Constructing International Relations: The Next Generation

The Next Generation

Karin M. Fierke, Knud Erik Jorgensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780765607386
• eBook ISBN: 9781317473862
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

The constructivist approach is the most important new school in the field of postcold war international relations. Constructivists assume that interstate and interorganizational relations are always at some level linguistic contexts. Thus they bridge IR theory and social theory. This book explores the constructivist approach in IR as it has been developing in the larger context of social science worldwide, with younger IR scholars building anew on the tradition of Wittgenstein, Habermas, Luhman. Foucault, and others. The contributors include Friedrich Kratochwil, Harald Muller, Matthias Albert, Jennifer Milliken, Birgit Locher-Dodge and Elisabeth Prugl, Ben Rosamond, Nicholas Onuf, Audie Klotz, Lars Lose, and the editors.

Part I

Reconsidering Constructivism

1

Constructivism as an Approach to Interdisciplinary Study

Friedrich V. Kratochwil

It is not surprising that the increasing specialization that characterizes our society and our understanding of the world leads to calls for “bridge building” and interdisciplinary studies. But if the progress of science consists in knowing more and more about less and less, then it becomes clear why scientific inquiry dissolves traditional, holistic worldviews, whether religious or philosophical. To that extent the success of science in providing us with warranted knowledge depends crucially on the disciplinary character and the often incompatible fundamental assumptions underlying the various disciplines. Thus, an economist is not helped in his efforts to build an economic theory by suggestions that the question of justice, or even of that of just price, should be included in economic analysis, even if philosophers and historians of economic thought might point to some interesting issues connected with such a suggestion.

It is perhaps for this reason that many attempts at interdisciplinary research are less based on a new perspective, or a new set of puzzles, than on the application of a new methodology taken from another field. While the fruitfulness of the latter strategy is, of course, an open question—to be appraised only by the substantive results that emerge from such a transfer— there is a danger. After all, the “law of the hammer” not only implies that we will find things to nail down—even if the problems we encounter would call for the use of a screw driver, or some other more suitable instrument; it also suggest that the need for other instruments, be they drill, plane, or even saw, will often be denied. As one representative of “rational choice” once humorously quipped, when the dangers of nailing down too many things were pointed out to him: “Listen, when you are equipped with my hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.”

The upshot of these initial remarks is that a new fruitful cooperation between International Relations (IR) specialists and international lawyers cannot be based on the demand that lawyers measure up to the canon of “scientific” explanation, that they beef up on causes, and on independent, intervening and dependent variables; and that political scientist should learn how to argue a case. Given the lack of agreement as to the proper methods or theoretical standards in the field of international politics, and that even those who opt for a scientific explanation in the fashion of logical positivism do not measure up to their own canon, such a demand by social scientists seems hollow indeed.

In short, the positivist understanding of how “warranted knowledge” is produced might be more a problem than an answer when the puzzles significantly differ from those of classical physics, which provides the template for the orthodox understanding of science among IR specialists. Furthermore, since law clearly deals with “ought” statements and scientists restrict themselves to “is” statements, all in accordance with the presumably neutral and established epistemological principle articulated by Hume, lawyers have been quite successful in rebutting the imperialist claims of scientists. Thus, learning how to argue a case and reflecting on this practice prudentially in light of higher order principles seems to encompass all the necessary and appropriate tools for a lawyer.

When we ask ourselves why certain types of interdisciplinary investigation seem to have been successful, we notice that none of them was based on some form of disciplinary imperialism, be it methodological or substantive. Rather, these investigations started with a substantive problem that did not fit the standard disciplinary accounts. It seems, therefore, reasonable not to prejudice the possibilities of interdisciplinary work by simply adopting a particular methodology instead of starting with a specific substantive problem to which a variety of approaches and methodological orientations can contribute.

The last assertion might raise the objection that this is, indeed, a curious stance in a chapter that explicitly undertakes to outline the “constructivist” position. Given that constructivists are supposed to be “reflexivists,”¹ “idealists,” etc., who are engaged in “understanding” rather than “explaining,” and given that most of the discussion in political science to date has centered on methodological issues, the espoused position seems rather odd. However, it is odd only if we accept what needs to be proven in the first place, that is, that the issue can indeed be reduced to one of methodology. In other words, were constructivism only a methodological orientation, it could neither avoid the pitfalls of methodological imperialism, nor serve as a new basis for interdisciplinary research.

