Peaceful coexistence of states – the imperative of our time

The signatories to the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the CSCE, concluded in Helsinki 50 years ago this summer, declare at the outset their “determination to respect and put into practice, each of them in its relations with all other participating States, irrespective of their political, economic or social systems as well as of their size, geographical location or level of economic development, the following principles, which all are of primary significance, guiding their mutual relations”:
  “Sovereign equality, respect for the rights inherent in sovereignty; refraining from the threat or use of force; inviolability of frontiers; territorial integrity of States; peaceful settlement of disputes; non-intervention in internal affairs; respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief; equal rights and self-determination of peoples; co-operation among States; fulfilment in good faith of obligations under international law”.¹

The principles enshrined
in the Final Act are essential now
for the formation of a multipolar world

The participating states committed themselves to unite in overcoming mistrust and increasing confidence, to resolve the problems that divide them, and to work together for the benefit of humanity.
  The signatory powers of the Helsinki Final Act committed themselves, in the interests of ensuring security in Europe, to continue:

• to make every effort to make détente in the universal sense both a lasting and an increasingly viable and comprehensive process;

• to contribute to the development of closer relations among themselves in all fields and thus to the overcoming of the confrontation stemming from the nature of their past relations and to better mutual understanding;

• to endeavour to contribute to the consolidation of peace and security in the world and to the promotion of fundamental rights, economic and social progress and the well-being of all peoples.

The Final Act was the result of the will of its 35 signatory states on 1 August 1975 to relax their relations and contribute to peace, security, justice and better cooperation. The signatory states included 15 NATO members, seven Warsaw Treaty states, and 13 “independents” with observer status – the Mediterranean countries Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia.²

A CSCE diplomat’s review³

At the centre of the Helsinki Final Act and the resulting détente process was the task of placing concepts such as peace and security and the cooperation required to achieve them in a context that remains necessary, indeed imperative, even today. It was about a still-valid main concern of a pan-European security structure and policy in the complexity of its elements.
  A new international negotiating structure began with the CSCE, its regulations, and its stipulations. The principle of equal rights for all participating states was a rejection of any attempt to introduce bloc structures into the process. At least, this was true at the beginning.
  The latter occurred primarily with the declaration on a catalogue for shaping relations, by which the participating states were to be guided, namely the principles on certain aspects of security and disarmament, on cooperation in economic, scientific, technological, and environmental matters, as well as cooperation in humanitarian and other areas with the later particularly controversial topics such as human contacts and information.
  With the Helsinki text from 1975, each participant ultimately implemented essentially what it considered necessary to safeguard its interests: The then-prevailing socialism in the form of the Warsaw Treaty saw the political and territorial realities of the time as secured by the principles of nonviolence, respect for territorial integrity, inviolability of borders, respect for sovereignty and non-interference. Respect for human rights in the catalogue of principles, the detailed formulation of the broad spectrum of humanitarian issues, the enormous field of information, and the problem of economic cooperation, especially with regard to the preservation of its own commercial advantages, were indispensable concerns for the Western system.
  The role of neutral and nonaligned states should be emphasised. With one exception – the former Yugoslavia – they generally sided with the West due to the nature of the system. Nevertheless, their role as mediators and coordinators in various working groups or in the conference plenary was in demand. This was particularly true in numerous cases wherein it was necessary to negotiate compromises on a larger or smaller scale.
  The Final Act and the resulting process of détente, which also involved military and confidence-building measures, went down in international history as a tried and tested example of how peaceful coexistence and cooperation among states with different social and political systems is possible and can be organised.
  Such a construction can also be understood as consistently democratic state behaviour in their international relations. Without this, a multipolar world will not be able to live in peace. It was and remains an international imperative without an expiry date.

