Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe

Regional security organization whose 55 participating states are from Europe, Central Asia, and North America. Its main areas of action are early warning and conflict prevention, crisis management, post-conflict rehabilitation, and supervising elections. It was founded in 1975 as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) at the Helsinki Conference in Finland, under the Helsinki Final Act on East-West Relations, committing members to increasing consultation and cooperation. By mid-1995, having admitted the former republics of the USSR, as well as other new nations from the former communist bloc, its membership had risen to 55 states (including the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, whose membership was suspended July 1992–November 2000).

Following the end of the Cold War, the 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe was concluded, committing CSCE states to democratic principles, human rights, and free market economies. At the same time an important Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, limiting heavy weaponry in the countries of NATO and their former Warsaw Pact adversaries, was finalized. That treaty, widely regarded as the linchpin of European security, was revised in 1999.

The organization's headquarters are in Vienna, Austria. There is also a High Commissioner on National Minorities in The Hague, Netherlands, an Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Warsaw, Poland, a Parliamentary Assembly in Copenhagen, Denmark, and a Court of Conciliation and Arbitration in Geneva, Switzerland.