BARTELSON, Jens - Second Nature

Second Natures: Is the State Identical
with Itself?
JENS BARTELSON
University of Stockholm
This article analyses existing assumptions about state identity within
contemporary International Relations theory, arguing that the quest for
the identity of the state leads to either circularity or regress. Departing
from commonsensical criteria of self-identity such as indivisibility,
distinctness and spatiotemporal continuity, this article examines how
these criteria are interpreted and applied within essentialist, institution-
alist, historicist and poststructuralist theories of International Relations,
depending on their different background understandings of the
relationship between problems of being and problems of knowing. The
article ends by suggesting a reconceptualization of the state in terms of
proper identity.
Until quite recently, the question of state identity did not pose much of a
problem to International Relations. When the international domain could
be dened as anarchic by virtue of being populated by sovereign states, and
these latter could be dened as sovereign by virtue of being situated in an
anarchic context, the task of International Relations could be dened simply
as an inquiry into the intercourse between such sovereign entities. To many
International Relations scholars, the state was a second nature.
Today, however, state identity has become increasingly contested, both in
terms of the general conditions of statehood and in terms of the identity of
particular states. Yet if the identity of the international domain has
conventionally been dened in terms of its composite states, and the
discipline of International Relations in terms of the relationship between
these states, then questioning the identity of the state is tantamount to
questioning the identity of the international domain itself as well as that of
European Journal of International Relations Copyright 1998
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 4(3): 295326
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International Relations. Thus, if the state ever really became as obsolete as
some theorists of International Relations imagine, this would spell the end
not only of their domain of inquiry, but also of their intellectual autonomy
vis-a-vis adjacent disciplines. But when one contests the status of the state in
International Relations today, what, more exactly, is being contested?
Therefore, and well before we can hope to settle ongoing theoretical and
empirical debates about the modern state and its future fate, it is necessary
to answer a prior question: what makes the state identical with itself?
Now the fact that this philosophical question rarely has been posed within
International Relations does not mean there is any shortage of answers to it,
only that these rarely are made explicit but tend to be buried among the
premises of theorizing, and thus removed from the standard range of
theoretical criticism. The primary objective of this article is to unpack and
then scrutinize these presuppositions and their implications.
Doing this, I shall analyse three different ways of making sense of the state
concept within contemporary International Relations theory, arguing that
they all rely on accounts of state identity which are either regressive or
circular. In response to this situation, I shall briey analyse the concept of
identity itself, arguing that this concept rather than that of the state is
responsible for the difculties experienced when trying to make sense of the
state. I shall end by suggesting that a concept of proper identity ought to
replace the conventional view of self-identity, and nally spell out some
implications for our understanding of the state.
1. State Identity in International Relations Theory
Before we can analyse existing accounts of state identity in International
Relations theory, it is necessary to describe some of the main but largely
subdued sources of philosophical controversy concerning the state, sources
which ultimately lie at the heart of all questions of identity. These are bound
to be Platonic in origin (see Rosen, 1989: 11859).
First, and when posed in its most basic terms, the question of state
identity is a question of the being of the state, and what makes a state a state
and not something else, such as a subject or object of higher or lesser
complexity. This question can be answered in two different ways, either in
terms of the attributes which taken together make a state a state, or, in terms
of some condition or conditions that make the state possible as bearer of
those attributes. The main problem here is whether the state is identical with
the sum total of its attributes, or whether it is identical with itself in virtue
of some condition that logically precedes the attribution of attributes and
which therefore is essential to statehood. Is identity something which the
state has, or is it something which the state is?
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Second, and closely related to the previously-mentioned problem, state
identity concerns the intelligibility of the state under what conditions is
it accessible to human knowledge and human action, either as a subject or as
an object? This question can be answered in different ways, but the main
source of controversy in the contemporary debate is whether the state is
accessible to understanding because it exists, or whether it exists only by
virtue of being intersubjectively believed to exist or by being instantiated in
political practices.
Solutions to this problem are typically dependent on the kind of
relationship between language and the world one subscribes to, whether
consciously or not. Whenever the existence of the state is thought to be a
condition of intelligibility, its concept is supposed to function as a medium
of representation which makes the state intelligible. Whenever its intellig-
ibility is thought to condition its existence, its concept is frequently
supposed to be constitutive of its existence (see Searle, 1996).
If these are the main philosophical sources of controversy in the
contemporary debate on state identity, how can we possibly hope to
compare different solutions to the problem of state identity, without taking
sides in these philosophical debates, and thereby implicitly privileging one
solution over the other? While it seems desirable to remain agnostic as to the
possible foundations of state identity, our very topic seems to prohibit such
an agnosticism, since in order to unpack the state concept, we have to admit,
at least tentatively, that its identity represents a possibility.
For our present purposes, therefore, it would be clearly sufcient to
provide a shopping list of the criteria that would make it possible for us to
speak as if states were identical with themselves, without committing
ourselves to any specic account of that identity or what it implies in terms
of agency, autonomy or rationality. In other words, we should avoid
phrasing the problem of state identity in terms that prematurely condition
our interpretation of existing solutions to it.
One way to accomplish this would be to use commonsensical criteria
which hypothetically could be used to answer questions about the self-
identity of any kind of subject, object or concept, and then tentatively
transpose them to the realm of states as if the latter were given to intuition
in much the same way as a person or a physical object supposedly is.
1
Doing
this, we must distinguish between the state as a type and the state as token.
Type identity concerns the identity of the state as as a general concept,
whereas token identity concerns the common characteristics of individual
states. This done, our shopping list would look something like this:
1. Indivisibility. A state would lose its fundamental character if it were
divided into parts. This implies that if our object of investigation is a
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state, it cannot be split into parts without ceasing to be identical with
itself. This goes for type as well as token identity.
2. Distinctness. States are not only categorically distinct from other classes of
subjects or objects, but also numerically distinct from each other, and
therefore ordinally separable. Thus, the state as a type remains the same
by virtue of being clearly distinguishable from other classes of subjects or
objects, and each individual state remains identical with itself as a token
by virtue of being numerically distinct from every other state.
3. Continuity. As a type, the state enjoys duration in time and extension in
space. As a token, individual states enjoy exclusive locations in time
and space. This implies that each state remains the same by virtue of
having a unique and continuous spatiotemporal trajectory.
All this may sound trivial, but as soon as we start to dig into the muddy
foundations of contemporary International Relations theory, it will become
obvious how difcult it has been and still is to make sense of state identity by
means of these criteria. To my mind, there are at least three different kinds
of solutions to the problem of state identity available today, and in the rest
of this section I shall describe and analyse these. Doing this, I shall try to
show that the interpretation of the criteria is strongly conditioned by the
above-mentioned philosophical controversies, and that they invariably lead
either to circularity or regress by circularity, I shall simply mean the
propensity to explain state identity in terms of itself, and by regress, I shall
mean the tendency to explain state identity by recourse to antecedent modes
of authority, modes in turn accounted for by recourse to yet another
identity.
But are not circularity and regress inherent in the way the problem of
identity has been phrased, rather than assumptions in need of exegetical
demonstration? At the most abstract level, this is certainly true by
dening the problem of identity in reexive terms, it becomes all too easy
and therefore also unnecessary to show that every identity is impossible. Yet
when applied to a concrete problematic, the analysis of this impossibility may
lead further to the realization that identity is but a name of this impossibility,
and that circularity and regress not only are the limits of deconstruction but
also the sources of proper identity.
