West’s Last Chance To Get Serious on Bosnia
By Bodo Weber
Democratization Policy Council
December 1, 2009
Talk of partition as ‘inevitable’ is in
danger of becoming an attractive excuse for the EU and US to make a
speedy exit from Bosnia’s current stalemate.
At the end of a year in which the political crisis in Bosnia has finally
made it back to the international public, and of intense EU-US
diplomatic efforts, talk of partition has become a legitimate political
position in the West’s policy debate.
In a recent article, Mathew Parish, former chief legal adviser of the
Brcko District international supervisor, argues that the disintegration
of the Bosnian state is “inevitable” and urges the international
community to change its policy towards peaceful moderation of the
independence of the Bosnian Serb entity, the Republika Srpska
(“Republika Srpska: after independence”, Balkan Insight November 19,
2009).
The problem with this argument is not that its analysis and conclusions
are fundamentally wrong. It has the dangerous potential of becoming
increasingly attractive among Western policy makers.
The year began with High Representative Miroslav Lajcak’s flight from
office and is ending with the floundering talks about the so-called
Butmir package of reforms, and last week’s lacklustre meeting of the
Peace Implementation Council, PIC, Steering Board.
In this bleak policy environment, with growing desperation both in and
on Bosnia, it is hardly surprising that talk of Bosnia’s dissolution as
a state has moved from the background in some European capitals to
public discourse. It has the appeal to the uninitiated of simplicity,
but it would be anything but simple to execute.
To understand this dangerous development, it is necessary to understand
how we got to the current crisis in Bosnia, what we are dealing with,
and where we stand now.
The fact has Bosnia has fallen back into serious crisis almost a
decade-and-a-half after the end of the 1992-5 war is not so much the
result of domestic Bosnian politics as a consequence of the
insufficiencies and false assumptions of international policy.
The Western intervention that led to the Dayton post-war order left
aside the question of the functionality of the Bosnian state in order to
achieve a political agreement. After the war was brought to a close and
public security restored, it rapidly became clear that the Annex 4
Dayton constitution and the governing structures that flow from it left
much to be desired, but the Western response has been ad hoc
throughout.
No comprehensive state-building and democratization strategy emerged,
let alone the will to implement it. Instead, the international community
entered the state-building business by empowering the Office of the High
Representative, OHR, with extensive powers – the so-called Bonn powers –
but without a strategy (at least not one beyond those developed by two
most active High Representatives, Wolfgang Petritsch and Paddy
Ashdown). The wish to exit from this resource-intensive engagement has
been effectively unchallenged for four years.
The current deep crisis follows the failed application of two standard
toolboxes of international politics in democratizing and state building:
The first one consisted of identifying pro-democratic political forces,
parties and leaders as the partners to bring into power for transforming
the country from top-down. A more systemic approach would be built on
the recognition that for structural reasons all major political actors
are part of the problem, not of the solution, and that it is necessary
to both transform the given institutional framework of political action
and the actors.
The second standard toolbox that was initially added to, and then
replaced, the first was EU integration, which was introduced after
international responsibility for Bosnia shifted from US leadership to
Europe after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The problem is not the goal
itself: EU integration is, in fact, the only reasonable end for
Bosnia’s transformation towards a democratic and stable sovereign
state. Yet it is not a sufficient means to get there, given Bosnia’s
specific political environment. It assumes the existence of democratic
partners that are willing to do the political heavy-lifting to join the
club. This is hardly evident in Bosnia.
When these standard approaches collapsed somewhere in 2006, this did not
lead to change of policy instruments but a move towards increasing
political irrationality on the side of the EU. Instead of changing EU
policy instruments, the European Union engaged in faking the reality on
the ground, trying instead to adjust it to the EU approach and not
vice-versa. Success was declared, and the representativeness of Bosnian
political elites was assumed. “Transition” from international authority
by closing the OHR and handing over political responsibility to the
Bosnians was declared a means to “ownership” and the restoration of full
sovereignty. In fact, it served as a cover-up of growing Bosnia fatigue
and a wish to shirk political responsibility for Bosnia. In so doing,
the EU created a power vacuum and an insecurity that unnecessarily
expanded the space for the politics of ethnic polarization and blocking
reform, which had been reduced in the early part of the decade.
The breakdown that occurred at the beginning of this year has led to a
gradual retreat of the EU and a gradual admission of the deteriorating
situation on the ground, but not to a fundamental policy rethink or
change. Instead, the EU has speeded up its desperate efforts to find a
way to run away from the problem. But the EU got trapped in this mission
impossible, with the ill-planned Butmir talks developing into a showdown
that has produced no results but inflicted enormous additional damage.
Trying to obtain concessions from the Bosnian party leaders to get the
OHR closed, conditional on some constitutional reform, has proven
impossible. The international community has whittled the “package” down
in an attempt to get the Republika Srpska premier, Milorad Dodik, to
accept. But Dodik knows that if he continues to refuse, the
international community may well give in altogether. The Bosniak and
Bosnian Croat party leaders on the other side are well aware that by
signing on to what is presented as incremental progress, they in fact
would consent to the international community’s effective departure from
Bosnia.
