Vienna — North Macedonia took over the chairmanship of the OSCE this month, becoming the smallest country to lead Europe’s largest security organisation — and inheriting an institution that has not had a properly agreed budget since 2021.
Foreign Minister Bujar Osmani presented his country’s priorities to the Permanent Council in Vienna on 12 January, placing support for Ukraine and the organisation’s own survival at the top of the list. The two, he suggested, are the same task: an OSCE that cannot pay its bills cannot document war crimes, run elections missions or keep its remaining field operations alive.
The budget arithmetic is stark. With consensus on the unified budget blocked — Russia objects to funding anything connected to Ukraine — the organisation has been operating on ‘provisional twelfths’, spending one-twelfth of the last agreed budget each month. No new programmes can start; no salaries can rise; every vacancy becomes an argument. Osmani told delegates the arrangement cannot continue without hollowing out the institution.
His own country’s path offers his argument. North Macedonia resolved a decades-long dispute with Greece, changed its name, and joined NATO — a small state betting its future on multilateral institutions. Its diplomats now chair weekly meetings where the Russian ambassador justifies the invasion of a fellow participating state, and where every procedural decision is a skirmish.
The chair’s priorities for the year include the situation of the OSCE’s detained staff in occupied Ukraine, the organisation’s financial stabilisation, and preparations for the thirtieth Ministerial Council, which Skopje will host at the end of the year. That meeting must, among other things, find a chair for 2024 — the post Estonia was vetoed out of in Łódź, and for which no uncontested candidate has yet emerged.
Osmani, a physician by training, described the organisation as a patient that must not be allowed to die on the table. The metaphor is doing a lot of work this year in Vienna — and everyone in the building knows who is holding the anaesthetic.
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