Whenever a government is unpopular, or when its people revolt, then many often say that it has "lost its legitimacy", but what exactly does that mean? Does the loss of legitimacy mean that the government in question has lost the support of its citizens? Has it transgressed some sort of boundary when it comes to human rights? Well, I figured that I might try to find out the opinions of the people on Partisan Lines on what they think is a legitimate government. Now, I think I should try to explain to you what I think is a legitimate government. In my opinion, any government is legitimate, because all governments practice control over people. Even governments in exile still exercise control over the people who are actually part of that government, regardless of whether they control territory or not. And besides, governments that many people consider to be illegitimate often end up in power, regardless of their supposed illegitimacy, because they were able to take and hold power better than their more "legitimate" rivals. Anyway, what do you think constitutes a legitimate government?
Hey welcome Rhom! Good topic too. Government is a term that is thrown around a lot and poorly understood. I'd say that any ruling body that has lost the support of the majority of its people is no longer legitimate. That assumes of course that the ruling body had the support of the majority of the people that in the first place. There certainly are many types of ruling bodies around the globe and many of them illegitimate from the git-go but of those that did at least initially have the support of the people, they are legitimate as long as they can first, keep the support of the people and second, hold onto their power. Once the support of enough of the people is gone, it is a just matter of either departing gracefully or pulling an "Assad" and hanging onto the reins of power as long as you can before the chaos overtakes your guns. Legitimacy is just a diplomatic way of saying we are top dogs at this point and what we say goes until you can get rid of us.
IMO, "legitimate" is the wrong word to be using when talking about governments. It's use by other countries is meant to convey that they accept, and typically support, the government in question. It's an announcement and a propaganda campaign, meant to convince others to also accept and support that government's leaders. So, my opinion is that a government's "legimacy" is more related to it's relationship with other countries than it's own citizens. It's a measure of it's "likeability" in the World community. Social unrest, economic downturns, brutal crackdowns... all affect how other countries view each other. The country itself may have zero support from it's citizens yet have a more favorable rating to the rest of the World and be deemed "legimate".
That's actually a really good way of looking at the whole deal. The whole idea of legitimacy revolves around the assumption that there are certain rules that governments must follow. However, there is no agreed upon definition of "legitimate", so there really is no point in even calling a government legitimate or illegitimate, because everyone has their own opinions of what is and is not a legitimate government.
