International Relations in a Constructed World

Vendulka Kubalkova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317467410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Explores the application of constructivist theory to international relations. The text examines the relevance of constructivism for empirical research, focusing on some of the key issues of contemporary international politics: ethnic and national identity; gender; and political economy.

Part I Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315703299-1

1 Constructing Constructivism

Vendulka Kubálková, Nicholas Onuf, and Paul Kowert

DOI: 10.4324/9781315703299-2

“… so that they will not understand one another’s speech …”

The Tower of Babel

“And thus what was written was fulfilled,” and a common language was lost. Books, articles, and conference papers explaining the world at the turn of the millennium are a Tower of Babel (Genesis 11). For half a century, English has been the unofficial but universal language of scholarly exchange. Today, scholars speak in many, highly specialized English languages, and they barely manage to understand each other. Specialized languages have always characterized disciplines, the subjects of study that scholars have delimited among themselves, as if these subjects were the natural and inevitable way to arrange the production and dissemination of knowledge. What is unusual and has reached truly biblical proportions is the way that specialized languages have swept across traditional disciplinary boundaries. International Relations (for convenience, IR) is a conspicuous case, in part because its status as a discipline is not secure, in part because its subject matter (international relations, in this book always spelled out in the lower case) has undergone a spectacular transformation within a decade’s time.

Indeed, the contributors to this book do not even agree among themselves on whether IR is a discipline in its own right, an interdisciplinary undertaking, or merely a field (or subdivision) of political science. Perhaps changes in the world make the traditional ways that scholars have divided up the world seem increasingly arbitrary and irrelevant. Perhaps the Babel of scholarly languages signifies the dismantling of the current arrangement of disciplines conventionally known as the social sciences. The editors do agree that a common language of scholarship is both desirable and possible for the subject of international relations; that this language should also suit social relations in general; and that this language should never be made deliberately obscure just to maintain disciplinary boundaries or, for that matter, to keep people who are not scholarly specialists in the dark.

IR scholars speak in many voices. They regularly propose new “approaches” to the subject, and proponents engage in “great debates” over their merits. They feel obliged to propose schemes for classifying an ever larger number of approaches. Their students spend an increasing, and perhaps inordinate, amount of time reprising these debates and memorizing classificatory schemes.

This volume grew out of the pedagogical concerns of a group of teachers and students at two universities in Miami. Although our backgrounds and interests vary, our discussions have increasingly centered on “constructivism,” in which the discipline as a whole has taken a great deal of interest since Nicholas Onuf (one of the group’s members) introduced the term in 1989. As we considered the version of constructivism that he had developed in World of Our Making and began to think about our other scholarly interests in constructivist terms, this book gradually took form. Onuf’s essay (see Chapter 3) sets out his version of constructivism in language that any serious-minded reader can understand. Other contributors explain and refine constructivism, and apply it to a variety of important topics in international relations. In the process, they help to dispel some myths and misunderstandings that have already attached themselves to a term that scholars have begun to use rather casually. One myth is that constructivism is closely related to the “post-modern” practice of “deconstruction”; a second is that constructivism mandates an “emancipatory” or “critical” politics; a third is that constructivism, being “post-positivist,” is indifferent to empirical research and antithetical to “positivist” science. (We shall consider these and many other terms more fully in this introductory chapter.)

This book shows that constructivism offers an unfamiliar but systematic way of thinking about social relations in general and international relations in particular. The book also shows the relevance of constructivism to the empirical investigation of important topics in contemporary international relations, such as national identity, gender in political economy, and the emerging information age. In sum, the volume addresses these questions: What is constructivism? Where does it fit in the discipline? How it can help the discipline to move on?

In this introductory chapter, we undertake several preliminary tasks. We look briefly into the relatively short history and currently confused state of the discipline. We discuss disciplinary boundaries, external influences, and endless debates as sources of confusion. We show that the ways IR scholars categorize approaches and stake out positions for debate have led them to underestimate constructivism as an alternative to received ways of thinking. Finally, and perhaps most important, we explain a considerable number of concepts that scholars often use but rarely give sufficient thought to, and that readers unschooled in the scholarly languages of philosophy and the social sciences will find utterly baffling.

The purpose of this book is not to pronounce on the state of the discipline, to assess all sources of confusion, or to pass judgment on every debate. Part I of the book does so only as necessary to discuss the intellectual context from which constructivism has grown. Nor is our purpose to discredit the efforts of IR scholars to learn from other disciplines. Our purpose, rather, is to show that constructivism can make sense of international relations by making sense of social relations, and that constructivism offers IR a way beyond the impasse of many discordant languages and distracting debates.

