Legitimacy, authority, and power at the United Nations Security Council

Where does the UN Security Council get its power? If it has any power, it is presumably not a product of military strength or the ability to coerce, and it cannot be entirely a function of the happy coincidence of interests among states. Drawing on evidence from political theory and from studies of the United Nations, this project argues that the power of the Security Council derives significantly from the perception among states that it is legitimate. This can be generalized to other international institutions as well. To make this argument, I develop a theory of legitimacy for international relations, show how it applies to the case of the Security Council, and derive a set of implications from this for the conventional practice of IR theory.; I begin with an examination of the concept of legitimacy in domestic and international political theory, and an illustration of its power in the case of norms of sovereignty. Taking the Security Council as the point of reference, I then chart the creation, deployment, and contestation of legitimacy in this case. First, I show how the early debates on the Council at San Francisco were conditioned by the need to legitimize a fundamental inequality in the new United Nations. Second, I show how central to. international politics today is the competition over the symbols spun off from the Council. Because of its legitimacy, the symbols of the Council are themselves valued as instruments of power for states. Finally, I examine one effort to undermine the Security Council by representing it as illegitimate. In this, I focus on Libya's strategy for weakening the sanctions regime against it between 1992 and 1999.; The payoff, besides understanding the Council better, is that this calls into question the traditional formulation of the international system as an ‘anarchy.’ Instead, I suggest that the evidence of Council legitimacy indicates the existence of at least some institutions of authority . This contradicts the basic premise of anarchy-centric theory and leads to a re-assessment of international theory.