the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

196 widening and deepening securityarguing that these require a foreign policy level explanation and theincorporation of an ideational variable. Kier’s (1995) analysis of Frenchmilitary doctrine claims that the choice of either offensive or defensivedoctrine can only be explained through a combination of civilian concernsover the military’s power and military culture itself (Kier, 1995: 68).Katzenstein and Okawara (1993) hold that since the international structurehad changed, but not Japan’s understanding of its security, domesticfactors have to be brought in (see also Berger, 1993, 1996). Turning fromstates to international institutions, Risse-Kappen (1996) argues that Neorealism’s(Mearsheimer, 1990; Waltz, 1993) inability to explain NATO’spost-Cold War survival is due to this theory’s exclusion of ideationalvariables such as values and identity. Rather than being formed againstan external threat and hence, as Neorealists predicted, due to dissolve asthis threat withers away, NATO, held Risse-Kappen, was founded upon aset of democratic, liberal values which would guarantee the institution’ssurvival.Conventional Constructivism has, not surprisingly, been criticised bytraditionalists as well as by other wideners. The main traditionalist criticismhas been that Constructivist theories have failed ‘to demonstratethat their theories outperform [R]ealist theories in “hard cases”’ (Desch,1998: 144). Hence, while Constructivism can supplement Realism it cannotsupplant it. More interesting, perhaps, is the way in which otherwidening approaches have attacked Conventional Constructivism forbeing ‘essentially a form of rationalism’ focused on states and militarysecurity (S. Smith, 2005: 39; see also Campbell, 1998b: 218). ConventionalConstructivism, in this view, fails to engage ‘security’ critically,and it pushes to the background the normative implications of acceptingthe state as the referent object and the military as the privilegedrealm.To say that Constructivists comply analytically with state-centrism isnot to say, however, that Constructivist analysis cannot be critical of particularstate policies. Kier’s analysis of the US military’s ban on openlyhomosexual service personnel argues, for instance, that the military’sjustification – that open integration of gays and lesbians would hinderthe primary group cohesion which is critical to military effectiveness– is false (Kier, 1998; Barnett, 1996). As laid out in chapter 5, toadopt a positivist epistemology does not by itself foreclose a normativeengagement, and while the study of norms may not necessarily benormatively explicit, it often produces a demand for a more explicit normativeand political assessment: is the norm against the use of chemical