Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Constructivism and the ‘English School’
As we will see, theorists of globalization reject the ‘state-centrism’ involved
in neorealist/neoliberal rational choice theory in favour of an approach that
stresses global social, economic, cultural and political forces. Other critics
of rational choice IR are less concerned by its focus on the state, and more
critical of the implicit assumptions that underlie that focus, in particular
the assumption that the nature of the state is, in some sense, given and that
the rules that govern state behaviour are simply part of the way things are,
rather than the product of human invention. By definition, rational choice
IR theories assume that states engage in goal directed behaviour, but within
a context that that is given in advance; they study how states play the game
of being rational egoists in an anarchic world, but they take for granted that
states are rational egoists and that the identification of the world as anar-
chic is unproblematic; in other words that the game is preordained. Critics
challenge this set of assumptions.
These critics share a hostility to rational choice approaches, but relatively
little else, and finding even a rudimentary classification schema here is
difficult; for purposes of exposition they are here divided into two groups.
First, the work of constructivists and their English School cousins will be
examined; then, moving progressively further away from the mainstream of
IR theory, critical theorists, poststructuralists and others misleadingly
termed postmodern writers will come under scrutiny.
Constructivism is the fastest growing oppositional movement within IR
theory, but a good part of this growth is a by-product of the lack of any
clear definition of what this approach might involve. Unfortunately,
constructivism has become a bumper-sticker term, a label appropriated by
those who wish to assert a degree of independence from mainstream
American IR theory while maintaining a certain level of respectability – it
has come to be seen as a kind of acceptable ‘middle way’ (Adler 1997).
In the late 1980s and early 1990s this was not the case. Then, the writings
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Understanding International Relations

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of Friedrich Kratochwil (1989), Nicholas Onuf (1989) and Alexander
Wendt (1987, 1992) established constructivist ideas as a genuinely radical
alternative to conventional IR.
The central insight of constructivist thought can perhaps best be con-
veyed by the notion that there is a fundamental distinction to be made
between ‘brute facts’ about the world, which remain true independent of
human action, and ‘social facts’ which depend for their existence on socially
established conventions (Searle 1995). There is snow on the top of Mount
Everest whether anyone is there to observe it or not, but the white and
purple piece of paper in my pocket with a picture of Edward Elgar on it is
only a £20 note because it is recognized by people in Britain to be so.
Mistaking a social fact for a brute fact is a cardinal error – and one
constructivists believe is made with some frequency – because it leads to the
ascription of a natural status to conditions that have been produced and
may be, in principle, open to change. Thus, if we treat ‘anarchy’ as a given,
something that conditions state action without itself being conditioned by
state action, we will miss the point that ‘anarchy is what states make of it’
and does not, as such, dictate any particular course of action (Wendt 1992).
We live in ‘a world of our making’ not a world whose contours are
predetermined in advance by non-human forces (Onuf 1989).
So far so good, but how are these approaches to be developed? A variety
of different possibilities emerge. First, unfortunately, there may be no
development at all, and in the 1990s a number of essentially empirical IR
scholars have proclaimed themselves to be ‘constructivist’ in so far as they
accept the above points, but have not changed their working methods in
any significant way, at least not in any way that outsiders can discern. This
is constructivism as a label. More to the point, and second, it might be
noted that because a structure is the product of human agency it by no
means follows that it will be easy for human agents to change its nature
once it has been established – agent–structure questions tease out the rela-
tionships between these two notions (Wendt 1987). Such questions are of