When representatives of participating States and civil society gather in Helsinki later this month to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act, they will tread familiar ground, asking themselves and each other, “how do we revitalise the OSCE?”  This is a question that has dogged the Organisation since its heyday at the turn of the 21^st century, as one by one its key achievements – the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), the sprawling network of field operations, and the general sense of shared purpose among participating States – have atrophied or fallen away altogether. Attention in capitals has shifted to other, less inclusive but more operational organisations, including the EU and NATO.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine remains a direct assault on the principles of the Helsinki decalogue.  But it is only the latest and most serious of a seemingly continuous series of crises that have rocked the Organisation over the past 20 years, hollowing out the OSCE’s political dialogue and leaving its institutional structures hobbled.

Throughout this “time of troubles,” well-meaning friends of the OSCE have sought ways to “reinvigorate” the Organisation, marking some successes along the way.  When OSCE Heads of State and Government gathered in Astana in 2010, they seemed to offer the prospect of renewal, based on a reaffirmation of agreed principles and commitments, and a shifted focus to the long-neglected eastern half of the OSCE region.  Mongolia’s bid to upgrade its status from partner to participating State demonstrated the Organisation’s attractiveness to those outside the OSCE community.  Yet all of these “revitalisation” efforts, from the 2009 “Corfu Process” to the ongoing “Structured Dialogue,” approached the future of the OSCE as one of many security questions facing the “Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian community”, rather than a repository of potential answers.

What if, instead of looking for ways to breathe relevance back into the OSCE, the community gathered in Helsinki focused instead on rediscovering the Organisation’s legacy, looking to it as a reservoir of fifty years’ worth of experience in addressing pressing security challenges?  Many of the fundamental security problems facing the Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian community today, including those many in the West believed were long resolved, find echoes in the OSCE’s half-century of experience.  Despite its current difficulties, the Organisation offers a wide range of lessons and tools with direct relevance to today’s security challenges.

Foremost among these challenges, of course, is the ongoing war in Ukraine.  That conflict will one day come to an end, at the negotiating table or on the battlefield, and concrete arrangements will be needed to secure the peace. In crafting those arrangements, the conflict parties themselves and the broader Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian community would be well served to look to the extensive toolbox developed in the OSCE framework over the past 50 years.  This includes resources and experience in arms control and confidence- and security-building measures (CSBM), both region-wide and at a bespoke sub-regional scale.  Despite the fraying of conventional arms control commitments over the past 20 years, considerable expertise and infrastructure remain.

The OSCE Communications Network, established to coordinate information exchanges and inspections, is a unique resource that could help enormously in facilitating the implementation of an enduring peace.  Veterans of the CFE, Vienna Document, and Dayton negotiations – still present in many OSCE capitals – could contribute meaningfully to the development of a tailored post-conflict arms control and transparency regime in Ukraine and Europe more broadly.  And the OSCE’s Institutions, including the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), the Representative on Freedom of the Media, and the High Commissioner on National Minorities, offer substantial capacity and expertise in fostering democratic resilience and civil society engagement, as well as encouraging inter-communal reconciliation in post-conflict societies.

In other areas, such as conflict resolution and monitoring, the OSCE’s recent record is more mixed. Disappointment with the ultimate failure of the Minsk process and the Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) in Ukraine is understandable. However, this does not foreclose the possibility of future success or negate the Organisation’s past achievements in these areas.  If a broad-based OSCE effort to support an eventual peace settlement is to succeed, it will need sustained high-level engagement of the kind we have not seen since the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Yet, it must also be clear that Russia is a conflict party, not an external guarantor.  Any OSCE monitoring arrangements would have to avoid the ambiguity that undermined the SMM and other efforts to resolve so-called “frozen conflicts” in the post-Soviet space.

Beyond the urgency of leveraging the OSCE toolkit to secure peace in Ukraine, participating States would be wise to rediscover the OSCE’s Cold War origins as a “conference.”  The Organisation lacks the resources and institutional capacity of the EU and NATO, but this light footprint allows it to offer a highly flexible framework for discussion and consensus-building.  Its lean institutional structure can do as much, or as little, as participating States want it to do on any given subject. And while consensus decision-making among 57 participating States presents a formidable obstacle, particularly in times of political polarisation, the Organisation also provides a framework within which smaller groups of states can develop their own arrangements.

Today, the basic international consensus established at Helsinki 50 years ago faces unprecedented stresses, with the fundamental principles of the Final Act being called into question from multiple quarters.  At the same time, the region faces new challenges, such as climate change, migration, and artificial intelligence, that don’t fit neatly into any multilateral framework, and where participating States may be hesitant to adopt formal, legally binding commitments.  The existence of an open, inclusive political forum for exploring new challenges holistically, and building common ground around a renewed commitment to sovereignty, territorial integrity, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and other principles that have guided the OSCE community since 1975, has never been more essential.

It would be foolish to expect dramatic breakthroughs in today’s polarised environment.  We are a long way from the days when regular CSCE/OSCE Summits (Helsinki, Paris, Copenhagen, Budapest, and Istanbul) reached landmark agreements that established basic ground rules for European security.  However, if participating States are prepared to engage seriously in facing contemporary challenges of war and peace, transparency and stability, democratic governance, and shared prosperity, many potential answers to today’s security challenges can be found in the half-century of experience within the OSCE.  The question for political leaders as the Helsinki Process reaches the mid-century mark is not “what can the OSCE do for us,” but rather, “what can we do through the OSCE”?  And the task for working-level experts is to ensure that the Organisation’s tools remain sharp and ready to use when the time comes.

The European Leadership Network itself as an institution holds no formal policy positions. The opinions articulated above represent the views of the authors rather than the European Leadership Network or its members. The ELN aims to encourage debates that will help develop Europe’s capacity to address the pressing foreign, defence, and security policy challenges of our time, to further its charitable purposes.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons / Mikhail Evstafiev