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0:00
Patrick Theiner: Hi, I'm Patrick and welcome back to ICEB, also known as one email away from the cat doing a lecture. Today we will be talking about our third theory, we already had realism, we already had liberal institutionalism and today we come to an interesting divergence from that pattern. As you remember, the previous two theories actually had quite a lot in common. And I said in talking about liberal institutionalism that that was interesting because it's always remarkable
0:31
when you can start from the same point but then develop a different line of argument, which is of course with liberal institutionalism was doing. Today we will be talking about constructivism, which is our first theory that really questions a lot of the basic assumptions of the other two theories.
0:53
So what do I mean by that? Constructivism is different from the previous theories because while the previous theories - so realism and institutionalism - differed in a couple of individual components. So for example, they held different views about which types of gains actors were motivated by - was it relative gains in realism, or was it absolute gains and institutionalism. They still saw the world kind of very much in the same way. So they
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both said that anarchy was what structured the world at its base level, they both said there was a degree of uncertainty. They both assumed rational actors, and the both were occupied with the material structure of the world. So realists are still, you know, counting guns and tanks, soldiers, and institutionalists were still counting well, money gains, maybe economic gains more so than military resources, but still, it was very much a materially determined world. And that was fine for a little
2:01
while. I mean, we've now sort of reached the 1980s, maybe in terms of theoretical development. But then at some point we came to a realization. And that was that that was a bit of a weird world - that this weird world of rational actors interacting in this rational choice type way. Because there was a couple of questions that were- that remained open even after we had applied those two theories. So one example question could be why do we not worry about all nuclear weapons equally? This is
2:37
something I will talk about in one of the coming slides, but ask yourself a very simple question. Are you more worried about one nuclear weapon that North Korea possesses, or one nuclear weapon that France possesses? And if those levels of concern are not the same, why are they not the same? It's both the same bomb, right? We could also ask why states respect human rights, for example, because what do human rights give states? I mean, there's no material
3:06
benefits associated with protecting human rights, right? You don't- you can't realize a lot of economic gains from respecting human rights. It certainly doesn't make you any militarily stronger. So why are a lot of states still doing it? Or why states concerned about the reputation? I'm recording this in the week where the news broke that the UK government might ignore certain things about international law, which made some scholars very excited and other scholars were very pale faced at that
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announcement. But in either case, the assumption was from outside observers that this type of action was bad for the UK's reputation, but what does that really mean? What is a state's reputation? And why are they concerned about how the look to the world how they are perceived by the outside world? Could that not be completely- why do we care at all about this? So constructivism answers these and a couple of other important questions. And it does this because what's new about
4:09
constructivism is that it's the first theory that sees the world as a social system. So we as individuals, of course, we live in a social world, our world isn't just determined by the material, by the objectively given material aspects of it. We follow certain social rules and we operate in a social system. And what's new about constructivism is that it acknowledges that states might do the same thing: the world is as much a social system-
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the world of states is as much a social system as the world of individuals is. So states will follow, similarly, social rules just as we as individuals follow certain social rules. And a couple of the key concepts that will play a large role here in constructivism are things that we tend to care about: they are ideas, norms, they are identities and they are the discourse, the dreaded discourse, you've probably heard about the discourse a lot. You might have heard about discourse analysis, or
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if you haven't already, you will. And I've given you just one little illustration here at the bottom of how the social world is different and how social rules can differ between country to country, at least in the eyes of this
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artist down here. The Norwegians have a perfectly acceptable way to deal with personal space, which is that about a meter apart is good to have a conversation. Supposedly, the Italians are way close together and talk way more. In the case of French people there is basically not a single piece of paper that can fit between that, but the Finns now, the Finns seem to have a very different conception of personal space. And by the way, this is not intended to offend any Finns that we have
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here. But if this is not correct, you can call me out on this. Supposedly the Finns have an idea of personal space where you're several kilometres away from a neighbor, that's just about close enough, and there's really no need to come any closer to exchange pleasantries. By the way, if you think that I'm joking, find a Finnish person and ask them how they queue at the bus stop. This is a real picture from Finland. This is how you queue at the bus stop. Why would you all cluster under
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the little bus stop hut, if you could- if you can just spread out down the road, really. So this is how you queue for the bus in Finland. So clearly, social rules differ between country to country, which also means that the social world isn't uniformly the same. And there's clearly variations between countries. And constructivists take this type of insight and apply it to the world of state. Constructivism emerged after both realism and liberal institutionalism had
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done their thing. It emerged very much in the early 1990s. So it's a relatively young theory. And what had happened was that the Cold War had ended. And this had surprised a great number of people, among them the realists which hadn't really expected that type of bipolar world to break down so completely, and especially break down without a war. Remember that realists, for example, would always assume that the path from one way that the system is organized - say from bipolarity to unipolarity -
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that would normally involve conflict of some kind. But of course, the end of the Cold War did not have conflict, it did not end because there was a great power war between the US and the USSR and then the winner basically determined how the system worked. It was a wave of democratization, and a wave of international cooperation. You suddenly have the world seemingly open up to the possibility of everyone working together, rather than big blocks standing against
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each other. And so what we had seen here was a great amount of change in the international system, not only change in an abstract sense, but very real sense- a very real change in the sense of a change of political systems. And that had also come about really rapidly. And these types of rapid change were really difficult for existing theories to explain, because the mostly dealt with rules of the game that were unchangeable. That should basically always be true. And that is not something that
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plays very well with the idea of change. So that's where constructivists came in. I'm going to tell you a little bit of secret about IR theorists, and that is that IR theorists tend to be thieves. And what I mean by that is that IR theory - and to a degree political theory in general - likes to look at our adjacent fields of study, say law, say philosophy, say economics, and we tend to steal their theories and repurpose them for our own. And so what happened in constructivism was
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that the political theorists had discovered sociology. I'm simplifying this a tiny bit. So when the liberal institutionalists had discovered economic theories of action and interaction, and they've repurposed that as IR theory, the constructivist had done the same with sociology.
