Forging a Peaceful New Century.

• Author: RENNER, MICHAEL
• Position: International peace keeping policy

"The 20th century was the century of warfare. The worm must endeavor to make the 21st the century of demilitarization and conflict prevention."

PEACE AND SECURITY POLICY in the 21st century will have to deal with the lingering legacies of the 20th century--acceptance of huge accumulated arsenals and the use of force as an arbiter of human conflict--and with new challenges as well, such as internal conflicts arising from social, economic, demographic, and environmental pressures. These problems are intertwined. While the particular causes of the 20th century's wars and arms races may quickly become history, the leftover military equipment makes for such ready availability of arms of all calibers, particularly small arms, that recourse to violent measures in future disputes is far too easy. To forestall the likelihood of endless skirmishes and wars in the future, governments, intergovernmental institutions, and civil society groups will need to find renewed vigor to pursue demilitarization, conflict prevention, more inspired global institution-building, and greater grassroots engagement.

During the Cold War years, the recognition grew that traditional security policies--building national or allied military muscle--often yielded insecurity. A series of independent international commissions headed by world leaders such as Willy Brandt of Germany, Olof Palme of Sweden, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, and Ingvar Carlsson of Sweden prompted a fundamental rethinking of security. Out of these efforts evolved two closely linked concepts: common security (the view that, in order for one state to be secure, its opponents must also feel secure) and comprehensive security (the notion that non-military factors such as social inequity, poverty, environmental degradation, and migratory pressures are at least as important as military ones in determining the potential for conflict). Questions have been raised as to whether many sources of conflict today are at all amenable to military solutions, a perspective currently being discussed under the heading of human security.

The years since the end of the Cold War have seen a reduction in military spending; production, trade, and deployment of arms; and the size of armed forces. Yet, progress has been highly uneven across the world; substantial arsenals remain in place; there is no letup in the drive toward more sophisticated weaponry; and business in transferring both new and "surplus" weapons from one country to another is still brisk.

Fundamentally, little has changed as far as reliance on armed forces is concerned. The utility of military power has hardly been fore-sworn by the world's governments. The Clinton Administration asserts that today's instabilities must be combated by military means. Its request for an additional $112,000,000,000 for the Pentagon during the next six years (2000-05) reverses the trend of recent years and is sure to influence decision-making in other capitals around the world.

A key task in the 21st century will be to establish effective restraints based on three principles. These contrast sharply with the approaches underlying past and present policies: disarmament (as opposed to arms control); universal constraints on arms (as opposed to non-proliferation); and war prevention (as opposed to regulating warfare).

Although the world has pulled back from the nuclear brink, disarmament is needed as never before. There are still few internationally accepted norms to curb the production, possession, or trade of arms. Several decades of arms control efforts have yielded mostly weak numerical limits on the numbers of certain weapons that states may deploy, and no limits at all on many other kinds of arms. The list of weapons that have actually been outlawed since 1899, when the Hague International Peace Conference decided to ban expanding, or so-called dumdum, bullets, is extremely short compared to the list of unregulated weapons. Although the use of chemical weapons was banned in 1925 (a pact violated several times), nearly another 70 years passed before the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention outlawed their production and possession. In 1995, the sale and use of blindinglaser weapons was banned, and a treaty prohibiting anti-personnel landmines, signed in 1997, came into force in 1999.

Now that there are no big-power confrontations and relatively few armed conflicts between states, an unparalleled opportunity beckons for far-reaching disarmament in both the nuclear and the conventional realms. Denuclearization--the establishment of a timetable to phase out and eventually eliminate all nuclear arms--is one of the pressing tasks in coming years. The nuclear "haves" not only insist that they will retain their arsenals indefinitely, they continue to pursue modernization programs, and their existing arsenals remain on hairtrigger alert. Moreover, the stakes are rising. India and Pakistan have joined the "nuclear club," and it is overly optimistic to assume that others will not eventually be tempted to reevaluate their policies and to acquire nuclear weapons as well. Even if no government is contemplating starting a nuclear war intentionally, other dangers lurk, among them accidental launchings of missiles and theft of...