Recognition and Global Politics

Critical encounters between state and world

Patrick Hayden, Kate Schick, Patrick Hayden, Kate Schick

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784993344
• eBook ISBN: 9781526104847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Recognition and global politics examines the potential and limitations of the discourse of recognition as a strategy for reframing justice and injustice within contemporary world affairs. Drawing on resources from social and political theory and international relations theory, as well as feminist theory, postcolonial studies and social psychology, this ambitious collection explores a range of political struggles, social movements and sites of opposition that have shaped certain practices and informed contentious debates in the language of recognition.

1

Recognition and the International: Meanings, Limits, Manifestations

Patrick Hayden and Kate Schick

Over the past two decades, critical debates and insights within philosophy, sociology and political theory have focused on the concept of recognition. From interpersonal relationships of self and other, to multiculturalism, identity politics, new social movements, economic inequality, human development and diverse modalities of power, theories of the ethics and politics of recognition have challenged mainstream liberal and communitarian accounts of political co-existence, oppression and the ‘normative grammar’ of social conflicts (see Thompson 2006). However, while the literature on recognition has had a significant impact within social and political theory delimited to the ‘self-contained’ space of the territorially bounded state, it has been comparatively neglected in international political theory. Only recently has recognition begun to move from being a marginal concern for theorists of international politics to a more prevalent current of thought. Matters of international or global redistributive justice have been the primary focal point of this mounting interest in questions of human recognition. While this growing attention is to be welcomed, we believe that too much of this conversation thus far has been limited, incomplete or inadequate in failing to open up to a host of other issues cutting across the intersection of recognition and the international. With that in mind, the contributions in this volume consider how post-Hegelian recognition theory can enrich our understanding of international, global or world politics over and above matters of global redistribution – while nevertheless acknowledging the importance of problems of economic justice in today’s globalized world. Our research explores new dimensions of the recognition–international nexus that move the conversation into original, critical analyses of rights, humanity, power and emancipation. We explore why and how bringing the political theory of recognition into dialogue with international political theory provides valuable insights into more than distributive justice, and push the debates into areas rooted in larger empirical and normative phenomena: from genocide to revolutionary trauma, from gender injustice to practices of care, from cosmopolitanism to the non-human environment. Specifically, the book uses entrenched, emerging and evolving issues of international politics to probe the range and limitations of the concept of recognition, and to place the concept in interrelated contexts from the local to the global that may often include deficient, misguided or denied recognition.

Even though the question of recognition is a relative newcomer to the scene of international political theory, it is a question that does not come out of nowhere. It has a particular place in the history of philosophy, as well as in modern social and political theory that attends to the ethical and political meaning of an intersubjective, shared yet conflictual world. In this chapter, we concentrate, first, on sketching the tradition of Hegelian recognition inaugurated in the early nineteenth century and, second, on some of the main extensions and transformations of this tradition throughout the late twentieth century and the outset of the twenty-first. In tracing key theoretical growths from the roots of Hegel’s thought, the first section is organized around specific contemporary conversations about not only the precise sense of the term ‘recognition’, but also why it matters so much to persons, groups and nations embroiled in debates about democracy, culture, equality, justice, resistance and responsibility. In charting recognition theory in this way, we sketch the theoretical contours within which successive chapters are situated. The subsequent section then presents the three core themes explored in this volume, and provides an overview of the essays that follow.

Charting recognition

What does ‘recognition’ mean? What critical approaches can we use to explore it? Recognition theory comes in numerous yet related forms – existential, Marxist, critical theoretical, feminist, poststructural, postcolonial, agonistic and psychoanalytic, to name a few – containing threads of the personal, cultural, social and political. While it is important to appreciate the multiple forms that recognition theory takes, and the connections between them, it is equally essential to clearly see its roots. The problem of recognition is a long-standing concern in moral and political philosophy, centring on questions about the relationship of the self to itself and to the other. Intellectually, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel plays a pioneering role in establishing the fundamental terms of the theme of recognition by calling attention to the nature of self-consciousness. His great innovation is to show that consciousness is always consciousness of something other than itself – both inanimate objects and animate others. Hegel’s phenomenology of consciousness was popularized when it deeply informed the thinking of leading French scholars such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as anti-colonial writers such as Frantz Fanon, by way of the leftist interpretation of Hegel popularized in the seminars of Alexandre Kojève from the 1930s through the postwar period.¹ For Kojève (1969), in addition to whatever basic needs define the animal structure of human being, there exists a properly human longing for recognition that finds its satisfaction only in the mutuality of reciprocated desire – driving a dialectical process whose future completion will signal the end of history. More recently, the debate around recognition gained new life due largely to the work of philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser, who reintroduced consideration of recognition dynamics into discussions of multiculturalism, religious conflict, social justice and the politics of identity.

