Legitimacy and Power Politics

The American and French Revolutions in International Political Culture

Mlada Bukovansky

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780691146706
  9780691074344
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400825417
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the causes and consequences of a major transformation in both domestic and international politics: the shift from dynastically legitimated monarchical sovereignty to popularly legitimated national sovereignty. It analyzes the impact of Enlightenment discourse on politics in eighteenth-century Europe and the United States, showing how that discourse facilitated new authority struggles in Old Regime Europe, shaped the American and French Revolutions, and influenced the relationships between the revolutionary regimes and the international system.


The interaction between traditional and democratic ideas of legitimacy transformed the international system by the early nineteenth century, when people began to take for granted the desirability of equality, individual rights, and restraint of power. Using an interpretive, historically sensitive approach to international relations, the author considers the complex interplay between elite discourses about political legitimacy and strategic power struggles within and among states. She shows how culture, power, and interests interacted to produce a crucial yet poorly understood case of international change.


The book not only shows the limits of liberal and realist theories of international relations, but also demonstrates how aspects of these theories can be integrated with insights derived from a constructivist perspective that takes culture and legitimacy seriously. The author finds that cultural contests over the terms of political legitimacy constitute one of the central mechanisms by which the character of sovereignty is transformed in the international system--a conclusion as true today as it was in the eighteenth century.

Chapter One

Introduction: The Transformation of Legitimacy

As if anyone could forget that the sovereign power resides in my person only . . . that public order in its entirety emanates from me, and that the rights and interests of the nation, which some dare to regard as a separate body from the monarch, are necessarily united with my rights and interests, and repose only in my hands.¹

It was not the respite of a reign that would satisfy France, enlightened as she was then become. A casual discontinuance of the practice of despotism, is not a discontinuance of its principles; the former depends on the virtue of the individual who is in immediate possession of the power; the latter, on the virtue and fortitude of the nation.²

This book examines a major transformation in both domestic and international politics: the shift from dynastically legitimated monarchical sovereignty to popularly legitimated national sovereignty. In the 1770s, a loosely federated band of colonies succeeded in winning independence from one of the principal great powers in the European international sys-system. In the 1790s, a new and inexperienced revolutionary regime in France was able to muster the resources for a major series of military campaigns—resources that had eluded the financially bankrupt “absolutist” monarch which that regime overthrew. A transformation of the terms of political legitimacy lay at the heart of both these events.

I seek to show how this transformation of political legitimacy came about and how it influenced the conduct of international politics. The best way to explain both the transformation and its consequences is to rigorously examine the complex interplay between elite discourses about political legitimacy and strategic struggles for power within and among states. In other words, I show not only that culture, power, and interests matter, but precisely how they matter in a crucial case of international change. I draw on the insights of constructivist scholars who have shown that “anarchy is what states make of it” but go on to show how political actors can remake anarchy. My goal is not only to contribute to our growing understanding of the limitations of liberal and realist theories of international relations, but also to demonstrate how they can be integrated with insights derived from the constructivist approach to explain major change.

The key to this undertaking is to develop a better understanding of two major and often misunderstood or neglected concepts in international relations: political culture and legitimacy. Political legitimacy is conceptualized and contested through the medium of political culture.Insofar as legitimacy has international as well as domestic dimensions, the international system can be said to have a distinct, system wide political culture. The political culture of the international system is that set of implicit or explicit propositions, shared by the major actors in the system, about the nature of legitimate political authority, state identity, and political power, and the rules and norms derived from these propositions that pertain to interstate relations within the system. In other words, we should use the term “culture” to refer to the shared knowledge of rules and norms that constructivist theorists argue is constitutive of the structure of the international system.³ Those rules and norms are grounded in political legitimacy conceptions.