A. The Givenness of the State
Within this largely mainstream view, the state is a brute fact of international
reality and therefore also is given as an object of knowledge much in the
same way as planets were given to early astronomy. The state is intelligible by
virtue of its existence as an irreducible part of international political reality,
and the main function of the concept of the state in theories of International
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Relations is to represent a portion of ready-made political reality, thus
making it accessible to theoretical and empirical knowledge.
The background understanding goes something like this. Token states
may come and go in history, but the type state is a form of political life
which is an immutable and perennial feature of the international domain.
Indeed, it is the sameness of the former that supposedly accounts for the
sameness of the latter. Individual states may change their attributes, through
revolutionary upheaval, constitutional change or war, but the type state
remains the bearer of those capabilities, interests and intentions.
Indeed, it is the variation of power, interests and intentions that makes it
possible to explain and understand the intercourse of states, yet this
understanding demands that the individual state be identical with itself
throughout this intercourse and that the general conditions of statehood are
unaffected by changes in power, interest and intentions among individual
states. Thus, the state is a given and undeniable fact of international political
life, but what makes it identical with itself?
Those who take the existence of the state for granted usually come up
with two different and prima facie incompatible answers to this question,
depending on whether they conceive of state identity in terms of its essence
or in terms of its attributes. Whereas the essentialist conception lies at the
heart of the monist theory of the state, the willingness to identify the state
with the sum of its attributes or components constitutes the core of the
pluralist theories of the state. Since the former conception has long
constituted the unquestioned foundation of most mainstream theorizing, I
shall dwell primarily on the monist point of view, while briey recapitulating
the pluralist critique.
From the point of view of givenness, our criteria on the shopping list are
transhistorical constants which help us to identify both the state as type as
well as token states. Let us therefore start with the notion of indivisibility, in
order to see how this criterion has been handled conventionally among
theorists who take the state for granted.
In International Relations theory as well as within classical political
philosophy, there has been a long tradition of dening the state as an
indivisible unity by virtue of its sovereignty (Vincent, 1989: 694 f.). Within
this view, sovereignty is an attribute of the state provided that a series of
political and legal requisites of sovereignty obtain. Indeed, most disputes
over the meaning and proper application of the concept of sovereignty
concern the ranking and operationalization of these requisites, as well as the
order of priority between internal and external aspects of sovereignty.
Two main positions can be discerned. Either sovereignty is attributed on
the basis of the actual distribution of power within a given state, or it is
attributed on the basis of the legitimacy of that distribution of power.
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According to the rst position, an effective de facto monopoly on the use of
violence is a sufcient condition of statehood. According to the second one,
this monopoly has to be supplemented, either by a sufciently homogenous
national identity or a sufcient degree of consent. While the rst view tends
to accord primacy to internal sovereignty, the latter typically puts a greater
emphasis on international recognition.
2
Behind this source of disagreement however, there is an underlying and
lasting agreement that it is sovereignty itself however operationalized
that confers indivisibility upon the state, rather than conversely. Within this
view, prominent in early-modern political thought, the state is dened as
indivisible by virtue of its sovereignty, since, according to a famous
formulation, sovereignty is it selfe a thing indivisible (Bodin, 1962: 185).
The idea that the attribute of indivisibility comes through the attribution of
sovereignty, and that the essence of sovereignty is indivisibility, lies at the
heart of the monist theory of the state. It took the concept of representation
to turn this idea into a nice piece of juridicopolitical ction:
A Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one
Person, Represented; so that it can be done with the consent of every one of
that Multitude in particular. For it is the Unity of the Representer, not the
Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One . . . The Multitude so
united in one Person, is called a Common-Wealth. (Hobbes, 1991: 114,
120)
In modern International Relations theory, however, the notion that states
are indivisible is something that largely has gone without saying or has been
left to international jurisprudence to discuss, although Morgenthau (1985:
341) constitutes a notable exception:
If sovereignty means supreme authority, it stands to reason that two or more
entities persons, groups of persons, or agencies cannot be sovereign
within the same time and space. He who is supreme is by logical necessity
superior to everybody else; he can have no superior above him or equals beside
him.
Thus, a state can be sovereign if and only if there is but one locus of
authority within it, since to divide that locus of authority would be
tantamount to dividing the state itself into two or more states. This is the
essence of the monist theory, since it assumes that the attribute of
indivisibility comes through the attribution of another property sover-
eignty which in its turn is dened by its indivisibility. Thus sovereignty is
conceived of both as an attribute of the state and as a condition of its
possibility by virtue of its indivisibility most theories that take the state for
granted vacillate uncomfortably between those interpretations but what
makes sovereignty itself indivisible?
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This brings us over to the next criterion on the shopping list, that of
distinctness, since indivisibility seems to presuppose that agents to which it is
attributed have to be distinct as well. At rst glance, the demand that states
ought to be categorically distinct from other classes of agents or objects
appears to be trivial. In International Relations theory, the justiable
intellectual demand for categorical distinctness has conventionally been
satised through a differentiation between the domestic and the inter-
national spheres.
This differentiation can be carried out in several ways. Before the quest for
scientic legitimacy, the distinction between the domestic and the inter-
national carried strong theological overtones, reecting the tragedy of the
human condition. Later, during the heyday of that quest, the separation
between the domestic and the international was frequently carried out in
terms of a methodological distinction between different levels of analysis
(Singer, 1961), a distinction which likewise functioned as a foil for
ontological commitments (Waltz, 1959). Sometimes, however, the ne line
distinguishing the domestic and the international was thought to reect a
profound existential difference between different spheres of political life. As
Aron (1962: 6) once stated, so long as humanity has not achieved
unication into a universal state, an essential difference will exist between
internal politics and foreign politics.
Arguably, however, even if there has been a wide agreement to the effect
that some such kind of divide indeed is indispensable to the intellectual
coherence of International Relations, the exact nature of and possible
relationship between the domestic and the international spheres has been
widely disputed. Later, when questions of ontology became common stock,
there was a growing awareness that the concept of sovereignty conditions
this categorical distinction by making domestic order and international
anarchy ethically opposed yet ontologically interdependent (Dessler, 1989;
Hollis and Smith, 1990: 92118; Wendt, 1987).
In the nal analysis, the categorical distinction between the domestic and
international spheres demands that the objects in the latter sphere share
something in common that distinguishes them from objects in the former
sphere, and yet that the objects in the latter sphere also are numerically
distinct. Hence, when regarded from the outside, each state appears to be
identical with itself by virtue of being ordinally distinct from every other
state, that is, by being countable. This means that two or more states do not
and cannot overlap spatially without at least one of them ceasing to be a state
proper. They cannot share the same territory nor can they be subjected to
the same sovereign authority without losing their individuality as states,
since states are states by virtue of being both exclusive of each other and
together exhaustive of the international domain.
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But if numerical distinctness furnishes the baseline for further identica-
tion, numerical distinctness itself seems to presuppose that each state is
unique by virtue of something else than by sheer numbers. This brings us
over to the nal and apparently most basic criterion of sameness, that of
spatiotemporal continuity. That such continuity appears to be most basic also
means that it is rarely made explicit the idea that states enjoy a certain
duration and extension of their own, and thus a unique spatiotemporal
trajectory, is a demand so commonsensical that it rarely has stood in need of
justication in the literature. Arguably, temporal duration and spatial
extension are features presumably so integral to statehood that the concept
of the state would be impossible to make sense of without implying them.
