I take it your talking about the medals screen, with the 5 Rank patches up top, the 4 ribbons, then the 4 medals.
The rank patches are controlled by the game itself. The ribbons and medals are awarded by mission scripts.
For Single Player games, the only scripts that hand out ribbons / medals are the story-telling campaign ones. In OP, the only story campaigns are for the pirates. If you download the EAW missions for OP script pack and play those campaigns, you can get the racial ribbons that way.
Tracey G had written some EAW scripts that award ribbons for PvP combat and medals for PvP victory (or something like that)... Obviously those are only applicable on D2...