Abstract
The prevailing wisdom in International Relations literature that foreign policies of states may be understood without reference to their history, political values or culture, that is, their national identity, has not gone unchallenged. At the same time, arguments based on identity have yet to make significant headway against conventional realist thinking. In our view, this is due to two factors: (i) the continuing attraction of realism as parsimonious and powerful (ability to explain a lot with a little) and conversely (ii) the inability of identity theorists to put forward a shared operationalized and testable theory. However, it may be that we are at a particular historical juncture in which investigations of national identity are going to become inevitable, whether theories are underdeveloped or not.
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