Anyone who has followed the progress of the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last few years would have difficulty in arguing that the military-led responses to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States have proved successful. Indeed, the truth is quite plainly the opposite. U.S. military might, based on the Cold War doctrine of deterrence (mutually assured destruction), no longer seems to deter anyone. Given the central role that the "global war on terror" plays in the mass media presentation of the current state of the world, it can be argued that this is a potentially fruitful moment in which to criticize militarism. Large sections of the general public in many countries are cynical and distressed about what the Pentagon and its allies have done in the Muslim world, and they are hungry to know that there may be better ways of tackling intractable conflicts. Belligerence and military threats do not seem effective. Analysts are more and more urging that attention be turned to employment creation and economic development as ways to undermine the appeal of the extremists. Moreover, new developments, such as the recent diplomatic settlement of the dispute over North Korea's nuclear program, also provide some hope that conflict does not inevitably spell war.

Article 9 and Its Significance

For all of these reasons, then, it is a promising time to be building support for the efforts by the Japanese civil society to protect Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. The International Peace Bureau (IPB) has long believed that it represents a vital contribution to the global effort of restraining militarism and ensuring a transition to a world free from aggressive wars and interventions.

Furthermore, Article 9 is an excellent model of what can be done at the juridical and political level to embed a firm nonaggression position into the policies and the very structure of the state. While this is not entirely unique--Costa Rica, Haiti, Panama, and twenty-four smaller states have abolished their armies(1)--it is certainly rare. While it is true that Article 9 was drafted in very specific historical conditions--after the defeat of an imperial power at the end of a very bloody world war--it remains a prime example of how a state and its people, with some help from their former enemies, can turn the page and set their face against aggressive military methods.

Japan--a Pacifist State?

It is of course no secret that Japan long ago abandoned (under pressure from the United States in the atmosphere of the Cold War) the literal pacifist interpretation of Article 9. It now maintains Self-Defense Forces (SDF) of more than two hundred thousand persons (all technically civilians), which gives it one of the larger collections of military personnel in the world. It also has a Treaty of Mutual Co-operation and Security with the United States, under which approximately fifty thousand U.S. troops are stationed in Japan.

Furthermore, Japan's US$43.7 billion per year budget makes it the fifth-largest military spender in the world, after the United States, China, the United Kingdom, and France. The SDF consumes some 6 percent of the government budget or almost 1 percent of Japan's GNP.

Thus, it can in no sense be said that Japan is a demilitarized society. However, the renunciation of belligerency and the specific abandonment of nuclear-weapons aspirations (through adopting Japan's Non-Nuclear Principles and by signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) represent two very important bulwarks against aggressive war in the Asia-Pacific region.

Even though Japanese forces have been involved in overseas operations, they have been small in scale and always unarmed. Even when the SDF were sent to Iraq, no use of force was allowed; Japanese personnel are protected by other coalition armed forces. No Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces have ever been involved in armed incidents near the various islands that are points of territorial dispute between Japan on the one hand and Russia, China, or Korea on the other. Thus, we can deduce that, until now at least, Article 9 has acted as an effective restraint.

More broadly, it is important to perceive that the strong grass-roots support for Article 9 in Japanese society acts to undermine excessive respect for the military, a fact that is observed in the relative lack of prestige attached to military careers and status in the SDF, and the poor social benefits allocated to SDF staff compared with other sectors. In some sense, Article 9 acts as a common reference point for the whole country, as a constant reminder of its imperial past and the disastrous consequences for the entire region--and indeed for the world. An increasing proportion of Japanese are too young to have personal memories of the war, and there are signs of impatience with the restrictions imposed by the postwar settlement. Yet the experience of Germany since 1945 shows the importance of a legally grounded framework that holds back any signs of a return to the aggressive militarism and imperialism of the past.

Article 9--a Moral Beacon

Article 9 also stands as a moral beacon to the world. It embodies an absolute rejection of the projection of state power through military aggression. This is a fundamental value shared by religious and nonreligious pacifists alike. And not only pacifists; many of those--in every country--who accept the need for self-defense are firmly opposed to the kind of war fighting forbidden by Article 9. As was declared at the historic Hague Appeal for Peace conference in 1999, "Every Parliament should adopt a resolution prohibiting their government from going to war, like the Japanese article number nine."(2)

This is especially important given the signs on the political horizon of the dangers of future interstate wars. Not only on account of nuclear proliferation (the alleged reason for the invasion of Iraq, and the source of the persistent tensions with Iran and North Korea), and not only because of severe intercultural strains between the "West" and the "rest." Most important, it is because climate change and resource depletion may well lead states in the coming decades to use force in disputes over oil, water, land, and other precious assets. If the temptation is there, then both international law and national legislation along the lines of Article 9 could be important in reining in the militarists.

IPB and Disarmament for Development

A sense of global history is crucial for successful peace work. Efforts to constrain violent conflicts are as old as humanity itself, and though often unsuccessful, they hold valuable lessons for those of us who feel moved to promote the "no-killing" principle in today's world. The IPB is privileged to be a very old, established organization, since it was founded in 1891, even before the creation of the League of Nations and the International Court of Justice--two institutions that the early IPB pioneers argued should be set up in order to avoid recourse to war between states.

Over the decades, the organization, which currently brings together 282 member organizations in seventy countries, has engaged in many peace initiatives and campaigns. These range from efforts to prevent or end particular armed conflicts to worldwide disarmament projects and educational schemes. In addition to its ongoing work in favor of nuclear disarmament, the IPB is currently engaged in a long-term program whose full title is Sustainable Disarmament for Sustainable Development.

