A Lost Cause?
The Future of the OSCE in the European Security System
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe is in a severe crisis. After the enlargement of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the OSCE suspended work in East Central Europe. In Southeastern Europe, the most important area of OSCE activity in the 1990s, the organisation is increasingly being replaced by the EU. The OSCE has failed to significantly increase its activities in the post-Soviet realm. Many Western states may wish for such an expansion of activity, but the overwhelmingly authoritarian regimes of the post-Soviet realm see this as unwanted interference. Thus, the OSCE has to wait for a new great moment, a second wave of democratic upheavals, before it can again champion the values of democracy and rule of law as declared in the Charter of Paris for a New Europe.
(Osteuropa 2/2012, pp. 117–134)