When it comes to constructivism in International Relations, I am one of the dinosaurs. We dinosaurs are still in a reasonably good state of preservation, and still talking. When a dinosaur speaks, we generally expect the old fossil to talk like, well, a dinosaur. And so I shall.

There aren't very many of us— Alexander Wendt, Friedrich Kratochwil and I are usually put together in a museum display called ‘IR in the 80s’. John Ruggie should be added to this group, thanks chiefly to an early essay he wrote with Kratochwil (1986), as should Raymond (Bud) Duvall, mentor to Wendt and a number of other constructivists. Nearby are feminists and a variety of self-styled ‘posties’— postmodernists, poststructuralists and postcolonial thinkers— who are occasionally grouped with us as constructivists, despite resistance on both sides. No doubt the familiar dynamic of ‘us’ versus a stigmatized ‘them’ or ‘other’ helps to account for this inappropriate simplification. So does the socio-cultural context of the 1980s.

I will talk as if nothing much has happened since the dinosaurs came on the scene. I will talk about metatheory— the philosophical rationale behind constructivism— although the dinosaurs were pushed aside by a bunch of furry little creatures with close-at-hand concerns. I will talk as if the issues animating philosophy (and especially the philosophy of science in the 1970s and ‘80s) have changed very little. And I could talk as if international theory lost its way once the dinosaurs had their say. But I won’t— at least, not here.

Instead let me say this about the time of the dinosaurs. The end of the Cold War had nothing to do with constructivism's arrival on the scene, despite what I hear younger museum visitors saying to each other. I suspect Wendt is at least partly responsible for this vagrant belief. All those young visitors, not to mention their parents, read the following passage from his great book, Social Theory of International Politics: ‘constructivist thinking about international politics was accelerated by the end of the Cold War, which caught scholars on all sides off guard but left orthodoxies particular exposed’.

Wendt had already muddied the waters by claiming that ‘a constructivist worldview underlies the classical international theories of Grotius, Kant and Hegel’ and that many post-World War II writers advanced ‘important constructivist approaches to international politics’.