International Politics, 2003, 40, (75100) r 2003 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1384-5748/03 $25.00 www.palgrave-journals.

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Managing Conflict in Post-Cold War Eurasia: The Role of the OSCE in Europes Security Architecture
P. Terrence Hopmann
Department of Political Science and Watson Institute for International Studies, Box 1970, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912-1970, USA. E-mail: Philip_Hopmann@Brown.edu

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is one of the most important, but least well known, of the security institutions in the panEuropean region since the end of the Cold War. This essay argues that the OSCE has a vital role to play in providing for European security that is not supplied by any other multilateral institution NATO, the European Union, the Western European Union, the Council of Europe, or the Commonwealth of Independent States. The OSCE is the only organization that bridges the military and the human dimensions of security. It plays an especially important role in conflict prevention and in trying to seek negotiated solutions in regions that have experienced violent conflict since 1989. The OSCE is most effective when it works cooperatively with other multilateral institutions in the region, and it constitutes a necessary part of the network of interlocking institutions that have created a trans-European security regime since the end of the Cold War. International Politics (2003) 40, 75100. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800009 Keywords: OSCE; European security; conflict prevention; security regime

Introduction
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is a regional security organization, recognized as such under Chapter VIII of the United Nations Charter. Formed by the Helsinki Final Act, signed in Helsinki, Finland, on 31 July 1975, by 35 heads of state, it was known until 1995 as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE).1 Since the beginning, the CSCE has defined Europe very broadly. Its 35 original participating states2 (as well as its 55 current participating states) come from across the entire northern hemisphere, including not only all political entities on the European continent as geographically defined, but also the United States and Canada as well as the regions of the former Soviet Union, extending through the Far Eastern portions of the Russian Federation and the Central Asian states that emerged after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Therefore,

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OSCE insiders often refer to Europe as extending from Vancouver to Vladivostok the long way around. The CSCE was the only regional security organization to bridge the East West divide during the Cold War, and this history has given it a unique role to play in the international relations of the European region since the Cold War came to an end in 1989. From the time negotiations opened near Helsinki in 1973, the CSCE established a set of normative principles to guide security relations among European states. These principles played an important role in undermining the influence of authoritarian regimes in communist countries during the Cold War (Thomas, 2001), and they have played an equally important role in defining the guiding principles of security in post-Cold War Eurasia. In addition, the Helsinki Final Act focused on three substantive areas of activity: (1) confidence-building measures in the realm of military policy, (2) cooperation in economic, scientific and technical spheres, and (3) cooperation in activities involving the human dimension of security, including individual human rights and the rights of persons belonging to minorities groups. Therefore, the OSCE has been unique because it formally links three dimensions of security usually dealt with by separate institutions: military security, economic well-being, and humanitarian principles. In practice, as the organization has evolved, the economic dimension has declined in relative importance, as other institutions such as the European Union have assumed a primary role in this field. However, the OSCE is still the only major European security organization that links the military and human dimensions of security at the core of its guiding principles. At the same time, the OSCE is often referred to as a soft security organization, because it is based on a political agreement rather than a formal treaty and also because it does not have at its immediate disposal military forces to implement its decisions. To carry out its decisions, therefore, it depends heavily upon the persuasive powers of its participating states, on the diplomatic skills of its officials and the professional staff of its missions and field activities, and on cooperation with other institutions that do have access to instruments of force (Adler, 1998). To be sure, in 1992 the CSCE Helsinki Summit adopted provisions to set up peacekeeping operations with a mandate from the CSCE, but carried out in cooperation with multilateral military alliances, such as NATO, the Western European Union (WEU), and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) the military organization in which some former Soviet states loosely cooperate. To date, the OSCE has not, however, engaged in any formal peacekeeping operation, although a High Level Planning Group has been created to plan for possible peacekeeping. If a political settlement to the conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan (see below) is achieved under OSCE
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auspices, a peacekeeping force might be created to verify and enforce compliance with it. However, the OSCE has worked closely with the NATO-led peacekeeping forces in both Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, and it has cooperated with CIS peacekeeping forces (mostly consisting of Russian troops) in the Republic of Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan. In addition, the OSCE has been responsible for training and monitoring the work of civilian police forces in locations such as Croatia and Kosovo. These cases notwithstanding, it is clear that OSCEs comparative advantage lies in the diplomatic, political, and humanitarian dimensions of security rather than in the military domain. That is, it focuses more on education, modeling, and persuasion than on the use of force to accomplish its mission. The bonds among OSCE participating states are based solely on a series of politically binding agreements rather than legal treaties. As a consequence, the OSCE depends heavily upon obtaining political consensus among its participating states, and it operates largely with the consent of those states on whose territory it carries out its field activities. This requires its representatives to exercise a great deal of subtle political discretion, as no state is legally required to have an OSCE mission operate on its territory, and missions may be removed if they fail to retain the support of those states where they operate. In spite of this limitation, the political power of an organization of 55 states, including some of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world, has given the OSCE far greater access to operate in regions of conflict than might have been expected on the basis of its limited mandate. While the organization operates largely on the basis of consensus, it has also adopted a procedure known as consensus minus one in which it may act without the consent of one of its participating states if that state is found to be guilty of flagrant violations of the commitments undertaken as part of its participation in the OSCE (1999, 2829). Nonetheless, OSCE officials and representatives are often limited in their ability to speak out about or take action against what many perceive to be violations of the organizations norms, and this often leads its critics to accuse the OSCE of failing to meet its responsibilities to uphold the highest normative standards. However, the reality of a large, multilateral organization representing a wide range of values and viewpoints is that the OSCE and its representatives must often speak and act cautiously in an effort to minimize conflict among its many diverse participating states. This does not mean, however, that the OSCE operates on the basis of a set of minimum common denominator principles and policies. Consistent with its founding political principles, the OSCE has enlarged and changed its functions significantly since the Cold War came to an end in 1989. Not only has the organization become more deeply institutionalized during this period, but it
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has also extended its normative base to include the basic principles of liberal democracy and the rule of law. In addition, it has assumed a wide variety of new functions in many of the troubled regions that have emerged in Europe and Eurasia (the former Soviet regions) after the collapse of communist regimes and the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. These have included especially the establishment of Missions of Long Duration and other offices and assistance groups currently in 19 countries and regions where violence has threatened to break out or where it has actually occurred (http://www.osce.org/field_activities/).3 In light of the expanded normative foundation of the OSCE, these missions have also played an active role in assisting transitional states to build democratic institutions and practices, respect for human rights and the rights of persons belonging to minorities, and a culture that recognizes the importance of the rule of law and legal process rather than violence as the primary means for resolving political differences. This essay has two purposes: The first seeks to illustrate the wide variety of functions and activities that OSCE Missions and Field Activities have performed over the past decade. These examples are intended to show the capability of the OSCE to play a significant, if low-profile role in the management of many conflicts that have appeared on the territory of two collapsed, multinational states, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The second seeks to evaluate the place of the OSCE within the overall context of European security institutions, seeking to identify its comparative advantages and weaknesses, and to suggest ways in which it may complement the work of other institutions without either competing with them or duplicating effort.

