ABSTRACT
Together with NATO, the EU and the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) forms the quadripartite institutional constellation now operating in the firmament of European security. A direct off-spring of the Helsinki process – the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) created in the ultimate period of the Cold War for the management of détente at the multilateral level – the OSCE presents a number of original elements.1 First, the OSCE’s ‘Europe’ refers to a region encompassing not only the whole continent up to the Caucasus, but also North America and the former Soviet Central Asia – which means that the OSCE provides a forum that is both Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian. Second, the OSCE pursues a global security agenda through a ‘cooperative security’ approach which prescribes military transparency, excludes coercion, privileges preventative diplomacy, and involves mutual accountability based on the right of friendly interference in internal affairs of states. Third, as a decentralised organisation with an operational focus and light bureaucratic structures, the OSCE has often demonstrated an outstanding capacity for rapid and flexible response to emergency situations. Fourth, the OSCE’s decisions and normative instruments, exclusively adopted by consensus, create politically binding commitments whose violation is as inadmissible as that of legal commitments. Fifth, the OSCE, whose membership includes four out of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, is the sole European security body which has officially proclaimed itself a regional agreement under Chapter VIII of the UN Charter.2
