Valdai Club

The bureaucratization of OSCE led to the situation, when this political institution has lost the sensitivity toward the fate of the peoples of Europe.

Just before the recent meeting of the Ministerial Council of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Belgrade Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that this institution was in a state of systemic crisis because of the political bias, and that the OSCE in its activity should quickly return to the fundamental norms and principles based on the Helsinki Act of 1975.

Like any "ideal project created in the name of justice" - the OSCE during more than 40 years of its existence has undergone all phases of the formation, development, and degradation.

The degradation began exactly when the OSCE began to be used for political purposes. The criticism by the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is completely justified: political bias is, in fact, the same as corruption, and demonstrates the weakness of this organization, deprives it of the authority and, therefore, does not allow to perform the functions for which it was created at the very beginning.

Since 1990s the OSCE 's activities during the crisis events in Europe demonstrated that rights of European nations were not respected.

To explain this, there are two sets of reasons.

The first group are internal causes. The bureaucratization of OSCE led to the situation, when this political institution has lost the sensitivity toward the fate of the peoples of Europe (Yugoslavia in 1999, for example) and let first partial and later complete trade-off of their sovereign rights. Degradation of the OSCE forced those European countries which, for various reasons could not "defend themselves alone", to seek the protection from other European institutions. Such protection did not happen.

The second group are the external causes. Firstly, it is the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left a number of Eastern European countries in the position of pleading ones: to join the European Union, to adopt a different market economy, etc.

Secondly, it is the aggressive activity of the US and NATO. The US had a particular commercial interest: to establish complete control over the prize European market. Americans used a range of means: from the controlled "Brussels bureaucracy" to imposed military services by the Pentagon's directly or through NATO.

Today we see the results: crowds of migrants "overload" the social system of the EU, European countries are forced into signing of the Transatlantic trade and investment partnership with the US.

The objective control data show that neither the OSCE nor other European institutions, so-called keepers of the European identity and sovereignty, cannot cope with the modern problems. This means that they have to be reformed and reconfigured, or Europe will lose its identity and sovereignty.

However, there is another "reserved" exit - Russia, the successor of the Soviet Union, reappeared in the geopolitical game. This means it can stand on guard of European interests, as it happened more than once over the past two centuries. Here scenarios can be very different.