A plea for ‘peaceful coexistence’
in a multipolar world

Multipolarity cannot be “domesticated” by monopolies. But this is what the collective West is currently working on. It is faced with an emerging geopolitical camp of rising forces and powers in Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America. Against this backdrop, a new international constellation of forces and conflicts is emerging in which the international rules, mechanisms, and profits handed down by the West are losing their previous monopoly and model function. Henry Kissinger compared such a new situation with a situation in which the “traditional European superpowers do not realise that the current geostrategic and geopolitical realities have become obsolete” and “the rules and norms organised by a pan-European elite are no more a sufficient vehicle for a global strategy if geopolitical realities are not taken into account”.⁴
  Today, this pan-European “elite” is endeavouring to close the global gap in the multipolar world to its advantage with its doctrine of a “rules-based international order” – this instead of exploring, defining and balancing the interests of both sides. Although the trans–Atlantic West invokes the United Nations Charter, it means something completely different – to enforce its international “superpower ideology, [its] monopoly of supremacy and [its] criteria for the exercise of power”.⁵
  The US in particular is fighting for its global hegemony by means of this doctrine. Documents from the US Congress leave no doubt about this. They characterise the “rules-based international order” as a “US-centred world whose allies and partners are committed to maintaining and promoting free, open, democratic, inclusive, rules-based, stable and diverse regions in order to uphold their shared values and interests.”⁶ [Emphasis A.S.]
  The constitutive principles of the BRICS states on the other side of this “divide”, however, are much different: “Commitment to multilateralism and upholding  international law, including the Purposes and Principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations as its indispensable cornerstone, and the central role of the UN in an international system in which sovereign states cooperate to maintain international peace and security, advance sustainable development, ensure the promotion and protection of democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, and promoting cooperation based on solidarity, mutual respect, justice and equality.”⁷
  In contrast to the doctrine of the Western “rules-based international order”, the Global South makes no claim to hegemony. The focus is on its claim to the democratisation of international relations, their instruments, institutions, and rules.
  America’s claim to assert global hegemony together with its allies, even under multipolar conditions, is currently becoming the focal point of international disputes. During his term in office Joe Biden used the term “era” as a generic term for a doctrine of “international relations under conditions of long-term strategic rivalry” after the end of the Cold War – a “Post-Cold War Era of International Relations”.⁸ This de facto amounts to an “open end”. The beginning of this era was located with the “seizure and annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014”, its “actions in eastern Ukraine” and “China’s actions in the East and South China Seas”. The US administration assessed these as a “threat to core elements of the international order shaped by the US”.⁹ In other words, the era of “long-term strategic rivalry” is already a reality and characterises the positioning of the US in the Ukraine conflict and far beyond.
  It remains to be seen whether America’s current president, Donald Trump, will follow this doctrine. Initial talks on normalising relations between the US and the Russian Federation, as well as a political end to the war over Ukraine, give rise to hopes of a new détente. Both could – welcomely, directly or indirectly – lead to their peaceful coexistence, conflicting interests notwithstanding.
  “There is no question that the foundations for a new world order have long been laid. While the surviving architects of the old-world order, namely North Americans and Western Europeans, have been stuck in it for 30 years, others, first and foremost the Chinese, have taken the reins and created “facts on the ground, as the expression has it. We may not like these facts, but we have no choice. We have to accept them as elements of an order that has been established without our intervention. If we do not, we will fail.”¹⁰

Peaceful coexistence
of states is more than the
absence of war and the use of force

Peaceful coexistence¹¹ is the creation, presence, and preservation of a political space in which conflicting social systems, value systems, and political systems interact without calling into question the principle in international law of sovereign equality among states with different social and political systems. Meeting all three objectives gives peaceful coexistence the character of both dynamism and stability. The prerequisites for success are the will for peace, understanding, mutual security and a willingness to compromise. The worst enemies are loss of trust and antagonism.
  The Helsinki Final Act embodies these predicates. In particular, its guiding principle that the CSCE States should develop better and closer relations with each other and thus overcome confrontation stemming from the nature of earlier relations and achieve better mutual understanding proved to be of practical value. These principles and commitments were already creations of Realpolitik, the pragmatic ability to compromise of state leaders of the two antagonistic camps, West and East, as well as nonaligned states to deal with their socio-political and value-oriented contradictions according to common rules of peaceful coexistence. Its primary pacifying goal was to guarantee collective security in Europe. The aim, spirit, message, and procedure of the Helsinki Final Act still offer indispensable peace policy instruments even in the rapidly developing multipolar power and conflict constellations.
  Even under conditions that were hostile to the system, the state leaders of both camps, socialist and capitalist, succeeded in mastering and “cultivating” their socio-political antagonism, including their respective global ambitions to political and revolutionary supremacy.
  “Peaceful coexistence in the long term requires institutional precautions and reassurances. But it also requires corresponding mentalities.” [Emphasis A.S.] This is how the German political scientist and peace researcher Dieter Senghaas formulated his findings from his research on “peaceful coexistence” and on overcoming the Cold War and the East-West confrontation from 1945 to 1990. In a “look back to the future”¹², he was concerned with “preventing a conflict constellation of a comparable nature or even in cushioned forms of an antagonistic constellation between regional powers from developing again in the future”. According to Senghaas’s historical perception, this is not at all far-fetched, as the East-West conflict constellation was, from a global historical perspective, of unprecedented intensity in terms of ideological system antagonism and the “incomparably monstrous incisive events” and “potential for destruction”. “There is still much to be learned from this past acute global political constellation.”
  What Senghaas considered to be “unprecedented” is now overtaking the present. This is the tragedy of our time. At present, the powers that decisively determine the international situation are in a confrontation that is degenerating into war. As recently as 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev saw the European security perspective in the “creation of a security and confidence structure that stands above the blocs”. By contrast, in 1991 US President George H.W. Bush interpreted the peaceful end of the Cold War as opening the way for a change in strategy towards a unipolar world order – an order in which the US shapes the rest of the world instead of reacting to it.¹³
  All in all, the question of peace is no longer the question of all questions internationally. But the narrative of “peaceful coexistence” as a European model of peace and détente remains more than indispensable. The Helsinki model also proved successful in the turbulent political European environment of the Cold War. The 35 European states and heads of state, including top German politicians, considered it opportune even in difficult times.
  The “subjective factor” in the form of the “role of personality in history” has moved and continues to move to a causal primary position with serious consequences insofar as it largely eradicates “peaceful coexistence” and its peace-making content in terms of foreign policy. The most common arguments for this are that their time value has expired in view of comparatively changed international conditions and that they are therefore “obsolete”.