But such continuity is itself difcult to make sense of without assuming
something that traverses time and space without ceasing to be identical with
itself by virtue of something else than its continuous existence, and, at a
minimum, that something has to be indivisible throughout its spatiotemporal
trajectory, since if it were to split into parts, it would also automatically cease
to be continuous. Spatiotemporal continuity seems therefore to defy any
further attempts at analysis, since it both is presupposed by and presupposes
other criteria on the shopping list. Hence, the identity of the state, much like
that of Theseus ship, is inextricably intertwined with time and space, since
it is supposed to exist in time and space yet presupposes time and space as
conditions of its existence.
So what makes the state a state, and what makes it given to International
Relations theory? From the earlier analysis we might infer that when
indivisibility, distinctness and continuity are treated as constants, they are all
inferentially connected if not dened in terms of each other, and that this
inferential connection is precisely what makes it possible to treat them as
constants. This is thus the essence of givenness indivisibility presupposes
a substrate to which this attribute can be ascribed, yet this substrate itself
seems to demand further individuation by means of the criteria of categorical
and numerical distinctness, which in turn necessitate an anterior individu-
ation by means of spatiotemporal concepts, whose application eventually
brings the concept of indivisibility back into play as a condition of their
applicability. This means that however far we push in search for the identity
of the state, we are likely to end up where we began, hence conrming our
initial assumptions about its basic essence, perhaps ultimately to be dened
in terms of some primordial and mysterious founding authority.
This brings us to the pluralist critique. For all the impression of coherence
it creates, the monist theory of the state has remained a target of criticism
within International Relations theory long after it was discredited and
marginalized within the rest of political science. This is not because of
intellectual underdevelopment within the former, however. Due to its long
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and partly mystical association with the modern concept of the state, the
notion of indivisibility has been the prime target of criticism. This criticism
had many guises. Whereas early critics of monism such as Barker and Laski
used to point to the absolutist roots and non-democratic implications of the
idea of indivisible authority, one of the main upshots of the behaviouralist
critique was to argue that the state concept is redundant to a scientic
understanding of politics (Easton, 1951: 108 ff.; Runciman, 1997: 15094;
Vincent, 1987: Ch. 6).
In International Relations theory, however, critique of monism has
frequently arrived through the back door, as have pluralist conceptions of
the state, most likely because a pluralist understanding of the state is difcult
to reconcile with a systemic perspective on International Relations.
According to a rst and widely accepted version of the pluralist critique,
the inherited monist understanding of the state is metaphysical in character
and also unwarranted empirically, and constitutes a major obstacle to a
detailed explanation of foreign policy formation. It should therefore be
replaced by a pluralist theory of the state that is able to make sense of the
foreign policy process. This is the standard way of underpinning the claims
of foreign policy analysis, that is, by dividing the state into those
components which taken together best explain those details of foreign policy
left unexplained by systemic variables (Allison, 1971; Gourevitch, 1978).
According to a second version, the monist theory of the state has become
obsolete due to increasing interdependence between states, and should
therefore be replaced by an account that takes into consideration the
plurality of state institutions and their transnational patterns of interaction.
This line of reasoning underwrites theories of interdependence (cf. Keohane
and Nye, 1977; Rosenau, 1990). In either case, what is disputed is the
methodological virtue of treating the state as an indivisible unity, but not
the ontological givenness of the state or its component parts from having
been conceived of as a unity of plural components, the state now appears as
a plurality of components themselves unitary.
Unfortunately, however, such criticism of the monist state concept in
International Relations has frequently bordered on the trivial or missed its
target, since very few today would deny that the state when viewed from
within resembles a divisible manifold, and that this should condition our
understanding of what goes on inside states. Nor has anyone seriously
denied that what goes on inside states might inuence their dealings with
each other, since what goes on on the inside might be suspected to inuence
foreign policy outcomes. What has been denied, either implicitly by virtue of
the very structure of existing explanations of interstate intercourse, or
sometimes explicitly in the name of parsimony, is that this potentially
confusing insight should be allowed to contaminate our understanding of
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what goes on at the systems level of analysis, since the international system
conventionally is dened in terms of its indivisible components.
This denial of course presupposes that the categorical distinction between
the domestic and the international is accepted as integral to the discipline
and its self-understanding, which is far from self-evident. But whereas
pluralist critics have busied themselves with the concept of indivisibility, they
have rarely bothered to question this categorical distinction. Having done
this, they would most likely have discovered that the monist concept of the
state is contingent upon this distinction. But in the absence of such
penetrating and potentially destructive criticism, it has been tempting to
conclude that as long as the concept of the sovereign state and that of the
international system remain dened in terms of each other, the dissolution of
the latter into a plurality of institutions would also spell the end not only of
the categorical distinction, but also of the international as we have come to
know it since its inception (see Milner, 1992; Parekh, 1990; Zacher,
1992).
Whether we stay monist or turn pluralist does not really matter as long as
we accept that either the state or its components are given in the ontological
sense of givenness discussed here. As long as we treat indivisibility,
distinctness and continuity as transhistorical criteria of sameness, we are
likely to end up in regress or circularity whenever we pose the question of
what makes a state a state. The state is then explained by itself, by, as it were,
a constant recourse to ever more primordial concepts of sovereign authority
which constantly are removed ever further from the scope of rigorous
theoretical analysis.
Accepting that the state is a given and brute fact of international reality
has two important consequences for our understanding of the state as a form
of political life. First, it becomes impossible to explain how the state and the
international system came into being more than in the most speculative
terms, since if the state is taken to be a perennial and constitutive part of the
international sphere, both the state and the international system will appear
profoundly immutable.
Second, it becomes difcult to explain how the identities of particular
states are formed and transformed other than in most supercial terms, since
the givenness of state identity also implies the essential uniformity and
sameness of states in time and space. While their power, their interests
and their intentions may vary, their basic identities are simply not accessible
to systematic inquiry.
The end of the Cold War has made the rst two implications look
problematic to many theorists, since they deprive International Relations
theory of the conceptual resources and theoretical possibilities necessary to
explain changing conditions of statehood as well as ongoing processes of
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identity formation and transformation. So even if today it is fashionable to
argue that the good old state is about to wither away thanks to the forces of
globalization, very few of those who have subscribed to the notion
of givenness can entertain any clearcut ideas of what possibly lurks beyond
the predominance of the state as a form of political life. Nor is it possible to
settle disputes between those who claim that the state is about to be replaced
by new forms of political identity and those who claim that the state is likely
to remain politically and legally prominent, since they depart from incom-
mensurable assumptions about what makes a state a state. It is to these
alternative conceptions we now must turn.
B. The Constructedness of the State
Those who want to make the case for the constructedness of the state
normally begin by criticizing the notion of givenness by showing that this
givenness is merely apparent and rooted in ontological misconceptions.
Doing this, they frequently point to the ctitious character of the state
concept, emphasizing that the presumption of givenness makes it impossible
to explain how the state came into being and was taken for granted. They
then try to demonstrate that everything previously thought essential to
statehood is merely historically accidental to it. As they argue, the concept of
the state might be a convenient metaphor or shorthand, but as soon as we
ask what it stands for, the state either vanishes before our eyes or dissolves
into an incoherent bundle of components (Ringmar, 1996). Hence the state
is not a brute fact, but an institutional and therefore ultimately also a man-
made fact.
