8
In contrast to existing work in constructivism, the argument also assumes that no
clean distinction can be made between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ identities.
31
Governments
may, of course, try to maintain a barrier between these levels, i.e., through censorship, but
this is ultimately a stop-gap and porous barrier that is readily bridged in practice.
32
Instead,
we need to treat a regime’s identity project as simultaneously positioned in, and
interacting with, domestic and international spheres, a fact that helps to produce
entrapment in at least two ways. First, a leadership may position itself against the
international community for domestic legitimization purposes: contemporary North Korea,
the early Soviet Union, and communist Cuba are all examples here. Second, a leadership
may articulate a fragmented identity project that bundles potentially contradictory identity
strands that create a imperative to reconcile these demands by virtue of outward-looking
strategies of revisionism. China’s use of official nationalism at home while projecting an
image as a ‘responsible power’ at the international level may provide a good example of a
second, fragmented, identity project.
33
I.
T
HE FORMATIVE PERIOD
The argument proceeds from the basic premise that all leaders, regardless of era or
regime type, must engage in some form of identity project in order to ensure stability of
rule by fostering citizen/subject identification with the regime. Indeed, we are particularly
interested in the content and coherence of the regime’s project for collective identity
because it is at this level where the regime (
1
) articulates its purposes; (
2
) outlines criteria
for assessing its performance; and (
3
) where the bases of membership in both domestic
and international society are defined.
34
Critically, this view rests on an understanding of
identity spaces in a given state/polity as shaped, often violently, rather than ‘natural,’ and
therefore substantial weight is placed on how power is wielded to form and then maintain
a particular identity project.
35
This initial era of identity formation is marked by a high degree of contingency,
strategic action by potential rulers, and a pervasive uncertainty over the nature of the
collective identity (or identities) that will find the most widespread acceptance among key
societal groups. This is not meant to imply, however, that would-be rulers are faced with
a tabula rasa situation in which they are able to craft their particular visions. Indeed, this
critical juncture period is perhaps best characterized as an era of ‘bounded contingency,’
in which there are a range of identities that are culturally possible at a given time. Put
differently, there is a collective stock of culturally available identities from which actors
can draw, but only one or some combination of these identities will be backed with
sufficient resources and with sufficient popular resonance to be selected and entrenched.
36
The public can, and often does, blunt or resist elite articulations as inconsistent with prior
held notions. Similarly, the international system’s collective stock of acceptable forms of
legitimacy can also remove particular options from the decision-making process.
Crucially, it is the temporal space between the initiation of a new collective
identity project (T
1
) and the consolidation of the project (T
2
) that determines the regime’s
subsequent vulnerability to entrapment pressures since it is at this point that the identity
31
Nau 2002, Hopf 2002; Wendt 1999.
32
China is perhaps the best example of a state that has aggressively used censorship to restrict
information available to its citizens. See Zittrain and Edelman, November 2002.
33
See for example Zheng 1999.
34
On the distinction between collective and individual levels of legitimacy, see Weber 1978
(Volume I): 33-38, 212-15 and Weber 1978 (Volume II): 901-04.
35
On the tendency to see identity as natural, see Hopf 2002: 1-38 and 261fn4.
36
Swidler 1986. See also Luong-Jones 2002, reconciles the structuralism of path dependency studies
with the contingency and strategic interaction that characterizes rational choice approaches.
Disagreement on ability of a focal point to form during this period 42fn29.
Convention