Ten years ago CORE was founded in the presence of many prominent personalities – then Federal President Johannes Rau participated in the founding act as did the First Mayor of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Ortwin Runde, the OSCE Secretary General, Ambassador Jan Kubis and more than half a dozen OSCE ambassadors. At that time, the Centre for OSCE Research represented more a hope than a showcase of significant achievements. Certainly, five volumes of the OSCE Yearbook had already been published and an initial research project on the High Commissioner on National Minorities had been started, but nearly everything else was still in the planning stage.

Ten research projects, 25 policy papers and 10 volumes of the OSCE Yearbook further on, the picture has changed. Worldwide, CORE is the only research institute that continuously follows the OSCE’s activities. A considerable proportion of the literature on the OSCE is generated in the context of CORE. Important areas of OSCE activities – its field operations, the HCNM, its police activities, and its democratization work in Central Asia – have been subjects of CORE research projects. Since 2001, dialogue projects between secular forces and (moderate) Islamists have been implemented in Tajikistan and Central Asia. CORE has substantially contributed to the founding of the OSCE Academy in Bishkek and currently the Centre is supporting the establishment of the OSCE Border Management Staff College in Dushanbe. Training courses for future OSCE Chairmanship countries have become a specific trademark. They were implemented in 2007 and 2008 for Kazakhstani and in 2009 for a mixed group of Kazakhstani and Lithuanian diplomats. In addition, we have actively participated in the OSCE’s discussions: Whether the Corfu process, the Forum for Security Co-operation or the Annual Security Review Conference – CORE is frequently represented in Vienna.

All of this has only been possible because we co-operated with many relevant institutions and they with us. First of among them is the German Federal Foreign Office that has supported CORE since 1999. Without the many discussions with staff members of the Federal Foreign Office, but also with the delegations in Vienna, the OSCE Secretariat and the OSCE institutions and field operations our work would not have been possible in this manner. The same holds true for our manifold contacts with scholars in a number of countries.

And the next ten years? There will be enough work for twenty! First, there is the new European security dialogue that started with President Medvedev’s proposals and will take years. This also means working in more depth on a number of issues from arms control and crisis management to energy security and the institutional inter-linkage of Europe. Further on, we want to expand our regional expertise, particularly on Russia and the other East European countries, the South Caucasus and Central Asia. And finally we want to continue what we have done over the last ten years: editing OSCE Yearbooks, following the development of the Organization, offering advice to the OSCE, governments and institutions, and assisting, through our training programs, in establishing practical expertise in European security building.

Contact: Dr Wolfgang Zellner