My name is Jean-Pierre Maulny, and I am the Assistant Director of IRIS (Institut de relations internationales et stratégiques). My research topics and themes are the European Security and Defence Policy (thus ESDP), arms policy and disarmament. The international community today is faced with a general weakening of its non-proliferation, disarmament and disarmament control instruments. I think this is related to the overall international situation, with one country, the United States, a military superpower, which as such may have less need of these disarmament instruments, which worked perfectly well, I would say, for a decade or a decade and a half, that is, between 1980 and 1995. So, you have a country that has less need of these disarmament instruments and at the same time, countries that are, I would say, rebelling against the international system. So while I don’t know whether you can call them rogue states, which is an American term, it is true that it is a situation in which a certain number of countries do tend to proliferate today, as can be seen in particular with the current nuclear issue with Iran.

So, it is true that a distinction must be made between what could be called the strategic disarmament forums, which are central to international stability, particularly is the nuclear issue and possibly conventional disarmament (since we are not currently seeing the conventional disarmament we witnessed in the late 1980s with the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe). So, these strategic disarmament forums are not moving forward today, or are losing ground, because again, there is no interest on the part of the US in this area, or on the part of a certain number of other powers such as China that, on the contrary, would like to restore the balance. And then you have what I call humanitarian disarmament, which is not strategic disarmament, but rather disarmament pushed for by civil society and NGOs, and this disarmament may move forward, often taken up by lesser countries such as Canada, Austria and Sweden. In the sense that these disarmament initiatives do not necessarily interfere with the US, we see that these disarmament issues can move forward as evidenced with the Anti-Personnel Mines Convention, and as we may witness in the future with small arms or submunitions, which is, I would say, related to the issue of anti-personnel mines.

Instruments and institutions

I don’t know whether disarmament instruments as such are affected by non-state actors. But what we can see, is that, for example, today, the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva is not really making progress. When I say that civil society and NGOs are actors that are pushing for disarmament, particularly humanitarian disarmament, I would say, in fact, that they favour disarmament instruments, even if they are outside of the official structures (such as the Conference on Disarmament), as we saw with the Convention on Anti-Personnel Mines that in the end was negotiated outside that conference. So I would say these actors play a somewhat more positive role, but one that is effectively outside the normal international instruments.

It is obvious with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is not functioning effectively, that is, it is obvious that countries that have mastered nuclear technology are at the same time strengthening non-proliferation instruments. I would say that while all of the initiatives taken over the past years are good ones, they neglected the problem of “proliferating” countries and that the proliferating countries are the basis for the breakdown of equality. That is the case with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, since basically, what pushes these countries to proliferate is the reasoning of “Why should we be prohibited from doing what we have allowed others to do?”, knowing that with Iran, the issue is even more complicated because the enrichment program is, I would say, of course, a civilian program. So on a legal basis, we would ordinarily have no right to prohibit Iran from having a civilian enrichment program. But at the same time, no one is fooled: this program has no civilian use and everyone knows that there is in fact a possible military objective. But it is an extremely difficult issue for the international community to bear in the case of Iran.