Introduction
Though it is traditional to assume that it has its origins in the seventeenth century, the modern international system has its real roots in the long nineteenth century.Footnote 1 Economic and social hierarchies created by nineteenth-century conditions have proven surprisingly durable.Footnote 2 Even as great powers have changed, the ‘West’ – elevated to an undeniable position of material power vis-à-vis the non-West in the nineteenth century – has remained at the political, economic, and social core of the modern system throughout the twentieth century, if not into the twenty-first. This is not to say that there have been no changes in the system since then: the way hierarchies manifest in the international system has varied considerably.Footnote 3 In the nineteenth century, political, economic, and social hierarchies were openly acknowledged, morally defended, and explicitly codified into legal arrangements and treaties, underwritten by the so-called ‘Standard of Civilisation’, which divided the world into ‘civilised’, ‘barbarous’, and ‘savage’ spheres, with corresponding degrees of legal ‘recognition’ from European states, ranging from full to none.Footnote 4 Some of these arrangements persisted into the twentieth century, sometimes in modified form as in the League of Nations mandate system,Footnote 5 but one of the more radical developments of the twentieth century was the spread and legal acknowledgement of notions such as self-determination and sovereign equality, which undercut the legitimacy of such explicitly hierarchical legal arrangements within the international system.Footnote 6 Territories and peoples previously deprived of legal recognition altogether or were given only partial legal recognition – because they were considered to be savage or barbarous – were gradually (and after much bloodshed) recognised in the twentieth century as having their own sovereign states. Now international lawFootnote 7 operates on the principle that ‘all sovereign states are equal’.Footnote 8
As far as much of the International Relations (IR) literature is concerned, this is where the discipline’s concern with the history of recognition ends. Until recently,Footnote 9 the concept of recognition was not usually probed in traditional IR beyond an absence/presence dimension in the narrow legal sense.Footnote 10 A state is either recognised as sovereign or it is not. If it is recognised, one may further ask by whom (de facto or de jure), but if a state ticks both boxes, there is nothing more to empirically probe from a ‘recognition’ angle. On the other hand, there has also developed in IR a parallel scholarship that has acknowledged (in a more critical vein) that recognition could be understood much more broadly, as a vital human need to be known, to be affirmed, to be recognised for who we are. Works in IR that have drawn attention to status-seeking, social stratification, or practices of exclusion usually operate, at least implicitly, with this second understanding of recognition,Footnote 11 which at first glance seems to have little to do with the legal understanding of recognition.
Put another way, IR has understood the concept of recognition in two different ways, with obvious implications for how it is problematised and studied. Let’s call the first understanding legal recognition and the second existential recognition.Footnote 12 In the first, thin, legal sense, recognition is mostly a problem only for those groups that seek statehood but have not yet achieved it. Gaining legal sovereignty solves recognition problems thus understood. In the second, thick, existential sense, all actors, including sovereign states, are seen to be motivated by their aspirations for recognition. This literature does not view legal sovereignty as meeting the innate need for recognition; rather, legal recognition of sovereignty factors at best as a prerequisite for agency. In mostFootnote 13 of these studies, actors that seek recognition in the broad sense are states already recognised as sovereign in the narrow sense.Footnote 14 Yet this literature does not explain why states in particular are motivated by recognition in the first placeFootnote 15 and why that aspiration is not met with achievement of legal equal recognition, as both traditional IR (and the neo-Hegelian literatureFootnote 16 on the domestic politics of recognition) largely assumes. What is not well scrutinised, in other words, is the relationship between the two sides of recognition in international relations, that is, narrow-broad; thin-thick; legal-existential. Because recognition is understood so differently in these two strands of the literature, it may be assumed at first glance that mechanisms for legal recognition and existential recognition operate entirely autonomously from each other, and the seeming link between the two sides of recognition is merely a semantic confusion. This assumption would be misplaced. In this article, I argue that sovereign equality (legal recognition) itself is actually a type of misrecognition, if recognition is more broadly understood (as existential recognition).
In line with the rest of this Special Issue, I understand ‘misrecognition’ as ‘the structural impossibility of actors being recognised in the ways they want to be’.Footnote 17 I agree with the authors of the introduction that the Hegelian figuration is a basic archetype to which most – if not all – hierarchical social relationships can be productively reduced. However, in that reduction lurks also the danger of flattening the differences between different types of hierarchies and losing a degree of analytical purchase. It is important, therefore, to establish how (and to what extent) various hierarchical forms – for example, domestic vs international – conform to or deviate from the basic Hegelian archetype.
