The crisis of legitimacy

Simon Longstaff

This article was published in Living Ethics: issue 85 spring 2011

With untold riches flowing from the Libyan oil fields, a vast store of weapons, mercenaries afoot and all of the organs of the State at his disposal, Muammar Gaddafi seemed to have everything a modern day dictator might need in order to stay in power. Yet he spent his final days skulking in some desert bunker reduced to issuing the odd recorded message. His angry defiance merely highlighted the fact of his impotence. So, what is the one thing that Gaddafi so lacked that his regime has been toppled? Legitimacy, without which no institution or individual can stand.

One of the recurring themes of the past decade has been the progressive loss of trust in institutions. Indeed, the Edelman Trust Barometer, published each year at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, has attracted increasing interest as a rising tide of cynicism has left its mark on the world. To focus on ‘trust’ has been useful and important. However, I now think that it may have blinded us to a phenomenon that is of another order of significance—an escalating crisis of legitimacy. For although one might accommodate another who is not trusted but who, nonetheless, retains legitimacy, the converse is not true. Niccolo Machiavelli allowed that a prince must be prepared to use force, fraud and cruelty in the preservation of his state—but must never come to be hated:

A prince must avoid being despised as well as being hated ... The best fortress you can have is in not being hated by your subjects.

Which is, I think, another way of saying that the prince must not lose legitimacy.

It would be a grave mistake to believe that the crisis of legitimacy is restricted to events giving rise to the Arab Spring in the Middle East. It would be equally mistaken to believe that it is only the standing of oppressive regimes being undermined. The legitimacy of entire systems is being eroded—yet very few people seem to be
noticing the spreading of the rot.

For example, serious questions are being asked about the legitimacy of democracy as a practical and effective form of government, and such doubts are being raised not only by radical extremists but also by others. Respected economists like Professor Jeffrey D Sachs of Columbia University are pointing to the global dangers posed by the European and US debt crises and sheeting blame home to the inadequacies of democratic politics. Speaking with Fran Kelly on ABC Radio National’s Breakfast on 23 September 2011, Sachs did not criticise the capacity of individual politicians to meet the challenge of governing. Rather, he questioned the democratic system as a whole. In particular, the way it confers minority interests with sufficient power to threaten the interests of the majority and breeds protracted forms of indecision and a preference for policies shaped to reflect the lowest common denominator in the political calculation. Or as a recent commentator put it during a private meeting: “I’d rather be a poor Chinese than a poor Indian”, the implication being that the Communist Party, in China, can at least drive real change once it has decided to do so.

Doubts about legitimacy are also corroding support for individual governments and politicians. The effect of this is not just a mounting electoral risk for the parties and individuals concerned. There is a wider sense in which major political parties and their leaders risk being sidelined by an electorate that has lost faith in the legitimacy of what it perceives to be a pointless cycle of politicking, constant spin and an apparent inability to put national interest ahead of the pursuit of power for partisan purposes. In one sense, it does not matter that this is a caricature of contemporary politics. Misinformed or mistaken, the community is progressively withdrawing from engagement in political life—as evidenced by the continuing decline in party membership.

The challenge of maintaining legitimacy is of a similar order in the private sector, and for much the same reasons. The global economic architecture has ill-served the community as a whole, especially given the tendency to privatise the upside and ‘socialise’ the downside.

Doubts about the legitimacy of the banking and finance industry are deeply entrenched in Europe and North America where the effects of systemic failure have been most hard felt. Individual corporations and their leadership have also lost legitimacy in the eyes of stakeholders, not least because they continue to structure their affairs in ways that defy common understanding about what makes for flourishing human communities. People can suspend their disbelief about the appropriateness of massive executive remuneration packages—but not forever.

The riots in London were ugly and unforgiveable. But against this background they are perfectly understandable. If anything, the rioters demonstrated a perfect grasp of the lessons taught by the ‘good and the great’ in the City of London: look after yourself, don’t worry too much about the effects of your actions on others, and don’t expect too much grief if you get caught (a big ‘if’, at that). Political and business leaders are right to condemn the pointless destruction of life and property that is the currency of rioters and looters. But they should know that with their own legitimacy in question, their words sound hollow and disturbingly similar to the last speeches of Gaddafi as they echo across the Libyan sands.