The Conflict Management Functions of the OSCE Since 1992

All OSCE missions are different, and their structure and function depend on the particular mandate for every mission. The size of missions varies from only a few individuals to about 300 persons. Larger missions may include specialists on issues such as democratization, election monitoring, rule of law, human rights, rights of persons belonging to minorities, freedom of the media, economic and environmental affairs, and conflict resolution. Overall mission activity is coordinated by the Conflict Prevention Center, which in turn is part of the OSCE Secretariat located in Vienna. Missions receive their mandates from the OSCE Permanent Council (PC) in Vienna and are responsible for reporting to the PC about their activities and accomplishments. Many of the specialized staff members may also coordinate their work closely with the corresponding OSCE organ. Thus, for example, specialists in
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democratization, elections, and rule of law work with the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR); specialists in human rights and rights of persons belonging to minorities coordinate with the High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM); specialists on media work closely with the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media; economic and environmental specialists work with the Coordinator of OSCE Economic and Environmental Activities; and conflict resolution specialists function in tandem with the Conflict Prevention Center.4 A Head of Mission (HoM) serves as the chief officer of each mission, a position normally held by a senior diplomat seconded by a participating state. Larger missions may also have a Deputy HoM. Missions also frequently have an administrative officer and a public affairs officer, as well as a staff of translators, usually furnished by the host country. The specialized staff varies in size and function according to the mandate of each particular mission. I have grouped the OSCE field missions and offices into five major categories according to their primary activity. However, most missions perform multiple tasks, although a few have very specific mandates. For example, the majority of missions have some individuals working on issues such as democratization and elections, whereas some other functions depend almost entirely on the details of the specific mandate. For analytical purposes, I have emphasized the primary and unique functions called for in the mandates for each mission, grouped into the following five categories: (1) Long-term conflict prevention through democratization, strengthening human rights, rule of law, and rights of persons belonging to minorities. (2) Monitoring, early warning, and conflict prevention to head off incipient violence. (3) Mediation during the negotiation of cease-fires in ongoing conflicts. (4) Preventing the re-ignition of violence and assisting the resolution of underlying issues in conflict situations. (5) Post-conflict security-building. Below I summarize each of these activities and illustrate with a few cases how the OSCE has performed each of these conflict management functions.5 Long-term Conflict Prevention The proposition that democracies generally do not go to war with other democracies has become a widely accepted finding of recent empirical research; further, intra-state or civil conflicts are less likely to occur in societies that have well-established procedures for the nonviolent resolution of conflicts of interest among their citizens (Russett and Oneal, 2001, Chapter 1). Therefore, the
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establishment of democratic processes, the creation of governments of laws and not of individuals, and processes to integrate persons belonging to minorities fully into the institutions of the state are together the best long-run guarantors of peace. Examples of democratization tasks include the missions to Estonia and Latvia, where the OSCE played a significant role on behalf of large minorities of ethnic Russians denied citizenship rights in these Baltic States; indeed, these missions were sufficiently successful that they were closed down at the end of 2001. Further, the OSCE has embarked since 1998 upon an effort to defend civil society in Belarus against an authoritarian government that has reversed that countrys early post-Soviet progress in the field of democratization. Although it is constantly threatened with expulsion, the OSCE Advisory and Monitoring Group in Belarus has played a vital role in providing international protection for non-governmental organizations and a severely restricted political opposition. Problems of democratization have also arisen in the five Central Asian states that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union with strong leaders in charge of centralized and authoritarian regimes. Therefore, in 1995 an OSCE Liaison Office in Central Asia was established in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. This effort was enlarged in 1998 with the establishment of OSCE centers in the capitals of three other Central Asian republics: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan. (The fifth Central Asian state, Tajikistan, has a full-scale OSCE mission operating on its territory with a more specific mandate in the field of conflict management that will be discussed below.) The focus of OSCE efforts in Central Asia has been on stimulating education about democratization and human dimension issues. In each case, numerous seminars have been organized with local political elites and NGOs in which there are outside specialists on topics such as criminality and drug trafficking, attracting foreign investment, regional environmental problems, sustainable development, and security and confidence-building measures among ethnic communities and with neighboring states. In addition, the OSCE has worked closely with local universities and other educational institutions to try to institutionalize these topics in their curriculum (http:// www.osce.org/almaty/).6 In all of these efforts, it is important to realize that democratization is an extremely difficult and long-term task even in the best of circumstances. Democracy is inherently fragile in all transitional societies, and more immediate measures of conflict prevention and resolution will frequently be required in order to avoid an outbreak of violence that might set back the democratization process by a decade or more. The linkage of security to political and humanitarian concerns epitomizes the special role that the OSCE missions have come to play in societies undergoing political transformation since the collapse of communism.