Understood from this perspective, then, it could be argued that legal sovereign equality is not just an ordinary case of misrecognition (as all attempts at recognition are), but something even more than that. Not only has the dissemination of the sovereign equality norm failed to solve recognition problems in the broad sense, it has helped perpetuate them and may in fact be instrumental to their perpetuation. This critique has already been levelled at champions of equal legal recognition norms within the domestic sphere,Footnote 18 but despite the obvious parallels between the notions of individual rights (or equal citizenship) and sovereign rights (or sovereign equality), the relationship of legal sovereign recognition to problems of international misrecognition in the broad sense has not been explored. Therefore, this article is concerned with delineating the reasons why (legal) sovereign recognition produces and reproduces (existential) misrecognition in the international system.
This article proceeds in three sections. First, building on Patchen Markell’s work in the political theory of recognition,Footnote 19 I advance a particular reading of the Hegelian master–slave recognition dynamic that draws attention to the durability of such hierarchical arrangements. This reading rejects the notion that recognition is an achievable goal on any level of politics, domestic or international, either through the master–slave dynamic or by ‘the master’ extending equal recognition to ‘the slave’. What I am especially interested in, however, is in explaining why master–slave hierarchies persist despite their inherent inability to provide the recognition that the actors sought in the first place. I argue that the master–slave dynamic is durable because it allows for the master to simulate sovereignty, or to have the image of sovereignty, even as they fail to achieve the real thing.Footnote 20 This is what turns the momentary struggle for recognition into a social structure of domination in which roles are internalised and therefore seen as natural by both sides of the relationship. This is the first main contribution of this article.
In the second section, I consider the role the modern state plays in the pursuit of sovereignty. In order to understand how the master–slave recognition dynamic translates into international relations and how it interacts with the aforementioned categories of narrow (legal) and broad (existential) pursuit of recognition in world politics, we must first locate the state properly in the recognition field. I argue in this section that the modern state, unusually for polities across history, has the dual task of providing sovereignty for its citizens while also being sovereign over its citizens. In other words, the modern state has to help individuals feel recognised, that is, as sovereign, in the world, while it also itself demands to be recognised as sovereign over individuals. The inherent unachievability of these dual tasks in a universe solely of their own – that is, the state-citizen relationship – is what projects the master–slave dynamic to the international stage.
The third section then argues that the nearly simultaneous emergence of the nation-state form and preoccupation with external recognition of sovereignty is not a coincidence, and that there is something very modern also about the internationalisation of the ‘politics of recognition’. Because the modern state is tasked with solving the recognition problem of its citizens by being sovereign for all of them, but cannot derive that power just from the recognition of the same citizens whose recognition problems the state is tasked with solving, the modern state’s pursuit of recognition increasingly turns to the external world after the nineteenth century. This is the second main contribution. I conclude with a discussion of how the sovereign equality norm has trapped all international actors in a futile ‘politics of recognition’ in the twentieth century and speculate briefly as to whether a different kind of politics is possible in the twenty-first century.
I. Why the ‘struggle for recognition’?Footnote 21
The desire for recognition is a desire for sovereignty, understood as an affirmation of the self: ‘the condition of being an independent, self-determining agent’, with ‘something like full ownership of one’s life and doings’.Footnote 22 In other words, the search for recognition is an extension of our desire for to be a ‘somebody’, a someone who can impose their will on the world, someone who is free.Footnote 23 In the beginning (according to Hegel), ‘self-consciousness believes itself to be independent, but finds this claim threatened by the sheer fact of its corporeality, which renders it subject to material forces and bodily needs beyond its control’.Footnote 24 This leads to a desireFootnote 25 to consume (or dominate) material things in order to confirm one’s freedom from them. Satisfying material desires is insufficient evidence of one’s sovereignty, however; by consuming an object, we show that we are more powerful than the object, but as soon as the moment of consumption is over, we need to consume more, which reminds us of our own corporeality. Therefore, material objects are not enough to give an agent the confirmation they seek of their sovereignty: ‘If an external object is to provide more than fleeting self-certainty, it must somehow both be negated in its independence and yet continue to exist … And the only sort of thing which can “abdicate” its own claims to independence in this way is … another self-consciousness.’Footnote 26 Therefore, according to Hegel, it is the self’s inability to secure certainty of its independent existence through satisfaction of material desires that leads it to a struggle for recognition. We want more than to exist as a physical being in the material world: we want our value, our awareness of ourselves, to be affirmed by another who is capable of doing so.
