The month of July 2012 saw delegates from more than 150 countries descend on New York City in an attempt to negotiate a global arms trade treaty under the vaunted auspices of the United Nations.  Although regulations govern transactions between states in areas as diverse as agriculture, commerce, manufacturing and travel, no such regulations exist for conventional armaments.  Efforts to regulate the international flow of weaponry can be traced to the early 1990s, but the UN first addressed the issue in 2006 in a General Assembly resolution.  It was hoped that July’s United Nations Conference on an Arms Trade Treaty would end in some form of agreement after the United States, which accounts for 40% of global arms exports, expressed support for the issue back in 2009 after years of Bush Administration opposition to the treaty.  Critically, this support was tempered by the condition that negotiations would be “under the rule of consensus decision-making,” effectively giving any one of the UN’s 193 member-states veto power over treaty agreements.  Nonetheless, this development galvanized the international community’s interest and set the stage for two years of preparatory committees meant to lay the groundwork for a draft treaty that would be ready in time for last month’s summit in New York.

Unfortunately, no final treaty emerged from a month of intense deliberation.  Instead, 90 states seeking to save face contributed to a joint statement: “we are disappointed, but we are not discouraged.”  The Control Arms Campaign – a collaborative project between Amnesty International, Oxfam International and the International Action Network on Small Arms – blames this breakdown in negotiations on the “lack of political courage by major players.”  Essentially, what this means is that the world’s biggest arms producers (the United States, Russia, France, United Kingdom, China, Germany and Italy), which together account for 80% of all sales, refuse to negotiate away one of their countries’ most lucrative export industries.  The executive director of Amnesty International USA, Suzanne Nossel, is much more direct in her condemnation: “This was stunning cowardice by the Obama Administration, which at the last minute did an about-face and scuttled progress toward a global arms treaty, just as it reached the finish line.  It’s a staggering abdication of leadership by the world’s largest exporter of conventional weapons to pull the plug on the talks just as they were nearing an historic breakthrough.” 

While it is a shame and a pity that the collective will of the international community could not agree on the principles and implementation of a treaty for global arms production and distribution, why is this regulation even needed?  The simple argument is that making the global arms trade more open, transparent and accountable will reduce the likelihood that these weapons are used for purposes that contravene international law.  This is because states that openly flaunt these norms would be exposed to the name-and-shame game, which would not only discredit them internationally but would also make them liable for violating existing international law, including human rights and humanitarian law.  In turn, this situation would render the offending government vulnerable to prosecution from national and international courts of justice, thereby providing an enforcement mechanism for the treaty.

But there is also a deeper argument with a more complex logic at play here: as a direct result of the systemic violence and instability engendered by the unregulated flow of conventional arms, socioeconomic development in the poorest countries is negatively affected, and progress towards the UN Millennium Development Goals is hindered significantly.  In addition to the incalculable human losses, armed conflict is estimated to cost the continent of Africa $18 billion per year – more than the amount of official development assistance directed its way per year – in lost foreign direct investment, destruction of property, criminal enterprises, corruption and a whole host of related societal ills.  With nearly 2,000 people dying every day as a result of gun-related violence, the pernicious outcomes of an unregulated global arms trade are becoming more and more difficult to ignore.

And yet, even if such a treaty did exist, illicit arms sales would continue to flourish.  Peter Herby, head of the Arms Unit at the International Committee of the Red Cross, warns that “all the core provisions of this draft treaty still have major loopholes which will simply ratify the status quo, instead of setting a high international standard that will change state practices and save lives on the ground.”  Brian Wood, head of Arms Control and Human Rights at Amnesty International, points out that arms sent abroad as aid or donations would be exempt from the latest treaty draft’s vague definition for arms transfers, meaning that “these loopholes could easily be exploited to allow arms to be supplied to those that intend to use them to commit serious human rights violations, as the world is seeing in Syria.” 

Other practical impediments to the realistic implementation of an arms control regime cannot simply be swept under the proverbial rug either.  Third-party countries and corporations can be used to facilitate the transfer of arms from a supplier-state to an outlawed client-state without attracting any unwanted attention.  National laws can be bypassed by manufacturing the weapons themselves in the blacklisted, recipient country’s sovereign territory.  Corrupt politicians, resource rivalries, fragile state institutions and offshore banking practices all contribute to the difficulty of identifying and impeding the proliferation of these armaments across national borders.  A noteworthy trend also compounding this problem is the increasing privatization of security and military services by governments all over the world, which can lead without much imagination to further exploitation of the treaty’s weaknesses.

In reality, the vested interests in a $60 billion industry would inevitably find and exploit the loopholes in any eventual treaty, but this does not excuse the failure of the world’s major powers to at least agree on a draft resolution of a treaty that would regulate the import, export and distribution of conventional armaments, including everything from tanks and combat aircraft to warships and missile launchers.  At the same time, this is no reason to sound the treaty’s death knell before it has even been given the chance to work in practice.  It is a necessary beginning to a less violent and more prosperous society of states, even if it is also for the time being insufficient.  Any consequent deficiencies in the core principles or implementation procedures of the treaty should be dealt with in a rigorous and systematic manner, but the moral imperative and overwhelming logic behind a regulatory framework for the global arms trade can simply not be disputed and should not be delayed any longer.

