INTERVIEW WITH
SIR PAUL LEVER Conducted by Jakub CSabay
Sir Paul Lever is a British diplomat. He was the member of delegation of the United Kingdom to the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) that negotiated the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. He was a head of the UK delegation to the talks in Helsinki in 1992.
In this interview, concluded as a part of the project of the OSCE Documentation Centre in Prague, Sir Paul Lever describes the road that led from Helsinki to the negotiation of the Charter for a New Europe in Paris in 1990. He reflects on the significance of the Charter and its legacy for the present day. He spoke with former OSCE researcher-in-residence Jakub Csabay.
This document was produced by the OSCE Documentation Centre in Prague as part of the Living Memory Project. Any views or opinions presented here are solely those of the author(s) and/or interviewee(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the OSCE and/or its participating States. The OSCE bears no responsibility for its content. Living Memory Project - Charter of Paris for a New Europe
An Extraordinarily Exciting Time
Interview with Sir Paul Lever
Sir Paul Lever is a British diplomat. He was the member of delegation of the United Kingdom to the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) that negotiated the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, he was a head of the UK delegation to the talks in Helsinki in 1992.
In this interview, concluded as a part of the project of the OSCE Documentation Centre in Prague, Sir Paul Lever describes the road that led from Helsinki to the negotiation of the Charter for a New Europe in Paris in 1990. He reflects on the significance of the Charter and its legacy for the present day. He spoke with former OSCE researcher-in-residence Jakub Csabay.
Jakub Csabay: You have the rare experience of having been involved in both the beginning of the Helsinki process in the 1970s as well as the transformation of the CSCE to the OSCE in the 1990s. Based on your experience, how would you describe the path from Helsinki to Paris?
Paul Lever: Bumpy and unpredictable, I suppose is the honest answer. As you say, my own involvement began with the opening of the preparatory talks for the CSCE, which started in Helsinki in November 1972. I was at that time serving in the British delegation to NATO, and when the British government had to put a team together to take part in these talks I was included because I had been dealing with European security issues in the NATO context. I wasn’t there full time, I used to go for periods of a couple of months. Not least because when these talks started, nobody knew how long they were going to last.
It’s worth remembering that the European security conference was originally a project of the Soviet Union, which they hoped to use in order to stabilize the political order in Europe. They hoped to make permanent their control over the Warsaw Pact countries and to reduce the influence of the United States and Canada. The NATO countries, including the United Kingdom, were not particularly interested in that agenda. But there was a parallel NATO agenda, which was to try to get talks going on conventional arms control – to deal with, as we saw it then, the threat of the massive Soviet and Warsaw Pact superiority in conventional arms in Europe. Talks had begun, bilateral talks between the United States and the Soviet Union on strategic nuclear arms control, but in many ways it was the conventional threat which for NATO countries was the most worrying. The Finns took up the issue of a European security conference; they made a proposal of their own, which mitigated some of the defects of the previous Soviet one because it involved the United States and Canada. And then, in September or October 1972, Henry Kissinger went to Moscow and effectively did a deal, I think personally with Brezhnev, that the United States and its allies would agree to preparatory talks for a conference in Helsinki on security and co-
2 operation, and in return the Russians and their allies would agree to opening talks on conventional arms control in Vienna in January 1973.
Those talks, after a long argument about their name, came to be called the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction Talks (MBFR). They went on until the late 1980s without ever achieving, or even looking likely to achieve, any concrete result. But they served their purpose from a NATO perspective, because one of the reasons the United States wanted these talks to get underway was that every year the administration was facing pressure from Congress, both the House and the Senate, to reduce the number of American forces in Europe. Congress was fed up with having to pick up the bill when they thought the Europeans should be doing more for themselves. Things haven’t changed much in 50 odd years, have they? And there was the so-called Jackson Amendment, by senator Henry Jackson, a very influential Democrat senator from Oregon, I think, who was trying to get amendments issued to the Budget Appropriations Bill, which would cut funding. In order to try to stave this off, the American administration wanted to be able to say: “we have negotiations going, it would be fatal to these negotiations if we started cutting forces unilaterally.” So that was the political background in Washington. From that point of view, the MBFR worked quite well, because the United States did not, in the end, cut its forces in Europe.