This work grew out of our earlier activities on human security. It builds on a long history of research into military spending by bodies such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI),(3) and political position taking by states within the UN, notably, the long series of General Assembly resolutions urging the transfer of financial resources away from the arms race and into development.(4) Unfortunately, very few of these noble aspirations have so far been put into practice. No international fund, for example, has been created to channel monies released from the military sector into antipoverty strategies. What has been lacking too has been a coordination of international civil-society efforts in this field--a gap that the IPB is attempting to remedy.

Military Spending

The amount the world spent on the military in 2006 has been estimated by SIPRI as US$1,204 billion. The larger part of this massive sum is spent on personnel, but military bases, weaponry, training, communications, and so forth, eat up billions more. The United States alone spends approximately half the total sum, and the numbers are growing with every additional troop request made by the Bush administration "for winning the war in Iraq." The UN estimates that with one-tenth of this overall sum it would be possible to achieve the Millennium Development Goals--something most economists and analysts say is impossible "for lack of funds."

Article 26 of the United Nations Charter

"In order to promote the establishment and maintenance of international peace and security with the least diversion for armaments of the world's human and economic resources, the Security Council shall be responsible for formulating, with the assistance of the Military Staff Committee referred to in Article 47, plans to be submitted to the members of the United Nations for the establishment of a system for the regulation of armaments."

Article 26, as quoted above, is one of the lesser-known sections of the UN Charter, yet it is among the most important. For so long as member states fail to make serious and systematic attempts to implement its provisions, the UN's two primary missions (the promotion of peace and of development) cannot be effectively realized. Symptomatic of the problem is the fact that the Military Staff Committee has failed to function. Nevertheless, the UN was able in 1980 to create a transparency tool known as the Standardized Reporting Instrument for Military Expenditures, which has been used by more than 110 states and provides at least a baseline for analysis of the phenomenon.(5)

The Impact of Weapons

Among the most important developments in the disarmament field in the period since the end of the Cold War has been the enormous growth in public awareness of the effects of weapons on ordinary civilians, and the sense that it is possible to do something about them. This was notably the case with land mines (banned by the Ottawa Treaty of 1996), but also to a lesser extent with small arms, and now cluster munitions and even depleted uranium, where some promising developments are taking place. All of these are weapons that have enormous human costs and can wreak devastation on poor communities desperately in need of development assistance. Thus, the way that militarism undermines sustainable development is not only in terms of the "opportunity costs"--money spent on weaponry and war preparations that could have been spent differently--but also through the direct effects of war on conflict zones and the people who make their livelihoods there.

There is a further, and in some ways new, dimension: the environment. Resources devoted to the military sector--and this includes private investment as well as government money--could and should be devoted, in today's world, to preventing the growing threat of climate change. It is true that the military may be among the most important institutions equipped to carry out rescue missions when, for example, dams break and large numbers of civilians are rendered homeless in freak storms. This kind of protection and rescue work will always be needed. But it does not normally need to be carried out by armed personnel and certainly does not require nuclear weapons, space lasers, massive aircraft carriers, or jet fighters.

Strategies and Campaign Activities

Making an impact on the global system of "wrong investments" will require a formidable effort on the part of civil society. The sea change in attitudes to militarism that will be necessary to shift policies and budgets into different paths is unlikely to be a rapid one in most countries. The International Peace Bureau's approach is to encourage the development of "Article 26" or "Disarmament-for-Development" coalitions and national networks. To this end we organize, together with local, national, and international partners in the peace, development, and environment fields, meetings for an exchange of perspectives and the development of joint advocacy. Last year, marking the twentieth anniversary of the 1987 UN Conference on Disarmament and Development, for example, we raised our campaign issues at the World Social Forum (Nairobi), at the UN Committee for the Rights of the Child (Geneva), at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Egypt), and elsewhere. In addition, the IPB is publishing campaign materials and working on a major photographic exhibition, all of which make the case for a radically different set of priorities.*

Conclusion

We can thus conclude that the strengthening of the Article 9 campaign (both in Japan and overseas) and the construction of an effective global program to promote Disarmament for Development (that is, Article 26 of the UN Charter) must go hand in hand. Both are essentially political endeavors, in that they assert certain collective choices decided at the political level. However, their promotion does not belong only in the political realm. They both require mobilization of a wide range of social sectors that are influential in national debates--not only parliamentarians and parties but also labor unions; students', women's, and religious organizations; youth; and environmental and antipoverty organizations. Even police and emergency personnel may be able to ally themselves with the argument that human security, rather than militarism, should be the guiding principle for protecting the population. The IPB is willing to put its experience at the service of all who share our perspective, and we look forward to working closely with Article 9 advocates in the pursuit of our common objectives.

Notes

(1) Christophe Barbey, La non-militarisation et les pays sans armee: Une realite, (Flendruz, Switzerland: APRED, 2001), www.demilitarisation.org.
(2) Www.haguepeace.org/index.php?action=history&subAction= conf&selection=what.
(3) Www.sipri.org.
(4) Most recently, resolution A/C.1/61/L.8 (A/RES/61/64), "Relationship between disarmament and development."
(5) Http://disarmament.un.org/cab/milex.html.
* The IPB gratefully acknowledges financial support from Rissho Kosei-kai in the development of this program.


IPB Publications
Warfare or Welfare? Disarmament for Development in the 21st Century (100 pp., 2005, from the Secretariat or at www.ipb.org).
Whose Priorities? An International Guide to Campaigning on Military Spending (forthcoming).