A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board
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A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree by Examining Committee Members: ABSTRACT Today’s international community is engaging in a new kind of arms control, which parts ways with past practice to privilege humanitarian concerns and civilian protections over perceived national security interests. Humanitarian disarmament has resulted in multiple multilateral agreements in recent years banning exceptionally injurious or unnecessarily harmful weapons. Existing arguments, which emphasize international pressure or norm diffusion as explicating policy change, cannot fully explain governments’ mixed reception to the humanitarian disarmament approach. They neglect the process by which persuasive action at the domestic level impacts policy-making, that can result in the legalization of new humanitarian norms. Through the examination of four states involved to varying degrees with the cluster munition disarmament process, this dissertation contributes a new theory of this domestic campaign pressure process. It shows that where civil society groups are able to run a well-resourced, organized domestic campaign that increases the issue’s salience and activate public participation in application of political leverage, disarmament policy change is likeliest to occur. States that join agreements as a result of this process do so for instrumental rather than normative reasons, but in self-imposing new weapons bans, reticent governments ultimately contribute to the humanizing of the laws of war. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my endlessly patient committee for sharing their knowledge, help, and advice through this process. It is through their guidance that I was able to flourish. Thanks also to the Department of Political Science at Temple University for being my second home and the greatest support in my life these past years. I couldn’t have done it anywhere else. Finally, thanks to the family and friends that cheered me on. You know who you are. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES………………………………………………………………..ii CHAPTER 1. AN INTRODUCTION TO HUMANITARIAN DISARMAMENT…………..1 2. THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF HUMANITARIAN DISARMAMENT…………………………………………………………….30 3. ‘THE CLUSTERBOMB FEELING’: CULTIVATING NATIONAL OWNERSHIP IN THE NETHERLANDS……………………………….......72 4. BRITAIN’S BALANCING ACT: NATIONAL INTEREST AND HUMAN RIGHTS……………………………………………………………………..108 5. SELF-CONSTRAINT IN THE FRENCH SENAT, OR: THE BENEFITS OF BEING GOOD …………………..…………………..155 6. POLAND’S RIGHT TO CLUSTER MUNITIONS ……………………......196 7. CONCLUSION: AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL FOR CONVENTIONAL ARMS CONTROL……………………………...…………………………...222 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………......252 LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Categorizing the Cases………………………………………………….…………...20 2. The Humanitarian Arm-Twist…………………………………….………………....50 3. The Continuum of Humanitarian Disarmament Behavior..………………………....63 4. Searches for “clusterbommen” and “cluster munitie” in the Netherlands over time..…………………………………………………….…………………………….118 5. Searches for “cluster bomb” and “cluster munition” in the UK over time..….........146 6. French political cartoons about cluster munitions…………………………..……...173 7. Searches for “bombes à sous-munitions” and “BASM” in France over time................................................................................................................................184 8. Cluster Munition Campaign materials in Poland………………………..…………216 ii CHAPTER 1 AN INTRODUCTION TO HUMANITARIAN DISARMAMENT, OR: HOW WE LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND BAN THE BOMB In the modern era,1 humans have advanced exponentially their technological capacity for killing while gradually also converging on the notion that the means of making war must have limitations. Through a series of comprehensive international agreements in recent decades, a majority of the international community of states has prohibited certain weapons perceived as inherently causing unnecessary suffering.2 Whereas conventional arms control practice privileges the national interests of states, these agreements were fomented through the newer approach of humanitarian disarmament, which prioritizes humanitarian considerations and civilian protection over state interest in the formulation of arms control policy.3 Humanitarian disarmament, in this project, is the category of policies and agreements that aim to regulate or ban particular weapons due to their humanitarian effects. 4 1 Particularly since the early 1990s with the rise of smart weapons, unmanned aircraft, and robotics. 2 Cluster munitions are shells that contain and disperse dozens to hundreds of smaller bomblets, scattering their payload across an area up to the size of a football field. With a failure rate between 5 and 30%, cluster munition duds operate like landmines, which do most of their harm to civilians after combat operations are over. “Cluster Munition Monitor,” Cluster Munition Coalition, last updated September 3, 2015. 3 Norwegian People’s Aid defines humanitarian disarmament as “operational and advocacy work which aim to reduce and prevent harm to civilians from the impacts of weapons and ammunition, and where civil society plays a critical role.” Humanitarian Disarmament. Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA). Retrieved from https://www.npaid.org/Our-Work/Humanitarian-Disarmament. 4 Also referred to as humanitarian arms control; this term is not well defined in the disarmament community beyond the NPA definition, which has yet to be adopted broadly. 1 Historically, arms control agreements largely addressed the weapons deemed to be an existential threat to the international community; the focus has shifted to weapons that threaten human rather than state security, and the language in many of these new agreements advocates normative rather than material concerns. Among these agreements are bans on landmines, cluster munitions, small arms, and light weapons, all of which have long-term humanitarian impact for post-conflict areas. Arms control advocates have adopted the term humanitarian disarmament to collectively refer to these issues and their agreements. While the new agreements and the humanitarian norms they instantiate enjoy broad support, and many now-champions of these regimes were once their staunch opponents, the new humanitarian disarmament agreements are far from universal. The puzzle that arises from this pattern of behavior is why governments that report valuing their weapons strategically would then become willing to abandon them, in part or whole, over a relatively short period of time. The core argument of this dissertation is that, notwithstanding the international pressures for states to build and maintain diverse military arsenals, it is domestic campaigns and domestic pressure that emerge as key drivers of humanitarian behavior change, particularly in democratic states. More specifically, I demonstrate that where issue advocates organize a broad and well- resourced domestic campaign, increasing the domestic salience of the issue through media work and lobbying, and activate citizens to participate in the application of political leverage by petitioning or demonstrating, reticent governments are most likely to exhibit humanitarian policy change. Joining previous studies of humanitarian advocacy 2 targeting rights violations in authoritarian states,5 this project fills a gap in our knowledge about how transnational advocacy networks approach and are approached by democratic states, and how this relationship shapes international outcomes more broadly, in terms of how norms and policies diffuse, why they gain traction at particular moments in particular places, and the role of transnational advocacy in guiding the behavior of democratic and non-democratic states alike on the international stage. This project explores the phenomenon of humanitarian disarmament through the study of participants to the most recent such international agreement, the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, seeking to understand why states that had previously made and used cluster munitions have, albeit sometimes grudgingly, abandoned them. This dissertation examines evolution in the behavior of four governments—the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, and Poland—involved to varying degrees with the drafting, entry into force, and ongoing universalization of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, uncovering the particular factors that guided improved humanitarian outcomes in each case. The design of the study is a most-similar-systems design, intended to hold as many factors as possible constant across cases. All four countries selected are democratic members of both NATO and the European Union, which have joined the sister agreement to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction (the Mine Ban Treaty). All four of these countries entered the negotiation of the Convention as defenders and users of cluster munitions, yet some 5 Keck, M. & Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press; Risse, T., Ropp, S. C., & Sikkink, K. (Eds.). (1999). The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 3 of them moved to sign, comply, and even over-comply with the Convention, while others held their ground as defenders of cluster munitions.