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One of the main works that this IR theory is built on is this book that I've shown you here, which was considered one of the five most important sociological books of the 20th century, even if you might not have heard of it at all, and might not have heard of the guys that wrote it. And it was written by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, and the book is called "The Social Construction of Reality". So what are Berger and Luckmann talking about in this book?
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They are making a couple of observations about the world, about our social world. So this is about us as individuals, because they're sociologists, not political scientists. They say, first of all, that how the world is structured in our own thoughts will determine how we perceive it. Now, that might seem completely banal, but what that really means at the base level is that the whatever conception you have in your head of the world will also determine how you see it. You don't see the world
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'objectively' so to say. A very easy way to illustrate this is to play a little association game. If I told you for example, that one specific material object, say a castle, and I asked you what that meant to you, you could come up with a number of different answers. You could say, well, maybe that's a tourism destination. Maybe that is, I don't know, maybe you're thinking of the landed gentry and unequal possession of land in the UK. Maybe you
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are thinking of military history in great battles and kings. I don't know, maybe you're thinking of architecture and how castles were built and all that. So
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another example could be a steak. So a piece of meat. What are the associations that come into your head when I tell you like, think about a steak? Are you thinking like, "Oh my god, delicious, nutrition, barbecuing", or are you thinking "meat is murder, we shouldn't be eating this, this is the product of exploitation of animals" and so on. So what I'm trying to illustrate here is that your perception of the same material object will differ based on how the world is structured in your head. If
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you're seeing the, say, food as an expression of exploitation, for example, you will see foods differently even though it's the same than someone that doesn't have that conception in their mind, say someone that's ignorant of the production processes of food. And that will then lead to the same material object being perceived differently by different people. Which is weird, right? Especially if we consider our previous IR theories, that always took the
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material world as a given. So if you take that together, then if you take basically the sum of everyone structuring and perceiving the world through their own minds, and you take the sum of that in any society, that means that whatever reality we have around us is always a socially constructed reality. And what that means is that we have - collectively as a society - we have generated certain perceptions of reality that we now kind of accept as true.
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And we've institutionalized these. So how should for example, an economy be set up? We have all, well, most of us, or maybe not, at some point decided that a free market society is good for us, for example, and we have institutionalized this view of the world, that that's how an economic system should be organized. We have institutionalized that in forms of laws, for example, in forms of institutions and organizations, in even in forms of parties. For example, there are whole parties whose
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whole reason for existing is to basically lobby and push for a specific form of economic organization. But of course, the reality- that reality could look different in different societies that are constructing realities in different ways. You can, of course, have communist societies. And I'm not, by the way, trying to imply that wherever you had communist societies, that was always the wish of everyone that was involved. But there were clearly countries where people - for a long time often - had
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the idea in their heads that that was the proper way to set up an economy. Yes, for example, in a state like Eastern Germany, while it was still a communist state, not everyone would have argued that everything is amazing. That probably was reserved for the elites that were making that argument. But it was still the case that most people that you would have asked on the street probably would have thought that that was the right and maybe even the natural way to set up an economic system.