Because each actor has the same goal to confirm their own sovereignty, the struggle for recognition is mutually exclusive, casting doubt on independence claims of both sides.Footnote 27 Thus, the quest for recognition takes the form of a ‘life-and-death struggle’,Footnote 28 which ends with either the death or surrender of one side. The defeated party affirms the sovereignty of the victor by recognising them as the master; the vanquished becomes the slave. What this means, however, is that the master is recognised by someone who is not quite an agent himself: ‘What now really confronts him is not an independent consciousness, but a dependent one. He is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself.’Footnote 29 Thus this relationship also fails to acquire for the actor what it sought in the first place: recognition from the slave is unfulfilling because it comes from someone who is not recognised as an equal or quite as human. The asymmetry of the master–slave relationship is thus a problem.Footnote 30
Many have read Hegel as thus advocating ‘for the master to complete the exchange by reciprocally recognizing the independence of the slave, which would, of course, amount to the abolition of the master-slave relations itself’.Footnote 31 This reading is then used to support politics of multiculturalism and identity recognition. The best-known example is Charles Taylor, whose 1992 essay ‘Politics of Recognition’ launched the politics of recognition in domestic politics. In that essay, Taylor makes a number of interesting arguments. For example, he suggests that recognition is a modern problem; before then, ‘general recognition was built into the socially derived identity by virtue of the very fact that it was based on social categories that everyone took for granted’.Footnote 32 Recognition becomes a problem when traditional categories of identity are eroded, and identity becomes, in Taylor’s words, ‘inwardly derived, personal, original’.Footnote 33 With modernity, identity is not automatically recognised or propped up by existing social categories; it has to be won ‘through exchange, and the attempt can fail’.Footnote 34 This is why, according to Taylor, we now understand that there is a human need for the recognition of identity; its absence can inflict grievous wounds.
By contrast, Markell suggests that the master–slave dynamic cannot be read to support a view that ‘the struggle for recognition can find only one satisfactory solution, and that is a regime of reciprocal recognition among equals’.Footnote 35 In Markell’s more convincing reading of the master–slave dynamic, the misrecognition of the slave or the injustice of the relationship does not result from a failure on the part of the master to recognise the slave properly. Rather it is the recognition dynamic itself that produces the slave and the asymmetry or the injustice, hence it cannot be rectified by an act of equal recognition.Footnote 36 In a way, both sides of the dynamic are trapped by the asymmetry of the recognition relationship.Footnote 37 The slave cannot have the recognition he seeks because he is not yet ‘human’ and the master cannot get recognition because he is the only ‘human’ (as he imagines).
Let’s pause here to also note that many readings of Hegel have focused on the fact that the dynamic comes to an end through a reversal, through the labour of the slave.Footnote 38 The argument goes that in the act of surrender, the would-be slave confronts their ‘own finitude’ and the futility of the ‘aspiration to demonstrate its sovereignty at all costs’.Footnote 39 The slave also acknowledges the need to overcome their situation, contrary to the master, who has no desire to overcome their role.Footnote 40 The slave is thus open to change, learning, historical processes. Furthermore, the slave is forced to work by the master: the slave moulds nature for the master, turning it into products, and in the process, achieves real ‘mastery’ through creativity and labour. Footnote 41 The master, on the other hand, is increasingly dependent on the labour of the slave for his existence.Footnote 42 Thus, in readings of Hegel that emphasise the reversal, the slave has a better chance of escaping from the master–slave dynamic than the master.Footnote 43 For our purposes here, however, the more intriguing aspect is the often-overlooked fact that the master is both trapped by the dynamic and (at least in one possible reading of Hegel) has an interest in prolonging it. The dynamic is both more ubiquitous and stable than one would expect: ‘what is most intriguing about Hegel’s account of master and slave is that, despite his claim that it is contradictory and cannot ultimately satisfy the desire that animates it, this social relationship does not simply collapse under the weight of its own incoherence’.Footnote 44 Why, then, do the master–slave recognition hierarchies persist for extended periods of time, if they are indeed so asymmetric, and so ultimately unsatisfying for both sides of the equation?
