Original Article

Of persons and peoples: Internationalizing

the critical theory of recognition
Volker Heins
Institute for Social Research, Goethe University, Senckenberganlage 26, Frankfurt D-60325,
Germany.
E-mail: volker.heins@gmail.com

Abstract Although Axel Honneth’s critical theory of recognition continues to

resonate among political theorists, its relationship to the debate on political and
moral cosmopolitanism remains unclear. The paper aims to fill this gap by defining
a few guideposts to a ‘recognition-theoretical’ conception of the international. My
argument is that Honneth’s theory oscillates between a liberal-cosmopolitan model
of the global spread of human rights and an alternative model that is closer to the
anti-cosmopolitanism of the late Rawls. Both models reflect certain assumptions
about the moral standing of political communities or ‘peoples’, even if those
assumptions remain implicit and unexamined. I begin by discussing the premise
that recognition theory is all about ‘natural’ persons instead of ‘artificial’ persons
such as states or peoples. I proceed by comparing Rawls’s notion of a distinct logic
of the international to Honneth’s more ambiguous gestures toward an international
political theory. Finally, I offer some thoughts on the place of peoples and
sovereign statehood in the theory of recognition.
Contemporary Political Theory (2010) 9, 149–170. doi:10.1057/cpt.2008.48

Keywords: Honneth; Rawls; cosmopolitanism; domestic analogy; justice; recognition

Introduction

The idea of ‘recognition’ has come to play a key role in important new lines of
scholarship across political theory and the social sciences in general. It has been
associated with research on social and collective identity, group rights,
transitional justice, family structures, immigration, customer relationship
management and adversarial politics, to mention some examples. This renewed
interest in ‘recognition’ builds on a well-established tradition of Hegelian social
and political philosophy that has in recent times been revived by a number of
theorists, of whom Axel Honneth is the most prominent. As a consequence, his
theory has attracted considerable attention from academics of different
disciplines. Much of this has been reflected in recent edited volumes and
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special issues of scholarly journals (van den Brink and Owen, 2007; Deranty
et al, 2007; Burns and Thompson, forthcoming; McBride and Seglow, 2009;
Petherbridge, forthcoming).
Although these multifarious developments around Honneth’s theory of
recognition have yet to lead to new synthetic efforts, I believe it is safe to
identify two of its key strengths. First, the theory of recognition is a useful
thinking tool that captures the fundamental moral dimension of social
struggles without discounting utilitarian motives as irrelevant or non-existent.
Honneth inverts the Marxist model of the critique of ideology; instead of
dispelling the moral illusions of historical agents engaged in power struggles, he
proposes to uncover the moral core of struggles that are apparently fought over
economic interests alone (Honneth, 1995, p. 165). Collective action is spurred
by subjects experiencing injuries to self in the form of disrespect, denigration or
undue indifference. The theory complements older accounts of ‘why men rebel’
(Gurr, 1970), which had already made clear that protest and opposition to
institutions cannot be explained as consequences of deviant behaviour,
political indoctrination or economic deprivation.
Second, Honneth regards moral feelings not only as driving empirical
struggles, but also as justifying them. Collective experiences of damaged
recognition are an ‘innerworldly instance of transcendence’ (Honneth, 2003b,
p. 238) that both explain efforts toward social transformation and provide the
normative criterion for evaluating those efforts. On a superficial level, Honneth
seems to restate Hobbes’s claim that serious conflicts can be provoked even by
small disrespectful gestures such as ‘a word, a smile, a different opinion, and
any other signe of undervalue’ (Hobbes, [1651] 1985, p. 185). However, unlike
Hobbesian conflicts, struggles for recognition hold the promise of a better
society. These struggles involve a triadic structure: they are waged by subjects
who draw on already institutionalized norms of mutual recognition that are
perceived as being ‘inadequately applied’ (Honneth, 2003a, p. 157) to their
respective life situations. These already well-established norms make struggles
for recognition legitimate and mark their difference from irrational,
‘Hobbesian’ desires for applause, honour or fame.
Through this double movement of the inversion of the critique of ideology
and the narrowing of the gap between the critical standards of observers and
the practical motives of participants in social life, the theory of recognition puts
the real experience of subjects back on centre stage. This distantly echoes
Adorno’s claim that every theory that fails to measure itself against the
experiences of ‘extreme horror’ suffered by the victims of twentieth-century
politics is ‘simply worthless, irrelevant and utterly trivial’ (Adorno, 2006,
p. 203), although obviously Honneth broadens the range of relevant
experiences far beyond the iconic events that Adorno had in mind. The theory
of recognition is also much more inclusive with regard to experiences of social
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suffering if we compare it with Habermas’ teleological conception which

reduces the public sphere to its function of a ‘warning system’ for political
decision-makers (Habermas, 1996, p. 359). In addition, it is worth noting that
Honneth’s approach is neutral towards the distinctions between violent and
non-violent resistance as well as between intentional and unintentional forms
of social struggle (Honneth, 1995, p. 163).
Given Honneth’s attempt to open up new vistas of understanding on the
social world, it is surprising that so far he has hardly anything to say about
possible international aspects of the struggle for recognition. He is broadening
the analytical focus to include moral experiences and impulses that occur
‘in the shadows of the political public sphere’ (Honneth, 2003a, p. 122),
whereas at the same time excluding issues pertaining to non-domestic domains
of justice. As a result of this obliviousness, international political theorists, in
turn, have shown little interest in applying the idea of a ‘struggle for
recognition’ to international politics – with the notable exceptions of
Alexander Wendt (2003), Brian Greenhill (2008) and a few others. This lack
of mutual awareness is unfortunate. Whereas the critical theory of recognition
has so far been largely limited to the analysis of domestic conflicts in advanced
liberal democracies, I believe it can also shed light on the possible meanings of
‘mutual respect’ (Brown, 2000) in international affairs.
This paper therefore deals with what I see as one of the most glaring blind
spots of the theory of recognition. I begin by examining the focus of Honneth’s
work on the autonomy and agency of ‘natural’ persons. I then proceed by
sketching the strong cosmopolitan model of the global spread of human rights
that is at the heart to what we might call Honneth’s embryonic political theory
of international relations. In the next step, I briefly discuss John Rawls’s
concept of peoples and summarize the reasons why he believes that peoples
are persons too, and deserve to be recognized as such. My claim is that
Honneth’s work lends itself to an alternative reading that is quasi-Rawlsian
and non-cosmopolitan. I conclude by showing how the scope of the theory of
recognition can be expanded so as to include international relations between
collectivities without signing on to a substantivist picture of these collectivities,
and without overstretching the analogy between domestic and international
struggles.

