important source of normative change. Other sources include the rise of new legitimation constituencies and self-reinforcing dynamics of normative change.

Between the Shadow of History and the ‘Union of People’

With the end of the Cold War, we observe two major changes in the way the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the African Union (AU) sought to legitimate themselves. First, the focus shifted from merely facilitating cooperation to demonstrating that the work of the OAU and later the AU actually made a difference ‘on the ground’; that it led to peace and development, to integration, and to a stronger representation of African interests in global institutions. Second, the AU sought to build its legitimacy on the notion of working not only for and with African states, but also for and with the African people. Legitimation thus increasingly focused on the principles of ‘democracy’, ‘human security’, or ‘human development’. As the chapter reveals, various dynamics in the organizational environment facilitated these changes, but norm entrepreneurship by the OAU/AU bureaucracy was central.

Legitimation Contests

In this chapter, we lay out the theoretical framework that informs our book. We argue that international organizations are legitimated in processes of contestation in which a plethora of actors seeks to define what distinguishes a ‘good’ from a ‘bad’ international organization. In doing so, the actors draw on as well as shape the normative environments in which international organizations are embedded. These environments, in turn, depend on the world political contexts of their time. Change in what we call the terms of legitimation therefore comes from two ends: first, from the dynamics of interaction among those who take part in legitimation contests (‘change from within’); and second, from material or ideational developments that support or challenge the persuasiveness of individual normative frames (‘change from the outside’).

The Involuntary Watchdog

The chapter reconstructs the ways in which the legitimacy standards applied to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have changed since the 1970s. While these standards remain more stable than in other cases we study, two normative developments are noteworthy. First, the nuclear accident in Chernobyl in 1986 meant that the safety pillar gained relevance not only in the policies but also in the legitimation of the Agency. Second, after the verification pillar was strengthened and then politicized in the wake of a post-Cold War expansion of the Agency’s authority, the organization sought to depoliticize and stress the development component of its work. Analytically, the relative stability of the IAEA’s legitimation discourse in a highly turbulent political environment lends support to the idea that field-specific legitimation cultures matter, and that international security governance remains more stable than most other fields.

Navigating between Refugee Protection and State Sovereignty

The chapter reconstructs major changes in the ways in which the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has been legitimated over the past four decades. First, we observe a strengthening of individuals and their rights as reference points of the organization’s activities. Second, managerial norms such as efficiency and accountability have gained relevance in the representation of UNHCR as a ‘good international organization’. While the first normative change attests to the rise of people-centred legitimacy standards, the second provides further evidence for the increasing importance of procedural expectations which international organizations are asked to fulfil. Somewhat paradoxically, then, the turn towards ‘results-based management’ implies that the legitimacy of UNHCR is measured just as much by how it works as it is measured by the outcomes it produces.

From Noah’s Ark to ‘Nature+’

The chapter reconstructs two major changes in the ways in which the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has legitimated itself. In the 1980s and 1990s, IUCN’s focus first shifted from conserving nature for nature’s sake to conserving nature for the sake of the people. This rise of human well-being norms was subsequently reinforced by the increasing emphasis of stakeholder participation, local knowledge, and, with some time lag, indigenous peoples’ rights. Since the early 2000s, we then observe the rise of a complementary legitimation strategy that centres around the economic benefits of conservation. Analytically, the chapter shows that changes in membership structures as well as in the ideational environment of international organizations provide windows for change, that these are used by strong norm entrepreneurs in the organization’s secretariat, and that normative changes have a tendency to be self-reinforcing, a phenomenon we term normative path dependence.

From the GATT Gospel to Democratic Global Governance

The chapter re-examines the history of legitimation contests around the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Descriptively, it shows how environmentalists and trade unions successfully challenged the traditional ‘GATT gospel’ in the early 1990s, with public protests ensuring that so-called ‘non-trade values’ became major reference points in the legitimation contest. The GATT and WTO eventually delegated labour standards to the International Labour Organization, awarded environmental values quasi-constitutional status, and turned democracy into a core norm around which to rebuild legitimacy after the Seattle protests. Analytically, the chapter confirms the relevance of politicization: protests in the wake of enhanced international authority provoked a recalibration of the legitimation discourse. At the same time, the chapter reveals how the post-Seattle decision to rebuild legitimacy around the notion of ‘democracy’ constrains the options the WTO faces in answering the most recent challenges to its legitimacy.

International Organizations under Pressure

In a contribution for the Foreign Affairs magazine in 2012, outgoing World Bank president Robert Zoellick explained ‘Why we still need the World Bank’. Taking Zoellick’s contribution as our starting point, we introduce the central theme of our book: the idea that it can no longer be taken for granted that a core institution of the post-war international order is needed and that international organizations have thus come ‘under pressure’. After laying out the ways in which our study goes beyond the state of our current knowledge, further sections elaborate on major aspects of our research design, on our core findings, and on the implications these findings have for the theory and practice of international organizations. A final section previews the content of Chapters 2 to 8.