This is because while actors can never fully achieve the kind of recognition they seek through this dynamic, the master–slave hierarchy ‘accommodate[s] contradictions … without resolving them’.Footnote 45 The master status in the master–slave dynamic creates for the master a very viable approximation of the self as sovereign: ‘this arrangement thus reflects back to the master something like the image of himself as sovereign that himself had originally sought, insulating him from the experience of his own dependence’.Footnote 46 The master may not have the recognition (or sovereignty) they desire, but they now have the image (or simulation) of that recognition: ‘These roles … lend relative stability to the intersubjective world, making it possible for the master to experience his own status – like the slave’s – as a reflection of who he always already is, rather than as the political (and therefore fragile) effect of an ongoing practice of subordination.’Footnote 47 This is a misrecognition that masquerades as recognition, for extended periods of time. Taking the argument even further, one can also observe that as much of the literature on social stratification and stigmatisation also demonstrates,Footnote 48 in social figurations where one is (mis)recognised as being better than the other, the ongoing interaction continuously creates and recreates the identities of the parties involved, which are then perceived as reflecting inherent, innate, and fixed characteristics. The slave then becomes a ‘natural’ slave; the master is the master because they must surely ‘deserve’ to be. More importantly, both parties internalise these roles as such.
This is a more satisfying dynamic for the master than it is for the slave, because through it the master gets an approximation of fully realised self-sovereignty in the form of the ‘master’ image. To be fully sovereign as a human being, as a consciousness, is to be the master of one’s destiny – it requires the ability to make and impose one’s own rules on the world, to stand up against and defeat the vagaries of nature and one’s own appetite. It is very difficult to realise this ideal, but in the master–slave hierarchy, the master can feel as if they have indeed achieved it (or has gone a long way in achieving it) in comparison with the slave. This is why in social hierarchies those in lower ranks are often characterised as anomic, untrustworthy, undisciplined, lawless, dirty, emotional, or having loose morals. In other words, they are perceived as being dominated by the animalistic side of human nature – they are supposed to be the ones who are ruled by appetite or instinct, that is, they are the ones who are not masters of their own destiny, they are the ones who are dependent. In comparison, the existential impasse of the master becomes tolerable and their own dependence is masked: the trouble with the master–slave relationship ‘is not only that it leaves the self-consciousness who becomes master in a condition of ontological ignorance, doomed to pursue a fantasy of sovereignty he cannot attain; it is also that the strategies he employs in pursuit of that impossible fantasy involve the subjection and unfreedom of others’.Footnote 49 By projecting all (or most of) undesirable attributes as stigma properties onto the slave, can the master create an image of sovereignty, and simulate their possession of a fuller, superior humanity.Footnote 50
II. The state and the struggle for recognition
Thus far, we have been speaking in the language of parable and not about actual events or relationships in history. How should this framework be translated into international relations? It is tempting to assume that the master–slave configuration can be used to make sense of relationships between states (posited as conscious agents) as much as individuals (as conscious agents) without any need for modification as one goes up and down the level of analysis. In this section, I will argue that while the dynamic is indeed helpful in making sense of international affairs, we cannot simply treat states as individuals when using the schema, for two reasons. First, the state has a special place of importance in Hegel’s thought, as well as in neo-Hegelian theories, and it is not conceptualised as the equivalent of an individual (or even the sum of individuals). Therefore, the state as an actor seeking recognition on the international stage cannot be treated unproblematically as if it was the equivalent of an individual, and instead needs to be located properly in the Hegelian theoretical framework, as a site that has supposedly reconciled recognition conflicts among individuals. Second, echoing Taylor’s point about the modernity of recognition politics above (but without Taylor’s optimism), there is in fact a historical dimension to how the states have become the primary vehicles for the pursuit of recognition by persons. The historicity of the state’s role on the domestic side of recognition politics is often recognised in the literature (most notably by Hegel himself) but the international dimension is often overlooked. As I will show, over time, the state’s struggle to gain recognition from its citizens and to solve the citizens’ own recognition problems has made recognition into an international issue, or a problem that sought its resolution internationally. In other words, there is a very historical dimension to the transfer of recognition struggle from the domestic level to the international one.