From a constructivist point of view, the state has no essence of its own that
transcends the sum total of its attributes, and these latter are the outcome of
either a structural context or a historical process. Furthermore, the state
ultimately exists because it is believed to exist or because agents act as if it
existed, and has therefore been institutionalized as behavioural patterns in
international society. Its existence is thus derivative from its intelligibility
rather than conversely, and the relationship between the concept of the state
and the corresponding reality is held to be mutually conditioning.
But if the ideas and institutions of the state are mutually conditioning, the
state can have no reality apart from the intersubjective reality constituted by
practices of statehood (Buzan, 1991: 57111; Wendt and Duvall, 1989).
Within this view, the indivisibility, distinctness and spatiotemporal continuity
used to identify the state are not transhistorical conditions of statehood, but
variables whose applicability varies with the structural or historical context.
Thus, what vary historically are not only the attributes of individual states
such as power, intentions and interests, but with them, the very conditions
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of possible statehood. The type state is not given, nor is it an immutable and
persistent feature of international life, but rather the outcome of interaction
between agents, each struggling for survival and recognition among other,
similar agents. This makes token states profoundly historical entities, with
denite beginnings and denite ends. Hence, there is nothing necessary
about the identity of individual states either, so when the time is ripe, states
can be expected to wither away and be replaced by some new form of
political identity.
Those who want to make the case for the constructedness of the state have
to explain two things, two things that those who take state identity for
granted invariably fail to explain coherently. First, they have to explain how
the type state became possible and seemingly inevitable as a form of political
life. Doing this, they have to account for how the state became indivisible
and how the categorical distinction between the domestic and international
realm emerged. Second, they have to explain how the identities of particular
token states have been constructed out of anterior resources. Doing this,
they have to account for how states actually are individuated from each other
numerically as well as spatiotemporally.
Today, those who argue that state identity is constructed usually come up
with two kinds of solution to the above problems, the one synchronic and
the other diachronic. According to the rst and institutionalist solution,
state identity is the outcome of interaction between other, antecedent classes
of agents within a more or less given structural context. According to the
second and historicist solution, state identity is seen as the outcome of a
unique historical process leading from embryonic to mature forms of
state.
These two views of identity formation converge on two assumptions.
First, they both assume that identities are never given prior to social
intercourse, and that the formation of identities precedes the acquisition of
everything but crude capabilities, interest and intentions. Second, they
assume that identities are profoundly intersubjective insofar as their existence
depends on socially constituted and shared meanings. To an extent,
therefore, state identity is what we make of it, however opaque the reference
of that we might turn out to be on closer inspection.
The main difference between these views concerns their explanatory
priorities. Whereas the institutionalist regards the creation of social meaning
as simultaneous with the process of social interaction, and the historical
processes as conditioned by both, the historicist is disposed to regard the
historical process as a condition of both possible structures and possible
meanings.
Let us again start with the notion of indivisibility, since if the state is not
immediately given to experience, neither can its indivisibility be. Conse-
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quently, if indivisibility is thought to go hand in hand with sovereignty,
sovereignty can hardly be conceived of as a ready-made attribute of states,
but must be interpreted and analysed as a condition of possible statehood.
But if sovereignty is what makes a state a state by conferring indivisibility
upon it, a consistent constructivist must nd a way to explain not only how
sovereignty becomes an attribute of states, but also how sovereignty
becomes constitutive of them, and this without implying the prior existence
of already individuated states.
The institutionalist way of making sense of sovereign statehood begins by
arguing that identities are inherently relational, insofar as they derive from
the social context in which an agent is situated. Social identities are sets of
meanings that an actor attributes to itself while taking the perspective of
others (Wendt, 1994: 385). What exists prior to interaction and the
subsequent acquisition of identity is merely the material substrate of agency
. . . an organizational apparatus of governance . . . and a desire to preserve
this material substrate (Wendt, 1992: 402). Thus, at the beginning of
things, sovereignty is not an attribute of ready-made states, but results from
the interaction of embryonic states in an international context. Sovereignty
is
. . . an institution, and so it exists only in virtue of certain intersubjective
understandings and expectations; there is no sovereignty without an other . . .
[t]hese understandings and expectations not only constitute a particular state
. . . but also a particular form of community . . . [t]he essence of this
community is a mutual recognition of one anothers right to exercise exclusive
political authority within territorial limits. (Wendt, 1992: 412)
Following the logic of this account, sovereignty does not derive from the
interaction between substrates, but is already present as a possibility in the
context of their interaction (see Krasner, 1989: 747). But then it becomes
difcult to make sense of sovereignty, let alone make sense of other things in
terms of it. Since interaction takes place in a context which is composed of
a plurality of individual organizational apparatuses with no single authority
above them, and if the possibility of sovereignty is inherent in the context
which shapes interaction, then the interacting agents have to be individuated
independently of their external relations in order to be able to acquire
sovereignty through interaction and mutual recognition. In legalistic terms,
this is to say that states have to be internally sovereign before they can
engage in those practices by virtue of which they become externally so, a
view also shared by many of those who take the state for granted.
The historicist way of making sense of indivisibility usually starts by
emphasizing the historicity of the modern sovereign state, by pointing to the
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fact that it is the result of a highly specic way of differentiating and
legitimizing political units (Ruggie, 1986: 142 f.). Within this view,
indivisibility and sovereignty are outcomes of a highly specic set of
historical circumstances, creating a form of political individuation which is
unique to the modern age. Thus, within this view, the modern state was
once assembled out of a variety of material and intellectual resources that
were handed down from the Middle Ages, culminating in territorially
dened, xed, and mutually exclusive enclaves of legitimate dominion
(Ruggie, 1993: 151).
In this account, what supposedly preceded the formation of state identity
was a patchwork of spatially extended but not yet mutually exclusive
enclaves, in which authority was both personalized and parcelized within
and across territorial formations and for which inclusive bases of legitimation
prevailed (Ruggie, 1993: 150). Regardless of the historical validity of this
characterization (cf. Fischer, 1992), such an explanation of state identity
departs from the assumption that the then prevailing claims to authority
were exclusive of each other, and that each such locus of authority itself was
given and indivisible, even if these power claims were yet unconnected to
specic and exclusive territorial portions. So again, even if there are no states
from scratch and hence no sovereign statehood either, their emergence
seems to presuppose some sort of indivisible authority at the bottom line, an
authority the origin of which is lost in prehistory.
Thus, while these different constructivist perspectives help to account for
the formation of state identity, they do so by presupposing that the members
of the class of embryonic agents that are thought to precede the formation
of states in their turn are sovereign and indivisible in some basic sense. This
brings us to the problem of distinctness, since one possible way of making
sense of state identity without presupposing indivisibility would be in terms
of numerical distinctness between agents or in terms of categorical
distinctness between classes of agents.
From an institutionalist point of view, state identities are fashioned
through interaction. But in order to explain the process of interaction that
shapes state identities, agents must be assumed to be numerically distinct if
such interaction is to be possible, simply because it takes two to tango. Thus,
numerical distinctness is what remains when all those attributes that result
from interaction have been stripped off, since
. . . the raw material out of which members of the state system are constituted
is created by domestic society before states enter the constitutive process of
international society, although this process implies neither stable territoriality
nor sovereignty, which are internationally negotiated terms of of individuality.
(Wendt, 1992: 402)
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Yet this fact of numerical distinctness is itself left unexplained. This implies
not only that the domestically constituted identities are taken for granted,
but also that distinctness itself is accepted as a baseline fact (cf. Mercer,
1995). Thus, from an institutionalist point of view, states are assumed to be
numerically distinct from scratch, and the context of their interaction is
nothing but a plurality of such numerically distinct agents.
