The literature on de facto states challenges the conventional identification of states by legal recognition, proposing to identify states based on their effectiveness instead. Yet, as I argue in this paper, rather than turning the tables on recognition, the de facto state challenge ultimately reveals all state identification in International Relations and international law to be essentially indeterminate. This lacuna, I suggest, is not an accidental omission, but an expression of the foundational paradox of modern political order that is rooted in the intertwined ontology of the state system and the individual states constituting it, with each presupposing the other. As a result, the opposition between empirical facts, political decisions, and legal norms invoked in attempts to identify states cannot but remain irresolvable. This should not be regarded as a problem to be overcome, however, but as a source of social order. Although states cannot be substantively identified, any effort to do so in practice naturalizes the state as the very form through which we articulate and shape political claims, conflicts, and settlements. In performatively enacting states precisely at the contested margins, state identification thus both invokes and (re-)produces the statist international as the central imaginary of modern political order.
While celebrated for bringing peace and prosperity to the region, European integration has been recently challenged by various internal and external crises that call the progressivist narrative of ever closer—and larger—union into question. Torn between regional community and global society, particularism and cosmopolitanism, and politics and technocracy, the European Union appears beset by fundamental tensions. In search of a different theoretical perspective on “the crisis,” some commentators have drawn on Carl Schmitt’s political theory to emphasize key issues concerning political decisions, identities, and boundaries in Europe. Yet, Schmitt comes with his own blind spots. For the purpose of a critical engagement with Schmitt’s potential insights and their limits, this article contrasts his approach with that of his contemporary Alexandre Kojève, who envisioned the integration of world society through economy, law, technology, and administration, a perspective not unfamiliar to the original story of European integration. In reconsidering the dialectic between Schmitt’s and Kojève’s positions, this article goes beyond their apparent contradictions and discusses attempts by both authors to reconcile the opposition, from Kojève’s move to Empires to Schmitt’s theory of the union, thereby illuminating deep-seated dilemmas of contemporary European politics which fundamentally condition its trajectory between contestation and re-constitution.
International law is classically based on a system of states whose members it attempts to identify by virtue of their effectiveness, their recognition by other states, and their creation in accordance with the rules of international law. In this article, I illustrate the indeterminacy of these three dimensions and argue that assessments of individual state creations are instead necessarily based on blunt, but silent, ontological commitments to any potential state's full presence or absence. While the 'great debate' between declaratory and constitutive doctrines of recognition has emphasized, but not finally determined, the ontology of the state, attempts to find compromises between material effectiveness and constitutive recognition as well as the turn towards the proper legal regulation of state creation have only bracketed and invisibilized its decisive role. The deconstruction of state identifications reveals an essentially empty state ontology that confronts scholars and practitioners with the predicament of having to ultimately presuppose any particular state's existence or its absence. This not only allows for reflecting on the stakes of individual assessments but also shows how all state identifications inevitably reproduce the hegemonic image of an exclusive and neatly delineated state system that brings its unruly fringes under control time and again.
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