As is well acknowledged, for Hegel, the state (or the modern state) was the solution to the impasse created by the master–slave dynamic. It is only through the state (as the end point of reason) that a person can become absolutely free: ‘self-consciousness, by virtue of its disposition, has its substantial freedom in the state as its essence, its end, and the product of activity’.Footnote 51 The struggle for recognition thus ‘can only occur in the natural state, where men exist only as single, separate individuals; but it is absent in civil society and the State because here the recognition for which the combatants fought already exists’.Footnote 52 This is taken up by neo-Hegelian theoriesFootnote 53 to argue that the state can indeed become a reconciliatory site by extending equal recognition to all its citizens (or groups of citizens, as the case may be). It is not only Hegelian theories, however, that attribute a particular importance to group endeavours in the age of modernity in the quest for sovereignty. There is a sense in much of Western political thought that ‘modernity’ is an equaliser that renders the ‘modern’ person much smaller and less powerful than the ‘best’ of his predecessors (for better or worse, depending on the thinker).Footnote 54 For some, this means the individual quest for sovereignty should be abandoned altogether in favour of some other goal, such as happiness or self-interest,Footnote 55 yet for others, such as Hegel but also Rousseau,Footnote 56 the state (or the group or the general will or the nation) becomes the only vehicle through which individuals can attain sovereignty.Footnote 57
The modern state so conceived was thus assigned with a dual task that most polities in history were not:Footnote 58 it needs to be sovereign over its subjects (common enough in history), and it needs to be sovereign for its subjects (much rarer, at least in reference to the majority of subjects). Therefore, built into the claim that the modern state can reconcile the struggle for recognition between individuals are a number of assumptions about different aspects of sovereignty, which actually do not hold up very well under closer scrutiny. The state that will reconcile the ‘struggle for recognition’ must first be recognised itself by individuals (Assumption 1) as having the capacity for such recognition (Assumption 2) and the ability to distribute it to all equally (Assumption 3). In other words, the state must be acknowledged as sovereign by its citizens, and must in fact be sovereign for its citizens, so that it can then ‘distribute’ that sovereignty equally among its citizens, so that they do not have to struggle to get it themselves. All three assumptions are problematic in their own way, but together they explain why the struggle for recognition in modernity has had such a pronounced international dimension, as will be discussed in Section III.
Let’s take Assumptions 1 and 3 together, since they both have to do with the recognition relationship the state has with its citizens. Following Hegel and neo-Hegelian theories of equal recognition, it may be tempting ‘to treat the state like a deus ex machine that appears from outside the social, which – by virtue of its sovereign elevation above the conflicts of social life – can serve as a mediating institution’.Footnote 59 Yet the state itself does not stand in a relationship of equality to its citizens; as is well acknowledged in IR, the state is atop the domestic hierarchy. Thus, the relationship the state has with the citizens is one of asymmetry by definition,Footnote 60 laden with the same problems as discussed in the previous section. Furthermore, the historical origins of any given state very much resemble the master–slave figuration; (Western) modernity entails a process of abstraction of authority from the person of the kings to institutions, but there is no reason to assume that the process of abstraction would transform the primary recognition dilemma. The fundamental problem remains that the act of recognition by the citizen-subjects by itself cannot create the sovereignty of the state, but only an image of it. The state cannot become truly sovereign via the recognition of its citizens any more than the master can; it can only simulate that sovereignty over time (more on this to follow). So, there is always something precarious about the domestic recognition of the state by its citizens, a tension built into the very character of state sovereignty.
There is also the problem that the modern state is not equally distant to all of its citizens. It has been long acknowledged that while the modern state promises political emancipation through the equal legal recognition of citizenship for all, such recognition often entrenches existing inequalities by designating social or economic issues as ‘non-political’. By labelling certain problems as beyond the purview of politics, legal equality thus ‘disguises their status as forms of power and makes them more difficult to address politically’.Footnote 61 Thus even when the state is approaching its citizens equally, it reproduces existing social hierarchies. But the problem runs deeper than that, in the sense that the state’s own quest for recognition becomes entangled in the politics of stratification domestically (also internationally, but more on that to come). The example Markell uses to illustrate this point is the Prussian emancipation Edict of 1812, granting full rights to Jews. The contradiction of that edict was that while it ‘moved to dissolve the legal distinction between Jew and Christian … the same edict took pains to ensure that Jews could always be recognized as Jews by the authorities’.Footnote 62 This is because the recognition of the sovereignty of the state is also a simulation, an image (as all recognition is, as discussed in the previous section); for it to be constantly reproduced, for recognition to be ‘more than momentary and ephemeral, the institutions of the state must maintain a vigilant surveillance of the Jews to be sure that they are conforming to the terms of their emancipation – and such surveillance requires that Jews be recognizable’.Footnote 63 This also makes the impossible task of acquiring sovereignty (state sovereignty in this case) the problem of Jews (or other similarly situated groups). In other words, the problem of domestic sovereign recognition (or the need for it be to continuously simulated) becomes disproportionately borne by the ‘others’ of society.
