ABSTRACT
The appeal to ideas as causal variables and/or constitutive features of political processes increasingly characterises international and European studies. Yet, perhaps because of the pace of this ideational intrusion, it is undoubtedly still the case, as it was in 2001, that ‘studies of ideational variables add up to less than the sum of their parts’ (Berman 2001: 231). Too often ideas have simply been grafted onto pre-existing explanatory theories at precisely the point at which they seem to get into difficulties, with little or no consideration either of the status of such ideational variables or of the character or consistency of the resulting theoretical hybrid. This is particularly problematic, for, as we shall see, ideas are far from innocent variables and can rarely, if ever, be incorporated seamlessly within existing explanatory and/or constitutive theories without ontological and epistemological consequence. In effect, we suggest, the burgeoning literature on the role of ideas has tended to lack solid, coherent and explicitly stated theoretical underpinnings. As a consequence, and despite the proliferation of ostensibly ‘ideational approaches’, there remains little clarity about just what sort of an approach an ideational approach is, about the range of ontological and epistemological positions with which such an approach might be compatible, and about what it would take to establish the kind of fully fledged ideational research programme many seem to assume they have already developed.
