[Footnote 102: This condition contains a restriction on the personal supremacy of the respective States. See below, § 128.]
[Footnote 103: See arts. 5, 25, 35, and 44 of the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, in Martens, N.R.G. 2nd Ser. III. p. 449.]
[Sidenote: Recognition timely and precipitate.]
§ 74. Recognition is of special importance in those cases where a new State tries to establish itself by breaking off from an existing State in the course of a revolution. And here the question is material whether a new State has really already safely and permanently established itself or only makes efforts to this end without having already succeeded. That in every case of civil war a foreign State can recognise the insurgents as a belligerent Power if they succeed in keeping a part of the country in their hands and set up a Government of their own, there is no doubt. But between this recognition as a belligerent Power and the recognition of these insurgents and their part of the country as a new State, there is a broad and deep gulf. And the question is precisely at what exact time recognition of a new State may be given instead of the recognition as a belligerent Power. For an untimely and precipitate recognition as a new State is a violation of the dignity[104] of the mother-State, to which the latter need not patiently submit.
[Footnote 104: It is frequently maintained that such untimely recognition contains an intervention. But this is not correct, since intervention is (see below, § 134) _dictatorial_ interference in the affairs of another State. The question of recognition of the belligerency of insurgents is exhaustively treated by Westlake, I. pp. 50-57.]
In spite of the importance of the question, no hard-and-fast rule can be laid down as regards the time when it can be said that a State created by revolution has established itself safely and permanently. The characteristic of such safe and permanent establishment may be found either in the fact that the revolutionary State has utterly defeated the mother-State, or that the mother-State has ceased to make efforts to subdue the revolutionary State, or even that the mother-State, in spite of its efforts, is apparently incapable of bringing the revolutionary back under its sway.[105] Of course, as soon as the mother-State itself recognises the new State, there is no reason for other States to withhold any longer their recognition, although they have even then no legal obligation to grant it.