This brings us back to Assumption 2 – can the state be sovereign for its citizens? Leaving aside the questions of whether it can achieve sovereignty via the recognition of its citizens or distribute whatever goods it produces equally, is there a scenario under which it can actually achieve sovereignty in the sense of ‘the condition of being an independent, self-determining agent’, with ‘something like full ownership of one’s life and doings’, as discussed in the previous section? Can the state master nature for its citizens? Can it be absolutely free in the world? Could it elevate its citizens to a condition of genuine, positive, freedom? Once again, we can point to a strand of political thought from Hobbes to Rousseau to Schmitt that sees this almost godlike potential in the state, but it is difficult to argue that any modern state has even approximated such sovereignty as an actor itself, let alone for its citizens.Footnote 64 One could even argue that the densely interactive conditions of modern world politics make approaching such freedom more difficult for modern states in the same way conditions of modern society do so for individuals. Yet, the modern state is relatively unique among historical polities in promising to deliver sovereignty for its citizens in addition to over its citizens. The primary justification for its level of penetration into daily life is in fact this very promise, which means that the modern state project has to be somehow legitimated despite its continuous failure to deliver upon one of its main goals. If one of the solutions is the domestic arrangement discussed above, yet another one is to projection of the simulation of sovereignty to the international arena. This is how the master–slave dynamic acquires an international angle.
III. The international struggle for recognition
It is not coincidental that social hierarchies of the international system became entrenched at the very historical moment – nineteenth century – that the modern state project reached maturation as an idea,Footnote 65 and as this section will argue, their co-emergence cannot be attributed to material factors alone. It is also not an accident that of all aspects of modern sovereignty, external recognition was the last to emerge (more on this to follow). This is not to say that there was no struggle for recognition in ‘world politics’ before the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, following the observationFootnote 66 that there is something modern about the ‘politics of recognition’ in that recognition becomes political in domestic politics only after traditional categories are eroded and identity becomes constructable (or after self-fashioning becomes possible), I would posit that there is something even more modern about the international ‘politics of recognition’. Modern states are much more preoccupied with ‘international’ recognition than most of their predecessors. The previous section has already gestured in the direction of this argument, but let me delineate even further, given that the argument runs entirely counter to received wisdom in rationalist IR that states (and especially modern states) do not care about intangible goods such as recognition and are motivated by material interests alone.
Most IR definitions of state sovereignty can be reduced to the components of ‘supreme authority’ and ‘territory’,Footnote 67 both of which come with implicit assumptions about recognition, internal and external. For example, Stephen D. Krasner defines ‘the Westphalian state’ as ‘a system of political authority based on territory and autonomy’;Footnote 68 elsewhere he distinguishes between ‘interdependence sovereignty … [that is,] the ability of states to control movement across their borders’,Footnote 69 ‘domestic sovereignty’, which denotes the extent to which political authority can ‘effectively regulate behaviour’;Footnote 70 ‘Vattelian sovereignty … [that is,] the exclusion of external sources of authority both de juri and de facto’Footnote 71 and ‘International legal sovereignty [which] refers to mutual recognition’.Footnote 72 Traditionally, most IR scholarship operated with the assumption that the ‘Westphalian state’ had in fact emerged after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which was supposed to have transformed the world from one dominated by religious divisions to one of territorial sovereign states extending each other mutual recognition. For the last few decades, however, the Westphalian narrative and the accompanied dating of modern sovereignty back to the seventeenth century has come under criticism. The overwhelming majorityFootnote 73 of these scholarsFootnote 74 date the emergence of modern state to a much later period. Interestingly the later dating usually does not focus on the emergence of the notion of centralised supreme authority, which most scholars concede date back to earlier periods,Footnote 75 but rather around the emergence of territorialityFootnote 76 and the principle of external recognition, both of which most scholars now date to the nineteenth century.Footnote 77
To give a few examples, Derek Croxton notes that historically, ‘the difficulty is not finding a ruler who considers himself to be sovereign, but a group of rulers who recognise each other’s sovereignty’.Footnote 78 Krasner notes that ‘the principle that rulers should not intervene in or judge domestic affairs in other states was actually introduced by two international legal theorists in the latter part of the eighteenth century, Emmerich de Vattel and Christian Wolff’.Footnote 79 Andreas Osiander notes that ‘before the nineteenth century state and society were not generally seen as coextensive’.Footnote 80 He also observes that ‘for a long time after Jean Bodin popularized the concept [of sovereignty] in the late sixteenth century, political theorists and practicians alike attached more importance to its domestic than its external side’.Footnote 81 Mutual recognition of sovereignty became emphasised (most notably by international lawyers) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after ‘the integrating power of industrialization brought about a near congruence between state and society: each “nation” state was now, or at least could conceivably be, its own society, considered complete unto itself’.Footnote 82 Jens Bartelson argues that ‘a modern notion of recognition first evolved in response to declarations of independence’Footnote 83 and while external recognition originally was understood to be a way of acknowledging facts on the ground, in the nineteenth century, it came to be understood as constitutive of statehood.Footnote 84 The way nineteenth-century legal frameworks developed, it was initially conceded that sovereignty was first acquired internally, but also argued that it was made complete by external recognition and through membership in international society.Footnote 85 But soon this view was replaced by one that elevated external recognition over internal recognition of sovereignty and made external recognition dependent on the level of civilisation, with humanity divided into three spheres as civilised, barbarous, and savage, all with corresponding degrees of recognition.Footnote 86 In the twentieth century, the same notion was echoed by the mandate system of the League of Nations, where it was held that some communities ‘have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognised subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone’.Footnote 87 The main difference between the logic underwriting the mandate system and Lorimer’s racial theory of recognition is that the mandate system accepts the possibility of future recognition; it is progressive.