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That also means that any social order that we see, say Berger and Luckman, is produced by us and not a given. So if we end up in a specific, say, social hierarchy with certain social roles and certain institutions, that is not just a god-given thing, that is something that society itself has kind of decided on. By the way, so constructivists aren't necessarily one of those, you know, like super postmodern people that are saying that, you know, "nothing in the world is real and everything
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is subjective" and all that that's not what that means. They're, they're not saying that if a tree falls in the forest, and no one sees it, that tree doesn't exist or hasn't fallen or whatever. That's not what this is. But what they say is, there is a material world, there is a steak, and there is a castle - but whatever that objective reality is - how those atoms are put together - that's also irrelevant, because what really matters is how we see
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that how society perceives it. So reality exists, but it's irrelevant because it doesn't have any inherent meaning. There is no meaning inherent in a castle as a building, that meaning is being ascribed to that building, as by the people that are seeing it. So they put this very nicely in their book, which means that the objectivity of the institutionalized world - so everything that you see around you in the institutionalized world - however big that may
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seem to you, is still something that we have collectively produced, and isn't just a natural way of how the world works. Constructivists thought that was a great idea and the stole mercilessly from this. The main proponent of constructivism, the first guy that really got a lot of citations for what he wrote about a constructivist view of the world was Alexander Wendt, who you see on the left here. And he wrote an interesting article - I want to say it was in 1992 and 1996 - that's
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called "Anarchy is what states make of it". And that itself is already an interesting title and that already tells you much about what his basic idea was. He started from the point where he attacked one of the foundational principles of the other theories. Remember that both realism and institutionalism had kind of accepted that anarchy was how the world was organized, that the world was anarchical, there was no overarching legitimate force that could
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compel states what to do. And that also- and that was also a given, that wasn't something that could be changed about the world. The world was- had always been like this, and would always be like this. Realists were a little bit stronger on this point than institutionalists. And now Wendt comes in and he says, "nah" anarchy is actually not just a given. It's not a natural state at all. It's just one of the possible states that the world can be
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in. And even if we have a world where we accept that it is kind of anarchical, that in itself also does not determine whether we would expect actors to be in conflict or in cooperation. He says that, in fact, what determines how the world works, what determines how states interact in anarchy, is simply what they've negotiated. So, it depends on how states themselves see themselves and others and what they think their interests are. So if all
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the states kind of in unison, agree that "Yes, the world is anarchical. We must all help ourselves, we would expect nothing but conflict", then that is how the world is going to be. But if for some reason, states would conceive of themselves and others differently, say you know, as actors that could be friends too, and not just enemies. Then that is also how the world can be. So what he essentially says is yes, much like the sociologists, much
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like Berger and Luckmann, material factors exist. But they're always perceived and filtered. The world does not contain any automatic conclusions about state behavior and state actions.
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So that already gives us the answer to our first little first little question that we asked on one of the first slides here. So if you look at this graph at the bottom, you might notice something interesting. If you go down the line of states here and I would ask you, which of these states are you afraid of? You probably wouldn't point to all of them at the same time. This, by the way, is of course the stockpiles of nuclear weapons as of I want to say
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2016 or something, stockpiles of nuclear weapons. So you in a realist world of course, we would say yes, we're most worried about Russia. The second thing that we're most worried about in the whole world is the US with its nuclear arsenal. Then the third state that we're worried about is France. And then some point- at some point down the line comes Korea, for example. But of course, that's not how we see the world. We are much, much more worried about Korean
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nuclear weapons than we are about French nuclear weapons, even though not only do the French have many more nuclear weapons, they're also much closer to the UK, for example. So why are we not terribly worried about those? Wendt says, well that is because there is no there's nothing given there's nothing objective in nuclear weapons. It is how we perceive these different nuclear weapons, perceive these different armaments that make them either threatening or not. And so that means that we're not
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actually in fact, in an anarchical world where everything that we expect is conflict. We are, in fact in the world where we as states can distinguish between friends and foes.
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So I'm going to give you a couple of illustrations of how- what that really means about the world, and how you can think of what a fundamental rethinking of how the world works that is. So the first way that you can think about this is that you basically can choose your classic philosopher and you can ask yourself, whose vision of the world you think is most accurate? So do you live in a Hobbesian world, do you think, where you have a war of all
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against all? And the only real relationship between actors is enmity? Or are you in a Lockean world? Philosopher John Locke, that said that, yes, the world is competitive, but also, actors can for example, have treaties with each other, they can introduce a degree of predictability, and they can make promises that they can expect not to be broken. So is this a Lockean world where the relationship between actors is based on competition? Or are we in a
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Kantian world where relationships between actors - and that includes states - can be friendly? So where you are possessed by reason and where you would expect to approach others with a degree of goodwill, as you first meet them? So is it Hobbes? Which would be probably the realists? Is it Locke, which is the institutionalists? Or is it Kant, which would probably be the constructivists? What vision of the world do you think is most- is most accurate? One way that I always like to
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illustrate this idea that things are not just a given is the scenario of a theater fire. So imagine a theater is burning, and we now have to evacuate a whole room of people. What do you expect is going to happen? Do you expect everyone to just run to the exits and you know, climb over each other, and they will, you know, are you expecting people to punch other people in the face to get through the door first? Or are you expecting, for example, there to be a
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degree of order and for the classic "women and children to go out first"? What do you think? What happens in these kinds of situations? And so realists in that case would say, "Well, of course, it's just the first, like every man for himself and you will see everyone fighting to get out of the exit". Or is that in fact, not what you would expect in this kind of situation to to happen.
