Diplomatic Negotiation

296 Diplomatic Negotiation
of chemical weapons. Its role in the Syrian crisis can be seen as a catalyst for this
decision by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. At this anniversary conference, 70 chemical
weapons experts – participants in the jubilee academic conference, whether diplomats or
scientists – played a tailor-made, future-oriented, negotiation exercise to raise awareness
about the impact of multilateral negotiation processes. In addition, the game served to
speculate on likely outcomes of such processes in the coming five years on the basis of
carefully designed realistic scenarios.
The game, like reality, reflected the struggle among nations in defence of their national
interests, striving to create the common good of the collective interest as they go along.
The exercise functioned as a vehicle to deal with global political complexity on a security
issue of utmost concern to the world as a whole. Participants, diplomats and academic
experts in the field bargained in five parallel workshops, where they represented six
OPCW member states, one from each continent: the United States of America; Brazil;
South Africa; China; Russia; and France. These countries were selected on the basis of
their regional distribution and their relevance to the OPCW. They can also be perceived
as representing the position of other states, which could not participate in the exercise as
more than six parties creates unsolvable complexity and thereby destroys the game. The
topics to be discussed were seen among experts as relevant to the OPCW in the coming
decade. Just as in reality, national and collective interests had to be balanced within the
framework of an already existing regime, based on a legal framework.
The negotiations were based on a fact-sheet consisting of twenty contentious sentences
of a single diplomatic text. In theory, these were the bracketed parts of a simulated single
text. Parentheses were shown, and agreed text was left out. Participants had to decide
whether a sentence would be included in the text (see Table 1 below). Each sentence was
connected to value points, which indicated the priority of that part of the diplomatic text
to the state represented in the table. The scores therefore naturally differ per country,
while the texts are identical for all delegations. The game is, of course, an abstraction:
first, because there are many other countries with many different opinions; and second,
because the positions of countries in certain discussions have to be estimated and this
is not necessarily in line with reality. Input by OPCW experts over a six-month period did,
however, guarantee that substance came as close to reality as playable.
Substance
The following issues were under discussion:
• Destruction of chemical weapons after 2012: According to the Chemical Weapons
Convention (CWC), all chemical weapons declared by the states parties have to be
destroyed no later than ten years after the CWC came into force – that is, by 29 April
2007. The deadline can be extended by a maximum of five years, but there are no
provisions for any further extension. The OPCW will have to find a solution if, as is
likely, chemical weapons’ destruction by some states parties will not be completed by
29 April 2012, in the absence of a clear-cut prescription in the CWC. Decisions need
to be taken on a possible role for the UN, the setting of a new deadline, permanent
inspection of the remaining storage facilities and subsidies for the destruction of
chemical weapons by CWC states parties.