Academic

Pettit on Legitimate International Institutions

By Lawrence Solum

Philip N. Pettit (Princeton University - Department of Politics) has posted Legitimate International Institutions: A Neorepublican Perspective (THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTERNATIONAL LAW, John Tasioulas and Samantha Besson, eds., Oxford University Press, Forthcoming) on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

Neorepublican theory requires the legitimate domestic state to protect people against domination by others in a way that is not dominating itself: state coercion is to be conducted under the pressure of citizens and their representatives on terms that citizens equally accept. The international order serves a similar protective role in relation to states themselves, and indirectly their members. So what is going to be required for its legitimacy? The chapter outlines a neorepublican response, focusing on how to resolve two distinctive problems. One is the membership problem as to which entities are to play the role played by citizens in the domestic context; the answer given is, legitimate domestic states or states that can be made legitimate. The other is the imbalance problem as to how such states can be equally empowered in the control of the international order; there is no easy answer but neither are there grounds for despair.

And from the text:

We confront a striking dilemma when we think about how to appoint to international bodies and how to police those appointed authorities ? those deputies or proxies ? so that they reliably act on suitable terms of association and argument. Either the distribution of appointments and the organization of offices will reflect the greater power of some countries, where that power may depend on population, territory, resources or wealth. Or it will not reflect such inequalities of power but be devised on an egalitarian basis. But in the first event, won?t the arrangements tend to favor the fewer, more powerful countries; and in the second, the more numerous and less powerful? And isn?t any such favoritism inconsistent with legitimacy? The first point to make in response is that there are some ways in which it is reasonable that the stronger or the weaker be favored, on plausible terms of reference, and that these should be distinguished from modes of favoritism that are indefensible. It is hard to imagine an international forum of discussion in which there was no agreement that those with larger populations should get greater access to some common benefit ? say, a vaccine that is distributed by international agencies ? and that those with more natural resources should be enabled to use them to their commercial advantage. And, equally, it is hard to imagine that there might not be agreement that those with lesser wealth should not have to pay the same as those with greater wealth into international agencies and that those with smaller populations should not be subject to unconstrained, majority control in international bodies. Let such positions on differential treatment be accepted in international discourse, and they may have an impact, not just on how argument is conducted in  international agencies and bodies, but on the appointments that different countries are allowed to control and on the modes in which appointees operate. They will support certain allowable asymmetries within those agencies and bodies. But won?t any asymmetries tend to facilitate unwarranted favoritism, whether towards the more powerful or towards the less powerful? Not necessarily, I think. The second point to make in response to the general problem of imbalance is that this is not an inevitable effect, however difficult it may be to avoid it.

Many international authorities and agencies will be proxies who are subjected to incentives, opportunities and constraints that support decision-making according to accepted terms of reference; the very reputation of the individuals and bodies involved may depend on the display of such impartiality (Brennan and Pettit 2004). And while there will certainly be many decisions that are up for negotiation between  countries of different levels of power, the asymmetry can be muted by the capacity of weaker countries to make common cause with one another.

Stronger countries may always seek advantages that would be hard to support in multi-lateral, egalitarian discussion of what ought to be accepted by each. This appears, for example, in their tendency to shift to another forum of debate when one forum proves disadvantageous, and in their attempts to opt out of multilaterial discussions altogether in favor of bilateral, one-by-one arrangements with other states (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000).  But it is by no means assured, and by no means evident, that they can always get away with these initiatives. Coalitions among weaker countries, if they can only hold together, may often be able to drag them back to the table and exploit constraints of discourse-compatibility in their own favor.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on December 15, 2008 (boomark / email).