Interpersonal Recognition

Honneth rejects the ‘atomistic premises’ of pre-Hegelian political philosophies

and thus any methodological individualism (Honneth, 1995, p. 14). At the
centre of the theory of recognition are relations between persons and the
relations-to-self emerging from interpersonal relations. The quality of these
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relations is seen to be crucial for the understanding of wider structures of

social and political injustice. The theory starts from the proposition that
individual identity and a healthy sense of self are formed only in and through
conflictual social relations of recognition. ‘Recognition’ is defined as a reactive
behaviour that responds to valuable attributes in persons, although at the same
time constituting central aspects of personhood (Ikäheimo, 2007, pp. 233–234;
Honneth, 2007b, pp. 331–332). More specifically, the reconstruction of a
morality of equal respect (and a concomitant phenomenology of forms of
disrespect) relies on the tripartite distinction between recognition in the private
sphere, the legal sphere and the sphere of work and community life. ‘Love’
and ‘care’ allow individuals to develop a steady sense of self-confidence;
recognition that grows out of the legal guarantee of basic rights fosters self-
respect; and recognition tied to achievements and contributions to the good of
others makes people feel worthy and special, and thus cultivates their self-
esteem (Honneth, 1995, Chapter 5; Honneth, 2003a, pp. 138–150). In all of
these dimensions, there is a close connection between interpersonal relations
and relations-to-self: thus, love begets self-confidence, respect for rights begets
self-respect, and social esteem for particular qualities or achievements begets
self-esteem. Relationships of mutual recognition are analysed through the
prism of the moral psychology of natural persons.
Given this focus on natural persons and the whole range of relationships
persons can have vis-à-vis other persons, Honneth is not so much interested in
establishing general principles of justice, but in defining more broadly the
appropriate conditions for a life worth living. These conditions are to be
deduced not from ideals of citizenship, but from human nature. They are
typically explicated in terms of their consequences for the well-being of
individuals (Honneth, 2007a). This does not mean that the theory has no room
for demands of recognition put forth by collectivities. Struggles for recognition
are in fact collective struggles. Yet, unlike authors such as Wendt (2004) or
Schmid (2008), Honneth does not seem to believe that collective actions or
experiences belong to a class of its own.
In particular, Honneth tends to ignore the specificity of large-scale historical
events on persons and the societies they form. His discussion of violence in The
Struggle for Recognition is instructive in this respect. When he mentions
‘physical abuse’ and the ego-shattering experience of ‘being defencelessly at the
mercy of another subject’ (Honneth, 1995, p. 132), he does not distinguish
between isolated individual experiences and those experiences that individuals
share with countless of their fellow-citizens in the event of wars or other
emergencies. Yet, there is a difference between the loss of self-confidence
experienced by an individual victim of violence and the effect, for example, of a
massive military defeat on a civilian population – an effect that has been
described as ‘a sudden collapse of the most anxious expectations, and a
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complete crushing of self-confidence’ (Clausewitz, [1832–1834] 1976, p. 255). In

hindsight, even many survivors of the bombing campaigns against Germany in
the Second World War, and certainly their successors, have come to see the
violence unleashed against them as necessary or unavoidable, though definitely
not as welcome or just. The harrowing experience of being bombed was not
automatically perceived as an insult or a sign of disrespect, or, if so, did not
automatically damage the sense of self-worth of the victims. There are
two lessons to be drawn from this example. First, as Jonathan Seglow (2009)
rightly points out, we should distinguish more clearly between verbal and
physical aggression on the one hand, and injuries to self-respect on the other.
Individuals exhibit different degrees of resilience in the face of aggression and
other forms of intentional disrespect, and resilience can be learned.1 Second,
collective disasters lend themselves to a dynamic of reconstructive interpreta-
tions that often reshape entire societies, even though the difference of scale may
not matter to the individual victim. Although it is true that torture or rape can
shock individuals out of their most basic self-confidence, regardless of their
cultural background, it is also true that painful experiences are processed
differently in different societies, particularly if those experiences are collective
in nature (Alexander, 2003). The distinction between individual experiences
and collective behavioural trends was also stressed by Kant, who argued that
historical progress cannot be measured by the level of enlightenment of
individuals, but only by studying the efforts of humans ‘on a large scale’ (Kant,
[1784] 1991, p. 41; his italics).
Although Honneth emphasizes the history and relevance of citizenship
rights, his tendency to focus on the anthropological needs of natural persons
and their relations-to-self bears a strong resemblance to the existentialist
impulse to dismiss politics and ‘the citizen’ in favour of ‘the human being’
stripped of any membership to political communities. As early as in the 1950s,
Judith Shklar has eloquently described this powerful ‘romantic’ stream of
contemporary thought according to which

there is a very clear conflict between ‘the man’ and ‘the citizen.’ All
political institutions are only so many means of transforming the former
into the latter. All are ‘intervening abstractions’ that prevent us from
recognizing each other as individuals y All politics are mere barriers to
genuine personal relationships. If there is such a thing as a romantic
political theory today, it consists in rejecting all historically possible
forms of political life. (Shklar, 1957, pp. 146, 151)

Honneth’s theory has in fact been interpreted in a way that comes close to
Shklar’s reading of post-war political romanticism. Christopher Zurn, for
example, believes that his theory is strong in unlocking experiences of social
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suffering at the personal level, but is lacking in general explanatory power (Zurn,
2005). Others, like Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault, have pointed
to the striking ‘underdevelopment of the political’ in the theory of recognition.
They conclude, a little prematurely, as I will show, that ‘In Honneth’s theory,
recognition tends to be conceived of as a single interaction between me and you’
(Deranty and Renault, 2007, p. 99; see also McNay, 2008, p. 135).

