'Where They Sit and Where We Stand': Insiders and Outsiders on Political Legitimacy

Abstract

Democratic theory should provide guidance not merely for the relations between citizens and their own political institutions, but should also inform the conduct of democratic regimes towards undemocratic regimes. When foreign individuals, firms and particularly foreign democratic governments interact at the global level with other regimes, they must decide whether and how to relate to those regimes while taking them as a given, rather than as objects of institutional design. We argue that democratic theory has largely neglected the second task of offering normative criteria to determine what kinds of regimes make for legitimate counter-parties in global political, economic, legal and financial interactions. Our core theoretical contribution consists in introducing a conceptual distinction between a regime's internal legitimacy vis-a-vis the insiders subject to it, and its external legitimacy in the eyes of outsiders who interact with it in various ways.We argue that democratic outsiders must consider the external legitimacy of other regimes they interact with. Such legitimacy assessments by outsiders are not paternalistic because the regime under consideration is taken as a given, rather than as an object of institutional design. Outsiders are merely concerned with how to relate to another regime, not with how to redesign it – and they are motivated with a concern for their own moral integrity. External legitimacy judgments by outsiders thus do not displace or invalidate the internal legitimacy judgments by insiders – the two are conceptually distinct.