What good is the OSCE?

I’m at the Organization for Security and Cooperation’s “Security Days” conference in Vienna (Austria, not Virginia) today.  This is an effort to open up discussion of OSCE’s future to broader than the usual governmental participation.  OSCE’s origins are in the Helsinki agreement of 1975, which at the time represented an important breach in what we termed then the Iron Curtain.  I’ll speak later in the day on reconciliation as a possible new vision for the organization, which is feeling a bit lacking in this department 24 years after the fall of the Berlin wall.

Ambassador Eoin O’Leary, representing the current chair of the OSCE, opens with emphasis on unresolved security problems and new challenges like terrorism and organized crime, which have to be resolved in an atmosphere of financial stringency.  He is doubtful an overall vision is what is needed.  OSCE needs to solve concrete problems, as it did in Kosovo recently by arranging voting by Serbs in the presidential elections.  Consensus is not always the right way to go–it leads to the lowest common denominator.

Former Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, now president of the Foreign Policy and United Nations Association of Austria, underlines the financial crisis, which has relegated security concerns to secondary priority.  There is a need to understand the added value of our security organizations.  The big problem is lack of trust.  There is the re-emergence of separate security communities in the West and the East.  The need is to focus on what unites, not divides.  There are both traditional and new, trans-national challenges.  He emphasizes the role of robots, which make it easier to start conflicts and harder to end them.

We need a bridge to future world governance, built on regional structures.  The OSCE is a natural for building trust in the Euro-atlantic space.  It needs a roadmap to 2015, when OSCE will celebrate its 40th anniversary in Helsinki.  He suggests in particular a code of conduct for state behavior in cyberspace.  He also emphasizes the importance of adapting conventional arms control to 21st century requirements.  Frozen conflicts are a big obstacle to progress in the OSCE area:  trans-Dniester is on the way to resolution, but Nagorno-Karabakh remains a problem, as does Georgia, where the OSCE mission should be deployed in the whole territory.

OSCE has done well to appoint three women as heads of mission this year.  It needs to keep its focus on pluralism and conflict resolution.  Religion is exploited in many situations where the underlying issues are really not religious.  Religion can also have a positive influence.  OSCE can play a positive role in North Africa and Afghanistan.  Mongolia is interested in joining.  Should there be an Asian Pacific version of Helsinki?

The 150 million euros that the OSCE costs represent a minimal expense.  It has lost one third of its budget during the last decade.  There is no good reason to continue in this direction:  OSCE can and should add far more value than its expenses.

That’s the end of the opening session.  Next up:  Shaping a Security Community:  Thematic and Geographic Issues Within a Comprehensive Security Agenda (where do they get so many words?).