Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

particular importance in the study of foreign policy and will be discussed in
Chapter 4 below. Third, once we recognize that the nature of the game of
international politics is not simply to be taken for granted, the road is
opened up for a Wittgensteinian analysis of the rules of the game, an
account of the ways in the grammar of world politics is constituted –
Kratochwil and Onuf have been particularly important in developing this
side of the constructivist project; for a paradigm of this kind of analysis the
reader is referred to Kratochwil’s account of the place of the rule of non-
intervention within the Westphalian game of ‘sovereignty-as-dominium’
(Kratochwil 1995). Alternatively, some German constructivists have
adopted an essentially Habermasian approach, focusing on communicative
action in world politics (Risse 2000).
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However, perhaps the most popular line of development has been in
another direction, towards using constructivist ideas to throw light on nor-
mative issues, in particular those that revolve around matters of identity,
and, by extension, on issues of cooperation between states (Ruggie 1998;
Wendt 1999). As noted above, ‘neo–neo’ IR theory assumes cooperation
takes place between egoists under conditions of anarchy, if, that is, it takes
place at all. The identities of the actors in question is a matter of no signifi-
cance, and norms promoting cooperation will have no purchase on what is
essentially a process of ends–means calculation, in which the end (‘security’)
is given in advance and is the same for all actors, and the context is provided
by a notion of anarchy that is essentially incontestable and unchanging.
Constructivists challenge each item in this formulation. Identity does matter:
US relations with, for instance, Canada and France are different from her
relations with Egypt and the People’s Republic of China not simply for rea-
sons of security, but because the first two countries share with the US a
common (broad) identity that the latter two do not – more dramatically, as
Ruggie points out, it mattered enormously that the US became (briefly)
hegemonic post-1945 rather than the USSR, in ways that cannot be cap-
tured by those who simply portray ‘hegemony’ as an abstract requirement
for a particular kind of cooperative regime. Equally, the idea that there is
only one ‘anarchy problematic’ will not do; anarchy means ‘no rule’ but
need not, though it may, mean chaos. The possibility exists that within an
anarchical framework norms can emerge.
This latter thought is developed extensively in the second half of
Alexander Wendt’s ambitious Social Theory of International Politics
(1999). As the title suggests, this book is a deliberate attempt to set up an
opposition to Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, although, as the title
also suggests, it also pays a kind of homage to the earlier volume. The first