The simultaneous unrest in the world and the fact that 50 years have passed since the historic Helsinki Accords were adopted pose five dilemmas for the people’s movements and especially the peace movement.
1. Selective view of human rights or avoiding interference in internal affairs
The first dilemma is that the defense of freedom of expression, human rights and democracy, which took on a regionally liberating role after the Helsinki Conference, has today turned into its opposite. The global human rights organization with strong roots in the Helsinki process has increasingly freed itself from the democratic people’s movement community. It also freed itself from the beginning from the indivisible concept of human rights that includes both social and civil rights. Then the defense of human rights was further reduced. Today in Europe it is increasingly only about abuses in countries that are considered to be in opposition to liberal values such as Russia, Belarus and Hungary.
This has led to people connected to the Norwegian Helsinki Committee taking the lead in silencing a professor who is labeled as pro-Russian, influencing his employer and organizers to restrict the freedom of expression that the Helsinki Committees were once formed to protect. The fact that human rights organizations contribute to a false image by systematically avoiding addressing gross violations of human rights such as massacres, murders, secret prisons and violence against politicians in a country like Ukraine weakens the work against the same abuses in a country like Russia.
The choice between the line that Western states and major capital owners have chosen to support with an increasingly selective view of human rights and a view where the internal affairs of other countries should be treated with caution by popular movements is false. Instead, a consistent line is needed that addresses human rights violations regardless of where they occur and who commits them.
2. The choice between Europe and the world
The Helsinki Process is generally considered to be as close as one can get to a peace agreement after the Second World War in Europe. Therefore, the Helsinki Final Act is de facto of global importance because the Second World War led to the formation of the UN and the adoption of indivisible human rights. The UN Charter is the basis of international law that all countries, despite growing disagreements, still refer to even when they violate it. There is no alternative in the current situation.
The Helsinki Final Act applies de jure only to the transatlantic area and countries of the former Soviet Union. This does not mean that they can accuse each other of violating agreements within Europe if they simultaneously violate the same type of agreements outside Europe, for example by using force in violation of the UN Charter. Regional agreements can be made but do not constitute a free pass to violate international law in other regions.
The choice between Europe or the world can be avoided by not using double standards for what happens in Europe and the rest of the world and by not placing a one-sided emphasis on formal rules or actions in practice.
3. The choice between “broader security concepts” in relation to indivisible human rights and sovereignty
Human rights are indivisible according to the UN. Promoting economic cooperation is included in the Helsinki Accords. The Helsinki spirit as expressed through the OSCE can also be interpreted as the right to unrestricted and equal sovereignty for all participating states.
When President Poroshenko in 2016 introduced a ban on timber exports to protect Ukraine’s forests and its own processing industry, this was stopped by the EU, which demanded that the ban be lifted to protect its own interests in the furniture industry in Poland and Romania. The right to freely decide on one’s sovereignty is formally inscribed in OSCE documents, but material power relations affect this right, which popular movements cannot ignore.
In the book 50 år med Helsingfors, Fredrik Löjdquist presents an eloquent story and defense that the core of the Helsinki talks’ follow-up with the OSCE is what is called the broad concept of security. “The unique thing about the European security order is the OSCE’s so-called broad concept of security, which links conditions within states (especially respect for democracy, human rights and the principles of the rule of law) to security between states. How material power relations operate between the centre and the periphery between the member countries or with countries in the global South is disconnected from this “broad” concept of security. Löjdquist’s book contribution also includes a story about how the 1990s were successful for Europe, where the severe social and economic crisis in Russia, which was even worse economically in Ukraine, is not included.
Löjdquist believes that the blame for the development towards an increasingly deteriorating security situation lies unilaterally with an antagonistic Russia and Western European politicians who, with concessions and a naive view of Russia, have created the situation that prevails today. By seeing it as freezing a conflict is creating peace, conflicts are due to misunderstandings, Russia can be led onto the right path and should therefore not be provoked, “Russia is partly right”, the primacy of realpolitik over the broad concept of security and other misjudgments have paved the way for Western politicians to where we stand today in violation of the OSCE principles.
In the choice between the “broad concept of security” and including material power relations within and between countries, it becomes important for independent popular movements to take both normative and consequentialist perspectives into account. Exemplary internal democracy cannot be separated from the unequal financial, technological, military, resource control and cultural factors on which these can be based. Anything else would be hypocrisy.
4. The choice between legitimization of the prevailing policy and marginalization.
Just before the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the historic adoption of the Helsinki Accords, all public funding of peace organizations was removed in Finland, something that also happened in Sweden. This has had tangible material effects on the Finnish peace movement’s ability to host the positions of international popular movements at the 50th anniversary. Instead, 1,000 dignitaries are now being invited by Demo Finland, the international democratic cooperation of the parties. Its executive director Anu Juvonen has been appointed as the special representative for civil society during Finland’s OSCE chairmanship. During the meeting with the dignitaries, the role of NGOs in the OSCE process will be a main feature. The Finnish Peace Federation will be able to convey the message of the Nordic Peace Alliance and other partners’ Helsinki+50 initiative.
