Recognition in International Relations

Rethinking a Political Concept in a Global Context

C. Daase, A. Geis, Caroline Fehl, Georgios Kolliarakis, C. Daase, A. Geis, Caroline Fehl, Georgios Kolliarakis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349499335, 9781137464712
• eBook ISBN: 9781137464729
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Recognition is a basic human need, but it is not a panacea to all societal ills. This volume assembles contributions from International Relations, Political Theory and International Law in order to show that recognition is a gradual process and an ambiguous concept both in theory and political practice.

Part I

Conceptual Foundations

1

Gradual Processes, Ambiguous Consequences: Rethinking Recognition in International Relations

Anna Geis, Caroline Fehl, Christopher Daase, and Georgios Kolliarakis

Introduction

‘Recognition’, or its negative counterpart, ‘misrecognition’, is relevant wherever people or their collective organizations interact – or fail to interact. Individuals and collective political actors seek recognition of certain qualities, positive characteristics, competencies, achievements, or of their status within a specific group of people, a society, a political system, or the international political realm. The addressees of this recognition-seeking behaviour vary broadly, depending on the respective situation and depending on what exactly one actor would like to see recognized by another. A child might seek recognition from her parents or from fellow children of her first colour painting; a scholar might seek recognition of her opus magnum from fellow scholars or the public. A non-governmental organization might seek recognition of its humanitarian work from governments, the UN, potential donors, or from the needy people it supports. The violent group ‘Islamic State’ might seek recognition of its self-proclaimed ‘caliphate’ from Muslim believers, Muslim leaders, or regional organizations. Even a superficial scan of the daily news shows the ubiquity of issues related to ‘recognition’ in politics and society. Yet, what a certain actor seeks recognition of and from whom, how exactly recognition comes about (or fails to come about), and how it can be ‘measured’ is not as self-evident.

Remarkably, the debate in Political Theory about struggles for recognition has focused almost exclusively on political conflicts within national states and societies. As such, it has neglected potential claims to recognition as well as processes of granting or withholding recognition in international politics. In addition, scholars of International Relations (IR) have been slow to pick up on the debate and explore the concept’s analytical leverage for understanding international political dynamics. This is all the more surprising given that the ‘constructivist turn’ in IR occurred at around the same time as recognition debates began to flourish in Political Theory. If we consider interactions in the international sphere to be regulated and modified by similar social dynamics to those that exist within societies (Wendt, 2003), political conflicts over claiming, granting, and withholding recognition in international society (Clark, 2007; Onuf, 2013) should become a central subject of analysis.

The contributions assembled in this volume build on a strand of research in International Relations that has recently begun to tackle these issues.¹ We argue that the cross-disciplinary transfer of recognition theory to the field of international politics warrants a more comprehensive rethink of the politics, motives, and effects of recognition than IR scholars have undertaken so far. This view is based on the following considerations.

First, political theorists have remained sceptical about the applicability of the concept to inter-state and transnational political processes (e.g. Honneth, 2012). This suggests that more discussion is needed about exactly how a social psychological theory dealing with individuals and social movements could be used to elucidate individual motives and patterns of interaction among large collectives such as states. Should this be done by way of analogy, or by modelling some sort of multi-level game between state leaders and societies? In what sense can states and non-state actors – in contrast to individuals – be said to be able to recognize others and experience recognition or misrecognition, be it in terms of formal (legal) recognition or more informal modes? Authors such as Alexander Wendt (2004) and Reinhard Wolf (2011) have dealt with the issue of methodological ‘transfer’ in detail, but the question of how to capture and ‘measure’ recognition beyond purely formal instances of, for example, legal acts of recognizing a new political entity as a full-fledged state remains a methodological challenge. Although this volume does not resolve these difficult issues, its contributors offer a number of conceivable answers to the above questions.

Second, it is striking that the application of recognition as a social science concept has remained largely unconnected to the long-standing debates in International Law and Conflict Resolution about the recognition of formal statehood (e.g. Crawford, 2006; Grant, 1999; Kelsen, 1941). The issue of the formal (non-)recognition of secessionist or disputed territories that has fuelled international conflicts for centuries has not vanished from today’s agenda (Caspersen and Stansfield, 2011). Yet, IR scholars and international lawyers concerned with these issues have largely failed to link existing insights into the politics surrounding the formal recognition of statehood to social theoretical readings of ‘recognition struggles’. By implication, this also means that they have failed to connect them to more informal practices of recognition pertaining to the recognition of governments as ‘legitimate’, the recognition of (violent) non-state actors as negotiating partners, and the recognition of states as belonging to certain ‘status groups’ within international society.² This volume seeks to establish such a ‘missing link’ by furthering a constructive engagement between approaches from law and political science to the recognition of statehood and the ‘new’ literature on social recognition in IR along shared lines of debate.

