‘The World Is Too Much with Us’: Reification and the Depoliticising of Via Media Constructivist IR

Abstract

International Relations’ constructivist turn – that body of approaches emerging in the late 1980s/early 1990s in which international outcomes were held to be predicated upon complex social arrangements, rules, norms, institutions, language and culture – emerged from a unique historical and intellectual moment. Initially, this theoretical turn was deeply committed to reflexivity and circumspection: since events were held to be contingent and theorists were bound up in them, the obligation to sustained critical self-reflection was central to the project. That commitment would not last, however. By the mid-1990s, it had given way to a ‘middle ground’ (or via media) position, which aligned itself with dominant materialist and rationalist methodologies and epistemologies. We wish to examine that moment of realignment: how it happened, and what it might mean. We argue that having imbibed a degree of the free-floating optimism that was ‘in the air’ in the 1990s, via media constructivism’s leading scholars came to believe that it was no longer necessary to problematise the historicity and contingency of their own historical moment and philosophical horizons. The post-Cold War ‘world’, we hold – or, at any rate, one account of it – was ‘too much with’ via media constructivism: selectively constraining its reflexive impulses and critical tools in ways that, however unintentionally, provided cover for particular normative and ideological configurations. To move past this, we argue that via media constructivists need a sustainably critical ethos: one which ‘repoliticises’ international theory by unmasking its hidden ideological and political starting points.