ABSTRACT
Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022 reignited the debate over whether a chance was missed at the end of the Cold War to replace Nato and the Warsaw Pact with a new pan-European security system based on the CSCE/OSCE and therefore including Russia. If the failure of this project was a mistake it was compounded by the subsequent expansion of Nato into Russia’s former empire in Eastern Europe, deepening the rift between East and West and feeding Putin’s claim to be threatened. This chapter assesses the arguments on both sides of the debate and the reasons why the CSCE/OSCE did not fulfil the hopes attached to it.
