Monday, April 6, 2015

Session 17: Complicating "Constructions" or Constructing Complications?



“We are cultural beings, endowed with the capacity and the will to take a deliberate attitude towards the world and lend it significance” – Max Weber

Most of the discourse in international relations has revolved around the Realist and Liberal schools of thought. To a large extent, “ideational” factors have been absent from theorizing in the realm of IR. In “What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge”, John Ruggie presents an analytical account of “Social Constructivism” not as a theory of international relations, but rather as a “theoretically informed approach” to the study of the discipline. Ruggie attempts to incorporate the power of ideas into the given framework of international politics, by providing an evolutionary trajectory of Constructivism as a field of IR. 

For the most part, the role of ideas has been heavily constrained within theorizing in international relations. Neo-realists and neo-liberals have often sought to simplify their work, by assuming that interests and identities of various actors within the international system are exogenous and hence, given.  The neo-utilitarian view is “narrowly circumscribed” with respect to the emphasis placed on ideational features of the international system. However, the neo-realist and neo-liberal schools of thought differ slightly in this regard. According to Ruggie, neo-realists such as Kenneth Waltz and Stephen Krasner have attempted include the ideational factors into their work by referring to the interests of states. However, the interactions and socialization of states are restricted to the framework of conflict and the balance of power in the international system. Despite Ruggie acknowledges that theorists have tried to “add greater determinative content” to Waltz work by including previously ignored ideational factors such as culture as an instrument of social mobilization. Neo-liberal theorists on the other hand attribute a greater, albeit limited, causal role to ideational factors. The neo-liberal school of thought divides ideas into three distinct categories: “world views”, which are effected by people’s conceptions of their identities; “principled beliefs” which form the basis of distinguishing right from wrong; and “causal beliefs”, that are beliefs about the cause-effect relations within the international system. These allow individuals to determine their preferences and choose the most efficient outcome based on their understanding. However, most of these neo-utilitarian ideas are taken for granted and left unexplored.

However, Ruggie considers this “cameo appearance” of ideas within the dominant IR theories as insufficient. He identifies three main problems with the neo-utilitarian approaches that allow for the development of Social Constructivism as a theory. Firstly, neo-utilitarianism does not address the “foundational question” of how constituent actors acquire their identities and interests. In addition, these identities and interests are assumed to be unchanging. According to Ruggie, Ilya Prigogine aptly describes this phenomenon: “States and the system of states simply are: endowed with the ontological status of being, but not of becoming”. Secondly, the generic identities attributed to states are not dealt with in an analytical manner. Neo-utilitarianism also ignores how “specific identities of specific states shape their interests” and their varied impact on international outcomes. Lastly, Ruggie believes that there is growing evidence that normative factors in addition states’ identities shape their interests and behavior directly – an idea that does not fall within the framework of neo-utilitarianism.  Therefore, social constructivism has emerged as a “metatheoretical critique” all the while addressing issues that were assumed, discounted and ignored by neo-utilitarianism.

Social Constructivism as presented by Ruggie, states that the “building blocks of international reality are ideational as well as material”. The international system is considered to be a social structure, made of “socially knowledgeable” and “discursively competent” players. Interactions within the social structure allow the identities of individual states, as states, to be constructed. Furthermore, Ruggie differentiates between three variants of constructivism: neo-classical constructivism, postmodernist constructivism and naturalistic constructivism. As the name suggests, neo-classical constructivism is rooted within the classical tradition, with an affinity toward pragmatism, tools to make sense of “intersubjective meanings” and a commitment to the idea of social science. Postmodernist constructivism on the other hand places emphasis on the “linguistic construction” or discourse prevalent within international politics. Naturalistic constructivism combines the two previous variants in order to present a theory that incorporates material and social worlds that deals in “un-observables”. 

Although constructivism provides a different perspective while examining international events as it allows for the inclusion of several ideational factors and human consciousness in the analysis, Ruggie himself admits that it “lacks rigor and specification”. Acknowledgement of the fact that Constructivism is far from perfect, adds strength to Ruggie’s work. However, the discussion presented within the article was entirely too philosophical and unnecessarily complicated for my liking.

1 comment:

  1. Starting off with Weber was great! Also, you did a good job engaging with Ruggie's arguments. And I agree that Ruggie is far too philosophical, which actually takes away from his overall argument. That being said, I appreciate your attempt to deconstruct it!

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