Legitimating the Use of Force in International Politics: A Communicative Action Perspective

Abstract

The legal provisions of the United Nations Charter offer imprecise and insufficient criteria for discriminating properly between legitimate vs illegitimate uses of force. The conflation of the concept of the legitimacy of the use of force with what is lawful, as agreed upon by a small number of major international actors, overlooks those situations in which legal standards are rendered instruments of political deception and manipulation in the hands of the most powerful actors. The solution proposed to address this problem draws on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action, and it is subsumed by the concept of deliberative legitimacy, understood as the non-coerced commitment of an actor to obey a norm adopted on the basis of the criteria and rules reached through a process of communicative action. The analytical value of the concept of deliberative legitimacy is examined empirically in two case studies — the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, and the 2003 US-led war against Iraq.