But why should we assume that states are numerically distinct from the
beginning, and that their context of interaction is given as a plurality, rather
than assuming that numerical distinctness results from the ssion of an
anterior unity? Whereas the the former view brings with it the assumption of
a primordial authority to divide et impera of a quasi-transcendental kind, the
latter implies assumptions about primordial unity of political identities
presumably some version of a Respublica Christiana.
From a historicist perspective, the assumption of such anterior unity is
crucial for explaining the transition from pre-modern forms of political
authority to modern ones. These explanations seek to account for the
passage from the universalist form of political identity held to be character-
istic of medieval Europe to the modern differentiation into territorially
exclusive states. But in doing this, however, the historicist typically tends to
assume that the numerical distinction between authorities was present in an
embryonic shape even during the pre-modern period, and then coexisted
with universalist institutions before it nally replaced them. Explanations of
this transition typically focus upon how boundaries between different forms
of authority were redrawn as a consequence of the struggle between
universalist and particularist claims, and how this process was propelled by
strategic rivalry between the embryonic loci of secular and particularist
authority the new organizing principle of reciprocal sovereignty was
challenged in and hammered home by wars (Ruggie, 1993: 162). Thus, the
logic of explanation here is the reverse of the institutionalist one, since from
a historicist viewpoint, numerical distinctness is the outcome of ssion rather
than of fusion (cf. Buzan, 1993; Kratochwil, 1986; Zolberg, 1981).
Turning now to categorical distinctness, both these views either assert or
imply that the international domain cannot be sui generis, since the
differentiation of political life into indivisible and distinct units necessarily
precedes the formation of such a domain. Still, however, the accounts of
how state identities are formed invariably tend to assume that the context in
which the agents that precede the state interact is characterized by the
absence of effective overarching authority, and that this absence conditions
the possibility of state formation. This makes these attempts to account for
construction of state identity vulnerable to the accusation that they no
longer are doing International Relations theory proper, but unwittingly have
undermined the autonomy of this discipline by assimilating it to the
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traditional concerns of historical macrosociology (see Giddens, 1985; Mann,
1988; Tilly, 1990). And ultimately, whether such a rapprochement is
perceived to be a problem or not depends on ones expectations about the
future fate of the state.
This brings us to the criterion most difcult to disentangle from the
existing ways of conceptualizing the state, that of spatiotemporal continuity.
Here all but a few theorists remain remarkably silent, yet concepts of time
and space arguably constitute the inescapable foundation of their theorizing.
Thus, whereas institutionalists are inclined to regard the construction of
identities as something that takes place in time and space, historicists tend to
explain how identities are constructed out of time and space.
What all these accounts presuppose, however, is that time and space
ultimately are dimensions external to the identities thus constructed,
something which entails that spatiotemporal continuity is presupposed by the
respective account rather than explained by it. Thus, whereas institutionalists
perhaps willingly would admit that historicists are right when they argue that
different conceptions of time and space are constitutive of political identities
in virtue of being inherent in the intersubjectively shared understandings
which make up these identities, they would nd it hard to argue this
consistently without assuming that the same identities are formed in a
timespace which is divorced from the intersubjective understandings which
are to be explained. By the same token, whereas historicists hardly could
argue much against the view that the formation of identities takes place in a
time and in a space not themselves constituted by the same formative
process, the formative process itself presumably being propelled by changing
conceptions of time and space. Hence, in the previous accounts, time and
space are both topic and resource simultaneously since, according to their
logic, even the constitution of time and space must take place in a wholly
dimensional timespace otherwise the very concept of process would lose
much of its meaning.
Whether institutionalist or historicist, the above-mentioned solutions to
the problem of state identity converge on the assumption that if the identity
of the state has been constituted through interaction, this identity is also
bound to dissolve sooner or later, and could therefore be expected to be
replaced by new forms of political identity. If the story of the state and the
international system has a beginning, it surely must have an end, and the fear
or hope that we are about to reach that endpoint tacitly underwrites most
constructivist accounts of state identity.
To institutionalists, the most obvious way this is going to happen is
through increased interdependence or internationalization, so that the
emergent mutuality of interests sooner or later will spill over into new forms
of identity or perhaps into a shared one. The sovereign state can then be
310
expected to yield gradually to the emergence of new forms of state or even
an international state (Cox, 1986; Cox, 1989; Wendt, 1994: 391 f.). To
historicists, the trajectory of the modern state will be completed once the
territorial basis of legitimation is undercut by transnational practices, giving
way to forms of rule not bound to exclusive territories (Badie, 1995;
Ruggie, 1993: 1714). How and when this is going to happen is rarely
discussed, however.
We might conclude this section by pointing to the regress and circularity
that the constructivist view gives rise to. If the state is an institutional fact, it
exists by virtue of being intersubjectively understood to be so. But if the
state exists because a critical mass of people believe it to do so or at least act
as if they did, what, more exactly, do these people believe exists or is
instantiated in their practices? Already this phrasing of the problem of state
identity seems to give rise to circularity, since the question of identity
supposedly is brought closer to a solution by being relegated to the level of
intersubjective belief, but whenever the content of these beliefs or practices
is questioned, the original problem reappears. Thus, pushing the problem of
state identity from the level of being to the level of intelligibility does not
make it prima facie easier to solve.
The answers provided by constructivists do indeed invite circularity and
regress, since they not only presuppose that other classes of agents are given
to analysis which is necessary for theory in order to remain empirical
but also that these embryonic and state-like entities are identical with
themselves by virtue of the same criteria that are used to individuate the
mature state, merely reiterating the exemplary juxtaposition of political
authority and identity that is the mark of internal sovereignty. Thus, however
far we push the quest for the ultimate sources of identity, we are bound to
discover that the antecedents of the modern state themselves display a
striking ontological resemblance to their mature counterpart, since the
formative process is reconstructed as if the state were coming to an end and
as if we stood at that very end looking backwards.
If subscribers to givenness unwittingly turned indivisibility into the most
basic criterion of statehood, constructivists seem to imply that numerical
distinctness is at the bottom line. If state identity is formed through
interaction, interaction in turn necessitates numerical distinctness, yet this
distinctness is left unexplained. Thus, what ultimately seems to make a state
a state in the earlier accounts is numerical distinctness, since within the view
of constructivists, indivisibility and continuity both seem to be derivative
from numerical distinctness.
Yet behind this reliance on numerical distinctness is a tendency in the
accounts to reduce the question of state identity to a question of primordial
authority. What allegedly precedes the formation of the modern state and
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what remains when the results of interaction have been abstracted from the
state is what is thought to be the essence of statehood, and this essence is
invariably symbolized by primordial concepts of authority, vested in the
person of the prince or in the rudiments of government or dominion. Yet
such a sovereignty is always double always an attribute of agents, but also
their condition of possibility and thus essential to their being. But is it
possible to account for sovereignty without presupposing it? This brings us
to the nal way of handling the problem of state identity in contemporary
International Relations theory.
C. The Contingency of the State
Those who want to make the case that the identity of the state is contingent
cannot remain content demonstrating as constructivists do that the
givenness of the state is an illusion resulting from undue reication, but have
to show that the conditions of possible state identity themselves are non-
essential and wholly contingent upon things other than those entities whose
existence the constructivist takes for granted in his or her account of the
state. Indeed, the upshot of the contingency argument is to demonstrate
that essence is not essential to our understanding of the international, and,
by implication, that things could have been totally otherwise had history
taken a slightly different turn.
