Global Political Legitimacy Beyond Justice and Democracy

Today it is widely accepted that political legitimacy is a desirable quality of political institutions, and that we have good reasons to want global institutions to have more of it. Despite this broad consensus, however, there is still little agreement on what the specific content of the principles of legitimacy ought to be. While research on global political legitimacy is still in its infancy, two main paths have thus far been taken to respond to the legitimacy deficit in global governance: one via the concept of ‘democracy’, another via the concept of ‘justice’. However, both have run into problems in theorizing political legitimacy at the global level. The ‘democratic path’ has difficulty accounting for the difference between a polity of collective decision-making in which the members have roughly equal stakes and decisions are made on a wide range of issues, and global institutions that are typically organized around specific polity areas where people have very different stakes, which would make democracy’s core principle of political equality normatively questionable. With focus on distributive aspects, the ‘justice path’ has directed the attention away from the question of political agency and of how the cooperative arrangements that allocate goods are themselves justly organized. Indeed, we can be the recipients of numerous goods without acting upon them. Yet, political legitimacy is about the authorization of political power, which requires political action of some sort. Through an examination of these paths, the aim of this paper is to explore a third path, which, drawing on Rainer Forst’s work, investigates global political legitimacy as a special kind of normative value, which is at a basic level distinct from democracy and distributive justice in that it is not reducible to either of them, perhaps even in principle possible to achieve without them.