As recent events in Sudan have shown, internationally endorsed referendums can be powerful political tools for achieving sovereign statehood and national self-determination.  Just over a month ago from January 9 – 15, 2011, southern Sudanese citizens flocked to polling stations all over the country to cast their ballots in support of a referendum advocating secession from the North and the creation of what is likely to become the newest member of the United Nations, the Republic of South Sudan.  This referendum should be seen as a long overdue policy solution for one of the most dysfunctional states ever seen on the world stage.  Ruled by colonial administrators for centuries, Sudan officially achieved independence in 1956 but has been at war with itself for nearly five out of the six decades it has existed.  Millions have died as a result of fighting, starvation and illness, and millions more have been displaced and made refugees in the process.  According to the terms of a peace treaty struck between the North and South of the country in 2005, as well as the results of the referendum which that very same treaty enabled, secession will ideally start a new chapter in the blood-soaked, conflict-ridden history of Sudan.

The basic idea behind the use of referendums to decide whether or not the people of a certain territory wish to govern themselves and become an independent political entity goes back to the heyday of World War I and the emergence of Wilsonian Liberalism in the United States.  American President Woodrow Wilson declared in his now famous ‘Fourteen Points’ that the defeated European empires were morally obligated to grant the nations within their imperial domains the right to determine their own destinies, a principle also known as national self-determination.  While the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires gave way to many newly sovereign states, the Western European imperial machines maintained their overseas domains for decades more.  This concept was not then as closely linked to democracy and popular participation as it is today, especially outside of the West.  It was only with the end of the Cold War, when liberal democracy seemed set to devour all other ideological orientations and Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed that ‘The End of History’ had arrived, that referendums were given directly to the people to democratically legitimize the doctrine of self-determination.

Self-determination is the freedom of the people of a given area to determine their own political status, but what exactly is a referendum?  Simply put, it is the process of referring a political question to the general electorate.  When this political question involves national self-determination and secession, international politics can become very interesting indeed.  The Republic of South Sudan is just the latest case in which an organized political community invoked their right to self-determination via referendum to peacefully and legitimately secede from a country without the need to wage a bloody and costly war for independence.  More than 30 new countries have been recognized since 1990 at a rate of 3 every 2 years, most of which owe their existence to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Balkanization of Yugoslavia.  Of the remaining dozen-or-so, only a handful achieved independence by using national referendums, but the trend is clearly growing.  The degree of news media saturation, the ease with which graphic imagery and sensitive information travels the world’s telecommunications networks, and the moderating influence of international public opinion makes violence an increasingly untenable tool for achieving political sympathy or sovereignty in today’s day and age.

Even when referendums were not used, it was either the support of the mobilized masses or the acceptance of top-down political processes initiated by national leaders which legitimized secessionist tendencies.  Popular protests in support of German unity following the Berlin Wall’s fall led invariably to the reunification of East and West in 1990, but no referendum was needed.  Decades of destabilization and conflict pushed the North and South Yemeni governments toward unification in 1990 as well, but no referendum was used here either.  Czechoslovakia’s fragmentation in 1993 into the Czech and Slovak Republics was made possible via parliamentary procedure amid fairly divided public opinion, but again, no referendum.  In an interesting counter-example, the Québécois held two referendums to secede from Canada, both of which failed to achieve independence in 1980 and 1995 – although 49.42% voted in favour in 1995, a result which could have created a new North American country if tens of thousands more votes out of millions would have gone the other way.

The first successful use of the national referendum to attain secession and sovereignty occurred not in Europe or the Americas, as some may have expected, but in Africa.  After warring for 30 years with Ethiopian forces, separatists held a national referendum in 1993 to establish the new state of Eritrea.  Another long-running quest for independence is that of East Timor, a Southeast Asian country which declared independence from Portugal in 1975 only to be annexed immediately by Indonesia.  Decades later, in an internationally recognized referendum sponsored by the United Nations, East Timor voted for and gained sovereign state status in 2002.  Even Montenegro – a state with less than 700,000 people – held a national referendum in 2006 to officially secede from Serbia, but Kosovo – a state with almost 2 million people – passed multiple referendums since the 1990s on top of unilaterally declaring statehood before it achieved comparable results.  The fact that more than 100 countries still refuse to recognize Kosovo testifies to the highly political and overly politicized nature of national referendums on secession and independence.

Long gone are the days of imperial adventurism and colonial conquest, but so too are the more recent days when these empires collapsed and waves of decolonization spawned new states all over the world.  In this imperfect world, some states are created more dysfunctionally than others.  Rather than resorting to the use or threat of force, civilized political discourse provides for the option of ‘referring a political question to the general electorate’ – also known as holding a referendum.  For now the results of Sudan’s referendum are unknown, but most analysts concur that its future effects are likely to be greater tolerance for minorities and greater cooperation between rival factions in the region.  Other countries in conflict-prone areas with secessionist movements will no doubt be watching unfolding events as a result of this most recent referendum closely and carefully.  If needless bloodshed can be avoided and democratic aspirations fulfilled, more referendums may be in store for 2011 after all.