The articles discuss the ‘becoming into beings of international actors’ and are therefore complementary to studies on the recognition of existing political units. As Hans Agné brings to our attention, I fully concur that it would be very challenging to scrutinize the effects of actors’ ‘legal’ non-recognition on issues of peace and war. We observe in the post Cold War order that not fully recognized entities such as Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, or the Hamas administration are more prone to war than ‘established’ ones.
Furthermore, the authors propose an innovative discussion on declarative and constitutive theories on international politics. For example, Eva Erman demonstrates quite convincingly the normative foundations of ‘declarative theory’. Statehood has certainly never been a purely descriptive international phenomenon reduced to the ‘realm of facts’. Recognition of ‘factual’ statehood always implicates the expectations of commitments and entitlements for such recognized actors and can therefore only be a normative phenomenon.
Finally, the articles present some very interesting ideas in regard to the effects of (non-)recognition in international relations. In the case of recognized states enjoying full protection under international law, for example, Jens Bartelson posits that even prior to 1919 when the right of conquest was still in place, legitimized territorial occupation has been a rarity. Conversely, truncated recognition can be a means of legalizing and seizing control of trade and territory. Critical legal studies have shown that international law and jus ad bellum doctrine of the so-called ‘founding’ fathers such as Vitoria served to legalize actions against those who were ‘out of law’ such as indigenous people (Allan and Keller Reference Allan and Keller2006).
These studies, however, also highlight a few of the shortcomings that stem primarily from their neglect of the social-psychological perspective and empirically founded recognition theory.
The heuristic plus value of a social-psychology insight
All authors have decided to ‘cut’ the concept of recognition in order to avoid its inflated boy scout use as a ‘swiss knife’ (Bartelson). The definition of recognition often appears too ‘mutilated’ considering that all the articles largely focus on the act of recognition. This limitation may be useful but it only scratches the surface of the recognition phenomenon and particularly a political actor's quest for self-esteem. For example, even decision makers in formally recognized states such as Weimar's Germany, Putin's Russia and Hu's China may feel ‘misrecognized’ because of their partial exclusion from the international system or due to the perception of an ‘unjust’, ‘punishing’, and even ‘humiliating’ international order. Furthermore, there is no discussion of unjustified struggles for recognition, such as master's quest for superiority (Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit).
I would argue that we need to understand the emotional aspects of non-recognition in order to be able to comprehend international politics. It is quite puzzling that the authors suggest that non-recognition may be a cause of war without an answer as to ‘why’. They instead refer to the more material observation of non-recognition ‘acts’ or purely formal logics.
First, there is a persistent Durkheimien misunderstanding that psychology is always linked to individual mental states. Erman's reserves against recognition's social-psychological approach seem to be motivated by this perspective. For example, according to Erman, it is questionable to assert that we begin by telling stories about ourselves and then test these stories on others. For her, identity formation is not about getting the ‘story right’ as Ringmar (Ringmar Reference Ringmar1996) believes, but ‘about getting a story in the first place’. The rightfulness of Ringmar's conception is an empirical question. There are empirical cases where ‘storytelling’ and ‘identity formation’, or even personal ‘fantasies’ (such as Louis XIV's France or contemporary North Korea) are more ‘internally’ conditioned just as there are cases where the ‘outside intersubjective’ expectations have conditioned self-conceptions (e.g. West Germany's self-descriptions in Post War II). Ideally we should distinguish between two aspects of non-recognition. In the first case, actors do not feel recognized because their self-descriptions are not confirmed by other actors. This identity-related denial of recognition is traditionally described as a ‘struggle for prestige’, and is more closely to the subject's identity than to others’ disrespectful behavior. In the second case, as highlighted by Erman and in my own work (Lindemann Reference Lindemann2010, Reference Lindemann2011, Reference Lindemann and Ringmar2012), (non-)recognition and identity is more associated to socially expected standards of consideration. However, even this type of recognition struggle is linked to emotions. As I would argue, non-recognition of accepted norms of a state's dignity such as rhetorical depreciations, stigmatization, the exclusion of international organizations or interference in internal affairs will not be easily ignored by a political unit for both strategic as well as emotional reasons. Feelings of injustice – ‘the denunciation of a scandal’ (L. Boltanski) – emerge when social conventions are violated.
Furthermore, emotions play a vital role in international relations due to ‘strategic’ reasons (Ringmar Reference Ringmar1996; Lebow Reference Lebow2010; Lindemann Reference Lindemann2010; Wolf Reference Wolf2011). Honneth clearly maintains that even ‘strategic decision makers’ have to take into account their public's emotional and moral expectations to secure their legitimacy (Honneth Reference Honneth2012, 29).