Disciplines and Dialects

Insular and protected as a discipline, IR is overwhelmingly the work of scholars from just two countries: Britain and the United States. Just as IR has finally begun to open itself to other disciplines and their languages, it is ironic that the subject matter of international relations came to the attention of scholars in those other disciplines. All of a sudden, “global concerns” are on everyone’s agenda. At the same time, scholars from all over the world have begun to identify themselves with IR as a discipline. IR has become a major importer of ideas and authors—ideas to be applied to IR and authors to cite as sources of inspiration. It is especially unsettling for an older generation of IR scholars to see other names than their own sprinkled in the footnotes of their younger colleagues.

As a discipline, IR has accumulated a huge intellectual balance of trade deficit. Little produced in the discipline has found its way into other disciplines. IR scholars do not seem to lead or influence public debate. The past decade was characterized by tumultuous and far-reaching changes that exposed the irrelevance of the discipline’s accumulated knowledge about international relations. Any number of politicians, intellectuals, and journalists have declared the end of the Cold War, communism, modernity, and history, and the beginning of some new epoch, with no help whatsoever from IR scholars. Furthermore, most of these scholars are only slowly adjusting to a new agenda of concerns—global warming, environmental degradation, overpopulation, ethnic conflict—identified by somebody outside the discipline. Everything allegedly new and different is “post”: post-communist, post–international relations, post-modern, post-positivist, post-realist, post-Soviet, post-structural, post-theory. As a universal prefix, “post” indicates more clearly what has been transcended or rejected than what may be expected in the future.

IR is hardly alone in its bewilderment. The division of knowledge by disciplines no longer seems convincing. There are so many bodies of knowledge, each couched in its own arcane language, that reaching across disciplines brings huge costs in translation, dissipating intellectual resources that could otherwise be used to address new concerns. Because IR combines global pretensions with an exceptionally insular perspective on itself and its subject, it suffers more than most disciplines from this state of affairs.

The creation and accumulation of knowledge in the last two hundred years advanced hand in hand with the multiplication of specializations and their institutionalization as disciplines. Since there is nothing natural or inevitable about the way scholars define their substantive concerns and parcel them out among themselves, some of these concerns—especially the ones now popularly called “global”—are shared, but the way they are studied is not. Even if scholars were able to overcome their parochial tendencies, disciplinary “dialects” make it difficult for them to share anything across disciplines. Indeed, the more something passes muster as knowledge within a discipline, the less likely it is to “translate” to other disciplines.

Dialects develop because the same words used in several disciplines or their subfields begin to carry different meanings in each. When scholars introduce and debate new concepts, they give new meaning to old words. They separate synonyms, realign antonyms, and invent new words. As worlds of scholarship, disciplines are never completely sealed off from each other. The words themselves drift across disciplinary boundaries like snippets of conversation for which an eavesdropper has no context. They tantalize scholars dissatisfied with the state of their own disciplines, who borrow them with minimal care and adapt them to new uses.

To give a few examples relevant to our concerns, structure, agent, and realism mean very different things in different disciplines. The structuralism of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has little to do with the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser and even less to do with the structural realism of IR’s Kenneth Waltz. Economists and sociologists mean quite different things by the term agent. Realism in philosophy is far removed from realism in international relations. (See Chapter 4 for a discussion of “scientific realism.”)

The term critical is another, instructive example. Philosophers have used the term in a specialized sense that goes back to Immanuel Kant. In the hands of Marxist theorists, it acquired a different, though still specialized, meaning. Other scholars had always used the term to refer to the “ability to find defects and faults,” once regarded as a critical faculty of every scholar. Thanks to the diffusion of a specifically neo-Marxist dialect, scholars in several disciplines now use the term in ways that neither Kant nor any ordinary person would understand. The antonym of the term critical is not uncritical but, in some cases, positivist (a term itself carrying several meanings) and in others, problem-solving. Not all scholars are critical (although this does not mean that they are “uncritical”). Not being critical might mean that a scholar is positivist or interested only in proposing policies to solve narrowly defined problems.

There are powerful incentives to perpetuate the confusion. Who would not want to be a critical scholar if it reflects on one’s intellectual abilities? Yet becoming “critical” carries certain implications: for some scholars being critical means openly acknowledging a connection to Marx, while other critical scholars go out of their way to deny such a connection. The distinctions are not often appreciated. Some scholars quote post-structuralists and critical theorists in support of the same argument, overlooking vehement disagreements between the two groups (Kratochwil 1984). The same argument may once be described as leftist or Marxist, and another time as right-wing and conservative. The same words point in altogether different directions.