From the viewpoint of contingency, the state is a discursive fact. As such,
what makes the state identical with itself is neither its essence nor the sum
total of its attributes, but rather the contingencies of political discourse. If
givenness implies that the attributes of statehood ultimately are reducible to
its essence, and constructivists make the point that this essence is nothing
but the structurally or historically variable attributes of statehood, con-
tingency implies that everything about the state is pure plasticity. The state
has no attributes or essence behind the succession of interpretations, and its
identity is simply what we have made of it in and through discourse.
The standard case for contingency is made by asserting or implying the
autonomy and primacy of such discourse in relation to state identity. State
identity is thus what we make of it out of linguistic habits which we
supposedly cannot fully control, since within this view, we ourselves are what
discourse has made of us. Hence, a coherent case for contingency
necessitates a wholesale reversal of the relationship between being and
intelligibility and the a priori assumption that the constitutive function of
language has primacy over the representative one. This is normally done by
arguing or implying that the very possibility of representation is dependent
on intralinguistic conventions rather than on any extra-linguistic distinction
between language and world.
312
So state identity does not inhere in the world, nor is it constructed from
things themselves given to experience, but is rather the outcome of the way
we happen to talk about things political. If identities are contingent, they are
contingent upon a discourse which both constitutes and renders them
intelligible. This implies that the criteria of indivisibility, distinctness and
spatiotemporal continuity are nothing but rhetorical resources which together
condition the possibility of both type and token state identity.
Like the constructivist argument, the contingency argument can be
articulated in either an synchronic or a diachronic version, even if these tend
to converge on crucial points. The question how the identity of the state has
been constituted can either be answered by deconstructing a roughly
contemporaneous discourse on International Relations, pointing to the
binary oppositions that constitute the state as essentially continuous,
indivisible and distinct from other forms of political life, or, it can be
answered genealogically, by analysing how the concepts and categories that
create and sustain this differentiation themselves have come into being in the
prehistory of that discourse.
In one deconstructive version of the contingency argument, state identity
is regarded as contingent upon the structure of International Relations
discourse. In this case the indivisibility of the modern state is understood as
the result of a discursive differentiation that separates the state from other
possible or actual forms of political life. Thus, the rendering of the state as
an indivisible unity is contingent upon an interpretive disposition regarding
the question of community in international affairs (Ashley, 1987: 406).
According to such an interpretation, the state is a perennial site of sameness,
at once different from what went before it and what exists outside it.
Ultimately, therefore, the state is constituted by the knowledgeable practices
by which domestic societies are differentiated from each other and from the
international context in space and time (Ashley, 1989: 301).
This interpretive disposition both conditions and is conditioned by
political practices of domestication that constitute the sovereign state as the
privileged form of political community and the sole locus of legitimate
authority in the world. Taken together, these practices reify the state as a
timeless and immutable identity (Ashley, 1988: 118 ff.), the ultimate source
of this differentiation being the silent community of realist power politics
(Ashley, 1987: 423).
From a deconstructive viewpoint, the question of spatiotemporal continu-
ity becomes a question of the timing and spacing effected by discourse, since
time and space cannot be anything but interpretations created and sustained
by a specic mode of discourse. Thus the temporal duration and the unique
spatial extension said to individuate each state are nothing but residues of
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the conceptual oppositions brought into play by a discourse which
constitutes a temporality and spatiality of its own.
Following the logic of the deconstructivist argument, indivisibility,
numerical distinctness and spatiotemporal continuity are reducible to the
categorical distinction between the domestic and the international spheres, a
distinction which in turn renders these as ethically opposed yet ontologically
implicating (Walker, 1990a: 914). This implies that the identity of the state
depends on a prior distinction between the domestic and the international
spheres, a distinction which originates in the same theoretical practices of
demarcation which also make states numerically distinct from each other,
and statehood distinct from other possible forms of political identity. Yet the
possibility of drawing these lines of demarcation is inherent in the total
structure of political discourse at a given moment, and is therefore difcult
to make sense of without circular recourse to the same discourse. Here the
state is not explained by itself, yet this strategy seems to demand that
discourse is wholly self-referential.
From a logical point of view, the deconstruction of state identity boils
down to the observation that if the criteria of indivisibility, distinctness and
continuity are dened in terms of each other within political discourse
which seems to be the case then these and the boundaries sustained by
them presuppose gestures of demarcation that must be logically extrinsic
and/or historically anterior both to the criteria themselves and the domains
these help to constitute as separate, since no distinction between classes of
objects itself can be a member of any of those classes it serves to
distinguish.
This brings us to the diachronic and genealogical version of the
contingency argument, whose task it is to explain the historical genesis of the
concepts and categories which have been put to use in the constitution of
state identity. Two main versions of such an argument can be discerned in
the literature.
In the rst version, the task is to understand how the concept of sovereign
state came into being and became a constitutive part of international life
within modern political discourse, including that of International Relations.
The point of departure is to regard state sovereignty as but one historically
specic solution to the perennial problem of creating political community
and legitimizing the presence of authority within it (Walker, 1990b: 164 f.).
Since solutions to this problem invariably involve practices of demarcation,
the drawing of boundaries between inside and outside is necessary to create
and sustain state identity in a world of difference. Interpreted in this way, the
sovereign state is the outcome of a series of discursive accidents together
which effect the kind of resolution between the universal and the particular
which we know and inhabit today (Walker, 1993: 81124).
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In this case both indivisibility and distinctness are regarded as derivative
from the timing and spacing created by political discourse, yet the identity of
this discourse in turn derives from the fact that it deals with the same
allegedly timeless problem, that of community. Hence, all solutions to this
problem seem to demand the ability to x a point of identity a
universality in time and space against which all differences in space and
time can be measured, judged, and put in their place (Walker, 1990b:
175).
In the second version, the task is to understand how the categorical
distinction between the domestic and the international has been created and
been subjected to change by different discourses through different periods.
The focus here is how changing discursive practices of demarcation coexist
with and are conditioned by changing modes of knowledge in the shaping of
historically specic forms of political community. Within this view, neither
the state nor the line separating it from the international domain are
transhistorically present, but result from the interfoliation of discourses on
power and knowledge. Thus, the indivisibility, distinctness and spatio-
temporal continuity of the state can be regarded as outcomes of the
epistemic and ontological options made available by a symbolic exchange
between philosophical and political discourse throughout the ages (Bartel-
son, 1995: Ch. 23).
Since both the deconstructive and the genealogical versions of the
contingency argument phrase the question of state identity in terms of
the conditions of possible intelligibility and then answer it by pointing to the
modal antecendents of the state concept, they of course beg the question of
what makes political discourses and discursive practices self-identical enough
to warrant treatment as objects of inquiry in their own right. Furthermore,
even if both deconstruction and genealogy explicitly problematicize time
and space by arguing that our modern that is, Newtonian inter-
pretations of time and space are wholly integral to the formation of state
identity, they nevertheless have to assume that this constitution of
state identity takes place in a historical time other than that produced by the
modalities of discourse, lest they either become incoherent or indistinguish-
able from pure ction.
