The CSCE, instrument of confrontation and tool for overcoming European asymmetries

The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) met for the first time in Helsinki and Geneva between 1972 and 1975 and gave birth to a continued process of multilateral meetings during the fifteen last years of the Cold War. The CSCE process was an exceptional collective effort of reflection and then negotiation on the very nature of the asymmetries that characterized Europe after 1945. This article proposes to show how the differentiated evolution of socialist and capitalist societies during the 1960s and 1970s, by deepening the original East-West asymmetry, contributed to making the Helsinki process an instrument of convergence.