What BSEC is and how it works

The sea, and the members who are not on it

Six members hold shore on the Black Sea: Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia, Türkiye and Ukraine. The others reach it at a remove or not at all. Moldova and Serbia sit in the Danube basin with no coast of any kind. North Macedonia drains to the Aegean by the Vardar and to the Adriatic by the Black Drin. Albania faces the Adriatic, Greece the Aegean and the Mediterranean, and Azerbaijan the Caspian, whose surface its record puts at 28 metres below sea level. Armenia's rivers run to the Caspian too, by way of the Kura.

Every ship that enters or leaves the Black Sea does so through the Turkish Straits, which lie inside one member. The sea's catchment is a good deal wider than its rim, and a roster wider than the coastline is the readable consequence of that.

An initiative before it was an organisation

Heads of state and government of eleven countries signed the Summit Declaration and the Bosphorus Statement in Istanbul on 25 June 1992: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Türkiye and Ukraine. What they had signed was an initiative with no legal personality of its own, and it stayed one for close to seven years. The Permanent International Secretariat opened in Istanbul on 10 March 1994. The Charter adopted at Yalta in 1998 entered into force on 1 May 1999, and on that day the initiative became an organisation able to hold rights in its own name. The UN General Assembly granted it observer status by resolution 54/5 on 8 October 1999.

The alphabet as a rota

The Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs is the principal decision-making organ, and it convenes at least once every six months in the country then holding the chairmanship. The chairmanship rotates every six months in English alphabetical order, two terms to a year, one beginning in January and one in July. Albania opens the sequence and Ukraine closes it, and a full cycle runs 13 terms, which is six and a half years. Nothing in the order is bargained for. It falls out of how the members' names are spelled in one language.

Two seats added, and a bank that did not add them

Serbia's seat was taken in April 2004 by the state union of Serbia and Montenegro; the union dissolved in 2006 and Serbia kept the seat. North Macedonia was admitted in 2020.

The financing arm did not follow. The Black Sea Trade and Development Bank has worked from Thessaloniki, on the Aegean, since it began operations in June 1999, and it lists eleven shareholder countries: the founders, without either of the states admitted to the organisation since. The Parliamentary Assembly, founded in 1993 and seated in Istanbul, does seat delegations from all of them.

The outer ring

Observer status is open on request to any state or international organisation, and the Council grants, suspends or terminates it under the Rules of Procedure. The observers are Egypt, the European Commission, the Energy Charter Secretariat, the Commission on the Protection of the Black Sea against Pollution and the International Black Sea Club: one state and four institutions. The sectoral dialogue partners are institutions throughout, among them the Danube Commission, the Black Sea Universities Network, the Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions in Europe and the Union of Road Transport Associations in the BSEC Region.

What nobody has to agree about

The organisation's own statement of purpose asks members to act "in a spirit of friendship and good neighborliness" and to pursue economic collaboration "in a manner not contravening the international obligations of the Member States". The second clause carries the weight. Bulgaria, Greece and Romania are member states of the European Union. Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, North Macedonia, Romania and Türkiye are in NATO. Armenia and Russia are in the Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Azerbaijan and Türkiye are in the Organization of Turkic States and the Economic Cooperation Organization. Every member is a participating State of the OSCE and a member of the UN.

There is no common tariff here, no free trade area, no currency and no security guarantee. What the countries around and behind this sea signed in 1992 obliges none of them to give up anything they had signed elsewhere, and the record of what they have signed elsewhere is on each of their pages.