To sum up, within the historical trajectory of the modern international system, thinking about sovereignty evolved from it being understood as primarily (if not exclusively) internally driven and being in the purview of the political ruler alone, to it becoming abstracted from the person of the monarch to institutions, then associated with the general will of the community – that is, the ‘nation’ – and territorialised. Around the same time, external recognition started to play a much larger role in the determination of sovereignty, eventually surpassing in many most parts of the world – that is, for those deemed ‘savage’ or ‘barbarous’ – the fulfilment of the criteria for the internal constitution of statehood. In other words, polities that had long displayed features of internal sovereignty (for example, the Ottoman Empire, Siam, Japan)Footnote 88 could now be called semi-sovereign due to lack of external recognition.
This legal framework evolved in the twentieth century, with the promise that the external recognition thus withheld in the nineteenth century could now be attained, only if domestic structures could be brought up to external ‘standards of civilisation’ (or modernity, or development).Footnote 89 The eventual outcome of this evolution was the emergence of the universal law of sovereign equality in the second half of the twentieth century. IR now has a corpus of works dealing with this period and the social, economic, and political hierarchies engendered therein. What we had not done a good job of explaining thus far was the puzzle about timing: why should the timing of the emergence of the preoccupation with external recognition (and thus international social hierarchies) coincide with the emergence of the modern state and become even more pronounced following the global diffusion of the modern state norm? The Hegelian reading of internal/external recognition dynamics I advanced in previous sections helps us make sense of the timing of these developments and explains why the nineteenth century was such a formative period in the emergence of modern international order.
To recap, when sovereignty lies with the ruler alone, as opposed to institutions, whoever is the ruler is recognised by his subjects more or less straightforwardly in the manner captured by the master–slave figuration. This is ultimately a misrecognition for the ruler because the subjects are in a dominated position, and the more dominated they are, the less valuable is the recognition they offer. Yet human history is littered with such arrangements and they are for the most part very durable. This is because the image of sovereignty mirrored back to such a ruler in such a situation – say, for example, the Pharaoh in Ancient Egypt – must be rather compellingFootnote 90 as an approximation of true sovereignty (which is unattainable). In such settings, which permeate vast swaths of human history, the desire for recognition figures into external relations of the polity in a different manner the modern world of international relations. If an enemy ruler is defeated in battle, they and their people are often enslaved (or absorbed) under domestic rule, which reinforces the pattern above. By contrast, peacetime ‘recognition’ gestures from other ‘sovereign’ rulers in the form of emissaries, tributes, gifts, etc. are probably somewhat meaningful to the ruler receiving them, but decidedly less so in comparison with the internal simulation of recognition in the form of worship or reverence.Footnote 91 The ratio between the importance of the internal vs external dimension of recognition of sovereignty undergoes a major change in the nineteenth century, after the emergence of the territorial, national, centralised state, which is tasked with being sovereign for its citizens (a new development) as well as over its citizens (a common feature in history). External recognition thus becomes increasingly important for the state because it is a path to simulating being sovereign for as opposed to over citizens.Footnote 92
Despite its increasingly penetrative and extractive reach, as well as its monopolisation of all sorts of authority previously dispersed, the modern state is not rejected but ‘recognised’ as sovereign by its citizens precisely so that it can now impose the will of the citizens on the world, so that persons can be sovereign through the state. But while the ‘recognition’ of subjects may have been enough to simulate sovereignty for a single ruler (or family), it is not enough for the modern state. The modern state cannot derive the power to recognise its citizens simply from the recognition of its citizens. It must march progressively through history to the pinnacle of civilisation, etc. (to invoke a few twentieth-century notions about the state’s purpose).Footnote 93 It must be sovereign in the world. Following the same pattern as self-consciousness seeking proof of its own sovereignty, the modern state’s pursuit of sovereignty also turns first to the external world, where it cannot find the confirmation it seeks, and then to a struggle for recognition, resulting in international master–slave configurations (or social hierarchies) between states.
