Survival and status in the liberal international order: the grantors of recognition

Abstract

This article focuses on the supply side of status recognition in the liberal international order (LIO). The order’s liberal milieu breeds hierarchies among states, which in turn generate certain exigencies for recognition. Although states receive ‘thin’ recognition, the order fails to structurally acknowledge their worth, value and uniqueness, or ‘thick’ recognition. This inconsistency lies at the heart of the order’s recognition regime and serves as a source of frustration and revisionism. Since recognition needs are not saturated systemically, an opening emerges for non-systemic grants of recognition, which are mostly conferred by a select core of liberal states. I unpack the said inconsistency in the LIO’s recognition regime and concentrate on the production of non-systemic grants of recognition and their practical implications. I identify the non-systemic grants of recognition as an effective, yet problematic characteristic of the recognition regime because they further exacerbate hierarchies based on a specific understanding of merit. In operationalizing the process of status recognition in the particular milieu of the LIO, the piece introduces a heuristic framework for qualitatively assessing the perceived functional worth of states and provides empirical examples.