Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is an international association of more than 55 countries in Europe, Asia, and North America that work to increase their security. Until 1995, the organization was called the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE).
The OSCE’s members are Russia and all the other nations of Europe, plus the United States, Canada, and the central Asian countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. Members include all countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as well as the lands that once belonged to the Warsaw Pact. NATO is a non-Communist defense alliance, and the Warsaw Pact was a Communist one. The two alliances were intense rivals during the Cold War, a period of hostility that developed between the Communist and non-Communist nations after World War II ended in 1945. The Warsaw Pact, led by the Soviet Union, was dissolved in 1991.
The first of many CSCE conferences met in 1975 in Helsinki, Finland. That conference produced the Helsinki Accords. In the accords, Western countries finally recognized Eastern European boundaries that had been set up after World War II. The accords also stimulated the formation of human rights groups that later helped overthrow many Communist governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In 1990, a CSCE conference in Paris declared an end to the Cold War. The Paris conference also established a CSCE secretariat in Prague, in what is now the Czech Republic; a conflict-resolution center in Vienna, Austria; and in Warsaw, Poland, an office to monitor elections in European countries.
The Soviet Union belonged to the CSCE until 1991, when the country broke up into a number of independent states. After the breakup, Russia assumed the Soviet seat, and all the other states that had been part of the Soviet Union eventually joined the CSCE.
In 1992, the CSCE acquired the authority to send peacekeeping forces to its member nations. It also agreed to oversee the negotiation of arms-control agreements between its Eastern and Western members.
