Yash Tandon
3 August 2008
opinion
Legitimacy is a philosophical-political concept. It is also an ethical concept. In Western philosophy a distinction is sometimes made between legality and legitimacy. Before the dawn of liberal democracy in the West, the will of the sovereign monarch constituted the legal order.
The French Revolution changed that. Henceforth, only the will of the people, expressed through representative institutions or directly by referendum, conferred legitimacy to the legal order.
Recently, for example, the people of Ireland decided by referendum, that contrary to the will of their government, they did not want to surrender their sovereignty to some supranational body called the European Union.
What the Irish vote showed was that the democratically expressed will of the people is the ultimate test of the legitimacy of any institution that seeks to make decisions on behalf of the people.
Of course, the international domain is different from the national. There is no World Parliament of Peoples. The nearest we have to a peoples' assembly is the United Nations.
The UN, however, is a cleverly devised global body based on an adroit balance between power (the Security Council with big power veto) and the voice of the people (the General Assembly, where this voice is presumably articulated through governments). This is the UN's ultimate legitimacy test -- does it properly balance the power of the mighty with the voice of the world's people?
Fifty years after its formation, the General Assembly has more or less kept up its representative character. It has, for example, absorbed all the new nations arising out of colonial past and given them an equal voice in the Assembly.
It still enjoys some legitimacy. But the Security Council has lost its legitimacy; it no longer reflects the new reality of power. The exercise by the United States, the United Kingdom and France of a triple veto of the Western nations while keeping out countries such as India and Brazil does not make sense any longer.
NONETHELESS, AS LONG AS the Security Council does notreform, it is the body that decides, for example, whether or not the internal situation in Zimbabwe constitutes a threat to international security.
The UN is a rule-based institution, even if the rules are now applied by an anachronistic Security Council. The G8, on the other hand, has no legitimacy whatsoever.
It has the power of its mighty, but it does not have the voice of the people. The G8 is a self-selected club of the rich and powerful. Nobody ever gave it the mandate or authority to decide on matters of economy, climate change, security, or to impose sanctions on states that do not bend to their will. The last G8 summit held in Hokkaido, Japan, July 7-9, sat in judgment over the democratic credentials of the government of Zimbabwe, even though it had itself no legitimacy.
The G8 had no choice but to bring the matter to the Security Council of the UN. And there the West lost: China and Russia vetoed. The G8 is no longer even the seat of the powerful.
It is a club of the six richest Western countries -- France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, United States and Canada, plus one rich Asian country (Japan), plus nearly rich Russia, a former Communist country that was admitted in 1998, but still sits, uncomfortably, on the margins of G7.
Yash Tandon is the executive director of the Geneva-based South Centre
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 The East African. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
