Diplomatic Negotiation

Chapter XI: Simulating Diplomatic Negotiation
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Although the teams were asked to avoid procedural discussions and to focus on the
subject matter as much as possible, more than half of the negotiation time was lost because
of a prolonged procedural struggle. A ‘fight’ over the explanation and interpretation of
things that were or were not allowed during the upcoming inspection period dominated
the first half of the negotiation and bedevilled the second half. This was not coincidental;
everybody recognized it as a strategy used by the ISP, and the flow of the bargaining
process clearly showed that it was extremely difficult for the IT to break through the ISP’s
defences. The rules and regulations of the CTBTO and its Manual – which is still under
consideration in reality – clearly give the high ground to the state to be inspected. It is
thus quite easy for the ISP to use procedural issues to postpone discussions on content.
This avoidance strategy provoked escalation, which did not really foster an integrative
bargaining process. While the ISP had a pulling strategy from the start, the IT had – because
of its time problem – no choice but to implement a pushing approach. In this situation, it
was more difficult for the ‘offensive’ party to stay balanced than for the ‘defensive’ party.
Positional bargaining characterized the process, although some useful integrative aspects
were inserted into the second half of the interaction by a group of experts of both parties,
which had reached agreement on a few important issues during their break-out session.
Being experts, so not being too bothered by the political process enfolding between
the two teams, it was not too difficult to bridge some rifts. Obviously, the back-channel
negotiations did not suffer from the loss-of-face problems with which the delegations in
the ‘plenary’ session noted above were confronted. However, these positive results forged
by the expert group could not (yet) turn the negotiation process into a problem-solving
process. Slowly but surely, the issue-specific power of the IT shifted to the ISP, with no
substantial results at the end of the bargaining process.
The lesson from this section is therefore that the CTBTO’s rules and regulations do
not – at least not in the context of this TTE – allow for enough space for the inspection
team to have a successful negotiation on on-site inspection with the inspected state party.
MULTILATERAL LESSONS FOR PRACTICE 3
Post-agreement negotiation was extensively dealt with in the book Getting it Done,
edited by Bertram Spector and William Zartman (Spector and Zartman, 2003), which
provides us with interesting lessons for theory and practice, foremost on stability. With
this book in mind, a simulation was created to test the impact of process, stages and
stakeholders, as three of the five stability factors mentioned in the book (Spector, 2003:
272–292). The occasion for this simulation was the tenth anniversary of the creation of the
OPCW, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (Krutzsch and Trapp,
1999; Yepes-Enríquez and Tabassi, 2002; Kenyon and Feakes, 2007). The Nobel Peace
Prize 2013 was awarded to the OPCW for its work on the monitoring and destruction
This section on ‘Multilateral Lessons’ is based on Meerts (2007), with the
support of Wilbur Perlot.