I

A superficial glance at the current usages of the concept of recognition within academic international relations conveys the impression that this concept has become to this discipline what a Swiss army knife is to a boy scout. During the past years, several books and articles have appeared in which key international practices and institutions are explained with reference to different mechanisms of recognition. Fabry (Reference Fabry2010) offers an account of how new states are admitted to international society by virtue of being recognized by other states, while Reus-Smit (Reference Reus-Smit2011) has argued that the struggle for recognition of individual rights played an important role in the development and expansion of the international system. Both Lebow (Reference Lebow2010) and Lindemann (Reference Lindemann2010) maintain that the struggle for recognition has been a major cause of international conflict. By contrast, Honneth (Reference Honneth2011) and Wolf (Reference Wolf2011) argue that mutual recognition between states is necessary to push international relations in a more peaceful direction.

This renewed interest echoes broader concerns with recognition within social and political theory. When this concept found its way back into social theory after decades of relative neglect, it was welcomed as an alternative to materialistic and rationalistic accounts of social order, and has since been used to explain how agents and their identities are constituted through interaction (Pizzorno Reference Pizzorno1986, Reference Pizzorno1991). Largely simultaneously, political theorists started to propose mutual recognition as a way of resolving social conflicts by restoring respect and justice between the parties (for overviews, see Tully Reference Tully2000; Zurn Reference Zurn2003; Kompridis Reference Kompridis2007).

Although the concept of recognition has been able to perform a variety of different roles in these theories, there is no systematic account available of this concept and its meaning. As Paul Ricoeur (Reference Ricoeur2005) has noted, despite its central role in modern philosophy, the concept of recognition has never been subjected to any sustained philosophical analysis. But instead of providing a philosophy of recognition himself, Ricoeur focuses on ways in which this concept actually has been used within modern philosophy, and then seeks to distill a few basic connotations from these usages. These are worth rehearsing for the purposes of this article. First, in the most basic sense, recognition is about the cognitive ability to distinguish and identify something as being itself and not something else (2005, 25). But in order to identify and distinguish something as this rather than that, we need recourse to criteria for including objects into different classes or categories. In this article, I will refer to this sense of recognition as epistemic recognition. In a second sense, recognition is a matter of acknowledgement. Such acknowledgement can assume two main forms, self-recognition or mutual recognition. Recognizing oneself is a matter of acknowledging oneself as an agent by virtue of possessing certain capacities, such as the ability to think, speak and act autonomously, as well as the willingness to assume responsibility for one's acts (2005, 69–149). Finally, the mechanism of mutual recognition is a way of accounting for how an unequal and conflicting relationship between two parties can be transformed or resolved by means of a reciprocal acknowledgement of their identities and values. This latter conception implies that the parties involved all are equally entitled to respect and human dignity (2005, 150–218).

To Ricoeur, these senses of recognition overlap and condition each other. Epistemic recognition appears to be the most basic form of recognition, being a necessary condition of both self-recognition and mutual recognition. For example, in Milan Kundera's (Reference Kundera1998) novel Identity, the failure of Jean-Marc to correctly identify his beloved Chantal leads to a sequence of misunderstandings that eventually undermine both their relationship and their individual sense of self. Furthermore, while mutual recognition presupposes some prior capacity to act, full self-recognition will necessarily involve mutual recognition, insofar as the former to some extent is the result of the latter. As Ricoeur states this point, being recognized ‘would for everyone be to receive the full assurance of his or her identity, thanks to the recognition by others of each person's range of capacities’ (2005, 250). As we shall be able to note, however, most theories of recognition within academic international relations are mute when it comes to the conditions of epistemic recognition, implying that the classificatory grounds for recognizing an entity as an actor of a certain kind already are given or at least sufficiently unproblematic. Finally, most theories of recognition find it difficult to account for the relationship between self-recognition and mutual recognition other than in vague dialectical terms, by giving explanatory or normative priority to either of them at the expense of the other. As Markell (Reference Markell2007, 101) has noted, this cuts to the very heart of recognition: ‘is recognition a response to something that already exists, or does it bring something new into being?’ As we shall note, this issue is of relevance to contemporary international theory as well.

