Transcript
The state as citizen: state personhood and ideology Jorg Kustermans Department of Political Science, Universiteit Antwerpen, St. Jacobstraat 2, 2000 Antwerpen,Belgium.E-mail:
[email protected] An important debate in International Relations and International Law is whetherstates are persons. In this article, it is argued that they are. That is, they are realpersons-as-status. Furthermore, state personhood is argued to be an ideologicalcategory, marked by ideological variety. Roughly, one can tell apart liberal andrepublican conceptions of state citizenship. In a case study, the conceptual toolkitof state citizenship is put to work to assess the liberal credentials of moderninternational society. While modern international society rests on firm liberalprinciples, expressed most clearly in the Charter of the UN, important republicanelements can be discerned, not in the least in the constitution of NATO. Journal of International Relations and Development (2011) 14, 1–27.doi:10.1057/jird.2009.35 Keywords: citizenship; international society; liberalism; personhood; republicanism;state Introduction Is the state a person? This topic has been widely debated in both InternationalRelations (IR) and International Law. A first aspect of this question concernsthe reality of state personhood. Is it real or fictitious? A second aspect concernsthe definition of personhood. Are persons different from things? From thispoint of view, the question of state personhood becomes a question of assessingthe human(-like) qualities of states. Or are persons different from individuals?From this point of view, personhood refers to a specific, say, Catholic orcommunitarian, understanding of what it means to be a full-fledged (andethical) human being, 1 and the analysis of state personhood becomes asimultaneous analysis of international community. Discussing state person-hood opens up an interesting but complex conceptual toolkit. Featured arepersons, actors, agents, individuals and personae, as well as a multitude of analytical dimensions: biological, psychological, legal, moral, social andcultural.Engaging this discussion, I advance the argument that states are realpersons. States are not like persons; they are persons. And yet states do notnecessarily have desires, or interests, identities or emotions. It is quite possible Journal of International Relations and Development, 2011 , 14 , (1–27) r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1408-6980/11www.palgrave-journals.com/jird/ to remain agnostic on this score (and even to argue against it) and yet toascribe to the real personhood of states nonetheless. Equally, the question of the material reality of the state, whether directly observable or not, does notimpinge on the question of the reality of its personhood. This position buildson a Maussian reading of ‘the category of the person’ and a Deweyan readingof the phenomenon of ‘legal personality’. States are real legal (and moral)persons, and legal personality is not (only) an analogous category. Further,I argue that the notion of state citizenship clarifies the notion of statepersonhood. It not only explains in what sense states are persons, but alsohighlights the politics of personality, legal or otherwise. In short, I argueagainst personification, but for personation (cf. Jackson 2004b).This article proceeds as follows. I start out with a practical example of thepersonification of states. In it, I sketch the different stances that theorists havetaken with respect to state personhood, as well as the different meanings of personhood. Then, I review the debate on state personhood as it is currentlywaged in IR theory, with a focus on various definitions of personhood and onthe alleged stakes of the debate. Third, I introduce an alternative reading of state personhood, starting from the observation that states are unequivocallylegal persons. The argument here is not that International Law offersan obvious way out of the debate — there is too much disagreement inInternational Law for that. Rather, the debate in legal theory (more so thanin international legal theory per se ), while paralleling certain aspects of thedebate in IR, has articulated an alternative perspective that ties in quite wellwith traditional concerns of social and political science, as it links the questionof personhood to the question of power and society. Personhood is redefinedin terms of communal processes of personation. Next, I discuss citizenshipand existing accounts of state citizenship, with a focus on two dominantideologies of citizenship. Even though legal scholarship often equates theconcept of ‘person’ with that of ‘citizen’, I prefer to keep them apart. Onereason is that the language of citizenship is more overtly political than that of personhood. A second is that it discloses different possible modes of personation. Liberal processes of personation