THE GOVERNMENT’S decision to take up the chair of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 2012 represents a major challenge to Irish diplomacy and an important opportunity to project the State’s values and traditional multilateralism in international affairs. It is also a feather in the cap of the Department of Foreign Affairs and a tribute to our role in peace-keeping and the organisation itself.
In the complex overlapping architecture of European security and human rights organisations, the OSCE plays an important, little reported role championing human rights and economic links, and as a forum for discussion of mutual security concerns. A creature of 1970s cold war détente, the 56-member OSCE is the largest regional security organisation in the world. It was created as a meeting point where Russia and its “allies” could participate with the West in a range of “soft security” issues that have given the organisation its distinctive role today – from early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation, to issues like regional proliferation and border monitoring.
Intrinsic to such co-operation, known as the “Helsinki process”, was a human rights dimension which became an important benchmarking and monitoring tool for dissidents and contributed significantly to undermining the Soviet monolith. And, in the OSCE’s reinvention following the collapse of communism, it would acquire a new operational role on the ground in setting standards and tracking observance of human rights obligations and elections in the emerging democracies.
With such countries then joining the older Council of Europe, with its similar standard-setting role and Court of Human Rights, and the EU taking on roles in election monitoring and governance reform, some have questioned whether the OSCE retains a raison d’être. Others suggest that, on the contrary, it is Nato’s existence that has been called into question by the new political landscape, and last year Russia proposed a new mutual pan-European security compact based on the OSCE as an alternative to controversial Nato expansion and missile defence. The notion that such a pact might give Russia a veto on security developments in its former satellites ensured it was a non-starter.
But the OSCE remains a key pillar of co-operation and human rights in Europe, a useful regional counterpart to the UN, and with all its limitations. Ireland’s year at the helm in 2012 can be an important opportunity to play our part in strengthening those roles.