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One maybe a little more contemporary example of this is alien movies. I love movies about alien encounters, because they say something about how we see the world. When we imagine encounter alien life for the first time, so imagine the spaceship literally comes down to earth. What do you expect to happen? And this is not a super hypothetical question, by the way, there's actual states that are thinking about this. There is some documents at least out there that think about these types of
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scenarios. So anyway, if you think that aliens are arriving, life forms that you've never interacted with, in an anarchical world, there's no rules yet, right? There is no, there is nothing that would make us think that they act one way or the other. Are you expecting this to become an "Independence Day" scenario where they just come in, and they just destroy what they want? And we can't really do much, and we can't really talk to them, unless we hack
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their computers, and we shut that whole thing down. Or are you expecting aliens to be like "E.T.", they're coming here and they're friendly, and they're cuddly. And we can talk to them and they want to talk to us and they want to be our friends? Or could this be something like "Arrival", which by the way is a is a terrific movie, where you first have to figure things out and you are actually unsure of what the interaction could be like, and you have to
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establish through communication what the ground rules of this interaction would be. So what this illustrates here is that none of these things are a given, say constructivists, you don't know, you could be in the one world, you could be in the Independence Day world, you could be in the E.T. world, or you could be in the Arrival world where you have to figure things out gradually, but you don't know on the surface what it's going to be.
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So let's run through a couple of the core assumptions then that constructivist IR theory has. We've already said that reality is always constructed. So you always have social perceptions and social actions, and there is no sort of objective international world that's fixed. So the world is more than just its material basis. And there is a degree to which we perceive the world and that then shapes how that world works out. Actors have identities. This
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is really important because it applies not only to individuals such as you, you have an individual identity. But it also applies to states - states suddenly become social beings. So states have beliefs about who they are. And they also have beliefs over who the others are. So does a state, for example, see themselves as being surrounded by a world of enemies? Or does a state believe that they are a modern forward thinking, Nordic welfare state, for
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example? And this is a set of beliefs. This is not a given, right? This could change over time. So actors have identities and just like you have an identity and you hopefully, know who you are, and what you stand for, and what you believe in and what you think about yourself - that is also true for states. And you will also have beliefs over who other people are. So it you as an individual, you have thoughts in your head about how other people act in
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the world, and how they will add interact with you, and and the other way around. You, of course have noticed these types of things if you ever were in a different cultural context, where you suddenly might have known who you were still, but when you travel, for example, to a different country, and you meet people you've never met, that follow different sort of cultural guidelines, and they have their own identities you've never encountered, then you
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will have, you will undergo a period where you're not quite sure who the others are, and you have to figure that out. So actors have identities. This is beliefs over who they are.
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These identities then filter your perceptions, you cannot perceive the world objectively. That doesn't mean that the world isn't there, right - there's still an objective world out there, but you cannot separate yourself from your perception of it. And that perception is intrinsically tied to your identity, and that in turn then determines your interests and your preferences. So this is something that might sound a little banal to you. But of course, who you are, like where you come from,
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determines much about how you see the world. You will have noticed, for example, that if you are a first-generation student here at university or you know any first-generation students, so students whose parents have not themselves gone to university, the mighty see university differently then people from backgrounds with high educational achievement already there. And of course, that is because it takes time, and it takes experience to understand a
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certain context. And if you don't have the identity that's already lined up with that contex then your perceptions will diverge from that, and it will take you a while to understand that new world that you're in. Now, that doesn't by the way mean that everyone with a similar identity has the very same interests and preferences. You should think of identities more as kind of guardrails - guidelines - that kind of tell you how you can see certain things, rather
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than determine how exactly you view stuff in any one given individual case. So who we are determines how we see the world, and how we see the world determines what we want. You might have come to university with the assumption that what you here for is mostly having a good time and growing up and meeting friends. Or you might have come to university with the assumption that you would train for a very specific job here. And depending on how you approach university - with what mindset - that will
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determine a lot about what your experience is.
