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THE GOVERNMENT’S decision to take up the chair of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 2012 represents a major challenge to Irish diplomacy and an important opportunity to project the State’s values and traditional multilateralism in international affairs. It is also a feather in the cap of the Department of Foreign Affairs and a tribute to our role in peace-keeping and the organisation itself.

In the complex overlapping architecture of European security and human rights organisations, the OSCE plays an important, little reported role championing human rights and economic links, and as a forum for discussion of mutual security concerns. A creature of 1970s cold war détente, the 56-member OSCE is the largest regional security organisation in the world. It was created as a meeting point where Russia and its “allies” could participate with the West in a range of “soft security” issues that have given the organisation its distinctive role today – from early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation, to issues like regional proliferation and border monitoring.