Another reason why the ‘emotional aspects’ of non-recognition are of significance is due to a human's ability to feel compassion and empathy toward others. As stated recently by A. Linklater (Reference Linklater2007), compassion and empathy are part of human emotions and have to be ‘neutralized’ if actors engage in acts of violence. Such emotions are numbed or suppressed by the reification of the other and the ‘normalization’ of violence (Zehfuss Reference Zehfuss2009).
In sum, we argue that both emotional factors (outrage) and ‘numbing’ factors are linked to ‘non-recognition’ are relevant in understanding violence in international relations – whether being by reason of self-inflated identities, perceived discriminations against oneself or due to the one's perception as being out of humanity or the normalization of violence as a rational technique.
Lastly, emotional aspects (of non-recognition) must be addressed because of the affective burden associated with the symbols of collective identity. A political official's identification with his state is likely because the prestige associated with the institution strongly influences his personal prestige. When the Greek Prime Minister defends Greece's standing in the world, he also fights for the personal respect that other heads of state convey to him.
The empirical plus value of the social-psychological perspective
How do we detect emotions of non-recognition? Agné stresses that in international political sociology, recognition is solely a ‘subjective phenomenon’ based on actors’ feelings of non-recognition. For the majority of sociological and socio-psychological studies, however, non-recognition is an intersubjective phenomenon. For example, in Lebow's (Reference Lebow2010) study an actors’ self-image are empirically identified independently from their supposed effects. The same is also true in my work (Lindemann Reference Lindemann2010, Reference Lindemann2011, Reference Lindemann and Ringmar2012) where non-recognition is empirically measured by inflated self-images (e.g. in governmental architecture) or by discriminatory practices in international politics in reference to the intersubjective normative understandings of recognition in a historical period (e.g. a great power's exclusion from international institutions unsympathetic punishment of defeated powers).
It seems to me that the real issue with emotional states is their supposed ‘empirically fluid’ character. The authors suggest that emotions of non-recognition cannot be grasped empirically. Therefore, they believe that I would deduce feelings of non-recognition post facto when actors’ are in conflict and correspondingly attempt explain war by feelings of non-recognition. It is impossible to detail how we can empirically examine feelings of non-recognition. There exists many methods – positivist as well as ‘post-structuralist’ ones – to study emotions (be it through their presence or absence) mediated by (non-)recognition. Content analysis based on the Freudian idea that the frequency of words in a discourse reveals our subconscious and its hidden emotions could be useful. In particular, it is possible to compare content analysis of ‘word fields’ of emotions.
It is also possible to investigate the intensity of emotional causality in a discourse by mapping the frequency of instrumental or emotional arguments linked to the justification of violence. Such techniques can be applied to official speeches in order to detect the ‘strategic’ role of emotions. They can also be used to detect ‘sincere’ emotions expressed more spontaneously in personal interviews. We can also examine symbols charged with emotions such as phallus symbols in discourse, interviews, and ordinary objects. Conversely, discourse analysis is more attentive to the callous cognitive framing of social reality by powerful actors exerting symbolic violence (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2003). This type of analysis allows understanding to how emotions are neutralized by various linguistic framings: ‘categorization’ of people as being ‘inferior’ or ‘reifications’ of the other as a simple means to an end. Such logics can be identified by discursive mappings of ‘equivalences’ and differences (Laclau and Mouffe Reference Laclau and Mouffe1985) and the ‘absoluteness’ of oppositions between in- and outgroups. In principle, discourse analysis is also attentive to the perlocutionary force of discourse that can be assessed by several means. The first is to grasp conventions of emotional speech or ‘distanciation’, such as the use of ‘personal/impersonal’ pronoun or ‘abstract’ or ‘concrete’ sentences. Furthermore, it should be possible to interview audiences to learn more about emotional reactions to discourses and association to words and symbols.
Paradoxically, the articles in this volume are mainly based on very stimulating speculation. They do not propose ‘falsification’ or ‘interpretative’ procedures to detect recognition in international relations. Causal statements are often made by referring to formal logics and not to empirical reality. For example, Bartelson states that the quest for identity and recognition may well lead to ‘an entrenchment of existing differences between Self and Other, thus aggravating their sense of separateness’. Indeed, I presume that Bartelson makes a point that thick cultural recognition of actors may produce communautarism and ‘ethnic’ war. In my opinion he equates, however, too quickly ‘alterity’ with conflict. I do not see why ‘recognition only can find its fulfilment in the subjugation of the Other’. I would agree with Bartelson that practices of state recognition may produce the ‘reification of the current international system’. However, the ‘actor’ of the social-psychological approach is not reduced to the state and could involve ‘persons’. There is no reason to believe that ‘state’ entities should be the preferred object of recognition ambitions (Wendt Reference Wendt2003).
In short, I would make the case for a ‘controlled’ scientific anarchy insofar as we should not sacrifice the reality of ‘emotional’ complexity to the benefit of an artificial ‘scientific’ order.
