Rethinking the Legitimacy of Global Governance: On the Need for Sociological Research and Philosophical Foundations

Peters, Dirk Working Paper Rethinking the Legitimacy of Global Governance: On the Need for Sociological Research and Philosophical Foundations Global Cooperation Research Papers, No. 2 Provided in Cooperation with: University of Duisburg-Essen, Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21) Suggested Citation: Peters, Dirk (2013) : Rethinking the Legitimacy of Global Governance: On the Need for Sociological Research and Philosophical Foundations, Global Cooperation Research Papers, No. 2, University of Duisburg-Essen, Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21), Duisburg, https://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:hbz:464-20150105-091129-3 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/214695 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ Dirk Peters Rethinking the Legitimacy of Global Governance On the Need for Sociological Research and Philosophical Foundations With commentaries by Frank Gadinger and Daniel Gaus Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21) Global Cooperation Research Papers 2 All Global Cooperation Research Papers are available online. To learn more about the Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research, please visit www.gcr21.org. DuEPublico Issues are permanently fi led at the public online archive server of the University of Duisburg-Essen, http://duepublico.uni-duisburg- essen.de. Printed by UDZ, Duisburg © Duisburg 2013 [Second Printing 2016] Copyright is held by the contributing authors. ISSN: 2198-1949 (Print) ISSN: 2198-0411 (Online) DOI: 10.14282/2198-0411-GCRP-2 Editorial Board Rainer Baumann Frank Gadinger Volker Heins Silke Weinlich Editorial Offi ce Martin Wolf Tina Berntsen Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21) Managing Board Markus Böckenförde Tobias Debiel Claus Leggewie Dirk Messner Schiff erstr. 196 47059 Duisburg Germany Tel: +49 (0)203 29861-100 Fax: +49 (0)203 29861-199 E-Mail: [email protected] Internet: www.gcr21.org A Central Research Institute of the University of Duisburg-Essen License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY-ND 4.0 Attribution Please cite the work as follows: Dirk Peters 2013. Rethinking the Legitimacy of Global Governance: On the Need for Sociological Research and Philosophical Foundations (Global Cooperation Research Papers 2). Duisburg: Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21). doi: 10.14282/2198-0411-GCRP-2. License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY-ND 4.0. No Derivative Works You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Notice For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page: www.gcr21.org/publications. Global Cooperation Research Papers 2 Contents Dirk Peters Rethinking the Legitimacy of Global Governance: On the Need for Sociological Research and Philosophical Foundations 5 Introduction 5 Conceptions of Legitimacy 6 The Debate About Legitimate Global Governance 8 The Way Ahead 13 References 15 Commentary by Frank Gadinger Don’t Be Afraid to Get Your Hands Dirty: The Case for Researching Everyday Legitimacy 18 Commentary by Daniel Gaus Universality or Diversity? The Normative Pull of Democracy as an Idea. A Rejoinder to Dirk Peters 25 Abstract What would constitute a legitimate global order? Dirk Peters argues that current research on this issue is one-sided: it takes Western democracy as a universal standard and focuses discussion on how aspects of democracy can be applied at the global level. But instead of promoting a universal standard, says Peters, research needs to listen to the actors involved in global governance. There can be no legitimate global order without taking into account what these actors regard as legitimate, and this will not necessarily be a model based on Western democracy. This point of view is endorsed by Frank Gadinger, who proposes a methodological technique from sociology to facilitate empirical research in this area. By reconstructing the arguments that ‘ordinary actors’ employ in the global political arena, we can reveal what they consider legitimate. Daniel Gaus, by contrast, takes issue with Peters’s critique of democracy as a universal standard. Peters may well be correct in contending that Western democratic institutions are not suitable as a basis for legitimizing global politics, says Gaus, but the very act of listening to the governed, and making their conceptions of legitimacy the yardstick of legitimate governance, is itself a democratic endeavour. Keywords Crises of legitimacy, global governance, research methodology, philosophy, normative concepts, pragmatic sociology Authors Dirk Peters Research Fellow, Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, Baseler Straße 27-31, 60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, [email protected] Frank Gadinger Head of Research Unit ‘Paradoxes and Perspectives