are distinct from republicanprocesses of personation. Finally, the case is made that the language of statecitizenship can illuminate the multifarious character of modern internationalsociety. Here I illustrate how my perspective parts company with existingaccounts of the constitution of international society. An Example There is a strong consensus among international historians that the Versaillespeace treaties were punitive in nature (e.g., Lesaffer 2004). But why was this so? Journal of International Relations and DevelopmentVolume 14, Number 1, 2011 2 Consider the following formulations of the puzzle: Why did Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George impose a punitive peace onthe German government after the First World War? Why did France, Great Britain and the US impose a punitive peace onGermany after the First World War?Possible answers are because they considered it in their interest to keepGermany poor and demilitarised; because, driven by bitterness, they wereseeking revenge; or because Germany was considered to have displayedunlawful behaviour and deserved to be punished. In all likelihood, a mixtureof these and other motives will feature in any convincing account of the event.More important for my present purposes is that the question and the suggestedanswers are a perfect illustration of the significance and the stakes of statepersonhood.The second instance of the question and the various answers to it (exceptpossibly the last) anthropomorphise the state. States are assumed to be actingwith intention on the basis of interests and of emotions. Some states punish,and other states suffer the punishment. The story continues, as is well known,with Germany feeling humiliated and, acting on this emotion, taking revenge.The first version of the question, in presenting flesh and blood actors, evadesthe philosophical difficulties associated with anthropomorphism. States are infact statesmen, so it seems, or at most governments. The metaphysics of statepersonhood are absent. A major downside of this take on the Versailles peacenegotiations is that it overestimates the discretion of individual statesmen, atleast in their private capacity. Unless their role as ‘statesman’ is explicitly takeninto account, it fails to grasp the dynamics of the event. Statesmen, so it mightbe argued, are ‘agents’ in the sense that they represent and are (to a greateror lesser extent) steered by their ‘principals’, that is, from the standpoint of democratic theory, their respective nations, governments or constituencies(cf. Bueno de Mesguita et al . 1999; Hampton 1986: Chapter 5). Indeed,‘activity embedded within the structural context of the state cannot and shouldnot be reduced to the actions of state officials’ (Wight 2004: 276). State officialsdo not simply act. As state agents, they enact. What this enactment entails isopen to theoretical discussion. Either they enact a mandate bestowed on themby their principals, and they do so in a strategic fashion for strategic purposes,or they are seen to enact a ‘narrative Self’, the enactment of which constitutesthem and the group they represent as persons/agents in the first place (Ringmar1996; Neumann 2004). Be that as it may, both are cases of authorisation. 2 The hypothesis that Germany was perceived to have acted unlawfully andthat it was punished accordingly is similarly free of anthropomorphism. Thisaccount expresses a view of a rule-based international community, viz . aninternational (quasi-)legal community (cf. Onuf 1989, 2008), which articulates Jorg KustermansThe state as citizen 3 criteria for legitimate membership (i.e., personhood). This account, then,points toward ‘person-community’ co-constitution. It is this perspective onstate personhood that I seek to develop below. Notice at the outset, though,that the ‘authorisation’ perspective and the ‘person-community co-constitution’perspective share a focus on ‘personation’ (Jackson 2004b), thus avoidingthe trap of anthropomorphism while still speaking of states as ‘real’ persons.The major difference between both interpretations of state personation lies inthe source of personation. In the first instance, the source is ultimatelydomestic, even if the domestic ‘author’ does not speak with one voice or istaking foreign or international ‘Others’ into account. In the second instance,the source is international, even if the struggle over its articulation is skewed infavour of certain actors that are well-positioned within the international realm.This difference, however, is analytical, not ontological, and the salience of bothsources (as well as their interplay) should be evaluated empirically. Moreover,the sources of personation are historically contingent. At a time when‘international relations’ was not yet a ‘category of the mind’, when it was notyet ‘conceptualised y as a domain’, 3 it can hardly be assumed to have