I’ve gone into this background, which may seem slightly irrelevant, because you need to understand what the motivations of the two sides were when it came to the CSCE. For most NATO countries it was initially – I would not use the term damage limitation – but it was a project which had not been a NATO initiative, but which NATO had agreed to go along with. Once we got into the negotiations, we realized that actually there were opportunities here. The Soviet principal aim was the consolidation of borders. One of the biggest arguments throughout the preparatory talks was on the issue of the inviolability of borders. What did this mean? As far as NATO was concerned, it meant that borders should not be changed by force, but they could be changed by mutual agreement, politically. For the Soviet Union, it meant that borders were immutable and should not be changed, ever. And that was one of the big points of contention. The other one was the human dimension. For most NATO countries, certainly the United Kingdom, the issue of human rights – freedom of expression, political freedom – was of great importance. We did not have illusions that we were going to change the whole nature of the communist system. We didn’t expect the communist system to change until 1989, when to our surprise it did. We had made no preparations for it. But the Helsinki talks were an opportunity to address some of the questions and to at least put them on the international agenda, in the hope that the way the communist regimes operated could be softened somewhat. That, I think, was our ambition in realistic terms. Of course, we would have never described it so modestly in public because that would have seemed a bit defeatist. But realistically, we did not expect communism to fall because of any agreements made in the CSCE process. We hoped that its impact on people in Warsaw Pact countries, the Soviet Union in particular, could be somewhat mitigated. It was a particular concern of the Germans, obviously.
When we started off, we also had to address the question of the language regime. The assumption was that we’d use English, Russian and French. That was a fairly familiar way of doing things in international meetings. But the Germans said that it was politically unacceptable for
3 them if they had to speak English and the East Germans spoke Russian. I think this was widely accepted as reasonable – the reasons for it were clear. It would have emphasized the distinction between the two Germanies. But once you accepted German, the Spanish – again, not unreasonably – said that Spanish is more of a world language than German, so if German is included, then Spanish should be as well. And then the Italians said: well, actually there are more people in Europe that speak Italian than Spanish. So, we ended up with what some would call a rather generous language regime. But there were good political reasons for it. We were able to stop at five. And I think that regime has stayed in place, if I’m not mistaken.
The Russians originally put it about that they expected these preparatory talks to last a few weeks. In fact, they lasted until the summer. And they resulted in terms of reference for a more formal negotiation, which led finally to the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. The uncertainty about how long this process was going to last made things, even from a purely administrative point of view, quite difficult. I remember a conversation we had when the British delegation had a dinner with the Poles one evening – one of many such encounters we had with different delegations. I was talking to a youngish member of their delegation, and he said that he actually wasn’t going to be in Helsinki very long because he was a military expert, and he was meant to go to Vienna for these – he didn’t say MBFR talks because that wasn’t what they were then called, but for the talks starting then. And most of us expressed surprise because it was the CSCE that was making more the headlines. So, we asked “why”? And he said, in a very Polish view of things: “these CSCE preparatory talks may only last three weeks, as the Russians want, or they may last six months, as you people in NATO seem to be anticipating. But sooner or later, they’ll end. Whereas these military talks in Vienna, they will go on forever, and all on foreign allowances.” And of course, he was right, they did go on forever.
[Both laugh]
What were the United Kingdom’s aims going into the negotiations in Helsinki?
They were, I think, to create some political flexibility in the arrangements in Europe. We weren’t essentially trying to change anything. We were realistic – some critics would say overly cautious – about what we could achieve. But there were certain principles that we wanted to get established. The ability to change borders was one. And achieving some gestures on human rights and freedoms was another. The economic elements – the economic basket, as it came to be called – I don’t think anyone regarded as of critical importance, because there were other economic organizations in the field as well, like the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. But again, if the CSCE could help in improving the economic context, then good. But the main Western priority was trying to do something about conventional arms control. The countries that were not going to be involved in the MBFR talks wanted there to be some military dimension to the CSCE as well, so we agreed to negotiate what came to be called confidence- building measures, essentially providing greater openness: notification of military exercises, some provision for observers, and so on. The Russians were rather sceptical about this, but it was difficult for them to object because the conference had been their idea.
