(OSCE), formerly the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), multinational forum for the promotion of peace, security, justice, and cooperation in Europe. By 1997 the OSCE comprised 55 member states.

Helsinki Accords.

After five years of discussion and preparation, reflecting a period of growing détente between the U.S. and the USSR, the CSCE formally convened in Helsinki, Finland, on July 3, 1973. Represented were the foreign ministers of 35 nations, including the U.S., the USSR, Canada, the Vatican, and every European country except Albania, which did not become a full member until 1991.

The “Final Act” of the CSCE was signed on Aug. 1, 1975, at a summit conference in Helsinki. The document recognized the inviolability of frontiers between states; pledged the signatories to respect basic human rights (“including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief”), to ease travel restrictions, and to allow freer dissemination of information; and provided for follow-up sessions to assess compliance. These so-called Helsinki accords implicitly ratified the postwar division of Europe into Communist and non-Communist blocs, including the separation of Germany into two sovereign states. Subsequent agreements expanded the Helsinki provisions for the movement of people and ideas (1983) and endorsed the principle of on-site inspections as one of several “confidence-building” measures leading toward disarmament.

Charter of Paris.

By 1990, the collapse of most Communist regimes in Eastern Europe had carved out a new role for the CSCE. Meeting in November, the leaders of 34 nations (among them the newly unified Germany) signed the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, which recognized the end of the cold-war division of Europe and formed the CSCE's first permanent organs: a secretariat in Prague, a conflict-resolution center in Vienna, and an election-monitoring office in Warsaw. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined the CSCE in September 1991, soon after they became independent from the Soviet Union; 11 more former Soviet republics, plus Croatia and Slovenia, joined in early 1992, and Russia took the seat formerly held by the USSR. Subsequently, the CSCE admitted Bosnia and Hercegovina and suspended Yugoslavia. When Czechoslovakia broke up at the end of 1992, both the Czech Republic and Slovakia were admitted. The name of the group was changed to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe at a summit conference in Budapest in 1994. The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia entered the OSCE in 1995; Andorra entered in 1996.