European security as a legal-political principle

Conventional wisdom has given credit to two arrangements for the maintenance of post-war European security and peaceful change: collective defense organizations and bilateral or multilateral peace treaties. My thesis refutes these assumptions on empirical and normative grounds. It demonstrates by means of textual analyses of diplomatic language that politics has been a more effective and flexible security agent than law. Multilateralism as an institutional form has emerged because treaties have satisfied insufficiently the needs of European security. The treaty-based regulation of conflict has revealed repeatedly the inherent deficiencies of legal constructs and their concomitant organizational forms. Suboptimal political commitments ("soft laws"), rather than contractual obligations, have managed relatively successfully the transformation of the Cold War system. Legally non-binding codes of conduct have proven useful because their operative validity has not hinged on the ratification by legislative organs. They have also proven useful because of their susceptibility to the evolution of human rights norms. The adoption of political security mechanisms that have in and of themselves not created legal rights and obligations has in no way diminished their effectiveness. Because of their considerable moral and normative status, legally non-binding agreements have enjoyed substantive influence on legal rights and obligations.;The thesis proves that informal political consultations within the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE/OSCE) and European Political Cooperation (EPC) have facilitated in crisis situations consensus-building in formal military alliances, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Western European Union (WEU). Second, the thesis holds that the open-ended finalities of political commitments have rescued Europe from imminent disaster either by circumventing legal gridlock or by offering face-saving exit options. "Soft laws" have created the preconditions for the formation and maintenance of elastic security regimes based on generalized organizing principles. Finally, because European states have increasingly recognized the value of joint gains in security cooperation, multilateral security regimes have reaped from them greater shares of exclusive sovereign prerogatives. As a result, positivist principles of sovereignty, such as categorical non-intervention, have been eliminated de facto from international legal and political practice.