of Democratisation’, Centre for Global Cooperation Research, Duisburg, Schifferstraße 196, 47059 Duisburg, Germany, gadi[email protected] Daniel Gaus Researcher at the Institute for Political Science, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Grüneburgplatz 1, 60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, [email protected]- frankfurt.de Global Cooperation Research Papers 2 5 Rethinking the Legitimacy of Global Governance: On the Need for Sociological Research and Philosophical Foundations Dirk Peters Introduction Legitimacy is an increasingly prominent focus of global governance research. In its early days, scholarship on global governance could rightly be criticized for devoting excessive attention to questions of effectiveness whilst ignoring normative issues. Over the past decade, however, there has been a major shift in this situation, and literature on the legitimacy of global governance has mushroomed. Such research is of interest not only for normative reasons—because global governance institutions should be legitimate—but also on purely functional grounds. Considerations of legitimacy will be of vital significance in determining the success or failure of international cooperation; and the more legitimate the design and outcomes of global governance institutions are held to be, the greater the likely degree of compliance. Moreover, conceptions of legitimacy will play an important role in bringing about cooperative institutions in the first place. Where actors hold incompatible views as to what is legitimate, they will be hard-pressed to find avenues for successful cooperation. The idea that actors may have divergent views of what constitutes a legitimate institution has received surprisingly little attention in the recent wave of research. Most of what has been written is based on the assumption that all actors in global politics can, in principle, subscribe to a single set of standards of legitimacy. From this viewpoint, a legitimate political order looks surprisingly like a Western democracy. In this paper, I will set out some preliminary thoughts, which I hope will eventually—once fully developed—clear the conceptual ground for an alternative approach in which the potential plurality of conceptions of legitimacy is taken seriously. I will begin by discussing what is meant by ‘conceptions of legitimacy’ and by seeking to substantiate my claim, firstly, that these conceptions are important preconditions for the success or failure of international cooperation and, secondly, that actors in the international arena may differ in what they regard as legitimate. I will go on to show that, despite an intense debate about normative issues, global governance research pays insufficient attention to the potential plurality of notions of legitimacy. A particularly worrying feature here is the tendency of the Peters: Rethinking the Legitimacy of Global Governance Global Cooperation Research Papers 2 6 debate to focus almost exclusively on ways of transposing the concepts of Western democracy to the international level. Even within this narrow, ostensibly universalist, focus, however, the literature comes up with multiple ideas as to what might count as legitimate institutions. This implies a need for further investigation along two routes. First, there should be empirical research to establish whether international actors subscribe unequivocally to the principles of Western democracy (as global governance researchers seem to do) and—if they don’t—to determine what alternative sources of legitimacy may be tapped. Secondly, there needs to be a theoretical debate about potential zones of convergence or overlap, in other words about how we can bring together differing or competing conceptions of legitimacy in order to build a legitimate global order. I outline an agenda for this research in my concluding section. Conceptions of Legitimacy What is legitimacy? Given its status as a central debating-point of political analysis and philosophy, the concept is, predictably, ill-defined. In essence, however, it has to do with the normative underpinning of authoritative rules. Legitimate rules imply a duty to obey these rules on the part of those who are governed by them (Bernstein and Coleman 2009: 5–9; Reus-Smit 2007: 158–9).1 Legitimacy is thus primarily a characteristic of rules or institutions (sets of rules). However, rulers (in the widest sense) and their actions can also be described as legitimate or illegitimate, depending on whether the rules on which their authority is based are legitimate. To be more precise, legitimacy is a characteristic that is ascribed by individuals or groups to these entities, and ‘this process of ascription is always norm-referential’ (Reus-Smit 2007: 162). To say that an institution etc.2 is legitimate is to make the judgement that it meets certain normative standards of legitimacy. It follows that to get at the substance of legitimacy (i.e. to be able to judge