Political legitimacy—or the terms by which people recognize, defend, and accept political authority—is important to international as well as to domestic politics. Political legitimacy is a critical component of political power, because a government perceived as illegitimate by its own subjects will have more difficulty mustering the resources for international competition than a legitimate one—as the troubled reign of Louis XVI demonstrates. The terms by which people define political legitimacy also constitute the polity. Monarchs and their supporters legitimated their rule by reference to blood and divine sanction; they saw the sovereign realm as the king’s patrimony, to be cared for and cultivated as such. Democratic governments legitimate themselves by the consent of the governed and conceptualize the polity as the body of the people, or a nation, making laws and governing itself through its representatives. The mode of political legitimacy defines the identity of the polity.

Political legitimacy also requires external recognition. When other states recognize a sovereign state they lend it legitimacy, and hence the capacity to engage in external relations: making treaties, engaging in trade, making war. In short, sovereignty is conditioned by legitimacy, and this has international as well as domestic implications. How one form of legitimacy ceases to be dominant in an international system and another comes to take its place is a question little explored in international relations; it deserves more attention.⁴

Explaining the Transformation

From the mid-eighteenth century onward, the political struggles of European and American aristocrats against the perceived despotism of their monarchs yielded a profound shift in how both leaders and subjects came to view the sources and terms of legitimate political authority. Bloodlines and divine sanction began to lose their symbolic power as sources of legitimacy; popular will—however nebulously defined—began its ascent as the ultimate source of legitimate authority. In their power struggles, monarchists and those who challenged them deployed the material and cultural resources at their disposal. A central resource for all sides was the complex and diverse body of discourse known as Enlightenment thought.

Enlightenment discourse gave meaning and content to domestic struggles for power within the state and to international struggles for power between states. That discourse facilitated a transformation in thinking about the terms of legitimate political authority. Because key late eighteenth-century political struggles—especially the American and French revolutions and the wars that accompanied them—were articulated in terms of Enlightenment discourse, one of the outcomes of those struggles was a new template for political legitimacy, grounded in the notion of popular sovereignty. That template was visible in both practical institutional changes and changes in political discourse in the wake of the revolutions and the accompanying wars. The challenge posed by the revolutions was not to specific monarchs, but to dynastic monarchy itself. Over time that challenge came to penetrate the entire EuroAtlantic states system and beyond.

We live in an era accustomed to taking Enlightenment conceptions of political legitimacy for granted. Equality, individual rights, the power of reason to resolve political and administrative issues, the necessity of checking the powers of government to allow civil society to flourish, and the notion that political authority—or sovereignty—ultimately resides in the people of a nation: all these notions, however imperfectly realized in practice, have come to dominate global political discourse. They are enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations as standards toward which all member states should strive. But historically, these standards of legitimacy emerged within a context dominated by a distinctly different notion of legitimate authority: that of dynastic, monarchical sovereignty legitimated by blood and divine sanction. How did this transformation from dynastically legitimated monarchical sovereignty to popularly legitimated national sovereignty come about?

Outside the field of international relations, standard explanations for the emergence of democratic legitimacy focus, in varying degrees, on the rise of markets, industrialization, and the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie in Europe. All these macrosociological phenomena may have been important factors, viewed in retrospect from a broad historical perspective, but they are not the focus of this book. The American and French revolutions are also seminal events in the emergence of democratic legitimacy, and therein lie some interesting puzzles. These revolutions occurred prior to the age of industrialization, and their “bourgeois” character has been challenged or at least qualified by the current generation of historians.⁵ Further, the Enlightenment ideas that these revolutions attempted to put into practice predate the revolutions by several decades. How could these ideas simply be the reflection of changing material conditions or a newly empowered class interest when those new conditions were not yet apparent, when that class had not yet risen to power, and when the ideas themselves seemed to be far more popular with the nobility than with the bourgeoisie? In my view, transformations of legitimacy are not fully explicable by reference to social transformations such as the rise of the bourgeoisie or material transformations such as the emergence of capitalist markets.

In addition, the American and French revolutions were strongly influenced by, and in turn influenced, international politics; if we analyze them only as discrete “domestic” phenomena while neglecting their international dimensions we will not find satisfactory answers to the question of how democratic legitimacy came to challenge monarchical legitimacy in the international system as a whole.⁶ In fact, if we take the international context into account, the assertion that democratic legitimacy was the strongest legacy of these revolutions becomes questionable. International relations theory ought to contribute something to our understanding of the transformation of legitimacy that was initiated by the late eighteenth-century revolutions.

