6 - Asymmetrical Recognition

Summary

The common root shared by legal universalism and the IACA-model of law is the insight that struggles for recognition are the locus of a normative account of boundary-setting. But whereas legal universalism interprets struggles for recognition, qua normative project, as progressively overcoming the contingency of boundaries, I will suggest that asymmetrical recognition offers a way of dealing with contingency, but not of overcoming it. Asymmetrical recognition is the core of a politics of boundary-setting that is authoritative by dint of recognising the other (in ourselves) as one of us and as other than us. I call this restrained collective self-assertion. For the one, collective self-assertion addresses, without exhausting, a demand for recognition. Instead of understanding struggles about boundaries as oriented towards an ever greater inclusiveness based on reciprocal recognition between the parties in conflict, my reading of collective self-assertion allows for situational generalisations (in the plural) without universalisation or universalisability (in the singular). For the other, collective self-restraint, in the strong sense to be espoused hereinafter, suspends the (full) application of the law to protect the other (in ourselves) as other than us.