Honneth on Human Rights

Although overall in his political-philosophical writings Honneth pays little

attention to the international dimension of the theory of recognition, he has
commented on the politics of human rights. Specifically, his paper Is
universalism a moral trap?, which was first published in German in 1994,
provides an interesting attempt at blending individualism and cosmopolitanism
in the spirit of Kant’s project of a perpetual peace (Honneth, 1997). In this text,
in which much of the wild optimism and end-of-history mood of the immediate
aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall are still palpable, Honneth draws an
analogy between ‘individuals’ and ‘nations’ (Honneth, 1997, p. 155) to explain
the prospects for moral progress in the post-Cold War world. For Honneth,
the antediluvian forms of structural animosity built into the system of states
are likely to be superseded by the international rule of law which, in turn,
mirrors and complements the rise of the rule of law within modern Western-
type societies. The new prominence of human rights signals the transition from
a politics grounded in the distinction between friends and foes to a politics
centred on the distinction between victims and perpetrators.2 Taking
inspiration from Kant’s belief in the human species’ capacity of learning,
Honneth seeks to refute neo-Hobbesian accounts that reject the politics of
global human rights as a way of ‘overburdening’ the capacities of states in an
irredeemably lawless world, in which states are forced to fend for themselves
like under-socialized humans in the state of nature. Instead he adopts a vision
of planetary social integration based on innovative regimes of global
governance and conflict resolution. He sides with those

who resolve to continue the project of a moralization of world politics y

Because new democratic movements have developed worldwide and so a
multitude of civil actors now codetermine what happens in world politics,
a politics of human rights has room for effective action for the first time
in history. A foreign policy of the worldwide implementation of human
rights as a means of peacemaking – with such a slogan we can summarize
the ideas of those who y argue for the Kantian model of international
relations. (Honneth, 1997, p. 157)
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It is not unreasonable to take the view that democratic states and movements
have played a significant part in establishing innovative regimes of inclusion
and protection that reach across state boundaries. However, some caution is
needed before assenting to Honneth’s claim that these developments give
rise to an unprecedented and unequivocally positive model of ethical
foreign policy.
Of course, there can be no doubt that over the last decades we have
witnessed an enormous expansion of human rights norms and assertions. For
example, human rights are no longer only for citizens but also for non-citizens
such as undocumented immigrants. They have also ceased to be the domain
of liberal elites in the West and have taken root in countless non-Western
regions and movements. In addition, the old separation between the law
of war and the law of peace has been gradually replaced by legal opinions
and treaties containing clear stipulations regarding ‘non-derogable’ human
rights obligations which cannot be suspended even in times of war or public
emergencies.
Yet, this expansion into ever-new fields and dimensions of social life is not
accompanied by an increasingly robust consensus on the meaning of human
rights. On the contrary, the more the universe of human rights expands, the less
these rights seem to work as an agreed-upon frame of reference. This negatively
affects the ability to ease conflicts between groups and nations whose common
humanity has been invoked in numerous human rights treaties. The situation is
likely to become more complicated as different categories of human rights
cease to be pitted against each other along the familiar fault lines of East vs
West or North vs South – fault lines that might soon be rendered obsolete by
globalization. The worldwide row that erupted over a Danish newspaper
publishing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in October 2005 is a case in
point. This event revealed, among other things, a growing sense of uncertainty
even within Western societies about competing notions of recognition and
tolerance as well as unprecedented tensions between UN human rights officials
and a small Scandinavian democracy.3
Honneth uncritically accepts the notion that human rights automatically
‘trump’ all other rights and concerns. More importantly, he underestimates the
contested nature of human rights themselves, which are far from being a
neutral ground for the solution of international crises. Quite the opposite is
true. Interpretive conflicts over the meaning and applicability of human rights
tend to drive policy-makers, activists and peoples apart. Although Honneth
correctly observes that human rights are regularly ‘placed above the basic
rights codified in the individual nations’ in order to ‘recognize the individual
person as a subject of international law’ (Honneth, 1997, pp. 170–171), it is not
at all obvious that this is always and necessarily a good thing. On reflection, his
argument invites dissent on two points of critical importance. The first point
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concerns the empirical consequences of the inherently contested nature of

human rights and hence of the legitimacy of intervening in other states (by
whatever means) in their name. If the thesis is correct that there is no universal
consensus on the meaning of human rights, then the elevation of these rights
above the sovereignty of nations would divide the world rather than uniting it
around common ideals. If unacknowledged, the divisive nature of the language
of human rights becomes even more pronounced. This is why critics have
highlighted the paradox that the discourse of international human rights, far
from establishing the global rule of law, has a tendency to make foreign policy
more arbitrary and temperamental (Cunliffe, 2007, p. 53).
My second point concerns the theoretical core of Honneth’s brief discussion
of post-Cold War international affairs. His account is predicated on the
assumption that only individual human beings are relevant units of moral
concern. On this view, states or peoples are little more than what Shklar quoted
as ‘intervening abstractions’ that merely complicate the realization of respectful
interpersonal relations. To be sure, for Honneth states can be promoters of, as
well as obstacles to, the realization of human rights. Yet, the cardinal point is
that they have no moral standing of their own, as they can only act as
mediators or conduits between the administrator of the international law of
human rights, who are firmly placed ‘above’ the states, and individuals who
can claim equal basic rights both within and without the boundaries of their
respective national envelopes.
In short, Honneth regards individual human rights as templates for the
progressive institutionalization of the recognition principle of equal legal
respect on a worldwide scale. His argument converges with the view held by
many theorists of international justice that massive human rights violations
entitle outsiders to intervene in other states’ internal affairs on behalf of the
victims. The language of human rights implies the notion of ‘international
responsibility’ (Honneth, 1997, p. 172). However, it is a thin line between
placing an ill-defined but sacrosanct set of human rights above individual
nations and legitimizing unaccountable international officials as the ultimate
arbiters of the global order. In my view, cosmopolitanism becomes
unacceptably strong when it postulates a broad and vague set of goals elevated
to the sacred status of human rights, while at the same time endorsing human
rights as the doctrinal basis of legitimate outside interventions into other
peoples’ affairs. Strong political cosmopolitans hold that in ‘an ideal world,
international interventions, military and otherwise, would be able to fix all
varieties of domestic dysfunctions’ (Lu, 2007, p. 949) – a view that denies
national societies the autonomy and the responsibility to define and ‘fix’ their
own problems. Here cosmopolitanism borders on benevolent imperialism. By
remaining vague about the scope of human rights and the moral standing of
peoples, Honneth’s text is not immune to a similar reading.
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But even if we exclude such an unfavourable reading as unwarranted, other

