BARTELSON, Jens - Second Nature

Second Natures: Is the State Identicalwith Itself?

JENS BARTELSONUniversity of Stockholm

This article analyses existing assumptions about state identity withincontemporary International Relations theory, arguing that the quest forthe identity of the state leads to either circularity or regress. Departingfrom commonsensical criteria of self-identity such as indivisibility,distinctness and spatiotemporal continuity, this article examines howthese criteria are interpreted and applied within essentialist, institution-alist, historicist and poststructuralist theories of International Relations,depending on their different background understandings of therelationship between problems of being and problems of knowing. Thearticle ends by suggesting a reconceptualization of the state in terms ofproper identity.

Until quite recently, the question of state identity did not pose much of aproblem to International Relations. When the international domain couldbe defined as anarchic by virtue of being populated by sovereign states, andthese latter could be defined as sovereign by virtue of being situated in ananarchic context, the task of International Relations could be defined simplyas an inquiry into the intercourse between such sovereign entities. To manyInternational Relations scholars, the state was a second nature.

Today, however, state identity has become increasingly contested, both interms of the general conditions of statehood and in terms of the identity ofparticular states. Yet if the identity of the international domain hasconventionally been defined in terms of its composite states, and thediscipline of International Relations in terms of the relationship betweenthese states, then questioning the identity of the state is tantamount toquestioning the identity of the international domain itself as well as that of

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International Relations. Thus, if the state ever really became as obsolete assome theorists of International Relations imagine, this would spell the endnot only of their domain of inquiry, but also of their intellectual autonomyvis-a-vis adjacent disciplines. But when one contests the status of the state inInternational Relations today, what, more exactly, is being contested?

Therefore, and well before we can hope to settle ongoing theoretical andempirical debates about the modern state and its future fate, it is necessaryto answer a prior question: what makes the state identical with itself?

Now the fact that this philosophical question rarely has been posed withinInternational 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 thepremises of theorizing, and thus removed from the standard range oftheoretical criticism. The primary objective of this article is to unpack andthen scrutinize these presuppositions and their implications.

Doing this, I shall analyse three different ways of making sense of the stateconcept within contemporary International Relations theory, arguing thatthey all rely on accounts of state identity which are either regressive orcircular. In response to this situation, I shall briefly analyse the concept ofidentity itself, arguing that this concept rather than that of the state isresponsible for the difficulties experienced when trying to make sense of thestate. I shall end by suggesting that a concept of proper identity ought toreplace the conventional view of self-identity, and finally spell out someimplications for our understanding of the state.

1. State Identity in International Relations Theory

Before we can analyse existing accounts of state identity in InternationalRelations theory, it is necessary to describe some of the main but largelysubdued sources of philosophical controversy concerning the state, sourceswhich ultimately lie at the heart of all questions of identity. These are boundto be Platonic in origin (see Rosen, 1989: 11859).

First, and when posed in its most basic terms, the question of stateidentity is a question of the being of the state, and what makes a state a stateand not something else, such as a subject or object of higher or lessercomplexity. This question can be answered in two different ways, either interms of the attributes which taken together make a state a state, or, in termsof some condition or conditions that make the state possible as bearer ofthose attributes. The main problem here is whether the state is identical withthe sum total of its attributes, or whether it is identical with itself in virtueof some condition that logically precedes the attribution of attributes andwhich therefore is essential to statehood. Is identity something which thestate has, or is it something which the state is?

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Second, and closely related to the previously-mentioned problem, stateidentity concerns the intelligibility of the state under what conditions isit accessible to human knowledge and human action, either as a subject or asan object? This question can be answered in different ways, but the mainsource of controversy in the contemporary debate is whether the state isaccessible to understanding because it exists, or whether it exists only byvirtue of being intersubjectively believed to exist or by being instantiated inpolitical practices.

Solutions to this problem are typically dependent on the kind ofrelationship between language and the world one subscribes to, whetherconsciously or not. Whenever the existence of the state is thought to be acondition of intelligibility, its concept is supposed to function as a mediumof representation which makes the state intelligible. Whenever its intellig-ibility is thought to condition its existence, its concept is frequentlysupposed to be constitutive of its existence (see Searle, 1996).

If these are the main philosophical sources of controversy in thecontemporary debate on state identity, how can we possibly hope tocompare different solutions to the problem of state identity, without takingsides in these philosophical debates, and thereby implicitly privileging onesolution over the other? While it seems desirable to remain agnostic as to thepossible foundations of state identity, our very topic seems to prohibit suchan 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 sufficient toprovide a shopping list of the criteria that would make it possible for us tospeak as if states were identical with themselves, without committingourselves to any specific account of that identity or what it implies in termsof agency, autonomy or rationality. In other words, we should avoidphrasing the problem of state identity in terms that prematurely conditionour interpretation of existing solutions to it.

One way to accomplish this would be to use commonsensical criteriawhich hypothetically could be used to answer questions about the self-identity of any kind of subject, object or concept, and then tentativelytranspose them to the realm of states as if the latter were given to intuitionin much the same way as a person or a physical object supposedly is.1 Doingthis, 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 individualstates. This done, our shopping list would look something like this:

1. Indivisibility. A state would lose its fundamental character if it weredivided 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 withitself. This goes for type as well as token identity.

2. Distinctness. States are not only categorically distinct from other classes ofsubjects or objects, but also numerically distinct from each other, andtherefore ordinally separable. Thus, the state as a type remains the sameby virtue of being clearly distinguishable from other classes of subjects orobjects, and each individual state remains identical with itself as a tokenby virtue of being numerically distinct from every other state.

3. Continuity. As a type, the state enjoys duration in time and extension inspace. As a token, individual states enjoy exclusive locations in timeand space. This implies that each state remains the same by virtue ofhaving a unique and continuous spatiotemporal trajectory.

All this may sound trivial, but as soon as we start to dig into the muddyfoundations of contemporary International Relations theory, it will becomeobvious how difficult it has been and still is to make sense of state identity bymeans of these criteria. To my mind, there are at least three different kindsof solutions to the problem of state identity available today, and in the restof this section I shall describe and analyse these. Doing this, I shall try toshow that the interpretation of the criteria is strongly conditioned by theabove-mentioned philosophical controversies, and that they invariably leadeither to circularity or regress by circularity, I shall simply mean thepropensity to explain state identity in terms of itself, and by regress, I shallmean the tendency to explain state identity by recourse to antecedent modesof authority, modes in turn accounted for by recourse to yet anotheridentity.

But are not circularity and regress inherent in the way the problem ofidentity has been phrased, rather than assumptions in need of exegeticaldemonstration? At the most abstract level, this is certainly true bydefining the problem of identity in reflexive terms, it becomes all too easyand therefore also unnecessary to show that every identity is impossible. Yetwhen applied to a concrete problematic, the analysis of this impossibility maylead 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 butalso the sources of proper identity.