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Now, the fourth point in the core assumptions here is that the discourse gives power too, and not just material things. So what that means is that whether or not you are powerful, whether or not you can make things happen, isn't just determined by the material things you have control over, but also by ideas. So ideas are power. The discourse is kind of the sum of how everyone talks about a certain issue or problem. And this discourse, this way in
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which we talk about certain problems, has people that are contributing and people that might not be contributing, but that is not necessarily dependent on how many material resources you have. You could have, for example, discourses about environmental degradation. We talk about how environmental degredation works and what we can do against it. And the people that determine much about our ideas here aren't necessarily just rich people. Yes, if
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you're super rich, and you can buy yourself a newspaper, and you can put out there that climate change isn't real and all that, yes, that means you can participate in the discourse. But you can also participate in the discourse if you are a climate scientist, for example. And that doesn't mean that you have necessarily a lot of material resources. You can even participate in the climate change and the environmental discourse if you are a school, if you are a girl who's in school in the
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Nordic countries, and of course, Greta Thunberg might show you how much someone can influence a discourse without any material power behind it. So having a good idea and being able to push that good idea, it can be worth just as much as material objects. And that is something of course that the other theories don't take into account at all. Like they would have no clue- like realists would have no clue how to deal with Greta Thunberg, because she doesn't
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adhere to anything that they normally deal with. She's not a state actor, she doesn't have a lot of material resources, she doesn't follow kind of a rational gains, gains-maximizing mindset and so on. And so in all of this together, in this world that's constructed, that has actors in it that have specific identities and perceptions, and that participate in a shared discourse - in an exchange about what to do and what not to do - norms and values and ideas really matter. So norms, values and
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ideas and rules are, of course, something that we care about, on the individual level, and in this specific social world of constructivism they matter here, too.
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So, what that also means is that when we're constructivists, we shift our models of decision-making. The previous theories - so realism and institutionalism - had a logic of consequentialism. So actors have preferences that are predetermined, and they want to get to their goals as efficiently as possible. And the only thing that they care about is, "If I choose a specific action, what are the consequences of this action for me to get to my goal?" So
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this is the 'homo oeconomicus'. For example, the model of decision-making that we're in constructivism in, is a logic of appropriateness and not of consequentialism. So what you want will be determined by your identity and by the culture in which you're embedded. And you will ask yourself not just what the actions with the best consequences are, but what actions are appropriate, and those things might not be the same. And then you are of
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course, a homo 'sociologicus'. An easy way to illustrate this is by asking yourself the question of why you queue in the supermarket. And you can think about this for a second. Think about the consequences of you skipping the queue in the supermarket. A actor following a logic of consequentialism would - if there's no material, downsides attached to it - always skip the queue, because you save a few minutes, and that's good for you. So someone following
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that kind of logic would just walk past the queue, put their stuff onto the conveyor belt and pay first because after all, what's the worst that can happen? I'm going to illustrate what the worst is that is going to happen to you when you skip the queue. [Tuts] That's the worst that's gonna happen, okay. People are going to silently judge you. In most cases, people aren't going to confront you, especially not in the UK. This might be different in other
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countries, obviously, where people might be much more prone to confronting you about a supposed rule breaking. A constructivist would see no problem at all with you queueing, even though following the consequentialist logic that doesn't really make sense. Because a constructivist would say, well queueing is the appropriate behavior that is expected of you, you know that others are expecting you to queue. And that's why you do it, even if there's no material benefit for you to be gained.
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Now, one way of illustrating these nice social rules is a- is thinking about norms, social norms in general. And I just want to show you a quick little experiment about social norms. And this is about one of my very favorite subjects: It's about elevator etiquette. This is a little Candid Camera clip that's two minutes long. So let's switch to this here.
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Narrator: The gentleman in the elevator now is a candid star. These folks who are entering - the man with a white shirt, the lady with a trench coat, and subsequently, one other member of our staff - will face the rear, and you'll see how this man in the trenchcoat [laughter] tries to maintain his individuality.
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But little by little. He looks at his watch, but he's really making an excuse for turning just a little bit more to the wall. Now we try it once again. Here's the candid subject. Here comes the Candid Camera staff, three of them at least. And this man has apparently been in groups before. [laughter] Here's a fella with his hat on in the elevator. First, he makes a full turn to the rear and Charlie closes the door. A moment later, we open the door, everybody's changed positions. [laughter]
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Now we see if we can use group pressure for some good. Now, in a moment on Charlie's signal everybody turns forward. Notice they take off their hats. And now do you think we could reverse the procedure? Watch.
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Patrick Theiner: So, what we saw here was the effect of well, you could call it the effects of peer pressure, right? But you could also call it social norms, of course. So the idea about social norms is that you are trying more or less desperately as an individual to always follow certain standards of appropriateness in your daily social life. And of course, the way that these poor people with their looks of shock and horror on their faces, at the
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realization that they seem to be breaking some kind of social rule that they're not aware of. It's always something that gives me great joy. So we are following a, actually an almost uncountable number of appropriate norms and standards in our daily life. And this is something that's very easy to illustrate. So think about how many - stop the video here for a second - and then think about how many things you can think of that are norms, unwritten kind of rules of social interaction. How many
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of those are you following each day? How many do you think? Take a take a little guess and come up with a few examples. Okay, let's let's see how much you came up with. So just an example. We just had the example of the elevator etiquette. Of course, there's other standards of elevator etiquette: there is, for example, the standard that as you go into the elevator, you have to go into the corners first, right, you can't stand right in front and
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then people have to squeeze by you. You also have the standard that you can look each other in the eyes very briefly, just to make sure that it's another human basically, but you can't stare at someone for an extended period of time that will be super creepy. No, you have to look at your shoes, or in the mirror, or at the buttons which are suddenly becoming very, very interesting. So elevator usage has a lot of actual social norms attached to it.
