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Recognition: A Short History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2016

Jens Bartelson
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Extract

During the past decade there has been a resurgence of interest in the concept of recognition in international theory. Once the narrow concern of social theorists, the concept of recognition is nowadays invoked in at least three different senses in order to explain three different things. First, it is commonly used to explain how states and their identities are shaped by interaction, and how the modern international system has emerged as a cumulated consequence of such patterns of interaction. In this context, the concept of recognition is used to explain how states are individuated and differentiated from each other, how the international system thereby becomes stratified along status lines, as well as why conflicts over status are possible or even inevitable. Second, although the concept of recognition has long enjoyed wide currency within international legal theory, where it is used to account for what makes states legal persons and equal members of international society, recent scholarship has done much to complicate this view by pointing out how practices of inclusion often have gone hand in hand with practices of exclusion, and how this has led to an informal stratification of international society. Third, the concept has most recently been invoked to suggest how the undesirable consequences of international anarchy can be mitigated or even avoided through mutual recognition between political communities.

Type
Essays
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , Fall 2016 , pp. 303 - 321
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Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 See, for example, Erik Ringmar, Identity, Interest and Action: A Cultural Explanation of Sweden's Intervention in the Thirty Years War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Christian Reus-Smit, Individual Rights and the Making of the International System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Richard Ned Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Richard Ned Lebow, Why Nations Fight (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Thomas Lindemann, Causes of War: The Struggle for Recognition (Colchester: ECPR Press, 2010).

2 See, for example, Gerry Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Mikulas Fabry, Recognizing States: International Society and the Establishment of New States Since 1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Ringmar, Erik, “Recognition and the Origins of International Society,” Global Discourse 4, no. 4 (2014), pp. 446–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See, for example, Axel Honneth, “Recognition between States: On the Moral Substrate of International Relations,” in Erik Ringmar and Thomas Lindemann, eds., The International Politics of Recognition (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2014), pp. 25–38; Wolf, Reinhard, “Respect and Disrespect in International Politics: The Significance of Status Recognition,” International Theory 3, no. 1 (2011), pp. 105–142 Google Scholar; and Friedrichs, Jörg, “An Intercultural Theory of International Relations: How Self-Worth Underlies Politics Among Nations,” International Theory 8, no. 1 (2016), pp. 1–34 Google Scholar.

4 Wendt, Alexander, “Why a World State is Inevitable,” European Journal of International Relations 9, no. 4 (2003), pp. 491–542 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 149–169, 150–218, and 25.

6 For this point, see Maria Birnbaum, Becoming Recognizable: Postcolonial Independence and the Reification of Religion, doctoral dissertation, European University Institute, Florence, 2015.

7 James Crawford, The Creation of States in International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 12.

8 Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, p. 98.

9 Ibid., p. 100.

10 Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 11.

11 Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 51–87.

12 Francisco De Vitoria, De Indis, in Jeremy Lawrance and Anthony Pagden, eds., Vitoria: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 250.

13 See, for example, Anthony Pagden, “Dispossessing the Barbarian: The Language of Spanish Thomism and the Debate over the Property Rights of the American Indians,” in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 79–98.

14 Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, pp. 13–32; S. James Anaya, Indigenous Peoples in International Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 15–48.

15 See, for example, Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2006), p. 110; and Stephen C. Neff, War and the Law of Nations: A General History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

16 See Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Martti Koskenniemi, “International Law and Raison d’État: Rethinking the Prehistory of International Law,” in Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann, eds., The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 297–339.

17 Alberico Gentili, De Jure Belli Libri Tres, trans. by John C. Rolfe (Oxford: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1933), I.II.12.

18 Ibid., I.IV.25.

19 Richard Zouche, An Exposition of Fecial Law and Procedure, or of Law between Nations, and Questions concerning the Same, trans. by J. L. Brierly, (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1911), I.I.3–4.

