Theory Talks: Theory Talk #70: Nicholas Onuf

Nicholas Onuf on the Evolution of Social Constructivsm, Turns
in IR, and a Discipline of Our Making

Can we really go on speaking about International Relations
as a ‘discipline’? Even if social constructivism is often presented as a robust
theoretical cornerstone of the discipline, one of the thinkers that established
this theoretical position challenges the existence of IR. Surely, Nicholas Onuf
argues, we have a disciplinary machinery—institutions, journals, conferences
and so forth—but these form an apparatus built around a substantive void—in his
words, ‘a discipline without an ‘about’’. In this Talk, Nicholas Onuf—among others—weaves an appraisal of
disciplinary boundaries through a discussion of social constructivism’s birth
and growth, tells the material turn to get serious and provides a bleak
assessment of IR’s subservient relation to political order.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is (or should be), according to you, the biggest challenge /
principal debate in current International Relations? What is your position or
answer to this challenge / in this debate?

In my view, the
biggest challenge for IR is making good on claims (I’d say pretensions) that IR
is a discipline in its own right. Such
claims presume that IR has a reasonably well-bounded subject matter and a body
of theory uniquely suited to that subject matter. For 25 years I have been saying that IR fails
miserably in meeting this challenge.
Much less do we acknowledge the challenge—there is no debate. As it is, we have institutionalized a
so-called discipline (journals, conferences, workshops, PhD programs) that
reaches far beyond (lower case) international relations. In short: a discipline without an ‘about.’ Were we to acknowledge the challenge, we
might be content to say: Forget disciplines,
it’s all about ‘the social’ and social theory belongs to us—too. Or we might say, it’s all about ‘the
political,’ and legal, political and
social theory also belong to us. I’m not
sure there’s much difference. I am sure
that it’s not enough to say our ‘about’ is ‘the international.’ And I have said as much publicly, though
intemperate terms that I instantly regretted.

Given such a
negative assessment of IR, you might wonder why I stuck with it all these
years. Why didn’t I just call myself a
social theorist and (try to) publish in the few journals in which theorists
gets a hearing? Actually, I did try a
few times, to no avail (just as I put ‘social theory’ in the subtitle of World of Our Making (1989) to no
discernible effect). I think there’s a
status issue lurking here. Once
identified with IR, it’s hard to get acknowledged outside IR. Nobody reads
or cites us; we ‘don’t get no respect’; status ordering condemns us to be
consumers rather than producers of big ideas. If (just perhaps) the era
of big ideas is over, then the next generation in IR may feel a little
braver than I was about jumping ship. Not that I’m betting on it,
especially since publishing in a host relatively new, expressly interdisciplinary
journals, such as Global
Constitutionalism, International
Political Sociology and International
Political Theory, offer a safer alternative.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International
Relations?

I have to say
that events have never inspired me. In
my callow youth, Hans Morgenthau’s Politics
among Nations (1948) inspired me to think about spending a lifetime doing
IR, as did my teachers Robert Tucker and George Liska—both realists with a taste respectively for
international law and international institutions. Working as Tucker’s assistant in revising Hans Kelsen’s Principles of International Law (1952) prompted
a longstanding interest in legal theory.
As a doctoral student, I got hooked on systems theory à la Hoffmann, Kaplan, Rosecrance; the
special issue of World Politics (vol.
14, no. 1) on the international system left an indelible mark, as did Waltz’s Man, the State and War (1959). Working with Richard Falk a few
years later affected me a great deal—he remains one of my very few heroes. So did Fritz Kratochwil,
briefly a student of mine and friend ever since.

In the 1980s
I got to know a number of mavericks:
Hayward Alker, Rick Ashley, Dick Mansbach, John Ruggie and Rob Walker
are by no means the only ones on this list.
More important, I think, were my feminist doctoral students, who changed
my life in a great many ways and were largely responsible for my turn to social
theory. It was in that context that I
took the so-called linguistic turn to Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin et al.
World of Our Making is pretty
clear about its many sources of inspiration.
The big trick was fitting everything together. Since then (and to keep the story manageable),
working with my brother Peter is responsible for my interest in Aristotle and in the making of the modern world; republican
theory links these two concerns. I
cannot blame Peter for my ongoing fascination with Foucault.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the
world in a global way?