So if the state is contingent upon discourse, it is also hard to imagine what
possibly could replace it. Both deconstructivists and genealogists are
reluctant to speculate about what may lurk beyond the modern state and the
international system, yet they argue as if both were dead letters and
inescapable at once. This being so, since the assumptions that inform their
enterprise seem to preclude anything but either a total transformation of the
present, or, that this present is totally immutable. That a transformation
either is under way spontaneously or about to be effected by discursive
315
intervention in the present is rarely doubted and often desired, but since
new forms of political identity have not yet been brought into being by
discourse, they are not yet intelligible either. The identity of the state is
explained as if existing explanations primarily were constitutive of it, rather
than helpful in analyzing it. As a consequence, very small conceptual
resources are left with which we could hope to understand what possibly
might replace the state, since the same set of statements and concepts hardly
can be expected to explain what they constitute simply because they
constitute what they explain.
We might therefore conclude that whereas contingency arguments
successfully have stripped the identity of the modern state from all remnants
of apparent givenness, the ensuing explanations of how the identity of the
state has been formed cannot but conrm the obvious, namely, that it has to
be explained with reference to something else that in turn has to be assumed
to be either identical with itself or completely different from itself. Thus,
even the most die-hard proponent of contingency must assume the existence
of something which contingent things are assumed to be contingent upon
and which is contingent upon nothing but itself, even if that is pure
difference. But if state identity is assumed to be contingent upon political
discourse, this discourse is often implicitly assumed to be contingent upon a
specically modern resolution of the problem of political community the
state whose presence the same discourse was to account for in the rst
place.
Also, since the core claim of the contingency argument revolves around
the categorical distinction between the domestic and the international, and
since the other criteria of identity are treated as derivative from this
disjunction, the main upshot of the contingency argument has been to
demonstrate and lament the interdependence between this divide and
disciplinary identity (Ashley and Walker, 1990). But if the questioning of
state identity automatically spills over into a questioning of disciplinary
identity and conversely, the contingency argument is vulnerable to the
criticism that deconstruction merely serves to assimilate the study of
International Relations to the concerns of literary criticism and that
genealogy turns International Relations into a branch of the history of
ideas.
Finally, not even a consistent contingency argument can avoid the
pervasive tendency to reduce questions of identity to questions of authority.
Whereas both deconstruction and genealogy denaturalize the state and turn
it into a discursive fact, they both beg the question of how the distinctions,
concepts and categories produced by discourse and productive of identity
themselves are authorized and rendered historically effective, a question
which is difcult to answer without venturing outside discourse for
316
explanations of the content of discourse, its dissemination and its impact. In
the nal analysis, we either stay inside discourse and attribute a certain
authority to discourse itself, or we step outside it by attributing authority to
those institutions and practices that supposedly produce and sustain it. In
the former case, the authority necessary to demarcate the state from its
others becomes ghostly and the ensuing explanation regressive, and in the
latter case we not only violate the methodological precepts of orthodox
discourse analysis, but also end up with a circular account in which the state
is identical with itself by virtue of being constituted by a discourse that itself
ultimately founders in or presupposes the state.
2. From Self-Identity to Proper Identity
What we have seen earlier is that even if the notion of constructedness was
articulated in conscious opposition to the notion of givenness, and the
notion of contingency in conscious opposition to both, these three views
nevertheless all led to circularity or regress, albeit through very different
conceptual detours and on different levels of abstraction. All these ways of
making sense of the state assume that the state is identical with itself by
virtue of its indivisibility, distinctness and continuity their main difference
concerns the grounds for interpreting and applying these criteria, and,
ultimately the very possibility of identity.
Accounts of state identity invariably necessitate assumptions about the
self-identity of other things. In one sense this is trivial, since there cannot be
any frameworks of inquiry devoid of presuppositions about their objects of
inquiry, and such presuppositions characteristically entail some ontological
commitments. Yet this also indicates something less trivial and highly
problematic, namely, that even if the concept of identity presumably is
susceptible to analysis, it also gures as a necessary precondition of all
analysis. As Nietzsche (1968: 309) once remarked, [t]here would be
nothing that could be called knowledge if thought did not rst re-form the
world in this way into things, into what is self-identical.
Within the problematic of state identity, the criteria of indivisibility,
distinctness and spatiotemporal continuity are therefore always both expla-
nans and explanandum, and this irrespective of whether they are interpreted
as transhistorical constants, structural or historical variables, or rhetorical
resources. Hence, given the way the problem of identity has been phrased,
what makes the state identical with itself in the earlier accounts is always
something other which is supposed to be spatially exterior or temporally
anterior to the state, yet that something is both constitutive of and thus
foundational in relation to the state proper. Posed in these terms, the
question of state identity will inevitably yield elusive answers, and a constant
317
quest for its conditions of possibility. And the ensuing recourse to some
foundational authority or primordial act of violence (physical or interpretive)
will seem inevitable, yet the outcome of such recourse will always appear as
a mystical limit to our critical abilities, and thus invite further deconstruction
(see Derrida, 1992a: 14).
But in order to be deconstructible, the identity of that which is to be
deconstructed must at least momentarily be taken for granted. At this point
we might suspect that the difculties we experience when analysing state
identity have more to do with the concept of identity itself than with any
inherent ambiguities of the state concept perhaps it is the other way
around. In this section, therefore, I shall take a brief look at the concept of
identity itself, and then try to restate the problem of state identity.
A. The Concept of Identity Revisited
If we accept that our interpretation of commonsensical criteria of identity
such as indivisibility, distinctness and continuity ultimately is conditioned by
more profound and largely unreected ontological commitments, it
becomes easier to realize that these commitments in turn are enabled and
circumscribed by a set of differences, such as those between essence and
attribute, being and intelligibility, and language and world. But if there is no
way of making sense of state identity without invoking such oppositions,
there is no way of making sense of these differences without invoking the
identities that constitute the terms of these oppositions.
This assumption boils down to the observation that identity can only
be understood in a context of differences, while difference can only be
understood within a context of identities. Conventionally phrased, this
further implies that something can only be identical with itself by virtue of
being different from something else. Yet this conventional logic inevitably
collapses into paradox, since if identity is premised on difference between
two or more things, these things in fact share in common both the attribute
of being self-identical and the attribute of being different from each other,
which implies that they in fact are identical with each other, and therefore
cannot be two. This daunting insight is frequently attributed to Hegel, as is
the solution to the paradox. As he states in his Logic,
. . . the truth is rather that a consideration of everything that is, shows that in
its own self everything is in its selfsameness different from itself and self-
contradictory, and that in its difference, in its contradiction, it is self-identical,
and is in its own self this movement of transition of one of these categories into
the other, and for this reason, that each is in its own self the opposite of itself.
(Hegel, 1969: 412)
Hegel held this to be a universal law of both being and intelligibility. Thus
318
interpreted, ontological difference becomes a condition of possible identity
rather than conversely, so that sameness ultimately depends on the possibility
of being different from itself. If this indeed is the fundamental law of all
identity, this would imply that the concepts put to use when phrasing and
solving the problem of identity themselves are subject to the law of identity
rather than being conducive to its solution nothing is identical with itself
by virtue only of itself. Thus, if identity and difference are mutually
implicating, something can be identical with itself only by virtue of being
different from itself, and different from itself only by virtue of being identical
with itself (cf. Siemens, 1988).
Therefore, in the nal analysis, what is proper to identity is the ability to
enter into a relationship to oneself, and to be different from oneself as a
condition of oneself. As Derrida (1992b: 10) has remarked, there is no self-
relation, no relation to oneself, no identication with oneself, without
culture, but a culture of oneself as a culture of the other, a culture of the
double genitive and of the difference to oneself . That is, a given identity will
remain identical with itself only by virtue of being related to itself as another,
yet such self-relation demands a medium through which it can be
articulated, a culture of oneself as a culture of the other, in Derridas
words. Thus, rather than merely showing state identity or any particular
identity to be impossible, this deconstruction of the concept of identity
has shown that identity not only is an impossibility, but that identity itself is
nothing but another name for that impossibility that hinders the constitu-
tion of a full identity-with-itself (Zizek, 1991: 37). We are therefore
obliged to conclude that identity is a profoundly contradictory concept,
since the conditions of its possibility coincide with the conditions of its
impossibility.