20 Ibid., I.VI.37.

21 Ibid.

22 Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, Or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns, with Three Early Essays on the Origin and Nature of Natural Law and on Luxury, edited and with an introduction by Béla Kapossy and Richard Whatmore (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), I.I.§4, p. 83

23 Vattel, Law of Nations, III.III.§47, p. 496.

24 Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, Historische und juristische Schriften, Vol. 1 (Frankfurt & Leipzig: Garbe, 1760), p. 185ff. For an analysis, see Alexandrowicz, C. H., “The Theory of Recognition In Fieri ,” British Yearbook of International Law 34 (1958), pp. 176–98Google Scholar.

25 See, for example, Barkin, J. Samuel and Cronin, Bruce, “The State and the Nation: Changing Norms and the Rules of Sovereignty in International Relations,” International Organization 48, no. 1 (1994), pp. 107–130 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 See Peter S. Onuf and Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions, 1776–1814 (Madison: Madison House, 1993); and Lorca, Arnulf Becker, “Universal International Law: Nineteenth-Century Histories of Imposition and Appropriation,” Harvard International Law Journal 51, no. 2 (2010), pp. 475–552 Google Scholar.

27 See David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 191–214.

28 Johann Christoph Wilhelm von Steck, “Versuch von Erkennung der Unabhängikeit einer Nation, und eienes Staates,” in Steck, Versuche über Verschiedene Materien Politischen und Rechtlicher Kenntnisse (Berlin & Stralsund: Gottlieb August Lange, 1783), pp. 49–56.

29 A Compendium of the Law of Nations Founded on the Treatises and Customs of the Modern Nations of Europe, trans. by William Cobbett (London: Cobbett and Morgan, 1802), p. 81.

30 Martens, Compendium, p. 82.

31 Golove, David M., and Hulsebosch, Daniel J., “Civilized Nation: The Early American Constitution, the Law of Nations, and the Pursuit of International Recognition,” New York University Law Review 85 (2010), pp. 932–1066 Google Scholar.

32 Alexandrowicz, “Theory of Recognition In Fieri,” p. 191.

33 Armitage, Foundations, p. 212; David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 84ff.

34 Martens, Compendium, p. 132.

35 Ibid., p. 135.

36 Ibid., p. 146.

37 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 366–67.

38 See Robert R. Williams, Hegel's Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 335.

39 Henry Wheaton, Elements of International Law (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1866), I.II.§21.

40 Wheaton, Elements of International Law, I.II.§21.

41 Bowden, Brett, “The Colonial Origins of International Law. European Expansion and the Classical Standard of Civilization,” Journal of the History of International Law 7, no. 1 (2005), pp. 1–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

42 James Lorimer, The Institutes of the Law of Nations: A Treatise of the Jural Relations of Separate Political Communities, Vol. I, (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1883), p. 3.

43 Lorimer, Institutes, p. 98.

44 Ibid., p. 102.

45 John Westlake, Chapters on the Principles of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1894), p. 82.

46 Quoted in Crawford, Creation of States in International Law, p. 15.

47 Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 384–86.

48 Lauterpacht, Hersch, “Recognition of States in International Law,” Yale Law Journal 53, no. 3 (1944), pp. 385–458 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Hersch Lauterpacht, Recognition in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), p. 6.

50 Crawford, Creation of States in International Law, p. 28.

51 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), section 178, p. 111.

52 Ibid., section 187, p. 114.

53 Ibid., section 191, p. 116.

54 Ibid., sections 196–97, pp. 118–19.

55 Alexandre Kojève, Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), p. 237.

56 Honneth, “Recognition between States: On the Moral Substrate of International Relations.”

57 Wolf, “Respect and Disrespect in International Politics,” p. 125.

58 Wendt, “Why a World State is Inevitable,” p. 511.

59 Ibid., p. 517.

60 Ibid., p. 520.

61 Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 103–113; and Patchen Markell, “The Potential and the Actual: Mead, Honneth, and the ‘I’,” in B. van den Brink and D. Owen, eds., Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 100–132.

62 Greenhill, Brian, “Recognition and Collective Identity Formation in International Politics,” European Journal of International Relations 14, no. 2 (2008), pp. 343–68 at 361CrossRefGoogle Scholar.