Abstract
The article focuses on recognition among states and on its relation to recognition of the poor on the international and global levels. Specifically, it analyses a concept of interstate recognition developed by Axel Honneth who articulates mainly developmental trends that are detectable in the moral grammar of social conflicts based on struggle for recognition in Western societies. The concept of the polemical relationships of mis/recognition between states is one of the specifications of this concept of social conflicts. The article addresses these issues in the following order. In the first part, on the metatheoretical plane, it touches on Honneth’s concept of moral realism, and specifies it with regard to the issue of the legitimacy of states today. It focuses on the fundamentals of Honneth’s concept of recognition between states, and dwell on the necessity of recognition for each state, including an issue of the relationship between the state and political and cultural recognition. In the second part, it formulates the dilemmas and limits of the concept of interstate recognition, especially in view of the global economic processes linked to the poverty, and in relation to a concept of the individual in relations of mutual recognition. Then, it discusses insufficient versions of theoretical transpositions of the patterns of social relations from the national plane to the international and global plane. In the third part, it focuses on developmental tendencies of international and global recognition, and work out author’s own approach that is focused on a transitory concept of extra-territorial recognition of the global poor. In the end, in the fourth part, the article concludes by explaining the concept of extra-territorial recognition of the poor by showing possibilities of the further examination of a theory of recognition at the international, transnational and global levels.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Honneth makes a classic differentiation into individual states, and deals particularly with states in the international context. He does not deal with relations between peoples, as it is done by Rawls, for example.
- 2.
Here I follow and develop my analysis on dilemmas of transnational recognition I started articulating in a part of my book on recognition and justice.
- 3.
Cf. Buchanan’s analysis recognizing the legitimacy that a state receives from other states on the basis of fulfilling certain criteria of justice. Disputation with this approach is offered by justification recognizing legitimacy from a pragmatic point of view by Naticchia.
- 4.
Honneth’s position is illuminated by seeing the conflict between the constitutive theory of statehood, which is based on the recognition of a state by other states, and declaratory theory, is not critical in this case because even declaratory theories eventually assume some, though not perhaps political, recognition by other states. This is evident in the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, where the explicit political existence of the state, in one sentence, is regarded as independent of recognition by other states but, in other sentences, certain forms of recognition are assumed, for example, in the matter of conserving peace by “recognized pacific methods”.
- 5.
If a cosmopolitan theory was not based in the relations of mutual recognition of persons within a community, it would suffer the same problems as traditional international theories. Neo-Hegelian defenders of cosmopolitan justice overcome the nationalistic explanatory framework of that time, and articulate a cosmopolitan potential of Hegel’s theory which is present in his critique of cosmopolitanism alienated from the community, i.e. his critique of -ism in cosmopolitanism.
- 6.
I thank Volker Heins for discussions on our international and transnational analyses of Honneth’s theory of recognition.
- 7.
Heins’s intention is to “‘globalize’ Honneth in the same way as Thomas Pogge was able to globalize Rawls”. Cf. Thompson’s investigation of Honneth’s three spheres of recognition beyond the state with an intension global theory of justice as recognition but without a global transposition of Honneth’s spheres.
- 8.
Honneth’s redefinition of his own original interpretation of recognition in the form of love in the sense of the possibility of the further normative development of this form of recognition facilitates the development of considerations in this transnational direction.
- 9.
These interactions can be realized in various ambivalent forms, from e-mail exchanges to daily interaction in social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, WeChat, etc.
- 10.
The more detailed elaboration of an analysis of the legal sphere of recognition is performed by Heins primarily on the examples of children’s global rights, human rights and intellectual property, but his articles also offer more general arguments about the global order.
- 11.
A similar argument, again on a metatheoretical plane, is developed by Honneth in his response to Nancy Fraser’s chapter on post-Fordism, postcommunism, and globalization in their already mentioned joint work on redistribution on recognition.
References
Al-Jabri, Mohammed A. 2011. The Formation of Arab Reason. Text, Tradition and the Construction of Modernity in the Arab World. London: I. B. Tauris.
Angle, Stephen C. 2002. Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bauer, Joanne R., and Daniel A. Bell, eds. 1999. The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Beck, Ulrich. 1999. World Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Brown, Chris. 2000. Cultural Diversity and International Political Theory: From the Requirement to ‘Mutual Respect’? Review of International Studies 26 (2): 199–213.
Buchanan, Allen. 1999. Recognitional Legitimacy and the State System. Philosophy & Public Affairs 28 (1): 46–78.
Buchwalter, Andrew. 2013. Honneth, Hegel, and Global Justice. In Global Justice and the Politics of Recognition, ed. Tony Burns and Simon Thompson, 23–47. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Burns, Tony. 2013. Hegel, Cosmopolitanism, and Contemporary Recognition. In Global Justice and the Politics of Recognition, ed. Tony Burns and Simon Thompson, 64–87. London: Palgrave.
Burns, Tony, and Simon Thompson, eds. 2013. Global Justice and the Politics of Recognition. London: Palgrave.
Craven, Matt. 2007. Violence of Dispossession: Extra-Territoriality and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. In Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Action, ed. Mashood Baderin and Robert McCorquodale. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199217908.003.0004.
Delanty, Gerard. 2009. The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dussel, Enrique. 2009. A New Age in the History of Philosophy: The World Dialogue Between Philosophical Traditions. Philosophy and Social Criticism 35 (5): 499–516. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453709103424.
Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Arlie R. Hochschild. 2003. Global Woman. New York: Metropolitan Books.
