The OSCE Ministerial Council elected Italy to chair the Organization in 2018. The consensus decision was taken on July 27 last by the current 57 members of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). And there is nothing to prevent that – by changing the Statute – also “observer” countries may add to them, as currently happens for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
Hence it would be appropriate to use this one-year OSCE Italian Presidency in a good and new way. It is worth recalling that the Secretary General of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly – with a five-year term which started on January 1, 2016 – is the Italian Roberto Montella, a conflict resolution expert who worked for years with the Organization in the Balkans.
Hence we must not think of a remake of the usual “European semester” to be served with bombastic statements, expensive conferences and zero facts, just to show off and publicize the national government.
The issue lies in thinking big, at last.
This is what Italy shall start to do if it wants to survive in the new international scenario.
Hence it shall make use of the largest organization for security in which as many as 57 countries operate, although it is an organization which has not yet full international personality.
However these are results to be reached on the field – not with official documents – as is the case with honor, respect, prestige and charisma.
So far we have seen the Vienna-based organization operating in the field of management and monitoring of elections. Nevertheless there is an extremely important functional factor for OSCE regarding – as by Statute – the settlement of international legal disputes. It is in this field that we must play our cards well.
We must not forget, however, the Warsaw-based office dealing with election observation missions.
In a phase in which there will be important elections – ranging from those scheduled in Somalia for next August to those in the Russian Federation on September 18, in Jordan on August 20, in Morocco on September 18, in the Palestinian West Bank and in Montenegro next October – the OSCE traditional monitoring activity projects the Vienna-based Organization onto the top of the current system of international relations.
This provided that it shifts from the observation of elections to a strategic project, which is not a mere “democratization”, but the redesign of international balances and alliances.
We hope that, with the Italian Presidency, the issue will not only be to monitor the formal regularity of the voting procedures, but to set a new mode of international political and strategic relations in the new global strategic scenario. This scenario has changed all the dreams of decision-makers following the end of the Cold War.
Certainly monitoring elections and, above all, making full use of the international legal affairs management system currently means having a flexible, wide, powerful, influential and universally recognized instrument.
This is designed to start to resolve some of the current global tensions and, in particular, to redesign the map of the balance of power, influence and stability.
Currently using the OSCE means being able to draw a new map of international balances outside the network of the old and now dead alliances: the Atlantic Alliance is increasingly a network à la carte, with Turkey playing its independent game in the Middle East and the United States which use the countries of the old Warsaw Pact to encircle Russia – not to mention the now countless NGOs only dealing with migration, humanitarian aid, peacekeeping or health, which are a direct expression of governments (over 54) or strictly regional organizations (at least 32 in this sector).
They are too small to be strategic and too weak to impose a new system of international relations, as well as too sectoral to solve even the problems they would like to solve.
They are all regional organizations and hence not very active: many of them are linked to the major governments of the various regional alliances, while others are still too specific in their scope to carry out strategic and geopolitical tasks and functions.
Therefore OSCE has the size, tradition and role to begin – with the Italian Presidency – to solve a series of problems that neither NATO, an organization which is currently experiencing weaknesses predicted as early as the end of the Cold War, nor the United Nations, too big and inhibited by cross vetoes, nor the EU, now Germany-centered and always deprived of a geopolitical project, nor other similar organizations can start to solve in a new and effective way.
Let us analyze the breaking points of the balance between Europe and the world’s great geopolitical areas which border on Europe or have traditional relations with it.
And let us examine how the OSCE could help us to solve them.
Meanwhile, we must still consider the Balkans.
Excessively fragmented, pending the end of the Cold War, to avoid the Slavonization of the region in relation to Russia, as well as the Serb hegemony, and to finally create independent, but not autonomous statelets, which would be EU members or small potentates.
Therefore the region is still unstable, dangerous, economically problematic and unable to be a rampart against the pressures exerted by the radical or non radical political Islam.
The Wahhabism imported from Saudi Arabia is still spreading like wildfire among the vast Muslim populations in the Balkans. In Bosnia the two different populations have never relinquished the separation project – either consensual or not – and the Republic of Srpska, namely the Serbian part of Bosnia, is threatening a referendum on independence to be held in 2018.
