Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe
Although it did not have the force of a treaty, it recognized the boundaries of postwar Europe and established a mechanism for minimizing political and military tensions between East and West and improving human rights in the Communist Bloc.
On the other hand, President Urho Kekkonen knew, on the basis of the note crisis in the autumn of 1961, that the militarily tinted political tension in Central Europe was not good for Finland.
The security meeting could help Europe to recover from the shock of the occupation of Czechoslovakia if it were a real negotiating forum and not just a propaganda scene like previous attempts.
The Warsaw Pact stressed the persistence of the borders resulting from the Second World War, the abstention of violence and the improvement of commercial-technical links, while NATO's main focus was on mutually subtracting forces.
Instead, the aim was to bring together the results of the preparatory meetings held in Dipoli, Espoo since November 1972, and to map out the second or main phase of the conference.
[4] After the first phase of the meeting, in a good and confidential atmosphere, Foreign Minister Ahti Karjalainen described the special "Spirit of Helsinki".
The meeting was attended by It was historic that the heads of state of West and East Germany sat at the same table in Helsinki for the first time.
[7] The Soviet Union appeared pleased about the OSCE Accords first section, which guaranteed the integrity of the state boundaries resulting from the Second World War and the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty.
[10] Jimmy Carter, elected president of the United States after Gerald Ford, made the defense of human rights around the world a key objective of American foreign policy.
The 10th anniversary meeting of the CSCE was held at Finlandia Hall at the foreign minister level at the end of July and beginning of August 1985.
The tense international climate was illustrated by the fact that Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Ševardnadze criticized the United States for their unwillingness to negotiate an arms limitation treaty, while US Secretary of State George Shultz listed by name the cases in which he considered the Soviet Union to have violated human rights.
Later in 1991, the leaders of the Baltic states, Arnold Rüütel of Estonia, Anatolis Gorbunovs of Latvia and Vytautas Landsbergis of Lithuania signed the accord.
In February 1992, the accord was signed by the heads of state of the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
At the 1992 follow-up meeting, the signatories were Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan.
