The 50th anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act in 2025 led to various reminiscences among former activist communities and participants of the Helsinki Process. Many asked where the conscience of Helsinki has gone today. Inspired by this question, this workshop endeavors to take stock of the field of citizen, non-state, and social movement diplomacy that the Helsinki Process facilitated or inspired. As E.P. Tompson (1990) remarked, the Helsinki Process offered citizens more opportunities to participate in security politics, giving "History a new hinge.” Similarly, Michael Cotey Morgan (2018) argued that Western decision-makers felt obliged to participate in the European security conference in the early 1970s because of what “non-participation would mean at home,” acknowledging that citizen action and public opinion (or the fear thereof) influenced foreign policy thinking.

In this workshop, we aim to expand these perspectives and ask how different non-state actors reconceptualized security through the Helsinki Process and if this influenced state perceptions. If one looks at the Helsinki Process and not only the formal CSCE, the breadth of actors is also expanded to include anti–nuclear groups, feminist movements, religious communities, trade unions, European Security Committees, Eastern bloc dissidents, Reaganite cold warriors, business leaders, concerned scientists, peace activists, and more. Therefore, we apply a broad conceptualization of the Helsinki Process to mean the numerous movements, meetings, conferences, and other connections across the European continent during the Cold War, inspired directly or indirectly by the 1975 Helsinki Final Act.

Some of these non-state actors attempted to participate more directly in the formal CSCE by organizing conferences and mobilizing public opinion in parallel to CSCE follow-up meetings. Others made Helsinki their own, redefining security in the process. This expanse of what Helsinki meant was sometimes dizzying for diplomats. As Pertti Paasio, Finnish Foreign Minister, stated in 1991 during negotiations with civil society actors on what role they could play in the 1992 Helsinki Summit, “we support the participation of civil society organizations… but so far your plans do not contain much substance of the CSCE.”

Through this workshop, we hope to expand upon these thoughts and investigate when and how citizen action, civil society diplomacy, and other non-state initiatives, such as business contacts, shaped the Helsinki Process. Additionally, we hope to shed light on the broad structural, social, cultural, and economic conditions (e.g., financing opportunities) that facilitated citizen diplomacy and activism in the Helsinki Process, and what impact this had on formal diplomacy, as well as state-level conceptions of foreign policy throughout the era.