After Anarchy

Legitimacy and Power in the United Nations Security Council

Ian Hurd

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780691138343, 9780691128665
• eBook ISBN: 9781400827749
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The politics of legitimacy is central to international relations. When states perceive an international organization as legitimate, they defer to it, associate themselves with it, and invoke its symbols. Examining the United Nations Security Council, Ian Hurd demonstrates how legitimacy is created, used, and contested in international relations. The Council's authority depends on its legitimacy, and therefore its legitimation and delegitimation are of the highest importance to states.


Through an examination of the politics of the Security Council, including the Iraq invasion and the negotiating history of the United Nations Charter, Hurd shows that when states use the Council's legitimacy for their own purposes, they reaffirm its stature and find themselves contributing to its authority. Case studies of the Libyan sanctions, peacekeeping efforts, and the symbolic politics of the Council demonstrate how the legitimacy of the Council shapes world politics and how legitimated authority can be transferred from states to international organizations. With authority shared between states and other institutions, the interstate system is not a realm of anarchy. Sovereignty is distributed among institutions that have power because they are perceived as legitimate.


This book's innovative approach to international organizations and international relations theory lends new insight into interactions between sovereign states and the United Nations, and between legitimacy and the exercise of power in international relations.

C H A P T E R 1

Introduction

THUCYDIDES’ ACCOUNT of the negotiation between Athens and the Melians is one of the earliest known statements of the connection between legitimacy and power. Resisting an ultimatum from Athens, the Melians suggest that might does not make right: “in our view it is at any rate useful that you should not destroy a principle that is to the general good of all men—namely, that in the case of all who fall into danger there should be such a thing as fair play and just dealing.”¹ The Melians put forward a case which differentiates between the justice that comes from superior power and the justice that comes from general rules and morals, arguing that these latter should be valued for both instrumental and normative reasons by the weak and strong alike. Some rules of war and diplomacy, they say, are legitimate and should be respected. They lose the argument, of course, and ultimately pay a high price for it, but in the process the Melians play their part in launching a long debate over the relationship between legitimacy, authority, and power. The debate has been continued in philosophic and sociological settings, carried forward by Aristotle to Machiavelli, Locke, and Rousseau, and on to Marx and the twentieth-century philosophers of modernity such as Weber. But although there is plenty of evidence that practitioners of international relations (IR) take seriously the power of international legitimacy and that academics make frequent reference to it in an ad hoc way, the concept itself only rarely receives sustained attention in analyses of the international system.

This book works on two levels. It raises important conceptual issues from the leading edge of IR theory and applies them to an understanding of the practical day-to-day operation of the UN Security Council. It can therefore be read as a work on IR theory or as a document of UN studies, as advancing theory or empirics. Better still, it might be seen as doing all of the above.

The central purpose of the book is to introduce a workable concept of legitimacy to the study of International Relations. Although the use of the term “legitimacy” is common in International Relations, very little attention is given to what it means or how it works. There is no available model of legitimacy for use in international relations that would allow serious inquiry into its causes, consequences, and implications. My first goal here is to provide such a model and show its worth by using it to explain empirical phenomena in world politics. The model itself, developed by borrowing from sociology, psychology, and management studies, fills a gap in International Relations that has been widening since the rise of constructivism in the late 1980s. Absent an account of legitimacy, much of constructivism’s empirical work on the “logic of appropriateness” remains ungrounded; legitimacy is inherent in the constructivist approach, and yet to date there has not been a full-fledged exploration of the concept and its operation.