A. The Givenness of the State

Within this largely mainstream view, the state is a brute fact of internationalreality and therefore also is given as an object of knowledge much in thesame way as planets were given to early astronomy. The state is intelligible byvirtue 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, thusmaking it accessible to theoretical and empirical knowledge.

The background understanding goes something like this. Token statesmay come and go in history, but the type state is a form of political lifewhich is an immutable and perennial feature of the international domain.Indeed, it is the sameness of the former that supposedly accounts for thesameness of the latter. Individual states may change their attributes, throughrevolutionary upheaval, constitutional change or war, but the type stateremains the bearer of those capabilities, interests and intentions.

Indeed, it is the variation of power, interests and intentions that makes itpossible to explain and understand the intercourse of states, yet thisunderstanding demands that the individual state be identical with itselfthroughout this intercourse and that the general conditions of statehood areunaffected by changes in power, interest and intentions among individualstates. Thus, the state is a given and undeniable fact of international politicallife, but what makes it identical with itself?

Those who take the existence of the state for granted usually come upwith two different and prima facie incompatible answers to this question,depending on whether they conceive of state identity in terms of its essenceor in terms of its attributes. Whereas the essentialist conception lies at theheart of the monist theory of the state, the willingness to identify the statewith the sum of its attributes or components constitutes the core of thepluralist theories of the state. Since the former conception has longconstituted the unquestioned foundation of most mainstream theorizing, Ishall dwell primarily on the monist point of view, while briefly recapitulatingthe pluralist critique.

From the point of view of givenness, our criteria on the shopping list aretranshistorical constants which help us to identify both the state as type aswell as token states. Let us therefore start with the notion of indivisibility, inorder to see how this criterion has been handled conventionally amongtheorists who take the state for granted.

In International Relations theory as well as within classical politicalphilosophy, there has been a long tradition of defining the state as anindivisible unity by virtue of its sovereignty (Vincent, 1989: 694 f.). Withinthis view, sovereignty is an attribute of the state provided that a series ofpolitical and legal requisites of sovereignty obtain. Indeed, most disputesover the meaning and proper application of the concept of sovereigntyconcern the ranking and operationalization of these requisites, as well as theorder of priority between internal and external aspects of sovereignty.

Two main positions can be discerned. Either sovereignty is attributed onthe basis of the actual distribution of power within a given state, or it isattributed on the basis of the legitimacy of that distribution of power.


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According to the first position, an effective de facto monopoly on the use ofviolence is a sufficient condition of statehood. According to the second one,this monopoly has to be supplemented, either by a sufficiently homogenousnational identity or a sufficient degree of consent. While the first view tendsto accord primacy to internal sovereignty, the latter typically puts a greateremphasis on international recognition.2

Behind this source of disagreement however, there is an underlying andlasting agreement that it is sovereignty itself however operationalized that confers indivisibility upon the state, rather than conversely. Within thisview, prominent in early-modern political thought, the state is defined asindivisible by virtue of its sovereignty, since, according to a famousformulation, sovereignty is it selfe a thing indivisible (Bodin, 1962: 185).The idea that the attribute of indivisibility comes through the attribution ofsovereignty, and that the essence of sovereignty is indivisibility, lies at theheart of the monist theory of the state. It took the concept of representationto turn this idea into a nice piece of juridicopolitical fiction:

A Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or onePerson, Represented; so that it can be done with the consent of every one ofthat Multitude in particular. For it is the Unity of the Representer, not theUnity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One . . . The Multitude sounited in one Person, is called a Common-Wealth. (Hobbes, 1991: 114,120)

In modern International Relations theory, however, the notion that statesare indivisible is something that largely has gone without saying or has beenleft 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 moreentities persons, groups of persons, or agencies cannot be sovereignwithin the same time and space. He who is supreme is by logical necessitysuperior to everybody else; he can have no superior above him or equals besidehim.

Thus, a state can be sovereign if and only if there is but one locus ofauthority within it, since to divide that locus of authority would betantamount to dividing the state itself into two or more states. This is theessence of the monist theory, since it assumes that the attribute ofindivisibility comes through the attribution of another property sover-eignty which in its turn is defined by its indivisibility. Thus sovereignty isconceived of both as an attribute of the state and as a condition of itspossibility by virtue of its indivisibility most theories that take the state forgranted vacillate uncomfortably between those interpretations but whatmakes sovereignty itself indivisible?


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This brings us over to the next criterion on the shopping list, that ofdistinctness, since indivisibility seems to presuppose that agents to which it isattributed have to be distinct as well. At first glance, the demand that statesought to be categorically distinct from other classes of agents or objectsappears to be trivial. In International Relations theory, the justifiableintellectual demand for categorical distinctness has conventionally beensatisfied through a differentiation between the domestic and the inter-national spheres.

This differentiation can be carried out in several ways. Before the quest forscientific legitimacy, the distinction between the domestic and the inter-national carried strong theological overtones, reflecting the tragedy of thehuman condition. Later, during the heyday of that quest, the separationbetween the domestic and the international was frequently carried out interms of a methodological distinction between different levels of analysis(Singer, 1961), a distinction which likewise functioned as a foil forontological commitments (Waltz, 1959). Sometimes, however, the fine linedistinguishing the domestic and the international was thought to reflect aprofound existential difference between different spheres of political life. AsAron (1962: 6) once stated, so long as humanity has not achievedunification into a universal state, an essential difference will exist betweeninternal politics and foreign politics.

Arguably, however, even if there has been a wide agreement to the effectthat some such kind of divide indeed is indispensable to the intellectualcoherence of International Relations, the exact nature of and possiblerelationship between the domestic and the international spheres has beenwidely disputed. Later, when questions of ontology became common stock,there was a growing awareness that the concept of sovereignty conditionsthis categorical distinction by making domestic order and internationalanarchy ethically opposed yet ontologically interdependent (Dessler, 1989;Hollis and Smith, 1990: 92118; Wendt, 1987).

In the final analysis, the categorical distinction between the domestic andinternational spheres demands that the objects in the latter sphere sharesomething in common that distinguishes them from objects in the formersphere, and yet that the objects in the latter sphere also are numericallydistinct. Hence, when regarded from the outside, each state appears to beidentical with itself by virtue of being ordinally distinct from every otherstate, that is, by being countable. This means that two or more states do notand cannot overlap spatially without at least one of them ceasing to be a stateproper. They cannot share the same territory nor can they be subjected tothe same sovereign authority without losing their individuality as states,since states are states by virtue of being both exclusive of each other andtogether exhaustive of the international domain.


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But if numerical distinctness furnishes the baseline for further identifica-tion, numerical distinctness itself seems to presuppose that each state isunique by virtue of something else than by sheer numbers. This brings usover to the final and apparently most basic criterion of sameness, that ofspatiotemporal continuity. That such continuity appears to be most basic alsomeans that it is rarely made explicit the idea that states enjoy a certainduration and extension of their own, and thus a unique spatiotemporaltrajectory, is a demand so commonsensical that it rarely has stood in need ofjustification in the literature. Arguably, temporal duration and spatialextension are features presumably so integral to statehood that the conceptof the state would be impossible to make sense of without implying them.