In short, I shall argue that constructivism is an approach, that is, it is characterized by certain “ontological” assumptions concerning human action, or “praxis” to use the classical concept, as well as by (some) methodological assumptions resulting from this commitment. I will have to show that the rather motley crew of researchers who was defined as the “out group” by the present day hegemonic discourse share some common ground, although not so much as is usually assumed. Furthermore, I will have to show the substantive contributions such an approach makes to the understanding of praxis. Finally, I want to flag some promising avenues for future research suggested by the constructivist approach.

In order to make good on these claims, my argument below takes the following steps. In section two I outline the “core position” of constructivism. Indeed most, if not all, of those who were designated “reflexivists” share these commitments. In this context it might come as a surprise to some readers that these positions come very close to the classical Aristotelian teachings as developed in his substantive treatises on ethics and politics, and in his methodological writings (Rhetoric, Analytics), as I shall show.

In the third section I focus on the “critical” element of the constructivist contribution. Here, I want to proceed by casting doubt on the appropriateness of the “anarchy problematique” and by a critical re-reading of E.H. Carr’s classic The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1964), which established IR as a field of study in its own right. Precisely because Carr’s distinction between realism and utopianism has subsequently been so successful in buttressing certain substantive commitments, it gave rise to “realism” and “legalism” as disciplinary understandings informing international law and international politics. Deconstructing this disciplinary history is, therefore, one of the first steps towards a more fruitful theoretical inquiry into international politics and international law alike.

The fourth section is devoted to an exploration of the positive heuristics of constructivism, that is, to the elaboration of the argument that man is not only a language-endowed animal, but to the idea that meaning is use and that communication among a set of people is governed by conventions and criteria. This thought in turn provides a new set of puzzles, new avenues for research, and rather distinct methodological preferences for constructivists strongly influenced by ordinary language philosophy and pragmatism. In this context, I also shall briefly review some of the methodological issues, particularly that of interpretation, and hopefully lay to rest some of the more egregious errors that have plagued the discussion of verstehen and the allegedly antiscientific stance that adherents of interpretative approaches have taken. A short summary in the fifth section concludes the paper.

The Constructivist “Core”

One of the characteristics of a hegemonic discourse is that the classification of various existing approaches occurs on the basis of a simple exclusion. The “other” category usually gets filled with rather disparate alternatives that often differ from one another perhaps even more than from the normal case represented by the hegemonic position. While they certainly share a critical element vis à vis the orthodox teachings, they often vary fundamentally as to the respective substantive and methodological assumptions. If one wants to claim, therefore, that “constructivism” represents an identifiable approach, one has to point to some basic theoretically relevant assumptions and to a fuller articulation of their implications for the methods employed, as for example Nicholas Onuf (1989) has done in his study on rules and rule in international relations. These epistemological corollaries can, in turn, serve as a criterion for evaluating the heuristic power of the approach rather than simply indicate the points of disagreement with the hegemonic discourse.

Many of the contemporary controversies surrounding the constructivist approach have historical roots in nineteenth century debates concerning the epistemology of the Kulturwissenschaften as opposed to the natural sciences. There is no need to rehearse these arguments at length here, a controversy which goes back even further, that is, to Vico’s and Herder’s opposition to the Cartesian program. Nevertheless, we have to keep in mind that the most radical version of constructivism was formulated by the Chilean physiologist, Humberto Maturana during the last decades.² Maturana’s Biology of Cognition (1970) soon became a type of cult book that engendered heated debate in the natural and social sciences, as well as in philosophy (epistemology), particularly on the continent. It attempted to integrate the results of three separate disciplines: cybernetics, psychology of language and of language acquisition, and biology.³ Without wanting to enter into a discussion of the complexities of “autopoetic systems” (but see ch. 5 in this volume), we had better be aware that the standard positivist model of science has increasingly come under fire in the sciences themselves because of the recognition of the importance of recursiveness. But this means that arguments attacking the “reflexivist” program as unscientific are as problematic as the assertion that because of the reflexivity of human action, an incommensurably different epistemology is required for the Kulturwissenschaften.⁴ Whether a consensus is emerging that reestablishes the “unity of science” position on a new basis remains to be seen.

For the more limited purposes of this paper, it seems to me that all constructivists in these fields base their research program on the assumption that the human world is not simply given and/or natural but that, on the contrary, the human world is one of artifice; that it is “constructed” through the actions of the actors themselves. While such a stance rules out any form of naive empiricism or naturalism, as well as most forms of structuralism, the specific thrust of constructivism consists in this fundamental assumption and its corollaries.

