In Fallout: Nuclear Diplomacy in an Age of Global Fracture, Grégoire Mallard, Associate Professor in Anthropology and Sociology of Development at the Graduate Institute, seeks to understand why some nations have agreed on certain limits to their sovereign will in the nuclear domain – and why others decidedly did not. He builds his investigation around the 1968 signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). We talked to Associate Professor Mallard about the book.
What is original about the book’s approach?
First, at the theoretical level, no sociologist has paid attention to how interpretations of treaties evolve over time, and which mechanisms drive these changes, especially in the field of international security.
Usually, sociologists interested in global affairs focus on the protection of human rights, gender equality and economic development. Thus, the communities of experts and policymakers deal with international security issues that are rarely analysed through sociological lenses.
Second, at the empirical level, no study has highlighted the conflicts and tensions that exist in the nuclear non-proliferation field between various regional and global regimes: in particular, the regime of nuclear trade that was set up in Europe with the second Rome treaty (the EURATOM treaty), and the global regime centred around the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and later the Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT. No one in the nuclear proliferation field has talked about the major role played by founders of the EU, such as Jean Monnet, in determining the outcome of NPT negotiations.
How these regional and global regimes evolved, and whether tensions endured over time or whether harmonisation efforts were successful, are issues that have never been studied systematically.
How does a sociological approach help address questions of global governance, and the threat represented by global fractures in the international system?
A sociological approach tries to overcome the pitfalls of two opposite perspectives that are commonly adopted in order to think through the relation between international law and global affairs.
The first perspective, which is “internalist”, assumes that “external” geopolitical or sociological factors only have a very limited and indirect influence on how international law evolves over time.
The second approach, which is an “externalist” approach to law, assumes that what the treaties or conventions say about any given issue is irrelevant in the conduct of international affairs; what matters is the balance of power between various state interests, or the formation of transnational coalitions based on common ideological agendas, etc.
The sociological approach that I promote tries to strike a balance between these two extremes. It shows that law really matters in global affairs – and the problems raised by a plurality of overlapping legal regimes are to be taken seriously – but it does not matter in the sense that international law would evolve independently of sociological factors. Rather, sociological mechanisms affect how new interpretations of existing legal frameworks can be generated, how conflicts of law are treated, why, and with what effects.
What light does your book shed on current affairs?
Overall, the book provides a historical background that anyone interested in understanding nuclear non-proliferation issues should know before answering the question of what to do with Iran or Pakistan or Israel.
In many ways, it shows that the real long-term question is not whether, and for how long, specific countries like Iran should be banned from the international community because they have committed treaty violations.
The real long-term question is whether we can initiate a process that will lead those countries that have been participating in often opaque nuclear trade circuits – like Pakistan and the buyers of its nuclear technologies – to state publicly which rules they commit to respect, and whether we can harmonise such rules with the present global regime centred around the NPT and the IAEA.
Thus, the real long-term question is not limited to how we can really enforce adherence to the rules of the NPT regime by those who claim to belong to that regime, such as Iran or Libya, but to start a process of harmonisation between the global NPT regime and the parallel nuclear rules followed by states outside the NPT (Pakistan, Israel and India).
It is much harder to solve this problem of harmonisation between various regimes than to find a solution to the problem of treaty enforcement. The process of harmonisation would require much more imagination, diplomatic skill and political determination than are presently deployed – albeit, one has to admit, in a very tough geopolitical context.
So hopefully, the book will participate in initiating that broader discussion which will have to take place if discussions on the contours of a Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)-Free Zone in the Middle East are ever to get off the ground.
Grégoire Malard will be speaking at a news briefing on the topic The Middle East and the Atom: Continued Anarchy or a Regional Nuclear Energy Community? at the Maison de la paix on 26 November.