ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to analyze whether the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) embodied a serious alternative for a new Europe at the end of the Cold War, why it failed to materialize, and what the consequences of this missed opportunity were for Western European relations with Russia. In some ways, a cold peace is even more unpredictable and dangerous than the Cold War: A Cold War accepts the logic of conflict in the international system and between certain protagonists in particular, a cold peace reproduces the behavioural patterns of a Cold War but suppresses acceptance of the logic of behaviour. The chapter suggests that the end of the Cold War retrospectively offered an opportunity for ‘a common European home,’ embodied by the CSCE, which was eventually not seized at the expense of Russia. The CSCE provided the neutral and non-aligned countries in Europe with an unprecedented stake in European foreign policy.
