Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord on securing this debate and introducing it so ably. It is pity that there seem to be as many chiefs as Indians speaking in it; I seem to be the only speaker who has no direct connection to the organisation. I speak mainly as someone who has worked a lot on Russia and its relationship with Ukraine.

The relationship between Russia and Ukraine is tangled and fraught wherever one looks. Even the Eurovision Song Contest has become embroiled. This year it is to be held in Ukraine. The Russian contestant, Yuliya Samoylova, has been banned from the country because she performed at a concert in Crimea in 2015. Each side is blaming the other and, so far, there is no resolution in sight. Samoylova sings from a wheelchair. One Ukrainian observer declared:

“They”—


the Russians—

“are using this girl as a live bomb in the propagandistic hybrid war against Ukraine”.

The Russian view, of course, is diametrically opposed, as is their attitude towards Jamala, the Ukrainian singer who won the contest last year, with a song about the deportation of the Tatars from Crimea by the Soviet Government in 1944. Like the OSCE, the song contest, which involves 43 participating states, is based on inclusiveness and consensus.

The OSCE was created during the Cold War but got what seemed like a whole new life with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Paris charter of November 1990 spoke of the coming of,

“a new era of democracy, peace and unity”,

which the OSCE would play a fundamental role in preserving. The ideological backdrop to this was captured by the then-celebrated work of the American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, with his announcement of “the end of history”. History very soon reasserted itself in the failure of West and East to agree a new security architecture for the European continent.

I consider this to be the structural backdrop to the stresses and strains that we see at the moment. A market economy failed to materialise in Russia while democratic reform remains stunted. The OSCE was marginalised while the western states remain locked into NATO, from which Russia was excluded. The common security space that the Russians have advocated never saw the light of day. Its last gasp was the blunt rejection of the Medvedev plan, originally put forward in 2008. I remember asking a Starred Question about it, and the Minister at the time gave a really dismissive reply.

The OSCE became increasingly seen by the Russians as driven by the aim to create regime change, while its civil rights missions were interpreted as attempts to infringe on Russian sovereignty. The Russian leadership also felt betrayed by NATO’s role in Libya, as it went well beyond the stated aims of the UN resolution that Russia had reluctantly, under pressure, endorsed.

The OSCE looked to be going nowhere, but it has been propelled back to the forefront precisely by the Ukraine crisis. The current chair, Austria, has inevitably made defusing that crisis one of its main priorities. Its capabilities to do so are self-evidently limited because of the need for consensus and the lack of legal personality, thus the Minsk 2 agreement—or a version of it—was implemented by members of the Normandy format, the Government in Kiev and representatives of separatist groups plus the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine. The OSCE is part of that latter group and was important in its overall monitoring role. Nevertheless, it is a collaborative organisation in a world seemingly once again becoming disturbingly geopolitical.

There are new challenges for President Putin inside Russia with the recent surge of street demonstrations. The response so far from the authorities has been straightforward repression and the arrest of its most prominent figure, Alexei Navalny. As the noble Lord said, President Trump’s likely policies with regard to NATO are, to put it mildly, still unclear, as is the real meaning of the friendly overtures that he made towards Russia in his campaign. He has virtually no experience of international politics. Russian hackers almost certainly intervened in the American election, and Russia is both cultivating populist leaders in Europe and being cultivated by them. The stand-off between Russia and Ukraine is a frozen conflict that could become very dangerous. This is a period of world history that could become deeply unstable.

In the past, the OSCE has been variously described as a toothless tiger, a sleeping beauty or a wining and dining club for diplomats. However, its role in the current conflict has been crucial, so I have two questions for the Minister. Does she agree that lessons learned from the experience of the special monitoring mission to Ukraine could potentially open up a new role for OSCE in other conflicts? Does she also agree that this is a time when, as a country, we must actively seek to defend and sustain multilateralism? This is, after all, by far the most interdependent world ever.