What's So Special about States? Liberal Legitimacy in a Globalising World

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Throughout the history of liberal thought, questions about political legitimacy concerned with the protection of individual rights and the entrenchment of democratic public decision making have typically focused on the structure and conduct of state-based institutions. Normative political theorists have so far said less, however, about the prospects for achieving liberal legitimacy via new non-state forms of political organisation involving powerful actors such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and transnational corporations (TNCs). The goal of this article is to present a preliminary theoretical assessment of the prospects of non-state institutions for delivering liberal political legitimacy in the context of globalisation. It asks: is there anything special about the various institutional forms associated with ‘states’ and ‘sovereignty’, or should these be superseded by some new public institutional order more suited to our era of globalisation? It is argued that while certain institutional characteristics of states will remain essential for achieving liberal political legitimacy in a globalising world, state-based institutional forms will be unable to deliver such legitimacy alone. Non-state forms of regulation and democratic decision making are increasingly essential for securing political legitimacy in a globalising world, but they have certain inherent weaknesses relative to state institutions. In light of this, global political legitimacy could perhaps best be achieved through the development of hybrid regulatory and democratic institutions, with selected characteristics of both state and non-state institutional forms. Questions about how best to develop such hybrid institutions should therefore receive more attention than they have done so far from normative political theorists.