Key Concepts in Politics and International Relations 41
tutionalism is usually associated with a written or codified constitution, a system
of checks and balances among government institutions, and formal, and usually
entrenched, guarantees of civil liberty. Nevertheless, the UK system of govern-
ment has sometimes been regarded as constitutional even though it has tradition-
ally lacked each of these three features. Critics of constitutionalism have pointed
out that it pays attention only to the formal and usually legal organization of
government. For example, constitutions and institutional fragmentation may
be less important in maintaining individual liberty than party competition and
democracy. Constitutionalism has also been criticized by socialists as a means of
constraining government power and thus of preventing meaningful reform of the
capitalist system.
CONSTRUCTIVISM
Constructivism (sometimes called ‘social constructivism’) is an approach to social
and political analysis that has been particularly influential in the field of interna-
tional relations. Constructivism is based on the belief that there is no objective
social or political reality independent of our understanding of it. Constructivists
do not therefore regard the social world as something ‘out there’, in the sense of an
external world of concrete objects; instead, it exists only ‘inside’, as a kind of inter-
subjective awareness. In the final analysis, people, whether acting as individuals
or as social groups, ‘construct’ the world in which they live and act according to
those constructions. People’s beliefs and assumptions become particularly signifi-
cant when they are widely shared, especially when they serve to give people, or
a community, a sense of identity and distinctive interests. However, construc-
tivist analysis in international relations can be systemic (focusing on the interac-
tion of states in the international system); unit-level (focusing on how domestic
social and legal norms shape the interests and identities of states); or holistic
(focusing on the entire range of factors conditioning the identities and interests
of states).
Significance
As an approach to international theory, constructivism has been paid significantly
greater attention since the end of the Cold War. The failure of mainstream realist
and liberal approaches to explain adequately why the Cold War ended, highlighted,
in a sense, a missing dimension in international relations theory: the role played
by ideas and perceptions, and in this case the changing social identity of the USSR.
Instead of following mainstream theorists in treating political actors as though
they have fixed or objective interests or identities, constructivists argue that these
interests and ideas are fashioned by the traditions, values and sentiments that
prevail in any given context. State interaction cannot therefore be explained essen-
tially in terms of the rational pursuit of national interests (as some realists argue)
or primarily in terms of interdependencies that operate at the international level
(as some liberals argue).
42 Key Concepts in Politics and International Relations
However, the relationship between constructivism, on the one hand, and realism
and liberalism, on the other, is a matter of debate. While ‘critical’ constructivism
clearly goes beyond the positivism of mainstream theory in either denying the exist-
ence of the real world ‘out there’ (in common with postmodernism), or in arguing
that it is buried under so many layers of conceptual and contextual meaning that
we can never gain access to it, ‘conventional’ constructivism seeks to probe the
inter-subjective content of events and episodes, but within a social-scientific meth-
odology. As the latter position embraces only a weak form of post-positivism, it
allows constructivism to be viewed as a means of refining or expanding mainstream
analysis, rather than rejecting it. Critics of constructivism have nevertheless argued
that it fails to recognize the extent to which beliefs are shaped by social, economic
and political realities. In the final analysis, ideas do not ‘fall from the sky’ like rain.
They are a product of complex social realities, and reflect an ongoing relationship
between ideas and the material world.
CONSUMERISM
Consumerism is a psychic and social phenomenon whereby personal happiness is
equated with the acquisition of material possessions. It is often associated with the
emergence of a ‘consumer society’ or of ‘consumer capitalism’. Consumer capitalism
was shaped by the development of new advertising and marketing techniques that
took advantage of the growth of the mass media and the spread of mass affluence. A
consumer society is one that is organized around the consumption rather than the
production of goods and services, a shift that has important socio-economic and
cultural implications. Whereas ‘productionist’ societies emphasize the values of disci-
pline, duty and hard work (the Protestant work ethic, for example), consumer societies
emphasize materialism, hedonism and immediate rather than delayed gratification.
Significance
Consumerism has become an increasingly prominent feature of capitalist econo-
mies since the 1950s, reflecting the recognition that business growth and the expan-
sion of corporate profits are reliant on ever-higher levels of consumption. Devices
and strategies therefore had to be devised to ensure that consumers consume.
Goods, for example, were transformed into ‘brands’, symbolic constructs, typically
consisting of a name, logo or symbol, which conveys the promise, ‘personality’ or
image of a product or group of products. This process was considerably boosted by
the advent of globalization and the emergence of global goods and global brands,
which came to dominate economic markets in more and more parts of the world.
Global consumerism gave rise to what Benjamin Barber (2003) called ‘McWorld’, a
world of ‘fast music, fast compters and fast food – MTV, Macintosh and McDonald’s
– pressing nations into one homogeneous theme park’.
However, there is significance disagreement over the nature and implications of
consumerism. The desire for wealth and the pleasure derived from material acqui-
sition have been viewed as nothing more than expressions of human nature. For