Often scholars and students blithely use words, such as discourse and the other, for their sophisticated and contemporary flair. The word problematique (with appropriate French pronunciation) is used instead of problem or hypothesis in total ignorance of the very special meaning that the French term is intended to convey. Similarly project is no longer just an exercise for schoolchildren. In the history of ideas, some antecedents are more controversial than others, and the genesis of many currently fashionable terms in earlier leftist ideas is still a sensitive subject. Practice is just such a term, only somewhat separated from the Marxist notion of praxis by translation into English. In fact, this is a term to which constructivists are partial, and readers will find it used in this book.

Words are imported from all over the place, including meteorology, physics, and mathematics. Terms such as turbulence, chaos, and cascade, which natural scientists and mathematicians have adopted from ordinary language for their own very specific use, have been borrowed by social scientists, including IR scholars, and used metaphorically. With so many casual appropriations and mixed signals, it is not surprising that many IR scholars are casting about for terms to describe themselves that simultaneously seem right for disciplinary purposes, flatter them in their ordinary meaning, and suggest a connection to other disciplinary conversations (con-versation is another term that scholars have favored with a specialized meaning). Just as some scholars feel that they ought to make sure that they are critical in some sense of the term, many are now self-proclaimed con-structivists. They often use the term to suggest what they are not: they are not realists or positivists in any narrow sense. They do not practice “deconstruction.” Taking the middle path, as they see it (Adler 1997), they are protected on both sides by the fuzzy use of language.

International Relations as a Discipline

The Enlightenment’s celebration of reason unleashed a tremendous range of intellectual activities previously restricted by the medieval acceptance of God’s revelation as the truth. By the end of the eighteenth century, two previously synonymous terms, science and philosophy, had been redefined and separated. Thereafter, science dealt with the material world and included such pursuits as astronomy, chemistry, and physics. Scientists made innumerable discoveries that had a cumulatively staggering effect on the material conditions of daily life. Overshadowed by the dazzling successes of science, philosophy was left with “metaphysical” questions that no one could hope to answer convincingly.

In the nineteenth century, between the growing edifice of science and the shrinking edifice of philosophy, ground was broken by one of the “inventors” of positivism, Auguste Comte, for an ambitious new undertaking. The new edifice of the “social sciences” was to be built to the image of the highly successful “natural sciences.” Sustaining this development was a belief, known as naturalism, that nature and society do not fundamentally differ. In positivist terms, any phenomenon, no matter how complex in appearance, can be broken down into units that can be studied scientifically. Cumulative knowledge will faithfully represent the world as it is, explain how it works, predict its future unfolding, and allow humanity to control its own destiny.

Late in the nineteenth century, the separation of political economy into politics (mainly government and public law) and economics, and the separation of sociology from the other two disciplines, followed the liberal practice of separating state, economy, and society. Anthropology came in tandem with colonial administration, while history occupied an ambiguous position between the humanities and the social sciences.

IR came late and developed slowly, in the shadow of the other social sciences, especially political science. World War I endowed it with a subject matter that other disciplines had relegated to the margins of systematic inquiry: the study of war and ways to avoid it. The first IR scholars were, for the most part, international lawyers and diplomatic historians. Diplomats and journalists mattered, and professional journals were devoted to policy issues and current events. Students of politics concerned themselves with the subject from the point of view of international law and international organizations (chiefly the League of Nations). Other social scientists were conspicuously absent, and the positivist idea of science was almost unheard of. (A British meteorologist, statistician, and Quaker, L.F. Richardson, is the most interesting exception to this generalization; his work went largely unnoticed until after World War II.)

Between the two world wars, many IR scholars were closely connected to the governments of the day in Britain and the United States. To the extent that the discipline can be said to have existed at all, its dominant concerns reflected the liberal internationalism of English-speaking political elites. A Continental tradition of concern for statecraft—Realpolitik—figured little in the discipline. Marxist concerns mattered even less.

After World War II, IR gained disciplinary momentum. The United States assumed an active stance toward the world commensurate with its power, universities in the United States expanded rapidly, and German Jewish expatriates brought a Continental concern for statecraft to the fore. What seemed like a new and very powerful way of thinking, styled realism,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors and the Contributors
• Preface
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. Constructivism in Context
• Part III. International Relations Under Construction
• Part IV. Construction in the Academy
• Index