‘Can you pass the salt?’ The legitimacy of international institutions and indirect speech
| Author | Matthew D. Stephen |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066114563417 |
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2015
EJ R
I
Article
European Journal of
International Relations
‘Can you pass the salt?’ The
2015, Vol. 21(4) 768 –792
© The Author(s) 2015
legitimacy of international
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066114563417
institutions and indirect speech
ejt.sagepub.com
Matthew D. Stephen
WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Germany
Abstract
This article introduces the concept of indirect speech and shows what it can contribute
to understanding ‘legitimacy talk’ regarding international institutions. Indirect speech
occurs when one kind of illocutionary act is used to communicate another. Examples
include euphemism, some forms of politeness and when a request is expressed as
a question (‘Can you pass the salt?’). Transporting concepts from pragmatics and
sociolinguistics, this article argues that legitimacy talk often serves this function in
international politics, operating by expressing specific requests in the form of more
generalized legitimacy claims. Understanding this double role of legitimacy talk sheds
light on otherwise puzzling empirical phenomena, such as why states frame their
demands in terms of legitimacy when they are transparently self-serving, why states
with different interests can nonetheless express their demands in the same terms, and
why they persist in doing so long after there is any realistic hope of being ‘persuasive’.
An analysis of the debate on Security Council reform illustrates the benefits of this
approach for the study of international relations.
Keywords
Dialogue, diplomacy, institutions, legitimacy, rhetoric, Security Council
Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer
cloudy vagueness. (George Orwell, Politics and the English Language 1946/2002)
Corresponding author:
Matthew D. Stephen, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Reichpietschufer 50, Berlin, 10785, Germany.
Email: matthew.stephen@wzb.eu
Stephen
769
Introduction
The nature of legitimacy — what it is, how it works and its causal significance — has
been of growing interest in the scholarship on international institutions, and global gov-
ernance more broadly (Barnett, 1997; Brassett and Tsingou, 2011; Coicaud and Heiskanen,
2001; Hurd, 1999; Reus-Smit, 2007; Risse, 2004; Seabrooke, 2007; Steffek, 2003; Zürn,
2004).1 Shifting away from a primarily normative focus on legitimacy as an evaluative
criterion (Buchanan and Keohane, 2006; Coleman and Porter, 2000), the perceived legiti-
macy of international institutions has increasingly been exposed to empirical appraisal
(Bernstein, 2011; Ecker-Ehrhardt, 2011; Hurd, 2007a; Steffek, 2003; Symons, 2011).
Because legitimacy cannot be directly observed, empirical legitimacy research
relies on proxy indicators. Increasingly, scholars have turned to the analysis of public
communications and statements as a methodology for the empirical study of legiti-
macy and the process of legitimation (Binder and Heupel, 2014; Eisentraut, 2013;
Haunss, 2007; Schmidtke and Nullmeier, 2011; Schneider et al., 2007; Steffek, 2003).
In contrast to survey-based approaches, which ask members of a political community
what they think about the legitimacy of institutions (Gibson et al., 2005; Weatherford,
1992), communication-based approaches study what members say about the legiti-
macy of institutions. Ian Hurd (2007b: 203) argues that ‘States (and people) appear to
find it irresistible to provide a justification for their behaviour’, and according to
Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink (1998: 892), this need for justification will
‘leave an extensive trail of communication among actors that we can study’.
Consequently, central to the empirical turn in legitimacy research has been a shift
towards textual and discursive analysis as the central methodology in uncovering, clas-
sifying and measuring processes of legitimation.
