2005 — The Problems of the OSCE

Nearly thirty years now separate us from the moment when thirty-five Heads of State and Government signed in Helsinki the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) — the crown of years of difficult negotiations.

I would have liked to speak about the OSCE in the year of its jubilee solely in cheerful tones of course, but it is not possible, because unfortunately not only positive things can be observed in the activities of this Organization.

Doubts are increasingly being expressed as to whether there is a need at all for the Organization in the new circumstances, and about its prospects. Evidence of an impending systemic crisis in the OSCE have been its inability to suggest a convincing agenda for consideration at the highest political level (there have been no summits since 1999) and the impossibility for the last two years in a row of agreeing on the general political declarations of the Council of Foreign Ministers meetings. All this, of course, isn’t fortuitous, for it reflects the lack of a common vision by the participating States of the tasks facing the Organization. Some experts are bluntly saying that the OSCE has exhausted its historic mission. There were also, as you know, proposals to merge it with other multilateral forums.

What are the reasons for such a sad evolution? They are several. One of them is the departure from the letter and spirit of the Helsinki Final Act, the appearance in OSCE activities of ever more glaring geographic and functional imbalances, which deprives the Organization of its identity.

The answer to the sacramental question of “what needs to be done” could, in our opinion, lie in solving a two-fold task: on the one hand, as they say, go back to sources, and on the other — finish building the OSCE edifice as it was originally conceived. This presupposes, among other things, freeing the OSCE “construction” of an accretion of alien elements in recent years, just like sea-going ships are cleaned from time to time of the shells clinging to their bottoms that hinder using the full engine power. Russia wants the OSCE to become a fully modern liner, operated according to advanced standards of multilateral diplomacy.

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