Relationship between Sovereignty and Legitimacy - Essay Example

On the other hand, in political science, the term legitimacy refers to the popular acceptance of the authority of the outside bodies by the governing body. The governing body has no option but to accept every authority that is given to it by the outside superior bodies. The governing body must just take them regardless of whether they favor the country's citizens or not (Cohen, 2013).

In political science, there are various relationships between the two states of sovereignty and legitimacy. Some of these relationships include the following ones. First, in both countries that exercise either legitimacy or sovereignty, the governing bodies must have to stick by their legislative deadlocks. In a political state that uses political sovereignty, they still have some small influential elites that all the governing bodies must adhere to. This is similar to a nation that exercises political legitimacy. They have no option other than just adhering to the authority of the governing regime. For example, in Chinese political philosophy, the political legitimacy of their rule in the government derived from the Heaven Mandate since the period of the Zhou Dynasty. Due to legitimacy, those rulers who lost had no option but to accept that mandate was to rule over the people (Kalmo and Skinner, 2010).

Other than that, the other relationship between sovereignty and legitimacy is that, in both states, there is a final regime. In political sovereignty, a body detects what appears to be interference from outside bodies. The body then decides on what should exactly be done about that, and there is nobody that can object to that. Similarly, in a political legitimacy state, there is a superior body that decides what the body of governors should do and there is no other body that has the authority to object to that. Taking an example in a real situation, the USA as a superior state that is in control of every other nation, has the power to decide the fate of other countries without being objected. For example, during the Iran and Iraq war, the USA president ordered the US security forces to get into the war without seeking permission from any of the two countries. Due to legitimacy, the two conflicting nations had no option but to accept the contributions of the US forces (Kalmo and Skinner, 2010).

In conclusion, countries need to exercise political sovereignty. This is because it gives the country the freedom to enjoy its decision-making. Otherwise, due to a lack of democracy and understanding in many countries, the respective countries should be subjected to political legitimacy.