In the 19th Century, war was seen as a legitimate function of sovereign rule. So long as the war-making body had legal authority to act and followed correct procedures, such as a proper declaration, war could be waged lawfully. Four 20th Century developments created a new legal regime:
1: Covenant of the League of Nations in 1919;
2: The Pact of Paris 1928 – the Kellogg-Briand Pact;
3: The UN Charter of 1945;
4: The London Charter of 1945 which set up the War Crimes Tribunal.
Taken together they establish a new legal regime in which war is only legitimate in two circumstances: as an act of self-defence or as an act of law enforcement to help others defend themselves.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact was a symbolic ‘high tide’. It was intended to mark 150 years of US-French friendship with the signing of a non-aggression pact but transformed into a general treaty to abolish war. A function of such an abolition is disarmament and arms control which must be distinguished from one another.
Disarmament
The attempt to eliminate armaments has historically taken place in two ways.
Imposed disarmament on the defeated state after a war. For example, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles limited the German army to 100,000 troops thereby rendering it incapable of offensive activity. Similarly, after the Second World War, restrictions were placed on Germany and Japan. Inability or unwillingness to enforce these restrictions has been their weakness. Germany established training facilities and munitions factories in the Soviet Union after the First World War without penalty, and after 1945, a primary goal of US foreign policy was to re-establish the military capabilities of both West Germany and Japan.
Voluntary disarmament, in which states seek a mutually acceptable framework to reduce the size of their militaries, has three models:
1: Reducing the size of an army to its bare minimum eg Germany after Versailles;
2: General and Complete Disarmament (GCD) which seeks the elimination of all weapons. Although associated with extreme idealism there are examples of it being tabled for example, at the Reykjavik Summit of 1986, Gorbachev proposed – and Reagan accepted – the elimination of all nuclear-armed ballistic missiles by 1996. The plan was never executed.
3: Regional disarmament seeks to reduce or eliminate weapons from a particular geographical area, frequently in the form of nuclear-free zones. This was proposed in South Asia but the SANFZ is hampered by the fact that both Pakistan and India have acquired nuclear weapons and are unlikely to give them up in the foreseeable future. However there are four successes: The 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco prohibits nuclear weapons in the South American region while three other treaties ban the placing of nuclear weapons in Antarctica, on the seabed or in outer space.
However, two major problems hamper the progress of disarmament:
1: Doubt over the assumption that arms cause war. CND claimed the arms race was out of the control of politicians and advocated unilateral disarmament to break the cycle. However, the end of the Cold War has seen a dramatic reduction in nuclear weapons suggesting that arms races are caused by underlying political conflicts.
2: The difficulty of verification. If some states disarm while others cheat and fail to do so, dangerous imbalances of power may result.
Arms Control
Arms control is to be distinguished from disarmament in that proponents of the latter argue that peaceful international relations can only be achieved by eliminating weapons from states’ calculations. Advocates of the former, on the other hand, seek regulation of arms. They don’t aim to construct a new world order, but rather to manage the existing one according to agreed principles, which include:
1: Limiting the number and kind of weapons that can be used in war;
2: Banning technologies that may have a destabilising effect on the balance of power.
Treaties include:
1925 Geneva Protocol banning the use of gas and bacteriological weapons
1968 NPT limiting nuclear weapon development in non-nuclear states
1972 SALT 1
1991 START 1
1998 Anti-Personnel Landmines Treaty (APLT)
The biggest problem is that of verification. States ‘cheat’ by not disclosing the full extent of weapons stocks, building secret installations and moving weapons around. Also uncooperative with weapons inspectors eg Iraq. But how to enforce arms control in a world of sovereign states with no over-arching arbiter? Short of armed intervention sanctions and diplomatic persuasion.
Another problem is that of LDCs or lesser powers complaining that the NPT of 1968, for example, allows the Global North to maintain its stranglehold on the Global South. Rather than increasing the peace, arms control can be seen in this instance as increasing international tension.
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