If you read the interview with Anu Juvonen about her mission, it is not a historical perspective to review the overall situation that many in the public in many countries perceive as serious. Instead of seizing the historical moment and taking half a century of development into account, it is a narrow perspective that civil society should participate in OSCE activities. “Civil society has always played an important watchdog role by holding decision-makers accountable by monitoring decision-making and implementation and reacting to any shortcomings.” It is further pointed out that “Civil society also plays an important role in generating information and data.” and interestingly enough, “Civil society has also been a significant source of social innovation. For example, women’s suffrage and improvements in labor rights have been civil society-led advances.” The withdrawal of funds for peace organizations becomes strange when Juvonen says, “In particular, the decades of experience that various peace organizations have are invaluable both in raising awareness of conflicts and in monitoring policies that affect conflicts.” The contradictory attitude of the Finnish state becomes clear when Juvonen says, “Civil society participation cannot be taken for granted, especially not during this time when funding for key actors in the civil society sector has been actively cut. In other words, the various opportunities for meaningful participation must be constantly developed. This is one of the goals of the Finnish Chairmanship of the OSCE.”
Special reference is made to the Civic Solidarity Platform, “a network of over 100 non-governmental organizations, developing advocacy plans and recommendations for the OSCE’s activities and closely monitoring its work.” It has grown out of a previous network of Helsinki committees with the limitations that sometimes placed them outside the broader perspective of popular movements and sometimes in direct confrontation with the peace movement.
Popular movements are a democratic function in society where anyone who wants to join an association’s aims and statutes can do so. This is in contrast to associations based on approval such as Rotary or professional organizations such as Greenpeace with an economic relationship with donors. The Ukrainian sociologist Volodomyr Ischenko has shown that NGOs often lack a social base and are more dependent on external donors than they are a democratic expression of the population’s democratic cooperative will.
Parties can be seen as part of civil society. But they also strive for state power. This makes them inappropriate to coordinate civil society’s cooperative efforts, where instead popular movements have a more uniquely democratic role.
The way that the Finnish state and the Finnish parties have chosen to act in the run-up to the 50th anniversary is therefore full of self-contradictions, not least in the democratic area. How then should independent popular movements act in this situation? The choice seems to be between being a decoration in a mutilation of the historical moment to a technocratic role in an OSCE machinery that has come to a standstill or being marginalized altogether.
But popular movements are not victims. It is entirely possible to break with the isolation in various sectors that the professionalization of both popular movements and parties has led to. This requires taking the entire Helsinki Accords into account and its global historical significance, which means that all popular movements should be invited into a common process. When the states and parties have so largely abandoned the historical mission that was assumed regarding both economic, environmental, social and in many other ways 1975 others should picki up the mantle that current politicians no longer wish to carry. Why not the popular movements?
With this willingness to take today’s global situation seriously instead of mutilating the legacy of Helsinki 1975, the anxiety and desire for change that humanity carries can be expressed. The need for peaceful coexistence, common security and disarmament for welfare and climate change should be strengthened by human rights organizations’ genuine willingness to tackle autocratization everywhere, including in Nordic countries. Something Civil rights defenders have given an example of in the report A Year with the Tidö Agreement. We can of course listen to the little words that come into politicians’ words about civil society and Helsinki+50 from time to time, perhaps there are openings that no one sees today. So we should certainly take advantage of the invitation to convey our message.
5. The choice between nostalgia and being relevant today
In the chapter Nordic Peace Since the End of History from the book Nordic Peace in Question, Johan Strang writes about the radical change that has taken place in the Nordic states’ stance since the Helsinki Spirit was viewed with positive eyes. From the countries seeing themselves as different to the fact that they are today largely seeking to appear as best in class among liberal countries, from social values and culture being unifying features to the fact that today it is largely common security policy interests that are at the center. The countries have also gone from having a longer perspective to what Strang calls presentialism, a preoccupation with the present.
There is a clear risk that the Nordic peace movement will nostalgically dream back to former glory days with the masses in its ranks and the Nordic states and voters behind them. But the world now looks radically different. The position as a point of balance between different economic systems in the West and the East has been lost. The position between North and South is taken with an increasingly hard stance for one’s own interests with the support of the voters and when it comes to rearmament, all Nordic parliamentary parties, not least on the left, have a stance different from that of the peace movement.
In the choice between nostalgia and being relevant today, it is necessary to let go of one’s hoppyhorses, drastically one could say that the fumbling good must give way to the new bad. But rather than fixating on the present and seeing oneself as an aspect of one people’s movement. A movement where the anti-nuclear movement’s obvious responsibility for tens of thousands of years of storing nuclear waste and its connection with the spread of nuclear weapons and radioactive risk in war or the climate movement’s long perspective with delayed effects of emissions and the need for the soil to be well cared for for carbon storage. Or the refugee friends’ realization that there are no war refugees, climate refugees or economic refugees but only refugees even if they appear at the border with Finland.
Tord Björk
April 9, 2025
Links
50 år med Helsingfors
Nordic Peace in Question
Anu Juvonen works for a more meaningful role for civil society in the OSCE
https://demofinland.org/en/anu-juvonen-works-for-a-more-meaningful-role-for-civil-society-in-
the-osce/
helsinkiplus50.org 