El-Ojeili, Chamsy, and Patrick Hayden. 1983. Critical Theories of Globalization. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fine, Robert. 2003a. Taking the ‘Ism’ Out of Cosmopolitanism. European Journal of Social Theory 6 (4): 451–470. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310030064005.
———. 2003b. Kant’s Theory of Cosmopolitanism and Hegel’s Critique. Philosophy and Social Criticism 29 (6): 609–630. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453703296001.
———. 2007. Cosmopolitanism. London: Routledge.
Fornet-Betancourt, Raúl. 2004. Crítica intercultural de la Filosofía Latinoamericana actual. Madrid: Trotta.
Fraser, Nancy. 2010. Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. New York: Columbia University Press.
Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso.
Hegel, Georg W.F. 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heins, Volker M. 2008a. Realizing Honneth: Redistribution, Recognition, and Global Justice. Journal of Global Ethics 4 (2): 141–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449620802194025.
———. 2008b. Human Rights, Intellectual Property, and Struggles for Recognition. Human Rights Review 9 (2): 213–232.
———. 2008c. Nongovernmental Organizations in International Society: Struggles over Recognition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hochschild, Arlie R. 2005. Love and Gold. The Global Care Chain. In Feminist Politics, Activism and Vision: Local and Global Challenges, ed. Luciana Ricciutelli, Angela R. Miles, and Margaret McFadden. London/Toronto: Zed and Innana Books.
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette, and Ernestine Avila. 2006. I’m here But I’m There. The Meaning of Latina Transnational Motherhood. In Global Dimensions of Gender and Care, ed. Mary K. Zimmerman, Jacquelyn S. Litt, and Christine E. Bose, 254–265. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Honneth, Axel. 1996. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
———. 1997. Is Universalism a Moral Trap? The Presuppositions and Limits of a Politics of Human Rights. In Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal, ed. James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, 155–178. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 2000. Suffering from Indeterminacy. An Attempt at a Reactualization of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum.
———, ed. 2002. Befreiung aus der Mündigkeit. Campus: Frankfurt am Main.
———. 2012. Recognition between States, On the Moral Substrate of International Relations. In The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition, ed. Axel Honneth, 137–152. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
———. 2014. Freedom's Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hrubec, Marek. 2010. Preconditions of an Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights. Veritas 55 (1): 183–205.
———. 2011. Od zneuznani ke spravedlivosti. Kriticka teorie globalni spolecnosti a politiky. Praha: Filosofia.
———. 2013. An Articulation of Extra-Territorial Recognition: Toward International and Supranational Solutions of Global Poverty. In Global Justice and the Politics of Recognition, ed. Tony Burns and Simon Thompson, 265–287. London: Palgrave.
———. 2018. Towards Justice in the World War. In From Social to Cyber Justice: Critical Views on Justice, Law, and Ethics, ed. Nythamar F. de Oliveira, Marek Hrubec, and Emil A. Sobottka, 313–331. Porto Alegre/Prague: PUCRS/Filosofia.
Jones, Charles. 1999. Global Justice. Defending Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kelsen, H. 1941. Recognition in International Law: Theoretical Observations. The American Journal of International Law 35 (4): 605–617.
Linklater, Andrew. 1998. The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era. London: Polity Press.
———. 2007. Critical Theory and World Politics. Citizenship, Sovereignty and Humanity. London/New York: Routledge.
Naticchia, Chris. 1999. Recognition and Legitimacy: A Reply to Buchanan. Philosophy & Public Affairs 28 (3): 242–257.
Nolan, Peter. 2018. China and the West. New York: Routledge.
Parrenas, Rhacel S. 2001. Servants of Globalization. Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Pogge, Thomas. 1990. Realizing Rawls. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
———. 2002. World Poverty and Human Rights. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Rawls, John. 1999. The Law of Peoples with ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
Robinson, William. 2004. A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Seth, Sanjay, ed. 2013. Postcolonial Theory and International Relations. New York: Routledge.
Sklair, Leslie. 2000. The Transnational Capitalist Class. London: Blackwell.
———. 2002. Globalization: Capitalism and Its Alternatives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1985. The Nature and Scope of Distributive Justice. In Philosophical Papers 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences, ed. Charels Taylor, 289–317. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139173490.012.
———. 1995. Irreducibly Social Goods. In Philosophical Arguments, ed. Charles Taylor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tehranian, Majid. 2007. Rethinking Civilization: Resolving Conflict in the Human Family. London/New York: Routledge.
Thompson, Simon. 2006. Political Theory of Recognition: A Critical Introduction. London: Polity Press.
Vincent, Andrew. 1983. The Hegelian State and International Politics. Review of International Studies 9 (3): 191–205.
Wallace-Bruce, Nii L. 1994. Claims to Statehood in International Law. New York: Carlton Press.
Wei, Xiaoping. 2010. Rethinking China’s Economic Transformation. New York: Global Scholarly Publications.
Wiredu, Kwasi. 1996. Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Young, Iris M. 2010. Responsibility for Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my colleagues from the Department of Moral and Political Philosophy and the Centre of Global Studies, and Axel Honneth for all the friendly discussions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hrubec, M. (2020). Recognition of the Poor on the International and Global Levels. On Dilemmas of Axel Honneth’s Theory. In: Schweiger, G. (eds) Poverty, Inequality and the Critical Theory of Recognition. Philosophy and Poverty, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45795-2_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45795-2_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-45794-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-45795-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)