problems remain. Any kind of cosmopolitanism favours other-regarding
policies in which outsiders channel resources to distant strangers, either
because they believe themselves to be morally or causally responsible for the
bad situation those strangers are in, or because they are the only ones who can
remedy the situation. Accordingly, Honneth hopes to see powerful democracies
and international agencies ‘enforcing the recognition of human rights’ through
advocacy, sanctions and ‘soft power’ (Honneth, 1997, p. 173). However, this
model sits uneasily with his general theory of recognition in which moral
progress is described not as a result of benevolent international interventions,
but rather of moral claims made by disrespected subjects themselves who draw
on already firmly established principles of recognition (Honneth, 2003a, pp.
144–145). One difficulty arises from Honneth’s premise of a close connection
between social suffering and action. He insists that the experience of disrespect
‘must be regarded as the motivational basis of all social conflicts’ (Honneth,
2003a, p. 157; italics added). But if this is true, how can we account for the
motivations of people who act on behalf of distant strangers without having
themselves gone through experiences of disrespect? The flip side of Honneth’s
making the move from suffering to political action too easy is the closely
related inclination to ignore the role of non-suffering spectators and how they,
too, can be prompted to action (Heins, 2008, pp. 27–32).
Another sort of problem emerges when we consider Honneth’s decision to
posit the existence of two types of society, one of which achieves the
institutionalization of principles of recognition on its own while the other needs
foreign intervention. This notion seems to be based on the assumption that the
recognition principles of individual achievement, legal equality and personal
love are ultimately uncontroversial and universally accepted. But this is far
from certain. Struggles for recognition are waged by subjects who believe that,
‘with respect to their own situations or particularities, the recognition
principles considered legitimate are incorrectly or inadequately applied’
(Honneth, 2003a, p. 157; italics added). With regard to human rights, Honneth
makes the similar claim that the only problem is that of ‘applying human rights’
(Honneth, 1997, p. 172; italics added) fairly and efficiently. This analogy,
however, is misleading. Human rights have given rise to more profound
struggles that are not only fought over the correct application, but also over the
very substance of these rights. Recent controversies over free speech, for
example, have shown that one and the same activity can be interpreted both as
an exercise and a violation of human rights. Contemporary struggles in this
field are thus about the implementation as well as about the justification of
rights. The fact that there are occasionally or perhaps even increasingly ‘calls
for intervention’ (Honneth, 1997, p. 171) from distant societies does not imply
that citizens in these societies desire or accept the same set of enforceable rights
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that are deeply rooted in other societies, although that is the way Honneth
appears to frame it. In a more recent paper on Kant’s philosophy of history, he
comes close to suggesting that humanity would arrive at the same insights if
its collective learning process was not ‘halted or interrupted through the
instruments of power’ (Honneth, 2007c, p. 15). Here again, politics and power
are viewed merely as disruptive factors responsible for the non-emergence of an
ideal world.

Rawls on Respect for Peoples

An interesting, if controversial, alternative to this exercise in possible world

semantics is contained in the little monograph The Law of Peoples by John
Rawls. As is well-known, Rawlsian international theory has drawn much
criticism from cosmopolitans who have accused him, among other things, of
acquiescing in lower or less comprehensive standards of human rights
protection for what he calls non-liberal or ‘decent hierarchical peoples’ (Rawls,
1999, pp. 62–70). Although this critique may be justified, it misses the more
important point that, for Rawls, peoples should be taken as persons too, and
need to be recognized as something more than, or different from, mere
collections of individuals. Prioritizing peoples as persons means two things:
first, taking them as no less real than individual humans (contra the ‘romantics’
quoted by Judith Shklar), and second, endowing them with an innate moral
superiority over their leaders (Faulkner, 2007, pp. 198–210).
Rawls’s rationale for putting peoples first in his theory of international
institutions is based not on his theory of justice, but on his concept of political
legitimacy (Wenar, 2002). Standards of legitimacy are generally weaker than
standards of justice. They are met when citizens, in spite of their objections,
accept the policies of their governments, or when philosophers consider these
governments and other basic institutions to be, if not just, ‘at least decent’
(Rawls, 1999, p. 126). This idea can also be phrased in terms of representation.
A legitimate government does not cease to represent all citizens merely because
several of them do not agree with its policy. The reason is that legitimate
governments represent the people as a whole, not just individuals and their
preferences. At the core of representation lies a mechanism of authorization
that either consists in free and equal elections, as in the case of liberal peoples,
or in some sort of hierarchical consultation, as in the case of non-liberal
peoples. The other side of the story is that for Rawls, as for Hobbes, peoples
exist only by virtue of being represented and impersonated by living human
beings. Peoples do not exist before, or independent from, sovereign statehood.
For Rawls, peoples-as-states are the ultimate units of a theory of the
international institution in the same way as individual persons are the ultimate
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units of a theory of domestic institution. In this specific sense, he makes use of