This communicative turn in legitimacy research throws up some fundamental ques-
tions: ‘What status should we accord appeals to normative principles in international
politics?’; and ‘What role do they play in accounting for behaviour?’. This article pro-
poses a new approach to such questions by suggesting that legitimacy talk in interna-
tional politics can — sometimes — serve as a form of indirect speech. Legitimacy talk
occurs when speakers invoke normative claims in order to evaluate and make demands
on an institution in a public communicative setting, while indirect speech refers to the
expression of one meaning via another. Approaching legitimacy talk through the theory
of indirect speech suggests how normative appeals can be used in a way that expresses
specific requests in the form of a more generalized legitimacy claim. This also helps to
clarify some important empirical puzzles regarding how legitimacy claims are wielded
in world politics, such as why states frame their demands in terms of legitimacy when
they are transparently self-serving, why states converge on common vocabularies of
legitimation despite attaching very different meanings to them, and why they persist in
doing so long after there is any realistic hope of being ‘persuasive’. These arguments are
developed through a study of legitimacy claims made by states regarding the reform of
the United Nations (UN) Security Council. The article clarifies what indirect speech is
and how it functions, illustrates its communicative mechanisms with examples drawn
from international politics, and applies it to the empirical case of legitimacy claims made
in negotiations over Security Council reform.
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European Journal of International Relations 21(4)
The article proceeds as follows. First, indirect speech is defined and contrasted to
other approaches to international communication, such as arguing, bargaining and rhe-
torical action. The second section elaborates on the concept, role and mechanisms of
indirect speech. It highlights the functionality of indirect speech to international com-
munication, and elaborates scope conditions under which legitimacy talk is likely to
fulfil this function. Third, the theory’s analytical value is illustrated by application to the
ongoing intergovernmental debates about the reform of the Security Council. It is argued
that, in many respects, the language of the ‘legitimacy’ of the Security Council has effec-
tively become an important indirect medium with which states can advance their own
interest-based demands.
The legitimacy of international institutions and interstate
communication
Whereas international institutions have traditionally been approached from a rationalist
perspective as mechanisms by which states realize mutual gains from cooperation, it has
become increasingly common to associate international institutions with the concept of
legitimacy. Legitimacy has been identified as one of the three major mechanisms that
underpin international orders and institutions, along with coercion and shared interests
(Hurd, 1999; Hurrell, 2005; Kratochwil, 1984). Legitimacy conveys a reason for a member
to comply with an institution not out of coercion or inducement, but out of normative
conviction.2 At the same time as international institutions require legitimacy in order to
command support, states appeal to notions of legitimacy when they advance their claims.
Legitimacy then becomes the subject of political contestation. Dynamics of legitimation
and delegitimation ensue, in which states seek to utilize and manipulate symbols of legit-
imacy at the same time as international institutions seek to shore up their legitimacy by
appealing to these — potentially conflicting — legitimacy demands.
The use by states of normative arguments and claims about legitimacy has been the
subject of a rich body of theoretical literature. These approaches take legitimacy talk —
public statements about legitimacy and standards of legitimacy — as their major empiri-
cal domain. This literature has approached legitimacy primarily in two ways. One is to
approach legitimacy talk as an indicator of legitimacy perceptions or beliefs. Such
research has primarily focused on such questions as: ‘To what extent are international
institutions regarded as legitimate?’; and ‘What standards of legitimacy are considered
relevant to their evaluation?’ (Binder and Heupel, 2014; Eisentraut, 2013; Rixen and
Zangl, 2012; Schmidtke and Nullmeier, 2011; Schneider et al., 2007). Others are scepti-
cal of attempts to ‘measure’ legitimacy (Hurd, 2014), and have sought to theorize legiti-
macy claims and normative appeals as part of a discursive process that is worthy of
investigation in its own right (for overviews, see Deitelhoff and Müller, 2005; Finnemore
and Sikkink, 2001). Such theories have sought answers to such questions as: ‘What do
these legitimacy claims mean?’; ‘What status should we accord legitimacy claims in
international public life?’; and ‘Should we pay attention to motives and intentions in
order to interpret their meaning and impact?’. In general, ‘How is this discursive process
to be understood?’. These are the questions addressed by theories of communicative
behaviour.
Stephen
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Existing accounts of communicative behaviour fall broadly into three clusters: theo-
ries of arguing, bargaining and rhetorical action.3 Sometimes, these theories are seen as
if they are embedded in different social theories, different ‘logics of...
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