But such continuity is itself difficult to make sense of without assumingsomething that traverses time and space without ceasing to be identical withitself by virtue of something else than its continuous existence, and, at aminimum, that something has to be indivisible throughout its spatiotemporaltrajectory, since if it were to split into parts, it would also automatically ceaseto be continuous. Spatiotemporal continuity seems therefore to defy anyfurther attempts at analysis, since it both is presupposed by and presupposesother criteria on the shopping list. Hence, the identity of the state, much likethat of Theseus ship, is inextricably intertwined with time and space, sinceit is supposed to exist in time and space yet presupposes time and space asconditions of its existence.

So what makes the state a state, and what makes it given to InternationalRelations theory? From the earlier analysis we might infer that whenindivisibility, distinctness and continuity are treated as constants, they are allinferentially connected if not defined in terms of each other, and that thisinferential connection is precisely what makes it possible to treat them asconstants. This is thus the essence of givenness indivisibility presupposesa substrate to which this attribute can be ascribed, yet this substrate itselfseems to demand further individuation by means of the criteria of categoricaland numerical distinctness, which in turn necessitate an anterior individu-ation by means of spatiotemporal concepts, whose application eventuallybrings the concept of indivisibility back into play as a condition of theirapplicability. This means that however far we push in search for the identityof the state, we are likely to end up where we began, hence confirming ourinitial assumptions about its basic essence, perhaps ultimately to be definedin terms of some primordial and mysterious founding authority.

This brings us to the pluralist critique. For all the impression of coherenceit creates, the monist theory of the state has remained a target of criticismwithin International Relations theory long after it was discredited andmarginalized within the rest of political science. This is not because ofintellectual underdevelopment within the former, however. Due to its long


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and partly mystical association with the modern concept of the state, thenotion of indivisibility has been the prime target of criticism. This criticismhad many guises. Whereas early critics of monism such as Barker and Laskiused to point to the absolutist roots and non-democratic implications of theidea of indivisible authority, one of the main upshots of the behaviouralistcritique was to argue that the state concept is redundant to a scientificunderstanding of politics (Easton, 1951: 108 ff.; Runciman, 1997: 15094;Vincent, 1987: Ch. 6).

In International Relations theory, however, critique of monism hasfrequently arrived through the back door, as have pluralist conceptions ofthe state, most likely because a pluralist understanding of the state is difficultto reconcile with a systemic perspective on International Relations.

According to a first and widely accepted version of the pluralist critique,the inherited monist understanding of the state is metaphysical in characterand also unwarranted empirically, and constitutes a major obstacle to adetailed explanation of foreign policy formation. It should therefore bereplaced by a pluralist theory of the state that is able to make sense of theforeign policy process. This is the standard way of underpinning the claimsof foreign policy analysis, that is, by dividing the state into thosecomponents which taken together best explain those details of foreign policyleft unexplained by systemic variables (Allison, 1971; Gourevitch, 1978).According to a second version, the monist theory of the state has becomeobsolete due to increasing interdependence between states, and shouldtherefore be replaced by an account that takes into consideration theplurality of state institutions and their transnational patterns of interaction.This line of reasoning underwrites theories of interdependence (cf. Keohaneand Nye, 1977; Rosenau, 1990). In either case, what is disputed is themethodological virtue of treating the state as an indivisible unity, but notthe ontological givenness of the state or its component parts from havingbeen conceived of as a unity of plural components, the state now appears asa plurality of components themselves unitary.

Unfortunately, however, such criticism of the monist state concept inInternational Relations has frequently bordered on the trivial or missed itstarget, since very few today would deny that the state when viewed fromwithin resembles a divisible manifold, and that this should condition ourunderstanding of what goes on inside states. Nor has anyone seriouslydenied that what goes on inside states might influence their dealings witheach other, since what goes on on the inside might be suspected to influenceforeign policy outcomes. What has been denied, either implicitly by virtue ofthe very structure of existing explanations of interstate intercourse, orsometimes explicitly in the name of parsimony, is that this potentiallyconfusing 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 systemconventionally is defined in terms of its indivisible components.

This denial of course presupposes that the categorical distinction betweenthe domestic and the international is accepted as integral to the disciplineand its self-understanding, which is far from self-evident. But whereaspluralist critics have busied themselves with the concept of indivisibility, theyhave rarely bothered to question this categorical distinction. Having donethis, they would most likely have discovered that the monist concept of thestate is contingent upon this distinction. But in the absence of suchpenetrating and potentially destructive criticism, it has been tempting toconclude that as long as the concept of the sovereign state and that of theinternational system remain defined in terms of each other, the dissolution ofthe latter into a plurality of institutions would also spell the end not only ofthe categorical distinction, but also of the international as we have come toknow it since its inception (see Milner, 1992; Parekh, 1990; Zacher,1992).

Whether we stay monist or turn pluralist does not really matter as long aswe accept that either the state or its components are given in the ontologicalsense of givenness discussed here. As long as we treat indivisibility,distinctness and continuity as transhistorical criteria of sameness, we arelikely to end up in regress or circularity whenever we pose the question ofwhat 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 authoritywhich constantly are removed ever further from the scope of rigoroustheoretical analysis.

Accepting that the state is a given and brute fact of international realityhas two important consequences for our understanding of the state as a formof political life. First, it becomes impossible to explain how the state and theinternational system came into being more than in the most speculativeterms, since if the state is taken to be a perennial and constitutive part of theinternational sphere, both the state and the international system will appearprofoundly immutable.

Second, it becomes difficult to explain how the identities of particularstates are formed and transformed other than in most superficial terms, sincethe givenness of state identity also implies the essential uniformity andsameness of states in time and space. While their power, their interestsand their intentions may vary, their basic identities are simply not accessibleto systematic inquiry.

The end of the Cold War has made the first two implications lookproblematic to many theorists, since they deprive International Relationstheory of the conceptual resources and theoretical possibilities necessary toexplain 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 toargue that the good old state is about to wither away thanks to the forces ofglobalization, very few of those who have subscribed to the notionof givenness can entertain any clearcut ideas of what possibly lurks beyondthe predominance of the state as a form of political life. Nor is it possible tosettle disputes between those who claim that the state is about to be replacedby new forms of political identity and those who claim that the state is likelyto remain politically and legally prominent, since they depart from incom-mensurable assumptions about what makes a state a state. It is to thesealternative conceptions we now must turn.