4 So that was the agenda we pursued. It was quite a novel experience negotiating in this format. Of course, there had been, and still were, negotiations within the United Nations in which some of these issues came up, but this was the first big East-West conference in Europe after the end of the Second World War, and there was a great uncertainty about how it was going to work and how long it was going to last. The Finns chaired it with extreme skill. The chairman of the preparatory talks was the state secretary, the most senior official at their foreign ministry, a man called Richard Tötterman. He was calm in a way that many Finns are, often to the point of, I won’t say being boring, but he treated everything as a practical issue to be resolved, and not as a point of controversy. And he remained scrupulously neutral and objective throughout. The Russians came to trust him. They of course had a long-time relationship with Finland of a very particular sort. And NATO countries trusted him. There were one or two players who engaged in – I don’t know if the term “grandstanding” is familiar to you. I mean showing off, creating difficulty for the sake of it. Malta and Romania tended in that direction at the time – no offense to them today. These were the days of Ceaușescu and Mintoff. And he dealt with them extremely professionally. From an organizational point of view and from a point of view of the actual conduct of the meetings, it worked well, slightly to everyone’s surprise. There were no histrionics, there was no shouting, nobody did a Khrushchev and banged the table with their shoe or anything like that. It was all done very professionally. For many of us, it was the first time that we had negotiated professionally with our colleagues from the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. The chief Soviet negotiator was a man called Lev Mendelevich. And we discovered that they might be communist, but they were actually extremely cultured and sophisticated people, and quite clever at negotiating as well. So, it was a fascinating professional experience, and when I look back, a very enjoyable one, too.
Thank you very much. I can’t even imagine, given when I was born and my own experience, how fascinating it must have been. You’ve talked about the Western priorities as a uniform set of priorities. Was there anything particular on the UK side? Or any specific case in which the UK played a decisive role? Or was it really a set of pre-agreed priorities with the partners that all negotiators pursued together?
There were no issues specific to the United Kingdom. Unlike, say, Germany, which obviously had the German Democratic Republic next door and had a particular interest vis-à-vis them. Or countries with territorial problems. We didn’t see this as a way in which bilateral issues involving the United Kingdom could be somehow exploited or furthered. I like to think that we were quite creative as negotiators. That may sound rather vainglorious on my part, but I think if you asked other people who were around at the time, they would say that yes, partly because most of the negotiations were conducted in English – I mean, not the plenary sessions. We were, I think, quite adept at seeing what might be a way through, and additionally how you might put things down in writing. But once the talks got under way, I think we did see the human dimension as one where we could make some progress. Progress in the sense of getting this, for the first time, accepted as being part of the European political agenda and pinning the Russians and the Warsaw Pact countries down on issues where they felt uncomfortable. So that was probably for us the main priority.
5 Moving now to the period of the early nineties – did these priorities evolve in any way for the UK?
I think they remained pretty much the same throughout all the various conferences and review meetings that took place in Belgrade and Geneva and so on up until the end of the 1980s. All that time we were dealing with a situation in which the division in Europe seemed to be permanent and the fundamental nature of communist regimes seemed to be unchanging. And there was a succession of deeply uninspiring leaders in Moscow. I mean, Brezhnev and then Andropov, Chernenko: old men rooted in the past. And then came Gorbachev, and it all changed.
No one in Britain in government had done any preparation for what might happen if the Soviet Union was no longer a communist state and if the Warsaw Pact was dissolved. There was absolutely no planning of any kind done for that. One of the breakthroughs in arms control which took place under Gorbachev that people remember was the Treaty on Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces. And there were the attempts at eliminating all strategic nuclear weapons. But what was perhaps, from a NATO viewpoint, even more significant was the Soviet Union’s willingness to negotiate on conventional arms control on the basis of equality between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, which involved a massive reduction in numbers on the Warsaw Pact side. And those talks, the so-called talks on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), which replaced MBFR with a different mandate and format, began in Vienna.
In 1990 I became the leader of the British delegation to those talks, and also to the CSCE talks that were going on in parallel. I had been the British representative in something called the NATO High-Level Task Force, which met in Brussels to prepare the NATO negotiating position of the CFE talks, so I was quite familiar with the subject matter when I took up my position in March 1990. And the CFE talks were of course the priority. The CSCE discussions going on in parallel were more routine business. But once it became clear that the changes in the Soviet Union and in the Warsaw Pact were going to be as fundamental as they turned out to be, then the CSCE talks took on a much greater political significance, because this was really the only forum in which the security arrangements in the new Europe, other than the purely military ones, could be discussed.
There were countries present which hadn’t existed a few months beforehand. It made the CFE talks extremely complicated because we had been negotiating on the basis of equality between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, but then the Warsaw Pact stopped existing, so we had to change the terms in which the treaty was drafted. Things could have gone extremely badly if it hadn’t been for Gorbachev and the then leadership of the Soviet Union. But fortunately, we got it done and it was signed in Paris in November in 1990. It was an extraordinarily exciting time. One which, in retrospect, was handled well by most of the governments concerned.
