The room for strategic maneuvering in argumentative discourse depends not only on the dialectical and rhetorical preconditions inherent in strategic maneuvering but also on various kinds of extrinsic preconditions imposed on strategic maneuvering by the institutional macro-context of the communicative activity type in which the maneuvering takes place. Van Eemeren and Garssen use the communicative activity type of plenary debate in the European Parliament as their case in point for illustrating the problems involved.