_ by Raluca Enescu

For its most traditional definition, a government’s authority over its citizens is to be considered legitimate if and only if the people consent to it. Legitimacy is the foundation of such governmental power as is exercised both with a consciousness on the government’s part that it has a right to govern and with some recognition by the governed of that right.

However, this definition poses certain problems. For instance, suppose a group of people ruled by a tyrant in perfect isolation: they have never heard of democracy, they are unaware of the fact that they have rights, they have no other means to figure out that there might be a better life out-there than, as George Orwell said in “Nineteen Eighty Four”, their own vague discontent. In consequence, they do not question the authority of their tyrant; they couldn’t. As theoretical as this example may seem- it is not far from what is happening in the totalitarian world: in Burma, the national media is totally controlled by the state, the internet is strongly censored and any attempt at communicating aout democracy and rights is punishable with heavy imprisonment.

The question that arises-regarding the question of legitimacy is: If people in the above example do not have any possibility to question this tyrant’s authority, because they are unaware of the very concept of democracy and of their own rights, would that legitimate the tyrany? Answering “yes”would be an obvious contradiction of common sense and of our moral intuitions. Therefore, the above definition of “legitimacy”, or at least one possible interpretation of it, may appear to be quite fallacious.

“Legitimate”, then, would be not “what one consents to” but rather “what a rational, properly informed and completely aware subject would consent to”. A possible answer to this issue are the social contract thories:

Suppose a group of people that have previously lived in a “state of nature” (meaning, basically, the absence of any kind of government) decide to form a society. They are the ones to decide the rules that they would abide by- and -supposing them as being rational, unconstrained and aware- would discuss them from a position of perfect equality, the purpose being, specifically, keeping and ensuring their natural rights and natural freedom. The so-estabished contract becomes the soure of legitimacy for state power. Consequently, we could define “legitimate” as “something that could be justified trough a social contract”.

The social contract theory is mostly associated with Western modern pollitical thought- from the “classical social contract theories” of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to contemporary theories such as those conceived by John Rawls or David Gauthier.

What is, perhaps, less known to the wide public, but quite familiar to those of you who have studied Aung San Suu Kyi’s writings is that the issue of government by consent is quie explicitly present in Burmese tradition; as The Lady writes in her essay “In Quest of Democracy” (included in “Freedom from Fear and Other Writings”) :

“The Buddhist view of world history tells that when society fell from its original state of purity into moral and social chaos, a king was elected to restore peace and justice. The ruler was known by three titles: Mahasammata, because he is named ruler by the unanimous consent of the people, Khattya, because he has domination over agricultural land, and Raja, because he wins the people to affection trough observance of the dhamma ( virtue, justice, the law). The agreement by which the first monarch undertakes to rule righteously in return for a portion of the rice crop repesents the Buddhist version of government by social contract. […] because the Mahasammata was chosen by popular consent and required to govern in accordance with just laws, the concept of government elective and sub lege is not alien to traditional Burmese thought”.

The point is quite clear- there is nothing tha could make totaliatarianism legitimate: not a so-called consent, obtained through the use of both sheer force and manipulation (as, for instance, what the junta is trying to obtain trough a sham referendum) and not any kind of so-called “traditional authority”- as you cam see from Suu Kyi’s words, tradition perfectly endorses the idea of government by consent.