The political theoretical
literature often focuses its attention on the dialectics between two core ideas
of political thought, the idea of justification and legitimation. At least in
principle, the two ideas should be seen as complementary since they should represent
two faces of a same coin. However, this is true if we consider the pluralism
typical of liberal-democratic societies, in which there can exist different
potential justifications in reciprocal conflict but still laying within a common
institutional and moral framework that upholds legitimation, especially
regarding human rights, civil liberties, intellectual freedom, political diversity,
etc. Nevertheless, what would be the case of a non-democratic regime? Would
justification and legitimation still be complementary and convergent, at least
in moral means, in an authoritarian country? In other words, may legitimation
tolerate, or even support, justification in a country where human rights and
liberties are challenged or perhaps banned? Additionally, an even more
worrisome question could be whether legitimation could be extorted by the
political ruling elite that legitimizes its power through a specific
justification – an ideology, for instance – through the means of mental
manipulation and the thorough use of propaganda for the purposes of fostering
consent. The issue is delicate and troublesome, as we can imagine, but to start
dealing with it is best to stress the meaning of the words legitimation and
justification, as conceived in political theory.
Legitimation represents the
way to provide political and institutional legitimacy, which implies an
historical and cultural process through which institutions become legitimate in
the eyes of a given social group because it connects to them a system of norms,
values, customs and behaviours that accepts as valid. Throughout history, the
idea of legitimation gave birth to different kind of societies: democratic
societies legitimized by the people’s will, revolutionary societies legitimized
by an ideology, transcendental societies legitimized by divine right, traditional
societies legitimized by hereditary succession, and so on. Today, the liberal-democratic
model typical of Western civilization seems to have created at least the
spectre of a common worldwide majoritarian form of legitimation that focuses on
the respect of basic human rights, tolerance, freedom of thought and rule of
law. As we can see, legitimation implies a bottom-up approach, which starts
from the subjects to reach the ruling institutions.
On the contrary, justification
represents a top-down and subjective substantive, which denies pluralism and
other means other than a single one to interpret the world and to discern the truth.
Justification is a typical philosophical approach claiming that there is only
one correct interpretation of reality and all others are wrong. As we can
detect, justification alone is insufficient to create a complete normative
conceptual standard, because it also needs legitimation in order to gain social
consensus. For instance, some concepts like the forbiddance of murdering or
stealing are generally supported by social consensus because they are both justified
by political institutions through common sense and legitimized by public
opinion. Thus, it is only through the combination of justification and
legitimation that a society can develop pluralism. The very idea of pluralism
itself is based upon the idea that there
is not a single truth, but many potential truths that may be likewise correct.
Now, let us imagine living in
a country where the political elite and ruling class or party upholds a strong
justification that considers as the basis for its legitimacy, but that contrasts
in a manifest way some basic standards of justice and equality, and that
nonetheless enjoys the legitimation of the majority of its population. In this country,
the masses have been politically and culturally indoctrinated by means of
propaganda or mental manipulation and thus consider perfectly valid and fair,
from a positivistic point of view – albeit not from a naturalistic one – the
justification of its political elite. So being things, how can legitimation
transform itself into a tool that counterbalances, refines or accomplishes
justification if it becomes an instrument subjected to justification? In other
terms, is legitimation a still effective parameter to identify pluralism if it
has been subordinated and shaped for the purposes of upholding and making
cohesive the political justification that leads a society?
Historically speaking, many examples
can be quoted. First of all, let us think of the Nazi regime in Germany, a
regime supported by a deeply articulated ideology founded on racism and
intolerance – the final political output of a European tradition rooted at
least already in the 18th century – that profited of a strong popular
legitimation due to the spirit of revanchism subsequent to the German defeat in
World War One on one hand and to the sophisticated propaganda machine built by
the Nazi political elite on the other. Although from a naturalistic point of
view, human beings consider as negative and undesirable the idea of
discriminating or murdering other human beings, in the Nazi state and
satellites the people legitimated the elite’s justification of getting rid, for
instance, of the Jews, because the positivistic ideology on which the Nazi
legitimacy based was made fair by propaganda and rhetoric. Similarly, the
Stalinist conceptual justification based on a violent application of the
Leninist-Marxist ideology, which for instance considered as enemies of the
people the relatively affluent farmers – the kulaks –, enjoyed the legitimation
of the people, which had been extorted by the regime through means of terror
and methodical distorted propaganda. Moreover, let us recall the horrible operations
of ethnic cleansing in the Balkan region, which repeatedly occurred at least
twice during the 20th century: Serbian chetniks, Croatian ustashas
and Bosnian Islamic fundamentalists, just to quote the majoritarian groups of
former Yugoslavia, engaged in an unbelievable campaign of mass murdering in the
name of religion and territorial hegemony despite belonging to the same ethnic
group and speaking a common language. Same considerations can be drawn when
considering the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the Turkish genocide of the Armenians
during World War One, and, nowadays, the horrible violence perpetrated by the
jihadists of the Islamic state against ethnic minorities and other religious
groups.
All of the above-mentioned
cases – but many more could be quoted – show us treacherously that a
political-theoretical justification, even when patently violating the main
principles of human rights and pluralism, can somewhat enjoy a legitimation by
the people, or at least by an influent group of it, that can transform a
totalitarian or one-sided ideology into a valid model advocating a polity. In
conclusion, this is why we believe that justification alone cannot be
sufficient as a conceptual standard to legitimize a state or regime because it
bears a one-way oriented view of the truth and of reality. At the same time, we
also reckon that legitimation alone too cannot suffice, because there is a risk
that it may be manipulated or extorted by an apparently reasonable ideological
justification that hides intolerance or violence. Hence, in order to obtain a
naturalistically fair, equal and just polity, we think that justification and
legitimation should surely combine, but that this combination should be based
upon the principles of pluralism, tolerance, civil liberties and rule of law. If
that is not, then the risk is to create political entities careless of naturalistic principles that upkeep only their positivistic, unilateral, view
of things, leading directly to tyranny and ferocity.
