Prompt: Based on your expertise in Comparative Political Systems, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has requested a meeting with you to discuss the “most pressing issue(s) in comparative governance and development around the globe.” 

Dear Secretary Blinken,

During the last two centuries, millions, if not billions, of people have ceased to believe in the divine right of kings and dismissed the idea that some men are born to follow and others to lead. Indeed, in the West, the belief that every human being is endowed with equal and inalienable worth and dignity has made it such that almost all citizens believe the difference between themselves and their leaders is not one of kind and barely even one of degree. Anyone could ostensibly lead, and thus, those that do occupy a governing seat have to work that much harder to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, many leaders are presently experiencing a crisis of legitimacy, causing their respective soils and spheres of influence to rumble with insecurity. The consequences of this are significant, posing an imminent threat to regional and global security, since, without legitimate authority, the likelihood of violent conflict rises significantly. Therefore, it behooves you, Mr. Secretary, to take this crisis seriously. As such, this briefing will first analyze the reasons why leaders’ legitimacy around the world is under siege and offer historical and present day insight into the potential consequences if it does not cease.

In Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation,” he argues that states are legitimized by one of three ways: tradition, charisma, or rational-legal authority. For Weber, the rational-legal paradigm has won the day with legitimacy coming by citizens giving their ascent to be governed by a system of laws and norms that they can apprehend and have the ability to inform. In brief, legitimacy begins and ends with the governed’s consent, and according to Francis Fukayama, this belief has become increasingly widespread. In fact, Fukayama contends that in the realm of systematic political philosophies, liberalism is human history’s final end. There is no other game in town besides governments derived from and upheld by the people’s consent. And yet, in the last few decades, consent of the people has become increasingly hard to get. 

There are a myriad of reasons for this, but high and chief among them is the fact that large groups of people, even whole countries, feel as if they have drawn the short end of the stick. On an international level, Andre Gunder Frank has argued that certain countries, by dint of their history as heavily exploited colonies, have been systematically undeveloped, and in The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto goes even further, claiming, “The triumph of capitalism only in the West could be a recipe for economic and political disaster.” Both men grasp, and Ted Robert Gurr would confirm, that continued feelings of “relative deprivation” could very well lead to an unpleasant, if not cataclysmic, global situation as poorer countries come to resent and contest the dominant place of the West. However, we need not only look at clashes between the “West and the Rest” to see that widespread feelings of deprivation and disillusionment pose a problem for any authority that wants to retain its legitimacy. In “Brexit’s False Democracy,” Kate McNamara contends that Brexit was a function of similarly discontent sentiments as the more “parochial” minded, who knew they were to be the losers in the pan-European dream, rescinded their consent and wrested back their sovereignty. 

In either case, the sense that a whole swath of people has drawn the short end of the stick makes it difficult to see those in charge, the “winners,” whether regionally or globally, as legitimate. To that end, Andreas Wimmer’s “like over like” paradigm, despite being initially confined to an ethnocentric argument, provides some helpful insight because while liberalism has impelled many to believe that their leaders differ from them only in their positional authority, a significant amount of people look at global leaders today and think, “they are not ‘like me.’” That is a problem for legitimacy because as Benedict Anderson has said, nations must be bound by a deep sense of “horizontal camaraderie,” and without that camaraderie, indeed with a felt sense that one’s rulers are irreconcilably distinct from the people they are ruling, consent of the governed will be exceedingly hard to achieve. Theologian John Courtney Murray put the problem like this:

“The fact today is not simply that we hold different views but that we have become different types of men… We are therefore uneasy in one another’s presence. We are not in fact present to one another at all; we are absent from one another. That is I am not transparent to the other, nor he to me; our mutual experience is that of an opaqueness.”

That sense of unease and opaqueness can do nothing but precipitate a legitimacy crisis, both between and within nations, as those who have drawn the short stick or else have different values, experiences, and/or historical grievances denounce winners and rulers as illegitimate. When this occurs, the risk of conflict increases dramatically because states that lose (or never secure) their legitimacy become much more susceptible to revolution, anarchy, and tyranny. Historically, Theda Skocpol has discussed the way state breakdown, of which a crisis of legitimacy is doubtless a piece, provided a necessary condition for French, Russian, and Chinese revolutionary activity. More recently, Jeffrey Herbst and Greg Mills have shown that a lack of legitimate authority in the Congo, even with the presence of foreign investment and backing, has led to insecurity and instability, ceding large chunks of the country to anarchy. Finally, in Hong Kong presently, the growing sense that the Chinese Communist Party is not a legitimate government has led many to take to the street in protest and led the Party to crack down with tyrannical viciousness. 

Unfortunately, Mr. Secretary, there is no “technical solution” to the crisis of legitimacy. Some thinkers, like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have argued that government officials, specifically in democracies, should maintain legitimacy by warding off extremes. However, doubling down on leaders’ gatekeeper-ness may only inflame hostile sentiments because as Hanna Pitkin has pointed out, there is an ongoing and raging debate about whether representatives govern as individuals or under the people’s mandate. If the latter, going against the people’s will, however extreme it may be, will only feed the crisis of legitimacy. Indeed, it might actually be too late to arrest the growing legitimacy crisis because as Francis Fukayama has observed, “A nation’s well-being… is conditioned by a single, pervasive cultural characteristic: the level of trust inherent in the society.” If trust is essential for a nation’s well-being, it must be all the more key for the health of the global community. And yet, as has already been discussed, there has been a real and pervasive decline in trust on almost every front, and in such conditions, the best that can be achieved appears to be little more than an uneasy peace. At the domestic level, Arend Lijphart has suggested as much with his “consociational model” whereby power sharing and group autonomy are both guaranteed. Unfortunately, it is doubtful this would do much to build trust and legitimacy, and there is no clear way to implement this globally. 

Sorry, Mr. Secretary. Things are pretty bleak, but I hope you have a nice holiday.

Sincerely,

Sarah Christine

Comparative Political Systems Fall 2022