the ‘domestic analogy’, by which students of international relations mean the
application of ideas based on domestic experiences to the discussion of
international affairs (Suganami, 1989). But Rawls uses the domestic analogy
only as a heuristic device to uncover similarities and differences between
domestic and international principles, and not as a tool for defending the idea
of a world body that governs all peoples in the way sovereign states govern and
represent their individual citizens. In fact, the whole point of Rawls’s
theorizing is that the Law of Peoples does not emulate the standards of
domestic justice prevalent in liberal societies, and that international society
must be considered sui generis. The domestic and the international are
not comparable, not because the former can be ordered according to principles
of justice, whereas the latter is doomed to remain in a perennial state of
nature, but because international order emerges without an overarching
central authority.
Here we touch on the main argument for the prioritization of peoples in
international theory: there is no agreed-upon set of authoritative political
institutions and their supporting belief systems – what Rawls calls a ‘public
political culture’ (Rawls, 1993, p. 13) – that spans the entire globe; nor is there
a global equivalent to the primacy of individuals that is commonplace in liberal
domestic societies. Rather, the global public political culture itself, to the extent
it exists, privileges peoples. This is not meant to suggest that international
relations take place in a separate sphere untouched by interpersonal relations.
In practical terms, the primacy of peoples in international life means, for
instance, that whenever individuals cross an international border, their
passports and visas and the privileges associated with them, and not domestic
standards of legal equality, become all-important in the interaction
between border officials and travellers. This is not to deny that citizens from
different countries increasingly connect with each other for all kinds of
purposes. Yet, the facts of globalization, which in recent times have inspired
much sociological speculation, have in no way weakened the normative
claims to sovereignty, self-determination and territorial integrity – norms that
have in fact even been strengthened in the past half century (Holsti, 2004,
Chapters 3 and 4).
The primacy of peoples (and thus of states) can be demonstrated by looking
at international human rights law. It is inaccurate to argue that human rights
treaties embody a higher law above the world of states. Rather, they are first of
all the result of self-commitments made by sovereign states. National
governments incur specific obligations vis-à-vis their citizens only by ratifying
international treaties and protocols. It also bears emphasizing that belonging
to a people organized as a state is itself a human right and one of the normative
fixtures in the otherwise uncohesive global political culture.4 If concepts of
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peoplehood are part of ‘the deep tendencies and inclinations of the social
world’ (Rawls, 1999, p. 128), and if we accept his aim of developing a ‘realistic
utopia’ (Rawls, 1999, pp. 11–23) in tune with those tendencies and inclinations,
then peoples, or non-individualistically conceived political communities,
deserve a central place in contemporary theory.
These thoughts can be distilled into the following two propositions. First,
even individuals from liberal societies prefer to belong to a liberal people rather
than living as stateless ‘global citizens’. This does not necessarily mean that
citizens from liberal peoples are willing to submerge their identities and desires
into those of the collective – like the small figures on the title page of Hobbes’s
Leviathan who gaze up towards the head of the colossus which they compose.
It means that they prefer to be governed by representatives who can be held
accountable, not by ‘Guardians, or Curators’ (Hobbes, [1651] 1985, p. 219).
Second, regardless of what individuals from non-liberal societies prefer, the
coercive institutions that build the framework of liberal societies cannot be
transposed to a global level without arousing the wrath of non-liberal peoples:

If liberal peoples require that all societies be liberal and subject those that
are not to politically enforced sanctions, then decent nonliberal peoples –
if there are such – will be denied a due measure of respect by liberal
peoples. This lack of respect may wound the self-respect of decent
nonliberal peoples as peoples, as well as their individual members, and
may lead to great bitterness and resentment. (Rawls, 1999, p. 61)

Here Rawls moves from the idea of the primacy of peoples to the closely related
idea of the personhood of peoples that we already find in Kant, for whom the
idea of the state as ‘moral personality’ [moralische Person] is key to his rejection
of colonialism (Kant, [1795] 1991, p. 94). In the same vein, Rawls introduces
state-based peoples as actors who honour agreements, remember and work
through historical traumas and insist on ‘receiving from other peoples a proper
respect and recognition of their equality’ (Rawls, 1999, p. 35). Given this state
of affairs, withholding respect from non-liberal peoples and their representa-
tives is considered unjustified as long as non-liberal peoples do not degenerate
into outlaw states. Among other reasons, non-liberal peoples deserve respect
because they protect human rights, even if they sign up only to a slimmed-
down version of the human rights catalogue (Rawls, 1999, pp. 65–67, 78–81).
At a more fundamental level, Rawls is convinced that both liberal and decent
peoples are by their very moral nature a force against what he calls ‘the great
evils of human history’ (Rawls, 1999, p. 126) such as unjust war, religious
persecution or slavery.
As a result of this modified moral geography, the concept of international
intervention becomes more complex. Violations of human rights are still
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 Internationalizing the critical theory of recognition

considered a legitimate trigger of outside interventions in the domestic affairs

of other societies, but they are defined restrictively as ‘a special class of urgent
rights’ (Rawls, 1999, p. 79). By carefully distinguishing human rights from the
full array of constitutional and other rights, Rawls limits the justificatory basis
for international interventions. For him, liberal states have no right to invoke
human rights as a means to iron out differences between societies. Most
importantly, Rawls forces us to think about the validity of a multidirectional,
less hierarchical conception of intervention. On this view, non-liberal peoples
may have good reasons, too, for intervening in outlaw states or ‘burdened
societies’ (Rawls, 1999, pp. 105–113). Also, they have no lesser right to publicly
criticize liberal peoples than vice versa.

