Critical Theory and Normative Theorizing in International Relations

Critical theory is a tradition in IR that has brought to the fore questions revolving around moral change and its limits. In response to the persistent charges of the utopianism of the critical theory tradition, Cox notably acknowledged that while critical theory necessarily contains an element of utopianism, it is constrained by its sociological understanding of historical processes. As he argued,

Little that is concrete has been forthcoming, however, concerning how one would construct such a theoretical project or what it would look like, specifically in the sense of how one could tell a political and ethical possibility from an impossibility. Until recently, few explicit clues had been provided by critical theorists as to how to make these imperatives of the desirable and the possible mesh. Indeed, prominent critical theorists themselves have often been explicit that they do not seek to provide “practical” ethics and solutions to substantive moral problems as that would be anathema to the critical theoretical project.¹¹

In the most systematic attempt to address some of these problems besetting critical theory in IR, Linklater in his magisterial work, The Transformation of Political Community, has argued that the task of critical theory consists of a threefold agenda of ethics, sociology, and praxeology. For Linklater, normative and sociological advances are incomplete without some reflection on practical possibilities. Reduced to basic distinctions, his “sociology” consists of the identification or explanation of the already immanent; his “ethical” is the formulation of the not already immanent; and his “praxeological” is guidance of how to realize the immanent. Concerning the latter, he explains that “praxeology is concerned with reflecting on the moral resources within existing social arrangements that political actors can harness for radical purposes.”¹²

Schematically, Linklater's threefold typology of the critical project is a most fruitful architecture and impressive accomplishment. But this formulation does not escape long-standing suspicions of teleology in progressivist theories: How does one know when something is “already immanent”? Linklater's formulation does not reveal much insight into limits—there are plenty of contradictory and unrealized good ideals out there, others subject to backsliding, and so on. Neither does Linklater's account contain a theory of agency, nor of power. Thus it does not yet, in the final analysis, provide a clear and complete bridge between the ethical and the immanent: how does the transition from the former to the latter occur? Despite his otherwise fruitful agenda, Linklater's theoretical account does not provide much of a sense of how these potentials are to be realized other than a progressivist mechanism of assumed evolution, thus undercutting this otherwise promising contribution to ethical theory. To buttress such an approach, there would seem to be a natural marriage with constructivist theoretical accounts of the development of norms and empirical analyses of some of those very same norms. These issues lead us to a key contribution of constructivism to ethics, which is its explicit and particular attention to the relation between the empirical and the ethical.

The Relation of the Empirical to the Ethical

Drawing more from continental communitarian traditions of ethics, Frost has made perhaps the most sustained case to develop an ethical theory of world politics via working through the relationship between the normative and empirical in constructing a constitutive theory of IR, which of course by the very name would seem to offer a project most compatible with a constructivist contribution to normative theorizing. In his important work, Frost deftly shows how any explanation of IR inescapably involves substantive normative theory.¹³

Frost's ethics are a perfect example of this, for while he make his case for the pervasiveness of the normative even in empirical claims in IR, Frost's constitutive theory, in turn, ultimately and ironically rises or falls depending on the plausibility of his empirical claims about the existence and content of what he terms “settled” international norms that constitute the terrain of ethical possibility. This is so because to criticize realism, Frost argues that no account of IR is coherent without acknowledging the role of rules and norms, and that might and right “are not conceptually and practically distinct in the way they need to be” to maintain the position that might prevails over right insofar as “power always exists within a practice which is partially constituted by certain normative ideas.”¹⁴

While empirical research and IR theory may not be able to escape normative theorizing, neither, I would contend, can normative theorizing escape some degree of empirical descriptivism and even explanation altogether—a side of the equation that many works of normative and critical IR theory do not examine systematically, thus limiting such work from offering all it otherwise could for the questions that animate this project about moral limit and possibility. This leaves many normative IR theories undergirded with a postpositivist epistemology in a bind. Acceptance of Frost's constitutive theory requires that one agrees with the descriptive list of norms he proposes as “settled” norms of world politics that provide the common domain of discourse upon which the search for normative solutions may proceed. But these in turn are even less guaranteed on Frost's own terms since in Frost's view, description depends on the normative premises the analyst brings to the table. Frost argues that “there is no objective way of choosing between paradigms.”¹⁵