Federal Republic of
Germany’s reason for détente –
the ‘common European home’

“I have agreed with General Secretary Gorbachev on building blocks for a common European home!”

(Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl)

Consequently, there was once a generation of political thinkers, primarily Western European leaders, including social democrats, who, under nuclear threat pressure, concentrated on common security and détente during the Helsinki period. Expectations of peaceful economic relations between the states in the West and East also had their place. It still acted “on the premise of the personal and collective memory of war” to “prevent the outbreak of the next war”. “In Germany, this was still the generation of Willy Brandt, Helmut Kohl, and Erich Honecker”.¹⁴
  The primary and personal motivation of the heads of state at the time was to prevent a nuclear escalation between the two antagonistic socio-political systems. The clarity and totality of this threat, the fact that it was a question of peaceful continued existence or the common downfall of humanity in a nuclear war, gave rise to the realisation that conflict potentials with a tendency towards nuclear war could no longer be controlled in the conventional way – through military superiority, military victory, defeat or subjugation of one of the two sides. Instead, the threat had to be eliminated in such a way that armed warfare was ruled out as a solution to conflict.
  It is worth noting that the Federal Republic was still guided by a number of coexistential principles when it came to constructing the external prerequisites and conditions for the merger of the two German states.
  This initially applied to Gorbachev’s plan (1987) of a “common European home”, in which the Soviet Union, the FRG, and the GDR were to coexist peacefully alongside other European states.
  Of more fundamental importance, however, were considerations on shaping a common European security order after the end of the East-West conflict, its institutionalisation and consolidation in and through the CSCE. Chancellor Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher understood this to mean the cooperative coexistence of states and their regulative principles. In his speech to the Bundestag on 28 November 1990, Kohl declared a “10-point program for overcoming the division of Germany and Europe” and that he had agreed with “General Secretary Gorbachev on the building blocks for a common European home”. He mentioned the following points as examples:

• “Full respect for the integrity and security of every state;

• “Every state has the right to choose freely its own political and social system;

• “Full respect for the principles and norms of international law, especially respect for the right of national self-determination;

• “The realisation of human rights;

• “Respect for, and cultivation of, the historically rooted cultures of the nations of Europe”.¹⁵