These different senses of recognition mix and mingle in contemporary international relations theory. First, the concept of recognition is widely used in order to explain how states are constituted through interaction, and how the modern international system has emerged as a by-product of such processes. In this context, the concept of recognition is used to explain how and why states are individuated from each other, how the international system thereby becomes stratified along status lines, and why conflict between states therefore is possible or even inevitable. Second, the concept of recognition has long enjoyed wide currency within international legal theory in order to account for on what grounds states might be admitted as members of international society, emphasizing the norm of sovereign equality. Third, the concept of recognition has recently been invoked to explain how the more undesirable consequences of international anarchy can be mitigated through the mutual recognition of collective identities. Here the concept of recognition is used to suggest a way out of the international system, by telling us how the conflicts this system engenders can be resolved by increasing respect for cultural and other differences.

Thus, the concept of recognition carries the burden of explaining not only how the modern international system once was formed and stratified, but also how an international society of nominally equal actors has been able to emerge, and, finally how this system or society eventually might be reformed or even transcended. Yet there is something enigmatic about this apparent versatility, since clear distinctions rarely are made between the constitutive, reproductive, and transformative powers attributed to recognition. This fuzziness in turn makes it hard to formulate questions about the relationship between different forms of recognition, as well as to understand how the transitions between these are carried out in political and legal practice.

The main purpose of this article is to clarify the logic behind these different usages, by distinguishing between what I take to be three distinct concepts of recognition, each rooted in different theories of recognition, and each with its own range of normative implications. While the primary focus in this paper is on different concepts of recognition and their meaning, I shall also provide a brief account of the actual practices of recognition in international politics. Doing this, I shall assume that these practices consist of speech acts, or otherwise symbolic acts that communicate the acknowledgement of the ontological, legal and moral status of certain objects and subjects. I shall also assume that these practices are shaped by different conceptions of recognition, but only to the extent that these latter are used in, or implied by, such speech acts.

While I would like to argue that different concepts of recognition are analytically distinct, they are also interrelated. The second task of this paper is therefore to explore the connections between the different usages of these concepts in international theory. How do political, legal and moral recognition relate to each other, logically as well as historically? Doing this, I shall address two assumptions common to the post-Hegelian lore. According to the first, there is a necessary relationship between political, legal and moral recognition to the effect that they form a historically progressive sequence, and that the mechanism of recognition gradually will propel the international system from a primitive state of war into a morally mature community of all mankind. By contrast, I shall argue that such assumptions cannot be warranted, at least not with reference to theories of recognition. International practices of recognition – by virtue of their focus on state actors – are more likely to reproduce and even reify the modern international system than to transform it. According to the second and corollary assumption, the chief outcome of practices of recognition is to bring inclusion into an international system, society or moral community. By contrast, I would like to argue that theories of recognition have been instrumental in justifying different forms of exclusion in world politics, thus bringing about a hierarchical relationship between those entities that merit recognition and those who do not.

II

Although all of the above usages of the concept of recognition appear to reproduce many of the original ambiguities of Hegel's ethics of recognition (compare Williams Reference Williams1997, 334–43), I think it would be advisable to unpack the different concepts of recognition before any attempt to discuss their relationship is made. Such is the task of this section. Yet while doing this, it is important to bear in mind that since the present analysis is restricted to the usages of the concept of recognition in international relations theory, it should come as no surprise that while the theories under consideration differ in terms of their assumptions about the nature of social and political order, they share a focus on the sovereign state as the paradigmatic subject and object of recognition. Thus, in the present context, the concept of sovereignty functions as a source of self-identity and a principle of self-recognition, which allows a peculiar kind of actor – states – to become a possible object of recognition, while excluding those actors that do not conform to this symbolic form from the purview of possible recognition. As we shall note, however, while the theories of recognition discussed below all carry some commitment to the principle of sovereignty, they differ widely about its ethical implications and the kind of political order entailed by this principle.

