Locating Discourse Theory in the IR Methodological Debate 67

and for their political projects of ‘Europe’.

The importance of the constitutive role of the outsider will emerge more clearly in chapter 3, which will deal with history. Here it will be noted how Russian thinkers have been trying to answer the question of Russia’s self-identity since 1830. The various answers provided to this question contributed to the development of a specific understanding of ‘Europe’ and of Western Europe (or the West). On the other hand, in Western Europeans’ representations of Russia, the concept of ‘Europe’ was imagined as a Concert of Great Powers in which Russia was perceived as either a ‘learner’, a ‘threat’ or as an ‘equal’ participant within the Concert. Through the examination of the historical narratives put forward by Western Europeans and Russians to identify themselves in relation to the Other, it is possible to detect claims about competing or compatible identities and to illustrate how these claims have been central to determining the constitutive role of outsiders.

Having addressed these crucial questions – why adopt a critical / post-structuralist discursive approach and why focus on EU-Russia energy relations – the next section will locate the post-structuralist discursive approach in IR methodological debates and explore its main sources.

1.1 Locating Discourse Theory in the IR Methodological Debate  

Generally, discourse theory is placed within a deconstructive and anti-essentialist tradition of enquiry opposed to positivism. Fuss defines essentialism as “a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the ‘whatness’ of a given entity”.171 Conversely, the notion of anti-essentialism opposes this stance and argues that the ‘whatness’ of any given entity is socially constructed. Rather than investigating explanations of behaviours based on cause-effect relations, the research agenda of discourse theory aims to understand how identities and meaning are socially produced.172 Political identities are always relational, historically and discursively produced. As such, they are the result of a contingent and unstable               

171 _{D., Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference, New York: Routledge, 1989, p. ix}  172 _{B., Sayyid, L., Zac, Political Analysis in a World without Foundation, in Scarbrough, E., Tanenbaum,}

construction. Thus, discourse analysts reject the existence of empirical phenomena generating identities and accept the irreducible gap between objectivity and its representation.173 Following the specific French epistemological tradition headed by Foucault, objects are not ‘given’ by the world of experience and facts, but are constructed in specific systems of knowledge. In ‘Madness and Civilization’, Foucault illustrates how the object of mental illness derives from the ‘rules of formation’ of psychiatric discourse, and does not exist a priori.174 In ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’, he adds that psychiatric discourse does not reflect a specific object, but is the result of the way in which dispersed objects are put together.175 Questions of ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ turn out to be subject to criteria set by the knowledge and rules existing within discourse. In this light, discursive analysis aims to detect the rules of discourses, how they are constructed, and how actors identify themselves discursively. In this respect, discourse theory draws on the works of Heidegger, Kuhn, Wittgenstein and Foucault who discarded the notion of ‘objectivity’ in favour of that of ‘meaning’.176 From this perspective, the positivist / rationalist analysis of society based on casual laws is thus questioned by the reflectivist focus on social behaviour and its interpretation. As noted, on one side, the rationalist / positivist methodology explains social phenomena through the cause / effect relationship (what caused what). On the other side, the reflectivist methodology explains the same social phenomena by investigating how it was possible, meaningful and how it can be interpreted. In addition, rationalist approaches to social science give priority to explanation but they neglect the discourse of social agents and their understanding of the world. In fact, a deeper relationship between understanding and explanation exists. For Winch ‘understanding is the goal of explanation and the end-product of successful explanation’.177 Following this reading, explanation is based on understanding. Instead, drawing from reflectivism, critical constructivism / post-structuralism believes that explanation is supported through categories, which are manifest in a specific conceptual language (e.g. Self / Other, antagonism / equivalence, or recognition / hegemony). When the Self is in the process of identifying itself it tends to make categories. By doing so, the Self produces a               

173 _{Howarth, Discourse Theory and Political Analysis, in Scarbrough, Tanenbaum, Research strategies in} the social sciences, pp. 282-283 

174 _{Howarth, Ibidem} 

175 _{M., Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, New York: Pantheon}

Books, 1972, p.48 

176 _{Howarth, in Scarbrough, Tanenbaum, Research strategies in the social sciences, p.283} 

positive inner identity opposed to that of the Other. This self-identification occurs through the ‘us / ‘them’ dichotomy, which contributes to construct ‘otherness’. By measuring the ‘degree of otherness’ – that is, how alien the Other is on a continuum from sameness (equivalence) to radical difference (antagonism) – it is possible to decipher if the Other is a friendly or an antagonist entity. The measurement of ‘otherness’ is supplemented by an examination of the discursive context of the Self / Other interaction. Such a discursive context includes unrestricted forms of ‘causal explanation’. Rather than explaining the cause-effect relationships of a social phenomenon in deterministic terms, the discursive ‘causal explanation’ enables us to understand why and how specific discourses emerged while others did not, or why a certain identity’s claims were constructed, and how they came to prevail over others in certain historical contexts.178

This is not to say that ‘reality’ cannot be accessed through the positivist methodology of falsification and validation, but rather that reality is always discursively and socially mediated.179 By conceiving ‘reality’ as discursively and socially produced, discursive approaches open the ground to innovative research inquiries – which rationalism has overlooked – such as the interpretations and the social meaning of political phenomena. The discursive and social nature of ‘reality’ has implications also with regard to the relation between identity and policy, As demonstrated in Chapter 1, identity and policy180 are linked within a political discourse. Foreign policies are discursively presented as caused by a representation or the effect of a specific identity.181 However, given the unstable nature of identities – which are (re)produced – identities and policies become ontologically inseparable only if this inseparability is sanctioned within a specific discourse which is, in turn, never fully stable. By contrast, for rationalism – and partially for conventional constructivism – causal epistemology is the crucial tool through which understanding can be gained. Yet, the rationalist causal epistemology fails to consider that ‘truth’ is generated through the historical reiteration of knowledge within a specific discourse, rather than in an extra-historical, extra-discursive objectivity.

178 _{D., Howarth, in Scarbrough, Tanenbaum, Research strategies in the social sciences, p.282} 

179 _{J., Lye, Some Post-Structural Assumption. Department of English Language & Literature, 1996-1997.}

Available from: http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/poststruct.php Accessed 1/06/2013 

180 _{Given that a ‘policy’ is an expression of a specific interest, the two terms interest are here used}

interchangeably