Constructivism’s micro-foundations: aspirations, social identity theory, and Russia's national interests (DRAFT)

Russia's national interests have not been defined on the basis of conventional cost-benefit assessments, perceptions of material threat, or the identities projected onto Russia by other countries. Aspirations to regain the international great power status that Russians believe their country enjoyed during the tsarist and Soviet past were critical to the creation of its present national identity and national security interests. This paper asks how Russian elites came to have these national interests in social competition for great power status. In trying to explain how national interests are created, I present a novel aspirational constructivist approach that draws heavily on social psychology to answer three fundamental questions: What are the sources of national identity? Why do multiple identities come into contention? How does one of these candidate national identities come to dominate the others and become "social fact," acting as "the" national identity that defines a country's core national interests? In developing the answers, we gain a better understanding of how foreign “others” enter into the definition of Russia’s national identity and the formation of its interests.