It was a time when, at a professional level, you were dealing with people you knew who six months previously had been your bitter – I won’t say political enemy, but let’s say opponents. And now, suddenly, all their lives they had been convinced democrats and they were delighted to be serving the new free government of whatever country it was. To be fair, some of it was
6 hypocrisy, of course, but not all of it was. I mean a lot of these people were very happy to be doing what they were doing. I remember even my colleague, the leader of the Soviet delegation Oleg Grinevsky, a man of enormous intelligence and sophistication, saying how wonderful it felt to be representing a proper free country. He was a Soviet Russian patriot, I think, rather than a convinced communist, but it did make a difference to him.
It was also an extremely exciting time to be in Vienna, living in a city next to countries like yours [Slovakia]. We went from a situation in which if I wanted to go to Czechoslovakia, as it still was at the time, or to Hungary, I needed a visa. I would have to get permission from the foreign office security department, I would have to tell them where I was going, if I would be staying overnight, where I would be staying, whom I would be seeing, and I’d have to notify them of all my routes in advance. I would probably have been followed by the local security police for part, if not all, of the time. And there wouldn’t be an awful lot to do even when one got there. Within a space of six weeks – I remember working it out – six weeks after that situation, my wife and I woke up on a Sunday morning in Vienna with nothing planned for the day, got in the car, drove across the border to Hungary, ate a nice foie gras and roast goose for lunch and drank some nice red pinot noir wine. I mean, it was a totally different world within six weeks. You slowed down at the border post, started getting out your passport, and when they saw what it was, they waved you through. And this had been fortified mines, barbed wire – I mean, it still was, it took them some time to get rid of them. But it really was a tremendous time to be living in Central Europe. And from that point of view, it was, both professionally and personally, remarkable.
We also discovered the idiosyncrasies of some of our fellow negotiators. The decision was taken to allow into the CSCE all the former countries of the Soviet Union, including some that you wouldn’t naturally have thought of as European – all the “Stans”, for instance, as they were called. And I can remember we were talking to a new colleague who had turned up from one of them – I won’t say from which one because it would be unfair to identify the person – but we were asking: “how does it feel to be representing your country?” And he said – he spoke very good English – ”well, it feels very strange, because I don’t feel it’s my country. Up until now my affiliation has been with the Soviet Union, of which I was a citizen, with my family, and with my tribe. But this country that I’m now representing didn’t mean anything to me before – it was simply an administrative area on the map, part of the old Soviet Union.” Of course, he had his language, and he mentioned his family and his tribe. But the country wasn’t something he had ever grown up feeling he had a loyalty to. And we asked him how he came to have got the job, because there hadn’t been any foreign ministry where he came from. He said, well, it was really because he was one of the few people who had had any contact with the outside world. He had done his doctoral thesis on the work of Noam Chomsky, who is an American linguistic professor now associated with left wing causes, but then a rather distinguished intellectual. And we said, “well, you studied in Harvard?” And he said: “no, I’ve never left the Soviet Union before.” You met people like this, he was an extraordinarily clever, and indeed a very nice guy, but you realized just what the differences were in how countries viewed identity.
Identity and the right to self-determination were probably the big issues, or the single biggest issue in the CSCE talks at that time, in the way that frontiers had been in the 1970s when it
7 started. Under what circumstances did the people of a territory have the right to independence or secession? And it turned out to be an issue that a lot of people were interested in and on which it was extremely difficult to formulate any generally applicable rules. Though that was what we spent a lot of our time trying to do. I mean your country and the Czech Republic separated amicably in a very short time, but I think that was a unique case. I can’t think of any other where separation has been achieved with pretty much the majority in favour of it on both sides. In all the other cases – Nagorno-Karabakh for instance, which turned into war, and then of course the former Yugoslavia, where all these issues about identity and the right to secede were played out against the background of a terrible armed conflict. I mean if Slovenia could secede from the former Republic of Yugoslavia, fine – it was a homogenous country without any minority, or hardly any. But then of course Croatia wanted to secede, and what about the Serb-speaking areas of Croatia, could they leave Croatia? And then Bosnia was even more complex. These problems were foreseen, but it seemed that there was a kind of locomotive train underway and you just couldn’t stop it, and the human consequences were terrible. And to this day it has not been possible to draft political language which establishes definitively under what circumstances a territory has a right to self-determination. That became the dominant issue during my time in Vienna and then later in Helsinki at the CSCE summit meeting of 1992.
