German and US Borderlands: Recognition Theory and the Copenhagen School in the Era of Hybrid Identities

Abstract

This chapter explores securitization and recognition theories as lenses into conflict, emerging from specific migration practices. In current critical scholarship, these practices are, for the main part, interpreted as disrupting and breaking down Axel Honneth’s institutionalized recognition order. They are fundamentally undermining migrants’ self-trust, legal rights, and abilities for self-determination and autonomy. By approaching the intersection of recognition and migration—and global mobility generally—from an interdisciplinary, critical, post-structural security studies perspective, this chapter makes two contributions to existing scholarship: First, it highlights the linkages between misrecognition and the logic of subjective intentionality of security, also understood as the securitization of subjectivity through negative securitization logic; and second, it draws attention to a normative opening—an inclusive, positive securitization, which moves misrecognition injuries as emancipation toward a more advanced, more complete, social and moral progress. By utilizing two similarly constructed “crises” environments—the migration discourse in Germany and the USA—this chapter takes its epistemological point of departure from both countries’ containment and deterrence migration policies and practices. Specifically, it interprets the US Remain-in-Mexico and Germany’s ANKER Center policies as liberal dispositifs of security. The struggle for recognition is a struggle of becoming “a self.” If the processes and lived experiences of becoming a self are disrupted, we speak of misrecognition. Instead of facilitating trust, respect, and esteem through undifferentiated rights, agency, and positive security for migrants, German and US migration practices violate the two countries’ own liberal and moral aspirations of universal rights, justice, social and moral progress. A way out of the negative security and misrecognition logic can be achieved through emancipation. The proposed interdisciplinary recognition and securitization lens, including the concept of thick recognition, provides an opening toward alternative approaches. It is an approach toward positive securitization as the maintenance of just, core values lived and realized through diversity, self-determined, and multi- and transcultural agency. This chapter evaluates these claims of a new normative opening increasingly asserted by a twenty-first-century, progressive era of transcultural, hybrid identities.