40:00
The norm of fair play is something that's completely unwritten, the idea that you have to be a good loser, for example, that you can't - when you lose a game of any sport, basically - just stomp off the field or destroy something, that is considered to be extremely socially inappropriate. We can think about gift-giving as social norms. And this is something I myself am interested in, because I'm currently writing a paper on diplomatic gifts,
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and how those are interesting international norms if you think about it. But gift-giving follows a lot of rules: For example, you shouldn't give someone a gift that is wildly disproportionate in value. When you receive a gift, you need to give a gift back and so on. You have the rule, for example, that you shouldn't talk to yourself in public. Whenever you meet someone that is in a room or out in the street and they're just talking to themselves, that person is either a lecturer,
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or someone who's a little bit not quite there in the head, obviously. You have the norm that you should respect other's personal space, obviously not infringe on them - which apparently my cat doesn't understand at all. You have the rule to be on time. This is completely unwritten of course: if you constantly come an hour late for your meetings, no one's going to drag you to court in all likelihood, especially not your friends. It is a social norm, a social standard of appropriate behavior that
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you're following here. The queueing I've already mentioned. And I'm just giving you this wonderful example from Thailand that even in places where queuing is as much a norm as here maybe, you still have sometimes tweaks on these social norms. What you see here is the genius invention, for example, of letting your shoes queue for you because after all, there's no real reason why you should stand there. You might as well just sit down and let your
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shoes do the dirty work here. All the guys that are watching this video are going to know what I mean by this specific rule. If you have a number of stalls In the bathroom and one is taken, don't be a weirdo. Don't take the one right next to it. That's just this- just it's weird. Okay, no one, no one should do it. That's clearly a standard you should, you should follow. Not talking on your phone while you're talking to someone, especially not on what seemingly is a
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date here, not eating with your hands, using appropriate cutlery. And of course, never any socks with sandals. So what I'm trying to illustrate with this slide here, with this multitude of norms really, is that you are following hundreds probably everyday standards of appropriate behavior in your daily life. And what constructivist is simply saying is, states do the same thing. They also have a large number of norms and rules that they're following, even though they don't have to, just
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because they are appropriate, and they know that it's expected of them that they follow these. So this standard of appropriate social behavior is something that constructivists say we see in a lot of areas of state behavior. And I'm just going to give you one or two here, interesting ones that correspond essentially with social norms such as, don't eat with your hands. We have, for example, the idea that sovereignty or non-intervention is something that is basically sacred. Now,
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there is, of course, a couple of social- of international treaties that protect state sovereignty. But that is still something that initially emerged as a norm, the idea that whatever goes on within your state borders, whatever goes on domestically, is really no one else's business and other states can't just come in and tell you what to do. The idea that we should foster democracy is a norm. There is of course, no international treaty that says
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every state needs to work together and we all need to bring about democracy in as many countries as possible. The idea that democracy is a good choice of system and the fact that states are actively trying to get other states to also adopt this system is a norm. Nuclear non-proliferation is a norm. So the idea that nuclear weapons should not spread to more states than have them at the moment. That's a norm. There are some treaties attached to it, but in the beginning at least, this was
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all norm based. Protecting the environment is a norm. Yes, there might be some kind of material drawbacks for this. But let's be real here. I mean, if you're Sweden, why do you care all that much whether or not the Amazon is burned down? That is something that might affect you, you know, a long way down the line, but you care about it right now. And you as Sweden, for example, are pushing right now for other states to protect the environment, even though
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it's not like you're going to suddenly get fat trade deals out of that, or become a militarily more powerful state, no. You follow this because it is a norm and what am i One of my other things that I really like is diplomatic relations were for the longest time - up until the 20th century - not regulated by treaties at all, this was all just based on norms. The fact that, you know, you shouldn't kill other people's diplomats, and you should respect their luggage. And an embassy is off limits
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for you as a host state, those things were all international norms. So constructivists say these standards of appropriate behavior are everywhere in the international system. Now, let's run for the last couple of minutes of this through a little case study that thinks about nuclear weapons really quickly. We've already said in the beginning, that one of the questions that we could ask is, why are nuclear weapons so rarely used? So why do we only have
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to wartime uses ever even though of course, a multitude of states have adopted nuclear weapons over the years. And why don't the deter non-nuclear attacks? So we saw in the little example of the Cuban Missile Crisis that Cuba for example, was very happy to shoot down American spy planes over Cuba. They seem to - at least at that point - not have been worried about nuclear weapons, that should have deterred them if the realists were to be believed. Why do so
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many states not really go for nuclear weapons even though they could , right? States like Germany, Italy, Japan probably could all build one next week if they wanted to, but they aren't. And constructivism says something about that. So, the way that realists tend to explain, for example, why nuclear weapons are only used very rarely is that well, they act as deterents. So they haven't really been used because their main task is to deter other
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states from attacking. So the whole point of nuclear weapons in other words in realism is to not have to use them. They will deter other nuclear weapon states from attacking you and they will also deter non-nuclear weapon states from attacking you. But if that were true, that doesn't really explain why the US and the USSR both didn't just drop a bunch of nuclear bombs on other states they were at war with. Why didn't the US use nuclear weapons in Vietnam.