Although not the first figure to introduce the theme of recognition into modern philosophy – aspects of the concept of recognition can be found in Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant – Hegel undoubtedly presents the most systematic and famous account of its social and political ubiquity. Borrowing from the philosophy of Fichte, and rejecting the Hobbesian solution to social order, Hegel makes both empirical and normative qualities central to his formulation of recognition: the process of mutual recognition explains the intersubjective constitution of people’s identity, while it also grounds an affirmative principle of equality in a just social and political order. For Hegel, recognition mediates between the particular (private individuals) and the universal (social ethics), thereby articulating the reflexivity of self to other within successive and increasingly complex forms of socialization from the family to the state. In making this argument, Hegel claims that human self-consciousness will not properly develop in the absence of recognition by others (see Williams 1992); we are radically dependent on others for the development of our selves. Such recognition ideally manifests itself within three central spheres of ethical existence: in the family, in civil society and in the state. In the family, members initially experience an undivided feeling of love which gradually becomes differentiated as self-consciousness matures into full personality. In the sphere of civil society, consciousness manifests itself in the contractual relations and coordinated interdependence associated with private law, property and labour. In the state, consciousness develops further differentiation in its movement from its own independence towards mediation by public institutions, and in so doing also attains consciousness of universality through membership in the totality of the political order (Hegel 1967).

Yet the process of recognition is also fraught with contradictions and failure and, for that reason, takes the form of a struggle waged by the subject through the stages of establishing interpersonal relationships, forming collective ethical horizons and advancing society’s moral progress. This struggle is famously depicted in Hegel’s account of the master–slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The surprising consequence of the subject’s desire for confirmation of its independence and self-certainty is that other subjects it encounters will resist extending recognition, because they too wish to claim their own independence. Self and other initially encounter each other as adversaries. This mutual resistance first precipitates a ‘life-and-death’ confrontation by which each self-consciousness seeks the destruction of the other, followed by a struggle for dominance and subordination as self-consciousness realizes that destruction of the other would deprive it of the source of affirmation and thus of satisfaction (Hegel 1977: 114–15). It should already be clear that the asymmetrical master–slave relationship also proves to be unsatisfying, in that the slave’s submissive act of recognition cannot be of sufficient worth to the master, and the master’s own freedom and self-certainty is surrendered by having to negate the freedom of the slave (Hegel 1977: 116–17). If only full recognition provides the sufficient condition of the possibility of self-consciousness’s proper formation, then each subject must renounce the claim to absolute independence and domination of the other, concede that the freedom of both self and other arises through mutual dependence and accept equivalent claims to reciprocal recognition and respect. Only then can we say that the identity and agency of the subject is truly fulfilled out of the context of intersubjective relations with others.

Habermas and Taylor: Recognition, emancipation and multiculturalism

Jürgen Habermas’s explicit engagement with Hegelian recognition began in the late 1960s. In Theory and Practice, Habermas argues that two conceptions of ‘spirit’ are present yet in tension in Hegel’s work. The first is found in his theory of self-consciousness, while the second appears in his account of the relationship between language, work and interaction. The merit of Hegel’s phenomenology of the struggle for recognition, notes Habermas (1973: 146), is his insight that ethical relationships may be formed on the basis of a reciprocity that reconciles the universal and the particular in a ‘moral totality’ of complementarily distinct entities. Yet this insight proves to be not entirely consistent with the fact that the formation of self-consciousness also takes place in the heterogeneous realms of language, or symbolic representation and communication, and of labour. On the one hand, the reconciliation that lies at the end of the struggle for recognition presupposes communicative interaction, which itself ‘is accomplished by virtue of the spoken word being accorded normative force’ (Habermas 1973: 160). Hence the dialectical mediation of self and other is actually possible because of the medium of symbols, which itself is already intersubjectively constituted. On the other hand, ethical reconciliation also presupposes the mutual satisfaction of material needs and desires, externalized both in an antagonistic nature that must be collectively subdued and in objects that are collaboratively produced through social labour. Consequently instrumental cooperation proves to be bound up in the same movement as intersubjective domination and subordination, ultimately institutionalized in legally and economically regulated interactions. While Hegel’s interpretation of the interrelationships between these realms evolved as his writing matured, for Habermas (1984) the indispensable point to take from this for a critical social theory is that the mutual demand for ‘reaching understanding’ communicatively, and thus for the affirmation of self and other as equal participants in the discursive process of reciprocal criticism and justification, is part of the process of human emancipation itself.

