Recognition and the constitution of epochal change
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117813479624 |
| Published date | 01 June 2013 |
| Date | 01 June 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
International Relations
27(2) 121 –140
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117813479624
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Recognition and the
constitution of epochal change
Nicholas Onuf
Pontifica Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Abstract
For two decades, political theorists have granted recognition a great deal of attention. However,
theorists of international relations have not, despite a common interest in identity politics. Instead,
the latter take recognition for granted as a long-standing practice enabling states to engage in
relations, as equals, under law. I hold that recognition is an unexplored way of addressing the
constitution of epochal change in the modern world. I develop this claim first by reviewing what
political theorists say about recognition. Not sharing their preoccupation with identity, I also
draw on a secondary but still important theme in this literature – recognition’s relation to justice.
I then turn to the relations of states to show how international society has always exemplified the
very processes of recognition that political theorists would like to find within their late modern
societies. I conclude with some comments on the enduring properties of international society.
Keywords
constitution, constructivism, epochal change, equality, identity, international society, justice,
modernity, political theory, recognition
In the last 20 years, recognition is a favored term among political theorists and the sub-
ject of much discussion. It has come to fashion by association with identity and the rise
of identity politics in the late modern world. Identity politics has also emerged as a major
and continuing concern in the field of international relations (IR). The end of the Cold
War prompted many scholars in IR to consider the nature of collective identity and its
implications for a world in which sovereignty was said to be eroding and the relations of
states undergoing epochal change. Belatedly, some of these scholars have become aware
of the discussion of collective identity, and thus of recognition, in relation to multicultur-
alism in domestic settings.1 Conceptual clarification is minimal.
Corresponding author:
Nicholas Onuf, Department of Politics and International Relations, Florida International University, Miami,
FL 33199, USA.
Email: onufn@fiu.edu
Article
122 International Relations 27(2)
Insofar scholars in IR think about recognition at all, we take it to be a legal condition
– one that is well established in state practice and international legal theory. In practice,
admission to the United Nations has made the recognition of states a collective undertak-
ing, which replaces recognition as an act that states take bilaterally but does not change
the function that recognition is presumed to perform for international society. That func-
tion is to bring states under a common regime enabling them to engage in relations with
each other as equals under law. In theory, legal recognition has produced one contro-
versy, fully fixed in place for decades.
The institution of collective recognition has neither brought identity politics into
focus nor resolved the controversy. The latter revolves around two questions.2 Does one
state’s formal recognition of another state simply declare a state of affairs that is legally
significant because objective conditions for the constitution of some entity as a state
have already been met? Or does the act of recognition by itself constitute the state as a
state in law and thus a state in relation to other states? An affirmative answer to either
question implies a negative answer to the other.
Later in this essay, I suggest that the declaratory–constitutive binary is grossly mis-
leading and that the controversy is readily dispatched. For the moment, I wish only to
point up an apparent paradox. While scholars in IR express little interest in recognition,
those of us calling ourselves constructivists are concerned with constitutive processes.
The formalities of state recognition merge with a broad and continuous flow of events,
at least some of them identity-conferring, many of them informal, all of them conse-
quential in degrees that (I might say) beg for recognition. By directing attention to
processes, most constructivists assume that constitutive events are many and small. If
so, then epochal change is a rupture in the flow of constitutive events and not, as I
argue below, a constitutive event in itself – one that is transformative in its effects on
social arrangements.3
Constructivists are hardly alone in ignoring epochal change. Generally and for the
most part implicitly, scholars in the field treat modernity as a single epoch and changes
in the modern state system as entirely endogenous. Aside from a few historically minded
scholars – Hayward Alker, Ned Lebow, and Richard Little are prominent examples – the
exceptions are epistemological radicals: poststructuralists, some critical theorists, and
even some constructivists. It may claim too much to say that members of this disparate
group are philosophical idealists (as I am). Yet they signal just such a stance often enough
by invoking Kant’s ‘conditions of possibility’ when they talk about ‘specifically modern
forms of political life’.4
Scientific and critical realists have also resorted to this Kantian formula but broadly
and without linking it to modernity as an instance of, or site for, epochal change.5 Kant’s
concern with conditions enabling human cognition does not automatically translate into
an assessment of the discursive or social conditions enabling some substantial number of
people to think more or less the same way about the world, but it does point in this direc-
tion. Blazing a trail for today’s epistemological radicals, Michel Foucault held that the
way we moderns think is not just discursively constituted but, more tendentiously, has
been subject to rapid, unanticipated changes. We can argue with Foucault over the distin-
guishing features of these constitutively transformative events and the epochs they
launch without challenging the large claim that these events take place in people’s heads.6
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