Peoples in Recognition Theory

I began my discussion with a summary of some features of Honneth’s work

because he gives an account of human rights and international affairs that, if it
were acceptable, would remove many of the difficulties that contemporary
international theory faces. By mapping the evolutionary narrative of liberal
modernity onto a global scale, Honneth draws on the domestic analogy to
make sense of the international. However, this approach has serious difficulties
of its own. Some of these difficulties were addressed by the late Rawls whose
Law of Peoples acknowledges the specificity and irreducibility of the
international, and therefore represents, in my view, a big improvement over
a theory which conceives of international relations as mere extensions of
domestic relations. In the remainder of this paper, I want to offer a fuller
reading of Honneth’s writings with the aim of integrating elements of the
Rawlsian international theory into the theory of recognition.
On the face of it, there is no trace of anything close to Rawls’s concept of
peoples in the deep structure of Honneth’s theory. In his ‘Formal Conception
of Ethical Life’ in which he outlines the hypothetical terminus of all successful
struggles for recognition, Honneth focuses on the general prerequisites for
complete ‘individual self-determination’ and the ‘personal integrity of subjects’
(Honneth, 1995, pp. 174–175; italics added). This utopia stands in stark
contrast to the idea of particular peoples seeking recognition as identifiable,
bounded, self-determining political communities. At the same time, however,
Honneth appears to be aware that the very conceptualization of different forms
of interpersonal recognition always presupposes a horizon of collectivity. For
instance, in explicating the history of the form of recognition found in legal
respect, he argues that civil and political rights need to be supplemented by
social welfare rights, because only these latter rights allow citizens to develop a
sense of ‘‘full-fledged’ membership in a political community’ (Honneth, 1995,
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 Heins

p. 116). Something similar holds for social esteem: individual human beings
desire to have their achievements or ways of life valued ‘within their
community’ (Honneth, 1995, p. 134). Again, in his debate with Nancy Fraser,
Honneth organizes his entire argument around the question of how ‘moral
progress can be evaluated within such [liberal-capitalist] societies’ (Honneth,
2003a, p. 185). On all these occasions, struggles for recognition are fought for
autonomy as well as for inclusion. But inclusion in what? Here the theory
remains conspicuously silent. Honneth consistently takes the outer boundaries
of ‘communities’ and ‘societies’ as given.
In order to insert ‘peoples’ into the theory of recognition, we would have to
show how belonging to a people differs from membership in families,
workplace communities or cultural minority groups that have already been
extensively discussed by recognition theorists; also, we would have to explain
why this difference matters from a theoretical point of view. To address these
desiderata, we need to reflect more deeply on the link between ‘peoples’ and
motivational sources of social suffering and resistance. What we discover when
we examine the collective dimension of the self-understanding of subjects is
that the need to belong to a particular people is incomparably stronger than the
need to be an employee of a particular company or a member of a particular
association. It is for this reason that the need to belong to a people has given
rise to specific human rights such as the rights to ‘nationality’ and ‘self-
determination’, as noted earlier. Of course, like other needs, the need to belong
is not felt where it is being met, which, however, is no reason not to take it into
account. It is easy to demonstrate that the basic aspiration of being part of a
people shows no sign of disappearing in modern societies, regardless of the fact
that traditionalist sentiments about one’s own nation that have come under
attack from a variety of sources. Even in advanced liberal democracies there is
a sense of moral urgency surrounding the desire to belong that is epitomized by
the massive mobilization in situations where the secession from, or splitting of,
a people is at stake.5 Citizens feel strongly about whether regional boundaries
within their countries should be turned into international boundaries (or the
other way round), as well as about the fixing of these boundaries.
Furthermore, there is ample evidence that citizens desire to be recognized by
their compatriots as belonging to the same people. Imagine a situation in which
a German (or any other) man, not knowing the nationality of his interlocutor,
praises a dark-skinned fellow-citizen for her full command of the national
language: ‘Fancy that! You speak just like a German!’ I believe that as a result
of this remark, even if it was made in good faith, the dark-skinned German is
likely to suffer a moment of diminished self-respect that may or may not be
perceived as part of a larger pattern of life experiences. The reason is, of course,
that the seemingly innocuous remark would be taken as a coded way of
expressing a general expectation about how people should look if they are to
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 Internationalizing the critical theory of recognition

pass as ‘real’ Germans. As a consequence, the desire to be counted as a member

of the political community remains unfulfilled.
In Rawlsian terms this desire to belong to a people is a ‘principle-dependent
desire’ based on strong legitimate expectations about how members of a
community ‘are to conduct themselves in their relations with one another’
(Rawls, 1993, p. 83). Rawls infers the intrinsic value of belonging to a people
from the observation that this kind of belonging is actually valued by real
subjects – a conclusion that has been supported and re-emphasized by David
Miller who insists that a meaningful international theory must take individuals
as they truly are, not as one might wish them to be (Miller, 2007, p. 38).
From the perspective of Honneth’s theory, these considerations are relevant
because they show that the category of ‘peoples’ is no mere abstraction
introduced artificially into interpersonal relations, but is refracted in the
consciousness and habitual responses of individuals. Individuals feel the dual
need to belong to a self-governing political community and to obtain
recognition for their belonging. Belonging is a particular quality with which
individuals are seeking to feed their sense of self-worth. Insofar as the desire to
belong is closely tied to the willingness to contribute to the good of fellow-
citizens or the common good, it elicits esteem from those same fellow-citizens.
Can the sheer fact of belonging to a people be a reason enough to demand
some kind of appreciation, even if those who expect to be appreciated in no
way contribute to the good of others? In modern societies such a demand is not
rationally justifiable. If it were, belonging to a people would constitute a
‘fourth principle of recognition’ (Honneth, 2003a, p. 161) apart from respect
for rights, love and esteem. Citizens would be entitled to some kind of positive
feedback beyond legal respect and regardless of their cooperation within the
community for the sheer fact of ‘being’ members. Honneth has rejected this
notion of a fourth principle of recognition in his discussion of multiculturalist
group rights (Honneth, 2003a, pp. 161–170), and it strikes me as even less
plausible for members of peoples in general. Seeking and valuing membership
in a people can be translated into already existing forms of recognition: the
principle of esteem that justifies differential rewards based on merit for the
cooperative members of society as well as of the principle of respect geared to
expectations of equal treatment within a community of citizens.
But if peoplehood does not affect basic assumptions about the fields and
media of recognition, why bother to integrate it into recognition theory? My
answer is that peoplehood is special because it forms the interface between the
domestic and international. Consequently, it also forms the interface between
types of struggles that follow different ‘moral grammars’. Struggles for the self-
constitution of peoples and struggles among peoples and states differ from
domestic struggles because they do not take place against the backdrop of a
universally shared, robust public political culture. There are very few global
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 Heins

