The Legitimation of International Organisations in Disruptive Times

International organizations (IOs) continue to stand out as the most durable and authoritative forms of international governance and many of them render binding decisions in the expectation of obedience – that is, they hold political authority (Hooghe, Lenz, and Marks 2019). Following Max Weber, political authority rests on the voluntary recognition on the part of the ruled that a political system has the right to take binding decisions because it is seen as legitimate. Legitimacy lowers the cost of rule and enhances the likelihood of compliance, and it is crucial for IOs because they generally lack coercive enforcement mechanisms (Tallberg and Zürn 2019). Given the importance of legitimacy for political rule, Weber expected that any political system would seek to cultivate the belief in its legitimacy. We refer to strategic acts that aim at stabilizing and enhancing beliefs in the legitimacy of an IO as legitimation. IOs are currently facing a period of particular disruption. Though they have always confronted an evolving political landscape, current structural shifts in their environment and contemporary political developments render their legitimacy particularly precarious and legitimation, therefore, especially challenging. We aim to advance a new research agenda on the legitimation and self-legitimation of IOs in disruptive times that gives due regard to the following three developments. • Structurally, IOs overwhelmingly lack an important source of legitimacy of national political systems: an established self-understanding among the ruled that its members share a common identity. Democratic legitimacy, the main focus in the extant literature, may serve as the basis for an identity narrative in Western-dominated regional and global organizations, but IO (self-)legitimation may have different roots in different places and these alternatives have gone largely untheorized in the literature (Billerbeck 2019, Söderbaum 2004, Witt 2019). Moreover, the growing scepticism about multilateralism by some of its traditional proponents means that exclusive nationalist conceptions of identity are gaining currency, increasingly challenging (inclusive) democracy-based or other constructions of community. What are the effects of this development for IO legitimation? • IOs operate in an ever-denser institutional environment in which claims to govern an issue increasingly overlap among different IOs as well as between IOs and other international “governors” (Alter and Raustalia 2018). As a result, competition over who holds political authority is not only contested between IOs and their member states, but to a growing degree also among international institutions themselves. This development may induce new IO legitimation strategies, e.g. an explicit differentiation of their legitimacy claims from those of competitors, and institutional complexity gives rise to interactions between the (self-)legitimation of different IOs that has gone largely unnoticed in the literature. • Politically, the functional justification for IOs, that they are indispensable for transnational problem-solving in a globalizing world, is increasingly being challenged by domestic political actors. The return of “populist nationalism” renders this hitherto largely uncontested justification of international authority transfers increasingly problematic (Copelovitch and Pevehouse 2019). Yet, the literature offers little insight on what replaces this well-established justification, and to what extent it has ever dominated in non-Western dominated IOs.