Would you be able elaborate a little more on the process and the discussions in which you were involved?
The discussions in which I was involved were in the framework of the conference, the CSCE. And a conference basically is about talk and the production of documents of a political character. But the move from the CSCE to the OSCE was not just a change of name, it was a reflection of the fact that the conference, which had been about talk, was now morphing into an organization that was expected to do things. And that just started during my time in Vienna, when it was decided to send, literally, under the auspices of the CSCE, people to do some monitoring of the situation in the former Yugoslavia, really Slovenia and Croatia. It was very low scale, they weren’t peacekeepers, they weren’t armed – they just wore little blue badges or blue jackets, and they were there simply to note what was going on. And that was the first time that the CSCE had actually done anything itself. Up until then it had been a framework in which the participating States were entitled to do things like receive notifications of military exercises and send observers. But this was the first time that the CSCE became operational. And that was a theme which ran through the discussions in Helsinki as well. There was a feeling that yes, drafting yet more documents was fine, but actually, with wars going on, it was beginning to look just slightly self-indulgent. So, attention began to turn to what in practice could be done through the CSCE, or the OSCE as it became, to help things. And that, I think, is what the strength of the OSCE is today.
When I left Vienna in 1992, I spent the rest of my diplomatic career first in London, dealing with security and intelligence issues, and then I was ambassador in Germany, so I didn’t after that have any personal professional involvement in the OSCE. But I think that the OSCE, its strength, is the things that it actually does, many of which do not attract a huge amount of public attention and interest, because the OSCE, in order to get things done, has to operate on a basis of
8 consensus. It has to cajole people into doing things, not engage in public rows which attract media attention. But establishing an office for democratic institutions, establishing offices that deal with human rights and the treatment of minorities, going in for election monitoring: these are practical things that help solidify the values that the OSCE is meant to represent. At the time of the CSCE nobody would have pretended that all of the subscribing countries shared the same political values. Under the OSCE this was supposed to be the case. Of course, Russia and some of the countries had human rights records which probably wouldn’t stand up to very close examination. But nonetheless, everybody was in principle committed to the same values. I think setting up institutions to deal with the practical aspects of this was what the OSCE has mostly focused on, and I think rightly so. And I think that’s what has kept it going. Because you have to ask – there are many multilateral organizations now in Europe, there’s the European Union, which I once worked with, there’s the Council of Europe and so on, so you could ask: “why do we need an OSCE as well? What’s the particular, unique selling point it has?” And I would answer: “its unique selling point is not that it brings ministries together once in a while; it is that in the intervals between that it actually does things which are helpful, and which are valued.”
Perhaps if you could – based on your own reflection as an experienced diplomat – reflect more specifically about successes or failures of the OSCE looking at developments in the 1990s and 2000s, when you were still active in foreign policy?
As you say, I can’t speak from direct experience – but I think probably that history will judge the OSCE rather in the way that it now judges the CSCE. I mean the CSCE at the time was regarded in many quarters in the West as toothless, “a talking shop, lots of blah blah blah, lots of meetings, nothing really came of it, why were the Russians allowed to get away with pretending that they were living up to these commitments” – and there was an element of truth in that. But when we talked later on to people from the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, they said no, it helped. The appearance of committees that could call themselves Helsinki Committees because they were committees based on agreements signed in the CSCE context, they were based on and derived from the Helsinki Final Act. Yes, the repression still continued, but it gave those who were trying to liberalize their societies an element of international respectability, which the regimes, the autocratic regimes, had to take account of. They couldn’t just simply close down something called a Helsinki Committee. I mean, they could, but there would have been international political consequences.
Take the OSCE’s ability to provide monitoring facilities for elections: has it made any difference in Russia? No, certainly not. But it has in places like Moldova. I mean countries which aspire to become liberal democracies find that the OSCE can help them and I think if all goes well, future historians will look back and maybe say – yes, obviously it was the people in this country who made the journey themselves, but the fact that the OSCE was there to encourage, to advise, to monitor, to provide an element of international support and international respectability to what they were doing – I think that’s what it will probably be remembered for. And that, to me, is the main justification for keeping it going.
9 Now, thirty years or so after the periods we have been discussing, we are living in a period of uncertainty – the conflict in Ukraine, the pandemic over the last few years – and if you were to reflect: how is this period different from the 1970s and the early ‘90s, the periods we have been talking about when you were in active diplomatic service, active in these negotiations.
