Designing Conventional Arms Control Agreements

What determines the scope of conventional arms control (CAC) agreements in Europe? The crafting of an agreement can have important implications for the stability and trajectory of future relations while reflecting adversaries’ existing political and military relationship. Scholars, while agreeing that CAC agreements are intended to reduce the costs and impact of rivalries, and having articulated how arms control fit into states’ broader strategic goals, have not theorized how agreements focus on geographic demilitarization or national arms limitations. This study proposes a theoretical model to understand and predict approaches to CAC agreements based on both the military relationship existing when the agreement is made and the geographic scope of the rivalry; after this, it hypothesizes that the configurations of these two conditions result in different but predictable approaches to the CAC agreement. The predictions are then tested against a dataset of 39 European agreements, made from 1919 to the present. Over 80% of the agreements matched the predicted outcomes, suggesting that the theoretical model may accurately explain a significant feature of CAC agreement design.