JEAN KLEIN

The birth of SIPRI came at the same time as I joined the French Centre d'Études de politique étrangère (CEPE) as a research fellow of the Centre national de la recherche scientique (CNRS). As my field of interest was the study of arms control and disarmament and the linkage between them and the shaping of international security, my first move was to get in touch with people who shared the same concerns. In France, these issues received hardly any attention from public opinion; and the decision of President de Gaulle to operate an 'empty chair' policy at the Geneva conference on disarmament reflected a widely held view in my country that negotiations conducted under the co-chairmanship of the two superpowers were not the right way to promote genuine disarmament. With the exception of the civil servants in charge of security policies at the Ministry of Defense, at the Quai d'Orsay (Foreign Office) and at the Secrétariat Général de la Défense Nationale (depending on who was Prime Minister), and a few university professors and academicians (e.g., Raymond Aron, Georges Berlia and Gaston Bouthoul) who tackled these issues in their lectures and writings, the only place in Paris where disarmament problems were discussed intensively was the CEPE. This Centre had been created in the mid-1930s on the pattern of the Council on Foreign Relations (New York) and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (London). After World War II it was headed by Jacques Vernant, a Professor of International Relations at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, who was also my sponsor at the CNRS. Thus I had the privilege to be associated from the beginning of my career with the research work of the CEPE, and I benefited from the regular exchanges and close links that the latter had established with other centres for international and strategic studies, in Europe and in the United States.

Robert Neild was open-minded towards the Gaullist policy on disarmament and
was eager to bring French experts into SIPRI meetings in order to enlarge the
debate on the future of arms control

My personal contribution to security studies at the CEPE was to expand the Centre's relations with representatives of the European peace research community and to revive the working groups on disarmament which had lost their momentum when the French Government adopted a low profile in this area. From 1968, the main emphasis was on the analysis of the problems raised by a mutual reduction of armed forces and conventional armaments in Central Europe, against the background of the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) proposals launched by the NATO Ministerial Council at Reykjavík. France did not support this diplomatic move, suspecting a 'bloc to bloc' approach to European security issues; yet the search for 'military détente' was generally in harmony with the 'philosophy' of the French models of European security elaborated by a working group of the CEPE and published in the journal Politique Étrangère (no. 6, 1967). The aim of this project was to explore the possibilities of pursuing the Gaullist policy of 'détente, entente and cooperation' by using regional disarmament as a tool to dissolve the 'bloc structure', thus promoting the unification of the whole continent. To some extent, our research work on arms control and disarmament in Europe contributed to the changes that occurred in France's policy under the Presidency of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in connection with the UN General Assembly Special Session on Disarmament (SSOD) in May-June 1978. France's proposal for the convening of a conference on disarmament in Europe in the framework of the CSCE started a process which led eventually to the conclusion of the CFE Treaty of November 1990.

The same remarks could be made about the work of another study group created by the CEPE in cooperation with the French Institute for Polemology (Institut Français de Polémologie) founded by Gaston Bouthoul. This project was devoted to the critical examination of nuclear arms control and disarmament negotiations after the signing of the first SALT agreements. I was responsible for leading the group, and the recommendations made in its report- published simultaneously in Politique Étrangère (no. 1, 1974) and Études polémologiques (no. 12, 1974)-inspired French decision makers when they proposed the reform of the negotiating body in Geneva (CCD) and suggested practical ways to break the deadlock on disarmament negotiations during the SSOD.

Considering my position at the CEPE, my continuing interest in 'the venture of disarmament' since I first chose this subject for my PhD dissertation, and my connections with the Pugwash Movement and prominent peace researchers like Johan Galtung, Bert Röling and Horst Afheldt, I was not surprised when a Swedish diplomat (Jan Mårtenson) the SIPRI Deputy Director, invited me to join the research team put together by its first director, Robert Neild. For professional and family reasons I was not able at that time to cut the link with the French research and university establishment and make the move to Stockholm, but I was pleased to be linked to the research project on the arms trade with the Third World, which was conducted by Frank Blackaby. I met him in London at the end of the 1960s, and we agreed that I would collect information on the main trends of French arms exports and elaborate on the foreign and defence policies that they were supposed to support. This commitment led me to carry out extensive research on the problems raised by the practice of arms trade in general, and to try to understand the logic of French policy in this field. It would not be proper for me to evaluate my own contributions to the SIPRI project, but it seems that Frank Blackaby, with whom I had regular, stimulating and friendly exchanges, was satisfied with my work: and I am proud to have been associated with a venture that led to the publication of an unprecedented work of reference on the international system of arms transfers and the economic, social and political implications of the proliferation of conventional arms in 'developing countries'.

My involvement in this project also gave me the opportunity to establish close relations with Robert Neild and some of the founding researchers of SIPRI during a short stay I made in Stockholm in the summer of 1970. As a guest of SIPRI at the Wenner-Gren Center I met among others Jozef Goldblat, Milton Leitenberg, Mary Kaldor and Julian Perry Robinson, and later I followed their writings assiduously and used them for my personal research and teaching activities. But the main repercussion of my participation in the SIPRI project was the interest I devoted from then on to the questions raised by the regulation of the arms trade and the linkages between arms sales, development and disarmament. I wrote extensively on this subject and some of my pieces have been published in foreign journals, like The Bulletin of Peace Proposals (PRIO, Oslo) and Strategisk Bulletin (Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Stockholm); I also contributed the chapter 'France and the arms trade' in Cynthia Canizzo's reader The Gun Merchants: Politics and Policy of the Major Arms Suppliers (1980).

To conclude my reminiscences of my involvement in SIPRI's activities at its creation, I would like to add a few words on the relations between the Stockholm Institute and the French personalities interested in disarmament and security issues. Robert Neild, who spoke French, was open-minded towards the Gaullist policy on disarmament and was eager to bring French experts into SIPRI meetings in order to enlarge the debate on the future of arms control. In this respect he shared some of the views expressed by Alva Myrdal when she denounced 'the game of disarmament'; and he suggested to me that we could use the network of the CEPE in order to develop a process of regular exchanges with French 'concerned scientists'. The first attempts were promising as I managed to send to SIPRI conferences a French expert on chemical and biological warfare and a naval officer competent in the field of the new Law of the Sea. Unfortunately, however, this policy was not continued by the next SIPRI Director, Frank Barnaby.

When two members of the SIPRI Governing Board deplored the weakness of French participation in the Institute's activities during a meeting they had with Jacques Vernant and myself in Paris at the end of the 1970s, we let them know that the loosening of the relations between SIPRI and the CEPE was not the result of our lack of interest but the consequence of a choice made in Stockholm. Nevertheless, this estrangement has never been a cause of resentment and most of the SIPRI publications have continued to be reviewed in a positive way in Politique Étrangère. In spite of all the obstacles that have accumulated in the past, I hope and trust that more French analysts will be involved in SIPRI events in the future.

Jean Klein is Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne) and Associate researcher at the French Institute of International Relations, IFRI. He was a SIPRI associate in the 1970s

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