Russia’s War as a Challenge for the Arctic Council and the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE)
The Arctic Council (AC) and the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE) have a lot in common. Both have their roots in limited cooperation between East and West during the First Cold War (1947–1991) but only gained their current form after the end of the First Cold War in the 1990s. Both the AC and the OSCE have always been perceived as not being real international organizations in the traditional, legal, sense of the term. The OSCE has what is called “participating states” while the AC has eight member states but also six “permanent participants” in the form of indigenous representative organizations from across the Arctic, as well as numerous observers, which can be very different types of entities.
This less formal approach can be explained by the circumstances that led to the establishment of these fora. During the First Cold War and immediately afterwards, some cooperation and communication were seen by many as being better than nothing and too much formalism could have stood in the way of actually getting things done. There were many good reasons for approaching cooperation in the AC and the OSCE and both fora have been doing important work in their respective regions. This work, which often has not been easy and which would not have been possible without the efforts of many people from very different backgrounds, including former enemies who found ways to cooperate, should be continued. But it should not be continued at all costs.
Russia is waging an illegal war of aggression against Ukraine. Russian forces have committed numerous war crimes, and the intentional targeting of civilians and the removal of millions of Ukrainians, including hundreds of thousands of children, from Ukraine to the territory of the Russian Federation, indicates that the intent behind the war is not the conquest of Donbas but the destruction of the Ukrainian nation. The world must not stand by as what increasingly looks like genocide is waged against the civilian population of Ukraine. Cooperation with the Russian Federation is not an option for states that are truly committed to international law, human rights, international peace, democracy, and the rule of law.
But Russia is a key member of both the AC and the OSCE. Therefore, both organizations have to find ways to function without Russia’s active participation. In the case of the Arctic Council, there are some efforts underway to achieve this. For the OSCE, the challenge might be even greater and the moment has come when cooperating for security in Europe means cooperation not only without Russia but, until peace, freedom, and the territorial integrity of Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, will have been restored, if necessary also cooperation against Russia. Which path the OSCE will take and whether it will remain relevant and if so, in which functions, remains to be seen.
Due to its limited self-organization, for which there were good reasons in the 1990s, neither organization has a procedure to exclude a state. The positive attitude that prevails in both the Ottawa Declaration that established the Arctic Council and in the foundational document of the OSCE (back then still referred to as the CSCE, the Conference for Security and Co-Operation in Europe), the Helsinki Final Act, did not lend itself to the idea that this option could become necessary. Indeed, both the AC and the OSCE are built on the premise that states respect international law and that the general framework of international law, in particular the system of rules that has been created in the era of the United Nations since the end of World War II, provides a sufficient foundation for the envisaged cooperation.
The AC and the OSCE were created as something less than full international organizations. Still, in the last decades, their own successes meant that they became more and more like actual international organizations. However, they never were given the constitutional foundation on which normal international organizations are usually built. To preserve what has been achieved in the last decades and to ensure that both entities remain relevant both during and after the current war, all states and organizations involved in both the AC and the OSCE will have to ensure the continued commitment to the basis on which AC and OSCE are built: respect for an international order that is based on rules that are not merely technical but that reflect values, including democracy, freedom, human rights, and the sovereign equality of states. These are not only ‘Western’ values but they are those on which the contemporary international legal order has been built over the last few generations.
