I recently authored a piece entitled "Thus Spoke Franco:The Place of History in the Making of Foreign Policy" (PDF), which was then included in the book "Foreign Policy in a Constructed World".

In this piece I begin the groundwork for "Historical Constructivism", a framework that focuses on the uses of memory as one of the key pieces of political discourse and identity formation.

Foreign Policy in a Constructed World

The publisher has summarized the structure and intent of the book as follows:

The study of foreign policy has become detached from the system-level analysis of international relations. The contributions in the first part of the collection ("Frameworks") establish the premises and introduce the tools that constructivists have crafted for this undertaking . In the second part of the book ("Constructivists at Work"), those tools are put to use in five case studies covering an intriguing range of topics. The final section ("Reflections") criticially evaluates the exercise.

I believe that the second part of the book is more than simply a collection of case studies. It is applied theory that reviews and extends constructivist theory with the knowledge gained on the anvil of history and praxis.

To wet your appetite for further reading, here's a small excerpt from the conclusion to my chapter:

...then one may begin to see constructivism not only as a tool to redescribe the world as it is, but also as a useful roadmap to redescribe and revisit the past. To do so, constructivism will have to embrace its conceptual cognate, historical constructivism, which explicitly sets out to deal with the temporality of social action and the questions it raises. Yet one does not revisit just any past. Historical constructivism presents a landscape populated by people and the things they do. Normative considerations, no longer a threat to the human activity we call research, take central stage as one begins to ask who is doing the ruling and for what purposes. In answering these questions, we discover that different policy alternatives rely as much on different assumptions and justifications about the past as they do on prospective policy goals and the means to achieve these. In this respect, Onuf’s account of policy making in this book misses one very important point. Understanding the making of policy cannot proceed solely from an analysis of the statements of assertion, direction, and commitment made by speakers engaged in strategically interactive games.It must first and foremost offer an account of how history has shaped the speakers’ perceptions of what statements could or should be legitimately made. Neither can foreign policy analysis be reduced to the process of "getting inside someone’s head" (a dubious empirical exercise),as foreign policy analysts have often attempted. Rather, what is needed is an understanding of how ruled renditions of history are socially sanctioned and of how this process in turn affects the making of foreign policy.

Thus, I propose that foreign policy analysis must first grasp how policy makers attempt to bring their policy goals into line with the internalized experiences of the polity whose collective good they claim to represent and pursue. It is just as important to study the ways policy makers try to reconstruct the collective experience of a polity in terms more favorable to their policy goals. Only then can foreign policy analysis search for the ways interaction has shaped the rules of the games in which different players find themselves.

By focusing on history and memory, FPA scholars and constructivists alike will be able to ask fresh questions and maybe build bridges between their specialized literatures. Constructivists who often call attention to agency might find in the study of memory a chance to see the human face of social construction. Foreign policy analysis may gain relevance by renouncing the quest for generality, so endemic to the positivist enterprise, in favor of the study of contextual decision-making. Were this prescription to be taken seriously, both groups of scholars would strengthen through their pursuits one of the foundations of democratic society: its ability to face the past.

 

Porcel Quero, Gonzalo. (2001). Thus Spoke Franco: The Place of History in the Making of Foreign Policy. Foreign Policy in a Constructed World. V. Kubálková. Almonk, NY, M.E. Sharpe.