For me at least, this is a tricky question. As I said earlier, I am not very much
interested in events—either as theoretical fodder or as a matter of what’s
happening in the world at any given moment.
Most of my friends and colleagues are fascinated by current events—how
often I find them glued to one news source or another. Students are too, and it seems pretty obvious
they should be. Most people in the field
engage in the skillful assembly of events, whether in ‘cases’ or as
statistically manipulated patterns.
Learning the appropriate skills takes a great deal of time and
training. At the same time, students
also need an exposure to theory—big picture thinking—and, in my view, the
philosophical issues that lurk behind any big picture.

Theory is a seductive. I was seduced at the age of 19 and never
gotten over it. Shifting metaphors, I always
told my doctoral students not to succumb to the theory bug, at least to the
exclusion of what I just called ‘the skillful assembly of events.’ In other words, don’t do it my way—I was lucky
to get away with it. Disposition is a different
matter. Students must love to work hard
for extended intervals with little immediate gratification. Machiavelli said that warriors must be
disciplined and ardent. I used to tell
my doctoral students, you have to be ‘warrior nerds.’ If you don’t fit this profile, find another
vocation.

You were immensely influential in
constructing the theoretical pillar of social constructivism in IR, starting
over 25 years ago. Looking back, has social constructivism delivered on the
promise you etched out in World of Our
Making?

No way, and for all kinds of
reasons. This was all too clear within a
decade, as I intimated in a review of Peter Katzenstein’s
The Culture of National Security (1996,
read introduction here)
and spelled out in Don Puchala’s Visions of International Relations (2003).
To simplify unduly and perhaps unjustly, the constructivists who came to
prominence in the 1990s made three mistakes. First, they took for granted that a
norm (as in ‘the norm’) is normative without asking whether, to what degree, or
how this might be so. I’m pretty sure this
mistake came from a mindless appropriation of functional sociology and utter
indifference to legal and political theory. Second, they substituted identity
(‘who am I?’ questions) for agency (‘who acts for what or whom?’ questions) in
guessing at the implications of the end of the Cold War. In doing so, they compounded the felony by
leaping from personal identity to collective identity and unreflectively
imputing agency to imagined collectivities. Third, they treated culture as an
aggregate residual and then assigned it enormous causal significance. Had any
of them taken the linguistic turn seriously, they might have extricated those
elements of ‘culture’ that (one might guess) are most consequential for social
construction.

More generally, I
came to see the constructivist surge of the 90s as a liberal-institutionalist
renaissance. Standing in for legal
rules, formal institutions and corporate personality, norms and identity look
like a conceptual breakthrough to a generation of scholars who had been taught
to dismiss old-time liberal IR. In the
2000s, a shifting panorama of events (genocide etc.) prompted a straight-on
liberal institutionalist revival with lots of help from lawyers. Meanwhile, a much more diverse range of
scholarship has come to be styled constructivist for lack a better label. Finally, there has emerged a gang of ‘third
generation’ constructivists who now actively repudiate their predecessors from
the 90s. They speak my language, but
I’ll let them speak for themselves.

How, do you think, do ‘turns’ in IR
relate to the broader context of real-world historical events? If the origins
of social constructivism have been located in the end of the Cold War, is there
some kind of dialectic whereby social constructivism then impacts on the course
of history? For instance, social constructivism is by now so established that a
big part of newer generations of practitioners in IR are probably social
constructivists. How does that influence international politics? In other
words, does social constructivism as an illocutionary theoretical approach hold
perlocutionary effect on its object of study?

I have some reservations
about the metaphor ‘turn.’ Do we imagine
IR as a colossal ship that turns, however slowly, all of a piece? I’ve already used the ship metaphor, but in
this context it’s not appropriate—we’re not that put together, and, besides, no
one is steering (not even those legendary gate-keepers). Or a herd of wildebeests, in which all the members
of the herd turn together by keying off each other once one senses danger and
turns? I don’t think so, even if we do
sometimes see signs of a herd mentality.

