Anne L. Clunan, Constructing Concepts of Identity まとめ

Beyond Boundaries: Disciplines, Paradigms, and Theoretical Integration in International Studies (Suny Series in Global Politics)

■Anne L. Clunan, Constructing Concepts of Identity: Prospects and Pitfalls of a Sociological Approach to World Politics, in Rudra Sil and Eileen M. Doherty eds., Beyond Boundaries?: Disciplines, Paradigms, and Theoretical Integration in International Studies, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000. まとめ

In this piece, Clunan attempts to anatomize social constructivism on identity formation and clarify both its possibilities and limitations. By setting constructivists between positivists and relativists, she expects it to take a gap-bridging role in order to make a more unified theory.

A social constructivist ontology rests between the positivist emphasis on the material forces in world politics and the relativist position that all reality is the effect of discourse. (p.89)

Firstly, Clunan makes clear the difference between constructivism and rationalism.

Unlike rationalist structural theorists, who can only study change in “preferences over actions or policies” within their models, constructivists can analyze what “preferences over outcomes” are, and where they come from. In other words, constructivists can analyze how and why the “game” was set up in the first place. (p.89)

Constructivists reject the positivist claim that scientific knowledge can only be obtained with “the abstract, rigorous exercise of logical proof.” Primary among the reasons for this rejection is that positivist science encourages the development of theories whose assumptions may be completely unrealistic as long as they can generate powerful predictions. (pp.109-10)

Secondly, Clunan points out the similarity constructivism has to “pluralist theories” such as integration theory, international regimes theory, international society, and so on.

These pluralist theorists all rejected the sparse view of international reality that structural realists and neoliberals accept. (p.91)

Both pluralist theorists and constructivists are dissatisfied with rationalist “parsimonious” theories and put much more stress on complicated processes than on “material structures such as the distribution of power.” (p.91)

Thirdly, Clunan mentions that constructivists have so wide variety of disciplinary roots and scholarly interests that it is hard to consider it a cohesive school of thought. (p.93) Clunan takes Ernst Haas and Alexander Wendt as examples to explain the division inside constructivists. By so doing, she distinguishes a state-centered systemic theory like Wendt’s from a theory of national collective identity that focuses more on domestic political factors than on international ones like Haas’. Clunan suggests that both could miss an important explanatory variable of international reality if they ignore the other perspective and result in a one-sided approach.

While international roles are clearly important in understanding a state’s identity, a true constructivist approach should reject any empirical distinction between the analytic categories of systemic and domestic politics, and recognize that the two analytic categories both contribute to the process of state identity formation. (pp.95-6)

As a prospective bridge between the two approaches, Clunan tries to see promise in “a theory of evolutionary learning.” Furthermore, Clunan refers to Emanuel Adler’s “theory of selection” by which “a unified constructivist theory of change” that includes both domestic and international factors will be possible. (p.106)

Emanuel Adler quite rightly argues that constructivists require a theory of institutional selection that accounts for why some social identities and institutions “stick” while others do not. He advocates a theory of cognitive evolution. (p.106)

Wendt also refers to learning “as a mechanism of what he calls cultural selection.” (p.107) He argues:

Cultural selection is “the transmission of the determinants of behavior from individual to individual, and thus from generation to generation, by social learning, imitation, or some other similar process.” (p.107)

Finally, Clunan implies in conclusion that constructivists and rationalists can complement each other, comparing to a case of constructivists and relativists or postmodernists.

Constructivists generally agree that all observation is theory-laden. This does not prevent them from believing that the unobservable objects of theory may in fact be real, and that there is some basis for establishing our knowledge of them. Haas and Adler agree with Wendt and Dessler that there is an external, independent reality to be studied, and this further separates them from relativists and postmodernists. (p.109)

Constructivists also reject the relativist position that “there is no consensual or true knowledge based on science,” and the postmodern position that reality is discourse. They agree that scientific reasoning can increase our knowledge of external reality. (p.109)

In many respects constructivist scholarship complements as well as challenges rationalist approaches, by unpacking the assumptions that rationalists make about what interests actors have and how world politics is structured. (p.110)

In this sense, constructivists accept positivism and have a larger place for cohabitation with rationalists than with relativists. Although Clunan puts constructivism in the middle between those two approaches, it doesn’t necessarily mean that constructivism can take a bridging role between them. Rather, as this piece proposes, it is trying to construct a unified constructivist theory of change (identity formation) in the first place.