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 g ... More

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.