It is here, then, where the kinds of empirical validation, including that notably practiced by constructivists among others, could help adjudicate between ethical accounts, at least forestalling premature descent into an endless relativist circle of ethical interpretation without hope of discrimination.¹⁷

The method of closely weighing alternatives against one another characteristic of many constructivist accounts points as well to the importance of alternatives that did not happen when considering moral possibility. This intimate relation between empirical explanation and normative possibility thus counsels close attention not just to the empirical grounds underpinning normative positions, but specifically to the kinds of counterfactual grounds invoked or, more often, implied but not explicitly established in claims about ethical possibility. To impugn, for example, humanitarian intervention such as that in Kosovo, or the criminal tribunals such as the one for the former Yugoslavia, typically the event is implicitly compared to some ideal (presumably an intervention in which state interests are not involved and few, if any, are killed) in light of which that which was actually possible is found wanting. Yet the preferable grounds to regard that ideal as even a remote possibility, let alone politically plausible, is often not persuasively and rigorously established, and it is hardly self-evident that it is ethically superior to counsel a course of action that one has been given no grounds to consider at all attainable. A more rigorous ethical assessment of such situations, then, cannot do without a systematic empirical and/or self-conscious counterfactual analysis of the type often practiced by scholars,¹⁹

Rationalism, Constructivism, and Agency

One outcome of constructivism's engagement with rationalism in IR would seem to be fairly wide recognition that both have something right in their accounts of agency. That is, it would seem just as impossible to deny that some agents of consequence act morally at least some of the time as it is to deny that there are actors who act in resolutely instrumental ways (whether pursuing a relatively straightforward conception of maximizing their self-interests defined as material power, or acting instrumentally upon more thickly socially constructed interests), with negligible capacity or willingness to learn or redefine interests or identities in light of engagement with others. As Risse has convincingly argued,

Indeed, a finding of a major study was that pure “bargaining” (“strategic action, which is based on fixed preferences and uses threats and promises of reward to coordinate actions”) was the exception, and that “arguing” (which presumes open preferences) was ubiquitous in international negotiations.²¹

A problem in some of the most heralded approaches to ethics is that there is little satisfactory engagement with the problem of whether and how to deal ethically with the ubiquity of ruthlessly instrumental actors. The influential work of Habermas is one of the most prominent contemporary approaches to ethics, and one that has been applied to world politics. In the Habermasian account of discourse ethics, the most plausible path to norms that are valid—that is, just and ethical—is if they are attained through a process of unforced truth-seeking dialogue among all agents affected by the norm, and accepted with their consent and agreement; that is, the product of rational consensus. In a Habermasian ethic, those who do not accept “the universal and necessary communicative presuppositions of argumentative speech” are excluded from consideration.²²

If one were to concede that many, even most, perhaps virtually all, important political situations will contain elements of such strategic practices and instrumental actors, is the realm of the ethically acceptable thereby confined to the scraps insofar as so little, if anything, would seem to be able to approximate the standard of what is ethical? Is the implication to consign strategic action and instrumental actors to the realm of immorality, that which must fall short, and would this not be an impoverished political ethic serving less as a positive ideal toward which to strive and more to confirm a deep contemporary cynicism of politics—and politicians—as inherently disreputable? Is that unattainable reminder indeed the indispensable function of an adequately critical ethic? Or, on the contrary, would not a workable political ethic be one that can more readily incorporate the everyday mix of forms of action? Indeed, almost any international treaty dealing with subjects such as human rights or war would seem to be a mix of the brutal bargaining of national interests and coercion sprinkled, if not always enveloped, with other, including moral, considerations.