Back in the late 60s, Karl
Deutsch suggested that the field had even then experienced a succession of
waves. I like this metaphor better
because it captures both the messiness of what’s going on and a sense that
perhaps not much is changing in deeper water.
You yourself switch metaphors on me when you mention a new generation of
constructivists. As it happens, I like
this metaphor a lot (and have a piece entitled ‘Five Generations of International
Relations Theory’ forthcoming in a new edition of International Relations Theory Today, which Ken Booth and Toni
Erskine are editing). It suggests a
dynamic internal to any field of study rather than one prompted by external
events. Inasmuch as constructivism got
its start before the Cold War ended but afterwards changed its profile
significantly tells us the story is actually rather complicated.

The more interesting question
is whether constructivism will, as you say, impact the course of history. The quick and dirty answer is, yes, but in
ways too subtle to document. We already
know how difficult it is to establish any impact from IR as a scholarly pursuit
on world affairs. That is, any impact
beyond realism and raison d’état. As we become more specialized in what we do
and so does everyone else, it seems ever less likely that we’ll be able to pin down
extended causal chains. But I suspect
that you have something more like ‘mood’ in mind. Once liberal institutionalists adopted a
slick kind of constructivism, they were pretty much in sync with the Zeitgeist, at least for a decade or
so. So, yes, as a not very helpful
generalization, we can surmise that some degree of co-constitution was then at
work. Always is.

One last point. I don’t have even the slightest sense that my
own scholarly work has had anything have much to do with large-scale world-making,
or that it will in any near-term. I
don’t have to be told that my work is too austere and forbidding to reach very
many people—though I am told this often enough.
Years from now, who knows? Yet my
teaching career convinces me that there’s more co-constitution going on in the
classroom than anywhere else we’re likely to find ourselves. Interacting with hundreds of MA and PhD
students in Washington DC over 28 years—during which I noodled through what
would become World of Our Making—affected
me and them in ways beyond measure. Some
of those students became scholars, but many more have spent their lives in
public service.

What has been, to you, the biggest
surprise or exciting move in IR since social constructivism saw the light?

The biggest and most
surprising ‘move’ has been the move offshore.
I speak of course as someone raised, trained and employed in the US when
IR was ‘AnAmerican Social Science.’ For the
last twenty years, IR has not so much left the US as gained strength everywhere
else. Better to say, its center of
gravity has moved. In the process, IR
has transformed, both as a claimant discipline and as a theory-driven
enterprise. As a participant-observer, I
see IR as an institutional beneficiary of globalization and, to a lesser
degree, those of us in IR as agents in this hugely complicated process.

Globalization has meant,
among much else, the extraordinary growth of higher education and its
institutional apparatus. The
proliferation of universities is an acknowledgment of cosmopolitan imperatives and an accommodation of national needs, exemplified
in programs for the grooming of managerial elites. For IR, this large process has been colored
by an ostensible rejection of American hegemony. One expression of this anti-hegemonial
sentiment is the fashion for post-positivist scholarship and the sort of constructivism
that is now conventionally ascribed to Fritz Kratochwil and me. For me personally, it’s just wonderful to be
taken seriously everywhere but my own country.

You recently have turned attention
towards cognitive and evolutionary psychology. This is a pretty
underrepresented field, in terms of its being mined in IR. What challenge has
this literature to pose, in your view, to dominant IR?

Long ago, I ventured into cognitive
studies as a consequence of casting a broad net in social theory. Since then, several disciplines have
converged in making cognitive studies just about the most exciting game in
town. I cannot imagine anyone not being
fascinated (but then I am also fascinated by advances in cosmology, however
little I understand the technical stuff). In recent years, I have developed a more
specific interest in what cognitive and evolutionary psychology might tell
about my mind, any mind, in relation to a world that my mind cannot access
directly, the world of appearances. As
you can see, I’m a philosophical idealist—with many qualifications, a Kantian
idealist. Most people in IR are
philosophical realists, for whom such issues are less compelling.