III

But how do these conceptions relate to each other? Since they all capitalize on the ambiguities inherent in the concept of recognition, there is little clear water between the different senses of recognition explored above. Political and legal recognition are difficult to distinguish with any precision due to their tendency to take the existence of states for granted, and legal and moral recognition tend to converge on the emphasis on rights. Finally, as seen above, moral recognition seems difficult to detach from political recognition. Yet it is tempting to assume that these different concepts represent different stages in the development of the international system. If political recognition endows actors with statehood and helps explain the emergence of the international system and the occurrence of conflict within it, then legal recognition entails that this system can be transformed into an international society based on sovereign equality. Finally, theories of moral recognition suggest that this society could evolve into a peaceful world community based on reciprocal esteem and respect between actors.

This possibility of a progressive sequence has led some authors to suggest that the very mechanism of recognition has the capacity to take us from the bare essentials of political life into conditions of moral maturity. This is how Kojève read Hegel's Phenomenology. To him, the creation of the modern state represented the culmination of the struggle for recognition by individuals. To him, ‘individuality can be fully realized, the desire for Recognition can be completely satisfied, only in and by the universal and homogeneous State. Such a state ‘completes History, since Man, satisfied in and by his State, will not be tempted to negate it and thus to create something new in its place’ (Kojève Reference Kojève1969, 237).

A more recent version of this kind of argument envisages the creation of a world state as the proper end of history, thus taking us beyond the limitations of Hegel. According to Wendt (Reference Wendt2003), the logic of recognition itself makes such an outcome inevitable. To him, ‘recognition is a social act that invests difference with a particular meaning – another actor…is constituted as a subject with a legitimate social standing in relation to the Self’. This further implies that ‘insofar as people want to be subjects, therefore, they will desire recognition of their difference’ (2003, 511). When individuals or groups struggle to gain recognition from each other, ‘the effect of mutual recognition is to constitute collective identity or solidarity’ (2003, 512). When transposed to the international system, the struggle for recognition among states in a condition of anarchy gradually will enable ‘states to develop supranational We-feeling and thereby overcome…the fundamentally tragic character of their struggle for recognition’ (2003, 517). Propelled by the logic of mutual recognition, the international system will first take on distinctive societal traits, then turn into a world society ‘which expands positive freedom for both individuals and states’ (2003, 520), leading to the formation of a collective security community, until finally culminating in a world state in which recognition has been universalized (2003, 524). But if collective identities are constituted through recognition by others, who would recognize a world state? To Wendt, in the absence of extraterrestrial recognizers, such recognition can only come from inside that state itself (2003, 527). A similar point has been made by Abizadeh (Reference Abizadeh2005, 48), who argues that ‘a collective identity can receive either the external recognition of an external other or the internal recognition of its own constituent parts, and the latter does not necessarily depend on the former’. This means that ‘cosmopolitan solidarity or identity does not require an actually existing other in contrast to which it must constitute itself’ (2005, 58).

To the critics of this view, the struggle for recognition may as well lead to an entrenchment of existing differences between Self and Other, thus aggravating their sense of separateness without giving rise to any shared identity in the process. As Markell (Reference Markell2003, 103–13) has argued, since the desire for sovereignty that propels the struggle for recognition only can find its fulfillment in the subjugation of the Other, the practice of recognition cannot but reinforce the patterns of injustice resulting from that desire. Thus, it might be objected that the struggle for recognition might as well fail to yield more encompassing identities in international politics. Rather, once generalized, the logic of recognition perpetuates the tragic predicament of a mankind divided into bounded groups, who will ‘remain locked in their cycles of identity-based conflict’ (Greenhill Reference Greenhill2008, 361).

Yet one thing seems clear. Theories of political, legal and moral recognition all assume that in order for the mechanism of recognition to kick in, there has to be some sense of self-recognition and self-identity among the actors. To most of the above accounts, the prior claim to sovereign authority constitutes such a basic requirement for entering into recognition games, whatever their expected outcome. The political, legal, and moral processes of recognition discussed above all involve actors who are sovereign, or at least aspire to sovereignty, in the basic sense that they are endowed with the capacity for autonomous agency, or seek to attain such agency in the course of recognition. While this presupposition might seem warranted in the context of European state formation, it also brings a discernible cultural bias to those theories.

