Observations on Political Legitimacy in Contemporary Europe

Before, during, and immediately after World War II, the viability of states was much discussed in political literature. Recently, however, that issue has waned as the international community has lowered its threshold requirements and definitions of what constitutes viability. States that would formerly have been deemed nonviable by virtue of their small size, awkward and indefensible frontiers, or meager human and material resources, are now normally and as a matter of course subsidized and sustained by the international community. Corresponding to this process in political life, there has occurred a simultaneous shift in the focus of political theory and political analysis away from the question of viability, and toward the issue of legitimacy as particularly important and problematical. The attention currently devoted to this problem of political legitimacy stems in part from a widespread sense that the contemporary state, while viable enough in terms of that older concern and its newer standards, is nevertheless somehow out of phase with the world's travails-seemingly too small and weak to solve such global issues as inflation, yet apparently too big and remote to evoke that cathartic trust, identification, and admiration of its subjects which the state requires if its political system is to function. This essay probes some of the problems-of theory and of policy-confronting state authorities in contemporary Europe as they seek to achieve, sustain, and enhance their always vulnerable legitimacy.