B. The Constructedness of the State

Those who want to make the case for the constructedness of the statenormally begin by criticizing the notion of givenness by showing that thisgivenness is merely apparent and rooted in ontological misconceptions.Doing this, they frequently point to the fictitious character of the stateconcept, emphasizing that the presumption of givenness makes it impossibleto explain how the state came into being and was taken for granted. Theythen try to demonstrate that everything previously thought essential tostatehood is merely historically accidental to it. As they argue, the concept ofthe state might be a convenient metaphor or shorthand, but as soon as weask what it stands for, the state either vanishes before our eyes or dissolvesinto an incoherent bundle of components (Ringmar, 1996). Hence the stateis 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 thattranscends the sum total of its attributes, and these latter are the outcome ofeither a structural context or a historical process. Furthermore, the stateultimately exists because it is believed to exist or because agents act as if itexisted, and has therefore been institutionalized as behavioural patterns ininternational society. Its existence is thus derivative from its intelligibilityrather than conversely, and the relationship between the concept of the stateand the corresponding reality is held to be mutually conditioning.

But if the ideas and institutions of the state are mutually conditioning, thestate can have no reality apart from the intersubjective reality constituted bypractices of statehood (Buzan, 1991: 57111; Wendt and Duvall, 1989).Within this view, the indivisibility, distinctness and spatiotemporal continuityused to identify the state are not transhistorical conditions of statehood, butvariables whose applicability varies with the structural or historical context.

Thus, what vary historically are not only the attributes of individual statessuch 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 andpersistent feature of international life, but rather the outcome of interactionbetween agents, each struggling for survival and recognition among other,similar agents. This makes token states profoundly historical entities, withdefinite beginnings and definite ends. Hence, there is nothing necessaryabout the identity of individual states either, so when the time is ripe, statescan be expected to wither away and be replaced by some new form ofpolitical identity.

Those who want to make the case for the constructedness of the state haveto explain two things, two things that those who take state identity forgranted invariably fail to explain coherently. First, they have to explain howthe type state became possible and seemingly inevitable as a form of politicallife. Doing this, they have to account for how the state became indivisibleand how the categorical distinction between the domestic and internationalrealm emerged. Second, they have to explain how the identities of particulartoken states have been constructed out of anterior resources. Doing this,they have to account for how states actually are individuated from each othernumerically as well as spatiotemporally.

Today, those who argue that state identity is constructed usually come upwith two kinds of solution to the above problems, the one synchronic andthe other diachronic. According to the first and institutionalist solution,state identity is the outcome of interaction between other, antecedent classesof agents within a more or less given structural context. According to thesecond and historicist solution, state identity is seen as the outcome of aunique historical process leading from embryonic to mature forms ofstate.

These two views of identity formation converge on two assumptions.First, they both assume that identities are never given prior to socialintercourse, and that the formation of identities precedes the acquisition ofeverything but crude capabilities, interest and intentions. Second, theyassume that identities are profoundly intersubjective insofar as their existencedepends on socially constituted and shared meanings. To an extent,therefore, state identity is what we make of it, however opaque the referenceof that we might turn out to be on closer inspection.

The main difference between these views concerns their explanatorypriorities. Whereas the institutionalist regards the creation of social meaningas simultaneous with the process of social interaction, and the historicalprocesses as conditioned by both, the historicist is disposed to regard thehistorical process as a condition of both possible structures and possiblemeanings.

Let us again start with the notion of indivisibility, since if the state is notimmediately 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 indivisibilityupon it, a consistent constructivist must find a way to explain not only howsovereignty becomes an attribute of states, but also how sovereigntybecomes constitutive of them, and this without implying the prior existenceof already individuated states.

The institutionalist way of making sense of sovereign statehood begins byarguing that identities are inherently relational, insofar as they derive fromthe social context in which an agent is situated. Social identities are sets ofmeanings that an actor attributes to itself while taking the perspective ofothers (Wendt, 1994: 385). What exists prior to interaction and thesubsequent acquisition of identity is merely the material substrate of agency. . . an organizational apparatus of governance . . . and a desire to preservethis material substrate (Wendt, 1992: 402). Thus, at the beginning ofthings, sovereignty is not an attribute of ready-made states, but results fromthe interaction of embryonic states in an international context. Sovereigntyis

. . . an institution, and so it exists only in virtue of certain intersubjectiveunderstandings 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 thiscommunity is a mutual recognition of one anothers right to exercise exclusivepolitical authority within territorial limits. (Wendt, 1992: 412)

Following the logic of this account, sovereignty does not derive from theinteraction between substrates, but is already present as a possibility in thecontext of their interaction (see Krasner, 1989: 747). But then it becomesdifficult to make sense of sovereignty, let alone make sense of other things interms of it. Since interaction takes place in a context which is composed ofa plurality of individual organizational apparatuses with no single authorityabove them, and if the possibility of sovereignty is inherent in the contextwhich shapes interaction, then the interacting agents have to be individuatedindependently of their external relations in order to be able to acquiresovereignty through interaction and mutual recognition. In legalistic terms,this is to say that states have to be internally sovereign before they canengage in those practices by virtue of which they become externally so, aview also shared by many of those who take the state for granted.

The historicist way of making sense of indivisibility usually starts byemphasizing the historicity of the modern sovereign state, by pointing to the


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fact that it is the result of a highly specific way of differentiating andlegitimizing political units (Ruggie, 1986: 142 f.). Within this view,indivisibility and sovereignty are outcomes of a highly specific set ofhistorical circumstances, creating a form of political individuation which isunique to the modern age. Thus, within this view, the modern state wasonce assembled out of a variety of material and intellectual resources thatwere handed down from the Middle Ages, culminating in territoriallydefined, fixed, and mutually exclusive enclaves of legitimate dominion(Ruggie, 1993: 151).

In this account, what supposedly preceded the formation of state identitywas a patchwork of spatially extended but not yet mutually exclusiveenclaves, in which authority was both personalized and parcelized withinand across territorial formations and for which inclusive bases of legitimationprevailed (Ruggie, 1993: 150). Regardless of the historical validity of thischaracterization (cf. Fischer, 1992), such an explanation of state identitydeparts from the assumption that the then prevailing claims to authoritywere exclusive of each other, and that each such locus of authority itself wasgiven and indivisible, even if these power claims were yet unconnected tospecific and exclusive territorial portions. So again, even if there are no statesfrom scratch and hence no sovereign statehood either, their emergenceseems to presuppose some sort of indivisible authority at the bottom line, anauthority the origin of which is lost in prehistory.

Thus, while these different constructivist perspectives help to account forthe formation of state identity, they do so by presupposing that the membersof the class of embryonic agents that are thought to precede the formationof states in their turn are sovereign and indivisible in some basic sense. Thisbrings us to the problem of distinctness, since one possible way of makingsense of state identity without presupposing indivisibility would be in termsof numerical distinctness between agents or in terms of categoricaldistinctness between classes of agents.