This should become plain once we put the theories of recognition into their proper historical context. Since recognition in the sense of acknowledgement presupposes a prior identification of the actor to be recognized, and since such identification in turn presupposes the possibility of distinguishing those actors that are fit for recognition from those who are not, actual practices of recognition will always depend on underlying schemes of classification. Since these schemes are historically variable and culturally contingent, the practices of political, legal, and moral recognition have also conditioned the differentiation between the European states system and its non-European outside. It is therefore important to remember that while theories of recognition seek to account for the inclusion of actors into some larger sociopolitical whole, the actual mechanisms of recognition have simultaneously served to exclude certain actors from membership. Such exclusions need not to be the outcome of any intentional withholding, but might as well result from prior failures to identify an actor as an object of possible recognition due to its lack of fit with the categories of available and predominant classificatory schemes. Since international practices of recognition have been intimately connected to the principle of sovereignty, a group of people must display some recognizably state-like qualities in order to qualify as an object of possible recognition. If this requirement is not met, then recognition is unlikely to be forthcoming for the simple reason that the entity in question falls outside the epistemic range of possible objects of recognition. That this has been the case is evident from the history of European imperial expansion, but is also reflected in the contemporary international hierarchy with full-fledged states on top, and a wide range of more dubious political beings at the bottom of the global order.

While struggles for political recognition paved the way for the creation of an international society based on the principle of sovereign equality among European states, this was not the case in the rest of the world. During European expansion, recognition was frequently withheld on the grounds that non-European peoples either lacked sovereignty or were uncivilized, or both. While the American Indians were certainly politically recognized by the Spaniards during the conquista, this did not mean that their societies or their members were recognized as bearers of rights according to the ius gentium, let alone were found worthy of moral esteem and respect (Anghie Reference Anghie2005, 13–31). During later phases of imperial expansion, encounters between Europeans and peoples on other continents led to intense interactions that sometimes also issued in some form of political recognition, but without legal rights or moral respect being granted to those peoples in the process. Non-European societies frequently were denied membership in the Family of Nations on the grounds that they were uncivilized, which meant that they lacked effective means for asserting their rights and gaining international legal recognition. This exclusion in turn paved the way for their annexation by European powers, their admission on unequal terms into international society, or forced these societies to conform to Western standards of civilization in the interest of obtaining legal protection under international law. As Benton (Reference Benton2002) has shown, imperial legal regimes gradually evolved from a condition of legal pluralism in which the existence of multiple legal systems were recognized by imperial powers, to later state-centric colonial regimes in which such differences were cancelled out. And by the end of the 19th century, the hierarchy between civilized and uncivilized societies that constituted the basis for exclusion had been firmly institutionalized and entrenched in legal practice (Anghie Reference Anghie2005). As Havercroft (Reference Havercroft2008, 118) has argued, ‘this meant that indigenous peoples were often left at the mercy of the sovereign states that had colonized their ancestral lands’.

But on those rare occasions when legal recognition in fact was granted to non-Europeans, this was done without any concomitant moral recognition of the entity in question by the dominant powers. Thus, Grotius, who has been credited with establishing the rights of sovereign states in international law, also provided the legal foundations for a much more flexible application of the principle of sovereignty in dealings with political communities outside Europe (Keene Reference Keene2002). When sovereignty was granted to political beings lacking the essential characteristics of statehood, this was merely a pretext for depriving them of control over trade and dispossessing them of their territories. This was done by providing colonial powers with watertight legal grounds for doing so through various contractual arrangements. As the dealings between the British and the Sultan of Muscat indicate, the former granted the latter sovereignty to secure his cooperation in the abolition of slave trade, but were neither aware of the precise extent of his sovereignty claims, nor of his ability to exercise de facto control over the peoples and territories to which these claims were addressed. These legal details were simply inconsequential given the British policy to abolish slave trade, and no considerations of equal moral worth arose from this encounter (Keene Reference Keene2007). Thus, from a postcolonial perspective, the practices of political, legal and moral recognition look like little but advanced forms of back-scratching, through which Western powers have secured their dominance over the rest of the world by excluding those entities that do not conform to the Western state form, or to Western standards of civilization, from consideration as legal and moral equals. When non-Western states eventually were admitted to international society, they were stigmatized and kept in a position of inferiority (Zarakol Reference Zarakol2010).