First, given that the human world is the result of “praxis,” what are the methods and criteria appropriate for the elucidation of human action? In this context the question arises whether and what type of theory of action is possible, that is, whether the knowledge we obtain for examining actions will differ significantly in its form from that of nature. I do not want to rehearse the important philosophical issues of intentionality, of ascription, of determinism and free will, or even of the traditional mind/body problem that are relevant here. I only want to point out two things: a) that it seems possible to agree with the first substantive point above and still argue for an “empirically” based study of regularities based on some observationally oriented research program and/or the standard accounts of science exemplified in logical positivism; b) that the decision on this last point necessarily raises some hoary “metatheoretical” issues.

Second, given the problematic raised by corollary 1 b) above, constructivists at a minimum argue that the metatheoretical issue has to be treated as an “open question.” At a maximum, they contend that specific elements for explicating actions require methodological tools for which the standard model of science is of little help because most accounts of action do not fit well with the standard version of causal imputation based on the model of antecedent causes. Even more important is the problem that what serves as an explanation for an action is extremely context dependent. Questions of “purposiveness” in action accounts (Aristotle’s hou heneka), or explaining an action in terms of the attribution of responsibility, etc., require an “internal point of view,” as Hart (1968) has put it aptly. They also raise the issue of the role of intersubjective understandings, which makes an appraisal of the action in question possible. In one of the key passages of his Politics, Aristotle (1962, Book 1, ch. 2, 28) addresses these issue with exemplary clarity:

It follows that … man is by nature a political animal; it is in his nature to live in a state (polis). He who by his nature and not simply by ill luck has no city, no state is either too bad or too good, either sub-human or super human—sub-human like the war mad man condemned in Homer’s words “having no family, no morals, no home”; for such a person is by his nature mad on war, he is a non-cooperator. … But it is not simply a matter of cooperation, for obviously man is a political animal in a sense in which a bee is not, or any gregarious animal. Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and for the purpose of making man a political animal she has endowed him alone of the animals with the power of reasoned speech. Speech is something different from voice, which is possessed by other animals also, and used by them to express pain or pleasure; for the natural powers of some animals do indeed enable them both to feel pleasure and pain and to communicate these to each other. Speech, on the other hand, serves to indicate what is useful and what is harmful, and also what is right and what is wrong. For the real difference between man and other animals is that humans alone have the perception of good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust. And it is the sharing of a common view in these matters that makes a household or a city.

Even if we no longer share with Aristotle the belief in the “purposes of nature,” the above passage remains an argument of considerable force. Fundamental for his analysis is the distinction of man’s sociality from that of “gregarious animals,” which, in turn, is related to the opposition of “voice” and “speech.” The latter pair is paralleled by the distinction between pain and pleasure, on the one hand, and the intersubjectively shared notions of “right” and “wrong,” on the other hand. Each of these oppositional pairs deserves some brief comment.

The first distinction concerns the specific character of human sociality. While systems of gregarious animals are also open, self-reproducing systems, their reproduction is regulated by genetically coded specialization, as, for example, in the case of bees. However, the further we ascend the ladder of evolution, the lesser becomes the importance of genetically coded specializations when compared to “positions” or roles, as, for example, in a pack of wolves. Occupants of these positions have to be selected on the basis of individual properties, usually through fights. Nevertheless, in both types of biological systems the signaling systems are of decisive importance. Thus, the biologist Karl Ritter von Frisch has demonstrated how bees utilize such a system in order to communicate with other bees about food supplies, and Konrad Lorenz has, among other things, studied the signals in a pack of wolves. Wolves must not only recognize other members by scent and through howls when they hunt. But beyond that, the “signals” of a tightly coupled stimulus response system are necessary for the social order in the group. If two animals are fighting for positions in the pecking order, they must not kill each other; otherwise the proverbial Hobbesian state of homo homini lupus would obtain. As Lorenz has observed, the underdog inhibits the winning wolf from biting his throat by exposing his jugular and making himself vulnerable.

But the world disclosed by signals—Aristotle’s “voice”—is quite different from that of speech, even if “pain or pleasure” are already part of it. Different from the world of signals, which keeps their beings dependent on the here and now, speech not only frees humans from the immediacy of the situation—we can talk about a situation that has already passed, or has not even arisen—it also allows us to make choices rather than merely respond to a stimulus. With speech, an assessment of actions and events in terms of common values and through recollection and comparison becomes possible. We also can now “learn” not only from our own experiences, but—through our conceptual grasp—even from those of others. Thus, although the human world is one of artifice, it is not an idiosyncratic or subjective creation. Rather, it is through the intersubjectivity of language, and its shared meanings that social order is created. The person who does not participate in such a community constituted by common meanings, who utilizes a language of his own, is the person who lives in his...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors and the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Reconsidering Constructivism
• Part II: Practicing Constructivism
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index