The Old Constructivism

This chapter revisits the classic texts of Constructivism from the 1990s and early 2000s. I show that many of their central insights still have much to offer current and prospective constructivists. Drawing on ongoing research into U.S. foreign policy-making toward great power challengers like Russia and China, I show that sensitivity to international norms and U.S. political culture, especially America’s role as a hegemon, are still crucial to understanding the formation of U.S. strategy. However, I also argue that Constructivism’s tool-kit is not limited to the concepts of culture, norms, or identity. To set the stage for the remainder of the book, and again in line with constructivist premises, I delve into the issue of how and why a narrow understanding of Constructivism took hold. I show that the approach fractured over the course of time, narrowing down to a set of hypotheses about the causal role of identity, culture, and norms in international political outcomes. In so doing, a number of dichotomies opened up—material vs. ideational explanations, structure vs. agency, explanation vs. understanding, subjective vs. objective accounts of social action—dichotomies that have produced the space for new approaches that can overcome them, setting the stage for the New Constructivism.