Political legitimacy in international border governance institutions
| Published date | 01 October 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885115589875 |
| Date | 01 October 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
2015, Vol. 14(4) 409–428
!The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885115589875
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EJPT
Article
Political legitimacy in
international border
governance institutions
Terry Macdonald
School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne,
Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
In this article, I address the question: what kind of normative principles should regulate
the governance processes through which migration across international borders is
managed? I begin by contrasting two distinct categories of normative controversy
relating to this question. The first is a familiar set of moral controversies about justice
within border governance, concerning what I call the ethics of exclusion. The second is
a more theoretically neglected set of normative controversies about how institutional
capacity for well functioning border governance can best be achieved, concerning what I
call the constitution of control of international borders. I argue that progress can be
made in resolving controversies of the latter kind by applying a new normative theory of
political legitimacy, distinct from the moral theories of justice routinely applied to ethics
of exclusion controversies. On the ‘collective agency’ model of political legitimacy that I
propose here, principles of political legitimacy have the regulatory role of combating
complex collective action problems that may otherwise impede an institution’s collect-
ively valuable functions. Through applying this theory, I sketch some provisional pre-
scriptions for the design of international border governance institutions that may follow
from the demand for strengthening their political legitimacy.
Keywords
Migration, immigration, border control, governance, legitimacy, realism
Introduction
What kind of normative principles should regulate the governance processes
through which migration across international borders is managed? International
border governance involves a complex range of political processes for managing
the movement of people and goods across the territorial boundaries of states. These
Corresponding author:
Terry Macdonald, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
Email: terry.macdonald@unimelb.edu.au
incorporate the policy-making and operational activities of individual states, along
with the wider regional, international and non-state institutions that support or
constrain states’ border governance activities (Global Commission on
International Migration, 2005). This is one of the most politically controversial
areas of international governance, since so many fundamental political values are
at stake: the territorial and self-determination claims of national communities; the
individual rights of asylum seekers, refugees and other vulnerable migrant groups;
and the potential economic, social and cultural benefits to be gained through care-
fully managed international mobility. Political controversies arise from disputes
about how best to prioritise and pursue these competing values, and normative
theories can help resolve these by prescribing systematic regulative principles.
Normative theoretical work on issues of international border governance has so
far mostly focused on a set of moral questions concerning what can be called the
ethics of exclusion – that is, of excluding individuals, through coercion and other
political means, from the benefits of particular political memberships or access to
territories. I argue in this paper, however, that this strictly moral theoretical framing
obscures another important and politically controversial category of normative
questions, concerning what can be called the constitution of control of international
borders. These questions ask how best to design institutional infrastructures for
controlling international borders, given the functional need for effective cooperation
among multiple state and non-state actors alongside unilateral state action. They
incorporate a range of moral concerns (including those about the ethics of exclu-
sion), but are best understood not as strictly moral questions, but rather as autono-
mously political normative questions about how best to solve complex institutional
collective action problems arising in the context of international border governance.
In what follows I elaborate these distinctive normative questions associated with
the constitution of control and argue that political theorists can help resolve them
via the application to border governance institutions of special normative prin-
ciples of political legitimacy. I develop this argument in three steps. I begin by
elaborating in more depth the set of border governance problems linked to the
constitution of control and explaining how these can best be understood as a spe-
cial category of international collective action problems. Next, I argue that nor-
mative analysis of these problems can helpfully be framed by a theoretical
conception of political legitimacy in which its normative principles specify the
conditions under which individual institutional participants should support the
functional operation of an institution, in order for the group to accomplish valu-
able collective action. Here, I explain the sense in which these principles of political
legitimacy possess an autonomously political form of normativity and clarify their
relationship to moral principles of justice. In the final section, I consider how this
normative model of political legitimacy can be applied to help resolve the govern-
ance controversies linked to the constitution of control, and I point to some pro-
visional normative prescriptions for international border governance institutions
that may follow from it. The key conclusion from this is that theoretical analysis of
political legitimacy in border governance institutions warrants further attention
from normative theorists than it has thus far received.
410 European Journal of Political Theory 14(4)
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