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Why didn't they use that in Iraq? Why not just drop a nuclear bomb on Baghdad, instead of going in there with their regular forces. So that's where the realist explanation already kind of breaks down.
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The liberals- liberal institutionalists would point to the importance of international institutions and they would say that well, we haven't seen the use of these things because we have international treaties where states have credibly committed themselves to not using them. But - at least say constructivists - that doesn't explain why they weren't used before those treaties had come around. Remember that the first time we used it was in 1945. But the treaties against using them and having
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them spread didn't come about until the 1960s. So that gives you a solid 20 years where you could have said, "Well, look, there is no international institutions that are dealing with this". So why aren't they spreading further? Why aren't they being used by other states? constructivists say, "Well, you know what: they're not being used, because there is a nuclear taboo". And there's a couple of good articles that talk about this. They say pretty simply,
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nuclear weapons aren't just another weapon. They're not just a bigger version of an artillery gun, or a bigger version of a conventional bomb. There's something that's completely different, because their use is considered uncivilized, their use is considered inappropriate. You can basically not think of a modern day scenario where we would- we could justify their use. So constructivists say there is a taboo around the use of nuclear weapons that
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makes nuclear weapons barbaric and unacceptable, and their use amoral. Which means that any state that is in that system where that is the prevailing norm doesn't want to go against that, in the same way that you don't want to skip the queue, or the poor guy in the elevator doesn't want to face the other way when everyone else is facing the back. So and one of the reasons that their use is taboo is still kind of inherent in their physical reality. They are too destructive to be used. And
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that then itself makes it barbaric to use them - if every use, you know, kills a couple million people, or could potentially kill millions of people, that is not something- that is not a weapon you can actually use. A quick illustration of this, the USSR, tested the biggest ever bomb in 1961 that's called the "Tsar Bomba". And you can go on Wikipedia tangent about this. It's crazy because it was so powerful that if it was detonated in the center of Edinburgh, in George Square, this is just
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the size of the fireball that that thing makes. The fireball is like five and a half miles across. The fire ball already goes from Heriot-Watt all the way into the ocean. This bomb when it was detonated, when it was tested, that was the size of the fireball. This is the radius in which people just die, you will still get third degree burns and other things in this radius. So if you got married down there in Gretna Green, down here, almost at the Scottish border basically,
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or at the Scottish border, you will still get severe injuries if only one of these bombs is dropped in Edinburgh. Now the craziest thing that I always think is: this bomb had so much destructive potential that 900 kilometers away.
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windows were bursting after it had been tested all the way up there at the Arctic Circle. So if you dropped this in Edinburgh, there would still be people in Norway that would have their windows shattered if you drop one of these bombs. And so while this is the most powerful bomb - it had a mushroom cloud, you know, seven times the size of Mount Everest and all those things, like just crazy statistics about this - while this is the most destructive
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bomb, of course, even smaller nuclear weapons are just as destructive in terms of human lives when you drop them on actual inhabited areas.
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So what I'm trying to say here is if you dropped even one of these bombs, nowadays, millions of people would die immediately or from the after effects, and that essentially precludes their use. It is too blunt an instrument, it's too barbaric to kill this many people in one fell swoop, and that is why the nuclear taboo has emerged. Now you could be asking if then there is a nuclear taboo around their use, why do you get these weapons in the first place?
