The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition
De facto rule or power simply means that, as it happens, a certain group, class, nation or whatever is in a position to control and order some political system. It does not necessarily mean that the rulers are illegitimate, but its principal use is as a contrast with de jure power. De jure power means that, according to some legal or political theory, a particular group is entitled to give, with legitimacy, orders of some type. Again, the actual coincidence depends on the theory one chooses to apply. To take an extreme example, someone might hold that Britain had de jure authority over a long-lost colony, or that England only had de facto power over Scotland and Wales, depending on the choice of ideologies.
The importance of the conceptual distinction is that it allows a distinction between the actual chance of someone in authority being obeyed (which might be a matter of the number of available machine guns), and the way in which the right to be obeyed is justified, or seen as justifiable by any chosen audience.
For example, until the official creation of the state of Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom had had de jure authority in what used to be known as Southern Rhodesia, although in fact the society had been controlled by white Rhodesians in revolt against the UK government from 1965 until the creation of Zimbabwe. The distinction has considerable practical effects in the world order, because most countries would have refused to recognize the de facto government of that country, and would have assisted in applying what the UK took to be the legal order, as it was the de jure ruler.
International law tends to operate by its own version of the common law rule of adverse possession, so that after enough time has passed, de facto rulers come to be seen as having established their own legitimacy. The distinction is probably coming to be much more important in lay discussion than in legal analysis. A common usage would be to answer a question about who makes rules in a community by answering, ‘Well, de facto it’s ‘‘x’’, though de jure it’s ‘‘y’’’. Alternatively, de facto authority can be identified as meaning the sovereign power in some context where no one has previously had any control. Thus the statement ‘The German Federal Bank is the de facto monetary authority for Europe’, if uttered before the start of the euro, might have recognized an important fact without implying either illegitimacy or the passing from power of some other authority.
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