The claim to be established: mechanisms of unit-creation in world political ontology

There is a need to identify the point at which a claim to collective political-ontological status succeeds in establishing an actual unit. At some point, for example, a claim to national sovereignty may be transformed into a state. Recent work has shown that the point is not straightforwardly fixable, and does not necessarily rely only on formal external recognition. This paper argues that the question may be explicated by conceptualizing political and social units as systems of offices through which biological human entities identify themselves and pursue and sometimes achieve esteem. This mechanism, here applied to formal political units, requires that humans support those offices and systems of offices which in turn support them. This is a mutually constitutive and affirming feedback loop, one direction of which has not drawn enough theoretical attention. Bounded political-structural contexts are an active part of the process, since they, or their agents, select among candidates for office. Emergent nodes – informal collective entities, real, imagined or metaphorical – may be constituted when they themselves become candidates for office in 'higher' structures like state systems. The phenomenon of states that exist only on paper shows that recognition of the unit by the system is not sufficient for successful constitution. It must be accompanied by a similar recognition, by the unit, of the system. Neither recognition need be formal or positive. Not only, therefore, do actors create systems of offices to suit their interests, the reverse also operates. Systems of offices create units who suit the system's interests.