Theorizing practical geopolitical reasoning: the case of the United States’ response to the war in Bosnia

This article seeks to develop a discursive-argumentative perspective on practical geopolitical reasoning, using the United States’ policy dialogue towards the Bosnian war in the early summer of 1992 as an illustration. Foreign policy statements, press briefings and public policy actions by the President, Secretary of State and their staff are used to document this policy dialogue. Sources include The Public Papers of the President: George H. W. Bush, journalistic reports from leading newspapers and transcripts of State Department press briefings, most of which are accessible in the data archives of Lexis-Nexis. Memoirs, where they exist, are drawn upon to provide insight into the backstage of foreign policy making. The perspective outlined here draws upon the work of the argumentative approach in public policy, some social constructivist perspectives in IR, and a selection of the literature on rhetoric and meaning in social psychology. The article outlines a heuristic theory of how practical geopolitical reasoning works and can be studied in a critical geopolitical fashion. The emphasis is on geopolitical reasoning not state interaction so there is no consideration of the ‘grammar’ of strategic interaction and communication between the U.S., its allies and the various Balkan warring parties. The goal is to illustrate an important feature of the United States’ Bosnian policy discourse, namely its consistent internal tensions and conflicts. This is perhaps best expressed as the argument that the Bush administration, and succeeding administrations, never really had a unitary foreign policy toward Bosnia but rather had a foreign policy argumentative space. The theoretical approach outlined in the article develops a synchronic map of this policy space and documents empirically how it operated.