The Platform for Co-operative Security: Ten Years of Co-operation

At the last meeting of the Security Model Committee held in Vienna on 5 November 1999, when, after several years of deliberations the OSCE participating States agreed on the final touches to a draft Charter for European Security, including the Platform for Co-operative Security, the Finnish delegation made a statement on behalf of the European Union (EU) stressing that the EU considered the Platform to be “one of the most important elements of added value of the whole Charter process”. Both documents were submitted for the approval of the Istanbul Summit on 18-19 November. Despite this recognition of the Platform’s significance, until this year, which marks the document’s tenth anniversary, the Platform rarely received the attention it deserved. Yet its adoption has considerably boosted the OSCE’s co-operation with other international, regional, and sub-regional organizations and initiatives “concerned with the promotion of comprehensive security in the OSCE area”, and has set in place a system and culture of interaction among organizations and institutions in the Euro-Atlantic space. The recently renewed interest in the Platform has been prompted by Russian calls to employ it more actively to establish dialogue among organizations concerned with Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian security. The Platform, and relations among security organizations in the OSCE area more generally, have thus become an element in the evolving debate on the future of European security.