Christine Chwaszcza

Symposium 'The politics of international recognition'

Recognition plays a multifaceted role in international theory. In rarely communicating literatures, the term is invoked to explain creation of new states and international structures; policy choices by state and non-state actors; and normative justifiability, or lack thereof, of foreign and international politics. The purpose of this symposium is to open new possibilities for imagining and studying recognition in international politics by drawing together different strands of research in this area. More specifically, the forum brings new attention to controversies on the creation of states, which has traditionally been a preserve for discussion in International Law, by invoking social theories of recognition that have developed as part of International Relations more recently. It is suggested that broadening imagination across legal and social approaches to recognition provides the resources needed for theories with this object to be of maximal relevance to political practice.

The Seat of Sovereignty: Hobbes on the Artificial Person of the Commonwealth or State

Is sovereignty in Hobbes the power of a person or of an office? This article defends the thesis that it is the latter. The interpretation is based on an analysis of Hobbes’s version of the social contract in Leviathan. Pace Quentin Skinner, it will be argued that the person whom Hobbes calls “sovereign” is not a person but the office of government.

Kelsen on Democracy in Light of Contemporary Theories of Human Rights

There is little agreement in contemporary political philosophy about how to conceive of human rights, except for a shared concern for freeing the concept of human rights from the legacy of traditional natural law theories. Even so, there is no place for anything like a reconciliation of Kelsen’s political-legal theory with a contemporary concept of human rights. The reason is not that Kelsen’s well-known and notorious criticism of various natural law traditions applies equally to contemporary philosophy of human rights, but that Kelsen’s account of democracy is incompatible with the idea of human rights. For despite all differences in detail, philosophers tend to conceive of human rights as substantive normative principles, which articulate standards of legitimacy for socio-political institutions that protect individual persons from legal or political overreach. By contrast, Kelsen conceives of democracy essentially as a method of legislating based on procedural authorization that imposes no substantive restrictions on the very content of laws. True, Kelsen explicitly defends constitutional “basic and liberty rights” with the argument that insofar as majority rule is essential to democracy, protection of minority rights is so too. But Kelsen’s account of those constitutional rights falls short of any idea of human rights, for constitutional rights are merely instrumental to the maintenance of democracy and articulate constitutional particulars of democratic states, not general substantive standards for legitimate government.

Kulturwissenschaft der internationalen Politik

Der Ausdruck »internationale Politik« bezeichnet einen komplexen Phanomenbereich, dessen engere Bestimmung selbst zu den immer wieder strittigen Punkten seiner wissenschaftlichen Reflexion gehort. Denn wie die meisten Kulturphanomene sind politisches Handeln und politische Organisationen »gestaltbar«; daher ist ihre theoretische Konzeptualisierung offen fur kontroverse Interpretationen.