Statehood, Self-Determination and Recognition

The idea that international law’s primary function is to regulate the relations among states has long been an axiomatic feature of the discipline. Yet this apparently straightforward description veils a longstanding problem. In one direction, the existence of a society of independent states appears to be a necessary presupposition—something that has to precede the identification of rules of international law, as produced through the mutual interaction of its members. In another, however, states are clearly products of international law themselves, whose status would have no meaning in the absence of of a prior set of rules to determine which political communities can rightfully claim the prerogatives of sovereignty. This defining paradox has shaped numerous key debates concerning the character of statehood (whether factual or normative), the implications of self-determination (whether determined or determining), of recognition (whether declaratory or constitutive) and beyond. Yet these are not merely abstract, theoretical debates. On the contrary, it was during the concrete process in which European imperial control was established over the Americas and much of Asia, Africa and the Pacific that the model of the European nation-state came to be defined and exported as the principal mode of political organization for all peoples everywhere in the world. This is to prompt a series of reflections. Why has the normative ‘pull’ (and material ‘push’) of an institution whose origins lie in the very specific historical, geographical, and cultural context of sixteenth-century Western Europe, proved to be so irresistible? What, if anything, changed with the emergence of right of ‘all peoples’ to self-determination in the mid-twentieth century? In an era of acute transnational inequality, instability, and violence, what can explain the continued enthusiasm for ‘secession’ as an antidote to the pathologies of statehood?