Legitimacy and World Society

Abstract

International Legitimacy and World Society. By Ian Clark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 280 pp., $65.00 hard (ISBN-13: 978-0199297009). Ian Clark has been one of the most important and incisive contributors to the recent upsurge of work on the question of legitimacy in international relations. In his previous book (Clark 2005), he focused on the historical evolution of practices of legitimacy within the normative and institutional structures of international society. In this book, he is concerned with the sources of normative change and with the process by which international society comes to accept certain principles and practices of legitimacy rather than others. The book seeks to expand our understanding of international legitimacy by studying the search for its normative sources. Its empirical focus (mirroring again his earlier work) is on normative change in and around major international peace settlements. Hence the core chapters cover: Vienna and the Slave Trade, 1815; The Hague and the Public Conscience, 1899–1907; Versailles and Racial Equality, 1919; Versailles and Social Justice, 1919; San Francisco and Human Rights, 1945; and Paris and Democracy, 1990. In the language of the English School, the book is concerned with the interaction between international and world society. Indeed he states that “…it is a key argument of the book that it is through the attempt to influence and re-shape the principles of legitimacy held within international society that world society comes closest to revealing some empirical reality, and a traceable history” (p. 7). These debates within the English School are well analyzed in Chapter One. As Clark recognizes, there has already been a great deal of important work …