Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

386Chapter 8legitimacy of its decisions, respectively. The regulatory competenceof the political system fails if the implemented legal programsremain ineffective or if regulatory activity gives rise to disintegratingeffects in the action systems that require regulation. Failure alsooccurs if the instruments deployed overtax the legal medium itselfand strain the normative composition of the political system. Assteering problems become more complex, irrelevance, misguidedregulations, and self-destruction can accumulate to the pointwhere a "regulatory trilemma" results.81 On the other side, thepolitical system fails as a guardian of social integration if itsdecisions, even though effective, can no longer be traced back tolegitimate law. The constitutionally regulated circulation of poweris nullified if the administrative system becomes independent ofcommunicatively generated power, if the social power of functionalsystems and large organizations (including the mass media)is converted into illegitimate power, or if the lifeworld resources forspontaneous public communication no longer suffice to guaranteean uncoerced articulation of social interests. The independence ofillegitimate power, together with the weakness of civil society andthe public sphere, can deteriorate into a "legitimation dilemma,"which in certain circumstances can combine with the steeringtrilemma and develop into a vicious circle. Then the politicalsystem is pulled into the whirlpool of legitimation deficits andsteering deficits that reinforce one another.(d) Such crises can at most be explained historically. They are notbuilt into the structures of functionally differentiated societies insuch a way that they would intrinsically compromise the project o£self.empowerment undertaken by a society of free and equalsubjects who bind themselves by law. However, they are symptomaticof the peculiar position of political systems as asymmetricallyembedded in highly complex circulation processes. Actors mustform an idea of this context whenever, adopting the performativeattitude, they want to engage successfully as citizens, representatives,judges, or officials, in realizing the system of rights. Becausethese rights must be interpreted in various ways under changingsocial circumstances, the light they throw on this context is refractedinto a spectrum of changing legal paradigms. Historicalconstitutions can be seen as so many ways of construing one and the