Legitimacy, Power, and the Symbolic Life of the UN Security Council

The Charter of the United Nations gives the Security Council enormous formal powers, but it. does not give it direct control of the tools with which to enact those powers. As many have noted, much of the power of the Council is contingent on the voluntary coop eration of states, measured in variables such as the contribution to peacekeeping missions and the national enforcement of sanctions re gimes.1 It is often also noted that this voluntary compliance depends also on states' perceptions of the legitimacy of the Council and its ac tions.2 However, the central role that legitimacy plays in supporting the power of the Council is rarely investigated. After Inis Claude's state ment of the matter in 1966, the issue has not been revisited.3 The contingent nature of Council authority means its effect in the international system is both broader and narrower than the formal pow ers of the UN Charter?narrower because the Cold War stunted the de velopment of the four-policemen idea, but broader because the high so cial status of the Council signals a deep pool of capital that it can draw on to induce compliance by states. This article expands the traditional emphasis of international organization (IO) studies from the black letter of treaties and charters to a perspective that takes into ac count actual practices and the power of symbols around the Security Council. Taking seriously the symbolic power of the Council helps us to see the reasons behind certain otherwise inexplicable phenomena in in ternational relations (IR) and allows us to ask questions regarding the legitimacy of the Council that were previously hidden from view. Most political conflicts have symbolic payoffs at their root, which a concern only with studying material gains will inevitably misunderstand. This is an important problem with respect to the Security Council because so much of what makes the Council a significant actor in international pol itics is a result of the informal development of its role in international society. This is both a cause and a consequence of the distribution of material rewards and costs. We miss much that is interesting in social 35