"Boiling in the Multilateral Cauldron": Interview With Shkolnikov

EurasiaNet has posted a thoughtful interview with former ODIHR staff person Vladimir Shkolnikov, and I wish we could hear more. Hopefully Shkolnikov will do some more writing and Youtubing about OSCE, which, as he justly notes, is a complex organization that takes a lot of effort to run every day, and should get more engagement from states -- and NGOs. Interestingly, he resounds the note of Sakharov's thesis and the Helsinki core principle of the intertwined relationship between security and human rights: 

"Outside the OSCE, it's actually hard to find fora that talk about democracy, human rights, freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of assembly in this particular framework as crucial for security. That these are not abstract good things. That without meeting the commitments of what in OSCE is called the human dimension, there is no security internally or in the region as such."

These are golden words, and now we have to think how to enact them in a climate of diminishing receptivity. There's a reason why NGOs became disengaged: a number of key international NGOs became utterly disenchanted with ODIHR under Gerard Stoudmann in the 1990s and early 2000s because of a pattern whereby ODIHR would send full-fledged observer missions to elections that didn't have even basic conditions for participation of beleaguered post-Soviet oppositions and civic groups. (Later, ODIHR developed more of a nuanced approach to send smaller teams that did not bless the poor pre-election settings but were merely monitors.) NGOs also became frustrated with the OSCE field missions which were often forced to make nice to the host governments in demeaning and debilitating ways just to keep their presence.

Some groups wrote off OSCE as a whole because of these frustrations, to my mind, too rashly, without giving enough persistence and time to the effort (many years went into the struggles against the old communist systems, but when they fell, there was a tendency to think they could change over night). Groups in those former Soviet countries were just as frustrated, if not more appalled at some of the missions, and then switched their attention to the Council of Europe, if their country was in it, or to the EU, if there was an accession process they could aspire to, because these organizations simply provided much more political traction and pressure for their causes -- the CoE has the European Court of Human Rights and the Committee for the Prevention of Torture; the EU had the carrot of membership.

None of that did any good for the countries not in the CoE or in the EU, and once countries were made members of the EU, the pressure was off -- and here we all are. That's why people are back looking at OSCE again.

Shkolnikov articulates an interesting thesis that ODIHR is now getting along better with Russia, although he says it has not changed anything in its behaviour and is still critical. He notes that the personal dynamics between Slovenian Janez Lenarcic and the Russians are working better than they did with Christian Strohal, the Austrian diplomat who is the former head of ODIHR.