Making Sense, Making Worlds

Constructivism in Social Theory and International Relations

Nicholas Onuf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136219467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Nicholas Onuf is a leading scholar in international relations and introduced constructivism to international relations, coining the term constructivism in his book World of Our Making (1989). He was featured as one of twelve scholars featured in Iver B. Neumann and Ole Wæver, eds., The Future of International Relations: Masters in the Making? (1996); and featured in Martin Griffiths, Steven C. Roach and M. Scott Solomon, Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations, 2nd ed. (2009).

This powerful collection of essays clarifies Onuf's approach to international relations and makes a decisive contribution to the debates in IR concerning theory. It embeds the theoretical project in the wider horizon of how we understand ourselves and the world. Onuf updates earlier themes and his general constructivist approach, and develops some newer lines of research, such as the work on metaphors and the re-grounding in much more Aristotle than before.

A complement to the author's groundbreaking book of 1989, World of Our Making, this tightly argued book draws extensively from philosophy and social theory to advance constructivism in International Relations.

Making Sense, Making Worlds will be vital reading for students and scholars of international relations, international relations theory, social theory and law.

Part I
Constructivism

1
Constructivism: A User's Manual (1998)

CONSTRUCTIVISM is a way of studying social relations—any kind of social relations. While it draws from a variety of other ways of studying such a broad and complex subject, it stands on its own as a system of concepts and propositions. Constructivism is not a theory as such. It does not offer general explanations for what people do, why societies differ, how the world changes. Instead, constructivism makes it feasible to theorize about matters that seem to be unrelated because the concepts and propositions normally used to talk about such matters are also unrelated.

As presented here, constructivism applies to all fields of social inquiry. In recent years, dissident scholars in many fields have selectively used the language of social construction to criticize existing social arrangements and scholarly practices. A great deal of discord has ensued (also see Kubálková et al. 1998). When constructivism is used systematically, it has the opposite effect. It finds value in diverse materials and forges links where none seemed possible.

Full of discordant voices, International Relations is the field to which this particular system of concepts and propositions was first applied. While this manual is intended for the use of anyone with methodical habits of mind, its users are most likely to have an interest in the subject of international relations. They may have also had some exposure to the field’s scholarly controversies. If this is indeed the case, they will soon discover that the subject is less distinctive, but more complex, than they have been led to believe.

Overview

Fundamental to constructivism is the proposition that human beings are social beings, and we would not be human but for our social relations. In other words, social relations make or construct people—ourselves—into the kind of beings that we are. Conversely, we make the world what it is, from the raw materials that nature provides, by doing what we do with each other and saying what we say to each other. Indeed, saying is doing: talking is undoubtedly the most important way that we go about making the world what it is.

Countries such as France, or the United States or Zimbabwe are among the social constructions, or societies, that people make through what we do. Countries are self-contained worlds because people talk about them that way and try to keep them that way. Yet they are only relatively self-contained. Relations among countries—international relations—constitute a world in its own right (see further Chapter 2). This is a self-contained world for the simple reason that it covers the earth, but it is still nothing more than a world of our making—a society of relatively self-contained societies.

Constructivism holds that people make society, and society makes people. This is a continuous, two-way process. In order to study it, we must start in the middle, so to speak, because people and society, always having made each other, are already there and just about to change. To make a virtue of necessity, we will start in the middle, between people and society, by introducing a third element, rules, that always links the other two elements together. Social rules (the term rules includes, but is not restricted to, legal rules) make the process by which people and society constitute each other continuous and reciprocal.

Rules are statements that tell people what we should do. The “what” in question is a standard for people’s conduct in situations that we can identify as being alike and can expect to encounter. The “should” tells us to match our conduct to that standard. If we fail to do what the rule tells us to, then we can expect consequences that some other rule will bring into effect when other people follow the rule calling for such consequences. All of the ways in which people deal with rules—whether we follow the rules or break them, whether we make the rules, change them or get rid of them—may be called practices (on practices, see Chapter 8). Even when we do not know what a rule says, we can often guess what it is about by looking at people’s practices.

Among much else, rules tell us who the active participants in a society are. Constructivists call these participants agents. People are agents, but only to the extent that society, through its rules, makes it possible for us to participate in the many situations for which there are rules. No one is an agent for all such situations.