He emphasised point 8 on his 10-point list: “The CSCE process is at the heart of this pan-European architecture. We want to drive it forward and make use of the upcoming forums”.
  Foreign Minister Genscher declared in the 226^th session of the German Bundestag, on 20 September 1990: “With our participation, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe is gradually developing into a structure of European cooperation, security and stability”.¹⁶
  Leading figures in the SPD also supported the Helsinki way, Egon Bahr in particular. At the Hamburg Institute for Peace and Conflict Research, which he headed, he developed alternative ideas for a collective European security system. His concept for the period after the end of the Cold War was guided by the idea of a common “space between Lisbon and Vladivostok as a security-political unit”. Europe had “the chance to organise the security of its states in such a way that wars between them become impossible”.¹⁷ In the “Basic Outlines of a Collective Security System”, Bahr was concerned with “creating pan-European bodies in the security sector that include Russia. Whether this country will develop democracy and a market economy in ten or fifteen years, whether it wants to or can do so at all, measured by Western European standards, is open, inevitably uncertain; but to wait for Russia’s stability before security is organised would be a mistake of the century”.¹⁸
  Manfred Wörner, NATO secretary general at this time, developed the concept of a “future security structure for Europe” in 1990. Its task was to organise “a security partnership for the European states to overcome the rigid hostility of the Cold War years, and to progress from confrontation to cooperation”. Wörner formulated the following NATO future principles: “A Changing Alliance: from confrontation to cooperation; from a military to a political alliance; from deterrence to protection against risks and the guarantee of stability; from peace-keeping to peace-building; from a US-led alliance to a genuine partnership with the Europeans now playing an equal leadership role”.¹⁹
  The US immediately countered these German concepts based on sovereign, independent interests. “The Atlantic alliance, it was now professed, should be concerned less about security and more about its political reach. The expansion of NATO up to the borders of Russia […] within several hundred miles of Moscow was proposed […] as a sensible method of “locking in” democratic gains”, said Henry Kissinger.²⁰
  This counterattack came immediately and followed a Pentagon orientation that “would become the cornerstone of US foreign policy”: “[T]he US government must ‘discourage the advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role’”.²¹
  Robert L. Hutchings, a member of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy team in 1989, noted in “American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War”: “Our diplomacy during this period was harnessed to securing, not German, but American interests. ‘Institutionalising’ the CSCE process was anathema to some in Washington who feared that the organisation would eventually undermine NATO”.²² Genscher’s “speech […] underscored the danger that, left to themselves, the Germans might pay – and make others pay – an unacceptable and unnecessary price to win Soviet acceptance of unification. The US was also concerned that Genscher elsewhere assured them of Germany’s continued membership of NATO – albeit “in a more political, less military NATO”.²³
  It was also consistent with the US anti-CSCE orientation that Secretary of State James A. Baker had already sounded out Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia in February 1990 for their agreement to an eastern expansion of NATO. Hutchings noted that while Poland and Hungary proved to be enthusiastic supporters of NATO, it was more difficult in Prague: “President Václav Havel had carried from his days in opposition the conviction that both ‘military blocs,’ NATO and the Warsaw Pact alike, should disband and be replaced by a new ‘pan-European peace order’ with the CSCE … evolving into a new system of collective security…. [W]e considered it important to help him understand why the United States felt that …  the CSCE … could not replace NATO as an agent of European security”²⁴ – This was already happening at a time when the Warsaw Treaty was still in existence.
  The head of the GDR delegation to the CSCE negotiations in Helsinki and Geneva, Siegfried Bock, also recalled in “Die DDR im KSZE Prozess” (The GDR in the CSCE process) that “it was here only the US that regarded the conference more as a concession to the Soviet Union, for which they expected an equivalent from Moscow. Kissinger always spoke very distantly of this conference; of whose benefits he was not convinced”.²⁵
  From today’s perspective, it must be taken into account that the intention of the German government at the time for “German unity” and the liquidation of the socialist German “foreign body”, the GDR, motivated extensive concessions to Gorbachev. Internally, there was probably a consensus that if there was to be a “common house”, then it would be only a united German house.  Equally, there was no “reshaping of the European security landscape” in the years that followed. Wörner’s prudence in expanding the political functions of NATO was also not realised. The hopes on the Russian side that NATO would change its nature remained Gorbachev’s illusion. The fact that the “Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany” (the Two Plus Four Treaty), signed in Moscow on 12 September 1990, has been violated as nonexistent, especially Article 2, which stipulates that “only peace will emanate from German soil”, has a downright peace-threatening effect today.

Conclusion and experiences

“Peace policy requires the ability to peaceful coexistence. This in turn is based on the ability to accept the other society and the other state as others and to respect them.” (Erhard Crome, p. 151)