Constructivist accounts of moral agency do not necessarily claim that moral entrepreneurs act “irrationally,” nor that members of transnational advocacy networks do not also act instrumentally in pursuit of their ethical goals.²³

An implication of the empirical engagement of constructivism with rationalism, then, is that the only pathway for a viable ethics lies not in positing how to respond as if myopically instrumental agents did not exist or were not who they were, nor with smuggling in a hidden premise hopeful of reforming unreconstructed instrumental interlocutors. Such tacks would themselves ironically constitute forms of exclusion, something antithetical to the core of dialogic ethics itself. Indeed, such approaches would be a manifestly inadequate way to think of how to deal with actors such as those who have animated the George W. Bush administration with their coming to power in 2001, a regime whose most powerful members would seem to exemplify—hardly uniquely, though unabashedly—the instrumental monological actor par excellence, rather impervious to learning and redefining their interests and identities in light of dialogue and engagement (not to mention evidence), instead constantly deploying every conceivable means at their disposal to reinforce the pursuit of their already-decided-upon goals from a position embraced explicitly as one of dominance, not equality. Such actors' approach to international interaction embody the antithesis of Linklater's characterization of genuine dialogue as “not a trial of strength between adversaries who are hell-bent on converting others to their cause; it only exists when human beings accept that there is no a priori certainty about who will learn from whom and when.”²⁵

The ethical problem, then, is whether and how to deal morally with the existence of such powerful actors and their instrumental logics. Thus, the debate in IR between rationalism and constructivism opens a contribution to one of the most prominent strains of contemporary ethical thought. What will not do for those seeking to draw on constructivist insights for ethics, then, is a conclusion to an ethical problem whereby the author sighs, “if only government such and such had not been so obstinate in insisting upon maximizing its power/pursuing its narrow interests…” and the like. Rather, a central challenge and necessary component in answering the question of “what to do” in global politics is to consider whether and what is ethically justifiable when faced with instrumental actors relentlessly pursuing their interests, armed with a variety of sources of power.²⁶

For now, might one not contend that rationalist analyses of institutions provide what one needs to know about the constraints of action and, by implication, moral possibility?²⁷

Constructivism and Hypocrisy

Important for moral judgment and practice is the constructivist emphasis on the role of legitimacy, which in turn offers significant ethical purchase on the practice of hypocrisy, a phenomenon rather familiar to students of politics including IR. Hypocrisy figures importantly in constructivist accounts as a mechanism on the road to compliance with norms, such as the literature that stresses the ultimate impact of holding governments to account, even if they only rhetorically profess adherence to human rights norms.²⁹

Another important implication of the focus on hypocrisy arises from the basic structurationist ontological insight that grounds constructivism, which explains that what may be constraining or productive social structures at one historical juncture or cultural space may not be so at another. If one is to take these effects seriously, it raises the possibility that one may morally justify a given course of action in a particular context but then judge an alternative course of action morally justifiable in another place, or, in that same situation at a later time, when conditions of possibility may have changed. Thus, might it not be mere hypocrisy (nor unjustified duplicity) but defensible morality to defend the granting of amnesties to the perpetrators of atrocities in an ongoing conflict to put a halt to the terror and then justify the later withdrawal of that amnesty when the threat of civil war had receded? Would not the structural conditions have changed so much that a moral assessment of genuine possibilities and limits (say, from a cosmopolitan perspective) must itself be altered?³¹

One possibility that presents itself is a more nuanced approach than regarding all hypocrisies as created equal. An implication of a constructivist view regarding the possibilities of change of social structures is that those practices that continue to seek to ameliorate the moral dimensions of a dilemma that are sacrificed in the short term for the sake of other moral values are different from those that sacrifice such moral goods for, say, more venal objectives and cynically manipulate them as a diversion from the latter. In this way constructivism would underscore that the very practice of hypocrisy in turn creates its own moral imperatives that themselves serve to raise the bar; failure to reach for that bar engenders cynicism, which in turn undercuts the ground for even genuine subsequent moral action. Hypocrisy, in short, hardly always needs to be condemned from a constructivist perspective, though condoning it must be delicate, lest it contribute to a culture that undercuts the very ontological basis of moral change itself.

