CONSTRUCTIVISM: The Most Favourite Perspective for Me Ever

I’ve already worked hard to understand the perspectives used in the field of international relations. However, as I increase my study, I didn’t understand much of the theories or perspective. A big blow for me!! But constructivism is rather different. I don’t know whether I’ve fallen in love with constructivism or I was born to be constructivist?! Not to mention that at the very first I learned constructivism, I can easily understand the theory and the basic logics of it. Here I compile the perspective that would be my most favourite from the book that also I like most.

Constructivism is a distinctive approach to international relations that emphasises the social, or inter-subjective, dimension of world politics. Constructivists insist that international relations cannot be reduced to rational action and interaction within material constraints (as some realists claim) or within institutional constraints at the international and national levels (as argued by some liberal internationalists).

For constructivists, state interaction is not among fixed national interests, but must be understood as a pattern of action that shapes and is shaped by identities over time. In contrast to other theoretical approaches, social constructivism presents a model of international interaction that explores the normative influence of fundamental institutional structures and the connection between normative changes and state identity and interests. At the same time, however, institutions themselves are constantly reproduced and, potentially, changed by the activities of states and other actors. Institutions and actors are mutually conditioning entities.

According to constructivists, international institutions have both regulative and constitutive functions. Regulative norms set basic rules for standards of conduct by prescribing or proscribing certain behaviours. Constitutive norms define behaviour and assign meanings to that behaviour. Without constitutive norms, actions would be unintelligible. The familiar analogy that constructivists use to explain constitutive norms is that of the rules of a game, such as chess. Constitutive norms enable the actors to play the game and provide the actors with the knowledge necessary to respond to each other’s moves in a meaningful way.

States have a corporate identity that generates basic state goals, such as physical security, stability, recognition by others, and economic development. However, how states fulfil their goals depends upon their social identities, i.e. how states see themselves in relation to other states in international society. On the basis of these identities, states construct their national interests. Constructivists accept that anarchy is the characteristic condition of the international system, but argue that, by itself, it means nothing. For example, anarchy of friends is quite different from anarchy of enemies, but both are possible. What matters is the variety of social structures that is possible under anarchy. It is important to understand that states may have many different social identities that these can be cooperative or conflict, and that state interests vary accordingly. States define their interests in the process of interpreting the social situations in which they are participants. Thus, one might argue that the cold war relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union was a social structure wherein the two principals identified each other as enemies and defined their national interests regarding each other in antagonistic terms. When they no longer defined each other in these terms, the cold war ended.

Constructivism emphasises that the international system consists of social relationships as well as material capabilities. Indeed, social relationships give meaning to material capabilities. Inter-subjective systemic structures consist of the shared understandings, expectations, and social knowledge embedded in international institutions. It should be understood that by ‘institutions’, constructivists mean much more than actual organisations. Instead, they regard an ‘institution’ as a stable set or ‘structure’ of identities and interests. Institutions are fundamentally cognitive entities that do not exist apart from actors’ ideas about how the world works. Institutions and states therefore mutually constitute entities.

Institutions embody the constitutive and regulative norms and rules of international interaction; as such, they shape, constrain, and give meaning to state action and in part define what it is to be a state. At the same time, institutions continue to exist because states produce and reproduce them through practice. States usually assign meanings to social situations on the basis of institutionally defined roles. Constructivism suggests that state identities and interests – and how states relate to one another – can be altered at the systemic level through institutionally mediated interactions. Constructivists focus most of their attention on institutions that exist at a fundamental level of international society, such as international law, diplomacy, and sovereignty. However, regimes are also important.

Constructivists argue that these regimes also reproduce constitutive as well as regulative norms. They help to create a common social world for interpreting the meaning of behaviour. A regime’s proper functioning, however, also presupposes that the more fundamental institutions are already in place, making its activities possible. These regimes, therefore, do not create cooperation; they benefit from the cooperative effects of much deeper structures.

As a theoretical approach, constructivism is difficult to employ. Constructivism, for example, does not predict any particular social structure to govern the behaviour of states. Rather, it requires that a given social relationship be examined, articulated and, ultimately, understood. When this is done, then it may be possible to predict state behaviour within that particular structure. However, if these predictions prove false, it could be that the governing social structures were not properly understood or have simply changed. Thus, realist descriptions of the implications of anarchy proceed from an interpretation of international society as a Hobbesian ‘state of nature’. This is a description of a set of social relationships that give meaning to the material capabilities of states.

If constructivism’s utility as an explanatory theory remains unclear, it is still productive as a theoretical framework. How and why particular social structures and relationships develop among different states is a matter for historical research and analysis. Past interactions between states set the context for the present, and may produce fairly rigid identities and interests, but such an outcome is not inherent to the logic of the international political structure. The relationship between agents and structures is at the heart of the ‘agent–structure debate’ between constructivism and other schools of thought in the study of international relations.