OSCE and Balkan security

Abstract

This paper starts with the assertion that in the context of the post-cold war transformation of the European security order, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has emerged as a secondary security actor, maintaining a niche, rather than a leadership profile in regional security. That the OSCE should lose its role as a guardian of the regional order is by itself a puzzle. The Organization has had a formative influence in building Europe’s security architecture by establishing newnorms of state behaviour. During the coldwar, its predecessor, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was the first pan-European institution to develop a pattern of cooperative security relations beyond the bipolar balance of power. Since the end of the cold war, the CSCE/OSCE has emerged as the broadest regional organization promoting principles of democratic peace and protection of the rights of minorities. The Organization has been credited with being a security community-building institution that extends beyond the geographic borders of Europe. During the 1990s, the OSCE enhanced its organizational capacities, assumed new roles in conflict prevention and crisis management, and contributed to the implementation of standards of multidimensional and cooperative regional security. At the same time, its institutional model has been modified in the context of continuing conflicts in the European periphery. At critical instances, the OSCE has had either to defer conflict resolution functions to other security actors, or to deploy only partial, rather than comprehensive, approaches to security management. This retreat has been especially pronounced in the sub-region of the western Balkans where the paradigm of cooperative security emerged as secondary to alternative frameworks of regionalism: alliance and integration. Both NATO and the European Union (EU) enhanced their status of security actors during the 1990s. They expanded their respective stakes in regional governance bymeans of parallel enlargement strategies and practical contributions to crisis management and conflict resolution. Such developments became coterminous with the relative decline of the OSCE’s capacity to demonstrate effective leadership through socialization and functional problem-solving. The OSCE lost its centrality as a pan-European