Ordinarily, we think of agents as people who act on behalf of other people. Considering the matter more abstractly, rules make it possible for us to act on behalf of social constructions, which may be ourselves, other human beings, or even collections of people, along with the rules, practices and the actual things that we make and use. Conversely, agents need not be individual human beings to be able to act on behalf of others (here referring to agents in the third person to emphasize that the terms people and agents are not completely interchangeable). Agency is a social condition. Thus the government of a country is a collection of people and a social construction. According to the relevant rules, these people act, together and in various combinations, on behalf of that country as a much larger collection of people.

Rules give agents choices. As we have already seen, the most basic choice is to follow the rule—to do what the rule says the agent should do—or not. Only human beings can actually make choices, because we alone (and not all of us) have the mental equipment to consider the probable consequences of making the choices that are available to us. Nevertheless, we always make such choices on behalf of, and in the name of, social constructions, whether ourselves, other people or collections of other people, practices and artifacts.

Agents act in society to achieve goals. These goals reflect people’s needs and wishes in light of their material circumstances. Every society has rules telling agents which goals are the appropriate ones for them to pursue. Of course, there are situations in which people are perfectly aimless. For example, when we freeze up in fear or fall asleep from exhaustion, we are no longer agents or, for that matter, social beings.

When we, as human beings, act as agents, we have goals in mind, even if we are not fully aware of them when we act. If someone asks us to think about the matter, we can usually formulate these goals more or less in the order of their importance for whomever we are acting as agents, starting with ourselves. Most of the time, agents have limited, inaccurate or inconsistent information about the material and social conditions that affect the likelihood of reaching given goals. Nevertheless, agents do the best they can to achieve their goals with the means that nature and society (together—always together) make available to them. Acting to achieve goals is rational conduct, and agents faced with choices will act rationally. Viewed from outside, these choices may appear to be less than rational, but this is due to the complexities of agency and human fallibility.

Agents make choices in a variety of situations. Rules help to define every such situation from any agent’s point of view. In many situations, rules are directly responsible for presenting agents with choices. Agents have made or acknowledged these rules in the belief that following rules generally helps them reach their intended goals.

In these situations, rules are related to agents’ practices, and to each other, through the consequences that agents intend their acts to have. Whether by accident or design, rules and related practices frequently form a stable (but never fixed) pattern suiting agents’ intentions. These patterns are institutions. As recognizable patterns of rules and related practices, institutions make people into agents and constitute an environment within which agents conduct themselves rationally. While it is always possible, and often useful, to think of agents—all agents—as institutions in their own right, we more commonly think of agents as operating in an institutional context that gives them at least some opportunities for choice.

Exercising choices, agents act on, and not just in, the context within which they operate, collectively changing its institutional features, and themselves, in the process. Nevertheless, from any agent’s point of view, society consists of diverse institutions that seem, for the most part, to be held in place by rules linking them to other institutions. Any stable pattern of institutions (including agents of all sorts) is also an institution. Agents are aware of the institutions populating their environments, and not simply because the rules forming these institutions directly bear on their conduct. To the extent that some agents make choices, and other agents are affected by these choices, institutions produce consequences for other agents that they cannot help but be aware of and respond to.

In a complex world, agents often make choices that have consequences, for themselves and others, that they had not anticipated or do not care very much about. Unintended consequences frequently form stable patterns with respect to their effect on agents. A perfect market provides a compelling illustration of this phenomenon. One by one, a large number of sellers and buyers are incapable of affecting the supply of, and demand for, a good. Collectively, their rational choices have the unintended consequence of setting a price for that good which they must individually accept as fixed (for more on institutions and unintended consequences, see Chapter 10).

Anyone may notice such stable patterns of unintended consequences. In the case of a market, no one could fail to notice it in the form of a good’s price, over which no agent seems to have any control. Sometimes, agents will choose to prevent changes in such patterns by adopting rules that are intended to have this effect. A rule fixing the price of a good under certain conditions is only the most obvious example.

Any stable pattern of rules, institutions and unintended consequences gives society a structure, recognizable as such to any observer (Chapter 6). Agents are always observers. Insofar as they observe consequences that they had not intended, and accept them, such consequences are no longer unintended in the usual sense of the word. If agents decide that these consequences are bad for them, they will act to change them, perhaps with other unforeseen consequences resulting.

