On 1 August 1975, an extraordinary event of great political importance took place in Finland. Leaders from 35 states signed one of the most important agreements of the Cold War – the Helsinki Final Act. The accord committed adversaries to a large number of wide-ranging pledges to enhance mutual security and to foster cooperation. Opposing political, military, economic, social, and ideological systems notwithstanding, the document also bound its signatories to a demanding catalogue of foundational norms, and its provisions for follow-up gave the accord a dynamic character, ensuring that progress could be monitored in the future and violations addressed for all to see. These impressive achievements make the Final Act a masterpiece of modern diplomacy and a textbook example of successful negotiations among enemies.

The Final Act had cost hundreds of diplomats nearly three years of arduous negotiation. It could hardly have been otherwise, given the diversity of participants and the chasms dividing them. All of the states of Europe – communist, capitalist, and neutral/non-aligned – participated, along with Canada and the two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union. Only Maoist recluse Albania stood apart, equating engagement with the class enemy as counter-revolutionary heresy.

Leonid Brezhnev, the ailing leader of the Soviet Union, had pressed hard for the talks in the belief that they would finally seal the status quo by making the post-Second World War borders permanent, including the division of Germany, and by legitimising Soviet rule over the unhappy peoples of what was then called ‘Eastern Europe’ (much of it in fact in Central Europe). Instead, the Final Act set out an ambitious agenda for change. It said that frontiers should not be violated but could be altered by peaceful means and by agreement, thereby keeping open the road to the reunification of Germany and the continent as a whole. It committed signatories to increase military transparency through an innovative catalogue of confidence-building measures. It also comprised an ambitious set of measures to facilitate exchanges across the Iron Curtain, including trade, cultural contacts, and the freer movement of people and information.

Unusually for the time, it contained a substantial section on improving working conditions for journalists in general and foreign journalists in particular. And it pledged signatories to ‘respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief’, saying that this was an essential basis for peace. These provisions put liberal values firmly on the diplomatic agenda of East-West relations.

Much of the credit belongs to the very patient, stubborn yet business-like negotiators on the Western side, led mainly by the nine members of the European Community, with significant support from liberal-minded neutrals like Austria and Switzerland. The United States mainly stayed on the sidelines, restrained by Henry Kissinger’s scepticism. The US Secretary of State more than once cursed the slow talks as ‘multilateral diplomacy run amok’, ridiculed the steadfast negotiators as ‘cloistered medieval monks elaborating sacred texts’, and dismissed a vital section of the accord as ‘Basket III crap’.

Echoing Kissinger’s negative view, the Final Act was poorly received by the US media, which declared it, wrongly, as a victory for the authoritarian governments of the communist world. History books perpetuated this warped view, alleging that the accord legitimised or even legalised the status quo, including Europe’s postwar frontiers. It would take decades until the unloved document became recognised as a masterpiece of diplomacy. Even Kissinger eventually recanted his criticisms.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Final Act gave enormous encouragement to dissidents within the Soviet empire, who gathered thick dossiers recording violations of human rights that signatories could raise at follow-up meetings. All this challenged authoritarians and hardliners across Europe, who feared openness and transparency and conflated mutual obligations with an invitation to foreign meddling. And it helped to corrode the Soviet empire, thereby contributing to the peaceful ending of the Cold War. This became known as the ‘Helsinki effect’.

The Final Act lives on today as the foundational text of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). With 57 members, it is the world’s largest regional security organisation, spanning from Vancouver to Vladivostok. Although severely damaged by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the OSCE still functions. It continues to pursue a vast agenda devoted to international security, conflict prevention, human rights and honest elections. Its diligent election monitoring alone ensures that there is no love lost between the organisation and pseudo-democrats such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

While often overlooked by the media, the OSCE maintains 13 missions in crisis regions across Europe and Central Asia, where it promotes, among other things, good governance, gender equality and freedom of the press. That it had established a presence in places such as Moldova well before Putin’s war directed attention to the renegade region of Transnistria says much about the OSCE and its important yet often thankless business. Ultimately, however, the organisation can only be truly successful if its member states lend more support and show more imagination than they have in recent years.

Beyond the breathless frenzy of present-day politics, the Helsinki Final Act offers lessons for future diplomacy. Most fundamentally, it demonstrates that engagement with adversaries is possible, despite deep-seated historical grievances, political cleavages, and ideological divides. And it serves as a potent reminder that building bridges across these chasms remains, as it always has been, a fundamental duty of responsible statecraft.

The Helsinki experience also reminds us that diplomacy can only tackle conflicts if the parties involved move beyond what President Barack Obama aptly called ‘the satisfying purity of indignation’. On the way to Helsinki, all sides made concessions, at times painful ones. They did not set aside their differences but looked beyond them to find common ground. And while tempers repeatedly ran high, they ultimately chose pragmatic compromise over moral posturing. In our age of polarisation – domestic and international – in which talking to the enemy is often decried as immoral and compromises slandered as appeasement, this is a history well worth remembering.

Fifty years on, the unloved masterpiece that is the Helsinki Final Act has much to teach us.