beensocially effective (Onuf and Onuf 2006: 118). In this respect, it is no surprisethat in Hobbes’ 17th century account, the ‘authors’ that authorise thesovereign as an ‘artificial person’ are the subjects of the state and not acommunity of foreign sovereigns. However, as the international sphere hasincreasingly been ‘thickening’ (Neumann and Sending 2007: 690), theinternational realm itself has also become a source of personation. The IR Debate: Persons, People and Actors Recent treatments of state personhood within IR regularly point to ArnoldWolfers’ (1962) essay on ‘the actors in international politics’ as the locusclassicus of their concern, and accordingly approach their subject as dealingwith the nature of state action. The fundamental question is not one of empirical ontology. Even if the state is becoming less important vis-a `-vis non-state actors of various stripes, the question remains what kind of entitythe state is, and what it can perform per se . Can states perform actions? Isstate action structured along the same lines as individual human action, or atleast as group human action (Wight 2004: 278)? Does the state perform theaction, or is the action performed through the state? If the former, statesare persons. An actor is a person; a person is an actor. Alexander Wendt, 4 forinstance, holds ‘‘‘actor’’ and ‘‘person’’ to be synonymous and apparently usesthe latter only because it is ‘common in philosophical discourse’ (Wendt 2004:289 footnote 1). This stance is not without significance, especially whencoupled to scientific realist premises. One major consequence is that Wendtdownplays the importance of conceptual histories of personhood and Journal of International Relations and DevelopmentVolume 14, Number 1, 2011 4 statehood, preferring to focus on certain essential features of both (e.g., Wendt1999: 201). His is an exercise in philosophical anthropology applied to thestate, so to speak. There is an essential state and an essential person, thefeatures of which science can disclose, and if these are present, persons/states can be said to exist even if the words as such were not invented yet. Thus,there were state entities before they were named so. Similarly, personhood isno contingent category. Persons, in Wendt’s view, are foremost biological andpsychological creatures. They have bodies, minds and lives. Persons are people.They are not ‘constituted ‘‘all the way down’’’ (Wendt 2004: 295).Of course, in a way, ‘people’ is simply the plural form of ‘person’, and thussynonymous with ‘persons’. Note, however, that ‘legal people’ is rarely used asa synonym for ‘legal persons’. To say that ‘states are people too’ is to speak of states as ‘psychological persons’ (Wendt 1999: 215; 2004: 295–96) and thus tofocus on the presence in the state of the psychological (and physiological)preconditions of action. These preconditions are intentionality, an organismand consciousness. Actor accountability for past deeds furthermore requirestrans-temporal identity and memory. If any of these traits is missing, an ‘entity’can still display behaviour but its behaviour cannot be (self-)interpreted asmeaningful action. A person in a vegetated state, having lost consciousness,cannot act in any meaningful sense of the word. The person might still twitchoccasionally, but she cannot wink anymore.It is this conception of person-as-actor that determines the stakes of thedebate. Jackson (2004a: 257–58) lists five reasons why the issue of state per-sonhood matters, two of which drive the bulk of the debate. These are thesocial-theoretical question of corporate agency and the ethical question of corporate responsibility (Erskine 2001). Can collective entities act? If yes, theycan be held accountable and rewarded or punished accordingly. But conversely,do we really want them to be able to act if this implies that individuals will notbe held accountable anymore (Lomas 2005)? Whereas Wendt argues that stateaction is possible and state responsibility desirable, Colin Wight (2004) disagreeson both scores. On the first issue, he remains thoroughly unconvinced thatstates transcend being agency-enabling or agency-amplifying authority struc-tures. It is simply not persuasively demonstrated that states are actors in theirown right, an impression that is reinforced by Wendt’s own qualifications in thisrespect. While Wendt defends the view that states have intentions, he would not,for instance, go so far as to consider them having an organism or consciousness(Wendt 2004: 315; Neumann 2004: 261). I share Wight’s scepticism and will nottry to improve on his analysis. But there is more. I see several problems with theconceptualisation of person-as-actor in the first place:1. The person-as-actor perspective systematically privileges the psychologicalover the moral and legal person. This is etymologically unwarranted. Jorg KustermansThe state as citizen 5
