ABSTRACT
From its relatively humble founding at Helsinki in 1973-1975 by thirtythree European countries plus the United States and Canada, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has grown into an impressive set of formal institutions and expanded to include 55 member states. It is no longer simply a conference in semipermanent session, dedicated to easing tensions in Europe that stemmed from the Cold War. It is now a full-fledged international organization whose area of declared security interest spans Eurasia. The OSCE also seeks to provide security in the broadest sense, going beyond its core military aspects to include cooperation on economic, social, and human rights issues that its charter documents argue are the essential underpinnings of cooperative security and stable international relations. Yet, for most of its first two decades the OSCE/CSCE2 was not even a formal international organization. Instead, it was a drawn-out process of political, social, and normative negotiations that took the form of irregular, multilateral conferencing. During much of that period it was also a forum of direct ideological confrontation between East and West, cloaked in what appeared to some to be nearly meaningless rhetoric about common security ambitions and “confidence and security building measures”
(CSBMs).3 Still deeper hypocrisy, or worse, was seen by critics in the original CSCE proclamation of aspirations toward elevated respect for human rights standards, supposedly shared among the conference’s three major groups: North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) states, Neutral and Non-Aligned Nations (NAN), and the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO), or Soviet bloc, states. To appreciate how far the OSCE has come, as well as to gauge the distance it has yet to travel, it is essential to review its history since it was founded as the CSCE in 1975.
