The justification narrative of “good functional governance”

Project manager: Prof. Dr. Jens Steffek

The starting point of the research project was the observation that in the current debate on the democratic deficit of international governance, the view is often held that international governance can be legitimized without parliamentary rule-making procedures, without direct citizen participation or increased control of the executive. Giandomenico Majone and Andrew Moravcsik in particular advocate a functional legitimation of international organizations (IOs) and the European Union (EU). These institutions are understood as agencies that are endowed by national executives with narrowly defined mandates for setting and applying technical rules. Their independence from day-to-day political business and their rather technocratic character are seen as an advantage, not a disadvantage. In this view, a “democratization” or “politicization” of international organizations is not necessary and is downright dangerous, as it opens up IOs to political dynamics and distributional struggles that they cannot successfully deal with. International organizations and the EU should therefore not legitimize themselves through democratic procedures, but through the social benefits and quality of their policy outcomes.
Empirically speaking, this argument has also been taken up by authors who do not share Majone and Moravcsik’s normative standpoint. In the form of a historical before-and-after comparison, it is assumed that IOs legitimized themselves through their regulatory output in the period before the emergence of talk of a democratic deficit and therefore also found social acceptance. This thesis is plausible, but has hardly been empirically researched to date. How exactly was international governance legitimized and how was it perceived at the civic level? The second part of the question can hardly be answered because it is no longer possible to reliably survey citizens’ attitudes after decades. The first part of the question, on the other hand, is accessible to empirical research, because the legitimation narratives, i.e. stories about the reason, form and purpose of international governance with a justifying intention, have been handed down in the relevant literature.

Our initial suspicion with regard to this legitimacy narrative was that, beyond the pure output performance of international organizations in terms of policy outcomes, there could be other aspects of good functional governance that could be legitimizing and are reflected in current work on the idea of “good governance”. The aim of this project was therefore to explore the legitimation narrative of good functional governance from a historical perspective, as very little is known about its genesis and the authors involved. The project investigated justification narratives of international governance from the period from 1900 to around 1970, based on academic publications on international governance and statements by employees of international organizations in positions of responsibility, such as the League of Nations, the United Nations or the European Community. The project team identified a number of important historical continuities. The following four central argumentation figures can be found throughout the 20th century:
– Historical necessity: the transnational interdependencies brought about by economic globalization and technological innovation can only be dealt with by political institutions that are located at the same level of aggregation.
– Objective orientation: transnational institutions can ensure that problems are dealt with solely on the basis of objective criteria, and better than previous historical forms of international diplomacy.
– Legal form: transnational institutions ensure that transnational problems are dealt with in a legal form.
– Orientation towards the common good: transnational institutions are not oriented towards particular national interests, but towards a global common good.

In the course of the project work, two new focal points emerged on the basis of these findings. Firstly, it became clear that the envisaged role of international law in the project of social and political modernization needs to be analysed even more closely, namely as it was put forward by proponents of functional international organization between 1900 and 1945. The project leader now takes the view that these authors were striving for the realization of ‘Weberian’ modernity on a global level, namely the transformation of international politics – at this time still strongly marked by all kinds of jingoism and aggression – into a form of rational public administration. The project team’s relevant research focused on four Anglo-Saxon political scientists of the interwar period who represent the so-called ‘functionalist’ tradition in thinking about international relations: Paul S. Reinsch, James Arthur Salter, David Mitrany and Pitman B. Potter. For them, law served to modernize international relations by shielding a technocratic mode of governance from political interference and thus helping to preserve the rationality of decisions made: juridification thus became an aspect of the ‘objectification of tyranny’, as Max Weber understood it. This process was ostensibly about the modernization of international relations (understood as relations between states), which included in particular the eradication of war. In practice, however, international public administration also exerted a strong influence on the domestic policies of states. Of the four early functionalists considered in the project, only David Mitrany openly and fully admitted that such interventions would be a consequence of the intended project.

Subsequently, the research project increasingly focused on modernization theory, in particular the rational bureaucratization of the world, as described and analysed in the work of Max Weber in particular. Legal-rational modernization, as it is called in reference to Max Weber, is a process in which social and economic organization is increasingly based on technical knowledge and scientific insight, on the depersonalization of procedures and capillary control. For Weber, this was characteristic of the Western path to modernity as it unfolded in Europe and North America; however, he also found examples of temporary phenomena of modernization in other cultural contexts. The penetration of formal law into all areas of society is a core element of this modernization process, as it helps to establish control, predictable behaviour and stable expectations. The characteristic organizational form that accompanies the process of legal-rational modernization is bureaucracy, both in the private and public sectors. At the level of public governance, legal-rational modernization creates a system of rule that minimizes the contingencies of political arbitrariness by delegating tasks to civil servants, experts and lawyers.

Unlike many international law scholars, who readily acknowledge the bureaucratic nature of IOs, political scientists have often conceptualized their activities as a manifestation of intergovernmental cooperation. Only in recent years have some constructivist IO scholars systematically used Weber’s studies of bureaucracy to research IOs. In general, however, it can be said that social scientists rarely place IOs in the context of bureaucratic modernization; this is somewhat perplexing given that the social sciences emerged at a time when public administrations were expanding at the national level, professionalizing and becoming less dependent on political influence in many countries. In international relations theory, however, the concept of modernization is often associated with the Enlightenment project in general rather than with bureaucratization and formalization as a more specific social phenomenon. While the Enlightenment is certainly understood as a programmatic intellectual project, empirical transformations in the organization of international politics are often interpreted as pragmatic and almost ‘mechanical’ reactions to changing contextual conditions, such as the globalization of the economy and the increasingly dense network of cross-border social relations that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries.
However, the legal-rational modernization of international relations was more than an inevitable adaptation to changing circumstances. It was a veritable political project. From a historical perspective, this project can be understood as a technocratic variant of the multifaceted phenomenon of programmatic internationalism. The narratives of transnational or, even more so, global modernization analysed in this research project are characteristic of the early 20th century; however, they still seem attractive as a justification strategy for international governance.

The most important publications in the research project include
Jens Steffek (2013): “Mandatskonflikte, Liberalismuskritik und die Politisierung von GATT und WTO”, in: Michael Zürn/Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt (eds.),Gesellschaftliche Politisierung und internationale Institutionen, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 213-239.
Jens Steffek (2012): “Die Output-Legitimität internationaler Organisationen und die Idee des globalen Gemeinwohls”, in: Leviathan: Berliner Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft 40 (Sonderheft 27), 83-99.
Steffek, Jens/Holthaus, Leonie (eds.) (2014): “Jenseits der Anarchie: Weltordnungsentwürfe im frühen 20. Jahrhundert” (Series: Normative Orders, Volume 13), Frankfurt/New York: Campus.
The dissertation project started as part of this research project has now been published as:
Holthaus, Leonie (2018): Pluralist Democracy in International Relations: L.T. Hobhouse, G.D.H. Cole, and David Mitrany. The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

The project included the workshop “Jenseits der Anarchie. Weltordnungsentwürfe im frühen 20. Jahrhundert”, TU Darmstadt, 12-13.07.2013.