Let me comment briefly on any
challenge the cognitive revolution might pose for IR in the philosophical
realist mode. IR’s substantive concerns
are so far removed from the stuff of cognitive science (neurons and such) that I doubt scholars in IR will ever feel
obliged take the latter into account.
Nor should they. Positivist
science is reductive—it always pushes down levels of analysis to explain what’s
going on at higher levels. But anyone
pushing down risks losing touch with what seems to be substantively distinctive
about one’s starting point, and IR and its event-manifold are a long way up
from the synchronized firing of neurons.
I would qualify this bald statement somewhat to account for the recent interest
of emotions in IR. At least some of the
psychological literature on emotions taps into a deep pool of research where
the age-old cognition-emotion binary has finally been put to rest.

You have a broad experience in IR.
How do you see the evolution of the field? Is it a tragedy of unfolding
rationalization and increasing division of labor, or is something else going
on?

As I intimated earlier, IR has
failed as a disciplinary project. I’m
almost inclined to say, there’s no hope for IR ‘as we know it.’ Better to say, IR has lost its self-told coherence. A hundred flowers bloom, but just barely, and
there are a lot of weeds. I don’t see
this as a bad thing (your weeds may well be my flowers), although other
disciplines, such as sociology and a resuscitated geography, cast shadows on
our scraggly garden. I do think larger
societal processes—modern rationalization and modernist functional
differentiation—have conjoined to impose a coherence we don’t see. Crudely, we are servants to other servants,
all of us ultimately minions to run-away capital and victims of its
techno-material seductions. I guess you
could call this phenomenon a tragedy, though its very impersonality undercuts
the sense of the term. I have no doubt,
however, that it will eventuate in a catastrophe from we moderns will never
recover. I have been saying this ever
since the 1970s, when the debate over The Limits to Growth
persuaded me that we would never turn the ship around.

A new ‘turn’ seems to be developing
in the social sciences, possibly a swing of the ontological pendulum back to
materialism—this time with a more postpositivist undertone. How do you relate
to such a turn?

I am skeptical. It looks like a fad to me—people casting
about for something new and interesting to say.
Moreover, the vitalist, Bergsonian tenor of so
much of the new materialism turns me off—I cannot see the case for ascribing
agency (and thus purpose) to things when the language of cause suffices. (And I am not among those constructivists who
will not speak of cause for fear of positivist contamination.) But there’s another issue that troubles
me: the continued power of the
materialist-idealist binary. In IR, we
call realists materialists and liberal institutionalists/soft constructivists
idealists when it should be obvious that whatever separates them (in my view,
not as much as they think) has nothing to do with idealism and materialism as
philosophical stances. Security dilemmas,
arms races and terrorist plots are not ideationally informed? Norm diffusion, identity crises and human
rights are not materially expressed? Get
serious.

I argued in World of Our Making that the material and the social are bound
inextricably bound together. Rules do
the job. They turn the stuff of the
world into resources that we, as social beings, put to use. I think I got it right then. Needless to say, I also think students afflicted
with mindlessly linked binaries can only benefit from reading that book.

Nicholas Greenwood Onuf is renowned
as one of the founders of constructivism in International Relations. He is also
known for his important contributions to International Legal Theory,
International History, and Social Theory. Onuf’s most famous
work is arguably World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social
Theory and International Relations (published in 1989), which
should be on every IR student’s must-read list. His recent publications
include Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American
Civil War (2006, co-authored with his brother Peter Onuf) and International
Legal Theory: Essays and Engagements, 1966-2006 (2008). Onuf is
currently Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Florida
International University and is on the editorial boards of International
Political Sociology, Cooperation and Conflict, and Contexto
Internacional. Professor Onuf received his PhD in International Studies at
John Hopkins University, and has also taught at Georgetown University, American
University, Princeton, Columbia, University of Southern California, Pontifícia
Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, and Kyung Hee University in Korea.