Events in Foreign Policy Analysis: The ‘Crossroads’ Metaphor and the Making of Crisis

As a branch of political science that is largely focusing on empirical cases in international politics, foreign policy analysis has paid remarkably little attention to the ontological underpinnings of its objects of study. The question of what constitutes an ‘event’ in foreign policy has remained largely neglected in the discipline with events in international politics treated as unproblematic and ontologically straightforward sets of data. The paper investigates the concept of event through the popular metaphor of ‘crossroads’. It is argued in the paper that the metaphor is used to frame occurrences as threating and alarming – a potential crisis. The metaphor is usually framed around two future options with the first one leading to the actualisation of the crisis scenario and the second one to a virtuous outcome. Occurrences can be represented in various different ways by emplotment, which creates a sense of causality and direction. Because the horizon is set in the future and the representation is ‘charged with futurity’ in Kenneth Burke’s terms, particular strong and convincing moral and aesthetic interpretations can be put forward without anchoring them to any empirical data.