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NGOs as catalysts for international arms control? The ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the United States

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Abstract

The article investigates the role of pro-arms control non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in furthering the domestic ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in the United States. The study starts out from the two-level framework for analysing domestic ratification processes of international agreements, and it introduces the concept of audience gains to complement this framework: being the counterpart of audience costs, audience gains denote positive contributions of domestic non-state actors to formal ratification processes. The article distinguishes two complementary pathways for NGOs to generate audience gains, that is, the pathways of ‘mobilising consensus’ and of ‘persuading veto players’. Two in-depth case studies on the ratification of the CWC and the CTBT in the US explore the extent to which pro-agreement NGOs were indeed successful in employing the two pathways. The evidence of the case studies is that NGOs were more influential catalysts of the ratification of the CWC than with respect to the CTBT. The article's findings on the prospects for NGOs to push the domestic ratification of international agreements are expected to be of more general relevance beyond the field of arms control.

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Notes

  1. We employ a broad definition of non-governmental organisations and take the term to refer to any societal group which directly or indirectly seeks to influence public policy and in which no governmental agents are represented. The designation ‘non-governmental organisation’ is understood as a generic term under which interest groups or social movements can be subsumed and which is agnostic as to whether or not a group has a transnational dimension to it (Gourevitch 2002: 319–20). This definition is not to ignore that many of the NGOs under study in the present article have enrolled former White House and Congress staff.

  2. The debates on the CWC and the CTBT in the US have invited a number of scholarly comparisons (Parachini 1997a; Delaet et al. 2005; Bower 2008). Although these studies pursue diverse objectives, they serve to corroborate this article's selection of cases.

  3. Among the most significant factors that come to mind in this regard are the priorities of the military, which was more concerned with the CTBT than with the CWC, and the different role of industry in the two cases. We owe this point to an anonymous reviewer. For further factors influencing the two ratification processes, see Bower (2008) and Delaet et al. (2005).

  4. By way of a broad classification, these factors can be taken to relate (a) to the intrinsic characteristics of the norms in question (Price and Tannenwald 1996), (b) the quality and capacities of the norm entrepreneurs (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 25–26), (c) the match between international and established domestic norms (Checkel 1999: 85–87) and (d) the set-up of a country's domestic structure (Risse-Kappen 1991: 484–6).

  5. Alternatively, NGOs may put public pressure on veto players by representing the views of specific segments of the public which are particularly attentive to the issues at hand. In the two arms control cases under study, however, pro-treaty NGOs sought to promote what they considered to be general public interests rather than special interests which would have aimed at clearly circumscribed groups in society. Their attempts to exert public pressure on veto players, therefore, could not count on reflecting the views of specific highly mobilised constituents or issue publics but rather had to address public opinion at large (Krosnick and Telhami 1995). We owe this point to an anonymous reviewer.

  6. The consideration of arguing processes in the domestic ratification of international agreements follows up on recent suggestions to move beyond the two-level framework's traditional reliance on rationalism and its concomitant focus on strategic action (Deets 2009: 38–41).

  7. The case study focuses on the post-November 1996 period, which is most propitious for a fruitful comparison with the ratification process of the CTBT.

  8. For the time between January and April 1997, Parachini (1997b: 39) counts 171 editorials in 102 papers in favour of the CWC and 17 against. Unfortunately, we do not have more specific information about the prominence and status of the editorials’ authors, which clearly affect their public impact.

  9. Parachini (1997b: 46): ‘several Senate offices supportive of the convention noted how Gaffney's vigorous fax campaign gave many the impression that only treaty opponents felt strongly about the convention’.

  10. Still, CWC opponents were better represented in the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee Hearings in April 1997: they were granted more time than CWC proponents, and 15 of the 23 speakers in the hearings belonged to the anti-CWC camp (US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations 1997).

  11. Some Republicans nonetheless continued to see the CWC as a bargaining chip, which could be employed to exert pressure in non-related fields such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty or the restructuring of foreign policy agencies (Helms 1997).

  12. Senator Dole, for example, has explicitly stated that these arguments have dispelled his concerns about the CWC (Clymer 1997: 1).

  13. These safeguards were meant to dispel concerns about the reliability and safety of nuclear weapons in the active US stockpile and about the maintenance of nuclear laboratory facilities. Also, Clinton affirmed that there would be the possibility to withdraw from the treaty in case the reliability of the stockpile was put into question, which was important to some CTBT sceptics in the Senate and beyond. This point was brought to our attention by an anonymous reviewer.

  14. The Stewardship Stockpile Program is an extensive national research programme on the patterns of nuclear weapons explosions that is based on computer simulations. It aims at ensuring the reliability of the US nuclear weapons stockpile without testing (Drell and Nitze 1999).

  15. Of the 100 editorials counted by Kimball (1999) shortly before the decisive Senate vote, fewer than ten opposed the treaty. More detailed qualitative and quantitative analyses of media reporting would be required to further substantiate and validate this finding. Such analyses were beyond the scope of the present study, though.

  16. The chairman of the FRC, Jesse Helms, refused to schedule hearings on the CTBT.

  17. In both the Senate's FRC and its Armed Services Committee (ASC), the number of experts in favour and against the CTBT was more or less in balance.

  18. The marginalisation of the FRC in the CTBT debate is striking. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, for example, had 23 days of hearings in the FRC and nine days on the Senate floor. The CWC was heard for 14 days in the FRC and for three days on the Senate floor (US Senate 1999b).

  19. During the ASC hearing on 7 October, Kathleen Bailey from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory testified against it. Paul Robinson cautiously approved it while insisting that certain conditions be met. John Browne, Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory approved it (US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations 1999). Statements from these experts were important to senators. In his speech during the floor debate, Senator Kyl, for example, referred to an expert from the Los Alamos National Laboratory (US Senate 1999c: S12260). We thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing our attention to this point.

  20. One example is Senator Kyl's statement about the feasibility of a technical procedure called, decoupling, (US Senate 1999c).

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of the article was presented at the CEEISA Conference in St Petersburg, 2−4 September 2009. We wish to thank the participants of our panel as well as JIRD's anonymous reviewers for their most helpful comments.

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  1. University of Cologne, Gottfried-Keller-Str. 6, Cologne, D-50931, Germany

    Kai Oppermann

  2. Institut Européen des Hautes Etudes Internationales, 10, avenue des Fleurs, Nice, 06000, France

    Dagmar Röttsches

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Oppermann, K., Röttsches, D. NGOs as catalysts for international arms control? The ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the United States. J Int Relat Dev 13, 239–267 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2010.8

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