The Constitutive Effects of Norms

A fourth contribution of constructivism to normative theory is, at first blush, to complicate the moral challenge—which, of course, might not seem an advance at all—in the sense of identifying previously underappreciated dimensions of moral regress that may accompany progress, or that may even be the condition of possibility that accompanies erstwhile positive moral change. A contribution of constructivism for normative theory inheres in the focus on the constitutive and not just restraining effects of norms on agents and identities: the contention that structures do not merely constrain already existing agents who have pregiven interests but also constitute those very agents and their interests themselves. In IR, Wendt has provided the most thorough theoretical treatment of this phenomena, but Wendt's account, like the security communities and democratic peace literatures, downplays a dark side of the constitutive processes of identity and interest formation. What if the very condition of possibility of establishing a peaceful regional security community such as the European Union (EU) or liberal democratic peace—within which the thought of interstate war fades to insignificance—is the exclusion and othering of outsiders and all that such processes may imply? As Rumelili has argued, “the discourses on the promotion of democracy and human rights are inevitably productive of two identity categories, a morally superior identity of democratic juxtaposed to the inferior identity of non-(or less) democratic,” thereby “constructing the very differences that transformation would ostensibly eliminate.”³²

The additional theoretical ethical challenge raised by constructivist analysis for normative theory then is: What does one make of moral change whose own condition of possibility seems to involve the production of the very (unjust) phenomena that are supposed to be overcome? To state this more positively, the achievement of constitutive analysis here is to make one more aware of and sensitive to both the consequences of recursive relations of structures and agents, as well as the link between identity construction and normative development, processes that have tended to fall outside of the lenses of many prominent moral theories, which have tended to black-box sociological descriptions or explanations of identity formations. This attentiveness to the constitutive effects of norms can provide an important supplement to prominent traditions of ethics such as utilitarianism or agent-centered Kantian approaches, or to efforts such as Gibney's splendid analysis of the ethics of asylum, in which he similarly seeks to integrate ethics with a careful appreciation of empirical possibilities but does not engage such constitutive dimensions of ethics.³³

Communitarian and identity-based political theory is conspicuously different on this score, of course, yet in turn such projects have tended to struggle with the difficulty of how to deal with transcommunity morality as demanded by the search for internationally acceptable answers to ethical challenges. Without wading into that enormous literature and its particular debates here, I confine myself for my purposes to noting that a constructivist focus on the exclusionary practices that often accompany the securing of community identities (which in turn are at the base of any moral construction) constitute vital elements of a constructivist contribution to normative theorizing and practice. This involves the illumination of previously unidentified moral problems that arise from a focus on the constitutive properties involved in the development of new international norms (including, that is, even putatively progressive moral change in world politics). This agenda then pushes that analytical strategy further into normative theory, asking us to consider: What does one make of practices that at once contain elements of progressive change that are not to be summarily discounted—such as peaceful relations among the powerful industrialized democracies—yet at the same time are predicated on or produce the conditions of possibility for other forms of exclusion, hierarchy, inequality, repression, or violence? Such an analytical awareness bears the potential of preemptively designing prescriptions more sensitive to a multidimensional ethical sensibility, building in protections for the novel moral challenges raised by attempts to deal with the old. Thus, rather than resting with a postmodern account of identity that seems to suggest othering is both inherently dangerous and endemic, Rumelili harnesses constructivism to normative theory and explicitly identifies community building practices such as those in the EU that can be ethically justified as distinct from those that cannot, assessing them by criteria such as their effects—for example, whether shaming techniques induce positive changes or produce conflict or even legitimize violence—or whether the nature of the collective identity allows for an ethical relation with the other.³⁴

Complicity and Co-optation in Moral Change

Attention to the constitutive nature of social and political relations as identified above has implications that run in several different directions (in terms of assessing moral progress). It can make what prima facie might seem like an unproblematically humanitarian development appear much less so on further analysis by underscoring new sources of exclusion or repression opened up by new social structures. This operation is one sense in which a constructivist normative agenda may respond to the criticism that constructivists have, to date, mostly studied the origins and operation of “happy” international norms (such as the abolition of slavery) rather than “bad” norms (such as, say, slavery itself)—constructivists themselves are well placed to identify some of the morally undesirable implications of erstwhile progressive developments as described above. This includes identification of the complicity of humanitarian developments with the oppressive. But at the same time, this agenda also points toward the humanitarian potential in social structures that some critical theorists may condemn for their repressive effects or potential.

