Statement held by Minister Eide at the 32nd OSCE ministerial council meeting

Thank you very much, Elina, and thank you for the wise words also from the parliamentary assembly and from our new Secretary General, my good friend Feridun, which has set us up for a very important conversation. And Beate, thank you for being such a good host.

As I walked in to this room this morning I remembered my first Ministerial meeting, which was the 8^th Ministerial meeting, in the year 2000. At that time the foreign minister of Austria was not called Beate, but Benita, and we were in the troika. These were years where the Western Balkans had been very important. We re-admitted what was then called Yugoslavia, which is today known as Serbia and Montenegro, into the organization. We had the Kosovo war behind us, and we were discussing a number of issues which became quite familiar in these ministerials, including Nagorno Karabakh. I will start by saying that after having deplored the non-solved situation on Nagorno Karabakh, the fact that Azerbaijan and Armenia now has shown a will to look forward, find a solution and to implement their agreement, we should all not only commend that, but support them so that one of the issues that has been on this organization’s table for so many years is progressing constructively.

So, the world was not easy 25 years ago, even if Hofburg was equally as beautiful as it is today, but right now as Andrii reminded us, it is even more complicated and even worse, because we have a hot war going on, the first large scale interstate war in Europe for 80 years which is still ongoing. So I share my dear friend Andrii’s hope that when we meet again ,we can celebrate that the bleeding is over.

But we should not only think about 25 years, what really matters is 50 years ago. I hope that we will try to remember what I will call “the spirit of Helsinki”. Because that was not a time, in ‘75, that we were about to share on a journey towards shared goals, friendship and togetherness. It was actually a time of deep distrust between East and West, and as Feridun said, a time of serious confrontation between great powers and with consequences for everyone in between. But we still understood that we needed to have a conference, as it was called, the CSCE, to deal with the issues that we could not avoid talking about. That we needed to start trying to have a process while we still distrusted each other. I think that when Andrii’s call for ending this war of aggression against Ukraine by our participating State Russia, when this is achieved, this organization can actually learn a lot from the spirit of that time. That we had to deal with certain issues that we shared even if it will take a long time to overcome distrust.

So, to manage distrust is very much what we have been trying to prepare for, maybe if not so much to achieve right now, but the Structured Dialogue that we have been engaged in is about rebuilding that exact thinking. This is not only about Ukraine, it is about Ukraine more than anything else because that is where the war is being fought, but we need to remember that there are many issues in the wider sense that we might forget when we focus so much on ending that particular war.

There are many countries in the balance that we need to remember. We need to remember both the sacrosanct nature of borders and the sovereign equality of states, but also the importance of the people who live in these states, of human rights and the human dimension to all these issues. I would like to recognize as just one example of the people we talk about, that  Madame Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya from Belarus is with us, not in this room but in a side event. I recommend people to listen to her, as just one example of the many questions that still will continue to be relevant when this war current war hopefully is over.

And my last point, Madame Chairperson, is that we need to stand firm on the principles. Because there is nothing wrong in the Helsinki principles. They are as valid as ever.  They have been violated, but that doesn’t mean that they are wrong.

We have to get back to the implementation, to the credence of these principles. But we could be flexible on structures, because I will say about the OSCE as I will say about any international organization, that the purpose of an organization is never the organization itself. Some people confuse that, but we as ministers, we set up organizations to solve a political purpose, and if we need to solve a different purpose, or the same purpose in a different way, we should be able to think about how we modernize, improve, develop, prioritize, and maybe take away certain activities that were right when they were introduced, but not necessarily are right today. So, let’s be flexible on how we organize ourselves, exactly, so that we can reestablish essence of shared security from Vancouver to Vladivostok, one day into the future.

The building of that post war order, the post Ukraine-war order, has to already start now, because we can’t just look at how we end the war. We as Europeans know very well, all too well, that the way a war ends defines the post-war era. And the post-war era is always longer than the war.  If you make mistakes by trying to move to a cheap ceasefire, you can have a very expensive peace afterwards. So, let’s think about this now, and this organization may be quite at the center of what follows next. And that’s the spirit that should inspire our conversation today.

Thank you very much, Elina.