Divine Sanction and Reason as grounds for legitimacy

(this is a stub post that has been stuck in draft mode. Experience has shown me that if I don't push it out it will languish for years. Really this is more like an idea for a book I don't have time to write).

With the Enlightenment, in principle reason succeeded divine sanction or mere possession of land and the legitimating grounds of governments in much of the world. As Linda Colley in her good but flawed book on constitutions pointed out, constitutions played a crucial role in disseminating this principle globally.

International law pushes this principle down into more granular territory, and IP protection is the area where this is perhaps best built out. China's attack on the legal grounds for IP protection threatens this principle, just as China has been eroding the practice of IP protection for some time.

Of course China and the rest of the Global South is not entirely wrong to challenge the putative principles-based world order. It was always supremely flawed. From the beginning it was eroded by the West's highly selective and limited understanding of the scope of universality, which generally starts at the extent of the speaker's perceived cohort and has always been limited by the pursuit of profit for specific groups (one vs. many, private vs. public), though the profit motive and the search for competitive advantage has on the other hand facilitated the globalization of production which has helped drag billions of people out of poverty, especially since the rise of Deng Xiaopeng, Manmohan Singh and Lee Kuan Yew.

With the erosion of divine sanction as legitimation, perceived injury has becomes new grounds (Hitler and Weimar, China and the Opium Wars, Putin and Glasnost) for legitimacy. Really this is a regression to Old Testament ways.

Retreat from international and multilateral agreements is lamentable (UN, EU, WTO, NAFTA, Putin and nuclear agreement, TPP). In general the more international agreement and cooperation on a variety of fronts, the better. We should be striving to arrive at something like Star Trek "United Federation of Planets" before an attack from another star system necessitates it.

Note to self: check out Habermas's Legitimation Crisis.