Thus, to take an example, I would contend that the effort to ban antipersonnel (AP) landmines represents a progressive intervention in world politics insofar as it has already notably reduced the numbers of innocent lives and limbs lost to these weapons for no justifiable military purpose. This stands against conservative claims that reject civil society infringements on the security requirements of the state, or the critical legal argument that initiatives based upon just war concepts have been co-opted into the war convention that legitimates warfare.³⁵

Such divergences points to a potential theoretical disagreement between some variants of critical theory and constructivism on the question of ethics. Reliance on existing social structures such as just war norms for critical change should come as no surprise to constructivists—theorists who take discourse, structure, culture, norms, and institutions seriously. For if such phenomena are to have any significance, one would expect that they could not simply be jettisoned at every whim, and that efforts, for example, to instantiate a new paradigm of human security (which places the security requirements of individuals as the priority rather than that of states) could not start anew. Yet the insistence of some critical theorists amounts uncomfortably close to just that, lest critical change be tainted with undue complicity with previous social structures beset by forms of domination, statism, and the like. Norms of warfare, notably, have been excoriated by critical theorists as ineffective at best and complicit in state violence at worst: “despite noble rhetoric to the contrary, the laws of war have been formulated deliberately to privilege military necessity at the cost of humanitarian values. As a result, the laws of war have facilitated rather than restrained wartime violence. Through law, violence has been legitimated.”³⁶

Claims about the violence-legitimizing effects of the laws of war are not altogether misguided insofar as they are grounded on a brutal correlation: the twentieth century witnessed the flourishing of elaborate laws and codes of war, and yet it was the bloodiest century of warfare in history. But it is precisely the dilemma of how to judge such double-sided developments that a constructivist normative agenda seeks to address, rather than rest with one-sided critique. Critics of just war norms importantly underscore that these norms suffer from inadequacies in restraining the character of contemporary large-scale violence—but, one must ask compared to what? It must be noted that there are difficulties with the one-sided critique of these claims, not the least the lack of consideration of plausible counterfactual scenarios and assessment of the implications of empirical cases to the contrary. To cite one obvious but telling example, what would the destruction of Iraq in the Gulf War of 1991 have looked like in the absence of norms that constrained the blatant targeting of civilians enough to prevent any bombing of Iraqi cities after the well-publicized bombing of a Baghdad air-raid shelter, let alone the use of nuclear weapons?

The theoretical argument here is that the normative ground of the critical theoretical perspective in the hands of practitioners such as the above threatens to betray its constructivist ontological underpinnings by not taking social structures seriously enough. Pushed too far, this ultimately results in a critical theory that seems inadequate to recognize progress, leaving it in a state of ethical paralysis because the demand seems to be for some ethical tabula rasa that bans all forms of complicity in violence, domination, or exclusion, without in turn engendering new forms (yet such power relations are at the same time seen as inherent in all social relations and political communities).

This ontological-ethical tension derives from several sources. First is the relentless critical tendency to engage in the unmasking of each and every political practice as being inevitably complicit in forms of domination, present in the works of IR scholars such as Campbell who have “gained inspiration from the critical themes of continental philosophy.”³⁷

In the process, an effect of this neglect is a perpetual ratcheting up of ever more stringent litmus tests that political action seems to almost always necessarily fail to meet, because the goal posts are constantly being moved else the critical enterprise have nothing to critique, and because some form of domination is never precluded. In one sense the ontological underpinnings of this position are entirely consistent with constructivism; one calls something progressive moral change if it represents a moral improvement on the current social and political constellation, so in that sense the present—and the standards of ethics situated in the present—always form something of a contingent historical-cultural baseline from which change is judged. As such, this may not be a position that constructivist informed international ethics can wholly shake, even as it cannot fully realize it either. Perhaps this is the space that critical/utopian theory is destined simultaneously to be condemned and celebrated to occupy, necessarily sacrificing itself between realists and progressives upon the Scylla of irrelevance and Charybdis of paralyzing critique.

More positively, an ethical stance flowing from this engagement between critical theory and constructivism would not be critical of, but rather open to, efforts to reach even farther for humanitarian ideals. However, at the same time this stance might understandably approach exasperation when such a disposition is not reciprocated; that is, when criticisms from the ideal point of view—usually of implied but not demonstrated counterfactual alternatives as above—target (to the point of dismissing) the smaller victories along the way that do effect meaningful change in real human lives if not whole systems. The danger of the critical tack for the causes it champions is fostering cynicism to a point that undercuts moral action more broadly. In contrast, constructivist scholarship's contribution has been to demonstrate how sometimes initially small developments open wedges to wider change, from genealogical studies of unintended consequences of shifts in language to the ultimate boomerang effects of small rhetorical concessions to human rights activists.

