The study of International Relations is currently grappling with a structural shift that traditional realism and liberalism struggle to fully capture. While constructivism, particularly through Alexander Wendt’s social construction of international structures, offers a framework to understand how threats and interests are contingent rather than fixed, its original formulation often suffers from excessive abstraction and state-centrism. This article argues that the European Union serves as a definitive litmus test for the Wendtian paradigm.
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