EUROPE's leaders will gather in Lisbon today for only the second summit of the 55 member Organisation for Security and Co operation in Europe since the end of the Cold War.
Their agenda will be dominated by that fact and the painful, laborious process of building a new European security architecture of many interlinking, overlapping organisations - OSCE, NATO, WEU - for the new realities.
The Taoiseach, Mr Bruton, will speak this morning and is expected to strongly support the reinforcement of the OSCE the only security forum in which the whole of Europe and Canada and the US participate.
But Russia would like the OSCE to replace NATO as the central focus of European security, delaying, if possible for ever, the enlargement of NATO to the east. Key decisions on the timetable of NATO enlargement are due next summer.
In Budapest in 1994, Russia proposed the idea of a legally binding treaty on European security, based on the OSCE, and the focus of Lisbon was to be the tying up of conclusions on that "European Security Model".
The Russian Prime Minister, Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin, here in the place of an ill President Yeltsin, is in no doubt about what he hopes for. He told the Lisbon daily Publico the OSCE must offer an alternative to NATO, becoming a "co ordinating structure for Europe's defence bodies".
Expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) "will not contribute in any way to solving the security problems currently confronting the European continent". The Lisbon meeting "will be a unique opportunity to create a single Europe", he said.
Although willing to see the OSCE enhanced in response to Russian NATO fears, most members are unwilling to go beyond political commitments.
The illness of President Yeltsin, the absence also of President Clinton, and the uncertainty about the final destination, mean the summit will only produce a half step in the Russian direction.
A declaration is likely to commit member states to a new cooperative security system for Europe, the strengthening of the OSCE's capabilities as a forum for debate, and in the fields of early warning, preventive diplomacy, conflict resolution and post conflict demilitarisation, and the improvement of links with other security organisations.
The organisation has traditionally had strong support from neutral Ireland because of its inclusive character and emphasis on a broad definition of security specifically not defined in terms of mutual defence pacts.
The OSCE was founded in 1975 in Helsinki as the security embodiment of the "Helsinki principles" of respect for democratic values, the rule of law and mutual territorial integrity. Based in Vienna, in the last few years it has developed new instruments of early warning, conflict prevention and crisis management and appointed a High Commissioner on National Minorities.
And it is in the latter sphere that the organisation has proved its potential. The OSCE currently has conflict prevention teams in 10 zones: Bosnia Herzegovina, Chechnya, Croatia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Macedonia, Moldova, Tajikistan and Ukraine. The organisation has also provided a forum for troop reduction talks and is currently examining the possibility of extending the CFE to the whole of Europe.
The OSCE's capacity to act is strictly limited by its unanimity voting, but it does provide an inclusive security forum and a benchmarking system for human rights and minority rights that parallels that of the Council of Europe.
But to continue to do so its credibility must be untainted, and one serious stain threatens that. Administering - the Bosnian elections in September, critics say, the OSCE succumbed to international political pressure to validate Unfair polls that legitimised ethnic cleansing.
The Swiss President in Office of the OSCE, Mr Flavio Cotti, charged with certifying that the elections could be conducted, said last June that the conditions did not exist for free and fair elections but, citing "other important factors", he allowed them to proceed.
Following agreement yesterday by the Bosnian Serbs, the organisation's mandate has been extended to organise the crucial twice postponed municipal elections, now probably in June. Scrutiny of the OSCE itself is likely to be intense.
