New SIPRI paper on Ukraine's small arms and light weapons exports
The Myrdal Committee
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From: Frank Blackaby, 'How SIPRI begun, SIPRI Continuity and Change 1966-1996', Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1966, ISBN 0-19-82960-0
2. The Myrdal Committee
I. Guidelines The Myrdal Committee (whose composition is given in Annexe B) was given a set of guidelines by the Swedish Government–or, more precisely, by the Minister for Foreign Affairs. The guidelines put all the stress on conflicts and conflict resolution, and there is only an incidental mention of disarmament. The first sentence of the guidelines document reads: ‘During recent years the necessity of widening our knowledge on the preconditions for a lasting peace and for peaceful solutions of international conflicts is becoming still more evident.’ Later in the document it reads: It would be in accordance with our general policy to try to make a constructive contribution to the further development of peace and conflict research, and thereby to widen the knowledge of the background of international conflict problems, of possible ways of alleviating tensions, remove sources of unrest and effectively use the United Nations as a safeguard for peace. Research efforts are needed not least to solve problems which are of urgent interest in connection both with UN peace-keeping activities and with disarmament negotiations. Otherwise the main points in the guidelines are the stress on the word ‘international’ and that the strictly objective character of the research should not be put in question. The Committee was also told not to regard this envisaged international institute ‘as an alternative to an expansion of national research resources in this and related fields. The question of needs which might arise in this national context should not be examined by the Committee’. There were the ‘on the one hand and on the other hand’ clauses which are normally to be found in documents of this kind: ‘Due consideration should be given on the one hand to the necessity of creating possibilities for meaningful research, on the other hand to the importance of avoiding a large and costly research organization’. In other words, the institute should not be too small and not be too large either. Again, ‘the work of the Committee should be rapidly carried on without neglecting the careful analysis of the problem’. The Committee took a year to report: the completed document was delivered to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs on 21 January 1966. The members worked their way through a very considerable pile of material. They took a great deal of evidence, in Stockholm and elsewhere, conducted a large number of interviews, and also received a great many memoranda, solicited and unsolicited. A number of academics took the opportunity to tell the Committee what they thought the new institute should do. This must have left the members of the Committee in a state of some confusion. For peace research was then a fledgling field of studies. There was at that time a good deal of rather primitive discussion which seemed to assume that somewhere in a Platonic heaven there was a ‘true meaning’ of the term peace research, and once that was discovered peace researchers would know what to do. Peace research was only just beginning to establish an international identity. II. Evidence The Myrdal Committee had available to it extensive inventories of virtually every organization with any kind of peace research activity–ranging from, for example, the Council for a Liveable World in New York to CARTT (the Committee Against Ringing Tucson with Titans–that is, the Titan missiles). Four examples of the evidence given to the Committee show the very different ideas put forward for the institute’s activities. It was natural that a good deal of time should be given to Professor Johan Galtung. He had established the first Scandinavian peace research institute, PRIO, in 1959. The beginning of PRIO was in total contrast with the beginning of SIPRI, which was from the start well funded by the Swedish state. About PRIO, looking back in 1972, Galtung wrote: Today it is strange to think back on those early days in 1959. ‘What a terrible word!’ was the spontaneous exclamation of the Ministry of Education when the first whispers of ‘peace research’ started circulating. In those days ‘peace’ was considered a word from the left, politically subversive or at best naive, scientifically unfashionable, even indicative of incompetence. The first grant to PRIO, of $5000, came from a private institute and a private company. In February 1965 Galtung prepared a document on the long-term development of peace research which he discussed with the Myrdal Committee in the spring of that year. In it he made his well-known distinction between ‘negative peace’ (the conditions for the absence of violent management of conflict) and ‘positive peace’ (the conditions for patterns of integration between human groups that will permit an optimum of self-realization). Peace research, he argued, should deal with both–although the terminology gave a clear impression of a preference. Given the choice between something ‘negative’ and something ‘positive’, which is more likely to be preferred? The PRIO research programme was presented under some 25 headings. Perhaps the main problem with the concept of positive peace is that it can encompass virtually all the problems faced by mankind, so that almost any world problem–hunger, population growth, the status of women, and so on–could be studied under that heading. A small problem-oriented institute should limit the number of problems it studied, so that it could build up shared expertise in the chosen areas. The point of an institute is that the researchers should be able to talk to each other about their work. If an institute took on too many subjects, then its contribution to each of them would be shallow. It is not a good idea to have researchers working entirely on their own, with no one in-house with whom they can discuss difficulties or ideas. A different set of priorities was presented to the Myrdal Committee by the Pugwash Movement (the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs). One