what is legitimate/illegitimate), we need to identify the normative standards in question. Such analyses of legitimacy can take at least two general forms. They can either reconstruct existing norm-sets and the judgements about institutions that real actors base on them. This is the sociological approach, most famously promoted by Max Weber and, in Beetham’s view (1991: 6), the one most commonly pursued by today’s social scientists: ‘What matters for an adequate understanding is not what they personally believe, but what is believed in the society they are studying. For this reason most social scientists in the twentieth century have followed Max Weber in defining legitimacy as the belief in legitimacy on the part of the relevant social agents; and power relations as legitimate where those involved in them, subordinate as well as dominant, believe them to be so.’ Research in this sociological vein can focus on simply determining whether or not actors believe an 1 For a defence of this 'traditional' view against more recent attempts to demonstrate that legitimacy does not necessarily entail political obligation, see Klosko (2007). 2 In what follows, I refer only to institutions and orders, but these should be taken to include all potential subjects of legitimacy and justice. Peters: Rethinking the Legitimacy of Global Governance Global Cooperation Research Papers 2 7 institution to be legitimate (e.g. Take 2013: 51–3); or it can aim at reconstructing the discursive bases of these beliefs—that is to say, the social norms in which they are grounded and the discursive processes and practices through which they are brought about (see Reus-Smit 2007: 162 f.; Gadinger and Yildiz 2012; Nullmeier et al. 2010). A second approach is concerned with actually constructing norm-sets against which the legitimacy of institutions can be judged. Such approaches are sometimes labelled ‘prescriptive’ or ‘normative’. I will call them ‘philosophical’, to indicate that their main concern is the reasoning about the normative structures and not primarily their ‘empirical’ reconstruction. In these kinds of approaches, researchers attempt to formulate generalizable principles from which the legitimacy of any subject can be deduced. We will see below how global governance researchers have followed this path, constructing standards of legitimacy for global governance. To enjoy legitimacy is obviously of major importance to any political institution. This is easy to see, even at a purely functional level. If those who are subject to political rules feel a duty to obey them, this will contribute hugely to ensuring compliance. By contrast, institutions that are regarded as illegitimate will need to rely on coercion and will be much more difficult to sustain. In this sense, legitimacy ‘has long-run efficiency advantages over coercion in reducing some kinds of enforcement costs and increasing the apparent “freedom” of subordinates’ (Hurd 1999: 388, with additional citations; see also Koppell 2010: 66). In the case of institutions that are perceived as illegitimate, meanwhile: ‘their effectiveness in providing valuable goods may be impaired’ (Buchanan and Keohane 2006: 407). Sustainable international cooperation or effective global governance will therefore be easier to achieve if it concurs with the conceptions of legitimacy held by the actors participating in it. In addition, there are moral reasons for favouring legitimate institutions over illegitimate ones: political order simply should be legitimate.3 If we take seriously the proposition that legitimacy is ascribed to institutions, matters immediately begin to look a little more complex. The legitimacy of an institution is always relative to the set of norms we apply in assessing it. Only if there is one uncontested common set of norms on which judgements can be based can we speak of legitimacy in absolute terms. This fact is of crucial importance for philosophical and sociological research and also in political practice. As far as philosophical approaches are concerned, it is a matter of first principles: whether one assumes a single set of norms or several possible sets of norms is a key decision in any philosophical theory of legitimacy. Formulating normative standards for legitimate institutions presupposes that you know whether to construct one set of such standards or be open to the possibility of a plurality. Sociological approaches can deal with the issue in a more relaxed fashion, as they can employ what I would call a ‘heuristic particularism.’ By this I mean that when such approaches are seeking to identify, by empirical means, the norm-sets on 3 From a utilitarian point of view, the functional advantages themselves constitute a moral argument in favour of legitimacy. Peters: Rethinking the Legitimacy of Global Governance Global Cooperation Research Papers 2 8 which actors base their judgements, they do not need to commit to a clear-cut perspective beforehand. They can proceed on the assumption that there may be multiple—perhaps even incompatible—norm-sets out there. In examining these, they may find that there are varying degrees of overlap, ranging from full-blown common normative structures to individual elements of agreement regarding global standards of legitimacy for political institutions. If this is the case, they will simply reverse the particularist assumption from which they started out. In terms of political practice, finally, building legitimate institutions requires a common normative structure of legitimacy to which all participating actors can subscribe. Against this background, it is obviously of major importance to know whether or not such a common set of norms exists. Assuming one where none exists may create political conflict of an overt or latent kind. In a best-case scenario, conflict over standards of legitimacy emerges during the institution-building phase, giving actors an opportunity to discuss these standards and find, or create, institutions that accommodate all the respective positions. In a less positive scenario, the conflict remains suppressed and institutions emerge which some regard as illegitimate and therefore end up being inefficient, ineffective, or open to moral question. Or it may be that conflict does emerge but cannot be resolved, causing institution-building to stall. By contrast, if a plurality of normative standards is accepted from the outset, all the actors involved have the opportunity to negotiate standards of legitimacy from scratch and—if this is successful—to create institutions which, besides being geared to problem-solving, are rooted in a sustainable common norm-base. How has global governance research dealt with these issues? My argument is that what global governance has essentially done is to note the pluralism of legitimacyclaims but respond with a call for universalism. This is inadequate. What is needed is not a proliferation of (philosophical) attempts to construct universal standards on which to base the democratic legitimacy of international institutions. Rather, global governance research should engage in a (sociological) examination of legitimacy-claims in the international sphere—an examination that is guided by a heuristic particularism enabling researchers to detect and carefully reconstruct potentially incompatible conceptions of legitimacy in the international realm. Such a reconstruction could serve as a starting-point for identifying zones of overlap—or for a political debate leading to the creation of such zones. It would no longer simply be assumed that everyone in the international realm could subscribe to the same vision—namely, the internationalization of liberal democracy. In what follows, I will seek to substantiate these claims by taking a closer look at global governance research. The Debate About Legitimate Global Governance Since the first half of the 1990s, global governance has become an increasingly important focus of scholarly investigation. Like any emerging strand of research, the early literature in this area was preoccupied with making a case for the originality of its focus. Its key claim was framed in descriptive terms. 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While such reflections are necessary to enable us to construe normative concepts beyond the traditional notions of liberal democracy and the nation state, they mask a flaw in the overall debate, namely a general lack of interest on the part of these disciplines in subjecting the politics of legitimation to empirical research. Against this background, the contribution which Dirk Peters makes to the debate in his leading article is particularly cogent. He argues that IR scholars in particular are more interested in developing normative frameworks for a just and legitimate world-order than in subjecting the relevant actors’ conceptions and understanding of legitimacy to concrete empirical research. As a result, he concludes, the Western concept of liberal democracy is constantly reproduced as a normative referencepoint. I agree with Peters that, framed in this way, the debate misses out a crucial step—namely, ‘ascertaining what the actors themselves would regard as the requirements for a legitimate order’ (p. 12) — and that it can rightly be claimed that an exclusively ‘philosophical’ understanding of legitimacy fails to take into account the plurality of legitimacy claims that emerge in the multiple controversies of international politics. Peters points to a questionable division of labour between, on the one hand, a privileged stratum comprising ‘philosophers’ or ‘thinkers on legitimacy’, and, on the other, a marginalized grouping comprising ‘sociologists’ or ‘researchers on legitimacy’. This critique evokes the old but ongoing controversy regarding the main purpose of political philosophy and, following from this, the appropriate research methodologies to use in political science. In sum this controversy involves