Legality And Legitimacy Analysis

In this essay I will firstly talk about the concepts of legality and legitimacy. Then I will present arguments on the side of legitimacy over law in international actions, followed by those against it, who emphasize that illegal activities should always be condemned. Both of these concepts relate to the U.S. military intervention in the Kosovo wars of 1999. The U.S. acted without approval from the UN, therefore making their actions illegal. Legitimacy should never surpass legality, because of its ambiguous nature and the potential consequences if it does.

The concept of legitimacy has only recently been taken into consideration in relative to international law. Firstly, as Thomas (2013) said “it is only comparatively recently that philosophers

There are cases in which laws are servants only to themselves, effectively rendering legitimacy as non-existent. Legitimacy is needed in order to oversee laws, and to ensure that they are servants of their inherent purpose, which is to benefit the citizens which they govern. The current international law sometimes fails to correspond to impending global needs, especially in the case of humanitarian concerns. So, legality is a concept concept which corrects the shortcomings of international law. Such was the case in Kosova, when international law prevented an intervention from the international community, clearly manifesting the large gap between legitimacy and legality and effectively putting hundreds of thousand civilian lives in danger. As Mertus (2001) said, “even though the intervention was the first sustained use of armed force by the NATO alliance; the first time a regional alliance, acting without UN authorization, had used a bombing campaign against a sovereign country with the stated intent of ending human rights abuses;” (Mertus, 2001, p.133), the surpassing of international laws by legitimacy is not without a precedent. As Popovski & Turner (2008) said “the Nuremburg Tribunal which is a prime example when emergencies demand action which the existing law at the time is unable to explicitly permit. So, such actions can be

However, while this serves member countries of the UN, it does not fare well with developing countries mostly in the east and south, which have an extensive colonial history and were subject to ruthless experiences during the Cold War. So, as Bali (2004) said “it is their point of view that interventionism, not its absence, represented the greater threat” (Bali, 2004, p.298). If we take as an example the region of East Timor in which during 1999, the same time the bombing of Belgrade occurred, the invasion of east Timor by Indonesia was under way. As Chomsky (2006) states, “The crimes in East Timor go vastly beyond Srebrenica or anything plausibly attributed to Serbia. And, crucially these crimes approaching true genocide were supported throughout by the United States and Britain” (Chomsky, 2006,