of the members of the Committee, Professor Hannes Alfvén,6 was a prominent figure both in Swedish Pugwash and in the international organization. Pugwash was predominantly a movement of natural scientists, primarily physicists, that was founded in 1957 (by among others a member of the first SIPRI Governing Board, Professor Joseph Rotblat).7 Many of the leading figures had worked on the Manhattan Project to construct the atomic bomb; they had, in Oppenheimer’s words, ‘known sin’, and were concerned to find some way to control the monster they had created. For example, the Pugwash Conference at Karlovy Vary in September 1964 discussed an array of proposals to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons. (The proposals included, incidentally, the cut-off of production of weapon-grade fissile materials; this proposal, over 30 years later, is just coming up for possible serious negotiation at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva.) Pugwash also had an international working group on biological weapons but did not have the finance for a research project in this field. One of the working groups at that conference, on ‘The role and responsibility of scientists in advancing the cause of peace’, unanimously adopted the following statement: The group has learned with warm appreciation of the proposal to establish and support a peace research organization in celebration of the 150 years during which Sweden has not been involved in war. Such an organization, independent and broadly international in its outlook and constitution, applying itself to concrete problems, would be of great value in permitting a range of important studies, several of which have been suggested at previous Pugwash Conferences, but for which proper support has hitherto been lacking. [Note the phrase ‘applying itself to concrete problems’.] The working group specifically suggested the establishment of a modern seismograph system on Swedish territory. Professor Alfvén kept in touch with the Pugwash Continuing Committee, and gave an account of the Myrdal Committee’s progress to the Pugwash Conference at Venice in April 1965. The Myrdal Committee also had a session with the Secretary-General of the new International Peace Research Association. He supported the idea of research concerned with the detection of underground tests. He had a rather strange proposal for ‘tension barometers’ to measure the tension between specific countries. He suggested that the institute might train peace researchers. There was a rather vague proposal to do research on the political relations in the world; he also suggested that the institute might pick one or two from a wide range of problems–overpopulation, the race problem and the hunger problem. Finally, there was the question raised by Dr John Burton, of University College, London, and which was also constantly raised in Sweden as well. Is not peace research better done within the existing discipline of international relations? Burton wrote: ‘Peace research’ organisations are now developing in many countries. They represent a somewhat belated popular intellectual response to the circumstances of the nuclear age. . . . Because peace research has developed in the context of postwar popular responses, because it involves people who in many instances have little training in disciplines which might reasonably be regarded as most relevant, and because it has developed outside the existing disciplines–most conspicuously, outside the discipline of international relations–it is likely to be regarded with caution and even suspicion. If peace research is to be taken seriously by governments, by universities which might be asked to establish readerships and departments, by foundations and private enterprises which might be asked to contribute finance, and by scientists who might be asked to undertake research, then there are some pertinent questions. . . . Why did peace research develop outside existing disciplines, is it new, and are these established disciplines not able to deal adequately and more efficiently with the field covered by peace research? In a letter to Alva Myrdal, Burton argued for a three- to five-year programme for the assimilation and organization of existing international relations material. ‘This would not require the employment of great names; it would require the employment of able young people, many of whom are endeavouring to become familiar with contemporary literature.’ This is only a sample of the disparate advice the Committee received. Alva Myrdal was looking for work which would help her in her position as Swedish representative at the ENDC. In her book The Game of Disarmament, written in 1976, she says: The peace research institutes, which are rapidly becoming established in many places, often concentrate upon problems of ‘strategic’ importance–as viewed from the point of view of one country or one bloc. Some lose themselves in model-building abstracted from the acute dangers implied in developments of the international arms race and from the practical questions that are perpetually being decided by politicians. Others, by focusing their attention on the ultimate problem of whether human aptitudes for aggression are innate or socially determined, render little guidance for actual policy. The leaders of institutes or groups for peace research occasionally confess privately that should they devote their work more directly to problems of armaments and the arms race, they would risk not receiving any funds from government sources or from foundations anxious not to fall away from the official line. This was written, of course, long after SIPRI had been established. However, it probably reflects her views at the time of the Myrdal Committee reasonably accurately. In May 1965, while the Committee was still at work, she gave an interview to a journalist from The New York Times. In that interview, she ‘explained that the institute could play a key role in promoting disarmament efforts’. Indeed, according to the report, she suggested that the new institute might ‘serve as the focal point of a world-wide monitoring system, checking on clandestine underground nuclear tests . . . The institute could serve as an evaluating center for seismic data, which