Key Points

• Social constructivism offers the prospect of bridging the gap between rationalist and reflec­tivist theories.

• There are many constructivists but the best example is Alexander Wendt and his 1992 art­icle 'Anarchy is what states make of it'.

• Wendt's attempt is important because Robert Keohane pointed out that unless the reflectivists could come up with a research programme then they would remain on the margins of the disci­pline. Wendt offers such a research programme because he promises to bring neo-liberals and reflectivists together.

• Wendt's key claim is that international anarchy is not fixed, and does not automatically involve the self-interested state behaviour that rationalists see as built into the system. Instead he thinks that anarchy could take on several different forms because the selfish identities and interests assumed by rationalists are in fact the products of interaction and are not prior to it.

• There are several important objections to Wendt's argument. The main ones are that he is really a rationalist and a realist, so that he is not in fact bringing together rationalism and reflec-tivism, but is instead defining constructivism in a very narrow way, one that is acceptable to ratio­nalists, but which would not be accepted by reflectivists who want a far deeper definition of identity and interest than he provides. Moreover, Wendt sees states as the 'givens' of world politics, but why should this be so instead of classes, or companies or ethnicities or genders? Finally, note that his view of identity is an ideational one, whereas many argue that material interests deter­mine our ideas and therefore our ideational struc­tures. In short, his account is really much more traditional and rationalist than at first seems to be the case.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have tried to summarize the three main areas of development in contemporary inter­national relations theory. As you can see I have my own views as to which of these three main theoret­ical positions is preferable, but that is of far less importance than your own views on which per­spective best explains world politics in this age of globalization. Each of the three positions has clear strengths, and probably the best place for you to start thinking about which is most useful is for you to cast your mind back to the Introduction and the first chapter; in each of these chapters we made a lot of points about globalization, and in the Introduction in particular we highlighted some pluses and minuses of globalization. Crucially, you now need to think about which of the contempo­rary theoretical perspectives discussed in this chap­ter gives you the best overview of the globalized world we have been discussing.

Clearly, the rationalist perspective, and partic­ularly the neo-neo synthesis dominates the profes­sional literature in the discipline of International Relations. That is the theoretical debate you will find in most of the journals, particularly the US-based ones. It focuses on the kinds of international political relations that concern many Western gov­ernments, particularly the debate about the future security structure of the international system. It is also very strong at looking at economic foreign pol­icy, as the discussions on the relative gains/absolute gains issue suggests. But do you think that it is wide enough a perspective to capture what are to you the most important features of world politics? You might, on the one hand, think that we need theo­ries that define the political realm rather more widely, so as to take in identity, economics, ethnic­ity, culture, and the like. On the other hand you might think that the most important features of world politics remain those that have dominated for the last two thousand years, namely the prob­lems of war and peace, and of international stabil­ity. If you think this then you will probably prefer the rationalist theoretical agenda, and you will cer­tainly do so if you think that these problems are 'natural', that is to say that they are features outside our control in the same way as the concerns of the natural scientist relate to a 'real' world that exists whatever we think about it.

The reflectivist theories obviously differ enor­mously with regard to what they are reflective about. As noted above they are really very different, but I put them together in one category because they are all rejecting the central concerns of ratio­nalism. Do you think that any one of them gives you a better understanding of the main features of world politics than that provided by the rationalist mainstream? Or do you think that they are not really dealing with what are 'obviously' the most important features of world politics? The real prob­lem with reflectivist theories is that they do not add up to one theoretical position in the way that the rationalist theories do. In some important ways, if you are a feminist then you do not necessarily agree with post-modernists or critical theorists. More fundamentally still, you cannot be both a critical theorist and a post-modernist! In short, the collec­tion of theories gathered together under the reflec­tivist label have a set of mutually exclusive assumptions and there is no easy way to see the the­ories being combined. Some combinations are pos­sible (a feminist post-modernism, or a normative critical theory) but the one thing that is clearly cor­rect is that the whole lot cannot be added together to form one theoretical agenda in the way that the neo-neo debate serves on the rationalist side. Moreover, the reflectivists do not have the same idea of how to construct knowledge as the rational­ists, and therefore they are unable to respond to Keohane's challenge for them to come up with testable hypotheses to compare with those pro­vided by the rationalist position. This means that the prospect of a rationalist-reflectivist debate is very low. The two sides simply see world politics in very different ways. Which side (or which subdivi­sion) do you think explains world politics most effectively?

All of this makes social constructivism partic­ularly attractive since it offers the prospect of a via media, a middle way that represents a synthesis between rationalism and reflectivism. As discussed above, this position, most clearly associated with Wendt, looks very promising to many, and I will predict that it will become one of the main research themes in international relations in the years to come. But I also noted the problems associated with Wendt's position. Centrally, there is the difficulty that he is not really a reflectivist at all, but, rather, is a rationalist (and a statist and a realist!), and thus his attempt to bridge the gap is always going to be unsuccessful because he is actually not sitting between the two positions, but instead is on one side. This raises the question of whether you think the social constructivist project is the way forward for international theory. Do you think that the two positions can be combined? Or are their views of how to construct knowledge so different that they cannot be combined? The trouble of course is that it sounds eminently sensible to say that the two positions of rationalism and reflectivism need to be combined, and the focus of the neo-liberals on institutions and learning makes it possible to see a way of linking up with reflectivists who focus on identity and the construction of actors. But this poses the ultimate question in social theory, namely whether there are always going to be two ways of theorizing the social world: one an inside account focusing on the meanings that actors attach to their actions; the other an outsider account, which sees the beliefs of actors as the prod­uct of material interests. I cannot pretend to answer that question, and this is not because of the space available in this chapter; rather this is such a hotly disputed question in all the social sciences that the only honest thing to do is to say that there is no easy or definitive answer. What I will say is that the answer to it will depend in part on how you see the social world and on what kinds of features of world politics matter to you.

I hope that this chapter has given you a good overview of the main developments in contempo­rary international theory. My main hope is that you will take from what I have written the thought that there is no one theory of world politics that is right simply because it deals with the truth. I also hope that you will be sceptical any time any theorist tells you that s/he is dealing with 'reality' or with 'how the world really is', since I think that this is where the values of the theorist (or lecturer, or chapter writer!) can be smuggled in through the back door. I think that world politics in an era of globalization is very complex and there are a variety of theories that try and account for different parts of that com­plexity. You should work out which theories both explain best the things you are concerned with and also offer you the chance to reflect on their own assumptions. One thing is for sure: there are enough theories to choose between and they paint very different world politics. Which theory paints the picture that you feel best captures the most salient features of world politics?