The signing 50 years ago on Friday, after nearly three years of intense negotiation of the “Helsinki Final Act” by 33 European countries, plus Canada and the US, is seen by many as the symbolic closure of the Cold War.
It was never a legally binding treaty, but agreed by its signatories as “politically binding”, and its institutional mechanisms and processes, ranging from security to culture, media and elections, have played, and continue to play, a quiet but significant part in both the reshaping of the continent and as a forum for dialogue.
The document, which spawned the Vienna-based Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), sought to balance the Soviet Union’s wish for western acceptance of an immutable post-war division of Europe against the west’s desire to leave the way open for peaceful change and a new era of human rights. Borders, Ireland’s no less than Germany’s, were only to be moved through peaceful negotiation.
The Soviet Union did not prove immutable, though its disintegration would have less to do with external western pressure than internal economic and political contradiction. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove a coach and horses through the OSCE’s aspirations. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said at an event on Thursday to mark the OSCE anniversary that one of Vladimir Putin’s ideas was that Russia’s borders were whatever it wanted them to be. And the ongoing war has led some to write off the OSCE as toothless and obsolete.
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In reality it was always toothless; its importance is as a marshaller of whatever consensus survives, and a vehicle for confidence-building operations like its election missions.
The world’s largest regional security organisation, the only one of which Ukraine, the US and Russia are members, continues to operate, now with 57 participating states. Its vision of a peaceful, cooperative Europe whose governments respect the international rule of law and protect human rights has not survived the test of time. But, in the spirit of the original Helsinki accord, it surely remains a prize worth striving to achieve.
