Conceptualizing throughput legitimacy: procedural mechanisms of accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness in EU governance

This symposium demonstrates the potential for throughput legitimacy as a concept for shedding empirical light on the strengths and weaknesses of multi-level governance, as well as challenging the concept theoretically. This article introduces the symposium by conceptualizing throughput legitimacy as an ‘umbrella concept’, encompassing a constellation of normative criteria not necessarily empirically interrelated. It argues that in order to interrogate multi-level governance processes in all their complexity, it makes sense for us to develop normative standards that are not naïve about the empirical realities of how power is exercised within multilevel governance, or how it may interact with legitimacy. We argue that while throughput legitimacy has its normative limits, it can be substantively useful for these purposes. While being no replacement for input and output legitimacy, throughput legitimacy offers distinctive normative criteria— accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness— and points towards substantive institutional reforms.Published versio

Overlapping regional security institutions in South America: The case of OAS and UNASUR

The Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) has positioned itself as a regional security organization aimed at reducing the influence of the Organization of American States (OAS) in South America. At the same time, the OAS paradoxically serves as a model for UNASUR because of its operational capacity and its legitimacy as a regional organization. This article analyzes the seemingly contradictory tendencies of replication and dissociation that UNASUR exhibits towards the OAS in terms of security conceptions and practices. In the first part of the paper, we will draw on recent debates on international regime complexity to develop a framework to study institutional overlap. The second part analyzes to what extent and in which respects UNASUR, and particularly its Defense Council, overlaps with the OAS in terms of security conceptions and practices, while the third part examines the causes of the emergence of a “competitor” for the OAS in South America

Comparing regional organizations in global multilateral institutions:ASEAN, the EU and the UN

Structural change brought about by the end of the Cold War and accelerated globalisation have transformed the global environment. A global governance complex is emerging, characterised by an ever-greater functional and regulatory role for multilateral organisations such as the United Nations (UN) and its associated agencies. The evolving global governance framework has created opportunities for regional organisations to participate as actors within the UN (and other multilateral institutions). This article compares the European Union (EU) and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as actors within the UN network. It begins by extrapolating framework conditions for the emergence of EU and ASEAN actorness from the literature. The core argument of this article is that EU and ASEAN actorness is evolving in two succinct stages: Changes in the global environment create opportunities for the participation of regional organisations in global governance institutions, exposing representation and cohesion problems at the regional level. In response, ASEAN and the EU have initiated processes of institutional adaptation