This symposium addresses the role of wars and crises as mechanisms of international change. Over the past two decades, the international system has undergone a number of remarkable transformations, from the end of the Cold War to the emergence of an ongoing “War on Terror,” and from the collapse of statist development models to the emergence of a contested—if evolving—neoliberal “Washington Consensus.” This volatility exceeds any underlying shifts in economic structures or the distribution of capabilities, and raises important questions regarding the roles of agency, uncertainty, and ideas in advancing change. In this introduction we examine the role of wars and economic crises as socially constructed openings for change. We attempt three things: to critique materialist approaches in the security and political economy issue areas, to outline the distinctive contribution that an agent‐centered constructivist understanding of such events offers, and to offer a framework for the study of such events, one which highlights an expanded range of elite‐mass interactions.

Over the past century, crises have often driven shifts in U.S. foreign policy, as a liberal tradition has been permissive of varying tendencies to isolationism, pragmatism, or a crusading internationalism. While materialist analyses emphasize the impacts of crises on the capabilities of state and societal agents, they obscure the role of agents in interpreting crises. In this paper, I therefore offer a constructivist analysis, stressing the role of presidential rhetoric in the construction of crises as events which legitimate shifts between variants of the American liberal tradition and definitions of the national interest. I specifically examine interpretations of the Cold War and War on Terror offered in the March 1947 Truman Doctrine speech and September 2001 Bush Doctrine speech. Truman and Bush each reinterpreted international challenges as pertaining to “ways of life,” transforming security and partisan debates in ways that delegitimated isolationism. In sum, this analysis highlights the enduring traditions and mass understandings which can themselves constrain elite debates.

In IR theory debates, there exists a recurring tendency to draw a distinction between problem‐solving and critical theory. Whereas problem‐solving theory ostensibly pertains to the short term, critical theory purportedly examines the evolution of more enduring social structures over the long term. In this essay, the argument is made that this distinction obscures the ongoing role—equally in the long and the short runs—of theory in the reconstitution of social structures. To highlight such possibilities, the essay calls for a “pragmatist constructivism,” which applies a critical approach to the analysis of not only long‐term policy possibilities but also to ongoing policy matters. After reviewing the arguments of two essentially pragmatist‐constructivist scholars—John Dewey and John Kenneth Galbraith—each of whom recognized the social bases of political life and designed their research with an eye to highlighting unappreciated policy possibilities, the piece concludes by stressing both the disciplinary constraints on IR theorists and the opportunity that the constructivist turn in IR theory offers for a more sustained engagement with public debates.

Emotional forces shape not only market tendencies to ‘manias, panics and crashes’, but also policy debates as they predispose agents to definitions of state and societal interests. Nevertheless, IR scholars often downplay emotional influences, casting them as secondary to coalitional or cognitive forces. In this article, I address these limitations by disaggregating intersubjective understandings into popularly resonant traditions of thought and elite-based paradigmatic frameworks. Drawing on the insights of Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard Hofstadter, I then argue that elite anxieties regarding populism can engender the ‘technocratic repression’ of emotion from paradigmatic debates in ways that paradoxically render policy less stable and pragmatic. Firstly, such repression obscures the emotional bases of market trends and engenders overconfidence in the ability of monetary fine-tuning to restrain manias and to contain panics. Secondly, in isolating paradigmatic debate from everyday language, technocratic repression frustrates deliberation and can exacerbate populist resentments, requiring the construction of crises to advance change. Shifting to an empirical focus, I suggest that tendencies to technocratic repression in the 1990s and early 21st century engendered overconfidence in monetary fine-tuning. In the post-subprime context, the key question is the extent to which this bias in favour of monetary policy has been reversed, or whether constructions of the subprime crisis have legitimated a revived regulatory stress. In sum, this analysis highlights the reality of emotion as an influence on the international political economy.

No abstract