Klaus Dingwerth

Denial that climate change is a problem is dangerous - and it needs to change

In recent years, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has faced increasing criticism by various stakeholders. Its authority to pass binding judgments on human rights violations committed by the signatory states of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) has been put in question not only by Russia and Turkey, which are frequently found to have violated the ECHR, but also by states such as Switzerland and the United Kingdom. However, the level of skepticism vis-à-vis the Court and the readiness to act upon the expressed criticism seem to vary across the different signatory states. Based on the conception of politicization proposed by Zürn, Binder, and Ecker-Ehrhardt, we compare the public evaluation of the ECtHR in Austria and Switzerland. Our analysis of evaluative statements on the ECtHR in the Austrian and Swiss quality press from 1999 to 2016 shows that the ECtHR is more strongly politicized in Switzerland than in Austria. Moreover, the justifications given for delegitimizing statements in Switzerland hint at different perspectives on the relation between international institutions and popular sovereignty. In the Austrian case, the ECtHR is seen to be helping to achieve sovereignty; in the Swiss debate, it is mainly viewed as hindering—or intruding on—popular sovereignty. In more general terms, this observation suggests a need to theorize and empirically map the interplay between local conceptions of legitimate political authority and the legitimation of international institutions.

Like any regulatory effort, private transnational standard-setters need to legitimate themselves to the audiences from which they seek support or obedience. While early scholarship on private transnational governance has emphasized the centrality of democratic legitimation narratives in rendering private governance socially acceptable, evidence from more recent standard-setting schemes suggests a declining relevance of that narrative over time. In my analysis of private sus- tainability regulation, I identify a combination of two factors that jointly contribute to this diminished role of democratic legitimation. First, private transnational governance has become a pervasive phenomenon. This means that new entrants to the field no longer face the same liability of newness that required first movers to make an extra effort in legitimation. Second, private standard-setting has moved from areas characterized by ‘governance gaps’ to areas in which meaningful intergovernmental regulation already exists. In these areas, however, the ‘state prerogative’ in legitimating governance holds. As a result, transnational standard-setters rely not so much on stressing their democratic credentials, but instead emphasize their contribution to achieving internationally agreed goals.

Current debates in International Relations (IR) entail two different claims regarding the global structures evolving in the post-Cold War world. Some suggest that the scope of the US power amounts to lasting American hegemony or even to a US empire; others speak of global governance in light of waning capacities of single states to tackle international problems or the growing salience of non-state actors. In this article, we discuss these two bodies of literature in conjunction. We argue that the global governance literature and the empire literature use different lenses to observe the same object, that is, world politics after the Cold War, and that they both address the question of power and authority in IR. The global governance literature identifies a diffusion of power and authority in world politics and thus a move from anarchy to heterarchy. The empire literature, in contrast, identifies a concentration of power and authority in the hands of the United States and thus a move from anarchy to hierarchy. We discuss different attempts to redress this seeming contradiction and show that there is much ground to believe that world politics is in fact characterised by both a concentration and a dispersion of power and authority. What we may see is neither global governance nor empire alone, but rather moves towards heterarchy and hierarchy at the same time.

This article examines what democracy means when it is used in academic textbook evaluations of international institutions and how the meaning of the term "democracy" in such evaluations has changed over time. An analysis of 71 textbooks on international institutions in the policy areas of international security, environmental, and human rights politics leads us to several answers. We observe slight changes in relation to three aspects. First, the range of democracy-relevant actors expands over time, most notably in relation to nonstate actors as important participants in (or even subjects of) international policymaking. Second, representational concerns become more relevant in justifying demands for greater participation in international institutions. Third, international organizations are increasingly discussed not only as subjects that enhance the transparency and accountability of the policies of their member states, but also as the objects of democratic demands for transparency and accountability themselves.