International relations theory offers two broad perspectives to explain the late eighteenth-century emergence of democratic legitimacy or, more accurately, popular sovereignty. From a liberal perspective rooted in the Kantian tradition, the development of democratic legitimacy and the rule of law represents the progressive unfolding of human reason to create the political and legal conditions for greater and greater self-conscious human freedom. One by-product of this process is the progressive bureaucratization and rationalization of political life as described by Max Weber. Another is the spread of democratic peace. From a realist perspective, the innovations in late eighteenth-century political thought and practice—particularly the development of mass armies and the centralization and bureaucratic streamlining of the modern nation-state—yielded success in international competition, and were thus emulated in what amounts to a system wide process of “natural” selection.

Although each of these perspectives provides a compelling explanatory schema, each is also limited in its capacity to shed light on the process and mechanisms by which the transformation of legitimacy came about. Nor do the liberal and realist approaches agree on what precisely emerged from the revolutionary period of the late eighteenth century. For liberals, democratization seems to be the main legacy; for realists, the outcome is better characterized in terms of mass mobilization, state centralization, and nationalism. Perhaps we are, in a very broad sense, approaching the “end of history” and the triumph of liberal democracy over other forms of governance, although this conclusion has provoked much debate.⁷ Perhaps the sporadic, circuitous, violent, and often apparently irrational character of the process by which we are approaching the end of history may be explained away by Immanuel Kant’s thesis that strife among men and among nations over time teaches them the necessity of coming to live peacefully under the rule of law.⁸ But even for those who have faith in liberal progress, the Kantian perspective leaves many questions about the trajectory of the development of democracy unanswered.

Democratic legitimacy did not emerge victorious from the eighteenth-century revolutions, but neither was dynastic legitimacy reasserted in its traditional form. Rather, it was the idea of popular sovereignty—the notion that legitimacy must come from the will of the people—that proved the most potent, immediate legacy of the revolutionary wars and domestic struggles, though that legacy was strongly challenged by conservatives.Closely linked to this development was the idea that the people, rather than the monarch, constituted—and ought to constitute—the nation.Popular sovereignty and nationalism were not inextricably linked to the notions of democratic rule or even the rule of law. Although many revolutionary thinkers and actors did try to maintain those linkages, those in favor of dynastic legitimacy tempered by traditional noble rights could also justly claim to be on the side of the rule of law. Nor was monarchical rule, if checked by some version of representation and separation of powers, antithetical to Kantian notions of republicanism. Further and most important, the practical experiences of the domestic and international politics of the late eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century favored populist nationalism—often supporting authoritarian rule—as much as republican checks and balances and the rule of law. Whatever faith one might have in progressive liberalism, and however one might choose to define it, the specific contours of the changes in legitimacy that were born in the mid-eighteenth century and came to dominate the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are not adequately described, let alone fully explained, by the notion of liberal progress.

The realist view of a system wide natural selection process working through international power struggles is difficult to discard in its broadest contours, yet this perspective also blurs rather than clarifies the process and mechanisms by which the transformation of legitimacy came about.In particular, the “natural” selection idea fails to to examine the origins and early survival of the new variation of legitimacy—popular sovereignty—in the midst of the apparently hostile environment of dynastic legitimacy. In the eighteenth century, absolutist monarchy appeared to most strategists as the most effective way to mobilize the state for war. Contemporaries initially thought that the American and French revolutions would weaken rather than strengthen the military power of each state. Further, the defeat of Napoleonic France yielded neither a restoration of traditional forms of legitimacy nor an unambiguous victory for popular sovereignty, so if there was a selection mechanism at work it was not very precise. Even granting that over time the appeal to popular sovereignty proved an effective tool of military mobilization, we are still left with the puzzle of how this new variation of legitimacy managed ...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Bibliography