Steven Wheatley. The Democratic Legitimacy of International Law

Abstract

The concept of global governance epitomizes transformations in the structure of political organization and highlights changes in the ways in which public authority is exercised. Times of change invite scholars to contemplate the plausibility of orthodox beliefs and doctrinal concepts. They push them towards innovation and there is indeed a strong sense among international lawyers that the terms of debate about the legitimacy of international law are shifting. A number of contributions over the past years have tried to respond to the challenges which phenomena of global governance pose to international legal scholarship. 1 The mounting wealth of literature now comes to speak in Steven Wheatley's book on The Democratic Legitimacy of International Law in which he calls on the legal profession to engage with questions of first principle, to reflect on the nature of international law, and to consider in closer detail the justification of legal constraints beyond the state. The book's main argument is at the outset rather straightforward. Wheatley observes a proliferation of sites of norm production and argues that the delegation of authority to international or transnational actors inevitably involves a loss for democracy. To remedy this deficit, he suggests restating requirements for democratic legitimacy in terms of the deliberative ideal as it is developed in the work of Jurgen Habermas. The book claims the use of Habermas� thought as its innovative edge, and develops its core argument accordingly. �[T]he legitimate exercise of public authority through law�, it claims, �is conditioned by respect for the cardinal principles of deliberative democracy: equality and public reason� (at 2). The book begins by taking stock of accounts suggesting that state sovereignty has lost its plausibility as an exclusive reference point in normative argument. While the grand variety of approaches under discussion converge in agreement on the facts of what �