The Helsinki Final Act (1975) and the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (1990) are permanently regarded as the constitutive foundations of a European peace order. At the same time, their principles form the core of an international policy of “peaceful coexistence” between states.
  The Helsinki Process was by no means a theoretical “paper event”, but internationally of a highly practical and successful nature. In the early 1990s, the CSCE and its transformed successor, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), played an indispensable mediating role in matters of security policy and military confidence-building.
  The common security code included: military restraint, all-round transparency and the assurance not to threaten each other anymore with nuclear weapons. Predictability of the different sides benefited above all the peace in Central Europe. It was underpinned by a military status quo, a “modus vivendi construction”.
  The states of the transatlantic alliance gradually moved away from this modus vivendi construct and its CSCE/OSCE pillars. In the perception of the Russian leadership, this amounted to Russia being excluded from participation in decisions on pan-European security issues on the shared continent.
  In retrospect, the overall construction of the modus vivendi proves to be the master key to peaceful coexistence. The CSCE process provides a blueprint for this.
  Freeing relations between the European and Eurasian states from their tensions requires overcoming a current state in which the Cold War misuses state relations as its weapon. The experiences of the CSCE process provide a blueprint for this.
  One, the CSCE process ran parallel to the first Cold War and thus provided a forum for equal discussion of problems. (The ultimate opposite of this is the NATO 2030 strategy with its “offer of compensation to Russia on its terms”. In plain language: compensation is not wanted.)
  Two, the primary understanding of “conflict civilisation” (Senghaas) was the prevention of war between states. This was based on the perception that it is not systemic differences per se that constitute a primary source of threat, but rather the militarisation of how these differences is dealt with. In the course of the Helsinki process, this developed into the following system of behaviour:

• The European leaders from the West and East understood how to protect their relationship between states from the real sword of Damocles which meant permanent mutual security threats, and to keep intact their personal relationship at leadership level, too.

• East and West were able to “freeze” or adjust the incalculability of security policy at a mutually harmonised level during the first Cold War. This enabled a mutual predictability of security policy. This particularly benefited a “resting of the weapons” in Central Europe, the dividing line between the pacts.

• This resulted in a modus vivendi between East and West based on two pillars: pillar one, the military status quo, pillar two, the political competition to be conducted by peaceful means.

This overall construction of a modus vivendi as stability of state relations, working relationship at leadership levels and keeping the military status quo proved to be a kind of master key to peaceful coexistence. It enabled consistent democratic behaviour of states to and with each other, especially of the major international states, but also of the regional ones.

Cold war of values –
which aspects of the conflict would
be pragmatic and surmountable?

One, relax European-Eurasian relations and relationship between states. A first essential step towards this would be to relieve them of the battles over values issues. This would allow considerable atmospheric improvements to be achieved in the near future. There is no objective reason why the “war of values” should not be stopped immediately. Neither the values nor the political order identity of Western societies is threatened by the East or South. The enforcement of human rights should place its focus on the preservation of the physical integrity of human beings as the most elementary prerequisite for any democratic progress. Conventions that demand and protect the physical integrity of human beings must be enforced.
  Two, a diplomatic approach should realistically assess the significance and place of the values issue under contemporary multipolar and socio-culturally plural conditions. Specifically, this should begin for Russia and the common Eurasian space. Modalities should be developed for dealing with the conflict of values, which enable co-operative state relations. The problem of values should be removed from any military policy context, such as NATO.
  Three, compliance with the principles of the “Helsinki Final Act” and the “Charter of Paris”. Within the framework of the OSCE, its signatory states should recommit to upholding its principles and basic rules. These states signed the Final Act, are familiar with its contents and agreed to its validity even after the end of the first Cold War as part of a European peace order. In reality, this order was shattered by the new conflicts between states that arose after the end of the East-West conflict and the first Cold War. The Final Act should retain its validity as a normative frame of reference.
  Four, the OSCE should assume a leading role in the modernisation of peaceful coexistence of its member states in the Euro-Asian region. It is the most effectively equipped regional organisation for this purpose, with proven state relations and mechanisms, mutual knowledge of political positions and constitutive principles and rules recognised by all member states. However, since the Charter of Paris, this area has also experienced a remarkable pluralisation of interests, values and political systems, the dynamics of which have not been followed by the dogmatised value paradigm being point of reference for its Western members. The OSCE still has the prerequisites to be a “laboratory” for constructing a Eurasian modern dynamic understanding of peaceful coexistence.
  Peaceful coexistence remains the last resort and ground-breaking way out of the ruinous crisis in which the relationship between EU Europe and its Eurasian continental context finds itself. •