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Prevention of Violent Outcomes in Potential Conflict Situations A major function of the OSCE has been to prevent Humpty Dumpty from falling off his wall. The organizations record in this case is mixed. However, the OSCE has often been blamed unfairly for failing to prevent conflicts. Too often OSCE inaction was the result of the refusal by one or more of its participating states to take action recommended by OSCE mission heads or other officials such as the High Commissioner on National Minorities, that is, by the failure to obtain the consensus that is required to take decisive action. Further, in the early post-Cold War years the OSCE did not have a sufficient structural capacity to respond to brewing conflicts. Thus, the conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were well underway by the time the first OSCE mission of long duration was sent into the field in late 1992, following the Helsinki Follow-on Meeting that summer. In the case of Kosovo, the OSCE was hamstrung by the fact that it had suspended the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from participation in May 1992. Although there were many good reasons for this action, it also had the perverse effect of preventing the OSCE from having any access on the ground in the Kosovo region until tensions had passed the point of no return. By the time the United States, led by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, persuaded the parties to accept an OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission on the ground in October 1998, it was too late to realize a peaceful resolution of the conflict. A similar decision a year or more earlier, however, might have prevented the bloody war and subsequent international occupation of Kosovo, although of course it is always impossible to prove what might have happened if.... However, it is very clear that the OSCE, and particularly the special representative of the Chairman-in-Office, Ambassador Max van der Stoel, provided substantial early warning of impending disaster in Kosovo.7 It was the failure of key participating states including the United States to take early action in the form of active diplomacy prior to late 1998 that permitted the outcome in Kosovo to be so violent and the subsequent task of reconstruction to be so enormous. Looking at the other side of the coin, the OSCE has contributed to the successful resolution of potentially violent conflicts in several regions of Eurasia. Perhaps most notable is the role played by the OSCE in mediating between nationalistic ethnic Russian politicians in Crimea and the central government of Ukraine. Such action was critical in reaching a solution to a volatile conflict that could have easily exploded into violence. Russian nationalists wanted to separate Crimea from Ukraine and perhaps return it to its pre-1954 status as a part of the Russian Federation, while the Ukrainian government was prepared to do anything necessary to prevent this from happening.8 Special credit here goes to the OSCEs first High Commissioner on National Minorities, Ambassador Max van der Stoel, whose continuing
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intercession using problem-solving workshops, frequently referred to as seminar diplomacy, played a major role in promoting a nonviolent outcome in this potentially grave situation.9 Ambassador van der Stoels work was also backed up by continuous efforts of the OSCE mission members in both Kyiv and Simferopol to broker a solution guaranteeing substantial Crimean autonomy while preserving the territorial integrity of Ukraine. This effort was especially important due to the strategic significance of the region. A war in the mid-1990s between Russia and Ukraine would have created a severe international crisis that would have affected the vital interests of the entire West, including the United States. Even if handling the Crimean dispute were the only accomplishment of the OSCE in the decade of the 1990s, this alone was worth all of the effort and resources that have been put into the entire organization by the United States and its European allies. This is, of course, not the only significant accomplishment of the OSCE during the 1990s. At least until 2001, the OSCE mission to Skopje (the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) played an instrumental role in preventing that former Yugoslav republic from falling into the kind of violence that has swept across Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo. Of course, the results of those efforts were placed in doubt as violence expanded in regions of Macedonia inhabited by large ethnic Albanian populations throughout 2001. Several factors largely beyond the control of the OSCE conspired to push the situation in Macedonia toward the brink of violence. First, the government of Albania collapsed in 1997, followed by looting of most light weapons and munitions from army storehouses weapons that made their way into Kosovo and subsequently into Macedonia. Another factor was the removal of UNPREDEP from the northern border regions when the Chinese, reacting negatively to Skopjes recognition of Taiwan, vetoed continuation of the UN force. Finally, one saw growing ambitions of some ethnic Albanian politicians to follow up their success in Kosovo with a similar effort to split heavily Albanian-populated regions of Macedonia off from the rest of the country, perhaps eventually creating a greater Albania. Fear that violence was imminent, however, led to a rise in nationalism among the Macedonia majority and greater restrictions on minorities, especially Albanians. At the same time, some parts of the Albanian minority, in the aftermath of the defeat of Serbian forces in neighboring Kosovo, began to advocate separation from Macedonia and joining with Kosovo and Albania. Their separatist ambitions were fueled by a ready availability of weapons that crossed the border from neighboring Kosovo. As a result, violence flared up in the spring of 2001 between Albanians near the border areas and the Macedonian armed forces. After a cease-fire was negotiated in the Ohrid Framework Agreement of August 13, 2001, several units of NATO troops
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entered Macedonia to disarm the parties, following which the armed forces were withdrawn. At the same time, the OSCE enlarged its mission in Macedonia to a total of 210 unarmed monitors, protected by some 1000 soldiers from France, Germany, and Italy (http:// www.osce.org/publications/ survey/survey01.htm). While its mandate remained basically unchanged, the necessity for intensive conflict prevention at the local level had been clearly indicated by the outbreak of violence and the increased radicalization of the two communities that lay behind the violence. Recent events in Macedonia have seriously challenged what was previously regarded as one of the more successful preventive diplomacy missions. Nonetheless, the OSCE Spillover Monitoring Mission in Macedonia, with some timely help from NATO and the continued engagement of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, had managed by the middle of 2002 to head off the escalation of violence and to prevent Macedonia from proceeding down the violent path that had overtaken Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.10 Cease-fire Mediation Once violence breaks out in a country, the OSCE role has generally been limited. One exception, however, was the first war in Chechnya that started with the Russian military assault in December 1994. Shortly afterwards the OSCE PC created the OSCE Assistance Group to Chechnya, which set up operation in Grozny in 1995. Russia, as a country that still clings to its selfimage as a great power, was of course reluctant to permit any presence by a multilateral organization on its soil. Therefore, it was somewhat surprising when the Russian government permitted a small OSCE assistance group to be established in the very vortex of the fighting. Under the able leadership of the second HoM, Ambassador Tim Guldimann of Switzerland, the OSCE expanded its activity beyond monitoring human rights violations and war crimes and assumed a role as an active mediator between the Chechen leaders and officials in Moscow. Guldimanns shuttle diplomacy, involving numerous trips between Grozny and Moscow, was largely responsible for setting up the meeting at Khasavyurt between Alexander Lebed and Zelimkhan Yanderbiev that brought an end to fighting and a withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya in August 1996 (Hopmann, 2000b). In January 1997, the OSCE assumed the major role in preparing, conducting, and monitoring the presidential elections in Chechnya, in which Aslan Maskhadov was elected. Nevertheless, the internal situation in Chechnya quickly degenerated into anarchy, with frequent violence directed at outsiders, even those representing international humanitarian organizations. This was followed by a renewal of Russian military action against Chechnya in
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1999, after the OSCE Assistance Group had moved its offices to Moscow owing to fear about the safety of mission members if they remained in Chechnya. Tragically, this also resulted in a decline of OSCE influence over the parties, and extensive efforts to re-establish a mediating role for the OSCE, undertaken at the Istanbul Summit in November 1999 by the United States and several other countries, failed to bring results; indeed, only in June 2001 did the OSCE Assistance Group finally return to Chechnya. This tragic outcome, however, should not cause us to overlook completely the potential for the OSCE to play an important mediating role, even in the midst of violent conflict, as it did in Chechnya in 19951996. Conflict Resolution after a Cease-fire Since the major OSCE conflict prevention functions were created after the spate of post-Cold War violence in the early 1990s, a major focus for OSCE missions has been the effort to broker longer-term resolution of the conflicts that had produced the previous chain of violence. In addition, the OSCE has sought to prevent the renewal of violence in situations where serious tensions remain. This has been the major focus of the OSCE missions in Moldova (regarding Transdniestria), Georgia (especially regarding South Ossetia and, to a lesser degree, Abkhazia where the UN has taken the lead role), Tajikistan, and the so-called Minsk Group dealing with the conflict in NagornoKarabakh. In this area, the OSCE record is clearly mixed, and there is probably no single aspect of the work of the OSCE where performance has fallen so short of aspirations. On the positive side of the ledger, in none of these regions has large-scale violence reappeared since the OSCE missions entered. In most cases, the OSCE has played a useful role in monitoring the performance of peacekeeping forces, mostly from Russia, operating under a CIS umbrella. In addition, OSCE activities in democratization, human rights, the rule of law, refugee resettlement, and support for the rights of persons belonging to minorities have assisted local authorities in keeping tensions below the boiling point. Perhaps of greatest importance, in each case the OSCE has played a third-party role in keeping lines of communications open and negotiations underway between former belligerent factions to try to resolve some of the important issues underlying these conflicts. Most of these conflicts have become frozen in place: there is no settlement, but also no return to mass violence. These outcomes are no small accomplishment, but they also leave open the potential for the OSCE to improve its effectiveness at managing negotiations to enhance its ability to bring about long-term settlement of frozen conflicts so that life in these divided states may return to some semblance of normalcy.
