At the invitation of the 2012 Chairman of the Permanent Council, Irish Ambassador Eoin O’Leary, the four institutes participating in the Initiative for the Development of a Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian Security Community (IDEAS) presented their report “Towards a Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian Security Community: From Vision to Reality” at an informal ambassadorial meeting in the Vienna Hofburg on 23 October 2012 that was attended by almost 100 persons from some 40 delegations.
This track II initiative, which has been jointly carried out by the Centre for OSCE Research (CORE) at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH), the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique (FRS), the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM) and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (University) of the Russian Foreign Ministry (MGIMO), was launched in late 2011 by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Germany, France, Poland and the Russian Federation who had asked the four institutes to organize a series of workshops to advance the discussion on the future character of a Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian security community and to present a report with recommendations to the participating States of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna. CORE arranged the IDEAS opening workshop with some 100 high-ranking participants from around 30 participating States in Berlin at the premises of the German Federal Foreign Office in March 2012. Workshops in Warsaw, Paris and Moscow followed until July 2012. Subsequently, CORE, with key drafter Wolfgang Zellner, took the lead in elaborating the commissioned IDEAS report. CORE also hosted an editing workshop in Hamburg in September 2012. The activities of CORE on IDEAS were financed by the German Federal Foreign Office.
The overall reception of the report at the Hofburg meeting was very positive. Ambassadors spoke about a “very impressive report”, “forward-looking and pragmatic” that could make a contribution to the OSCE’s current discussions in the “Helsinki plus 40” context. Others stressed that the report showed the importance of track II activities and emphasized that this work should be continued in a broader context including other think tanks. Criticism raised concerned the notion of normative convergence in the OSCE space, the existence of a European identity, human dimension issues and the neglect of the situation of young people. All in all, it was encouraging (not only) for the four institutes, to see in which positive and constructive way this track II initiative has been taken up officially by the OSCE.
The IDEAS report “Towards a Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian security community. From vision to reality”, edited by CORE / Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique; MGIMO / PISM, Drafting Group Wolfgang Zellner, Hamburg 2012 is available online at Link.
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