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Good question, say constructivists. If we think about realists, realists would say "Well, states just get nuclear weapons because it increases the security, it makes them more likely to be able to deter others". And in this kind of world, the states that would want nuclear weapons the most would be the ones that are most threatened by others. So we would think that states like Israel, Iran, and North Korea would all go for the bomb, which of course,
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is very much true in the world at the moment. Proliferation - so the spread of nuclear weapons - is actually not really a problem in the realism. In fact, neorealists think it's a good thing, if more states have nuclear weapons. I know this sounds completely bonkers, but that is exactly what neorealists are arguing for. John Mearsheimer - you know, our guy that made himself look like Machiavelli in the Photoshop - has argued that Iran should get the bomb and he wrote an article that's
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called that, because he said that would actually pacify relations, because then everyone could be sure of mutual deterrence. Now in a liberal world world, how we would deal with nuclear proliferation is that states would be willing to cooperate
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in terms of stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, but they could remain skeptical, right? So it's still a Prisoner's Dilemma, you still don't want to be the sucker that doesn't get nuclear weapons, but everyone else around you gets them. So the people that do try to acquire nuclear weapons are then states that tend to be isolated from others. So states that aren't integrated in a system of institutions and alliances. And again, we can find a few real life examples, such as South
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Africa. South Africa had a nuclear weapons program, they had a nuclear weapon- they had nuclear weapons, they detonated them. They dismantled their program, to date is still the only country in the world that has had a nuclear weapons program, but has fully dismantled it nowadays. And the way that you could prevent the spread of nuclear weapons is that you build a global system of treaties and regimes and alliances and promises and institutions that could increase the level of
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certainty that states have about each other's intentions and about each other's capabilities. Constructivists take a completely different route. And they say, no, it's all about identities. It is states that think that nuclear weapons are a key part of what makes a state powerful, what makes a state important, what makes you you know, a big strong leadership state, that that's the states that would be going for these. So you are demonstrating that you are, you know, someone to be
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reckoned with, by getting these. You're not getting them to use them, you're getting them because of the prestige and the identity that comes with it. And that, again, is the case for a couple of states in in history, empirically speaking. And so the way that you could prevent the spread of these weapons would be that you change what we think about nations that have nuclear weapons. It shouldn't be just about you being powerful, it should be that we are pushing the idea that nations have to be
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responsible, so that you can be a powerful nation without nuclear weapons. States, like Germany have led the way in this a little bit, in demonstrating that you can be a powerful state on the international stage without the use of nuclear weapons or the possession of nuclear weapons.
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So the last thing that I want to talk about really briefly - because I'm going over way over length already, again - is that change is a really interesting thing in constructivism because constructivists are so comfortable with it. Remember that I told you that realists and institutionalists both have a problem with change because they think that the world is mostly built on unchanging rules. But constructivists really don't have a problem with that. They say that identities and
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interests are changeable, just like you are not the same person when you were 15 compared to now compared to when you are 40. That also means that you- what you're thinking about the world, what how you perceiving the world, and what you want from the world will change over time. And that's fine. And whenever we have changes in how we understand the world fundamentally, that will then also enact systemic change. So once we collectively had decided that the planet was something that needed to be
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saved, right - forests was something that needed to be saved or biodiversity - that also then changed what we thought about- what we thought of was appropriate behavior. And once enough states followed that, that could then enact systemic change in how we deal with the world. I'm not going to talk in detail about these mechanisms of change, but the you can look these up in the custom textbook.
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So now, as a last point, we can always ask is this really good theory? We asked about it in the case of realism and for institutionalism, too. So what's good about constructivism as a theory? The first thing is that this is a world that's a little bit more recognizable to us there. It's a social world. It's not a world where we have to pretend that everything is rational and all states are just motivated by material gains. It is a world that
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follows social rules. And it allows non-state actors to play a role, right? I mean, that talked about Greta Thunberg, who in constructivism is a perfectly fine actor to look at, and someone that we would not expect to not have an influence on the world like we would in realism. Non-material factors play a role, which is great. So we can finally talk about ideas, we can talk about values, we can talk about norms, we can talk about how states talk about certain things, speech acts, and we
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can describe processes of change much better than other theories. Why it's a bit of a problem is that it's more an approach than a theory. So it doesn't really generate a ton of testable predictions about the world - mostly because so much of how the works is basically negotiable between the actors. And that also means it sometimes doesn't quite react to what other theories are doing in a very direct way. And it doesn't really talk much about state
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interests. And it does maybe neglect material factors to a larger degree than we might be comfortable with. So maybe at the end of the day, it still matters more than constructivists might want, how much money you have, how many tanks you got, and how much- how materially powerful you are in the world. So that's the little summary: we have an international system that has an international social structure. anarchy itself means nothing, because what
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can come out of that can be different worlds of how states can interact. And this can go all the way from an actual state of enmity like a Hobbesian world, to a Kantian world where everyone can be friends basically. Everyone has identities and interests and together - the way that we collectively think about the world - that generates what's called intersubjective knowledge. So we have agreed that we believe certain things about the world, how the world
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works, who we are and who others are. And in principle, any type of actor can be important here and not just states. And when we act, we follow a logic of appropriateness and not a logic of consequences alone.
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And the sum of these logics of appropriateness, the sum of appropriate actions is what we call social norms that we follow. Okay, that was a long explanation of constructivism, but I think it's a fascinating theory. It's a really interesting theory that can tell you a lot about the world. But the next time we come to the first theories that actually don't just accept that the world is the way it is. They think that the world is changeable, and can be
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changed and maybe also should be changed and those are critical approaches. So I'll see you in the next one.
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