Helsinki, Plus

Here we go again. As I write, the third Follow-Up Meeting gets under way in Vienna. What’s being followed up is the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE for short). The whole ongoing “Follow-Up” is known as the “Helsinki process.”

We must give the professional diplomats their due, for sheer dogged persistence. The “third” Follow-Up Meeting is actually the eighth, by my reckoning, a number reached by counting the single-issue meetings as well as the all-embracing ones. The full-scale ones, of which this is the third, started with the Belgrade talkathon (October 1977-March 1978); the second installment was the still more talkative Madrid meeting (November 1980-September 1983). In addition, we had an Athens meeting on the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes, a Venice Seminar on the Mediterranean, the useful Ottawa conclave of experts on Human Rights, a Cultural Forum in Budapest, a get-together in Berne on Human Contacts, and of course the Stockholm conclave on Confidence and Security-Building Measures and Disarmament in Europe (see NR, Nov. 7).

BC

About the Author

Brian Crozier

Featured Tags

Here we go again. As I write, the third Follow-Up Meeting gets under way in Vienna. What’s being followed up is the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE for short). The whole ongoing “Follow-Up” is known as the “Helsinki process.”

We must give the professional diplomats their due, for sheer dogged persistence. The “third” Follow-Up Meeting is actually the eighth, by my reckoning, a number reached by counting the single-issue meetings as well as the all-embracing ones. The full-scale ones, of which this is the third, started with the Belgrade talkathon (October 1977-March 1978); the second installment was the still more talkative Madrid meeting (November 1980-September 1983). In addition, we had an Athens meeting on the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes, a Venice Seminar on the Mediterranean, the useful Ottawa conclave of experts on Human Rights, a Cultural Forum in Budapest, a get-together in Berne on Human Contacts, and of course the Stockholm conclave on Confidence and Security-Building Measures and Disarmament in Europe (see NR, Nov. 7).