a traditional distinction between Platonists, who focus on normative conceptions of a good and just world and seek out universalist standards based on pure reason, and Aristotelians, who deny the existence of eternally valid norms based on pure reason and instead stress the historicity, contingency, and situational nature of all human action. Up to now, the Platonists (later known as Neo-Kantians) have always had the more positive image, being seen as noble idealists, whereas the Aristotelians (later known as Pragmatists) have been characterized as ‘grubby urchins’ with ‘dirty hands’ because of their emphasis on ‘real politics’ and on people’s everyday problems and practices. In his hard-hitting critique of this division of labour, Raymond Geuss (2008) makes a similar point to that of Peters. Gadinger: Don’t Be Afraid to Get Your Hands Dirty Global Cooperation Research Papers 2 19 He complains (2008: 16) that, when it comes to theorization about politics, the ‘utterly fundamental divisions between Is and Ought, Fact and Value, or the Descriptive and the Normative . . . have fallen prey to a kind of fetishism’. He goes on to argue that this distinction is not only artificial but misleading, given the limited scope of this kind of ‘ethics first’ view in addressing more complex phenomena in politics (Geuss 2008: 9). There has been much discussion recently about the ‘interpretive turn’ in humanities and social science research. Ignoring as it does the supposed distinction outlined above, it may well offer us a means of throwing off the straitjacket which that distinction imposes. Most of the innovative approaches in IR today—in the areas of constructivism, pragmatism, practice theory, actor-network theory, and cultural theory—relate normative arguments to empirical research. From an interpretive point of view, it makes no sense to begin the research process with dogmatic decisions. What one must start with, rather, is problems. Summarizing this kind of interpretive shift in social science research, Bruno Latour (2005: 23) remarks that ‘the task of defining and ordering the social should be left to the actors themselves and not taken up by the analyst’. The critiques offered by Peters and Geuss fit well into this new wave of socially grounded approaches to research. I support the general plea which Peters makes for a sociologically oriented research-programme that requires researchers to ‘listen to the actors involved and find ways of reconstructing what they believe constitutes legitimate and illegitimate, just and unjust rule’. I would, however, like to go further and reinforce his argument by putting flesh on the bones of his rather cursorily defined ‘sociological approaches’. In particular, he says little about the methodological requirements that would pertain if this kind of approach were applied to research on legitimacy. In attempting to plug this gap, my analysis—in contrast to Daniel Gaus’s more theoretical critique—will focus on methodological considerations within the framework of the current debate about legitimacy. In order properly to investigate the legitimacy claims of ‘ordinary actors’ in the tradition of ethno-methodology (Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman), it is not sufficient to track ‘public’ discourses via analysis of survey-data or make marginal corrections to positivist research-designs in line with functionalist understandings of legitimacy. What is needed, rather, is a resolutely interpretive paradigm-shift in the understanding and analysis of legitimacy. While some of the scholars featuring in the discourse do begin the process of reconstructing the patterns underlying legitimacy-claims (Nullmeier et al. 2010), they show no interest in the critical agency of ordinary citizens and do not regard the controversies that arise in everyday life as appropriate objects of investigation for the social sciences. As a way of reintroducing ethno-methodology into research on legitimacy, I propose turning to the ‘pragmatic sociology of critique’, as propounded by Luc Boltanski (2011) and his collaborators. With one or two exceptions (Blokker and Brighenti 2011; Gadinger and Yildiz 2012), this is an approach rarely mentioned in current debates on political legitimacy. I will argue that only a sociological approach to research on legitimacy—one that takes as a starting-point the justificatory practices and critical capacities of the agents involved—can present a viable framework within which to combine abstract normative thoughts on changing political legitimacy with sociological sensitivity to the legitimacy claims of Gadinger: Don’t Be Afraid to Get Your Hands Dirty Global Cooperation Research Papers 2 20 ordinary citizens in a complex world (cp. Celikates 2006: 22). Such an approach can make a valuable contribution to contemporary debates about how to explore the politics of legitimation in institutional and transnational contexts. In addition, it rediscovers a moral-political