Outside observers (agents from a different society) may recognize a more complex structure than agents do as observers. Outsiders can stand back, so to speak, and see patterns that insiders cannot see because they are too close to them. As agents on the inside become aware of what observers have to say, observers become agents, whatever their intentions. When agents in general take this new information into account in making their choices, an even greater complexity of structure results.

Scholars who think of themselves as constructivists have given a good deal of attention to the “agent-structure problem” (see Gould 1998 for a thorough review of these discussions). The term structure is the source of much confusion (an ontological confusion), because scholars cannot agree on whether structures exist in reality or only in their minds. The important point to remember is that structure is what observers see, while institutions are what agents act within. Nevertheless, structure can affect agents. We are often affected by phenomena, natural and social, that we do not or cannot see, but we then respond as agents by putting what has happened to us in an institutional context. When agents do this, they institutionalize structure by bringing rules to bear on their situations.

Generally speaking, scholars today tend to think that the structure of international relations is not institutionalized to any great degree. This is so even for some scholars who think of themselves as constructivists. They believe that countries are highly institutionalized as states, but that states, through their agents, conduct their relations in an anarchic world. The term anarchy points to a condition of rule among states in which no one state or group of states rules over the rest. It also implies that there is no institution above states ruling them. When we say that states are sovereign, we are saying the very same thing.

By calling international relations anarchic, scholars are not saying that there is an absence of rule. This would be chaos, not anarchy. Instead, they seem to be saying that structure—and especially a stable pattern of unintended consequences—rules the day. In the same sense, we might say that the market rules the behavior of sellers and buyers.

Starting with rules, as constructivists often do, leads quickly enough to patterns of relations that we can only describe as a condition of rule. Usually this condition is sufficiently institutionalized that we can recognize specific agents as rulers. Sometimes there is very little evidence of institutionalization, as in mob rule, but there is also little reason to think that this condition will persist as a stable pattern without institutions emerging. In other words, where there are rules (and thus institutions), there is rule—a condition in which some agents use rules to exercise control and obtain advantages over other agents. Rule is a stable pattern of relations, but not a symmetrical one.

Anarchy is a condition of rule in which rules are not directly responsible for the way agents conduct their relations. To be sure, there are rules in the background. They make sure that the unintended consequences of agents’ many choices, and not rulers, do the job of ruling. If unintended consequences seem to rule, it is because some agents intend for them to do so.

Some agents want to be ruled in this indirect sort of way because it suits their goals more than any other arrangement would. Other agents have little or no choice in the matter. Perhaps patterns just happen, but agents make arrangements. Arranging for anarchy is just one possibility.

Constructivists should seriously consider dropping the word structure from their vocabularies. Social arrangement is a better choice. Appearances aside, international anarchy is a social arrangement—an institution—on a grand scale. Within its scope, many other institutions are recognizably connected. In every society, rules create conditions of rule. The society that states constitute through their relations is no exception.

Whether we, as constructivists, start with agents or with social arrangements, we come quickly enough to particular institutions and thus to rules. If we start with rules, we can move in either direction—toward agents and the choices that rules give them an opportunity to make, or toward the social arrangements that emerge from the choices that agents are making all the time. Whichever way we go, we ought to keep in mind that rules yield rule as a condition that agents (as institutions) can never escape.

The practical problem is that, as constructivists, we want to move in both directions at the same time. Yet if we try to do so, we come up against the staggering complexity of the social reality that we want to know about. It is impossible to do everything. The practical solution is to start with rules and show how rules make agents and institutions what they are in relation to each other. Then we can show how rules make rule, and being ruled, a universal social experience.

The remainder of this user’s manual is dedicated to these two tasks. To make points as clear and understandable as possible, it repeats most of what the reader has now had a taste of. In the process, it introduces many additional concepts and propositions, expressed in the simplest terms that its author can think of. Used consistently and systematically related, these concepts and propositions constitute a comprehensive framework for understanding the world in constructivist terms.

Rules make agents, agents make rules

Rules make agents out of individual human beings by giving them opportunities to act upon the world. These acts have material and social consequences, some of them intended and some not. Through these acts, agents make the material world a social reality for themselves as human beings. Because agents are human beings, acting singly or together on behalf of themselves or others, they act as they do for human purposes—they have goals reflecting human needs and wishes. The tangle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• PART I Constructivism
• PART II The metaphysics of world-making
• PART III The art of world-making
• PART IV Making sense of modernity
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index