Recognition of the Poor on the International and Global Levels. On Dilemmas of Axel Honneth’s Theory

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.