The artificial separation between these two strands of research, we argue, is related to a third issue: the tendency of IR scholars to interpret the dynamics of recognition as a specific form of ‘identity politics’ and to treat recognition as a psychological need that motivates state and non-state behaviour (Greenhill, 2008; Lindemann, 2010; Lindemann and Ringmar, 2012). This approach is partly inherited from Social Psychology and from Political Theory’s delineation of the ‘politics of recognition’ from the ‘politics of (material) redistribution’ (Fraser, 2000; Fraser and Honneth, 2003). At the same time, it is also a function of disciplinary divides within IR: apart from the issue of recognized statehood, recognition dynamics in IR have been studied mostly by scholars who subscribe to a – moderate or radical – ‘constructivist’ ontology, implicitly suggesting that recognition is somehow antithetical to the notions of instrumental rationality and material interest.

We argue that this is an overly narrow and oversimplified reading of the concept of recognition, as it only captures part of the dynamics of formal and informal recognition in international politics. Recognition needs may sometimes clash with material interests, but (mis)recognition can also entail manifest material costs and benefits. Recognition theorists such as Nancy Fraser (1996) concede this point, stressing the limitations of a purely ‘culturalist’ position that overlooks the ‘interpenetration’ of cultural and economic spheres of life (p. 44). Furthermore, individuals may well raise recognition claims strategically in view of expected material and immaterial gains. Lastly, as recognition theorists have argued, recognition is not only an individual experience but also a collective social practice (Fraser, 1996, pp. 25–7; Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 29). Consequently, studies of recognition struggles in global politics need to go beyond analyses of individual psychological needs to understand the interactive social processes through which (and the conditions under which) formal and informal recognition is granted to or withheld from states and other collectives in international society. To capture both sides of this interactive process, this volume combines actor-centric and identity-focused perspectives on global recognition struggles with studies highlighting the instrumental dimension of recognition politics and more structuralist analyses of collective practices of recognition.³

A fourth problem is that IR studies have neglected the ambiguity of recognition in political practice. Many political theorists, as well as IR scholars who work with the concept, widely agree on the emancipatory potential of recognition, and that the denial of recognition often causes social conflict. However, recognition (in international as well as intra-state politics) may also have normatively undesirable consequences and lead to paradoxes.⁴ Recognition in itself does not always produce benevolent results, and it can backfire in terms of producing counterproductive precedents and new modes of exclusion in intra- and inter-state politics, as we will discuss in more detail in section ‘shades of recognition: analytical and normative complexity’ below. Jens Bartelson (2013, pp. 124–5) has recently accentuated a similar point and summarized aptly: ‘[ ... ] when seen from within the international system, recognition appears to be both poison and antidote’.

In the remainder of this chapter, we briefly – and selectively – outline various alternative approaches to recognition in Political Theory, International Law, and International Relations in order to highlight key insights and gaps in the existing literature and position the volume in relation to the ‘state of the art’. In the following section, we identify several critical lines of debate in the existing literature and relate the individual contributions of this volume to these contested questions. In the final section, we discuss in more detail the innovative overall contribution made by this volume and outline our shared understanding of recognition as a gradual process with ambiguous effects.

The pervasive significance of recognition for individual and collective actors

The politics of recognition in the domestic realm: Political Theory/Social Philosophy

Reflection on the various manifestations of ‘identity politics’ and ‘struggles for recognition’ by minorities and social movements in multi-cultural societies (e.g. Fraser, 1997; Fraser and Honneth, 2003; Taylor, 1992; 2001) has led modern social theories of recognition to emphasize the paramount significance of recognition in both social and political relations (Benhabib, 2002, pp. 49–81; Young, 2000, pp. 81–120). Drawing on Hegelian ideas⁵ as well as on modern evolutionary psychology, recognition theorists conceive of recognition by other individuals or by society as a vital human need. It is only when an individual is appreciated for having certain qualities (and as such enjoys social esteem) that he or she will be able to develop self-esteem as well as an ‘intact’ personal identity (Taylor, 2001, pp. 26–37). With regard to society, recognition operates as a mechanism that constitutes a normative status (of equals) and allots rights and duties within a society (Fraser, 2000; Honneth, 1995; 2010). Accordingly, acts of misrecognition constitute acts of injustice in that they violate personal integrity and impede people from becoming full members of a social collective. Experiences of misrecognition can provoke strong, even violent responses on the part of affected individuals.

