After the First World War, the nations of Europe faced exchange-rate volatility, high national debts, and inflationary pressures. In response, many sought to stabilize the economies through extensive fiscal and monetary reforms. One of the key figures in the reconstruction effort was Henry Strakosch. As the Bank’s informal adviser, he was responsible for devising restructuring plans across Central Europe and the British Empire. Leveraging his connections at the League of Nations, the Bank of England, and the City of London, Strakosch led negotiations that resulted in the establishment of both the Austrian National Bank and the South African Reserve Bank. His work exemplified the institutionalization of economic orthodoxy in circles of influence and heralded the rise of the international financial expert. More broadly, Strakosch’s interventions contributed to the state-building process in the interwar years, as new nations drew on expert knowledge to establish their political legitimacy.

International law is a system of rules, institutions and practices that govern the relations of States with one another. It is designed to distribute resources and solve problems that States identify as relevant for creating order in the world. In a world without a centralised government States use international law and its institutions to generate solutions for emerging and complex issues and problems, such as climate change and terrorism. The effectiveness of international law is often called into question when it fails to stop certain kinds of activities that appear abhorrent to most people from around the world. However, it also manages to resolve and address issues and challenges that would otherwise get ignored without international cooperation. A lot of international law is designed to meaningfully contribute to establishing order. States also use it to legitimise disruptions to global relations.

This chapter focuses on the fact that a major difference between a change in an international order and a change of international order is that the scope and depth of the former are not as great as those of the latter—in other words, change unfolding in an international system is somewhat circumscribed. To reflect on a change in the international order and what this means for its legitimacy, this chapter focuses on three points. First, it examines some of the characteristics that facilitate change in an international system and what this implies for the sense of legitimacy. Second, it mentions the reforms that an international order and its legitimacy can adopt to respond to evolving pressures, alluding to the stress faced by the current international system in the last few years. Third, this chapter ends with an overview of the systemic risk to which the present international system is exposed.

In this book, I have tried to make sense of legitimacy at the international level, especially in relation to international law. I have paid a lot of attention to international law, in particular aligned with the demands of legitimacy and justice. But international law is only one aspect of the forces and the ecosystem that shape international order. Therefore, alone it cannot engineer the change that the international system requires today. This change has to be part of a more comprehensive approach. Here is not the place to offer a full account of the areas on which research could concentrate in the future to further encourage justice and legitimacy at the international level. However, it is worthwhile to present a general overview of these areas. In particular, three domains offer a possible road map for facilitating a constructive path forward: globalization, emotions and passions in social life, and the geopolitics of tomorrow.

This chapter focuses on change of an international order and its sense of legitimacy—in other words, change of the system of an international order and of its legitimacy. Concentrating on the change of an international order and of its legitimacy consists of exploring a type of change that is so transformative that it brings about a change in both how an international order is organized and institutionalized and functions, and how this is justified by the culture of legitimacy that is part of it. As a way to analyze this issue, this chapter addresses three questions: What can be the reasons triggering a change of international order/system and the sense of legitimacy that comes with it? What are the modalities and processes indicating that an international system and its legitimacy are changing? What has shifted—that is, changed—when a new international order and its culture of legitimacy have emerged?

This book addresses some of the following questions: What is the relevance of legitimacy, in general and today? How does legitimacy compare nationally and internationally? What are the components of legitimacy at the international level? What are the limitations of international law when it comes to legitimacy? How does legitimacy change over time at the international level? How can the international system, and the international law that comes with it, be made more just and legitimate? The book is organized into six parts and twenty-three chapters. Part I sets the stage for the book. Part II unpacks the meaning and role of legitimacy in politics. Part III turns attention to legitimacy at the international level. Part IV focuses on how international legitimacy is constructed in international law. Part V addresses change and international legitimacy. Part VI adopts a point of view that is at the same time critical and constructive or, more precisely, reconstructive of international order.

This chapter develops the theoretical framework. It defines international orders as configurations of authority. It then conceptualizes representants as effectively integrating material and ideational features, while being irreducible to either. It explains how representants relate to discourses, and material resources, and highlights the value-added of representants in relation to cognate concepts, like Bourdieu’s symbolic capital, status symbols, or Pitkin’s representation. Representants do not come alone, but are embedded into semeiotic webs. On this basis the chapter develops four mechanisms through which representants constitute international orders: they characterize the units of international politics, they legitimize them, they position them in power relations towards each other, and they serve as tools for governing. Representants are constitutive of international orders, while also being the building blocks political agents use to change orders. The chapter develops two mechanisms of changes in representants. One focuses on struggles between actors over getting specific representants socially recognized. The other is an unintentional change in representants themselves. It outlines why some artifacts, practices, and language become socially recognised representants. The last section develops a semeiotics of materialism to study representants and capture the constitutive effects of material reality on a par with those of language.

Despite ubiquitous references to ‘ethnicity’ in both academic and public discourse, the history and politics of this concept remain largely unexplored. By constructing the first transnational and interlingual conceptual history of ethnicity, this book unearths the pivotal role that this concept played in the making of the international order. After critiquing existing accounts of the ‘expansion’ or ‘globalisation’ of international society, the chapter proposes to rethink the birth of the international order through a scrutiny of its major concepts. Fusing Reinhart Koselleck’s method of conceptual history with the philosophical writings of G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Derrida, the chapter theorises the emergence of the international order as a dialectical process that both negated and preserved existing imperial hierarchies. The concept of ethnicity is ejected by this dialectical process as a residual category – an indigestible kernel of difference and particularity – that cannot be internalised by the work of sublation.

Chapter 3 examines mythical, historical, and scientific facts. It offers a brief history of East Asian international relations, paying particular attention to the Chinese World Order, the Khmer Empire, and post-colonial Filipino historiography as samples for how to theorize histories from an IR perspective. The chapter discusses war and peace as well as political economy, the subject matters important for East Asian history and IR theory. It also offers a section on impacts and lessons of history, illustrating how history contributes to background knowledge, historiography and belief systems, foreign policy analysis, and IR theory. A better understanding of East Asian history allows us to contextualize contemporary issues without which we may not be able to put together a puzzle. Historical experiences inform our belief system, into which people typically fit new events or factors as explanation. History is evolutionary by nature, whether we frame it that way explicitly or not.