Trusting the Poles? Constructing Europe through mutual recognition

European integration has been and will continue to be flawed with conflicts, conflicts of interests embedded in broader conflicts of identity. I argue that these conflicts and the bargains they require exhibit similar patterns across a wide array of issues, as struggaes around 'mutual' recognition where mutuality plays a crucial role. Indeed, the challenges and perils of recognition are universal. But Europe can be seen as an experimental polity where, more formally than elsewhere, actors debate the contours of a norm which has migrated from regulatory praxis to mode of governance, and beyond, to political principle. If the 'Polish plumber' has come to serve as the emblem for the denial of recognition in the EU, mutual recognition is no less conflictual when it comes to the status of refugees, Bosnians or cartoonists. Normatively, if 'managed mutual recognition' is to serve as a blueprint beyond international political economy, we need to better analyse the relationship between recognition and trust, blind and binding trust, deferential and interventionist recognition. Keywords: Diplomatic recognitionlegitimate differencesmanaged mutual recognitionPolish plumberstruggles for recognitiontrust ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Shachar Nativ and Susanne Schmidt for their comments. Notes 1 As an outcome, managed mutual recognition can be contrasted with `pure' mutual recognition in the same sense as managed trade can be contrasted with free trade. It involves complex sets of rules and procedures that may serve to reduce, if not eliminate, the open-endedness of access rights. The four main dimensions along which mutual recognition can be fine-tuned are: (a) prior conditions for equivalence, from convergence to inter-institutional agreements; (b) degree of automaticity of access; (c) scope of activities or features covered by recognition; and (d) ex-post guarantees, including ultimately provisions for reversibility. Statically, variation along each of these dimensions can be seen to indicate how far parties have travelled down the road to full recognition. Dynamically, the management of mutual recognition can be viewed as a process involving evolving trade-offs between these dimensions. 2 For instance, Evelyne Gebhardt, of the Parti Socialiste Européen (PSE) rapporteur on the services directive, argued that the Socialist Party was proposing to 'establish the principle of mutual recognition instead of that of country of origin in the directive that is that if one enterprise was established in one country legally it should be able to establish services in the whole of the EU not having to apply all the relevant country of origin principles (sic) but operating under a principle of minimum standards applicable in the host country. The "country of origin" principle is not a European answer to the problem – but mutual recognition and harmonization are.'