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Post-conflict Reconstruction and Security-building After episodes of significant violence, social relations within society are usually badly broken. Hatred, anger, and the desire for revenge become dominant emotions that often reinforce the differences that produced conflict in the first place. Rebuilding war-torn societies is often a long and difficult task.11 It would not be appropriate to expect Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks, for example, to forget about their long and bitter struggle in a few short years. Thus, one of the major challenges facing the OSCE has been to try to assist societies torn by violent conflict in their efforts to rebuild. NATO and other multinational forces can help by providing security, both for international personnel and to prevent opposing sides from resuming violence. The EU and other international financial institutions can assist by contributing desperately needed economic aid to rebuild infrastructure and jump-start economies so that they can begin to grow on their own and thus reduce the poverty that so often becomes a breeding ground for violence. However, in virtually all cases of violence in the Eurasian region, the primary responsibility for reconstructing political institutions and developing a democratic political framework for resolving differences peacefully the most difficult task these regions face has fallen overwhelmingly on the OSCE. This activity has been the major focus of some of the largest of the OSCE missions, including the missions in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo. It has also been the primary task of the OSCE presence in Albania, as well as an important function of the missions in Georgia and Moldova (http:// www.osce.org/moldova/; http://www.osce.org/georgia/; http://www.osce.org/albania/). In many ways, OSCE endeavors in this category resemble those of long-term democracy-building activities; only here these activities face the especially difficult challenge of operating in a post-conflict situation. OSCEs close cooperation with other security institutions, especially with the UN, NATO, and the EU, is particularly necessary in these regions. In the effort to revive these war-torn societies, the OSCE cannot succeed alone, but its contribution is nonetheless essential to the successful accomplishment of this task.

Place of the OSCE in the Context of European Security Institutions

There are a plethora of multilateral institutions working in the field of European security since the end of the Cold War. Some of these overlap at least in part with the OSCE in membership and functions; some even compete with the OSCE to play a prominent role in conflict management in the region. Others cooperate closely with the OSCE in performing their functions, and the coordinated effort to maintain security in the fragile regions of Southeastern Europe and post-Soviet Eurasia. Ideally each institution should assume
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specialized functions within an overall division of labor, so that all major functions required to maintain security in this region are being performed by one or another institution with a minimum of overlap and competition. Therefore, it is important to understand what functions can be performed best by the OSCE and its missions, what may be better accomplished by other institutions, and how the OSCE and other institutions may coordinate their work to achieve their common objectives. Unfortunately, most of the security institutions that existed in Europe when the communist regimes collapsed were largely unprepared to deal with the new security situation. Most were plagued in one way or another by their Cold War composition or mission. The only surviving pan-European institution dealing with issues of security was the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). As a consequence, the OSCE holds a special status in the overall European security architecture. No other institution has the same universal participation of all of the states in the region; no other institution has so closely linked the human dimension of security with politicalmilitary foundations of security. No other institution at the regional level has a similar mandate to work in the field of conflict management, and no other organization has the capacity to engage in these activities on a scope comparable to that of the OSCE. All of these factors provide a very central role for the OSCE in the European security framework. This section summarizes briefly the major structures and functions of the multilateral institutions that frequently operate in close proximity to OSCE missions. In each case, areas of overlap are identified, emphasizing examples of specific contexts in which the OSCE and other institutions operate side-by-side. I will emphasize the areas where different institutions frequently coordinate their work with the OSCE to create a clear division of labor that enables all essential functions to be carried out with a minimum of duplication of effort and competition, as well as some instances in which cooperation thus far is less than might have been hoped for. I will thereby identify those activities where the OSCE has a clear comparative advantage relative to other institutions. I will also suggest ways in which the OSCE can work effectively in tandem with other institutions to enhance its effectiveness. United Nations The United Nations institutionally was very greatly affected by the end of the Cold War, especially in the realm of security where the threat of a veto by one or more of the permanent members was no longer a major hindrance to effective action in response to threats to security anywhere in the world. One of the major new UN activities was in the field of preventive diplomacy, the same area in which the OSCE sought to establish its credentials within the Eurasian
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region. UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali incorporated the basic concepts of preventive diplomacy in his 1992 statement entitled An Agenda for Peace. In the period since the end of the Cold War, beginning with Secretary General Boutros-Ghali, preventive diplomacy has been identified as a principal area of activity for the UN Secretary General and his staff of special emissaries. Thus, the function of conflict prevention has usually been performed by senior officials of the UN based in New York or Geneva rather than by missions permanently stationed in the field, as has generally been the case for OSCE activity in the field of conflict prevention. The UN Secretary General frequently offers his good offices as a framework for conciliation among parties to a dispute. As an eminent person of wide international esteem, the Secretary General or one of his special representatives is often able to enter into conflict situations, to urge the parties to find a settlement, and to provide a third-party framework within which negotiations may take place. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague also offers a framework for the judicial settlement of conflicts that have a significant legal foundation, but it only deals with conflicts between states. The ICJ thus offers an opportunity for states to settle their differences through conciliation by the court or through direct arbitration, in which the court makes a ruling favor of one party or the other. However, many UN members, including the United States, have refused to accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ, so that most cases that appear before the court are entered voluntarily by states seeking a peaceful resolution of their differences. The United Nations, like the OSCE, has extensive machinery in areas such as human rights, especially focused around the UN Commission on Human Rights, supplemented in 1993 by the creation of a High Commissioner for Human Rights (http://www.unhchr.ch/). Further, a SubCommission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities has recently been established. The UNs Department of Political Affairs includes an Election Assistance Unit, which helps states to conduct and monitor national elections. And the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) plays an active role in providing for the basic needs of refugees, especially refugees escaping from regions experiencing violence. UNHCR also plays an active role in assisting the return of refugees to their homes in the aftermath of violence or natural disasters. Thus, OSCE field missions frequently find that they are working in close proximity to representatives of UNHCR. In short, many of the functions that have been created in the OSCE, particularly since 1990, overlap and even duplicate functions that are also fulfilled by organs of the United Nations. This naturally raises the question about when the UN is most likely to be more effective versus
