Malta’s decision to accept to chair the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has saved the organisation from certain death.
It is better to have the OSCE in the intensive therapy unit than in the mortuary. 2024 would have been the year of the demise of the OSCE as an organisation. It came into existence in the 1970s, during the Cold War, to “serve as a multilateral forum for dialogue and negotiation” between the East and the West.
Why is the OSCE in a deep crisis? Two years ago, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I told my ministerial colleagues in Stockholm: “If we are dissatisfied with what OSCE is doing, we should stop a moment and reflect about what we are doing to OSCE, how we are behaving, how we are using it and abusing it. An English proverb says: ‘A bad workman always blames his tools.’ A Russian proverb is much more brutal and equally wise: ‘Don’t blame a mirror for your ugly face.’
“Let us not blame the OSCE. Let us not blame the tool. Let us not blame the mirror. The faults, dear colleagues, are not in OSCE but in ourselves. That is where we need to address them. Are we ready to do so?”
The barometer is not to blame for the stormy weather we have. The OSCE is just reflecting the geopolitical environment in which it is struggling to operate.
Thomas Greminger (OSCE secretary general 2017-2020) describes this environment: “Low levels of trust in multilateral institutions and mechanisms for solving global problems, with the political winds blowing in favour of unilateral and transactional approaches… arms-control regimes are in disarray and the risk of military incidents is growing… we are confronted with a paradox in which multilateral cooperation is being called into question and avenues for discourse are being cut off, all while the need for cooperation and real dialogue grows ever more urgent.”
The OSCE’s crisis deepened when the United States decided to extend NATO to the borders of Russia. They chose not to build a new cooperative security architecture for Europe within the OSCE after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, to look after each country’s security without undermining the security of each country’s neighbour. Instead, the United States decided to ignore Russia’s security concerns and enlarge NATO.
In her memoirs, Madeleine Albright, US President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, admits that “[Russian President Boris] Yeltsin and his countrymen were strongly opposed to enlargement, seeing it as a strategy for exploiting their vulnerability and moving Europe’s dividing line to the east, leaving them isolated”.
Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state, said: “Many Russians see Nato as a vestige of the cold war, inherently directed against their country. They point out that they have disbanded the Warsaw Pact, their military alliance, and ask why the West should not do the same.” This was a very pertinent question and neither the Clinton administration nor its successors have even tried to answer it.
The OSCE’s crisis deepened when the United States decided to extend NATO to the borders of Russia- Evarist Bartolo
George Kennan, the architect of America’s containment policy during the Cold War, warned, in a May 1998 New York Times interview, what the US Senate’s ratification of NATO’s first round of expansion would set in motion: “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war… I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.”
Cooperating with enemies
What these American diplomats, certainly no apologists for Russian President Vladimir Putin, warned about has come to pass. We are in a brutal Russia-Ukraine war with no end in sight. It is going to be very difficult to resurrect the spirit of Helsinki that served Europe well in the middle of the Cold War and proved to be a turning point in the easing of tensions between the West and the East.
Our geopolitical environment has become so toxic that simply calling for hostile neighbours to sit together is dismissed as naïve at best and denounced as a betrayal at worst. We have weakened multilateralism through division, polarisation and mutual distrust and then we blame multilateral structures like the OSCE as being fragile and ineffective.
We have deprived inclusive multilateral structures and processes of leadership, legitimacy and resources and then blame them for being dysfunctional. We set up alternative arrangements of fake multilateralism that often marginalise and exclude those we disagree with and withdraw into a bubble of “like-minded” countries to talk to ourselves.
We are practising politics as the continuation of war by other means as the role of the military in formulating and implementing foreign policy continues to grow. The military industrial complex has become an integral part of the export sector of the economy in different countries. The armaments industry needs new markets and so needs new tension and conflicts to justify the purchase of yet more armaments.
Military expenditure is at its highest in the last 30 years while spending on the climate crisis, development, health and education often face budget shortfalls. Even as enemies, we need to find ways of working together. Even our selfishness and narrow interests dictate that we cooperate with our enemies.
OSCE secretary general Helga Schmid told Welt newspaper in January 2023 that keeping diplomatic channels open with Russia “makes sense” and did not encourage the country’s suspension from OSCE as several countries have proposed. “OSCE is the only security organisation in which everyone important to the European security architecture sits at one table.”
The International Crisis Group agrees: “Russia and the West will have to find ways to co-exist regardless of how the conflict in Ukraine is resolved. It seems short-sighted at best to let the broadest standing regional forum where they can work through matters of European and Eurasian security fall into disuse.”
Evarist Bartolo is a former Labour foreign and education minister.