Global governance and legitimacy

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR

Robert O. Keohane is Professor of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. He is co-author (with Joseph S. Nye, Jr.) of Power and Independence (1977; fourth edition 2011), the author of After Hegemony: Cooperation and discord in the World Political Economy (1984) and co author of Designing Social Inquiry (1994). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a corresponding Member of the British Academy.

Notes

1 This comment draws freely on Buchanan and Keohane (2006), in which further references to works of normative theory can be found. I am indebted to Professor Buchanan for many of these ideas, although of course he bears no responsibility for my use of them here. I also appreciate some very perceptive critical comments on an earlier draft, sent to me by Professor Antonio Jorge Ramalho of the University of Brazilia.

2 Using this categorization, the paper by Steven Bernstein in this volume is concerned with sociological legitimacy, since he seeks to understand “how particular requirements [for legitimacy] came to be viewed as justifications” (p. 19). His is a critical version of sociological theory. In contrast, the paper by Daniel Mügge, like my shorter contribution here, pursues the normative project of seeking to assess the legitimacy of international institutions – and ultimately, in his words, to conduct “legitimacy audits” (Mügge, this volume).

3 See the argument by Scholte in this forum for a more ambitious interpretation of how inclusiveness might play out in global governance. See the intervention by Kishore Mahbbubani for an emphasis on greater inclusion of non-Western peoples.

4 See the discussion in Rodrik (2007: 201–202) of Friedman (1999), who coined the “golden straightjacket” phrase.

5 Sen, 1999. I believe that following John Rawls (1971), by examining what publics would prefer behind a “veil of ignorance,” would yield a similar conclusion.

6 I have in the past sought to use Fritz Scharpf's categories of input and output legitimacy (Scharpf, 1999), but they never seemed to be entirely distinguishable from one another. Mügge in this volume provides an interesting analysis indicating how difficult it is to make this distinction in practice.

7 There might be useful opportunities here for using agent-based simulations to explore worlds with and without the Security Council.

8 For a discussion of what I call the “contingent legitimacy of the Security Council” see Keohane, 2006.