BACKGROUND: What is the Munich Security Conference?

Feb 5, 2011, 17:45 GMT

Munich - The Munich Security Conference was founded in 1962 by Ewald von Kleist, a former German army officer who plotted to kill Adolf Hitler and then went on to become a publisher.

Throughout the Cold War, the Wehrkunde Conference, as it was called at the time, essentially served as a privileged channel of communication between West Germany and the United States.

'We needed a forum to discuss, in confidence, our specific security interests with US partners in the hope that these interests would be given attention in Washington. It was the discussion between the dependant and the decision-maker, between the endangered and the protector. Simple,' its current host, German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger, noted in a 2009 article.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the conference extended its reach to Central and Eastern European countries and Asia under the leadership of Horst Teltschik, a former vice-head of the German Chancellery.

But it is only in the last decade that the conference has evolved into one of the most prominent fora of international diplomacy, regularly attended by hundreds of world leaders, government ministers and defence experts.

It was here, for instance, that in 2007 then Russian President Vladimir Putin launched into a jaw-dropping anti-US diatribe and warned that its plans to deploy an anti-missile defence shield in Eastern Europe would lead to a new arms race.

Two years later, it was Joe Biden's turn to use it as an excuse for his first foreign trip as vice president of the United States.

The 47th edition of the conference was to see the usual who's who of makers and shakers. This year's guest list included US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron and NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Such is the prestige of the conference that European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton convinced her colleagues to use it as a venue for a meeting of the so-called Middle East Quartet comprised of the EU, Russia, the United States and the United Nations.

Clinton, meanwhile, was to take advantage of the presence of her Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, to exchange documents on the new START Treaty (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty).

Held in the prestigious Bayerischer Hof, a five-star luxury hotel in central Munich, the conference casts itself as an 'independent forum for the exchange of views by international security policy decision-makers.' It benefits from the support of both public and private sponsors.