The theory of legitimacy, then, contributes in two ways: first, by open-ing up the empirical study of the Security Council in ways previously not possible; and, second, by providing a bridge between rationalist and constructivist approaches. On the empirical contribution, my interpretation shows the importance of beginning with considerations about legitimacy and legitimation when trying to understand either the history or the cur-rent practice of the Council. From the earliest debates over the veto in 1945, to the current controversies over peace missions, new members, and the 2003 Iraq crisis, and into the future of Council reform, we can see the fundamental role played by the processes of legitimation and delegitimation in all that the Council does. It is not too much to say that the Council has power when it is seen as legitimate and loses power as that perception recedes. All Council decisions contain at least some concern for how the choices will help or hurt its legitimacy to various audiences. In some moments, as with the endgame of the Libyan sanctions in the 1990s, legitimacy concerns can come to dominate other considerations in the decision-making calculus of even the Great Powers at the Council. At such times the central role of legitimacy is made clearest; but it remains important even in the more mundane politics of day-to-day Council operation. The empirical cases in the book draw from both the moments of high-politics drama and the more commonplace “normal politics” of the Council.

The essential role legitimacy plays in international politics complicates the academic study of International Relations, because it means that at least some part of outcomes are influenced by this shifty, intersubjective quality which is only indirectly available for empirical study. The power of legitimacy to define actors’ goals and interests, as well as to construct what actors take for granted, means that observers of the international field need some way to monitor and decipher actors’ senses of the legitimate and illegitimate.² To read international politics without paying attention to the competition over legitimacy would leave one with no way to understand such common acts as saving face, offering justifications, using symbols, and being in a position of authority. One cannot be offended by another’s rejection of protocol, or by a rival being well treated by a third party, unless one shares a common definition of what appropriate protocol requires and what constitutes a step up or down on the ladder of status. Such acts make up a large proportion of the stuff of foreign policy and international politics, just as they are common in domestic and inter-personal politics, but they cannot be decoded without a prior sense on the part of the observer of what the actors accept as legitimate and what they define as illegitimate.

An institution that exercises legitimated power is in a position of authority. 3 In international relations, this means that a legitimated international organization possesses sovereign authority. Sovereignty, under-stood as the “right to exercise final authority” over a people and territory, is distributed among various types of actors in the international system.⁴ This includes states, of course, but also, as is shown in the following chapters, any international institutions such as the Security Council which exercise legitimated power over states. The presence of sovereign authority in nonstate actors suggests that the common understanding of the term “international anarchy” is misleading. The international system comprises diverse actors with legitimated power and so has diverse locations of sovereign authority. State interactions occur in a social space that contains authoritative institutions like the Council, and this contradicts the “anarchic” premise of much contemporary IR scholarship.

This book explores these issues through the practical workings of the Security Council. It examines how the members of the United Nations approach the Council and how the Council responds in its daily operations. The practical role of the Council in international relations is not well understood, despite the great deal of reporting and analysis on its actions since 1945. Even simple questions about the behavior of the Council and its effects on states and on the international system have complicated answers. This complexity, I suggest, is due in part to an underappreciation of the role of legitimacy and legitimation in the routine business of the Council. Without understanding the peculiar nature of power based on legitimacy, one cannot understand the behavior and effects of the Council.

Consider, for example, what appears to be a simple question: What power does the Council have in international politics? Its most tangible products are its formal resolutions: the Council issued approximately 1, 675 official resolutions as of May 1, 2006, as well as many hundreds of Presidential Statements. These are all carefully negotiated statements of intent, resolve, concern, or action, and together they make up the Council’s most tangible contributions to world politics. Each is drafted, discussed, debated, and duly promulgated, after which it is published, publicized, and sent to research libraries worldwide. It is not entirely clear what happens after that. Some resolutions become famous because they relate to conflicts that are in the public consciousness, for instance, Resolutions 242 and 425 on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and 660 and 678 on the Iraq-Gulf War. Most, however, do not. Moreover, the real impact on the world of even the “famous” resolutions is not easy to trace. They are generally seen as important documents in international politics, but this certainly does not mean they are automatically followed. Despite the legal obligations they might create, Council resolutions clearly do not necessarily elicit full and complete compliance by nation-states. States still seem to “pick and choose” from Council decisions those elements they respect while pretending other elements do not exist.

