Understanding international regimes raises a twofold problem: regimes may be studied not only as outcomes to be explained (dependent variables), but as social institutions which have distinctive impact on state behavior (intervening variables). This article takes up both kinds of questions by examining the case of the human rights and humanitarian area (the human dimension) of the CSCE from the Helsinki Declaration in 1975 to recent developments.
First, in an attempt to demonstrate why the human dimension regime of the CSCE formed, endured, and changed, the basic causal variables to explain the regime development are applied. These include “political power” and “egoistic self-interest”, but the importance of such factors as learning, knowledge and ideas has been also stressed in the recent literature. Second, it will examine how the regime substantially affected the participating states in their cognition and behavior, or whether their policy changes were attributed to the international power structure or to the domestic factors specific to each country (non-regime).
The human dimension of the CSCE can best be understood as an integral part of the CSCE's “comprehensive and compound” framework. It also includes the other two areas of security: military CBMs and environmental and economic cooperation. When a regime consists of several issue-areas, linkages between different issues often promote compromises among parties in the decision-making process and hence persistence of the regime. And by the term “comprehensive”, I refer to the CSCE's comprehensive concept of security which interrelates nonmilitary aspects of security (human rights etc.) with the traditional sense of security.
The Helsinki Declaration set forth norms and rules for human rights and for the cooperation in the fields of human contacts and free flow of information. The USSR agreed to such norms mainly in exchange for a formal recognition of the territorial status quo in post war Europe. The case study concludes that the CSCE human dimension did not exist as a regime in the 1970s, in a sense it had no impact on the USSR and her allies in East Europe in their behavior (declaratory regime).
The regime, however, came to matter gradually through the follow-up conferences at Madrid (1980-83) and Vienna (1986-89). Several factors can be pointed out to explain these changes. Tactical linkages between issues such as in the fields of military security and the human dimension contributed to maintain the balance of the conflicting interests of the East and West. But other factors began to gain more importance. (1) Social movements in the USSR and East European countries developed, claiming that their govenments should implement the norms and rules of the regime. They also acquired strong support from the transnational networks. It suggests that the CSCE human dimension was not merely a declaratory regime wihtout binding force towards states, but its norms and ideas could be directly accepted by social groups and individuals and possibly reinforced changes in their governments' behavior. (2) The “review of implementation” rule at the follow-up conferences to assess the participating states' performance in the human dimension made the Eastern states learn how neccesary it was to comply with the regime standards. Some changes in behavior of the Eastern states took place before the end of the Cold War, partly because of their domestic policy requirements, the factors independent of the regime. After the revolutions of the Eastern countries in 1989, the regime emerged with new tasks of how to promote democratization in the former communist countries and to prevent ethnic conflicts (regime change).
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