Varieties of critical positions would counter that such reformist gestures simply facilitate the perpetuation of larger systems that are fundamentally unjust and that call for more revolutionary action. This is not a position easy for constructivists to deny on their own terms, insofar as scholars documenting change and processes such as learning in world politics have often emphasized the crucial importance of a “crisis” as a catalyst for major change. The ethical prescription that follows is to foment the conditions for crisis rather than abate them. I am skeptical there is a grand resolution at a sufficient level of abstraction to match this problem. But one implication of constructivism here would be to suggest that if one weighs demonstrable human gains against the failures of an ideal (let alone making things worse in the hopes of more fundamental change), then those gains come out rather well. This is especially so if such gains cannot be demonstrably shown to render impossible, or even more unlikely, further progress toward more fundamental change, and it is such empirical claims that constructivism is well positioned to deliver for its ethics, whereas traditions that epistemologically reject empirical research in favor of interpretivism would be rather hard-pressed to respond persuasively.

Thus, while constructivist and other scholars have shown just war norms to have had meaningful effects in restraining death and atrocity that would otherwise have taken place, Jochnick and Normand level stinging criticisms that “the basic fact that nations purport to respect the rule of law helps protect the entire structure of war-making from more fundamental challenges.”⁴⁰

Constructivism offers a way out of the potential critical trap by taking the prevalence of power seriously without precluding the possibility of meaningful humanitarian change nonetheless. It does so by recognizing that some degree of complicity in previous social structures is inherent in social change, whether regressive, reformist, or even (putatively) revolutionary, and that some forms of co-optation of some agents of change to forms of domination is common, or perhaps even pervasive rather than the exception, for political action that amounts to more than self-sacrifice and defeat. Pointing out the presence of co-optation, complicity, hypocrisy, and the like does not at all remove the grounds from claims of positive moral change, unless accompanied by a more plausible alternative: compared to what?

Power and Ethics

The section above points to a final contribution of constructivism to normative theorizing and practice in world politics; namely, pointing a way to avoid what has often been an undue divorce of ethics from power. Constructivists tend to understand the moral norms they study as embodying forms of power, which provides a way to avoid a chief liability of many previous versions of liberal- and critical-minded scholarship in IR, and to deal with a long-standing criticism of the real-world relevance of numerous philosophical approaches to ethics that do not sufficiently contend with the obstacles to ethics that may lie in power. Constructivist accounts of moral change as a form of real-world politics that both confronts other forms of power and embodies their own forms of power provides a way toward a synthesis of the “is” and the “ought.” Here I confine myself to engaging how constructivism could address the ethical problem of power that arises from the prominent Habermasian and Foucauldian poles of contemporary political and social theory.

There remain important respects in which the critique of utopianism still haunts approaches such as Habermas's that would assess ethical outcomes by the force of the better argument between interlocutors divested of the dialogically corrupting accoutrements of power, since such situations would seem to be empirically rare, if not indeed theoretically impossible, for some versions of constructivism.⁴²

Linklater is, of course, not unaware of this potential paradox, disclosing that “individuals cannot escape the moral language embedded in the social conventions that have previously constituted them as moral subjects … [therefore] absolute foundations for the assessment of the merits of different cultures or historical epochs will necessarily elude them.”⁴⁴

Here constructivist research methods can make a contribution to the kind of ethics as outlined by Linklater. If interventions in Kosovo or Iraq, for example, presented ethical dilemmas for Western policymakers or scholars, they did so in a particular way for those with cosmopolitan sensibilities who might have been torn between the imperatives of saving lives and upholding the international law of war. But rather than simply ordain an ethical evaluation from a perspective one might defend on deontological or utilitarian grounds, constructivism would additionally encourage the empirical embodiment of a dialogic ethic to open up and buttress the grounds of such assessments. That is, as against exercises in ratiocination such as utilitarianism, Kant's categorical imperative or Rawls's thought experiment of the original position, communicative ethics of the sort championed by Habermas calls for procedures of consensus through deliberation without coercion among all concerned as the most promising path for justice. Some scholars have thus sought to investigate empirically the extent to which such practices are actually approximated in world politics (bringing politics and power into ethics). Risse has importantly responded to the empirical critique of idealism of the communicative action model—namely, proving the actual existence of situations characterized by actors who recognize each others as equals engaged in truth seeking toward consensus—by persuasively contending that “the ideal speech situation is not meant as a statement about the empirical world or—even worse—some utopian ideal; instead it constitutes primarily a counterfactual presupposition” to be analyzed for its influence in any given situation against other forms of action such as bargaining (as strategic action) and rhetoric that themselves are ideal types rarely uncontaminated by the other forms of action.⁴⁵