I think what’s different is that security in Europe is now much more unpredictable. At the time of the Cold War, yes, there was this fundamental relationship of opposition between East and West, between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and yes, there was a high level of military confrontation. But there was a sense, at least on the Western side, certainly in Britain, that we understood, or thought we understood, what the interests of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were and how they would interpret those interests. And therefore, we had a sense of where the red lines were. We felt that we understood, whether we liked it or not, that there were certain things that the Soviet Union would never accept – and other things where we could push them. But that there was no point in pushing them beyond a certain point. In military terms, again, we thought we knew how provocative we could be, they could be, and what the consequences were if we were more provocative. And there were channels of contact and therefore we behaved militarily in a way which respected those red lines. This involved things like overflights and submarine incursions and intelligence gathering and so on. The only time when things looked really dangerous was when NATO conducted a military exercise called Able Archer in 1983. It was a command-post exercise practising nuclear release procedures. The Soviet Union misinterpreted it and thought that this might be for real. Fortunately, nothing happened, and the problem was de-escalated. But that was an occasion when communication didn’t work and misjudgement might have happened.
It’s much more difficult now with Russia because they, we, simply do not know what their real red lines are in Ukraine. I mean, it seems that they don’t really accept that Ukraine is a sovereign independent country at all. They regard it as somehow, not just part of their sphere of influence, but part of, almost part of their territory. And when Putin and others talk about possible use of tactical nuclear weapons – they never did this in the Cold War. Of course, we knew what weapons they had. We knew where they were stationed. We knew what their capabilities were. But not even Brezhnev would threaten to use tactical nuclear weapons. I mean, it’s true Khrushchev said “we will bury you”, but I think that was just a reminder of how powerful they were rather than a declaration of an actual intention to use nuclear weapons. Now, with Putin, it’s very difficult to judge, hence the decisions that NATO countries make – not on whether to support Ukraine, but on what form of military support to offer, what type of weapon assistance, how much direct assistance – these are much more difficult judgments to make, because Russia has become an unpredictable and much more malevolent force. In the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s aim was to retain and preserve the power that they already had. Now, we have a Russia which is aggressive, which is expansionist, which is not content with the situation it has, which wants to capture and retain part of the territory of another state. That was not the case with the Soviet Union. I think it’s a more volatile, more unpredictable situation today. The job of my successors, I mean people like me who are engaged in public policy in the security field, I think it’s much more difficult. I don’t envy them the sort of decisions that they have to take.
10 If you were to talk to a younger generation, maybe looking more towards the future, what would you say its role should be in these times of crisis and uncertainty?
What advice would I give to younger people? Well, I would tell them, the world in which you are operating is a vastly better one than we had during the Cold War, and you should be grateful for that. I would say, don’t underestimate the role that international organizations can play. No country can do it on its own. The OSCE is not the only organization involved in European security and nobody would claim that it’s as important as NATO, or the European Union, come to that. But I think that if you’re interested in international affairs, the international world, if you want to deal with the reality of understanding other countries, their interests, their aspirations, their fears – the OSCE is a rather good vehicle for doing this on a day-to-day practical basis. It’s not somewhere where you go to hear lofty speeches. It is somewhere where you go to understand what are, what is the background to the relationship between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Or how Moldova sees its future. And I would encourage anybody who is contemplating a career in diplomacy, if they want to post you to your country’s delegation to the OSCE, and you feel, “gosh I’ve barely heard about it. I know about the United Nations, I know about NATO, but isn’t this going to be just a backwater somewhere where I’ll be out of the limelight?” My response is that you may well be out of the limelight. But sometimes it’s the jobs which are out of the limelight that are the more interesting, which give you personally more opportunity to achieve results. Because you’re operating more at the level of day-to-day things, you’ve got to find practical solutions to how to deal with issues of minorities and human rights and monitoring, and you have more opportunity to do that at perhaps a more junior level than you will if you are attending an EU or a NATO summit.
On this positive note, let me thank you for all your insights in this interview. And I wish you all the very best.
You too. Thanks for talking to me, I enjoyed it.
This interview is part of the oral history project “Living Memory - 30th Anniversary of the Charter of Paris for the New Europe”, an extra-budgetary project conducted by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)'s Documentation Centre in Prague, headed by Ambassador Irena Krasnicka. The project envisages intergenerational dialogue based on memories of diplomats who attended the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE)'s Paris Summit in November 1990. The interview was conducted on 29 November 2022 by a former OSCE researcher-in-residence Jakub Csabay of Slovakia, a PhD student at the Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge.
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