dimension in explaining problems of social ordering in terms of local and global cooperation. A Pragmatic Notion of Legitimacy: Applying Boltanski’s Pragmatic Sociology Pragmatic sociology, as advanced by Luc Boltanski and his colleagues, evolved from an internal critique of the then dominant sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. In their masterwork, On Justification, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) develop a socialtheory programme which focuses on the interplay of justification and critique in ordinary actors’ everyday disagreements. From a pragmatic point of view, everyday life is not a sphere outside the political; it is the general site of the social—and the most interesting for analytical purposes. In situations of conflict, actors generally need to coordinate their action-plans to reach social agreements. But what sort of acquired competences, critical capacities, and moral resources do they mobilize to justify their actions? This simple question lies at the heart of pragmatic sociology and illustrates its distinct understanding of legitimacy as a contingent product of negotiated legitimacy-claims between actors in daily situations of conflict. Boltanski emphasizes the significance of uncertainty in our social interactions. It is the uncertainty and unease in ‘problematic situations’ (John Dewey) which drives actors to reach agreements through negotiated practices of justification—rather than simply obeying the logic of pure interest or normative expectation. Pragmatic sociology suggests that these kinds of conflictual situations, in which rules of acceptability regarding the causes of conflict are negotiated, have a significant impact in terms of social change. What implications does this kind of pragmatic notion of legitimacy have in terms of research methodology? To begin with, it means taking seriously the muchquoted actor-network slogan ‘Follow the actors themselves’ (Latour 2005: 12)— often misunderstood as a straightforward imperative to engage in participant observation. And this in turn implies learning to ‘avoid ontological claims which are not empirically found’ (Bueger 2013) and instead listening carefully to the legitimacy claims articulated by ordinary actors. From a pragmatic point of view, ‘social practices cannot be understood from an objective standpoint alone, because they are internally related to the interpretations and self-images of their participants that can only be grasped if one takes their perspective as fundamental’ (Celikates 2006: 21). When it comes to legitimacy, this kind of research-perspective is still absent from the current debate. Pragmatic sociology differs from discursive approaches in that 1) it provides an analytical tool for revealing the practices of justification and critique employed in concrete situations and 2) it adopts a ‘pragmatic actor’ model. The following passage from Boltanski and Thévenot (2006: 37) illustrates their approach to the politics of legitimation in everyday life: How can a social science hope to succeed if it deliberately neglects a fundamental property of its object and ignores the fact that persons face Gadinger: Don’t Be Afraid to Get Your Hands Dirty Global Cooperation Research Papers 2 21 an obligation to answer for their behavior, evidence in hand, to other people with whom they interact? It suffices to be attentive . . . to the justifications that people develop, in speech and in action, to see that the social sciences must begin to take this phenomenon into account, must reckon with the fact that the ordinary course of life demands nearly constant efforts to maintain or salvage situations that are falling into disarray by restoring them to order. In everyday life, people never completely suppress their anxieties, and, like scientists, ordinary people never stop suspecting, wondering, and submitting the world to tests. This passage also points to the moral dimension present in the pragmatic approach to legitimacy. People involved in day-to-day struggles over legitimacy are subject to an imperative to justify their stance; they are endowed with critical capacities, moral resources, and a normal sense of justice. Struggles over legitimacy can be viewed as ‘tests’ or ‘trials of strength’, in which actors negotiate over their mutual claims to legitimacy and test the ‘worth’ of these en situation. Yet no one has the overall capacity to resolve the uncertainty and unease in a situation of conflict. It is therefore not sufficient simply to articulate personal points of view of the type ‘I do not agree with you because I do not like your face’ (Boltanski and Thévenot 1999: 360). Instead, people ‘[make] their demands, [denounce] injustices, [produce] evidence in support of their complaints, or [construct] arguments to justify themselves in the face of the critiques to which they are themselves subjected’ (Boltanski 2011: 27). If we adopt a ‘pragmatic actor’ model of this kind, we must