B. The Concept of the State Revisited
But granted that identity is nothing but a radical impossibility, how are we
to make sense of the theoretical discourse on the state?
To my mind, the main reason why existing accounts of state identity lapse
into either regress or circularity is that they fail to apprehend that the state
concept ultimately is self-referential within most contexts of employment.
Existing accounts of state identity are therefore best understood as expressive
of the same identity they seek to describe and explain, since the very
possibility they share in common, namely that of conceptualizing the state as
if one stood outside it, presupposes precisely that kind of difference which is
integral to its proper identity.
The main historical reason why state identity has become so difcult to
disentangle and analyse is that existing accounts of state identity within
319
International Relations theory consistently have departed from the outcome
of prior juridicopolitical justications of the state in terms of its ideal
genesis and and progressive trajectory, and have then transposed this
outcome to the international domain, oblivious of the fact that the state and
the international domain are wholly simultaneous. This deserves some
elaboration.
First, in order to make sense of state identity, theorists of International
Relations typically start from a hypothetical situation in which all supposedly
accidental attributes of the state have been stripped off. Originally applied to
the juridicopolitical person in the context of contractarian justications of
authority, this way of reasoning is supposed to yield the kind of clean slate
from which the emergence of the state can be explained and justied, much
in the same way as the state of nature was invented in order to explain and
justify the presence of authority in the domestic context. But behind the
ideal genesis of the state we nd nothing but primordial violence
International Relations has incorporated into its ontological core an
understanding of political authority that originally was tailored to conceal
the facts of conquest and the violent origin of all authority, and then once
and for all sealed this understanding by grafting it on to a domain which is
nothing but an iteration of the original and concealing contractarian
context.
Second, and now in order to account for the possibility of transformation
and expectations of transcendence, the same theorists venture to explain the
present identity of the state in terms of its structural, historical or discursive
antecedents. Originally invented in order to justify visions of the perfect
community and to legitimize expectations of transcendence, this temporaliz-
ation of present identities is supposed to lay bare the conditions of possible
transformation in the international domain. But again, this gesture is one of
iteration, since the ideal trajectories of the state, portrayed in terms of its
future demise or permanence, wholly correspond to and sustain its idealized
origin at the speculative end of the state we will always nd nothing but
its legitimizing foundation.
This is why the juridicopolitical conception of the state as identical with
itself yields strange results when inserted within a context dened by the
absence of central authority and common identity. The original use of this
latter conception was to justify existing political authority and to conceal
foundational and revolutionary violence by temporalizing it. But in sharp
contrast to the later employment of a notion of a state of nature in the
context of International Relations theory, its domestic counterpart state was
not created to account for the identity of its constitutive components.
But since there is no international authority to justify and no common
international identity to depart from in the ensuing explanation of the state,
320
accounts of state identity which repeat the gestures mentioned earlier are
also bound to reproduce the initial conditions of their own starting point,
since the logic of explanation presupposes what it sets out to explain,
namely, that the state always already is identical with itself. This goes for the
critical possibility as well. On the one hand, international anarchy makes
criticism of the sovereign state seem urgent, since the state looks like the
main source of discord in the world. On the other, the fact of anarchy makes
criticism very difcult, since the state cannot be summoned to appear before
a moral law that is not simultaneously the law of the state, hence it is
ultimately founded in the very same condition that one so urgently wishes to
subject to criticism.
Hence, the kind of state identity which gures as an object of theoretical
controversy in contemporary International Relations theory is nothing but a
ction dreamed up by contractarians and cultivated by their historicist
successors in order to conceal the facts of conquest and the ignoble origin of
all law. It is this concept that signies something given according to the
adherents of givenness, something constructed and therefore reconstructible
according to constructivists, something contingent therefore deconstruct-
ible according to proponents of contingency the state is their second
nature, and the secret source of their professional enjoyment.
C. Conclusion
But even if the efforts to transcend the state are demonstrably futile, we may
well be able to move beyond the current connes of political imagination.
How, then, could we reconceptualize the state in the light of the earlier
analysis?
Such a reconceptualization would amount to nothing less than a
wholesale reversal of perspectives. First, through an intitial detour through
Weber, we should regard the state as a claim to a monopoly of violence, but
without deciding pace Weber upon whether this claim has to be
successful or legitimate in order for us to speak of the state. Regarded as
nothing but a claim, it becomes possible to view the state as a contestable
possibility whose fulllment is impossible, and whose legitimacy always is
derivative from its relative success, rather than conversely. As Hoffman
(1995: 6275) has argued, the nal success and total legitimacy of any such
claim would be tantamount to its cancellation, which entails that the state is
profoundly contradictory it is but a name for a certain structural
impossibility made possible by a certain political practice.
Thus, viewed from inside itself, the state is always necessarily an apple of
discord before it can present itself as a source of political identity and order.
Hence our conceptualizations of the state will always reect the interpretive
321
violence of a founding authority, as well as its capacity to authorize itself by
concealing the fact of primordial conquest. When viewed from outside itself,
the state is but a battle beset by deadlock or ceasere long enough to have
been forgotten by the combatants, but always ready to erupt in a renewed
struggle and new conquests, conquests in turn awaiting new acts of
concealment, and new authorizations of the fundamental laws of the
political. Thus, rather than being the happy outcome of successful domesti-
cation and pacication, the state is a continuation of war with other means
(see Foucault, 1997: 1617).
Second, this implies that all politics ultimately is international politics, if
we by international no longer mean what takes place within a pre-
constituted realm, but rather the kind of practices that are fundamental to
the establishment of such realms that is, as politics as the quest for the
rst principles of the political in the absence of rst principles. From this
perspective, the juridicopolitical ction of the self-identical state, along with
its corollary international system are nothing but momentary stabilizations
of historical practices of power politics, practices which both precede and
exceed the constitution of political identity and political authority, but which
themselves nevertheless are historically specic and dinstinctively Western in
origin. In the nal analysis, the impossible possibility of the state founders in
raison d etat, and will live and die with its dissemination. What we are
witnessing today is therefore not the death of the state, but an intensied
awareness of how its permanent crisis eludes understanding other than from
within a perspective that cannot but contribute to its reproduction. Only
when this perspective itself has been long forgotten, will we be totally
entitled but not the least tempted to speak of the end of the state.
Notes
I would like to thank Andreas Behnke, Didier Bigo, John Crowley, Kjell Goldmann,
Perti Joenniemi, Lotta Wagnsson as well as the anonymous referees of EJIR for their
valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article.
1. I must admit that I have compiled this list somewhat impressionistically, drawing
both on discussions of the identity of physical objects and that of persons, trying
to boil them down to a set of common denominators. See among others Brody
(1980: 439); Chisholm (1971); Gracia (1983: 3948); Hollis (1985); Oksen-
berg (1988: 7898); Sprigge (1988) and Wiggins (1971).
2. The debate concerning the meaning and attribution of sovereignty is enormous.
See among others Barkin and Cronin (1995), Hinsley (1986), Jackson (1987),
Kelsen (1969), sterud (1997) and Thompson (1995).
322
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