equivalents of the principles of recognition identified by Honneth; among those

few is, significantly, the legal principle of the self-determination of peoples.
However, the meaning of this principle remains vague because peoples do not
pre-exist in collections of natural persons, but are the result of struggles over
power and ideas for which there are no uncontroversial normative standards
that would offer guidance in adjudicating claims to self-determination. The
recognition of new peoples or states has therefore been called ‘not a matter
governed by law but a question of policy’ (Lauterpacht, 1947, p. 1; see also
Greenhill, 2008, pp. 362–363).
The question of what kind of recognition peoples (as opposed to natural
persons) owe each other is therefore inherently bound up with the question of
how practices of recognition play a part in constituting those peoples in the
first place. To make some headway in answering these questions, it is
worthwhile turning once more to Honneth’s discussion of whether cultural
minority groups within a larger society are right to demand some sort of special
esteem from outsiders for the way in which they are ‘different’ from those same
outsiders (Honneth, 2003a, pp. 161–170). I suggest taking Honneth’s line of
argument one crucial step further. Imagine a self-affirming minority
population within a society and then throw into the mix the emotionally
charged idea of a homeland. Given outstanding political skills, a favourable
social dynamics and the presence of powerful third-party supporters abroad,
such a population can eventually reach a juncture where it begins to redescribe
itself as a ‘people’. Honneth stops short of examining historical or hypothetical
cases in which the positive self-conception of groups, perhaps partly as a result
of not being shared by others, gives rise to the crafting of foundation myths,
attempts to define one’s own citizenship, and ultimately struggles for secession,
a redrawing of boundaries and a declaration of new statehood. In many cases,
these struggles can be interpreted as a way in which stigmatized and oppressed
groups seek to ‘maintain a kind of collective self-respect’ (Honneth, 1995,
p. 156), as the historical examples alluded to by Honneth – Zionism and
anti-colonialism – demonstrate. Synthesizing Honneth and Rawls, one can
summarize this line of reasoning by asserting that new peoples emerge from the
fusion of collective self-love or self-esteem with the establishment, if they are
lucky, of reasonably just, or decent, governmental institutions based on a
shared conception of justice (Rawls, 1999, pp. 23–24).
Although the recognition of peoples has much in common with the
recognition of cultural minority groups in domestic settings, there are at least
two important differences. First, peoples do not generally demand or expect
the positive evaluation of their way of life from outsiders, although individual
citizens typically take pride in the achievements and peculiarities of their
nations, and tend to advertise them to outsiders. But the point of the self-
constitution of peoples is that the dynamics of positive self-images becomes to
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 Internationalizing the critical theory of recognition

a large extent independent from the value-statements of outsiders. Second,

peoples do not appeal, at least not under normal circumstances, to outsiders
for funds or other measures that are essential for maintaining and developing
the community, very much unlike cultural minorities in democratic societies
(Honneth, 2003a, p. 164).
The end-point of political movements of collective self-constitution is the
struggle for a special form of legal recognition, which is international
recognition, followed by the establishment of diplomatic relations. Ideally,
international recognition will be granted only if certain minimal requirements
of constitutional justice, or decency, as Rawls says, are satisfied. In a first
move, international recognition is exercised unilaterally by sovereigns who
thereby admit an emerging state as a member in international society. This, in
turn, is the precondition for states to be able to communicate with each other
and to cultivate the space in between them, the ‘inter’ of international relations.
International recognition and related practices are not on the radar of
recognition theory, as it stands today, although Honneth has recently begun to
ponder a ‘turn to instances of generalized recognition’ in a way that involves
not just individuals, but also institutions (Honneth, 2007b, p. 345). Yet, he
makes clear that institutions are taken into account only as sources, not as
receivers or addressees of recognition. He chooses to ignore peoples and their
basic institutions, although they, too, are involved in specific struggles for
recognition. To the extent they have established themselves as states and
members of the United Nations, peoples are treated as equals by being cast as
legal persons analogous to individuals in domestic society. As a result,
whenever intellectuals or politicians talk about other peoples and states as not
being worthy of recognition, they can be sure to trigger a public uproar.6
Peoples-as-states are persistent beings only if they are recognized as such by
other peoples-as-states. To call for the denial of international recognition
therefore means taking these collectivities no longer as persons with rights and
duties, but the international analogue of ‘mere animals’ (Ikäheimo, 2007).

Conclusion

Can Honneth’s distinction between three types of interpersonal recognition

(love, respect and esteem), each of which is conducive to the constitution of
autonomous selves, be applied to international relations between peoples? Is
there a sense in which the identity of political communities, in analogy to the
identity of persons, is constituted and changed in and through struggles for
recognition?
The analogy does obviously not work in the case of recognition in the form
of love. In this regard, peoples are very much unlike individual humans, if only
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 Heins