Today the insistence that states must be democratically governed in order to obtain legal recognition performs a similar discriminatory function in the international system. The interpretation and application of the principle of self-determination is a case in point, since the grounds for granting legal recognition on the basis of self-determination implies that the people or a community in question not only is recognized as an actor in its own right, but also that the people or community in question is democratically founded by virtue of being based on popular consent. Since such popular consent constitutes a requirement of both self-determination and democratic legitimacy, recognition of a positive right to self-determination easily spills over into the demand that a state must be democratically governed in order to merit international recognition of its sovereignty (Buchanan Reference Buchanan2004, 261–88). This shift to democratic governance as a ground for recognizing states has been regarded as a deviation from the norm of non-interference, and, by implication, a return to imperial legal practices (Marks Reference Marks2003; Anghie Reference Anghie2009).

But equally often moral recognition might be a way of compensating for the lack of legal recognition of actors deemed unqualified for full statehood by parts of the international community. As Fabry has pointed out, since the positive right of self-determination cannot be universally applied for reasons of impracticality, it has ‘not led to a disappearance of claims to statehood that stand outside of its confines’ (2010, 13). Moral recognition then becomes a way of handling the mismatch between proliferating claims to self-determination and the restrictive recognition of such claims. This is the case when moral recognition is granted to peoples to which members of international society is unwilling to grant legal recognition for political or other reasons, such as stateless or indigenous peoples. Such communities are sometimes able to command moral recognition in the absence of legal recognition, perhaps on grounds that their sheer existence reflects the intrinsic value of human diversity and therefore ought to be granted some autonomy in relation to those states within which they happen to find themselves (Tully Reference Tully2001; Anaya Reference Anaya2004).

In our postcolonial predicament, different practices of recognition have created and sustained a hierarchical international order with developed and predominantly Western states on top, granting full political, legal and moral recognition to each other, and a residue of political beings that are excluded from full-fledged membership in international society. Some of these beings already enjoy political recognition, or are involved in struggles to attain it, but are for various reasons not legally recognized as sovereign states. While some of these have gained moral recognition, and are regarded as legitimate candidates for self-determination, others remain outside the scope of both legal and moral recognition by virtue of being seen as too weak, rogue or undemocratic.

IV

Thanks to the ambiguities of the concept of recognition, it has long been a versatile tool in the hands of lawyers and politicians. In this paper, I have tried to distill three basic senses of recognition from the ways in which this concept currently is used within international theory. While these usages differ in terms of explanatory priorities and normative implications, they also share some underlying assumptions about the possible objects of recognition, the sources of their identity, and the causes of conflict among them. When it comes to the object of possible recognition, these theories all assume that some state-like features are necessary in order to be recognized by other, similar actors. And while these theories of recognition purport to explain the emergence, reproduction, and eventual reform of the international system, they do so by assuming that the sociopolitical world ultimately consists of distinct and bounded groups of people, stuck in a condition devoid of overarching political, legal, and moral authority.

But by making such assumptions, these theories also presuppose a particularistic social ontology along with a theory of identity according to which the Self is constituted by its differential relationship to the Other. This difference between Self and Other is not only a condition of possible recognition, but also a permissive cause of the violent practices that legal and moral forms of recognition hopefully would help us escape. Whatever their precise relationship to the principle of state sovereignty, the ensuing quests for political, legal and moral recognition all seem to be grounded in aspirations to autonomy and identity that invariably must lead to conflict in a world devoid of overarching authority. Therefore, when seen from within the international system, recognition appears to be both poison and antidote.