Moreover Kosovo is undergoing a deep economic crisis, but the local Serbs have recently gained the right to territorial autonomy, which has led to harsh demonstrations by the Albanian population that, with some naivety, the United States had promoted to the rank of hegemonic population in the region.
Just think that Kosovo is the “masterpiece” of the two Balkan wars between 1991 (Slovenia) and 1995 (the Croatian war of independence), then of the Bosnian war which began in 1992 and apparently ended in 1995, as well as of the actual Kosovo war, which began in 1991 and ended in 1999, followed by the insurgency in the Presevo valley from 1999 to 2001 and finally by the uprising in Macedonia in 2001.
The dates and number of wars show that the current solution is worse than the tensions which gave rise to the splitting and fragmentation of the Balkans, which has always been the greatest danger for the peace and stability of Europe (and also of its allies).
Here a great project of the OSCE Italian Presidency could be to follow again a great idea of an excellent Italian Foreign Affairs Minister, namely Gianni De Michelis.
Having already foreseen the silly indefinite fragmentation and splitting of the Balkan ethnic groups and micro-nations, in 1991 the Venetian Minister launched the so-called Pentagonal Initiative, later renamed the Hexagonal Initiative with the addition of Poland, which served to stabilize Central Europe, to allow its integrated development and to support the idea of a “united and democratic” Serbia, as well as to finally manage the large infrastructure aid which the Pentagonal Initiative could not fund on its own, but only through the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).
Furthermore, in Minister De Michelis’ mind, the problem was to remove the danger of triggering off more or less historically justified separatisms which would endanger Europe itself – as also happens today.
The issue is still pending and the OSCE could solve it – at least starting from the one-year Italian Presidency – by equipping itself with a series of financial and operational arms on the field, which are practicable considering its autonomy and legal specialization.
Moreover Macedonia is currently without a stable central government and the large Albanian minority is getting organized after some public demonstrations.
The OSCE solution could be a new alliance, a new wider “Pentagonal Initiative” supporting a network of alliances resulting from the crazy geopolitics of the Balkan splitting and fragmentation.
The issue still lies in linking economic aid and investment to a sound internal stability, to mutual military, strategic and commercial consultations between the countries in the region and finally to a new strategic stability pact between the EU and the whole system of micro-States resulting from the Balkan wars fought between the 1990s and 2002.
Here the issue does not lie in the usual and mere monitoring of the regularity of elections, as often happened in the OSCE brilliant history.
As the old saying goes, when the cat is away, the mice will play: once regular elections are over, the country destabilizes itself exactly as if they had not taken place.
The “daily referendum” – as the French historian Ernest Renan called the election process – only works if the political classes and the elites share relevant homogeneous traits.
Hence the real problem that the Italian Presidency shall solve is the “substantial legitimacy and lawfulness” of the micro-States’ actions, thus avoiding their coalescing towards the jihad exporting countries and the strategic porosity of the whole Balkan system which, as previously recalled, is the greatest threat to European stability.
This is the reason why a Pact among all 57 members of the Organization would be needed, ensuring the possibility of an interposition and stabilization intervention – also at military level – outside the NATO context and with the inevitable agreement of the other great country vitally interested in the Balkans, namely the Russian Federation.
Russia has been an OSCE Member State since June 1973.
Another point of tension that the organization could begin to solve is in the Greater Middle East. The Near East we knew in the past was an old design on the British map between London and the Indies: today it is the largest source of global instability and the point in which all the geopolitics threads converge, both eastwards and westwards.
Many of the smaller Islamic countries of the region are OSCE Member States: Turkmenistan (since 1992), Azerbaijan (since 1992), Uzbekistan (since 1992) and, more importantly, Turkey, which is an OSCE Member State since 1973.
At this juncture the issue lies in encompassing Israel, which is not a member of the Organization, along with some other countries in the region.
