International Politics of Recognition

Thomas Lindemann, Erik Ringmar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594518096
• eBook ISBN: 9781317257455
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The origins of international conflict are often explained by security dilemmas, power-rivalries or profits for political or economic elites. Common to these approaches is the idea that human behaviour is mostly governed by material interests which principally involve the quest for power or wealth. The authors question this truncated image of human rationality. Borrowing the concept of recognition from models developed in philosophy and sociology, this book provides a unique set of applications to the problems of international conflict, and argues that human actions are often not motivated by a pursuit of utility maximisation as much as they are by a quest to gain recognition. This unique approach will be a welcome alternative to the traditional models of international conflict.

Part I
Theoretical Preliminaries

Introduction
The International Politics of Recognition

Erik Ringmar

Identities matter to individuals and they matter to collective entities. In fact, few things matter more than the identities we put together for ourselves since, without an identity, we have no idea of who we are. Yet putting together an identity is often quite a struggle. We need to come up with an account that describes us, but in addition, we need to have this account accepted by people around us. We need to be recognized.¹ As the chapters in this book make clear, the logic of identity creation is relevant also to the entities that populate world politics—most notably to the state. States too are coming up with self-descriptions and struggling to have them recognized.² In fact, the struggle for recognition takes up much of a state's time and resources, and it makes states act and interact in specific ways. This is a logic of action and interaction, which has been largely ignored by traditional scholars of international relation.³ As a result, many international phenomena, including colonialism and armed conflicts, have been misinterpreted and badly explained.

The reason why previous generations of scholars have ignored questions of identities is simply that they did not come up. The state was the indisputable subject of a study of world politics and its existence was impossible to problematize. The question was always what the state did and why, and never what, or perhaps who, the state was. We are placed in a better position. In the twenty-first century, identity crises and identity makeovers are everywhere, and the position of the state in world politics is questioned like never before. Abandoning the old Realpolitik for a new Identitätsproblematik, we need new intellectual tools. This book unapologetically assumes that world politics is a social system that can be analyzed with the help of the tools of sociology.⁴ More specifically, we believe that sociological insights into how identities are formed, maintained, and dissolved have much to teach a student of international relations. This introduction provides a first outline.

The Subjectivity of the State

There is a sense in which the state is a subject that can be compared to a person.⁵ Admittedly, this is a contested and an explicitly Eurocentric argument. It is Eurocentric since it most obviously applies to the international system that came into existence in Europe in the late Renaissance, and it does not necessarily apply elsewhere. The argument is contested since states clearly are not persons.⁶ States can be compared to persons to be sure but that does not make them into persons. Most obviously, a state has no unified consciousness, no single memory, and no subjective will. As a result, it is surely difficult to talk about the "identity" of a state and to assume that this identity is fashioned in the same way as the identities of individuals.

A person may not be what a state is, but this is nevertheless how states have been talked about at least for the last four hundred years. The European origins of this way of talking explain how subjectivity came to be attached to the state. In the Middle Ages, political relations, like all human associations, were understood through the metaphor of the corpus, the body.⁷ Guilds and fraternities were bodies but so were cities and kingdons, and all bodies were ultimately incorporated into the universal body, which was the body of the Church. In early modern Europe, the sovereign state found it useful to adopt this body language and to use it for its own purposes.⁸ It was common to talk about the "body politic," and to endow this body with "arms," "legs," a "stomach," and a "heart." Naturally, it was the king, or the "head of state," who directed the state's overall movements.

The states made up stories about themselves. States in early modern Europe were compulsive self-mythologizers, attaching their often quite undistinguished present to a past filled with classical or biblical references.⁹ The nationalists of the nineteenth century rearranged these accounts to include more references to "the people," inventing traditions designed to bring legitimacy to their claims to national self-determination.¹⁰ Propagated through the new systems of public education, these stories were soon established as the official histories of the nation-state.¹¹ Most of us still believe in some versions of these semi-mythological accounts.

In early modern Europe, the world was often compared to a stage.¹² Sometimes, as in Shakespeare, the metaphor was used, slightly pathetically, to express the superficiality and vanity of human pretensions, but it soon became the standardized way in which international politics was discussed. The body-metaphor and the stage-metaphor were combined; that is, the body of the state was turned into an actor. After the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the state became increasingly regarded as a sovereign, self-directing actor constrained only by the actions of other states.¹³ At the royal courts but also on more popular occasions, such as at country fairs, plays were performed that illustrated the political relations of the day.¹⁴ On the stage before them, the audience would literally see their state acting and interacting with other states.

