On 20 March 2012, the first workshop of the Initiative for the Development of a Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian Security Community (IDEAS) took place in Berlin at the German Federal Foreign Office. IDEAS is a joint initiative by CORE, the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique (Paris), the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM), and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (University) of the Russian Foreign Ministry (MGIMO). It aims at giving more substance to the vision of a security community – a region where conflicts are resolved without war or the threat of war. The objective of creating a security community was adopted by the OSCE Heads of State and Government at their 2010 Astana Summit meeting. The Berlin meeting brought together more than 100 participants and guests from 30 OSCE participating States, among them 25 ambassadors. Ambassador Lars-Erik Lundin participated on behalf of the Irish OSCE Chairmanship, from the OSCE Secretariat participated Ambassador Adam Kobieracki, the Director of the OSCE Conflict Prevention Centre.
The workshop opened with a passionate and comprehensive speech by Federal Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, who touched most pressing working areas of the OSCE from conventional and nuclear arms control to the human dimension. The Foreign Minister stressed, in particular, the need to give substance to the vision of a security community, and confirmed that the German Federal Government is interested in and will promote IDEAS’ work. In his welcoming statement, Wolfgang Zellner, the Head of CORE, had expressed his sincere gratitude to the Federal Foreign Office for its extensive support without which the workshop would have been impossible.
The first roundtable, which dealt with the basic preconditions of a security community, was introduced by Professor emeritus Robert H. Legvold from Columbia University. He is also Director of the Euro-Atlantic Security Initiative (EASI), an initiative founded by former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and former German State Secretary Wolfgang Ischinger, which published a widely read report in February 2012. Robert Legvold identified the major obstacles on the way towards a security community as distrust and a lack of political will and outlined a number of key areas of co-operation, including missile defence and energy issues. In the ensuing debate, this idea of strategic and ‘game-changing’ co-operation projects was taken up by a number of speakers. Other participants addressed issues such as global interdependence, the growing stress on national and international institutions, the ongoing impact of security dilemmas, and the absence of shared values. It was also questioned whether there is a real objective need for a security community or whether this is only a nice idea put forward by well-meaning people.
The workshop’s second roundtable focused on the institutional dimension of a security community. It was introduced by Ruprecht Polenz, Member of the German Bundestag and Chairman of its Foreign Affairs Committee. He stressed the need to produce more security in a globally interdependent world on the basis of common security arrangements and shared values. Subsequently, high-ranking representatives of NATO (Assistant Secretary General Ambassador Dirk Brengelmann) and the EU (Ambassador Mara Marinaki) explained their organizations’ mandates and missions, followed by contributions on, among others, unresolved sub-regional conflicts, the specific place of Eurasia in the concept of a security community, Russia’s place in such a framework, the OSCE’s current and future contributions to a Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian security community, and the need for a breakthrough.
Pál Dunay from the Geneva Centre for Security Policy introduced the third roundtable, which dealt with arms control. He highlighted a decline in identifiable inter-state armed threats. He spoke about the 2008 Georgian-Russian war, and warned that the level of military transparency has been already declining and that the U.S.-Russian ‘Reset’ has so far been confined to nuclear issues only. Questions touched upon in the discussion included the contradictory links between conventional arms control and sub-regional conflicts, the relationship between military co-operation and arms control, legal versus political instruments, and the pros and cons of the currently fashionable transparency-only approach.
Finally, the fourth roundtable (which was not dedicated to a specific subject) provided another opportunity to raise any questions that needed further debate. In his introduction, former State Secretary Wolfgang Ischinger stressed that global and regional governance is a growth industry, and warned against the negligence towards arms control, which is one of the few foreign policy instruments enjoying broad support by different political forces in most countries. Another contribution stressed the need to explain why we need a security community.
There was general agreement that the Berlin workshop produced a wide variety of useful contributions to clarifying the substance of a Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian security community and has thus made a good start to the whole cycle of IDEAS workshops, which will be continued in Paris (April), Warsaw (May) and Moscow (June).
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