ABSTRACT
Social constructivism is a generic term that covers a large group of dynamically evolving theoretical approaches to the study of global politics, whose presence is increasingly felt not only in the field of International Relations (IR) but also in European studies. This means that there is no single social constructivist theory of international relations or of European integration. Instead, social constructivism has been undergoing a process of internal pluralization and its many branches share very little beyond the basic ontological position that global (and European) politics is socially constructed. As a result, some constructivist approaches – such as the liberal constructivism of the Wendtian type (Wendt 1999) – have become firm parts of the theoretical mainstream, while others – such as the more linguistically oriented types of constructivism (Balzacq 2007; Browning and Joenniemi 2008) – have adopted an openly critical attitude to this mainstream.
