The Politics of Recognition in a Contested Neighbourhood

While it has been asserted that “the formation of new states is a matter of fact, not law" (Crawford 1976) only explicit recognition is able to allow for territorial entities to become full-fledged members of the international community. Despite the existence of legal criteria the “recognition of states is not a matter governed by law but a question of policy” (Lauterpacht 1947). During the last decades a new understanding of statehood has developed and the creation of new states differs significantly from the practice codified in the Montevideo Convention (territory, population, government) in favour of more normative considerations (democracy, human rights, minority protection), often abandoning considerations of effectiveness and stability. Thus, the willingness to recognize entities as states tells more about the values and interests of recognizing states than the attributes of the recognized entities (Eckert 2002). By drawing on the social constructivist literature (e.g. Wendt 1992) this paper analyses the use of recognition by the EU in its immediate neighbourhood as a foreign policy instrument. The paper draws on the cases of Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo and Palestine, and asks what it tells us about the norms of the European Union and how these values influence the construction of the European neighbourhood, also implementing the idea of recognition as justice in deciding which claims for self-determination are legitimate, and developing a concept of “remedial recognition”, as the clarification of status aims at taking a territory out of the power-contest, by guaranteeing its sovereignty also against a “parent-state”. The paper addresses the frictions between ideals and goals and the recognition practice of the EU but also the constraints the EU faces because of the divergence of interests between Member states and the effects of the “conflict on recognition” in practice.