Arms Debates - a 'Positional' Interpretation

This article is based on debates on security problems in four different parliamentary as semblies. (La Chambre des Députés, 1903, the German Reichstag, 1911, the British Parliament, 1927, and the US Senate 1963)The original aim of the project was to register what changes occur in the structures of argumentation in these debates. The main finding, however, is that the principal arguments are the same in all four debates in spite of great differences in the outside objective situation. The 'radicals' and the 'conservatives' each use one and the same set of arguments in all four debates. This leads to the conclusion that the debaters' views on security policy are not decided by objective factors. Because of the ambiguity of this kind of problem, basic political attitudes structure the debaters' perceptions of 'reality'.Finally, the structures of argumentation in the debates are explained by concepts developed in an article by Samuel Huntington.