The OSCE (the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) is one of those acronyms in the world that most Americans (and probably a lot of other people) have never heard of. In fact, the agreement that spawned the institution --the Helsinki Final Act -- is one that many people don't even remember. It's so dull that even the conspiracy nuts haven't assigned a mythological capacity to it to land black -- or blue -- helicopters anywhere. If you ever heard a scandal about the OSCE like "oil-for-food," it's probably about the breakfasts at the Hotel Planeta in Minsk.
A famous saying has been invented about NATO -- "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down" -- but nobody even remembers that anymore". If you had to invent a saying about OSCE, it might be, "To keep aging foreign service officers employed, to get inexperienced junior staff members deployed, and to keep NGOs annoyed". Sometimes you hear talk around various foreign ministries that the expensive, sprawling body that has no binding force under international law (except indirectly) should just be dismantled. The U.S. has stopped paying dues to it -- not necessarily with fervent ideological revulsion, as Washington used to do with the UN, but because nobody bothered to care. Russia has tried to take OSCE over to bend it to its long-dreamed agenda of making a security umbrella on the Eurasia continent that the Kremlin will utterly control, but the West isn't biting. Meanwhile, the OSCE-i-phate of seminars for resolutionaries who were once revolutionaries, time-keepers and mine-sweepers keeps lumbering on, a kind of mash-up and muddle of good intentions gone awry, cynical per-diem grabs and hopeful citizens that sometimes are helped.
If nothing else, one wise old diplomat counseled about this hybrid body with more free speech for NGOs at its meetings but less clout than the UN -- "let it be a job corps for dissidents". If some people who are out of favour or inadequately employed in their own oppressive countries can get a job or a consulting contract or even just a berth at a seminar, that's all to the good. If somebody has a pot of money for a plane ticket that might get somebody to a seminar rather than a jail cell -- it's the Lord's work. Critics say it's more often that retired intelligence officers, Wendell Wilkie idealists and regime-changers, and folks whose brother-in-laws run large construction companies are the ones who get the gigs. An American foreign service officer who took a number of times to pass the personality part of the foreign service exam once bragged to me that driving around in the white vans with "OSCE" stamped on the outside, he found it easier to "pick up babes".
Indeed.
I've chosen a rather bland layout and colour for this blog -- I love making blogs! -- because it's a dull organization, but it's easier to read the black on white and if you want colour and widgets and even viral Youtubes of kittehs and a drunk guy at the 7-11, go here. But after days of trying to think up a really crackerjack blog title, I couldn't think of anything really superior. I wanted to stay away from titles likely taken by very dull legal publications like "OSCE Overview" or "OSCE Observer", and also wanted to avoid treacly names like "Human Dimensions" or the creepyness of calling a blog "Final Activist". (An exasperated OSCE official who was tired of repeatedly giving me the floor at a Human Dimension Seminar where nobody would speak once called me "The Participating State of Fitzpatrick".
Hence "Unbound," which for me is associated both the greatest promise and the greatest peril of this organization. It has no power of binding international law, except for the phrase we always repeat about the treaties incorporated within it "by which they [the states] might be bound". States often *don't* feel bound at all by their old Helsinki or Copenhagen or other obligations. Boundaries were supposed to be made inviolable in exchange for the "third basket" human rights elements being incorporated, but in the end, the borders became moveable for situations like Kosovo and the basket dumpable for situations like Chechnya. Even so, it is OSCE that has likely done more than any other institution to make it possible for people in Eurasia unbind their shackles over the decades. I'm also thinking if something is "unbound," it is not only freed, but unpacked and explained.
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