Amid the several crises with which the Helsinki process was confronted during the last decade of the Cold War, various strategies were developed to keep it moving forward. These included, inter alia, keeping the agenda flexible, expanding it, and harnessing the asymmetry of the participating States’ preferences by introducing the concept of balanced progress in all relevant dimensions of the CSCE. This enabled major stakeholders to maintain a strong feeling of co-ownership of the process, despite voices in both the East and the West that questioned the rationale of the Helsinki process. After discussing how these strategies were applied in the CSCE years, this paper concludes by exploring their contemporary relevance. In doing so, it elaborates on both the differences and the similarities between the CSCE and the OSCE, such as the clearly asymmetric preferences of their participating States.
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