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those occasions when the OSCE role should take precedence in dealing with particular threats to international peace and security. In general, the basic principle has been that efforts to deal with threats to the peace should originate at the regional level before coming to the UN, but efforts to take enforcement action should only be launched with specific authorization by the UN Security Council. Occasionally, the OSCE has entered into potential conflict situations without explicit authorization from the UN. For example, when a Chinese veto forced the withdrawal of UNPREDEP forces deployed under a UN mandate in Macedonia, the OSCE was able to enlarge its mission on the ground in partial compensation. However, in general the OSCE has sought to obtain UN authorization for all of its major activities. At the same time, the OSCE has often found that it can play a useful role by relieving an overburdened UN from having to assume too many responsibilities for peace maintenance in Europe, allowing it to concentrate more on other areas without such an effective regional organization, including the Great Lakes region of Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America. There have been occasional tensions on the ground when both the UN and the OSCE have assumed responsibility for preventive diplomacy and mediation of ongoing disputes. These conflicts have been reduced over the years, however, as the two institutions increasingly have negotiated a mutually acceptable division of labor. For example, within the Republic of Georgia, the UN has assumed primary responsibility for monitoring Russian (formally CIS) peacekeepers along the de facto border between Georgia and Abkhazia and for assisting the negotiations between the parties to try to find a peaceful resolution for their differences. At the same time, the OSCE has taken the lead role in performing the same functions between Georgia and the breakaway region of South Ossetia. They also share office facilities in the same compound in Tbilisi and often interact cooperatively on the ground. At the Budapest Summit in 1994, several governments argued for an OSCE first policy with respect to disputes arising within the OSCE region, in part to relieve the UN of additional burdens. However, this effort was opposed by several major participating states, and indeed the limited role that the OSCE has assumed with its largest missions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo has already stretched the OSCE, operating as it does with a small budget and limited staff (http://www.osce.org/general/budget/). Therefore, some mutual division of labor between the global and regional organizations will certainly continue to be necessary in the future. These efforts, however, must be undertaken cooperatively so that neither institution, both strapped for cash and for available personnel, wastes valuable resources in a duplication of effort or, even worse, by competing to garner the limelight in any particular region experiencing tensions and conflict.
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North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) NATO was founded in 1949, in the early years of the Cold War, as a collective defense institution, as defined in Article 51 of the UN Charter. The essence of the NATO Treaty is found in Article 5, which declares that an attack against any member of the alliance shall be considered an attack against them all, and that they may then decide to take collective action, including the use of force, in their defense against the act of aggression. With the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, NATO remained the only significant multilateral military organization in Europe by the end of 1991. Since 1991, NATO has tried nobly to reconfigure itself to meet the demands of the new security situation in Europe. It has abandoned virtually wholesale its previous military doctrine, although the new doctrine remains intentionally somewhat ambiguous. Its doctrine emphasizes crisis management and peacekeeping, and focuses less than in the past on collective defense. NATOs major transformation, however, has been visible in two principal areas. First, NATOs outreach to its former adversaries and previously neutral and non-aligned countries in Europe through the Partnership-for-Peace (PfP) and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) has linked the alliance to its former adversaries in the East, as well as the previously neutral and nonaligned states of the continent, to the Western alliance. The North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC), created in 1991, developed close consultation between NATO and the governments of the former Warsaw Pact and former Soviet states, especially in an effort to encourage them to reform military doctrine and practice and to try to instill respect for the Western concept of civilian, democratic control over armed forces. In 1997 the NACC was replaced by the EAPC, composed of 44 countries from throughout the entire region, to provide for broad consultations among all Eurasian states on the military dimensions of security. The PfP program, begun in 1994, has essentially permitted all of the states of Eurasia that wished to participate to join in a program of integrated military activities. Individualized programs with specific former communist states have included joint exercises, joint participation in the Stabilization Force (SFOR) units in Bosnia, and other military activities at the operational as well as the political level. Second, NATO has begun to engage for the first time in out-of-area activities including peacekeeping and peace enforcement, often alongside its new partners within the EAPC. In 1998 NATO was enlarged to include for the first time three former members of the Warsaw Pact, namely Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. This enlargement was generally opposed by Russia and to a lesser degree by other neighboring OSCE states including Belarus and Ukraine. In partial compensation, NATO negotiated the NATO-Russia Founding Act and the NATO-Ukraine Charter in 1997, establishing close
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cooperative relationships between NATO and the two most powerful postSoviet states. Relations between these countries and NATO have sometimes been tense, however, especially as NATO agreed to another round of enlargement in 2002 that invited Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The last three are especially controversial in Russia since they bring into the Western alliance not only former Warsaw Pact states, but three former republics of the USSR. In addition to its connections eastward, NATO has increasingly trained its troops and developed logistical structures to support peacekeeping and other similar functions out of area in response to mandates that in principle should be granted by other, more political organizations such as the United Nations or the OSCE. Thus NATO undertook major responsibilities in BosniaHerzegovina to enforce the provisions of the Dayton Peace Accords, along with some 20 non-member countries, including 16 PfP participants and four additional countries from outside the OSCE region. Since 1999, KFOR in Kosovo has consisted of a similar deployment, in which the bulk of the troops came from NATO countries, but many PfP participants also sent troops and supporting equipment. In spite of these many important changes, NATO has thus far failed to escape fully from its Cold War legacy, and the residue of that past limits its ability to play a dominant role in Eurasian security into the 21st century for four primary reasons. First, NATO is still seen by some members of the public and politicians, especially in the East, as one of the two Cold War military alliances, and that image is unlikely to change entirely. Of course, the decision by NATO to grant Russia a seat in the NATO-Russia Council in May 2002, albeit without a veto over issues ranging from membership to decisions about the use of force, represented a major gesture by the Atlantic alliance towards its former enemy. However, this will inevitably be viewed by many skeptics as a way of buying Russias acquiescence in the eastward enlargement of NATO, at least into the Baltic States. Second, in spite of the enlargement of the alliance and of the many activities through which non-members may participate in NATO activities, especially the creation of the NATO-Russia Council in May 2002, the alliance essentially remains a structure dominated by Western Europe and the United States. While Russia now has a seat at the NATO table, it still lacks direct influence over the most important security decisions taken by the Alliance. Indeed, for the foreseeable future NATO will inevitably be an organization whose political decisions are taken by an important, but limited subset of European and North American states. NATO thus falls far short of being a truly pan-Eurasian security structure. Furthermore, US hegemony within the Alliance is resisted by many politicians in Russia and other former Soviet states, and these individuals tend to view institutions such as the OSCE, which are less
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completely dominated by the United States, as being more legitimate than NATO as a basis for cooperation on threats to regional security in Europe. Third, at its core NATO is still essentially a military organization that has taken on some important, but still secondary, political, scientific, and economic tasks. For the most part, however, its view of security is one-dimensional, focusing primarily on military security, and it has very little capacity to deal with some of the most important underlying causes of violence in post-Cold War Eurasia, which are primarily political, social, ethnic, economic, and even environmental in nature. Fourth, contrary to some initial assurances given to Russia and other postSoviet states, NATO undertook military action in Kosovo in March 1999 without authorization from either the UN or the OSCE. This especially fueled Russian resentment, as Russia had traditionally been sympathetic to the Serb cause. Thus action was taken on an important security issue where Russia had significant perceived interests without authorization from a multilateral institution in which Russia participates and without the consultation prescribed in the NATO-Russia Founding Act. For these reasons, especially, Russia began to return to a theme that it had emphasized in the early post-Cold War period, namely that the OSCE with its broad membership, not NATO, should become the leading institution to promote European peace and security broadly. At the same time, Western leaders continued to place increasing confidence in NATO rather than the OSCE because of the former organizations ability to employ force when necessary to preserve the peace. The different views of the United States and Russia over the relative priority accorded to NATO versus the OSCE underlie many of the tensions that occasionally appear in the field where the two organizations operate side-byside. At the same time, NATOs major functions clearly do not overlap with the OSCEs to the same extent as in the case with the United Nations. The OSCE has no access to instruments of coercion except through those that can be provided by the participating states, or military organizations in which they participate, such as NATO and the Tashkent group from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Therefore, when matters go beyond preventive diplomacy, peaceful resolution of disputes, and cooperative security, it may be necessary to call on NATO. On the other hand, that NATO is both a military organization and excludes certain key states from participation means that many political functions required to enhance security and cooperation cannot be performed by NATO, at least nowhere as well as they can be performed by the OSCE. Even though NATOs political functions are limited, especially in the area of conflict prevention, cooperation between NATO and the OSCE in BosniaHerzegovina represents a model that may well be emulated elsewhere. In this
