Divide et Impera: Legitimacy Politics in the WTO

International Organizations increasingly engage in what has been dubbed a „politics of legitimation“. Borne by a general trend towards transparency in governance but also the spread of transnational public criticism towards their procedures and policies, they employ a variety of techniques to defend or reconstitute their claim towards legitimacy in the eyes of the general public and their main stakeholders respectively. Compared to other international organizations, especially the world economic organizations have directly reacted to such resistance and have opened up to grant access to civil society actors. In our article we aim to show that this opening up has to be qualified in several respects. While organizations have generally increased possibilities for access to civil society critics, the quality of these possibilities is often questionable. As we argue, world economic institutions often employ a divide et impera-strategy to silence and disperse resistance. Drawing on the WTO, we show that various forms of access have been on the rise since 1998, shaping the image of an inclusive organization in reaction to strong transnational resistance, among them (1) the proliferation of 'outreach activities' as educational tools, (2) the creation of civil society deliberation fora, and (3) the direct addressing of critics in annual reports and Ministerial Declarations. As our analysis highlights, these forms of access usually follow a similar pattern: While moderate critical voices (opposition) are included, radical critics (dissidence) are ignored or dismissed, thereby dividing civil society. Contrary to ideas that perceive of civil society access as a means to transform international organization, this legitimation strategy is employed to silence and disperse resistance and rather serves to preserve the institutional rationality of organizations.