conceive of actors as endowed with an ability to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate ways of rendering criticism and justification. It is this competence that characterizes the normal sense of justice which people bring to their disputes (cp. Boltanski and Thévenot 1999: 364). As a result, what counts as a justification in a specific situation cannot be strategically controlled. In situations where people are constrained to provide a justification, they have to base their stance on a normative order or a higher moral principle. Pragmatic sociology argues that when regulating their mutual normative expectations in a dispute, actors need to mobilize higher moral principles that accord with public interest (not selfinterest). Relating a claim of legitimacy to a higher moral principle makes it easier for those involved in the interaction to accept defeat, agree on a compromise, or demand more evidence (cp. Celikates 2006: 34). What makes pragmatic sociology’s approach interesting from the perspective of political science research on legitimacy is its distinct view of situations of conflict as struggles over legitimacy. Boltanski uses the term ‘test’ to describe the contingent production of legitimacy in controversial situations. Thus every legitimacy struggle is a ‘test of strength’ (Boltanski 2011: 29) which touches on the rules of justice and the power of institutions. Compromise is not an inherent part of the process of constructing orders of worth. As a result, when this kind of struggle over legitimacy is evolving, it is uncertain whether agreement will be reached. ‘It happens in action,’ as Peter Wagner (1999: 343) points out, ‘in the dispute over which criteria to mobilize for the evaluation of a situation.’ Pragmatic sociology’s initial suggestion of using a framework of six orders of worth, sufficient to describe most practices of justification, should not be misunderstood as apodictic. The framework does indeed provide a good methodological entry-point to the study of legitimacy-struggles between ordinary actors. However, it also allows compromise Gadinger: Don’t Be Afraid to Get Your Hands Dirty Global Cooperation Research Papers 2 22 between different orders of worth (the development of a project-based order in the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007) is a case in point) and it is possible for new orders of worth (such as the ecological one in present-day society) to emerge. Pragmatic sociology forces us to think about the social impact of everyday struggles over legitimacy and why these controversies often have such an inflexible character. Even within a community such as a football club, a research group, a body of teachers, or a trade union, securing agreements that are accepted as legitimate is a hard task. Everywhere we look, rank and position need to be negotiated. Who do we accept as a legitimate team-captain, trade union leader, or head of a financial authority? Besides having significance in personnel terms, these kinds of questions highlight areas where politics of legitimation (and orders of worth) take conflicting forms. Should someone highly placed in what Boltanski terms the commercial or civic world be allowed to supervise banking? Should university reform be shaped by market criteria or by considerations of creativity? Who is the ‘right person’ to conduct negotiations on climate policy—an experienced politician, a scientist, or an environmental activist? In modern societies, people are forced to combine different orders of worth and switch between them. This explains the moral dilemmas we face in our everyday practices as, say, consumers or working people. In most social conflicts of this kind, more than one normative principle can be called upon to justify something or criticize it, to demonstrate its legitimacy or illegitimacy. The normative tension between political and economic orders is only one of many contentious spheres in which legitimacy has to be negotiated in a complex world. Studying Legitimacy-conflicts: A Promising Path for Global Cooperation Research? Pragmatic sociology can provide valuable tools for analysing legitimacy-related conflicts in contested policy-fields such as climate change, the global financial crisis, or Western interventionism. It allows political scientists to reconstruct the normative struggles going on in these areas by studying the practices of justification and critique employed by the actors involved. From a pragmatic point of view such as this, the financial crisis, the climate-change summit, and the international negotiations regarding potential intervention in, say, Libya or Syria constitute normative discourses involving an irreducible plurality of moral standards from the economic, political, public, and private spheres. Boltanski would speak of different worlds—worlds in which we live and which require us to configure them as needed. Morally complex situations of this kind, in which claims of political