Keeping the Process Alive

As Switzerland and Serbia are preparing to take over the presidency of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in a two-year Chairmanship package for 2014 and 2015 respectively, this provides opportunity to look back into these countries’ legacies in the multilateral European security framework. The OSCE nowadays is an international institution somewhat in the shadows of the European Union, the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Coming to life during a brief period of relaxation of tensions in the Cold War during the 1970s, its predecessor, the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), however, turned out to be the central forum for East-West negotiations in Europe over the following two decades. At the time the neutral and non-aligned states (N+N), including Switzerland and former Yugoslavia, played a particular role in bridging the gaps in European security talks between the opposing military blocs of NATO/EC and Warsaw Pact/COMECON. Indeed, as this study shows, the contribution of the N+N to keeping the CSCE negotiating process alive in the early 1980s during the most critical years of crises in the later Cold War period was crucial. Although the geo-strategic and ideological context is altogether different today, there still might be some lessons to learn under what conditions European non-alliance member states can come into play to move multilateral negotiations forward. The CSCE experience with its open negotiation structure and all-inclusive thematic approach is a case in point. The study at hand meticulously traces the role of the European neutral and non-aligned states in the CSCE history beyond the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 making widespread use of previously unexplored private and public archival material and oral history sources. Its author, Thomas Fischer, who has emerged once as a young scholar from the Center for Security Studies (CSS), has established himself in the past decade as a leading international expert on the neutral and non-aligned states participation in the CSCE process.