Inside the American State: Reconciling Political Economy and Discourse Analysis Within a Critical Realist Perspective.

It is now considered important for IR to better understand how states as complex collectives come to act on the world stage. Toward that end, this paper examines how the United States reached a collective decision to attack Iraq and what it means and does not mean to call that decision a collective one. In the process, the paper will illustrate how a critical realist perspective permits a synthesis of two approaches normally considered opposed: political economy and discourse analysis. The decision-making process will be shown to have been a de-centered one, dependent on rhetorical maneuvers among elite actors within a field of structured power relations and against a background of public inattention. The picture will hardly accord with the traditional IR conception of nation states as simple rational actors pursuing clear national interests. Called into question as well is the traditional Kantian confidence in the moral behavior of democracies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]