OSCE turns to NATO when it needs to put muscle behind diplomacy

By Udo Bergdoll

MUNICH (DPA): As the East and the West came together in the depths of the Cold War to sign an agreement which would become known as the Helsinki Final Act, nobody could have guessed how dramatically the document would change Europe within a relatively short time.

If the heads of government and state of the 35 European countries as well as those of the United States and Canada had known what they were signing up to, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) -- a fascinating example of how history is made -- would never have made it off the ground.

It started as a means of decreasing tensions on the world stage between the superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union, of limiting the nuclear and conventional arms races and of laying down the ground rules for the status quo and mutual security in Europe.

The Soviets wanted the advance they had made into the heart of Europe as a result of the World War II to be recognized and to drive the U.S. out of Western Europe. The Americans, very tentatively, were looking for some way to take forward the process of de-escalating tension which had just begun.

The West Europeans, above all the Germans, were making efforts to make the post-war international borders -- which were considered as good as unalterable at that time -- more open and therefore make the division of Germany more bearable for the people it affected. The ideas behind the conference was a bold one -- the goal of altering the status quo, piece by piece, and without being noticed.

The neutral countries and those not tied to either of the major power pacts saw themselves in the role of negotiator. The CSCE produced three so-called "baskets" or sets of recommendations which took in all the vastly differing interests of its participants from both sides of the Iron Curtain.

The first set dealt with non-aggression, the integrity of national borders, non-intervention in countries' internal affairs, peoples' right to self-determination and measures to build confidence between states. Moscow frowned on that basket.

The second basket, only marginally significant, contained recommendations for economic and scientific co-operation. The third represented a concession on the part of the Soviets and their central European Communist satellite states -- it dealt with the "human dimension". It covered contact between the peoples of a divided Europe, reuniting families, easing travel restrictions, working conditions for journalists and religious freedom.

This third basket made it possible to denounce human rights violations without the regime involved being able to suppress the information. The people behind "Charter 77" in Czechoslovakia and church groups in the former East Germany could then cite the Helsinki Final Act -- and frequently did.

The CSCE did not bring down Communism. Claiming it did would oversimplify the situation. It was less an agreement than a process -- the only forum for dialogue between the East and the West during the Cold War.

It was a framework within which a learning process could take place, eventually resulting in change. The imposition of martial law in Poland during the next meeting, the three-year-long conference in Madrid, the proclamation of martial law in Poland almost led to a complete breakdown.

Slowly at first and then more successfully, the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty between NATO and the Warsaw Pact on reducing levels of conventional weapons started to make some progress under the CSCE umbrella.

The Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, was initially outraged and claimed that proposals to allow observers to monitor military maneuvers and to report any movement of troops near borders were little more than thinly veiled attempts at espionage.

The CSCE's task had been carried out by the time the peaceful revolution had taken place successfully. It was then given the job of helping to keep Russia within the European fold and to offer the Central Asian republics which had fallen out of the Soviet economic system and landed in a political vacuum the chance of a first stop on their way to Europe.

The Charter of Paris changed the whole fabric of the process, little more than a network of non-binding conferences and documents with no effect under international law, into an organization under the wing of the United Nations with its headquarters in Vienna. In 1994, the CSCE was assigned a wider range of tasks and was renamed the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

Today, the organization has 55 members. Their task is no longer dialogue but early warning, conflict-prevention and crisis intervention. Observers are sent to the Caucasus, former Yugoslavia and Estonia on missions in its service. The OSCE is currently active in 20 different countries.

The OSCE also helps with the preparations for elections and programs for the protection of minorities. Its representatives are for the most part diplomats, military personnel, high-ranking officials or civilian experts.

It cannot threaten reprisals in cases where human rights are violated -- it has no soldiers. Its only weapons are advice, arbitration and publicity. When the time has passed for preventative diplomacy and some muscle is called for -- in Bosnia, for instance -- someone else has to step up an take on the dirty work. In Europe, that means NATO.