From an institutionalist point of view, state identities are fashionedthrough interaction. But in order to explain the process of interaction thatshapes state identities, agents must be assumed to be numerically distinct ifsuch interaction is to be possible, simply because it takes two to tango. Thus,numerical distinctness is what remains when all those attributes that resultfrom interaction have been stripped off, since

. . . the raw material out of which members of the state system are constitutedis created by domestic society before states enter the constitutive process ofinternational society, although this process implies neither stable territorialitynor 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 impliesnot 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 benumerically distinct from scratch, and the context of their interaction isnothing but a plurality of such numerically distinct agents.

But why should we assume that states are numerically distinct from thebeginning, and that their context of interaction is given as a plurality, ratherthan assuming that numerical distinctness results from the fission of ananterior unity? Whereas the the former view brings with it the assumption ofa primordial authority to divide et impera of a quasi-transcendental kind, thelatter 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 iscrucial for explaining the transition from pre-modern forms of politicalauthority to modern ones. These explanations seek to account for thepassage from the universalist form of political identity held to be character-istic of medieval Europe to the modern differentiation into territoriallyexclusive states. But in doing this, however, the historicist typically tends toassume that the numerical distinction between authorities was present in anembryonic shape even during the pre-modern period, and then coexistedwith universalist institutions before it finally replaced them. Explanations ofthis transition typically focus upon how boundaries between different formsof authority were redrawn as a consequence of the struggle betweenuniversalist and particularist claims, and how this process was propelled bystrategic rivalry between the embryonic loci of secular and particularistauthority the new organizing principle of reciprocal sovereignty waschallenged in and hammered home by wars (Ruggie, 1993: 162). Thus, thelogic of explanation here is the reverse of the institutionalist one, since froma historicist viewpoint, numerical distinctness is the outcome of fission ratherthan of fusion (cf. Buzan, 1993; Kratochwil, 1986; Zolberg, 1981).

Turning now to categorical distinctness, both these views either assert orimply that the international domain cannot be sui generis, since thedifferentiation of political life into indivisible and distinct units necessarilyprecedes the formation of such a domain. Still, however, the accounts ofhow state identities are formed invariably tend to assume that the context inwhich the agents that precede the state interact is characterized by theabsence of effective overarching authority, and that this absence conditionsthe possibility of state formation. This makes these attempts to account forconstruction of state identity vulnerable to the accusation that they nolonger are doing International Relations theory proper, but unwittingly haveundermined 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 isperceived to be a problem or not depends on ones expectations about thefuture fate of the state.

This brings us to the criterion most difficult to disentangle from theexisting ways of conceptualizing the state, that of spatiotemporal continuity.Here all but a few theorists remain remarkably silent, yet concepts of timeand space arguably constitute the inescapable foundation of their theorizing.Thus, whereas institutionalists are inclined to regard the construction ofidentities as something that takes place in time and space, historicists tend toexplain how identities are constructed out of time and space.

What all these accounts presuppose, however, is that time and spaceultimately are dimensions external to the identities thus constructed,something which entails that spatiotemporal continuity is presupposed by therespective account rather than explained by it. Thus, whereas institutionalistsperhaps willingly would admit that historicists are right when they argue thatdifferent conceptions of time and space are constitutive of political identitiesin virtue of being inherent in the intersubjectively shared understandingswhich make up these identities, they would find it hard to argue thisconsistently without assuming that the same identities are formed in atimespace which is divorced from the intersubjective understandings whichare to be explained. By the same token, whereas historicists hardly couldargue much against the view that the formation of identities takes place in atime and in a space not themselves constituted by the same formativeprocess, the formative process itself presumably being propelled by changingconceptions of time and space. Hence, in the previous accounts, time andspace are both topic and resource simultaneously since, according to theirlogic, even the constitution of time and space must take place in a whollydimensional timespace otherwise the very concept of process would losemuch of its meaning.

Whether institutionalist or historicist, the above-mentioned solutions tothe problem of state identity converge on the assumption that if the identityof the state has been constituted through interaction, this identity is alsobound to dissolve sooner or later, and could therefore be expected to bereplaced by new forms of political identity. If the story of the state and theinternational system has a beginning, it surely must have an end, and the fearor hope that we are about to reach that endpoint tacitly underwrites mostconstructivist accounts of state identity.

To institutionalists, the most obvious way this is going to happen isthrough increased interdependence or internationalization, so that theemergent mutuality of interests sooner or later will spill over into new formsof identity or perhaps into a shared one. The sovereign state can then be


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expected to yield gradually to the emergence of new forms of state or evenan international state (Cox, 1986; Cox, 1989; Wendt, 1994: 391 f.). Tohistoricists, the trajectory of the modern state will be completed once theterritorial basis of legitimation is undercut by transnational practices, givingway to forms of rule not bound to exclusive territories (Badie, 1995;Ruggie, 1993: 1714). How and when this is going to happen is rarelydiscussed, however.

We might conclude this section by pointing to the regress and circularitythat the constructivist view gives rise to. If the state is an institutional fact, itexists by virtue of being intersubjectively understood to be so. But if thestate exists because a critical mass of people believe it to do so or at least actas if they did, what, more exactly, do these people believe exists or isinstantiated in their practices? Already this phrasing of the problem of stateidentity seems to give rise to circularity, since the question of identitysupposedly is brought closer to a solution by being relegated to the level ofintersubjective belief, but whenever the content of these beliefs or practicesis questioned, the original problem reappears. Thus, pushing the problem ofstate identity from the level of being to the level of intelligibility does notmake it prima facie easier to solve.

The answers provided by constructivists do indeed invite circularity andregress, since they not only presuppose that other classes of agents are givento analysis which is necessary for theory in order to remain empirical but also that these embryonic and state-like entities are identical withthemselves by virtue of the same criteria that are used to individuate themature state, merely reiterating the exemplary juxtaposition of politicalauthority and identity that is the mark of internal sovereignty. Thus, howeverfar we push the quest for the ultimate sources of identity, we are bound todiscover that the antecedents of the modern state themselves display astriking ontological resemblance to their mature counterpart, since theformative process is reconstructed as if the state were coming to an end andas if we stood at that very end looking backwards.

If subscribers to givenness unwittingly turned indivisibility into the mostbasic criterion of statehood, constructivists seem to imply that numericaldistinctness is at the bottom line. If state identity is formed throughinteraction, interaction in turn necessitates numerical distinctness, yet thisdistinctness is left unexplained. Thus, what ultimately seems to make a statea state in the earlier accounts is numerical distinctness, since within the viewof constructivists, indivisibility and continuity both seem to be derivativefrom 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 primordialauthority. 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 thestate is what is thought to be the essence of statehood, and this essence isinvariably symbolized by primordial concepts of authority, vested in theperson of the prince or in the rudiments of government or dominion. Yetsuch a sovereignty is always double always an attribute of agents, but alsotheir condition of possibility and thus essential to their being. But is itpossible to account for sovereignty without presupposing it? This brings usto the final way of handling the problem of state identity in contemporaryInternational Relations theory.

