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How do diplomats interpret treaty rules in the field of international security? In a situation of increasing global legal complexity, do past regimes survive the entry into force of new and contradictory regimes? Who decides how legal rules should be interpreted when contradictions exist between overlapping regimes? This book answers such questions by exploring how successive generations of American and European policymakers promoted various regimes to solve the problem of nuclear proliferation in Europe and in the rest of the world; and how those rules were harmonized with the creation of a global regime centered around the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Based on the systematic study of more than twenty personal archives of the diplomats and experts who gathered around Jean Monnet to create the European Community of Atomic Energy (Euratom), as well as public foreign policy archives in the United States, France, and the European Union institutions, this book shows that who wrote treaties matters to explain whether treaty rules survived over time. Yet, this book also shows that how diplomats interpreted treaty rules – whether the latter are transparent, ambiguous or opaque – matters even more to explain how transitions from one legal regime to the next operate. From the successful harmonization between the European and global regimes, the book not only addresses for the first time the questions of legal complexity and legal pluralism in international security, but it also draws conclusions on the conditions that could facilitate the inclusion of the remaining NPT outliers (Israel, India and Pakistan) within the global non-proliferation regime.

The first months of Barack Obama's administration have led to expectations, both in the United States and abroad, that, in the coming years, the country will increasingly promote the international rule of law—a position that many believe is both ethically necessary and in the nation's best interests. This book explains that such views demonstrate a dangerously naive tendency toward legalism—an idealistic belief that law can be effective even in the absence of legitimate institutions of governance. After tracing the historical roots of the concept, it lays out the many illusions—such as universalism, sovereign equality, and the possibility of disinterested judgment by politically unaccountable officials—on which the legalistic view is founded. Drawing on such examples as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's invasion of Serbia, attempts to ban the use of land mines, and the free-trade provisions of the WTO, the book demonstrates throughout that the weaknesses of international law confound legalist ambitions—and that, whatever their professed commitments, all nations stand ready to dispense with international agreements when it suits their short- or long-term interests. It will serve as a wake-up call for those who view global legalism as a panacea, and as a reminder that international relations in a brutal world allow no room for illusions.