Deitelhoff and Muller for their part argue that while their systematic research attempt to discover instances of authentic persuasion suggests that it does occur in world politics, the project was “unable to methodologically and empirically prove this assumption: it is a theoretical paradise that is empirically lost!”⁴⁷

This is a crucial contribution of constructivism because it simultaneously provides a response to two critiques that could emerge from the Habermasian and Foucauldian poles of contemporary political and social theory. On the one hand, the accounts of ethics and politics in thinkers such as Habermas or Linklater privilege, as those outcomes that issue from deliberation, argument, and consensus, “the force of the better argument” as free as possible from what they see as the distorting influences of power. Constructivist analyses have demonstrated that ethically progressive change has been attained in other ways, and indeed that confirmation of the Habermasian ideal as applied to world politics may be methodologically and empirically next to impossible.⁵⁰

On the other hand, another vein of self-declared critical scholars have insisted on placing power front and center in their analyses of world politics, while contending against the mainstream of explanatory positivism that IR is all about ethics. Campbell notably has centrally engaged the question of ethics, though his work in the end does not yet provide workable responses to the kinds of questions of ethical judgment and practice being posed here. Campbell's invocation of Derrida and Levinas for ethics is deeply problematic as a basis for ethics insofar as it ultimately delegates one's own ethical responsibility to the Other without providing any grounds for distinguishing when that other is morally reprehensible and not deserving of such moral consideration as opposed to ontological recognition. Campbell himself is forthright enough to acknowledge this: “We may still be dissatisfied with the prospect that Derrida's account cannot rule out forever perverse calculations and unjust laws.”⁵¹

One analytical task for a constructivist contribution to ethics that takes power seriously is to unpack and identify the sources and different kinds of moral dilemmas. As the tragic realist view of politics, among others, reminds us, there simply may be genuine dilemmas not subject to ethically satisfying resolution. Constructivists stand at varying points along a continuum in their willingness to grant the existence of immutable realities, from Wendt's “rump” materialism to a poststructuralist denial of any political reality outside of discursive practices. Within this space, putative dilemmas may be revealed to be the product of social practices amenable to long-term transcendence if not immediate resolution, and whose irresolvable character evaporates upon further analysis. Towns demonstrates that while gains in gender equality in Sweden were achieved by defining gender equality as “Swedish” culture and setting it apart from “immigrant/non-Western” culture, the key to gender equality does not have to be found in culture conceptualized this way. Thus a politician is not forced to choose as if in a genuine and immutable moral dilemma, particularly since viewing immigrants in terms of a cultural frame (as opposed to labor) and defining Swedishness in terms of progressive women's rights are both recent and not immutable constructions.⁵²

The dilemma between humanitarian intervention and norms of self-determination is illustrative in this regard. The world constructed the practice of self-determination in no small part to solve one set of moral problems, but this has now created a series of consequences including new moral dilemmas. This kind of insight points to an important difference with realism—the dilemma much of the world now wrestles with is not some universal problem due to the anarchic system, it is not due to material power, it is not due to human nature or biological givens. Rather, it is the product of human agency, of moral change, rather than the realm of recurrence and repetition.

These dilemmas only arise if these norms are social facts, which they have become. Illumination of this feature of dilemmas differentiates a constructivist approach to ethics from a classical realist ethic of prudence (not to mention skepticism), insofar as it allows for more change and opens the door to more critical interventions in world politics than most realists would seem to be willing to concede. Progress may well be had, and even though it may be at the price of the generation of yet new dilemmas, this in itself points to a different ethic than that premised on world politics as a realm of recurrence and repetition devoid of possibilities of humanitarian moral change.