C. The Contingency of the State

Those who want to make the case that the identity of the state is contingentcannot remain content demonstrating as constructivists do that thegivenness of the state is an illusion resulting from undue reification, but haveto show that the conditions of possible state identity themselves are non-essential and wholly contingent upon things other than those entities whoseexistence the constructivist takes for granted in his or her account of thestate. Indeed, the upshot of the contingency argument is to demonstratethat essence is not essential to our understanding of the international, and,by implication, that things could have been totally otherwise had historytaken 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 sumtotal of its attributes, but rather the contingencies of political discourse. Ifgivenness implies that the attributes of statehood ultimately are reducible toits essence, and constructivists make the point that this essence is nothingbut the structurally or historically variable attributes of statehood, con-tingency implies that everything about the state is pure plasticity. The statehas no attributes or essence behind the succession of interpretations, and itsidentity is simply what we have made of it in and through discourse.

The standard case for contingency is made by asserting or implying theautonomy and primacy of such discourse in relation to state identity. Stateidentity is thus what we make of it out of linguistic habits which wesupposedly cannot fully control, since within this view, we ourselves are whatdiscourse has made of us. Hence, a coherent case for contingencynecessitates a wholesale reversal of the relationship between being andintelligibility and the a priori assumption that the constitutive function oflanguage has primacy over the representative one. This is normally done byarguing or implying that the very possibility of representation is dependenton intralinguistic conventions rather than on any extra-linguistic distinctionbetween language and world.


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So state identity does not inhere in the world, nor is it constructed fromthings themselves given to experience, but is rather the outcome of the waywe happen to talk about things political. If identities are contingent, they arecontingent upon a discourse which both constitutes and renders themintelligible. This implies that the criteria of indivisibility, distinctness andspatiotemporal continuity are nothing but rhetorical resources which togethercondition the possibility of both type and token state identity.

Like the constructivist argument, the contingency argument can bearticulated in either an synchronic or a diachronic version, even if these tendto converge on crucial points. The question how the identity of the state hasbeen constituted can either be answered by deconstructing a roughlycontemporaneous discourse on International Relations, pointing to thebinary oppositions that constitute the state as essentially continuous,indivisible and distinct from other forms of political life, or, it can beanswered genealogically, by analysing how the concepts and categories thatcreate and sustain this differentiation themselves have come into being in theprehistory of that discourse.

In one deconstructive version of the contingency argument, state identityis regarded as contingent upon the structure of International Relationsdiscourse. In this case the indivisibility of the modern state is understood asthe result of a discursive differentiation that separates the state from otherpossible or actual forms of political life. Thus, the rendering of the state asan indivisible unity is contingent upon an interpretive disposition regardingthe 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 practicesby which domestic societies are differentiated from each other and from theinternational context in space and time (Ashley, 1989: 301).

This interpretive disposition both conditions and is conditioned bypolitical practices of domestication that constitute the sovereign state as theprivileged form of political community and the sole locus of legitimateauthority in the world. Taken together, these practices reify the state as atimeless and immutable identity (Ashley, 1988: 118 ff.), the ultimate sourceof 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, sincetime and space cannot be anything but interpretations created and sustainedby a specific mode of discourse. Thus the temporal duration and the uniquespatial extension said to individuate each state are nothing but residues of


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the conceptual oppositions brought into play by a discourse whichconstitutes a temporality and spatiality of its own.

Following the logic of the deconstructivist argument, indivisibility,numerical distinctness and spatiotemporal continuity are reducible to thecategorical distinction between the domestic and the international spheres, adistinction which in turn renders these as ethically opposed yet ontologicallyimplicating (Walker, 1990a: 914). This implies that the identity of the statedepends on a prior distinction between the domestic and the internationalspheres, a distinction which originates in the same theoretical practices ofdemarcation which also make states numerically distinct from each other,and statehood distinct from other possible forms of political identity. Yet thepossibility of drawing these lines of demarcation is inherent in the totalstructure of political discourse at a given moment, and is therefore difficultto make sense of without circular recourse to the same discourse. Here thestate is not explained by itself, yet this strategy seems to demand thatdiscourse is wholly self-referential.

From a logical point of view, the deconstruction of state identity boilsdown to the observation that if the criteria of indivisibility, distinctness andcontinuity are defined in terms of each other within political discourse which seems to be the case then these and the boundaries sustained bythem presuppose gestures of demarcation that must be logically extrinsicand/or historically anterior both to the criteria themselves and the domainsthese help to constitute as separate, since no distinction between classes ofobjects itself can be a member of any of those classes it serves todistinguish.

This brings us to the diachronic and genealogical version of thecontingency argument, whose task it is to explain the historical genesis of theconcepts and categories which have been put to use in the constitution ofstate identity. Two main versions of such an argument can be discerned inthe literature.

In the first version, the task is to understand how the concept of sovereignstate came into being and became a constitutive part of international lifewithin modern political discourse, including that of International Relations.The point of departure is to regard state sovereignty as but one historicallyspecific solution to the perennial problem of creating political communityand 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 createand sustain state identity in a world of difference. Interpreted in this way, thesovereign state is the outcome of a series of discursive accidents togetherwhich effect the kind of resolution between the universal and the particularwhich we know and inhabit today (Walker, 1993: 81124).


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In this case both indivisibility and distinctness are regarded as derivativefrom the timing and spacing created by political discourse, yet the identity ofthis discourse in turn derives from the fact that it deals with the sameallegedly timeless problem, that of community. Hence, all solutions to thisproblem seem to demand the ability to fix a point of identity auniversality in time and space against which all differences in space andtime can be measured, judged, and put in their place (Walker, 1990b:175).

In the second version, the task is to understand how the categoricaldistinction between the domestic and the international has been created andbeen subjected to change by different discourses through different periods.The focus here is how changing discursive practices of demarcation coexistwith and are conditioned by changing modes of knowledge in the shaping ofhistorically specific forms of political community. Within this view, neitherthe state nor the line separating it from the international domain aretranshistorically present, but result from the interfoliation of discourses onpower and knowledge. Thus, the indivisibility, distinctness and spatio-temporal continuity of the state can be regarded as outcomes of theepistemic and ontological options made available by a symbolic exchangebetween philosophical and political discourse throughout the ages (Bartel-son, 1995: Ch. 23).

Since both the deconstructive and the genealogical versions of thecontingency argument phrase the question of state identity in terms ofthe conditions of possible intelligibility and then answer it by pointing to themodal antecendents of the state concept, they of course beg the question ofwhat makes political discourses and discursive practices self-identical enoughto warrant treatment as objects of inquiry in their own right. Furthermore,even if both deconstruction and genealogy explicitly problematicize timeand space by arguing that our modern that is, Newtonian inter-pretations of time and space are wholly integral to the formation of stateidentity, they nevertheless have to assume that this constitution ofstate identity takes place in a historical time other than that produced by themodalities of discourse, lest they either become incoherent or indistinguish-able from pure fiction.