¹ https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/6/e/39503_1.pdf
² This limitation related only to the right to sign.
³ This section of text was penned by Peter Steglich, a former East German ambassador. Starting with preparations for the Helsinki Conference and the drafting of the Final Act, Mr Steglich accompanied the subsequent Helsinki process throughout: 1977–1990 as Deputy Head of the Main Department for Policy Issues and Planning in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the GDR. During this period, he headed the GDR delegation to the CSCE follow-up meetings in Madrid (1980-1983) and Vienna (1986–1989) as well as other CSCE conferences in Bonn, Hamburg and Paris.
⁴ Henry Kissinger. World Order, Penguin Random House, 2014
⁵ Hans Köchler. Demokratie und Neue Weltordnung, Universität Innsbruck, VIII, 1992, p. 10 (translated from the German)
⁶ The United States global leadership role, Congressional Bills 117 the Congress 2021/2022, [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office], [p. 1169 Reported in Senate (RS)], STATEMENT OF POLICY, BILLS-117hr3524ih.pdf (congress.gov) (1)
⁷ Joint statement of the BRICS ministers of foreign affairs/international relations, 10 June 2024, https://www.mea.gov.in/bilateral-documents.htm?dtl/37860/joint+statement+of+the+brics+ministers+of+foreign+affairsinternational+relations
⁸ https://crsreports.congress.gov
⁹ ibid
¹⁰ Gregor Schöllgen, Gerhard Schröder, Letzte Chance. Warum wir jetzt eine neue Weltordnung brauchen, (Last chance. Why we need a new world order now), Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2021
¹¹ This is close to the international category of “collective security”, which means the rejection of any aggressive behavior within the sphere of influence of participating states. (Kissinger, World Order, Penguin Random House, 2014)
¹² Dieter Senghaas. Weltordnung in einer zerklüfteten Welt (World order in a fractured world), Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012, p. 75.
¹³ Uri Friedman, The “attraction of American society … is today less clear”, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, Washington, 13 September 2018, https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2018/09/america-losing-power-and-influence-and-must-adapt-warns-un-secretary-general/151242/
¹⁴ Erhard Crome. Die ungeliebte Alternative, Rückbesinnung auf friedliche Koexistenz für eine zeitgemäße internationale Politik (The unpopular alternative: a return to peaceful coexistence for a contemporary international policy), Hamburg: VSA Verlag, 2021, p. 145.
¹⁵ Ten-point programme for overcoming the division of Germany and Europe, speech by the Federal Chancellor to the German Bundestag on 28 November 1990, https://webarchiv.bundestag.de/archive/2006/0706/geschichte/parlhist/dokumente/dok09.html
¹⁶ Bulletin of the Federal Government No. 113/p. 1187 of 21 September 1990
¹⁷ Egon Bahr. Zu meiner Zeit (In My Time), Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich, 1996, p. 166
¹⁸ ibid., p. 566
¹⁹ The Atlantic Alliance and European Security in the 1990s, Address by Secretary General
²⁰ Kissinger, op. cit., p. 106
²¹ Jeremy Rifkin. The European Dream: The Vision of a Quiet Superpower, Polity Press, 2004
²² Robert L. Hutchings. American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War, John Hopkins, 1999
²³ ibid
²⁴ ibid, p. 176
²⁵ Siegfried Bock. Die DDR im KSZE-Prozess (The GDR in the CSCE Process); in: Siegfried Bock, Ingrid Muth, Hermann Schwiesau. DDR-Aussenpolitik im Rückspiegel (GDR Foreign Policy in Retrospect), LIT Verlag, Münster, 2004, p. 105

*  Doctor and honorary Doctor Arne Clemens Seifert (born 1937 in Berlin), former ambassador, Senior Research Fellow, WeltTrends Institute for International Politics, Potsdam. Studied at the Institute of International Relations, Moscow, specialising in Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, graduated in 1963. Doctorate at the Institut für Internationale Arbeiterbewegung (Institute for International Labour Movement), Berlin, 1977. Honorary Doctor at the Orient Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences 2017. Positions in the Foreign Ministry of the GDR 1964–1990: Arab States Division, worked on the ground in Egypt, Jordan; Sector Head Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan; Research Assistant to the Deputy Minister for Asia, Africa; Ambassador to the State of Kuwait 1982–1987; Head of Department 1987–1990. After 1990: OSCE Mission to Tajikistan; Central Asia Advisor at the Centre for OSCE Research (CORE), Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, specialising in OSCE and Central Asia research – Civil Conflict Prevention, Transformation, Transformation and Development. Civil conflict prevention, transformation, political Islam, secular-Islamic relations, political processes. Recent publications include: Dialogue and Transformation – 25 Years of OSCE and Central Asia Research, Nomos; Islamic Awakening in Central Asia – Specifics of Religious Radicalisation Prevention, OSCE Yearbook Vol. 24, 2018; Peaceful Coexistence in Our Time – The New Cold War and the Question of Peace, WeltTrends, 2021.

(Translation Current Concerns)