might come from scientific institutes or from governments after processing in national laboratories’. In the event, the Swedish Government established the quite separate Hagfors seismological station.8 III. Committee discussions and conclusion What sort of work should the new institute do? Professor Anders Wedberg, and also Martin Fehrm and Karl Birnbaum, thought that some part of the research effort should be devoted to basic problems of conflict and conflict resolution–and this view did find expression in some paragraphs of the report. However, it was clear that Alva Myrdal herself favoured what might be called the ‘Pugwash approach’, and the subject discussions were mostly concerned with disarmament or arms control issues. Some of the Committee members did feel that the Pugwash Continuing Committee was thinking of the new institute as Pugwash’s research arm. This did not go down well; of course Pugwash could suggest subjects, but it would be for the new institute’s Governing Board to decide. Before Alva Myrdal’s interview with The New York Times, it was generally accepted that a seismic study of some kind would be a good idea; but other members of the Committee were not keen on loading the new institute with all the data processing from worldwide seismic stations. There was some discussion of the directorship: that an American would be inappropriate–and that a candidate should possibly be chosen from a neutral country, such as Switzerland. There was a discussion in 1965 at the Pugwash conference at Venice with the President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Academician M. D. Millionshchikov, who agreed that the director should not come from either of the two great powers. The Myrdal Report itself perhaps gives a misleading impression, in the space given to the study of conflicts and conflict research. For example, in the English version of the summary, one paragraph reads: ‘The research should not only be concerned with relations involving the great powers but should to a considerable extent focus attention on potential conflict situations related to social and economic factors in all parts of the world, not least in the hitherto less developed regions’. However–again in the English summary–this is immediately followed by a paragraph which reads: The Committee wishes to recommend that the research work should primarily be directed to the problems of disarmament and arms regulation. It is believed that within this field important scientific contributions can be made which have great relevance for efforts to achieve stable and peaceful international relations. The international character of the institute can also specifically in this field of study serve a comprehensive research effort and contribute to its scientific as well as to its political value. This paragraph then proceeds to be qualified again: The studies should, however, have good possibilities to extend from this point to other research areas. The Committee has had in mind such widely defined research subjects as studies of current conflicts, their origin, development and solution, not least observing the impact of communication processes and mass media; ways of alleviating tensions between states and removing sources of conflict; the role of international organisations for conflict resolution, and special theoretical and methodological studies in connection with projects in these fields. However, the significant statement in the Report is the priority given to disarmament and arms regulation. Consequently it recommends that the institute should have ‘a higher proportion of natural scientists than is usual’. The Report then gives four examples of the types of project which would fit with their picture of the institute’s work: a seismological study, addressed to the problem of the comprehensive nuclear test ban; a project on biological weapons; a study of the treatment in the media of certain localized international conflicts; and the problems in international law of exploiting new water supplies. From the beginning–indeed, from the time of Erlander’s speech at Eda–it was laid down that the institute should be international. The Myrdal Committee took this word seriously. There are a number of institutes around the world which have taken the label ‘international’ but which are directed and largely staffed by nationals of the country where the institute is sited: the international component consists of some visiting scholars from outside. SIPRI has never had a Swedish director; most of the Governing Board members, apart from the chairman, and most of the research staff have been from other countries. SIPRI has been very careful to steer clear of Swedish political issues. It was necessary, in the early years, to establish this independence, and it was successfully done. SIPRI has of course been criticized–but not on the grounds that it was an agency of the Swedish Government. Possibly, in later years, SIPRI was over-cautious in its arms-length relationship with Swedish institutions; but in the early years the overriding need was to establish that it was the Stockholm International Institute, not the Swedish International Institute, for Peace Research. On the structure of the Institute, the Committee envisaged: (a) a Scientific Council consisting of not more than 30 members with consultative functions in the planning of the research projects and in their evaluation; (b) a Governing Board of international character with 8 members, with the responsibility for more important decisions about the planning of the work and its administrative management; and (c) a director whose tasks should comprise the organization and the setting up of the institute, and the general planning and direction of the research activity. High personal qualifications should be demanded of the director, who would be a central figure in the institute.
6) Professor Alfvén received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970. 7) In 1995 Professor Rotblat and the Pugwash Movement were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 8) The Hagfors station is run by the Swedish National Defence Research Establish-ment (the Swedish name is Försvarets Forskningsanstalt, FOA).
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