The term international legitimacy means adherence to a set of principles and laws that govern and direct international relations through the United Nations and what is issued by its bodies charged with maintaining global peace and security, foremost of which is the UN Security Council
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Legitimacy is the description of any system based on legal, moral, or value foundations around which a consensus of a particular group or most of its members is held, given what unites them from those foundations and the fairness and justice it provides in regulating transactions between them and the protection of minimum limits of rights for each one of them.
International legitimacy, as it is in circulation today, finds its basis in the consensual nature of the contractual international laws, which is expressed in international treaties and conventions that states adopt, agree to and are committed to implementing, given that the state is the main interlocutor of public international law.
Some jurists of law and political science do not hesitate to question the origin of legitimacy, including international legitimacy, in light of the correlates of power with legitimacy, as legitimacy is often an effort by the strongest to give his power a legal and moral character.
For example, the international legitimacy emanating from the Second World War was created by the victory of these powers and their hegemony on the international scene.
History
The world has known many wars, some of them between me, and two of them of a global nature that took place in the first half of the twentieth century and left tragic effects on the human and material levels.
In light of this, the imperative to search for an international mechanism to provide a lasting peace and develop the appropriate tools to prevent the recurrence of the tragedy of the global war has emerged.
In the aftermath of World War II (1939-1945), a new international order emerged that was formulated by the victorious countries (the Allied Powers), based on the necessity of maintaining international peace and the inevitability of managing the dispute between the two prominent poles created by the new international equation, namely the western camp led by the United States and the eastern camp led by the Soviet Union.
The race for world leadership and the blatant ideological dissonance between the two sides heralded the possibility of a new war, and technological and scientific progress and its destructive effects revealed by the war confirmed that a new war would be devastating, especially with the development of nuclear technology of mass destruction.
The decision of the major powers to set up a legal and structural arsenal for peacekeeping has resulted in legitimacy by virtue of the affiliation of the rest of the world with the frameworks and agreements regulating this new international reality in which the national state emerged as a basic unit in the international system.
Implementation mechanisms
International legitimacy depends on the bodies of the international system to enforce their decisions and embody their positions on the issues before the international community. From the Charter of the United Nations, which sets out the controls on the use of armed force under the cover of international legitimacy.
Security Council resolutions are only effective if they are supported by nine of the fifteen members of the Council, with the additional condition that none of the five permanent members object to the resolution.
Here emerges the problem of the victorious powers continuing the war in monopolizing the reality and future of the international community.
Legitimacy and International
Law International law is the most important legal framework for international legitimacy, and it is its legal basis from which it derives the obligation to submit to the international community.
Here arises the problem of the heterogeneity of the international community with different ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds to the point of contradiction, and therefore the great injustice of large groups of this society that were absent from the formulation of the international legal arsenal in its foundational stages at least, because the majority of the countries of the world had not yet appeared, as The marginal countries that existed at the time had little luck from participating.
Thus, the requirements of international law were issued for the most part from a single civilizational background, which is Western civilization, with its various branches, and neglected the moral, value and religious specificities of the rest of the world.
In addition to this dimension, we find that international legitimacy serves the political agendas of the dominant powers, which is not surprising if we take into account that these powers established the international system to serve their interests and consolidate their hegemony over the world with a peaceful measure of their differences and divergent ambitions.
International legitimacy has failed to achieve minimum levels of justice in a number of international issues, and perhaps the Palestinian issue is one of the most shining examples of the failure of international legitimacy to enforce its decisions, which Israel has been intransigent in implementing. Rather, it does not miss an opportunity to express its contempt for it, benefiting from the generous support of the United States. The United States and Western powers at the international level.
The apartheid regime in South Africa, the Algerian case, and the Vietnam War were also shameful manifestations of this blatant moral and ethical failure.
Prior to that, the phenomenon of colonialism and its continuation under the new international system after the World War was also the site of a major failure.
In this regard, it is good to mention the Syrian crisis and the international community’s chronic failure to resolve it, despite its five bloody years, in which more than a quarter of a million people were killed, including large numbers of civilians, and about ten million Syrians were displaced.
It is known that Russia was the one who kept preventing a Security Council resolution from being passed on Syria, and even refused to refer Syria's file to the International Criminal Court.