Critical theorists such as Fraser and Axel Honneth link the concept of ‘recognition’ to encompassing concepts of justice that are spelled out in their normative critique of social and political subordination in modern capitalist societies and that concern all spheres within a society. While many struggles over political recognition have focused on identity issues, Fraser has rightly criticized such a narrow conceptualization as displacing the important issue of material redistribution and leading to a reification of group identities:

Both problems – displacement and reification – are extremely serious: insofar as the politics of recognition displaces the politics of redistribution, it may actually promote economic inequality; insofar as it reifies group identities, it risks sanctioning violations of human rights and freezing the very antagonisms it purports to mediate. (2000, p. 107)⁶

We cannot account for these long-standing, extensive, differentiated, and stimulating debates in Political Theory/Philosophy in this brief introduction. The recent volume by Shane O’Neill and Nicholas Smith (2012) demonstrates once again that these theoretical debates are not only worth continuing but that empirical applications enrich our understanding of social conflicts in many aspects, since phenomena of misrecognition pervade all spheres of – domestic and international – society.

In social theory, recognition has often been associated with the goals of (new) social movements organized around class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, or language, and with positive normative concepts such as emancipation, justice, equality, and dignity. This positive normative connotation has been reproduced in many applications of recognition theory, although not in all (Smith, 2012). This is also the case with studies of international recognition politics, which highlight the potential of recognition struggles to transcend national boundaries and security dilemmas and contribute to the collapse of oppressive international hierarchies (e.g. Reus-Smit, 2011; Wendt, 2003).

The term ‘recognition’ is part of a semantic field that is shaped by other positive terms such as respect, love, care, (self-)esteem, status, prestige, or honour, and it suggests a certain reciprocity and a positive evaluation.⁷ While the positive effects that recognition often has in everyday life and in political practice should certainly be acknowledged, ‘recognition’ is an ambiguous concept in politics that requires far more empirical research. This is not to say that there is a complete lack of empirical research on (mis)recognition in the social sciences. The debates in Political Theory have inspired a number of empirical studies in Sociology, and the contributions in O’Neill and Smith (2012) explicitly aim to carve out such a distinct research programme (Smith, 2012, pp. 5–7) and partly also consider the potential downsides of recognition politics and policies.

Several strands of critical theory have a distinct record of highlighting the ‘dark sides’ of recognition: poststructuralist and postcolonial theorizing has criticized modes of domination, and the dynamics of processes of inclusion/exclusion generated by recognition politics. The recognition of a social group by the dominant, hegemonic culture of a society can also imply its ‘assimilation’ and conformism with ruling ideologies, as authors such as Franz Fanon, Louis Althusser, and Jean-Paul Sartre have argued. The result can be a misconstruing of the self or a reification of a fixed and putative identity, instead of liberation or progress. Hence, recognition is also a technology of social differentiation that establishes layers of legitimacy and social hierarchies. With reference to theorists such as Michel Foucault and Fanon, as well as more recent authors such as Iris Marion Young and Andrew Schaap, the following review of the ‘paradoxes of recognition’ aptly summarizes their achievements in highlighting the ‘dark sides’ of recognition:

The crucial point of these authors is to draw attention to the contingency of struggles for recognition [ ... ] This contingency should draw our attention to a missing link in conceptual and normative terms, in particular to the necessity to specify the conditions of an emancipatory course of struggles for recognition, or ex negativo: to specify the conditions of the impossibility of struggles for recognition leading to either self-negation and self-condemnation ... , to reciprocal exclusivity ... , to repressive authenticity ... , to colonial forms of cultural appropriation ... , or to immobilisation of social relations and inside-outside distinctions. (Hitzel-Cassagnes and Sc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  Conceptual Foundations
• Part II  Recognition among States
• Part III  Recognition of States and Governments
• Part IV  Recognition among States and Non-State Actors
• Part V  Concluding Reflections
• Index