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instance, the OSCE has assumed a lead role in virtually all political and arms control measures, whereas NATO has taken the lead in peace enforcement. NATO cannot run elections, promote human rights, assure freedom of the media, assist in the repatriation of refugees, or engage in many of the other activities undertaken by the OSCE Mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Were it not for the OSCE presence, therefore, there would be little improvement in the political conditions which necessitated the IFOR/SFOR deployment in the first place and hence no possibility for an eventual military withdrawal. On the other hand, given the tensions and insecurity that existed in BosniaHerzegovina after the war, it would have been impossible for unarmed OSCE mission officers to fulfil their mandate without the security provided by IFOR and SFOR troops. Therefore, the joint OSCE and NATO missions in Bosnia illustrate effectively the principle that peace and security can be built best when institutions each specialize in doing what they can do most effectively, dividing the labor among themselves, and cooperating to assure that all essential tasks are fulfilled with a minimum of overlap and duplication of effort. The Western European Union (WEU) The WEU was created in 1948 by the Brussels Treaty, and it served as a vehicle through which Western European states managed the rearmament of West Germany in 1954. At that time its membership consisted of Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, and West Germany. During the Cold War, it played only a minor role, mostly reassuring Germanys neighbors that it would never again become a threat to their security. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the WEU has become the focal point for a newly emerging European Security and Defense Identity (ESDI). Beginning with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1991, the WEU has increasingly become the focus for military cooperation among most of the Western European members of NATO, and the possibility that the WEU might become the military arm of the EU and its emerging Common Foreign and Security Policy has gained widespread support from many members of the European Union. The so-called Petersberg Declaration issued in 1992 following a meeting of the WEU Council of Ministers proclaimed that the WEU might authorize, or even undertake directly, humanitarian and rescue missions in zones of conflict, peacekeeping, and even active combat as part of a peacemaking operation. Indeed, the government of France argued that these functions ought to be handled solely by the WEU in response to crises appearing in Europe, while NATO should be restricted solely to Article 5 missions of collective defense. Other WEU members resisted this move, however, in large part because of the strong objections raised by the United States.
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Nonetheless, the WEU has undertaken several military missions in recent years under the mandate of other international organizations, including the deployment of naval forces in the Adriatic and the Danube to enforce economic sanctions against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). Similarly, most of its members supported Italy when they created a coalition of the willing to send a small military force to Albania following the collapse of its government in 1997. Similarly, the WEU, under OSCE auspices, deployed a Multinational Advisory Police Force to Albania to provide information, advice, and training to Albanian police forces (http://intserv.weu.int/). The United States has expressed its concern about the WEU becoming too much of an independent European voice within NATO due to its potential for undermining US leadership of the alliance. Several Western European countries with strong ties to the United States have supported this view. Therefore, although the WEU has been significantly reinvigorated in recent years, it is unlikely to play a major, independent role in European security affairs for the immediate future. The CIS In the East, the CIS formed a quasi-military alliance under the Tashkent Treaty signed in 1992. However, many of the most important former Soviet states besides Russia, including the so-called GUUAM group (Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Moldova), have refused to join this organization. Although it has nominally been utilized for several peacekeeping operations on former Soviet territory, in reality these operations, like the Tashkent group itself, are largely an instrument of Russian policy in which the other member states have thus far played only a minimal role, if any. Although some CIS forces have supplemented Russian troops along the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, elsewhere in the region peacekeeping operations have been composed almost exclusively of Russian forces. Therefore, the CIS, like the WEU, can at best play a minor operational role under mandates from other, more politically significant multilateral organizations. The European Union (EU) Another major contender for a central role in European security is the EU. The EU first began to move into the area of foreign and security policy in the early 1990s, with an agreement on a Common Foreign and Security Policy reached as part of the 1991 Maastricht Treaty. This agreement was largely a product of joint Franco-German efforts to stimulate deeper integration among the EU member states across a wide range of activities, including the realm of foreign
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policy. The actual formulation at Maastricht, however, was quite vague, stressing primarily the desire of the European states to move towards a joint policy in matters of foreign affairs and defense. No operational content was decided and no new institutional structures were created to implement this new policy, which in fact has largely been the responsibility of the government holding the EU chair at any particular moment in time. The limitations of the Common Foreign and Security Policy in its early years were perhaps best indicated by the failure of the EU to agree upon any common response to the multiple crises in the former Yugoslavia beginning in 1991, especially in Bosnia, in the absence of clear American leadership as the crisis was developing (Woodward, 1995, Chapter 6). Since that time, the common foreign policy has been implemented more in a procedural context; for example, the EU generally makes joint statements about various international issues, for example, in the OSCE Permanent Council. However, to date, the EU has taken only limited operational action in foreign or defense policy. The EU has several major drawbacks that hinder its ability to take a leading role in providing security for Europe in the post-Cold War period. First, its membership is limited mostly to states in Western Europe, and the United States and the Russian Federation are unlikely to become members for the foreseeable future. For better or worse, it is almost impossible to imagine that an organization can be effective in promoting pan-European security without their participation. Second, the EU remains primarily an economic organization. Although the integration process has advanced a great deal since 1958, the EU has still failed to complete its mission of promoting full economic integration, as evidenced by the difficulty of gaining universal acceptance for a single currency. Progress in other sensitive issues, where the claims of national sovereignty still remain strong, has been even slower, especially in matters of foreign policy and national defense. Although the Common Foreign and Security Policy has taken on considerable substance in recent years, going well beyond the simple rhetoric of the early 1990s, it still falls well short of constituting an independent policy extending beyond the limitations imposed by the member states, so that integration in the security sector still lags well behind that in the economic and other functional areas. Third, while the EU has adopted a significant program of economic assistance out of area, initially to developing countries, especially in Africa and more recently in Central and Eastern Europe, its politicalmilitary role outside of its geographic borders has remained limited. The diplomatic efforts that it undertook to prevent and subsequently to bring an end to fighting in several former Yugoslav states provoked internal dissension within the EU, especially between Germany and other member states, and largely failed to
