In many respects, post-communist Europe was the spiritual off-spring of the Helsinki process.

For nearly two decades, the CSCE filled in East-West relations a vacuum ongoing since the emergence of the Cold War and even, perhaps, the 1917 October Revolution. It constituted a global channel of communication of unprecedented flexibility in multilateral diplomacy. Through the Helsinki Final Act, it provided a normative compass and, thus, a yardstick to assess the behavior of governments at both inter-State and intra-State level. It offered a long-term programme of comprehensive security.

Performing as such, the CSCE brought qualitative change. First, it “Europeanized” East-West relations previously just managed by the USA and the USSR. Second, it democratized East-West relations by integrating the neutral and non-aligned States on equal footing with NATO and Warsaw Pact members. Third, it introduced human rights and military confidence-building (as well as environmental matters) for the first time on the East-West agenda.

The CSCE process demonstrated that “the specter haunting Europe” was not communism (as argued in Karl Marx’s Manifesto), but human rights: hence, a long standing taboo became a legitimate subject of dialogue and, gradually, of co-operation. In parallel, the implementation of Confidence- and Security-Building Measures aimed at “reducing the dangers of armed conflict and of misunderstanding or miscalculation of military activities which could give rise to apprehension” (Helsinki Final Act) de-dramatized routine military activities in Europe. The CSCE has to be credited for its pioneering on-site inspection regime which prefigured those subsequently established under the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces and Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaties.

The CSCE gave a most sophisticated solution to the problem of how two clusters of States, whose relations were a constant alternation between phases of extreme tension and ambiguous relaxation, could be brought into an enduring framework of peaceful co-operation. Against all odds, it resisted several adverse political cross-currents such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and NATO’s dual-track decision on euromissiles. The collapse of communism vindicated the CSCE, which actually had been operating against the background of a widespread skepticism in the Western word. In many respects, post-communist Europe was the spiritual off-spring of the Helsinki process.

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