POS 130

11/5

Introduction: International system dominated by neo-liberalism

- States as central actors; security and survival

- Anarchy = self-help system, self-reliant
- Hierarchy and distribution of power
- Suspicious, misanthropic, etc.

Neo-Liberalism

- States cooperate on various issues

- Improvement of lives
- Absence of trust = create international institutions
- Individualism (fixed interests are constrained by structure

Both schools assume that interests are unmalleable

- Materialism (structure is defined by distribution of power, technology, geography, etc)

What is Constructivism?

- Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making (1989)

o Norms and ideas = important in understanding behavior of states and NSAs
o End of Cold War = impact of ideas, transform organization of world politics
- The core of constructivism
o Focus: Human consciousness
 A commitment to idealism and holism (Wendt)
 Idealism: take seriously the role of ideas in world politics
 Ex: “balance of power”
- Holism
o The world is social, our interactions construct, reproduce, influence structures
 What are structures?
 Set of relatively unchangeable constraints on the behavior of states
 For constructivists: study how action does or does not reproduce the
actor and the structure
 Ex. States are like bacteria, structure is the glass slide
 Ex2. US in Vietnam
o US was a ‘great power’
o Engaging in enabled action of intervention
o Reproduced identity as great power, and gave structure that
gave meaning to its action
- Alexander Wendt
o Fundamental principle
 People act towards objectives, including other actors, on the basis of the
meanings that the objects have for them
  States act differently towards enemies than they do towards allies
- Distribution of Power
o Affects states calculations
 But how it does so depend on the intersubjective understandings and
expectations on the distribution of knowledge.
o Identities
 3 Necessary functions
 They tell you and others who you are, and they tell you who others are
 Identity of the state implies its preferences and its consequent actions
 State understands others according to the identity it attributes to them, while
simultaneously reproducing its own identity

11/12

Identity of the state implies

- Its preferences
- Consequent actions

NB:

Example

- Cold War
- Yugoslavia and other East EU countries understood the Soviet Union as Russia
- Soviet Union control over identity was structurally constrained by East EU understanding, but
also by its practice of conversing in Russian

Social Facts

- Constructed reality often appears as objective reality

o Social facts depend on human argument
o Ex: money, refugees, terrorism, human rights, sovereignty

Norms and Rules

- Norms
o Regulative and constitutive
- Rules are not static
o They can be revised through practice reflection, by actors

Actors

- How to actors make activities meaningful?

- Max Weber: “we are cultural beings with the capacity and the will to take a deliberate attitude
toward the world

Oriental Globalization

- Interlinked ‘empires’
o Overland and seaborne trade
  T’ang China
 IslamicUmayaad
- Multdimensional > linear process
o Political,economic, technology, military, legal, cultural, environmental.
o IR: significance of globalization differs per country
o “global capitals” “global cites” “cosmopolitan elite”

11/19

Introduction

- When confronted by a significant external threat

o Balance = allying with others against the threat
o Bandwagon = alignment with source of danger
- Balancing Behavior
o States form alliances in order to prevent stronger powers from dominating it
o Heart of traditional balance-of-power theory
- First reason
o If they fail to curb a potential hegemon before it becomes too strong = place survival at
risk
o Alliance with the dominant power = placing one’s trust in its continued benevolence
o Join with those who cannot readily dominate their allies to avoid being dominated by
those who can
- Second reason
o Joining weaker side increases new member’s influence within the alliance
o The weaker side has greater need for assistance
o Allying with strong side gives new member little influence
o