legitimacy are at issue, cannot be resolved through rational generalization or truth-seeking. These are cases where politicians, environmentalists, financial analysts, human-rights activists, and ordinary citizens disagree as to what is the most important common good. In order to explore practices of justification in each contested policy-field, one can observe multiple sites where controversy is the order of the day: EU summits, G8 meetings, Occupy protests. Taking the justifications of ordinary citizens seriously does not, of course, mean falling for any rhetorical tricks they may engage in. ‘[Following] the actors themselves’ implies carefully analysing differing claims to legitimacy in their Gadinger: Don’t Be Afraid to Get Your Hands Dirty Global Cooperation Research Papers 2 23 situational context. In terms of outcomes, as Boltanski and Thévenot warn (2006: 135): ‘It is important to note that no situation, however pure, can permanently eliminate the diversity of the contingencies whose static is maintained around the edges of what is in order.’ Again, one should bear in mind that agents who are knowledgeable, critical, and reflective are nonetheless limited in their capacity to calculate the ramifications of every problematic situation. Reconciling disparate normative principles and living, as it were, between different worlds, taxes their abilities. This theoretical premise of uncertainty in social interactions entails an absence of positive, strategic action-plans. Finally, another of the premises on which pragmatic sociology operates is that people who are involved in legitimacyconflicts and come to realize that something is amiss rarely remain silent about it. Wherever it might be—in garages, factory canteens, university cafés, all kinds of public places—people will express their discontent to each other about aspects of society they perceive to be unjust. The mass protests that have taken place against the background of the EU crisis are a case in point—one that highlights the way in which actors invoke divergent moral principles to bolster claims to legitimacy. Gadinger: Don’t Be Afraid to Get Your Hands Dirty Global Cooperation Research Papers 2 24 References Blokker, Paul, and Brigenthi, Andrea (2011). ‘Politics between Justification and Defiance’, European Journal of Social Theory 14 (3): 283–300. Bohman, James (2010). Democracy Across Borders, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Boltanski, Luc (2011). On Critique. A Sociology of Emancipation, Cambridge: Polity Press. — and Chiapello, Eve (2007). The New Spirit of Capitalism, London: Verso. — and Thévenot, Laurent (1999). ‘The Sociology of Critical Capacity’, European Journal of Social Theory 2 (3): 359–77. — — (2006). On Justification. Economies of Worth, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bueger, Christian (2013). ‘Actor-Network Theory, Methodology and International Organization’, International Political Sociology 7 (3), 338–42. Celikates, Robin (2006). ‘From Critical Social Theory to a Social Theory of Critique: On the Critique of Ideology after the Pragmatic Turn’, Constellations 13 (1): 21-40. Clark, Ian (2005). Legitimacy in International Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gadinger, Frank, and Yildiz, Taylan (2012). ‘Unruhige Legitimität. Die Finanzkrise aus Sicht der pragmatischen Soziologie der Kritik’, in Anna Geis, Frank Nullmeier, and Christopher Daase (eds.), Der Aufstieg der Legitimitätspolitik. Rechtfertigung und Kritik politisch-ökonomischer Ordnungen, Leviathan Special Issue 27, Baden- Baden: Nomos, 302–18. Geuss, Raymond (2008). Philosophy and Real Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Latour, Bruno (2005). Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nullmeier, Frank et al. (2010). Prekäre Legitimitäten, Frankfurt a.M.: Campus Verlag. Rosanvallon, Pierre (2011). Democratic Legitimacy. Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wagner, Peter (1999). ‘After Justification. Repertoires of Evaluation and the Sociology of Modernity’, European Journal for Social Theory 2 (3): 341–57. KHK / GCR21 is the youngest of the ten Käte Hamburger Kolleg supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The Centre recognises global cooperation as the key to solutions for urgent transnational problems. It provides a framework for internationally renowned scholars from different disciplines to pursue research on the challenges and opportunities of global cooperation in a culturally diverse world society. Global Cooperation Research Papers ISSN 2198-1949 (Print) ISSN 2198-0411 (Online) The Research Papers series is intended to reflect the latest state of research at the Centre. Individual issues are based on ideas that have emerged from in-depth exploration at the Centre’s research colloquiums. Papers may be submitted either by permanent Centre staff or by visiting academics and their research partners. 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