The rise of international organizations (IOs) particularly after the end of Cold War has led political philosophers to turn their gaze to international level to discuss the legitimacy or “justness” of global governance institutions. In doing so, they frequently rely on what I call the methodology of domestic analogy: Deriving normative ideas and concepts from domestic contexts, and then applying them in the international sphere. However, IOs differ from states in several key respects. Institutionally, they are often considered defective because they often lack a permanent law-making institution (exceptionally COPs and the UN General Assembly) and seldomly possess enforcement mechanism (the UN). Functionally, they are often created to solve specific international problems, thereby being designed to exercise authority in a functionally limited domain.
The domestic analogy treats domestic authorities as the primary case, relegating international authorities to a secondary status. This domestic bias often risks missing the distinctive characteristics of international organizations. From the perspective of legitimacy analysis, there are two crucial elements that differ IOs from their domesitc counterparts. First, unlike states, characterized by the capacity to exercise practical authority, very few international organizations can give its subjects (states) orders and commands. The World Health Organization (WHO), for instance, is an international organization responsible for coordinating the activities of states over global public health related concerns and endowed with the competence of adopting agreements, regulations and making recommendations. Yet it is hard to say that it is qualified as an international authority that may give states orders or commands because it lacks a law-applying institution. In contrast, the World Trade Organization is often seen as the epitome of international practical authority, mainly because it is equipped with permanent law-applying institutions with compulsory jurisdiction. Regional human rights organizations (the ECHR regime) can also exercise practical authority over states by virtue of their degree of institutionalization. In sum, IOs can be categorized into two different categories depending on their degree of authoritativeness: i) international epistemic and i) practical authorities.
IOs can also be classified according to the kind of problems they are created to solve, and subsequently the kind of service they are expected to deliver. I will argue that international practical authorities are often created to deliver two different services: i) solving international coordination problems and ii) solving the problem of domestic akrasia. While the WTO is created to solve international coordination problem on trade norms, regional human rights regimes are designed to help states to overcome their human rights violation problem. I will call them respectively anti-perfectionist and perfectionist authorities. This classification based on services has further implications for i) international obligations (collective/piece-meal), ii) institutional design (self-enforceability), iii) the legitimacy of interpretive methods (originalist/teleological). Using the WTO and the ECtHR as the paradigmatic examples of these international authorities, the paper concludes by explaining how these differences affect their legitimacy over domestic authorities. It particularly addresses the problem of non-compliance, arguing that anti-perfectionist authorities are not so much vulnerable to non-compliant state behaviors, insofar as their institutional structure remains functional.