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achieve significant results (Woodward, 1995, 183189). In short, the Common Foreign and Security Policy remains a goal for future cooperation in the realm of security within an expanding EU region, but it does not currently provide a sound base on which to construct a pan-European security edifice. The EU is most effective at promoting peace and security in Europe when it focuses on its comparative advantage, namely in the economic domain. The dynamism of its economic integration serves as an attractive magnet to all of the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It, and other related financial institutions such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, can provide valuable assistance to alleviate some of the economic and social conditions that provide the seedbed for violent conflict to develop in the first place. In this way it may provide an essential supplement to the conflict prevention work of the OSCE, which lacks direct access to significant economic resources to carry out its tasks in this region. The OSCE missions may also call upon the support of the EU when dealing with the many candidate countries seeking EU membership, several of which have also had OSCE missions stationed on their territory. For example, in Estonia the effort to meet the criteria for being placed high in the priority list for EU expansion probably encouraged the government to cooperate more actively than it might have otherwise with OSCE demands regarding the treatment of its large minority group of ethnic Russians. Finally, in several instances such as in Macedonia, EU Monitor Missions have operated alongside OSCE missions on the ground with very similar mandates. In these circumstances, however complex they may be, it behooves both organizations to try to negotiate a workable division of labor. Since many such missions are typically understaffed, an agreed division of labor may make it possible for the two institutions to work side-by-side to accomplish their respective, if overlapping, mandates more effectively. In summary, conflicts between OSCE and EU mission members have occasionally occurred in regions where both institutions have overlapping mandates. One of the most essential tasks, therefore, of mission members may be to negotiate workable arrangements on the ground, even when their superiors have failed to do so in their respective secretariats. The Council of Europe (CoE) The CoE has also become an important actor in some aspects of European security policy, especially with regard to the human dimension of security. Indeed, there is probably no other institution working in the OSCE region with such a similar mandate, especially in the fields of the development of democratic governance and the furtherance of human and minority rights.
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Established in 1949, the CoE, consisting initially of 10 member states, drafted the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950, and created the European Court of Human Rights in 1959 at Strasbourg. Its statutes require that its members must accept the principles of the rule of law and of the enjoyment by all persons within its jurisdiction of human rights and fundamental freedoms (Council of Europe, 1996, 12). It has also taken a leading role in promoting European cooperation in spheres of culture, education, environment, parliamentary democracy, and social policy. It has thus focused almost entirely on the human dimension as an essential component of security. During the Cold War, CoE membership consisted exclusively of Western European democracies. Currently its membership has expanded to 40 states, including 16 former communist countries from Central and Eastern Europe. Further, membership in the Council of Europe is a prerequisite for candidacy to enter the more prestigious EU. Neither the United States nor Canada is eligible for membership, largely because the Council has defined its geographic scope somewhat more narrowly than the OSCE. At a Summit meeting of Council of Europe heads of states in Vienna in October 1993, it added to its tasks of promoting democratic development a new set of responsibilities to combat racism, intolerance, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism, while also promoting the adoption of confidence-building measures to avert ethnic conflict, mostly in the new member states to the east. The Council operates primarily by setting up strict criteria for membership. Thus, unlike the OSCE, which that requires states to affirm their intent to live up to a series of commitments contained in the cumulative set of OSCE documents and monitors their performance in living up to those commitments long after they become participating states, the CoE requires its current members to certify that candidates meet the following criteria before they can qualify for participation: (1) Their institutions and legal system must provide for the basic principles of democracy, rule of law, and respect for human rights. (2) Their government must include a parliament chosen by free and fair elections with universal suffrage. (3) They must guarantee free expression including a free press. (4) They must have provisions for the protection of the rights of persons belonging to minorities. (5) They must demonstrate a track record of observance of international law (http://www.coe.int/T/e/Communication%5Fand%5FResearch/Press/ The%5F Council%5Fof%5FEurope%5Fin%5Fbrief/). States that fail to fulfill these obligations may be suspended from membership. For example, Russias membership was suspended in 1995 due
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to the behavior of its armed forces in Chechnya. Other former communist countries that continue to maintain the death penalty as part of their penal code have also been denied membership, since the CoE considers the death penalty to represent a violation of fundamental human rights. However, as a general matter of practice, once accepted into membership there are no sanctions for violations of these CoE principles other than suspension. Unlike the OSCE, once a state is admitted into membership, there are no permanent missions stationed on its territory. Therefore, CoE monitoring of its members is quite minimal, unlike the OSCE that has a somewhat lower standard for initial participation but which continuously monitors and encourages its participating states to rise up to its higher standards even after they have become full participants in the organization. The CoE fulfills its role in conflict prevention and the promotion of democracy using techniques similar to those of the OSCE, but always by employing experts from outside the country. As requested, staff from a relevant Council section in Strasbourg may be sent to states undergoing problems during the difficult process of democratic transition to set up seminars, to offer expert advice, and to run training courses. It is these staff members who interact most frequently with OSCE mission members who are already on-site. The CoE also monitors allegations of human rights violations in member countries, and it may refer especially serious potential violations to the European Court of Human Rights. Most of the CoEs effort goes into working with states that are candidates to join the Council. It has worked proactively to encourage states throughout the broadly defined European region to meet its criteria for membership, and it has provided them with considerable assistance in advancing to the point where they qualify for acceptance. By defining its primary mission as encouraging good governance as a long-term mechanism for conflict prevention, the CoE has carved out for itself a role that overlaps with that of the OSCE in many important areas. However, it has often pursued its own agenda in countries where it operates alongside OSCE, with little direct cooperation between the two organizations, even when they are mandated to work on similar issues. Consultations frequently have taken place at the highest level in both organizations to improve cooperation, but on the ground this cooperation has often been hard to realize due to the somewhat different interpretation that the two organizations have about their primary role. Specifically, the CoE does not undertake an active role in conflict prevention, management, and resolution, unlike the OSCE. Thus it often works in parallel to the OSCE in the human dimension activities, while leaving the OSCE to take the lead in more active measures to prevent, manage, and resolve violent or potentially violent conflicts. Thus, close coordination between OSCE and CoE missions is essential in those countries where the
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two operate side-by-side, but there can be little doubt that the OSCE still has several comparative advantages. First, it has a broader mandate in the area of conflict, including a more specific role in conflict prevention and resolution. Second, it has a broader base since the participating states are defined on a geographical basis and not according to specific political criteria. The mere fact that the United States participates in the OSCE is itself an extremely important difference between the two organizations. Third, it provides a continuous longterm presence through its missions of long duration and other field activities in a large number of OSCE participating states that have not yet fully consolidated democratic practices or where threats of violent conflict remain. However, of all the overlapping institutions that make up the web of postCold War European security, the potential for redundancy is perhaps greatest between the OSCE and the CoE. This functional overlap thus requires close cooperation so that this redundancy does not become excessively counterproductive in the mutual efforts of the two organizations to promote long-term peace and security through building democracy, the rule of law, and human rights.

