By Alexander Klimburg.
The reports of the death of multistakeholder Internet governance have been greatly exaggerated. But persistent misunderstanding of the phenomenon of multistakeholderism is indeed a potentially lethal threat to the future of the Internet.
“The king is dead, long live the king”. Famously associated with the English monarchy, similar expressions of simultaneous rupture and continuance are found throughout the history of political governance. The historian Ernst Kantorowicz showed in his brilliant and often-repurposed book The King’s Two Bodies that any type of political governance lives in two shells. The first body is the physical, corporal and even institutional shell that inevitable is shrugged off when its time has come. The second body, often lives on – that is the legitimizing principle from which the first body draws its sovereign authority and which forms its body politic that supports it. What exactly the legitimizing principle is obviously varies depending on setting. For an absolute monarchy it could be as simple as a divine right of kings, while a parliamentary monarchy might concentrate on securing property. For the young American democracy rejecting British rule end of the 18th Century, the legitimizing principle was the consent of the governed.
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