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The Recognition of States: Law and Practice in Debate and Evolution. By Thomas D. Grant. Westport CT, London: Praeger, 1999. Pp. xxii, 231. Index. $65.
Many of the great names in international law have tackled the thorny subject of statehood and recognition. The question "What is a state?" is central to the classic theory of international law, based as it is upon the view that the state is the only actor in the international legal arena. As international law developed to encompass not only the state, but also new actors such as individuals, groups, international organizations, and multinational corporations, the issue of the nature of the state has remained pivotal, perhaps because, as the roles and the impact of these new actors has become more tangible, the state itself has been transformed.
Kelsen,1 Lauterpacht,2 Jessup,3 and, more recently, Crawford4 have written seminal works on the nature of statehood. There is also a wealth of journal scholarship on the subject, and one might well wonder whether yet another book on the topic could hope to provide any new thinking or, indeed, any useful reflections on the existing body of work. The breakup of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, however, persuaded Thomas Grant-- previously a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge University and currently Warburg Research Fellow at St. Anne's College, Oxford University-- that another look at the recognition of states was worth undertaking.
In The Recognition of States: Law and Practice in Debate and Evolution, Grant sets out to provide a guide to the intellectual development of the voluminous literature on states and recognition, particularly the great debate over the constitutive and the declaratory theories of recognition.5 In the first part of the book, which deals with the great debate, Grant makes some interesting comments, but his analysis follows well-worked furrows. The latter part of the book is far more valuable. After examining, in general, the process by which recognition is granted, Grant analyzes the particular process by which the European Union (EU) determined whether and when to recognize the republics of the former Yugloslavia. This section on the EU is based on rich factual material and presents a persuasive argument that there is an emerging expectation, at least in Europe, of collective...