The stage was a world and the world was a stage. Together the various states formed a theater company that regularly met for performances on the battlefields of Europe or in the conference halls where the peace treaties were signed. It was an illustrious troupe: the actors were civilized, they were Christian, they had an awesome military and political capability. It was in their company that lesser political units one day aspired to appear. And this is how we still think about international politics. Pick up any newspaper article on world affairs, and it will be replete with states "considering options," "acting aggressively," "signing agreements," or "threatening sanctions"—all before the critical or the approving eyes of world opinion.

This is how the subjectivity of the state originally came to be established. This metaphorical cluster and its associated performative practices were eagerly adopted by absolutist rulers for whom they seemed ideally suited. The l'état c'est moi of Louis XIV was not an egocentric indulgence as much as an expression of the official French theory of sovereignty.¹⁵ But the subjectivity of the state was equally useful to republics and later to the needs of democratic governments. Both citizens and leaders identify themselves with their states; the state is the protector of our national culture and our status in the world. We tie our hopes to our states and make careers in their institutions; we celebrate their successes and lament their defeats. Funnily enough, such étatisme is often strongest in places where state institutions are least appreciated. L'état, even Americans agree, c'est nous!¹⁶

In international law, the subjectivity of the state is a well-established commonplace. The state is the persona of international law in much the same way as individuals are the persona of civil law and corporations the persona of commercial law.¹⁷ In international law, a state is a subject endowed with rights and obligations, and it is an actor who can think rationally and be held responsible for the consequences of its actions. In fact, in legal treatises the state has usually attained nothing short of a transcendental status.¹⁸ The state remains the same even as it changes its rulers, its citizens, and its political system, or as territory is added to or subtracted from it. It is only if the state is completely divided up by others that its subjectivity comes to an end.

We may perhaps object that this language is metaphorical through and through and that the subjectivity of the state for that reason is a matter of language rather than any real, observable facts. Perhaps it is nothing more than a hermeneutic device—a way to illustrate and explain things; a way to show how international politics works. And admittedly, beyond this metaphorical language, there can be no additional proof of the state's subjectivity. But much the same can be said about the subjectivity of individuals.¹⁹ If we probe our brains for evidence of our identities, we will necessarily be disappointed. Brain states, after all, are not what we are. Identities are social facts created through social interaction, and what is true for the identities of individuals is true for the identities of states.²⁰ We are not in the realm of reality; we are in the realm of interpretation.

Recognition and Its Denial

If there is a sense in which states can be thought of as persons, it should be possible to understand the formation of state identities with the help of the same intellectual tools we use for understanding the identities of individuals. Relying heavily on Hegel's celebrated account in the Phenomenology of Spirit, we can understand this process first as a question of the stories that individuals tell about themselves.²¹ We make up an account, or we make up many, which describe ourselves to ourselves. The problem with these self-descriptions is that they often are faulty. Unfettered in our fantasies, we are wont to exaggerate our importance and our prospects or, alternatively, we are only too ready to accept the accounts, handed down to us by society and by tradition, of what a person like ourselves is supposed to be. In either case, we will be mistaken about ourselves.

And even if we somehow manage to describe ourselves in a reasonably realistic fashion, there are still many things about us that we simply do not know. Locating ourselves inside our bodies, we believe we have privileged access to our mental states—indeed we may believe that we are our mental states—but this privileged perspective is also quite limiting. Above all, since we never can see ourselves except awkwardly and in fleeting moments in a mirror, we have only limited knowledge of what we look like while interacting with others.²² Other people, by contrast, are wont to describe us far more realistically. They are unlikely to exaggerate our importance or our looks, but equally, they may be able to see potentials in us that we have ignored. After all, other people have a privileged perspective, too: seeing us from the outside, they know far better what we are like as social beings. In the end, identities are created through an interplay of these two alternative perspectives. We start by telling stories about ourselves, which we go on to test on people around us. We let other people know who we believe we are, and they let us know whether or not our account is reasonable. In this way, our stories about ourselves are, or are not, recognized.

Stories are told about states in much the same fashion. A community of storytellers could be referred to as a "nation."²³ A nation consists of people who mutually recognize each other as belonging to the same imagined community. The stories locate the national self in space and time; they provide the nation with a past and a future, a "national character," certain traditions, ways of behaving, and long lists of things that people like ourselves are likely to think, do, and eat. The stories are expressed in our particular vernacular and disseminated through national printing presses and electronic media. Reading, hearing, or watching these accounts, we know where we belong. The state can be understood as the political guardian of this story-telling community. For that reason, it is important—important to nationalists—that each nation should have a state, and each state only one nation.

This story-telling capacity is acknowledged by international law. Each state has the right to "national self-determination," meaning not only a right to independence, but a right to determine the character of its own collective self.²⁴ This right has been protected at least since the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, where the principle of cuius regio, eius religio stipulated tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Part I Theoretical Preliminaries
• Part II Empirical Applications
• Part III Conclusions
• About the Contributors
• Index