Habermas’s intervention into recognition theory deepened with the arrival of the multiculturalism debates in the 1980s and 1990s. The work of Charles Taylor also figures prominently in these debates, most notably his 1994 essay ‘The Politics of Recognition’. The background to Taylor’s argument is the perception that just as the recognition framework can be applied to interpersonal and social relations, so too can it be extended to intercultural relations. Thus Taylor brings Hegelian self-consciousness to the point that it is compelled to confront cultural difference as an asset for authentic self-realization. Recognition and multiculturalism are connected, Taylor claims, by way of liberalism’s fundamental idea that every human person possesses a dignity independent of their natural abilities or social position, by virtue of which they should be respected by others as equal. In terms of public policy, this liberal principle has developed in two directions: first, through formal recognition of the equal rights of all citizens on the basis of ethical neutrality and, second, through equal recognition of the uniqueness of each individual and his or her distinctive identity. While the first model is ‘unable to give due acknowledgment to distinctness’ and therefore is intrinsically ‘homogenizing’ (Taylor 1994: 52),² the second model allows for the distribution of equal rights across different cultural contexts. A liberal society attuned to the politics of difference would, says Taylor, adopt a substantive commitment to respect and promote the survival of diverse cultural identities, which will also have the effect of preventing any single community-based identity from becoming hegemonic and potentially discriminatory. Taylor (1994: 32) emphasizes that human identity and agency are fundamentally dialogical in character, meaning that we ‘become full human agents . . . through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression’, which we learn ‘through exchanges with others’. Because mutual understanding is predicated on intersubjective dialogue, lack of recognition or misrecognition of distinct cultural identities, and concomitantly of the self’s dialogical relations with others through which cultural self-understanding is generated, ‘can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being’ (Taylor 1994: 25). The ‘vital human need’ for recognition thus extends to acknowledging the presumed equal worth of different cultures and taking their perspectives into account ethically, legally and politically (Taylor 1994: 26, 73).

Habermas’s response to Taylor contends, however, that the latter’s argument ultimately resorts to an untenable dualism between private and public autonomy. In essence, Taylor’s attempt to ‘correct’ liberal proceduralism by mapping collective rights intended to protect the substantial values of cultural groups onto the formal rights of individual citizens implies the splitting of autonomy into two separate yet somehow internally linked spheres. In the end, Habermas argues, the double-edged aspect of cultural identity within the liberal constitutional state – which defines individuals concurrently as citizens at large and as members of distinct cultural groups – will pose conflicts or dilemmas, typically associated with exclusion from the public sphere, to which Taylor’s position cannot adequately respond. Somewhat paradoxically, this may then render it difficult, if not impossible, for some people or groups to engage in the emancipatory struggles for recognition valued by Taylor. On Habermas’s own account (1994: 112–13), private and public autonomy are co-original, and recognition is a form of social practice that requires autonomy as a mode of communicative and deliberative participation. Rather than regarding rights as inhering either individually or collectively, then, Habermas suggests that both types of rights arise together in the relationships among people generated through practices of mutual recognition. In engaging in such practices, those affected by domination or marginalization – and here Habermas refers to feminism, multiculturalism and anti-colonialism – simultaneously assert their public autonomy and, through articulating the relevant aspects of their own particular experience, also secure their private autonomy (Habermas 1994: 116). In contrast to Taylor’s focus on the legislative and administrative recognition of the equal worth of different cultures, Habermas (1994: 126–9) advocates placing ongoing debates about what is and is not valuable, what is and is not deserving of equal recognition, within public discussions of an inclusive political process.³ The central difficulty here, of course, is that Habermas’s position presumes precisely what may be missing, namely, a degree of recognition sufficient to allow persons or groups to be seen as rightly having access (or ‘belonging’) to the public sphere. This leaves aside, then, the difficult problem posed by cases of radical non-recognition.