So if the state is contingent upon discourse, it is also hard to imagine whatpossibly could replace it. Both deconstructivists and genealogists arereluctant to speculate about what may lurk beyond the modern state and theinternational system, yet they argue as if both were dead letters andinescapable at once. This being so, since the assumptions that inform theirenterprise seem to preclude anything but either a total transformation of thepresent, or, that this present is totally immutable. That a transformationeither is under way spontaneously or about to be effected by discursive


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intervention in the present is rarely doubted and often desired, but sincenew forms of political identity have not yet been brought into being bydiscourse, they are not yet intelligible either. The identity of the state isexplained as if existing explanations primarily were constitutive of it, ratherthan helpful in analyzing it. As a consequence, very small conceptualresources are left with which we could hope to understand what possiblymight replace the state, since the same set of statements and concepts hardlycan be expected to explain what they constitute simply because theyconstitute what they explain.

We might therefore conclude that whereas contingency argumentssuccessfully have stripped the identity of the modern state from all remnantsof apparent givenness, the ensuing explanations of how the identity of thestate has been formed cannot but confirm the obvious, namely, that it has tobe explained with reference to something else that in turn has to be assumedto be either identical with itself or completely different from itself. Thus,even the most die-hard proponent of contingency must assume the existenceof something which contingent things are assumed to be contingent uponand which is contingent upon nothing but itself, even if that is puredifference. But if state identity is assumed to be contingent upon politicaldiscourse, this discourse is often implicitly assumed to be contingent upon aspecifically modern resolution of the problem of political community thestate whose presence the same discourse was to account for in the firstplace.

Also, since the core claim of the contingency argument revolves aroundthe categorical distinction between the domestic and the international, andsince the other criteria of identity are treated as derivative from thisdisjunction, the main upshot of the contingency argument has been todemonstrate and lament the interdependence between this divide anddisciplinary identity (Ashley and Walker, 1990). But if the questioning ofstate identity automatically spills over into a questioning of disciplinaryidentity and conversely, the contingency argument is vulnerable to thecriticism that deconstruction merely serves to assimilate the study ofInternational Relations to the concerns of literary criticism and thatgenealogy turns International Relations into a branch of the history ofideas.

Finally, not even a consistent contingency argument can avoid thepervasive tendency to reduce questions of identity to questions of authority.Whereas both deconstruction and genealogy denaturalize the state and turnit into a discursive fact, they both beg the question of how the distinctions,concepts and categories produced by discourse and productive of identitythemselves are authorized and rendered historically effective, a questionwhich is difficult to answer without venturing outside discourse for


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explanations of the content of discourse, its dissemination and its impact. Inthe final analysis, we either stay inside discourse and attribute a certainauthority to discourse itself, or we step outside it by attributing authority tothose institutions and practices that supposedly produce and sustain it. Inthe former case, the authority necessary to demarcate the state from itsothers becomes ghostly and the ensuing explanation regressive, and in thelatter case we not only violate the methodological precepts of orthodoxdiscourse analysis, but also end up with a circular account in which the stateis identical with itself by virtue of being constituted by a discourse that itselfultimately 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 wasarticulated in conscious opposition to the notion of givenness, and thenotion of contingency in conscious opposition to both, these three viewsnevertheless all led to circularity or regress, albeit through very differentconceptual detours and on different levels of abstraction. All these ways ofmaking sense of the state assume that the state is identical with itself byvirtue of its indivisibility, distinctness and continuity their main differenceconcerns the grounds for interpreting and applying these criteria, and,ultimately the very possibility of identity.

Accounts of state identity invariably necessitate assumptions about theself-identity of other things. In one sense this is trivial, since there cannot beany frameworks of inquiry devoid of presuppositions about their objects ofinquiry, and such presuppositions characteristically entail some ontologicalcommitments. Yet this also indicates something less trivial and highlyproblematic, namely, that even if the concept of identity presumably issusceptible to analysis, it also figures as a necessary precondition of allanalysis. As Nietzsche (1968: 309) once remarked, [t]here would benothing that could be called knowledge if thought did not first re-form theworld 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 interpretedas transhistorical constants, structural or historical variables, or rhetoricalresources. Hence, given the way the problem of identity has been phrased,what makes the state identical with itself in the earlier accounts is alwayssomething other which is supposed to be spatially exterior or temporallyanterior to the state, yet that something is both constitutive of and thusfoundational in relation to the state proper. Posed in these terms, thequestion of state identity will inevitably yield elusive answers, and a constant


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quest for its conditions of possibility. And the ensuing recourse to somefoundational authority or primordial act of violence (physical or interpretive)will seem inevitable, yet the outcome of such recourse will always appear asa 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 bedeconstructed must at least momentarily be taken for granted. At this pointwe might suspect that the difficulties we experience when analysing stateidentity have more to do with the concept of identity itself than with anyinherent ambiguities of the state concept perhaps it is the other wayaround. In this section, therefore, I shall take a brief look at the concept ofidentity 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 identitysuch as indivisibility, distinctness and continuity ultimately is conditioned bymore profound and largely unreflected ontological commitments, itbecomes easier to realize that these commitments in turn are enabled andcircumscribed by a set of differences, such as those between essence andattribute, being and intelligibility, and language and world. But if there is noway of making sense of state identity without invoking such oppositions,there is no way of making sense of these differences without invoking theidentities that constitute the terms of these oppositions.

This assumption boils down to the observation that identity can onlybe understood in a context of differences, while difference can only beunderstood within a context of identities. Conventionally phrased, thisfurther implies that something can only be identical with itself by virtue ofbeing different from something else. Yet this conventional logic inevitablycollapses into paradox, since if identity is premised on difference betweentwo or more things, these things in fact share in common both the attributeof being self-identical and the attribute of being different from each other,which implies that they in fact are identical with each other, and thereforecannot be two. This daunting insight is frequently attributed to Hegel, as isthe solution to the paradox. As he states in his Logic,

. . . the truth is rather that a consideration of everything that is, shows that inits 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 intothe 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


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interpreted, ontological difference becomes a condition of possible identityrather than conversely, so that sameness ultimately depends on the possibilityof being different from itself. If this indeed is the fundamental law of allidentity, this would imply that the concepts put to use when phrasing andsolving the problem of identity themselves are subject to the law of identityrather than being conducive to its solution nothing is identical with itselfby virtue only of itself. Thus, if identity and difference are mutuallyimplicating, something can be identical with itself only by virtue of beingdifferent from itself, and different from itself only by virtue of being identicalwith itself (cf. Siemens, 1988).

