06 November 2009
Helsinki Treaty Spurred Fall of Berlin Wall, End of Communism
OSCE continues to expand legacy of human rights diplomacy
Washington — When 35 European nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, signed the Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe on August 1, 1975, it set in motion events that would topple the Berlin Wall and leave a lasting imprint on international relations.
The “Helsinki Process” made explicit the link between individual human rights and national security. It helped end communist rule in Eastern Europe and usher in new security and economic relations between East and West. It formed the 56-member Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) — an active international body that advocates for democracy and human rights worldwide.
Yet Helsinki’s greatest achievement may be the establishment of a set of human rights obligations and democratic commitments by which citizens across the region still hold their governments accountable.
Retired Army Colonel Ty Cobb, once an adviser on the Soviet Union to President Ronald Reagan, told America.gov that when the Soviets signed the Helsinki Accords, 30 years after the end of World War II, they thought they were getting a good deal.
The treaty seemed to legalize the postwar borders between Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union, but in reality, the human rights provisions of the treaty were an opening tear in the Iron Curtain.
“While conservatives in the West generally felt the treaty would not change things much in the USSR, in fact the Soviets’ signing committed them to many obligations,” especially in the human-rights area, Cobb said. And in the long run the treaty “proved a useful instrument” for resolving conflicts and ultimately led to the dismantling of Soviet power both in Eastern Europe and Russia.
Among its provisions, Helsinki allowed the formation of human rights monitoring groups by participating nations that provided an opening for dissident movements and nonviolent protest groups to operate in the East bloc. The Moscow Monitoring Group was especially effective in drawing international attention to human rights violations in the Soviet Union.
German historian Fritz Stern noted in a recent article, “Paths to 1989,” that in the beginning, “few political leaders on either side realized [Helsinki’s] inflammatory potential … that it offered dissident movements in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union moral encouragement and shreds of legal protection.”
THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL
In Europe, the collapse of communism accelerated on November 9, 1989, when East Germany opened its borders and allowed citizens to travel to the West.
Within a year the 106-kilometer-long Berlin Wall was being dismantled, former jailed dissident Vaclav Havel was president of Czechoslovakia, dictatorships from Bulgaria to the Baltics were overturned, and 100 million people in Eastern Europe were given an opportunity to choose their own governments after 40 years of communist domination.
Carol Fuller, U.S. charge d’affaires to the OSCE, told America.gov: “The fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union gave a renewed emphasis to the Helsinki Process. The OSCE developed new structures — including a secretariat and field missions — and faced new challenges, from terrorism and climate change to military transparency and stability in the Balkans and the territory of the former Soviet Union.”
What did not change, Fuller said, was “our commitment to the principles that underpinned the Helsinki Process.”
Those principles are now advanced through a focus on resolving conflict through confidence-building mechanisms developed by the OSCE with civil society, governments and the private sector to help defuse political tensions, not only in Europe but increasingly worldwide.
OSCE EXPANDS HELSINKI WITH NON-EUROPEAN PARTNERS
Since the early 1990s the Helsinki Process has expanded beyond Europe. OSCE now partners in democracy programs with six Mediterranean nations and five countries in Asia, making it the world’s only fully inclusive, trans-Atlantic/European/Eurasian political organization.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, conflict resolution operations in Bosnia, Albania, Croatia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Georgia and Tajikistan thrust the OSCE into the spotlight as the organization provided democracy-advocacy support for fledgling civil society groups and legislative bodies. It now has 3,000 employees working in more than 20 missions worldwide.
An important contributor to OSCE democracy efforts is its Parliamentary Assembly, which hosts periodic meetings of lawmakers, including a main session held every summer. The sessions address important international issues while promoting mechanisms for conflict prevention and resolution.
Parliamentary delegations are sent on special missions to crisis areas and are employed to train and support election-observation teams. A case in point is the OSCE election-monitoring team that observed the July 23 election in Kyrgyzstan, which the U.S. Mission to the OSCE praised as an “unbiased and professional” effort.
In Asia, OSCE Partners for Cooperation include Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Afghanistan and Mongolia. In June, Japan hosted a conference to discuss how OSCE and its Asian partners could cooperate to work on regional security challenges.
Hirofumi Nakasone, then Japan’s foreign minister, called OSCE a “pioneer” in developing “the human dimensions of security,” and said that “today, security is not just from Vancouver to Vladivostok anymore, but is indivisible from security in the entire world.”
The organization held a two-day conference in Afghanistan in November 2008 to discuss security issues as well as economic development and elections.
Later, Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta said: “Afghanistan cherishes its partnership with the OSCE. … We applaud the OSCE Secretariat initiatives that strengthen border security and management, foster cross-border co-operation between the Central Asian participating states and Afghanistan, and enhance national law enforcement capacities.”
Conferences have also been held with OSCE’s Mediterranean Partners for Cooperation — Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia — on topics that include confidence-building, fostering norms of behavior, human rights commitments, new media technologies, and migration and integration policies.
In June, based on a suggestion from Egypt, OSCE conducted a workshop with its Mediterranean partners on self-regulating media. The session brought together more than 35 journalists, government public affairs officials and publishers to discuss how to promote journalistic professionalism without government interference.
Following the workshop, Acting U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs William Hudson told members of the U.S. Helsinki Commission, “The United States is interested in increasing cooperation with the Mediterranean Partners … and in hearing Mediterranean perspectives on broader regional issues.”
Noting that the OSCE Mediterranean Partners “have played a positive role in both the regional and world arena and have the potential to make an even greater contribution,” Hudson said the Obama administration is committed “to working with the OSCE, via the Mediterranean Partners … to ensure that our efforts with countries of the region are consistent and mutually reinforcing.”
