ABSTRACT
The end of the Cold War was marked by a renewed interest in regional and sub-regional cooperation leading to the emergence of new regional arrangements and organizations. In 1992 11 states of the wider Black Sea area1 launched their regional experience, establishing the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) as an informal and flexible forum of cooperation with the ambitious aims to achieve further development and diversification of their bilateral and multilateral co-operation, to foster their economic, technological and social progress, and to encourage a market economy and free enterprise (BSEC 1992b:3). A few years later the participating states acknowledged that in order to attain its goals BSEC should be endowed with permanent institutions2 and therefore decided to transform the BSEC initiative into a fully fledged international organization, with an international legal personality. To this effect they negotiated and signed the founding treaty, the Charter of the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation, in Yalta on 5 June 1998. The charter entered into force on 1 May 1999.
