Multilateral arms control: state ratification of universal treaties

One of the most crucial areas of the multilateral cooperation in the post-World War II era has been represented by arms control. For more than 50 years, the international community has been seeking to enhance international security by concluding universal arms control treaties. On the whole, those treaties provide significant security benefits to states. However, in spite of those benefits states access arms control treaties with a different speed. Even the treaties that have ultimately reached an almost universal membership were ratified by their members in a rather incremental way. Moreover, some of the arms control treaties have still not been joined by a considerable number of the sovereign states. This leads to the following puzzles: What explains that some states join arms control treaties in which other states do not participate? Why do some states join arms control treaties faster than other states? Despite the importance of these puzzles, the existing knowledge about the factors that determine state participation in multilateral arms control institutions is still very limited. In this paper, I formulate a theoretical explanation for state ratification of universal arms control treaties. I argue that the likelihood and speed of ratification of universal arms control treaties is influenced by two factors connected with the political benefits of states: by the nature of the domestic political regime and by the ratification behaviour of the country’s peers. More specifically, a country is more likely to ratify an arms control treaty when it has a democratic political regime and when it participates in political and institutional networks consisting of countries with a high ratification rate. Nevertheless, the ratification behaviour is simultaneously modified by security costs laying in the possession of the weapons banned or regulated by the respective treaty and by the external security threats that a particular country is facing. To provide an empirical test of this argument, I conduct a survival analysis dealing with eight important universal arms control treaties. The employed dataset covers the ratification behaviour of 205 states during the years 1963-2018. The empirical analysis confirms the proposed theoretical argument. The findings have several important academic implications for the research on multilateral security cooperation, as well as policy implications related to the current state and future of multilateral cooperation in the field of arms control.