Notions of Self/Other and Discourse in Constructivism

‘fixed’, ‘given’, or ‘planned’, “[t]he problematic of identity/difference contains, therefore, no foundations which are prior to, or outside of, its operation”¹³⁴. Self and other are performatively constituted, are not fixed and achieved through the

‘inscription of boundaries’ which mark the differentiation between the two concepts.

The discursive interaction between self and other is also important for the study of international relations since the approach of a state and state actors to international relations is based and influenced greatly by understandings of self and other which form the basis of identity.

for granted might have arisen from methodological issues (that it is not possible to problematize everything at once), Wendt opposes rationalist ontology since such position could conceal the answers to the questions on what happens when actors interact. Wendt’s core argument is thus “interaction at the systemic level changes state identities and interests”¹⁴⁰.

Onuf, on the other hand, asserts that considering identities as a process of an unending

“social construction involving agents’ choices for themselves” implies treating the self, though unintentionally, ‘as an unproblematic primitive term’ (similar to that of rationalists) because “the process itself presupposes participants already aware of themselves”¹⁴¹. Following Rene Descartes and his self-conscious self¹⁴², Onuf states that although he is reluctant to study identity he places his limited attention on personal identities rather than collective ones. He deals with the self that is at work while one becomes conscious of the world, which he calls ‘the indexical self’. In his words: “It is mine alone, indubitably experienced here and now, imperfectly remembered as there and then in any future here and now that I consciously experience”¹⁴³. Human beings are social and sociality entails subjectivity; that each is indispensable to the being of other; that they constitute each other; that humans convey their subjective experiences through language (without which no activity is fully social) in the context of socializing.

Conversely, setting up identities and confining them into an innate position might exhibit a safer world for rationalists where actors (agents/ states/ individuals/

institutions as a whole) would have the chance to predict the future of themselves and of others within a particular context –an approximation. In Hopf’s words¹⁴⁴:

“Durable expectations between states require intersubjective identities that are sufficiently stable to ensure predictable patterns of behavior. A world without identities is a world of chaos, a world of pervasive and irremediable uncertainty, a world much more dangerous than anarchy”.

The self strives to infer implicit meanings from the other’s speeches or actions, both of which are assumed to root in its identity. No doubt about it, the identity of a state gives some clues on its preferences and decisions, and in turn actions, however, “the

140 ibid, 384.

141 Onuf, Making Sense, Making Worlds, 75–76.

142 “Descartes created the conscious self by strictly separating consciousness from the world of experience.” See, ibid, 77.

143 ibid, 79.

144 Hopf, “The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory”, 174–75.

producer of the identity is not in control of what it ultimately means to others; the intersubjective structure is the final arbiter of meaning”¹⁴⁵.

Although post-modern scholars are skeptical about ‘objective accounts’ of human involved events and regard identity ‘as a collective delusion’, there are few similarities between post-modernists and constructivists that both ‘tend to treat self as an unproblematic primitive term’ and place self prior to its interests/goals with the belief that knowing/identifying self comes before deciding –a type of positioning that makes self ‘an unexamined primitive term’ which act on its preferences and interests¹⁴⁶. Constructivist view underlines the discursive power (ideas, knowledge, language, culture) other than material one (military or economic or both) in understanding world affairs thoroughly. Thus identities and interests are inextricably linked together and not reducible to one another, however, identities can be prior to interests since no actor can make decisions without knowing itself at first. As Wendt articulates, “[i]dentities refer to who or what actors are. They designate social kinds or states of being. Interests refer to what actors want. They designate motivations that help explain behavior”¹⁴⁷. On epistemology, on the other hand, Wendt introduces two empirical issues. First one is “to what extent are state identities and interests constructed by domestic vs. systemic structures?”¹⁴⁸. The domestic path leads to the answer that state identities and interests are exogenous to the international system whereas the latter reaches the opposite. The second one is “to what extent are state identities and interests constant?”¹⁴⁹. Although rationalism, unlike constructivism, falls short of analyzing endogenous preferences and identities are constructed not by but within the international system, Wendt claims that the results of construction process are highly stable. The inference on stability leads Wendt to rationalist camp as it assumes constancy to the extent that it is empirically warranted. In other words, while he criticizes rationalism as an ontology, adheres it as an epistemology, in his words below¹⁵⁰:

145 ibid, 175. This quotation shall be enlarged with various examples one of which could be the USA’s ideal of bringing democracy to the Middle East and its misconception as waging a war among average citizens in the region. Thus, one’s own identity is structurally constrained by others, and intersubjective context assigns eventual meaning.

146 Onuf, Making Sense, Making Worlds, 75.

147 Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, 231.

148 ibid, 37.

149 ibid, 38.

150 ibid, 39.

“Given my idealist ontological commitments, therefore, one might think that I should be firmly on the post-positivist side of this divide, talking about discourse and interpretation rather than hypothesis testing and objective reality. Yet, in fact, when it comes to the epistemology of social inquiry I am a strong believer in science –a pluralistic science to be sure, in which there is a significant role for Understanding, but science just the same. I am a positivist”.

As he argues an idealist ontology does not require a post-positivist epistemology, thus, there is a hope for reconciling so-called incompatible ontological and epistemological standpoints by which he aspires to create a via media. Constructivism should be taken narrowly as an ontology, as he clears, not broadly as an epistemology¹⁵¹.

In respect of identities, Wendt asserts their peculiarity that roots in both subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, as well as self- and other- understandings. Therefore, two kinds of ideas, those constituted by the self and those constituted by the other, shape identities. So, it is pertinent to mention that an identity is constructed by both external and internal contexts¹⁵².

