“Italy and the Paris Charter of the CSCE for a new Europe. History of a negotiation (July-November 1990)” by Antonio Armellini addresses the negotiations that led to the Paris Charter for a new Europe and describes with rigor and abundance of specifics and critical spirit what happened between July and November 1990. The second part contains contributions on the content of the Charter written by some of the diplomats and academics involved in the negotiation and ends with a selection of unpublished documents that help the reader to better understand what happened.
With the Charter of Paris, the CSCE had intended to revisit the conceptual and covenant scheme of the Helsinki Final Act – which had represented the cornerstone of European stability and prefigured the path of possible changes – reaffirming its validity in the new reality in which the crisis of The USSR and the announced end of the Cold War were taking shape. What had previously been done in three years, was done in six months: the traditional opposition between the blocs gave way to Western initiative, with an effective proactive role of the young European political cooperation. The transition towards a shared democracy, which the Charter of Paris had imagined over the years, failed after a few months because of the Yugoslav crisis and the disintegration of socialism, but the framework that it had outlined, and gradually updated, remains valid. The “new cold war” that is looming today is different; in the first one, recognized parameters of mutual benefit and its limits were applied, while today security, sovereignty and democracy appear as antithetical and conflicting terms. For this reason, a platform capable of recalling, by adapting it, the concept of cooperative security of the Paris Charter can become overwhelmingly topical again.
The book can be consulted digitally at this link.
For years, diplomat Stefano Baldi has been responsible for the “La Penna del Diplomatico” project, which catalogs the works written by his Italian colleagues and moderates a series of recently published book presentations.
