POLI 244 Chapter Notes -Realpolitik, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vladimir Zhirinovsky

• School: McGill University
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POLI 244
• Professor: Fernando Nunez- Mietz

Document Summary

Wendt addresses four issues: assumptions, objective knowledge, explaining war and peace, and policymakers" responsibilities: assumptions. Constructivists think that state interests are in important part constructed by systemic structures, not exogenous to them; this leads to a sociological rather than micro-economic structuralism. Where neorealist and constructivist structuralisms really differ, however, is in their assumptions about what structure is made of. Neorealists think it is made only of a distribution of material capabilities, whereas constructivists think it is also made of social relationships. Social structures have three elements: shared knowledge, material resources, and practice: social structures are defined, in part, by shared understandings, expectations, or knowledge. Constructivism is therefore compatible with changes in material power affecting social relations: social structures exist, not in actors" heads nor in material capabilities, but in practices. The cold war was a structure of shared knowledge that governed great power relations for forty years, but once they stopped acting on this basis, it was.