Democratising Global Governance? The Role and Meaning of Normative Concepts in the Politicisation of International Organisations

The proposed paper analyses the politicization of international organizations (IOs) by state representatives. It seeks to contribute to politicization research in two important ways: First, by empirically investigating one of its central underlying assumption, namely that of a rebalancing of functional in favour of democratic standards of legitimate global rule; and second, by emphasizing one important aspect that current attempts to conceptualize politicization as (de-)legitimation have insufficiently taken into account: the potentially disputed meaning of the norms used to (de-)legitimize IOs. The paper compares patterns of democracy-based politicization of two UN organizations, namely the Security Council (SC) and the General Assembly (GA). Comparing the role that democracy discourse plays within diplomats’ politicization of the two IOs focuses on 1) the frequency of democracy-based evaluations of both IOs; 2) the tenor of democracy discourse (are references to democracy used to legitimize or to delegitimize the IOs?); and 3) the meaning with which the concept of democracy is applied to the organizations. For this comparison, corpus linguistic methods are applied to 1076 speeches of 163 state representatives made within the UN reform debate (2003-2013). They allow for scrutinizing the role and meaning of democracy discourse within countries’ statements about the SC and the GA. Moreover, the paper integrates the results from interviews conducted with diplomats surrounding this year’s UN reform debate to further analyse the meaning of states’ democracy-based politicization of the two IOs. The latter is particularly important. While politicization scholars have emphasized the increase in norm-based (especially democratic) evaluations of IOs, they have neglected possible differences in actors’ understanding of these norms. This paper proposes a conceptualization of politicization that accounts for the contested meaning of norms of legitimate rule. Increasing scholarly awareness of the matter may also help to reduce the considerable Western bias that characterizes current politicization research.