because no one has ever touched or talked to a people or a state. Peoples have
no bodies and it is doubtful in what sense they have consciousness, even if there
may be things such as collective intentions (Wendt, 2004).
The case of respect is more complex. Legal recognition occurs both at the
interpersonal and the international level. Like individual humans, peoples-as-
states are legal personalities invested with specific rights and duties, and they
deserve to be respected as such by their fellow sovereigns. In this sense, we can
indeed speak of a strict analogy between persons and peoples, or between
‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ persons.7 However, I have two caveats. First, unlike
citizens in a democracy, not all states are legally equal. As Amy Eckert (2006,
p. 848) argues contra Rawls, some states are Great Powers with special rights
and responsibilities. These privileges are routinely accepted by middle and
small powers because they are perceived as serving the maintenance of
international order. The veto power conferred to permanent members of the
UN Security Council is an expression of this situation of legal hierarchy.
Second, we must distinguish between the diplomatic act of international
recognition of a people as state and the persistent attitude of recognition that
political theorists have in mind. Recognition theory is as clueless as
international law when it comes to evaluating competing claims of collectivities
to sovereign statehood. The act of international recognition differs from an
attitude of respect in that it hardly implies any positive value-statement about
others; the requirements for being recognized as a state and accepted as a
member of the United Nations are minimal and do not even include the
protection of basic human rights. In international affairs recognition only
means that states grant each other ‘a right to exist’ (Greenhill, 2008, p. 363).
Still, once a self-constituted people has become an independent state, the ethics
of recognition does not allow for measures that threaten the constitutional
independence achieved by that people. This is a concession to practicality, not
a move to enshrine sovereign statehood in a universal conception of ethical life.
In the world we live in, sovereign statehood is sought and cherished by humans
not as an end in itself, but as a means to fend off all three forms of disrespect
listed by Honneth: threats against the integrity of their bodies, their rights as
citizens and their way of life (Honneth, 1995, Chapter 6).
The third way of valuing others is showing them esteem for their particular
qualities, capacities or achievements. Here again, relations of esteem seem to
exist as much between peoples as between persons. Individuals constantly
make value-statements about the real or imagined qualities of neighbouring or
distant peoples. One could also argue that peoples-as-states deserve recogni-
tion, if they contribute to the good of others, for example by providing public
goods such as open markets and military security (in the case of Great Powers)
or by signing treaties that benefit others as much as themselves. Of course,
international society differs from domestic societies in that it has not
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institutionalized some kind of achievement principle that would allow us to

measure the contributions of some peoples to the good of others, or the
common good. The more important question is, however, whether interna-
tional relations of esteem have the kind of transformative power on collective
identities and patterns of conflict that theorists from Hegel to Honneth have
attributed to the intersubjective dynamics of recognition. In other words, do
collectivities actively seek and struggle for esteem in the process of defining
themselves? I offer three tentative answers. My first answer is yes. Great
Powers, in particular, have often advertised themselves – their constitutional
ideas, products, opportunities and way of life – in order to shape the beliefs,
desires and value-statements of foreign peoples. It can be argued that the very
standing or status of certain Great Powers was gained in a process of
generating esteem from others. Second, at a more abstract level it is also true
that the very point of the self-constitution of peoples is to uncouple the
fabrication of a positive collective self-image from the opinions of mankind. In
relations between peoples, there is no direct link between the denial of esteem
and a damaged sense of self-worth. The kind of recognition sought by
individuals and groups within a state is incongruent with the kind of
recognition states try to obtain from each other. Third, the struggle for esteem
among peoples and governments is shot through with struggles for honour
and prestige – categories that are often wrongly lumped together under the
same umbrella of ‘recognition’ or ‘respect’. Honneth’s contention that the
‘premodern concept of honor’ has disappeared in favour of its twin modern
successors ‘legal respect’ and ‘social esteem’ (Honneth, 2003a, pp. 140–141)
may be true for liberal-capitalist societies, but does not equally apply to
international relations between peoples. In international life the struggle for
recognition is always amalgamated with a politics of hierarchy between
incumbents and challengers. This is in fact one of the lessons international
theorists can take away from the critical theory of recognition. Like their
domestic counterparts, international conflicts, which are apparently fought
over power interests alone, often have a moral core. This moral core, however,
is itself spurious, and it takes special thinking tools to study the peculiar alloy
of egalitarian recognition and hierarchical honour characterizing the relations
between peoples.

Acknowledgements

I thank two anonymous referees for their unusually helpful comments on

the first draft of this paper. The paper also benefited from discussions
with Jacob Levy, Heikki Ikäheimo, Mathias Risse, Leslie de Meulles and
Xiangzhen Wang.
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 Heins

Notes

1 Think of the SERE (‘Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape’) programme of the US military
that was designed, among other things, to increase the resistance of possible future prisoners of
war against various forms of duress and abuse including sexual assault.
2 This shift from the old binary of friends and foes, or victors and vanquished, to the new binary of
perpetrators and victims was already introduced by Adorno, who believed that not political
enmity but the situation of being ‘persecuted [is] a typical fate in our time’ (Adorno, 2006, p. 18).
For more on some institutional ramifications of this shift, see Heins (2008, Chapters 2 and 3).
3 Denmark was rebuked for its ‘intransigent defense of unlimited freedom of expression’ at the
expense of ‘religious freedom’ and international ‘religious harmony’. See Commission on Human
Rights, ‘Situation of Muslims and Arab peoples in various parts of the world’ (Special
Rapporteur Doudou Diène), UN Economic and Social Council, E/CN.4/2006/17, 13 February
2006, pp. 10–11.
4 See, for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Art. 15.1: ‘Everyone has the right
to a nationality’, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Art. 1.1: ‘All
peoples have the right of self-determination’.
5 In the referendum on sovereignty and secession from Canada in Quebec on 30 October 1995, the
turnout was 93.5 per cent.
6 A recent example is the Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder who, in August 2006, declared in the
conservative paper Aftenposten: ‘We no longer recognize the state of Israel’. He later explained
himself by adding that he didn’t use the term ‘recognition’ in the international legal sense, but in
a ‘moral’ sense (quoted in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 14 August 2006, p. 38).
7 I am using scare quotes here to indicate my awareness of John Dewey’s argument against this
very distinction. His point was that, ‘put roughly, ‘person’ signifies what law makes it signify’.
Seen in this light, there are no ‘natural’ persons; nor is there anything unreal about ‘artificial’
persons (Dewey, 1926, pp. 655, 669).

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Date submitted: 6 May 2008

Date accepted: 29 August 2008

170 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 9, 2, 149–170