Therefore, in the final analysis, what is proper to identity is the ability toenter into a relationship to oneself, and to be different from oneself as acondition of oneself. As Derrida (1992b: 10) has remarked, there is no self-relation, no relation to oneself, no identification with oneself, withoutculture, but a culture of oneself as a culture of the other, a culture of thedouble genitive and of the difference to oneself . That is, a given identity willremain identical with itself only by virtue of being related to itself as another,yet such self-relation demands a medium through which it can bearticulated, a culture of oneself as a culture of the other, in Derridaswords. Thus, rather than merely showing state identity or any particularidentity to be impossible, this deconstruction of the concept of identityhas shown that identity not only is an impossibility, but that identity itself isnothing but another name for that impossibility that hinders the constitu-tion of a full identity-with-itself (Zizek, 1991: 37). We are thereforeobliged to conclude that identity is a profoundly contradictory concept,since the conditions of its possibility coincide with the conditions of itsimpossibility.

B. The Concept of the State Revisited

But granted that identity is nothing but a radical impossibility, how are weto make sense of the theoretical discourse on the state?

To my mind, the main reason why existing accounts of state identity lapseinto either regress or circularity is that they fail to apprehend that the stateconcept ultimately is self-referential within most contexts of employment.Existing accounts of state identity are therefore best understood as expressiveof the same identity they seek to describe and explain, since the verypossibility they share in common, namely that of conceptualizing the state asif one stood outside it, presupposes precisely that kind of difference which isintegral to its proper identity.

The main historical reason why state identity has become so difficult todisentangle and analyse is that existing accounts of state identity within


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International Relations theory consistently have departed from the outcomeof prior juridicopolitical justifications of the state in terms of its idealgenesis and and progressive trajectory, and have then transposed thisoutcome to the international domain, oblivious of the fact that the state andthe international domain are wholly simultaneous. This deserves someelaboration.

First, in order to make sense of state identity, theorists of InternationalRelations typically start from a hypothetical situation in which all supposedlyaccidental attributes of the state have been stripped off. Originally applied tothe juridicopolitical person in the context of contractarian justifications ofauthority, this way of reasoning is supposed to yield the kind of clean slatefrom which the emergence of the state can be explained and justified, muchin the same way as the state of nature was invented in order to explain andjustify the presence of authority in the domestic context. But behind theideal genesis of the state we find nothing but primordial violence International Relations has incorporated into its ontological core anunderstanding of political authority that originally was tailored to concealthe facts of conquest and the violent origin of all authority, and then onceand for all sealed this understanding by grafting it on to a domain which isnothing but an iteration of the original and concealing contractariancontext.

Second, and now in order to account for the possibility of transformationand expectations of transcendence, the same theorists venture to explain thepresent identity of the state in terms of its structural, historical or discursiveantecedents. Originally invented in order to justify visions of the perfectcommunity and to legitimize expectations of transcendence, this temporaliz-ation of present identities is supposed to lay bare the conditions of possibletransformation in the international domain. But again, this gesture is one ofiteration, since the ideal trajectories of the state, portrayed in terms of itsfuture demise or permanence, wholly correspond to and sustain its idealizedorigin at the speculative end of the state we will always find nothing butits legitimizing foundation.

This is why the juridicopolitical conception of the state as identical withitself yields strange results when inserted within a context defined by theabsence of central authority and common identity. The original use of thislatter conception was to justify existing political authority and to concealfoundational and revolutionary violence by temporalizing it. But in sharpcontrast to the later employment of a notion of a state of nature in thecontext of International Relations theory, its domestic counterpart state wasnot created to account for the identity of its constitutive components.

But since there is no international authority to justify and no commoninternational identity to depart from in the ensuing explanation of the state,


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accounts of state identity which repeat the gestures mentioned earlier arealso 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 thecritical possibility as well. On the one hand, international anarchy makescriticism of the sovereign state seem urgent, since the state looks like themain source of discord in the world. On the other, the fact of anarchy makescriticism very difficult, since the state cannot be summoned to appear beforea moral law that is not simultaneously the law of the state, hence it isultimately founded in the very same condition that one so urgently wishes tosubject to criticism.

Hence, the kind of state identity which figures as an object of theoreticalcontroversy in contemporary International Relations theory is nothing but afiction dreamed up by contractarians and cultivated by their historicistsuccessors in order to conceal the facts of conquest and the ignoble origin ofall law. It is this concept that signifies something given according to theadherents of givenness, something constructed and therefore reconstructibleaccording to constructivists, something contingent therefore deconstruct-ible according to proponents of contingency the state is their secondnature, and the secret source of their professional enjoyment.

C. Conclusion

But even if the efforts to transcend the state are demonstrably futile, we maywell be able to move beyond the current confines of political imagination.How, then, could we reconceptualize the state in the light of the earlieranalysis?

Such a reconceptualization would amount to nothing less than awholesale reversal of perspectives. First, through an intitial detour throughWeber, we should regard the state as a claim to a monopoly of violence, butwithout deciding pace Weber upon whether this claim has to besuccessful or legitimate in order for us to speak of the state. Regarded asnothing but a claim, it becomes possible to view the state as a contestablepossibility whose fulfillment is impossible, and whose legitimacy always isderivative from its relative success, rather than conversely. As Hoffman(1995: 6275) has argued, the final success and total legitimacy of any suchclaim would be tantamount to its cancellation, which entails that the state isprofoundly contradictory it is but a name for a certain structuralimpossibility made possible by a certain political practice.

Thus, viewed from inside itself, the state is always necessarily an apple ofdiscord before it can present itself as a source of political identity and order.Hence our conceptualizations of the state will always reflect the interpretive


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violence of a founding authority, as well as its capacity to authorize itself byconcealing the fact of primordial conquest. When viewed from outside itself,the state is but a battle beset by deadlock or ceasefire long enough to havebeen forgotten by the combatants, but always ready to erupt in a renewedstruggle and new conquests, conquests in turn awaiting new acts ofconcealment, and new authorizations of the fundamental laws of thepolitical. Thus, rather than being the happy outcome of successful domesti-cation and pacification, the state is a continuation of war with other means(see Foucault, 1997: 1617).

Second, this implies that all politics ultimately is international politics, ifwe by international no longer mean what takes place within a pre-constituted realm, but rather the kind of practices that are fundamental tothe establishment of such realms that is, as politics as the quest for thefirst principles of the political in the absence of first principles. From thisperspective, the juridicopolitical fiction of the self-identical state, along withits corollary international system are nothing but momentary stabilizationsof historical practices of power politics, practices which both precede andexceed the constitution of political identity and political authority, but whichthemselves nevertheless are historically specific and dinstinctively Western inorigin. In the final analysis, the impossible possibility of the state founders inraison detat, and will live and die with its dissemination. What we arewitnessing today is therefore not the death of the state, but an intensifiedawareness of how its permanent crisis eludes understanding other than fromwithin a perspective that cannot but contribute to its reproduction. Onlywhen this perspective itself has been long forgotten, will we be totallyentitled 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 theirvaluable comments on earlier drafts of this article.

1. I must admit that I have compiled this list somewhat impressionistically, drawingboth on discussions of the identity of physical objects and that of persons, tryingto 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).


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BARTELSON, Jens - Second Nature