Honneth and Fraser: Recognition, redistribution and reframing

Axel Honneth also borrows from Hegel the concept of a process whereby individuals fully develop a sense of self and self-worth only by recognizing and being recognized by others. But where Taylor takes recognition to its limit in cultural authenticity, Honneth identifies the development and maintenance of self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem as the most important factor that influences each individual’s capacity to engage in reciprocal recognition with others. In his view, the development of our faith and trust in others in turn shapes our sense of agency and responsibility, which itself then impacts on our sense of worth and distinctiveness. Ideally, each of these capacities is formed and sustained through corresponding types of intersubjective relations: from familial relations of love and friendship, to civic relations of equality and legal rights, to solidaristic relations of shared values and projects.

The crux of Honneth’s account of the intersubjective conditions for identity formation is to show that the ‘struggle for recognition’ carries within it an implicit normative ideal. Unlike in Hobbes’s depiction of an egocentric war of all against all, the reworked Hegelian conception of social experience realizes that subjects engaged in a conflictual struggle must have ‘already positively taken the other into account’ as a ‘partner to interaction’ before the struggle could even ensue (Honneth 1995: 45). Our intersubjective relationships are conflictual precisely because human interaction is structured around a ‘normative expectation that one will meet with the recognition of others’. When that expectation is not met, we then act so as ‘to make the others take notice’ of us (Honneth 1995: 44). Since each of us acts to fulfil this expectation vis-à-vis others, a constitutive link binds us together as we seek to gain recognition of our not-yet-recognized needs, identities and expectations (Honneth 1995: 48).

Honneth’s theory is normatively salient because it provides a basis for understanding the motivations behind the demand for recognition and thus for illuminating the ‘moral grammar’ of social conflicts. If mutual recognition is the condition that permits becoming fully human, then there is a shared human interest in attempting to create and re-create sociopolitical institutions that extend recognition to all. The struggle for recognition is, in short, a struggle for justice, for due recognition of all as equal and distinctive persons. This necessarily entails critique of those prevailing conditions that foster asymmetric relations of misrecognition, and of social, economic and political inequalities that violate self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem (Honneth 1995: 131ff). Honneth (2007) singles out violation of the body, denial of rights and denigration of ways of life as the most pernicious forms of disrespect. The experience of profound disrespect or humiliation can then give rise to resistance and organized social movements demanding the expansion of conditions of mutual recognition, as well as the political establishment of progressive institutions that advance the ability of the subordinated and excluded to become fully human.

The interplay between forms of misrecognition predicated on racial, national, sexual and gender status orders, and forms of exclusion through socio-economic inequalities, is what Nancy Fraser believes prepares the ground for struggles for social justice. However, where Honneth maintains a monistic theory according to which all matters of justice can be located under the ‘fundamental, overarching moral category’ of recognition, Fraser pursues a dualistic theory which holds that the two categories of recognition and redistribution ‘are co-fundamental and mutually irreducible dimensions of justice’ (Fraser and Honneth 2003: 2–3). Traditional claims for socio-economic redistribution ignored or rejected issues of recognition, such as in ‘difference-blind’ welfare policies, while claims for cultural recognition culminating in contemporary multiculturalism valorized diversity to an extent that obscured matters of economic exploitation and inequality. Fraser argues therefore that an adequate theory of social justice must be ‘two-dimensional’ in understanding how injustices are rooted in the intertwined social spaces of economy and culture. While not necessarily occurring ‘in equal proportions’, given that ‘in all societies economic ordering and cultural ordering are mutually imbricated’, Fraser (2003: 63, 51) argues for attention to the ways that problems of maldistribution and misrecognition are related in situationally specific contexts. For this reason, she suggests that recognition theory ought to concentrate less on identity and more on status (Fraser 2003: 29). This shift to status recognition, she believes, helps move the focu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Recognition and the International: Meanings, Limits, Manifestations
• Part 1: Meanings: Critical Interventions
• Part 2: Limits: Recognition’s Blind Spots
• Part 3: Manifestations: International Orders and Disorders
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint