This book should not have needed to be written. As I explore further in this concluding chapter, the seeds of the practice and relational turns, the New Constructivism's reflexivity, and its advancement of a phronetic social science, are written all over Constructivism's DNA. Many of the early constructivist theoretical treatises placed heavy emphasis on practices and relations – in some cases, more than norms, identity, and culture – as well as reflexivity and history.

For Wendt, for example, what was ‘so striking about neorealism was its total neglect of the explanatory role of state practice’. Noting how ‘social structures are not carried around in people's heads but in their practice’, he stressed that international anarchy was not sufficient to lead to a self-help world. If IR displayed self-help characteristics, this was due to process. For Wendt: ‘Security dilemmas are not acts of God; they are effects of practice.’ For Onuf, similarly, constructivism at base was an approach that studied how people in practice create the rules by which they live. As a consequence, ‘Constructivism begins with deeds. Deeds done, acts taken, words spoken. These are all the facts there are.’ While Onuf 's interest lay with language and the construction of rules, he noted approvingly Michael Oakeshott's reminder that ‘most human behavior can adequately be described in terms of the notion of habit or custom and that neither the notion of rule or that of reflectiveness is essential to it’. Finally, Kratochwil has also consistently placed political practice at the forefront of his constructivist theorizing as social norms, rules, and conventions emerge and have their effects in the specific practical context of individual reasoning and decision-making. As Ruggie explained, ‘Constitutive rules define the set of practices that make up a particular class of consciously organized social activity – that is to say, they specify what counts as that activity.’

Hand in hand with a concern with practice went a thoroughgoing relationalism in early Constructivism. Onuf, for example, cited approvinglyMichel Foucault's exhortation ‘to dispense with “things”. To “depresentify” them. … To define these objects without reference to the … foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance’.

Introduction

The following two chapters address two lingering questions from this book's exploration into the New Constructivism in IR theory. First, what is the New Constructivism's politics or ethics? Put differently, should Constructivism operate in a political, normative, or ethical register? If so how? If not, why not? Second, and relatedly, the chapter asks what form of knowledge Constructivism offers. Suspended between the positivist mainstream and various modes of critical and post-positivist theory, what type of knowledge – exactly – does the New Constructivism represent? How can the knowledge the New Constructivism offers be justified as comparable or even superior to alternatives, both mainstream and critical?

Scholars like Jason Ralph, Martin Weber, Silviya Lechner, and Mervyn Frost have recently posited the question of Constructivism's stance vis-a-vis politics and ethics. Together, these scholars, and others, have argued that practice-relationalism, and the pragmatist dispositions much of it builds upon not only assist the New Constructivism in offering thicker accounts of the social construction of world politics vis-a-vis Old Constructivism, but also allow constructivists to interrogate the ethical content of norms and culture in ways previously downplayed. Armed with pragmatism and practice-relationalism, it is suggested, the New Constructivism can bridge the gap between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ in world politics.

In this chapter, I assess their arguments, and others who seek to place ethics and Constructivism into dialogue. I argue that the New Constructivism struggles – without different degrees of success – to move beyond a core tension from the Old Constructivism when it comes to the issue of ethics and normativity. In many ways, a problem with Old Constructivism was not the lack of norms and normativity, but an over-abundance, which led many realists and rationalists to characterize Constructivism as a ‘soft’approach based on norms and taboos, rather than the ‘hard’ matter of power and interests. The Old Constructivism was normative by definition, and scholarly disposition. But at the same time, a critical engagement with ethics and politics was absent, as Old Constructivists sought to keep the approach within the modernist project of a social science of IR, remaining true to Max Weber's plea for a fact-value distinction in theorizing. Can the New Constructivism generate a real via media, and should it?

The premise of this book would seem to suggest that the Old Constructivism should be discarded. Not so. In this chapter, I show that the Old Constructivism still has many virtues. Many of its core contributions are as relevant as when first made over two decades ago, and as necessary to grapple with for newcomers to the field. Those fresh to Constructivism – in IR and political science in general – should revisit the foundational texts of Constructivism discussed here for themselves. While doing so, however, they should bear in mind two related points.

First, newcomers should recall what the authors of the early constructivist texts were arguing against, and why their arguments seemed exciting and refreshing to so many at the time, even dangerous to some of their critics. Second, they should keep in mind the dynamics of IR as a field, dynamics that prioritize scholarship that looks beyond its borders for new insights over revisiting insights from within the field. Together, these caveats reinforce the conclusion that to acknowledge the evolution from the Old Constructivism to a new version of the same does not entail throwing the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. The virtues of the Old Constructivism remain.

Scholars at the forefront of mainstream American IR in the late 1980s and early 1990s had converged on a remarkably narrow set of core issues by the standards of today's variegated international studies profession. The so-called Neo-Neo debate revolved around the sources of state's interests within an international system understood to be anarchical – without a power above the sovereign state able to prevent or at least regulate inter-state conflict. In the words of neorealist contributor to the debate Joseph Grieco, neoliberal institutionalism and neorealism each accepted the anarchical structure of the international system, but differed on whether under some circumstances – notably on trade – the search for relative gains with other states could trump the desire for absolute gains over rivals.

Constructivism burst onto the US IR scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the midst of the Neo-Neo debate, drawing the field's attention to an exotic array of objects quite unlike the bombs, tanks, and gross national products, with which IR scholars were used to adjudicating the nature of international politics.

The previous chapter left off on a rather dispiriting note, with sociologist Andrew Abbott's cynical-sounding conclusion that, when Constructivism reappears in the social sciences – as it does for him, on a roughly generational cycle – there are ‘different wrinkles … and of course there is a new terminology … [but] there is no real progress, no fundamentally new concept. We simply keep recalling a good idea’. In this chapter, I show that such a characterization of Constructionism beyond IR both fits with the experience of the New Constructivism in IR theory to some degree only, falling a little wide of the mark. It all depends on what we mean by progress and fundamentally new ideas.

Abbott is correct to the extent that the New Constructivism ultimately makes the same point as the Old: that international politics – like all human life – is a collective accomplishment. The social world, including the main categories and concepts we use to understand it – truth, science, knowledge, cosmologies – are constructed in and through practice. There is nothing natural about them. If progress and fundamentally new ideas are taken to mean something more than this, then no, the New Constructivism is not fundamentally distinct from the Old, and little progress has been made. But if progress is unmoored from the grip of prevailing understandings of the word ‘science’, understandings rooted in ‘solving’ problems we all agree on once and for all, the New Constructivism represents precisely the type of progress IR scholars should aim for. The New Constructivism offers an array of new concepts, perspectives, and methodologies designed to help us overcome the problematic dichotomies associated with the Old Constructivism outlined in Chapter 1, and to help us think about exactly how the socially constructed world shapes our collective and individual doings.

The New Constructivism, and those concepts, perspectives, and methods, has emerged from two recent ‘turns’ in IR theory: the turn to practices and relations. Practice theory draws attention to everyday logics in world politics, and asserts that actors are driven less by abstract forces such as the national interest, preferences, or social norms, than by practical imperatives, habits, and embodied dispositions.

In a recent paper submitted to a prominent international affairs journal, I claimed that my approach ‘hewed to a constructivist way of thinking’. I made the point almost in passing, not giving it much thought. I should have known better.

The reviewers were quick to refute any association between what I was doing and ‘Social Constructivism’. Constructivism, they emphasized, focuses on the role of interaction in creating mutual identities in world politics, ‘or something along those lines’. My paper was on the topic of expert contestation in the making of US national security policy. It explored the intermingling of political struggles over the framing of America's national interest vis-a-vis a major power competitor with professional competition over the nature of foreign policy expertise. One reviewer pointed out, quite correctly, that Constructivism is not concerned with beliefs and ideas alone, factors important in the story I was telling. Since identity making in interaction was explicitly absent from the piece, both reviewers concluded that a claim about its constructivist pedigree should be removed.

To me at least, the paper was unambiguously constructivist. I was not adopting a realist perspective, one focused on the supposed verities of power politics, whether in a classical – prudential or realpolitik– or structural guise. Equally, the paper was not rationalist in its research design. It did not picture policy-making as an effort at utility maximization within a bargaining game – whether with a full-or partial-information game. Finally, the paper was not an exercise in critical or post-modernist theorizing. Despite the Gramscian overtones of its focus on America's policy-making elites, the paper was not trying to unmask hidden power structures in society with the aim of helping overturn them. Rather, the paper was an explanatory exercise – in a broad understanding of the word – aimed at accounting for the effects of professional contestation on discursive representations of the United States in world politics. It was about how the world was constructed and the social world(s) of those doing the constructing – the experts and policy-makers. It all seemed solidly constructivist fair to me.

Again, I should have known better. The politics of Constructivism as an approach in International Relations (IR) theory are often fraught, and frequently downright hostile. At least the reviewers in question were polite about it. And they were quick.

In this book's Introduction, I emphasized historical sensitivity as a core feature of the New Constructivism. But what is history in IR? Why does the New Constructivism have to be historical?

Beginning in around 2000, a historical ‘turn’ witnessed a proliferation of reflections on the relationship between IR and history, including assessment of IR's historical consciousness, advocation for a dialogue with international historians, lobbying against interpretive closure of historical events, rediscovery of the historical orientation of the English School, identification of narrative as an inherent feature of explanation, reconsideration of the assumptions about temporality embedded in different IR theories, examination of IR's historiography, and outlining of the potential of historical sociology, to name just a few contributions. Most of the debate's participants supported a historical turn. As Duncan Bell observes, ‘History, in its various manifestations, plays an essential, constitutive, role in shaping the present’; in mainstream IR, he goes on, ‘this has often been disregarded’.

The debate continues. But what, precisely, is at stake in the debate over history in IR? And why does it matter for the New Constructivism? What is at stake is the type of knowledge IR scholars should aim for, and, indeed, the relationship between theory and practice in international affairs. The surge in interest in history is part of the wider movement in the social sciences away from neo-positivism – a broad philosophical position on human knowledge and its creation that views deductive analysis of empirical sense-data as the sure road to scientific truth, as opposed to knowledge gained through argumentation, belief, faith, and so on, often equated with nonscience.Neo-positivism's dominance has clear disciplinary consequences, one of which is to relegate history to a storehouse of context-free ‘data’ and historical knowledge to second-class status.