This obvious fact of international politics leads to a conundrum: if the most visible products of the work of the Security Council cannot be judged as clearly successful in shifting the policies of member states, then does the body really have the power it was intended to have under the UN Charter? Indeed, what actually is the power of the Security Council, and where does it come from? More broadly, where does any international organization get its power? In a world of formally independent nation-states, the answers to these questions are intrinsic to the claim that international organizations matter at all in the international system.

If we see states as sovereign bodies, legally free to make their own decisions, and international organizations as constraints on state freedom, then there is a contradiction at the heart of the most powerful organizations in international relations. The founding documents of many international organizations give them broad powers to supervise, regulate, and enforce activities throughout international politics and economics, and yet the rights of sovereign states are supposed to protect them from out-side interference, including that of international organizations. States are supposed to be sovereign, and yet an effective international organization must, in some way, infringe on the freedom of states. Hardt and Negri describe the contradiction:

On the one hand, the entire U.N. conceptual structure is predicated on the recognition and legitimation of the sovereignty of individual states, and it is thus planted squarely within the old framework of international rights defined by pacts and treaties. On the other hand, however, this process of legitimation is effective only insofar as it transfers sovereign right to a real supra-national center.⁵

Perhaps nowhere is this paradox more clearly exhibited than with respect to the UN Security Council. The Council is endowed with tremendous formal power by the UN Charter and with primary authority in the international system over questions of international peace and security. And yet it is apparent in the post–Cold War world that attempts by the Council to use that power generate enormous controversy. The Council’s power is spelled out explicitly in the Charter, but in practice its use is always problematic.

This contradiction between international commitment and state sovereignty is traditionally resolved in academic texts by noting that international obligations are generally binding only when a state chooses to be bound. A state could so choose either by joining an organization like the United Nations, and thus consenting to the authority of the Security Council as defined by the UN Charter, ⁶ or by complying with or ignoring a particular decision of the Council on a case-by-case basis.⁷ Either way, the power of the Security Council and its decisions perpetually depends on the consent of states, either prior (when the state joined the UN) or contemporary (when the state responds to a particular requirement). In this way the institution can be seen as entirely consistent with, and indeed subordinate to, the independent desires of sovereign states.⁸

The “consent” approach to resolving the contradiction is convenient but at odds with certain evidence about state behavior toward international rules.⁹ On the one hand, state decision makers often seem to take at least some international obligations extremely seriously, even when they might prefer to ignore them. National governments expend a great deal of energy in managing and interpreting international obligations, while also trying to influence what international organizations say and do. On the other hand, even when states violate international commitments, that violation is usu-ally accompanied by an effort on the part of the state to present the viola-tion as consistent with its obligations. In both cases, the free choice of states seems at least partially constrained by the existence of the organizations, even when they do not wish to be constrained and even when they choose to maneuver around an international obligation. States generally try to manage their relations with international organizations such as the UN and to influence their development rather than ignore them or pretend they do not exist. That some international organizations are taken for granted is important, for it means that the organization is in a position of power in inter-national society, even if states sometimes choose not to comply.

In a notable article published in 1966, In is L. Claude Jr. suggested a more satisfying way to resolve the conceptual conflict between state autonomy and international obligation.¹⁰ Claude argued that states some-times perceive international organizations as legitimate and therefore view the obligations they embody as acceptable and correct. Singling out the Security Council...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One Introduction
• LEGITIMACY IN THEORY
• Chapter Two A Theory of Legitimacy
• Chapter Three Legitimacy, Rationality, and Power
• LEGITIMACY IN PRACTICE
• Chapter Four San Francisco, 1945
• Chapter Five Blue Helmets and White Trucks
• Chapter Six Libya and the Sanctions
• CONCLUSIONS
• Chapter Seven Legitimacy and Sovereignty
• Epilogue
• References