Conclusion: OSCEs Comparative Advantage in the European Security Framework

In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, several states and some analysts advocated making the OSCE the primary foundation for European security in the new era. It was a plausible candidate to assume this role for several reasons: (1) It has the broadest membership, with all states in the region participating. (2) It has the broadest mandate, especially because of the close linkage between politicalmilitary elements of security and the human dimension, including democracy building, encouragement of human rights and the rights of persons belonging to minorities, and a foundation built on the rule of law. (3) It immediately developed expertise in conflict prevention, with the institutionalization of the Conflict Prevention Center (including its missions and other field activities) and the office of the High Commissioner on National Minorities. It is quite apparent, however, that the thick web of European security institutions that has been modified and reformed over the decade since 1990 has not produced a single, dominant institution. Rather, what is emerging is an increasingly pronounced division of labor among institutions, in which each institution seeks to strengthen its own area of comparative advantage, while relying on other institutions to provide the necessary ingredients to build a
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more solid structure for security and cooperation in future relations within the broad European/transatlantic area. Further, it has become increasingly evident that the interconnected areas of preventive diplomacy, conflict mediation, and post-conflict reconciliation constitute the one most important function that the OSCE has carved out for itself. These tasks are not carried out adequately by any other regional institution, and in this area the OSCE capacity generally exceeds even that of the single global institution, namely the UN. All of these tasks require efforts to redress the specific grievances that have given rise to violence, as well as to alleviate the structural conditions that make it more likely that conflicts of interest will assume violent forms. Thus effective and just governance based on the rule of law, along with respect for the rights of individuals and of persons belonging to minority groups, constitute the essential foundations for conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction. When disputes do develop, immediate outside assistance by third parties to reduce tensions before violence erupts is an equally important contribution. And continuous on-theground monitoring of the efforts to rebuild societies that have experienced violence and to create institutions that will alleviate the threat of renewed violence, is also essential. These are the principal functions that the OSCE has a unique ability to provide as its central contribution to the overall architecture of European security. At the same time, these conditions cannot be fulfilled by the OSCE acting alone, in isolation from other international institutions and nongovernmental organizations. However, the OSCE has a vital role to play in these areas, and in this one area in particular there is no other institution or organization on the scene that can perform these functions with comparable effectiveness.

Notes
1 This article will refer to the OSCE when discussing the organization in general, or when making specific reference to its activities since 1995. It will refer to the CSCE when referring to specific events and actions prior to 1995. 2 States participating in the OSCE are referred to as participating states rather than as member states. This is done in order to emphasize the political (as opposed to legal) basis for the organization. It is an organization of participants who share in its governance rather than a formal organization comprised of member states like the United Nations. 3 Five mission and field activities have been closed down in the past several years after fulfilling their mandates. 4 For a summary of the functions of each of these institutions, see http://www.osce.org/structures_ institutions/. 5 Much of this analysis is based on extensive field research by the author at the OSCE headquarters in Vienna for extended periods of 6 months each in 1992 and 19971998, as well as many shorter visits to Vienna and to a number of the field missions since 1991. A more detailed account of the work of these missions may be found in Hopmann (1999). 6 See also the parallel websites for Bishkek, Tashkent, and Ashgabad.
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100 7 8 9 10 Interview with Ambassador Max van der Stoel, The Hague (November 1997). For further details about the role of the OSCE in Crimea, see Hopmann (2000a). See van der Stoels (1999) personal account of his role. The author conducted background interviews with senior members of the OSCE Spillover Mission to Skopje in June 2002. 11 Jentleson (2000, 330333) refers to this as the Rubicon Problem and the Humpty Dumpty Problem. The latter refers to crossing a threshold of violence that makes resolution of the underlying problems even more difficult than prior to the outbreak of violence; the latter refers to the difficulty of putting societies torn apart by war back together again.

References
Adler, E. (1998) The OSCEs Community-Building Model, in E. Adler and M. Barnett (eds.) Security Communities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 132138. Council of Europe (1996) The Challenge of a Greater Europe: The Council of Europe and Democratic Security, Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. Hopmann, P.T. (1999) Building Security in Post-Cold War Eurasia: The OSCE and US Foreign Policy, Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace. Hopmann, P.T. (2000a) The OSCE Role in Ukraine and Moldova, Studien und Bericte zur Zicherheitspolitik 1: 2561. Hopmann, P.T. (2000b) Can International Organizations Intervene in the Internal Affairs of Powerful States? An Analysis of the OSCE Role in Chechnya, 199597, Paper Presented to the Convention of the International Political Science Association; August 16, 2001, Quebec, Canada. Jentleson, B.W. (2000) Conclusions and Lessons, in B.W. Jentleson (ed.) Opportunities Missed, Opportunities Seized, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. OSCE (1999) OSCE Handbook (3rd ed), Vienna: OSCE, pp. 2829. Russett, B.M. and Oneal, J. (2001) Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence and International Organizations, New York: Norton. Thomas, D.C. (2001) The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. van der Stoel, M. (1999) The Role of the OSCE High Commission in Conflict Prevention, in C.A. Crocker et al. (eds.) Herding Cats: Multiparty Mediation in a Complex World, Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace Press. Woodward, S. (1995) Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War, Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.

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