Conception Of Political Legitimacy Research Articles

“No Peace with the Hohenzollerns”: American Attitudes on Political Legitimacy towards Hohenzollern Germany, 1917-1918

The notion that a nation's 'people' are the sovereign arbiters of its affairs, exercising power through a representative leadership who govern in the name of public 'virtue', point to a concept of political legitimacy which has proven to be a guiding principle in American diplomacy. The Wilson administration's response to peace overtures by the German government between 1917 and 1918 is a good illustration of this tendency. In line with American domestic political mores and values, the Wilson administration, along with the U.S. Congress and American publicists sought to encourage a political reshaping of Germany through aggressive public diplomacy. This was achieved by apportioning war responsibility between sections of German society (guilty autocrats and subservient citizens). The legitimacy of the German state as an equal partner in international relations, was thereby questioned. This distinction, in time, collapsed showing the inconsistencies within the Wilson administration in challenging the internal workings of a foreign government.

Plotting conflict in Florence 1300

In June 1300, a procession in honour of Florence's patron saint, San Giovanni, was assaulted by a group of eminent Florentines. For Dino Compagni, the attack was an attempted coup organized by Cardinal Matteo d’Acquasparta, papal legate and former general of the Franciscans, and the Black Guelfs. Compagni, however, is the only chronicler to mention it. Nevertheless, his account of the conflict in 1300 shares in common with Giovanni Villani's Nuova cronica a fight that had broken out between the leading families of the factions during a festa on May Day 1300 and some connection with the Guelf victory at Campaldino in 1289. These events and their retellings provide windows into the manipulation of urban space and concepts of political legitimacy through narrative and ritual.

Introduction

The concept of political legitimacy has hitherto tended to occupy a rather modest place in the historiography of twentieth-century Europe. In contrast to the attention paid by historians of pre-modern and non-European societies to issues of political culture and, more especially, to the ways in which the exercise of power by all rulers, be they sacred or secular, putative or actual, has to be located in a complex matrix of conventional beliefs, rituals and practices, historians of contemporary Europe have tended to regard issues of political legitimacy as of secondary importance compared with other more tangible factors. Political power in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been perceived by historians as being the product of an amalgam of ideological projects, forms of state (internal and external) aggrandisement and nationalist struggles for emancipation. Modernity – so it seems to be assumed – transformed the exercise of power, creating both new needs and justifications for active government and massively increased resources to bring these to reality, as well as flattening much of the pre-existing undergrowth of ancien régime convention and pre-industrial tradition. Government became incommensurably stronger, but also simultaneously starker. In the new world that emerged between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, the powerful forces of ideological or national messianism and the democratic (or assumed) mandate of the people lifted state power to new heights. Consequently, governmental authority flowed remorselessly downwards through the new structures of civilian and military bureaucracy and legal authority, reducing social organisations, local communities and above all the individual citizen to the role of disciplined, though not necessarily powerless, subjects. Legitimacy, in so far as it surfaces in such accounts, is regarded as having been largely constructed by rulers themselves and subsequently conveyed by the modern institutions of social control – notably mass education, conscription and state propaganda – to the population. Thus, French peasants were made into Frenchmen, Russian workers into agents of Bolshevik power and German bureaucrats into functionaries of the Nazi state.

Religion and State in Libya: The Politics of Identity

Striking as the role of religion has been in the modern political history of Libya, it illustrates ambiguities in political identity that are, in fact, common throughout the Muslim Arab world. The tensions between the concepts of political legitimacy bequeathed by the historical Islamic empires and Western-inspired notions of ethnic nationalism and state patriotism have created dilemmas for rulers and the ruled in the Muslim Arab world since the beginning of the twentieth century. The Libyan governments' reliance on Islamic formulas to inspire political loyalty reflects the weakness of both Arab and Libyan nationalist traditions in the country. Qadhdhafi's revolutionary ideology constitutes an effort to transcend the dilemmas of Libyan national identity, but it has not proved persuasive to most of his compatriots.