As noted above, in external battles, the more common historical pattern before the nineteenth century was absorbing the vanquished into the polity, either outright or as tributary entities. Those outside of the ontology of the polity were mostly ignored. By contrast, since the nineteenth century, what we see instead is a trend of keeping the side that has submitted as distinct as unit from the dominant party (and increasingly so), while simultaneously pushing for it become as similar to the dominant party as possible. This trend was driven from the top by European/Western states that had to demonstrate their sovereignty comparatively. This is why nineteenth-century empires exhibit different centre-periphery patterns than other empires in history, with purported ‘nation-states’ visibly at the centre. By the twentieth century, great powers increasingly move away from territorially absorbing those countries that they dominate, preferring to keep nation-state territoriality intact even in instances of full-blown occupation. At the same, there is a parallel trend towards domestic homology (also helped along with other forces of modernity, such as capitalism and rationalisation)Footnote 94 – the more ‘the slave’ resembles ‘the master’, the more satisfying the recognition, however simulated. As more communities and polities are thus remade in the image of the nation-state, they also become tasked with being sovereign for their citizens, and they too become increasingly more preoccupied with external recognition of their sovereignty. For all these reasons, the emergence of the framework of sovereign equality is not the eradication of master–slave hierarchies in the international system, but is itself a product of those hierarchies.
Conclusion: Sovereign equality as (mis)recognition
The international legal regime of sovereign equality, even though it grants the ‘slave’ communities of the modern order the recognition previously withheld from them, is not driven by a genuine recognition of sovereignty of ‘the other’, which is impossible in any case. The extension of the legal recognition of sovereignty recreates at the international stage the same dynamic that modern state has with its own ‘others’: equal recognition is gradually extended to those previously deemed ‘savage’ or ‘barbarous’ in order to bolster the recognition that they themselves had given to the ‘mastery’ of the West. But for their simulated recognition of the ‘master’ to be anything more than fleeting, their ‘otherness’ has to be continuously recreated through stigmatisation.Footnote 95 Sovereign equality thus not only masks relations of domination in the international system by ‘translating’ them into seemingly voluntary contracts entered by seemingly equal agents, but also helps perpetuate the hierarchies of the international system.
Furthermore, the presence of this norm has extended the lifespan of the master–slave recognition dynamic by blocking the avenues that would help ‘the slave’ get out from under that dynamic. For example, one of the reasons ‘the slave’ is ultimately able to escape from the figuration is because they are supposed to have understood the futility of the ‘aspiration to demonstrate its sovereignty at all costs’.Footnote 96 Yet, the processes described above render ‘the slave’ an emulator of ‘the master’, and ‘the master’ does not understand the futility of the aspiration. The same processes also rob ‘the slave’ of the creativity they would develop through their work on the natural world.
The disappointing conclusion for the international order is that ‘the slave’ cannot escape this dynamic in the sense of acquiring real freedom and sovereignty any more than ‘the master’ can, and both sides remain fixated on the politics of recognition and status, as a great deal of literature in IR now demonstrates.Footnote 97 Sovereignty is simulated but not achieved.Footnote 98 The best ‘the slave’ can hope to achieve is the reversal of the hierarchy of simulation. If this Hegelian reading is correct, the anticipated rise of China or the non-West will not overcome the asymmetry of the recognition relationship, but at best will replace it with another hierarchy. The international system may very well be eroded or improved upon from other angles, but the international politics of (mis)recognition cannot be the solution to the problems it has had a part in creating.
Acknowledgements
This article borrows ideas from previously published work in order to revisit and further develop the arguments therein in relation to the concept of ‘recognition’. I would like to thank the organisers of this Special Issue as well as the contributors for their comments on previous iterations of this article.