The Jewish State is even the key to the new OSCE which should start with the Italian Presidency: firstly, it would be the pivotal link between the Organization and the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, the new “Silk Road” between East and West proposed by the Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Nevertheless China, too, is not an OSCE Member State – hence the quick and anti-bureaucratic role played by the Organization’s “observer members”.
Moreover, Israel could provide to the OSCE its great economic and technological potential, which is essential for the new foreign policy which is in the offing.
And in so doing Israel could also reconnect its foreign policy with a wide network of alliances and mutual balances which it currently lacks in the new Middle East devastated by the jihad.
Nothing prevents, however, that the entry of new countries in the region allows to implement less war-directed rules and regulations than the current ones, in a context of relaxation of tensions in the region in which Israel could also avoid the two-way relationship both with the Russian Federation, which has other interests in the region, and with some Iran’s Islamist enemies, with which Israel’s relations are bound to be written on water.
Hence to make Israel get out of the current strategic cul de sac and impose, at least on a part of the Arab world, new negotiations, outside the Cold War myths – for example, we can here consider the hypothesis, never relinquished by Saudi Arabia, of an exchange between territories and pan-Arab (Sunni) recognition.
Old stuff, which could be overcome if the OSCE proposed itself not only as an organization capable of managing elections, but also as an organization active in conflict resolution within a new context, by involving old and new regional and global players in the negotiations.
I am referring to Russia, China, as well as many Central Asian republics, and even to the United States which, in this case, would see their leadership within NATO be less burdensome for them.
Another issue to be considered in the new OSCE set-up here proposed is Great Britain’s new economic and strategic integration after the Brexit.
Great Britain is now an autonomous country, but it cannot fully use its Commonwealth, in which many countries now have size and interests which are very different from the British ones. It is currently outside the EU political context, regardless of the date of its formal exit from the European Community.
Great Britain has been an OSCE Member State since June 1973 and the network we are planning for the new organization is such as to mostly replace the system of alliances that Great Britain had reached with the EU throughout its long membership.
Hence support on an equal footing and not monopolized by the European concert for the new British globalization.
We must be well aware that while the UK cannot do without the European strategic system, which is its natural bulwark for geopolitical security, not even the EU can do without Great Britain, a member of its military nuclear club and a country of great influence within the UN Security Council, as well as a globally strong and autonomous financial center.
The EU is blind without Great Britain, while the latter could become deaf without a network uniting the EU and the rest of the world, such as the OSCE.
Hence, with its integrated system of international relations and its legal expertise, which could be used both in trade negotiations and in more strictly strategic ones, the Organization could be a good way to recover Great Britain, which cannot leave the EU alone.
Therefore I am thinking, first and foremost, to a large OSCE Conference on the Greater Middle East, in which some basic points would be established: a) Israel’s universal recognition and the equivalent right to its autonomous self-defense; 2) an Israeli system of relations, through the OSCE, with all regional and global players without the dangerous burden of interactions with the United Nations and NATO; 3) the redesign – not imitating the Balkan follies – of the Arab areas in the region, with an OSCE interim protection for small countries and such a border protection as to finally prevent the Islamic globalization, namely the jihad.
Briefly a “Pentagonal Initiative” for the Middle East.
In the Balkan region which, as we all know, has always been the hotbed of European instability, we shall follow the heritage left by former Minister Gianni De Michelis: stabilization of the region; avoidance of the crazy virus of ethnic fragmentation and splitting; the network of intra-State aid which, in this new strategy, could be integrated with the Chinese aid of the Road and Belt initiative.
The great OSCE Conference should make Great Britain come back into play in the international system, precisely through the Organization, so as to recover it to a Grand Strategy without too many debts with the United States and suitable for what is still a major world power.
Once again, through the OSCE, Israel could establish its new network of international relations, thus quelling many Arab countries which, although not being members of the Organization, are too experienced to neglect it.
Hence the issue lies in shifting – by also making OSCE acquire autonomous international personality – from an Organization only monitoring elections to an Organization which, pending the structural crises of the others, plans and designs a new geopolitics in the most important points of tension: the Balkans, Northern and Eastern Europe and, above all, the Greater Middle East.
It is a major challenge to which the OSCE Italian Presidency should be able to rise up.