International Regimes and the Legitimacy of Rules: A Discourse-Ethical Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How, given the absence of a universally shared set of values at the international level, may international rules possessing legitimacy be articulated? That is the question addressed by this article. Those who argue that international normativity enjoys relative independence from power relations or self-interest are confronted with the absence of a value consensus capable of undergirding a true sense of community at the international level and from which valid and legitimate rules may be derived. Claims that a community encompassing all of humanity is emerging have been made throughout history, and have been subjected, on the one hand, to charges of utopianism and idealism, and, on the other, to the criticism that such a community would simply mask the existence of fundamental disagreements regarding values and interests. (1) Many IR theorists interested in the problem of normativity have turned to social constructivism in an effort to place their project on more solid foundations. (2) The insights derived from these explorations are many and varied, and the uses to which they are put and the theoretical conclusions to which they contribute cover a wide spectrum. It may be useful to place the projects of these various authors into three categories in order better to identify some of the common themes uniting them and to understand the contributions that they make to international-relations theory. (3) According to one conception, which is inspired by democratic-peace theory, the fact of cooperative relations among certain states, particularly liberal democracies, leads to strong identification and a sense of mutual trust among those states. Based on these observations, attempts are made to identify the conditions for further community building at the international level. According to another conception, which draws on critical international theory and on a cosmopolitan approach to international relations, there is cause to be wary of arguments that the transmission of liberal-democratic values is a precondition to community building at the international level. Instead, a means for consensus building is sought that is not predicated on the universalizability of a set of values held by one group of states, (4) particularly if the group of states in question--namely, liberal democracies--wields disproportionate power in international society. The goal of critical cosmopolitanism is not to disseminate one worl dview but rather to build a consensus that leaves room for difference and diversity while being sufficiently substantial to provide the basis for the validity of norms. (5) A third conception holds that norms derive their validity not from commonly held values and a sense of community, but rather from intersubjective understandings that are constructed by agents in the course of interaction, and from which practices, rules, and institutions are constituted. While these intersubjective understandings normally constitute the background against which interactions take place, they can be critically examined by the agents who employ them and subjected to processes of argumentation through which they can be confirmed, modified, or reconstituted on the basis of reasons that participants in these processes accept. This article begins with a brief discussion of the theoretical approaches taken within each of these three conceptions. I then briefly explore social constructivism in international relations, and more particularly a social-constructivist conception of the regime as a site of international governance. I then discuss Jurgen Habermas's discourse ethics and seek to identify points of convergence between Habermas's project and international-relations theory. Finally, I argue that the regime, as described in social-constructivist terms, may operate as a forum for discourse and deliberation and as such may permit the articulation of international rules and norms grounded in consensus and therefore enjoying legitimacy. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.077 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.028 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".