Drawing on George Herbert Mead’s dichotomy between I and Me,¹⁵³ Wendt suggests four types¹⁵⁴ of identity:¹⁵⁵ personal or corporate identity, ‘type’¹⁵⁶ identity, role identity, and collective identity¹⁵⁷. The first one presents a material base for the other types of identity, and individuals (as a personal identity) or states (as a corporate identity) can only have one such. This type of identity presupposes its entities’

consciousness and memory of self that are indispensable in forming a collective form of identity. It also has an ‘auto-genetic’ feature and is ‘constitutionally exogenous to Otherness’¹⁵⁸:

“As postmodernists have emphasized, constituting an actor as a physically distinct being depends on creating and maintaining boundaries between Self and Other, and to that extent even personal and corporate identities presuppose difference”.

Although Wendt overlooks it, awareness and the ability to make categorizations as well as comparisons, without whom no identification of difference will be available,

151 ibid, 41.

152 ibid, 222.

153 ‘I’ is related to inner self in other words it is the ego aspect of an individual whereas ‘me’ is the outer aspect or social self that is to say what is learned in interaction with the environment and the others/society.

154 His earlier reviews on identities also involves four types but with some differences about their labels, namely personal or corporate identities, social identities, state identities, and collective identities. See, Wendt, “Identity Formation and the International State.”

155 Wendt clearly states that the book is not about state identity formation, but to the extent that it is related to culture, he develops identity conceptions on pages 43, 130, 317. See, Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics.

156 Wendt, as states, borrowed the term from Jim Fearon.

157 Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, 198.

158 ibid, 225.

should be taken for granted. Since it is entirely endogenous to individual, this is the only type that might be taken as given, such as one’s gender or nationality (read place of birth).

Type identity, the second type, is a generic term that encompasses any sort of identical characteristic or characteristics with social content or social meaning, such as language, knowledge, opinion or even being a teenager, a member of a political party, and heterosexual as Fearon exemplifies. Unlike personal or corporate identity, an individual may have several type identities at once, and their social content should be restricted by formal or semi-formal “membership rules that define what counts as a type identity and orients the behavior of Others toward it”¹⁵⁹. Wendt takes the example of sexuality (sexual identity) a step further and adapts it to homosexuality to show how these rules are bounded historically and/or culturally. Following his words: “There have always been people who had sex with other members of the same sex, for example, but they only became homosexuals, with its attendant social consequences, in the nineteenth century”¹⁶⁰.

Although being homosexual need not to be named or recognized by others, so to say it is intrinsic to the individual itself at base, yet still, membership rules which grant an individual with a certain social type entail involvement of others, at least during the process of their constitution. Hence, one can only become a homosexual when such a category emerges as a source of identity, and society in which the person resides assigns a specific category to this type of conduct.

Role identity, the third one in Wendt’s alignment, furthers the degree of involvement of others because it engages a conceptual position that is extrinsic to the individual.

To clarify the difference between an intrinsic and an extrinsic position, one might compare the examples of being a mother with being a teacher. In the first situation if a woman gives birth to a child she becomes a mother needless of any recognition by others as it is entirely pre-social whereas the latter necessitates either recognition by or counter-identity of others (being student, for the given example), as it is totally

159 ibid, 226.

160 ibid, 226.

social. Role identities, therefore “exist only in relation to Others”¹⁶¹ and “the degree of interdependence or intimacy between Self and Other” sets the most of roles¹⁶²:

“When intimacy is high, as in Arab-Israeli conflict, role identities might not be just a matter of choice that can be easily discarded, but positions forced on actors by the representations of significant Others. In this situation even if a state wants to abandon a role it may be unable to do so because the Other resists out of a desire to maintain its identity”.

The last one, collective identity¹⁶³ is the combination of the second and third types, and ends up with identification which is a cognitive process wherein collectivity and collaboration involved, and the self-other division blurred and merged in a socially constituted we (as in general, or much specifically ‘me’ as in Mead’s). Similar to ‘type’

and ‘role’ identities, there might be multiple collective identities simultaneously attributed to the same individual or actor but come into play in a logical order. In other words, they are issue-based, and it’s the contextual situation that selects and imposes the right one at the right time. The formation process might hardly be defined as fixed, yet, shared narratives, deriving from collective understandings, play a key role in depicting the endless picture of the self and other. Thus collective identity formation entails domestic determinants.

For Wendt, identities are foundational, thereby “whether or not the structure of a state system is anarchic is intimately tied to the distribution of state identities”¹⁶⁴. Accordingly, since structures would not exist without agents, identities constitute the state-systems as anarchic (as oft-cited) when member states embody juridical independence and governance. Therefore, all –hegemon, balancer, liberal, communist, revisionist, and so on– are the attributions of state-identities. Hence his famous quote

“Anarchy is what states make of it” should be understood as a focus on the difference between an anarchy of friends and an anarchy of enemies. How the state approaches the other actors in the international system is linked to its own identity perceptions and the kind of self and other conceptions also determine the kind of relations in the system.

161 ibid, 227.

162 ibid, 228.

163 It is also named as Social Identity in the Social Identity Theory. For a counter assesment of Wendt’s, with a neo-realist standpoint, See, Jonathan Mercer, “Anarchy and Identity”, International Organization, v. 49, no. 2 (1995): 229–52.

164 Wendt, “Identity and Structural Change in International Politics”, 47. It is a modified version of the author’s another article titled “Collective Identity Formation and the International State” which published in American Political Science Review in June 1994.