But are these underlying assumptions about political identity warranted? Does the Self really need an Other in order to constitute itself as a Self? Such a differential logic of identity seems foundational to many modern theories of international relations. For example, to Carl Schmitt (Reference Schmitt2005), a sharp differentiation between friend and enemy is a defining characteristic of the political world. Similar assumptions about the sources of political identity have been endlessly reproduced within realist scholarship. In seeming support of such lines of reasoning, some social psychologists have argued that all groups depend for their cohesion and identity on distrust and hostility towards other groups and their members, and that such differentiation between Self and Other is an inescapable feature of social life (Tajfel et al. Reference Tajfel, Billig, Bundy and Flament1971; Tajfel Reference Tajfel1981). Given that assumptions like these also underpin many theories of recognition in academic international relations, I have argued that we should be careful not to pin too much hope on recognition between states as a source of peaceful reform in the international system, but instead focus on the functions performed by practices of recognition in the maintenance of particularistic political orders, as well as on the exclusions that these practices invariably bring about.

That is not to deny that practices of legal and moral recognition frequently serve important purposes by being instrumental in conflict resolution in the present. But although practices of recognition certainly are instrumental in resolving some conflicts, they are also likely to entrench and aggravate others. But if that is the case, another normative challenge concerns whether theories of recognition can be modified in such a way that practices of recognition do not lend themselves to an automatic reproduction of the current international system and the re-entrenchment of conflicts. The emphasis on internal recognition by Wendt and Abizadeh represents an important step in this direction, yet one that is susceptible to the objection that the mechanism of recognition would have outlived its usefulness as a driver of moral progress the very moment a world state has come into being. While internal recognition might still be needed to maintain the self-esteem of individuals and groups within a world state once attained, there is no Other left to endow the world state with recognition from without.

But provided that theories of recognition tend to presuppose a differential logic of identity, why assume that theories of recognition could provide an escape out of an international system structured accordingly? To be sure, there are other ways to account for sociopolitical identities that do not assume that their formation entails a differential logic or a struggle for recognition. For example, as Brewer (Reference Brewer1999) has argued, there is no reciprocal connection between the mechanisms that bring people together in groups and those that pull these groups apart. In her terminology, ‘ingroup love is not a necessary precursor of outgroup hate’ (1999, 442). Rather, to her, identity formation is a complex processes that involve both integration and separation as constitutive features. Consistent with this view, Lebow (Reference Lebow2012) has recently offered a sustained critique of contemporary theories of identity and identity construction in the social sciences, arguing that the idea of unitary identities and that the differential logic frequently invoked to explain them both lack empirical support. By contrast, Lebow argues that social and political identities are fluid, and that processes of identity formation are integrative rather than exclusionary in character. Individuals and groups become what they are not in contradistinction to any real or imagined others, but by emulating and incorporating characteristics from a variety of scripts and models.

But even if notions of unitary identity and the differential logic of identity commonly invoked to sustain them both are illusory, particularistic allegiances remain important social facts in their own right, and as such also constitutive of the segmentation of the modern international system. To say that the modern international system ultimately is based on a misconceived view of the sources of political identity does nothing to alter the structure of that system, but it does beg a series of questions about the relationship between our notions of political identity on the one hand, and the actual segmentation of the modern international system on the other.

I believe that further inquiry into the theory and practice of recognition can provide important insights into the nature of this relationship. This would require that we regard recognition less as a solution to a series of problems – such as the formation, reproduction, and transformation of the international system – but more of a problem integral to that system. Doing this would compel us to inquire into the prehistory of the international system, and describe how the anterior conditions of recognition first evolved, until it became possible to look back upon and reconstruct the historical trajectory of that system precisely as an outcome of practices of recognition. In that regard, we would perhaps be better off no longer taking Hegel as our starting point, but rather – and true to the spirit of his work – as the point of emergence from which it becomes possible to narrate the past, present, and possible future of the international system in terms of recognition. This is not to suggest that we ought to posit any universalistic order from which our current international system would look like little but a tragic and perverse deviation, and within which the theory and practice of recognition hardly would make any coherent sense. What I would suggest that we do, rather, is to pay close attention to the historical contexts within which theories and practices of recognition have evolved, inquiring into what kind of prior conceptual commitments they have presupposed in order to become intelligible and viable, and what functions they have performed once they were incorporated into the self-understandings of those actors whose intercourse they undeniably have informed since.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Hans Agné, Magdalena Bexell, Catia Gregoratti, Martin Hall, Sara Kalm, Nick Onuf, Jakob Skovgaard, Lisa Strömbom, Pål Warnge as well as the anonymous referees of IT for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article.