A year has been wasted. With the breakdown of the EU’s current
approach, the upcoming change of the EU presidency and the personnel and
organization changes ahead in Brussels following acceptance of the
Lisbon Treaty, and with Bosnia’s upcoming election campaign, the next
year is unlikely to see significant progress.
Meanwhile, the US has discredited itself, moving from Vice President Joe
Biden’s visit in May, when he pressured the EU to accept Bosnia’s
deteriorating reality, to sending Deputy Secretary of State James
Steinberg to Butmir and playing by the EU’s rules.
It is time for the international
community to get serious on Bosnia. There are a number of theses and
arguments circulating around on what is actually going on in Bosnia that
serve to legitimise the international community’s, and particularly the
EU’s, lack of political will.
1) Closing OHR is the way to ownership, and those that argue against
it want to keep a dependent “protectorate.” Wrong. Dayton Bosnia has
never been a real protectorate with the international community having
full responsibility and calling the shots. Moving from a deteriorating
situation in which international and local actors all have roles to
shutting down the international institutions overnight will not bring
about ownership but catastrophe. The only way to true ownership is a
strategy that leads to a system that can function without international
involvement.
2) Dodik’s regime represents the “Bosnian Serbs” and thus has popular
legitimacy and stability. Wrong. The political rise of Dodik is much
more the unintended product of the direct interventions of the
international institutions in Bosnia in the political system than the
expression of any collective will in the RS. Almost 80 per cent of the
citizens in all of Bosnia and Herzegovina in several polls over the last
year have made it clear that they don’t identify with any part of the
political elites. The Dodik regime is not nearly as stable and eternal
as is commonly perceived. There are already clear signs of erosion, both
political and economic.
3) Dodik is a rational actor in full control over the consequences of
his populist policy. Wrong. He has set in motion a political dynamic
that has already slipped out of his control. The political agenda and
management style he has pursued has resulted in his facing corruption
charges by the Bosnian state court’s chamber for organized crime. He has manoeuvred himself into a position where he appears to feels the need to
destroy the state’s post-Dayton institutions in order to escape
prosecution, linking the fate of the Bosnian state to his own personal
fate. His populism has led him to a point where he cannot compromise, or
accept the minor concessions sought in order to have the OHR closed,
even while this prevents him from succeeding in his ultimate aim, which
is to have unrestricted control over the RS by eliminating the OHR, with
its executive Bonn powers.
4) There is no threat of a return to ethnic war and conflict because
there are no ethnic armies any longer and none of the political players
is interested in it. Wrong discourse. There is real potential for new
ethnic violence, but it comes from the lack of security forces that
function independently from politics, and the lack of an independent
judiciary capable of enforcing the rule of law. This means that a local
incident that is not ethnically motivated can easily escalate into wider
ethnic clashes. The recent violent clash in Siroki Brijeg, between the
inhabitants of this West Herzegovinian Croat stronghold and the
supporters of the Sarajevo soccer team, should stand as a warning to
those denying the dangers. The victim of the shooting, a supporter of
the Sarajevo soccer club, had a Croat and not a Bosniak first name. Had
it been otherwise, who knows what might have happened?
In a situation where international policies have become so highly
irrational that even the ordinary Bosnian citizen is able to sense it,
where the confrontational dynamics of local politics have slipped out of
the elites’ control, and with the foreseeable further radicalization of
political rhetoric in the upcoming election campaign, everything is
possible.
To avert the realization of this volatile potential, the EU and the US
must change their current policy and get serious on Bosnia. What has to
be done does not demand the investment of any huge additional resources,
just political will:
- The roles of High Representative and EUSR should be decoupled, with
the “reinforced” EUSR performing its role of assisting Bosnia in the
enlargement process, and the High Representative holding the line to
ensure Dayton implementation and compliance, not to enforce state
building. Maintain EUFOR with its current strength and Chapter VII
mandate.
- PIC member states must allow the High Representative to extend the
international judges’ and prosecutors’ mandates, thus preventing the
disintegration of the state court.
- The EU and NATO both need to make clear that while constitutional
reforms will not be imposed, they are conditions for Bosnia’s further
progress toward membership. Clear guidelines are needed. An
international expert commission with a mandate to interact with civil
society and citizens at large, not just politicians, should attempt to
identify workable solutions for Bosnia’s governance.
Without this substantial shift, arguments about the inevitability of
Bosnia’s disintegration will become an attractive excuse for a lack of
political will and turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The option to allow the RS to become independent, despite its faux
simplicity, does not exist – at least not without more violence. This
would not simply be the creation of another state on the Balkans, as was
Montenegro. An attempt at RS independence would be attended by certain
violence of unpredictable scale, and would throw the whole region back
into conflict and instability. The international community shouldn’t
delude itself about the stakes in its frantic search for an exit.
There is absolutely no need to allow Bosnia's disintegration. After
nearly a decade-and-a-half of post-war engagement, the international
community risks reopening Pandora’s box due its own divisions and lack
of strategic patience. This lack of will, particularly from the EU, to
recognize that the Bosnian governance system is the reason why its
normal enlargement approach isn’t working, has led to the unnecessary
escalation of rhetoric and risk. A consolidation of international will
to face the problem squarely is what is needed to reverse this dangerous
trend.
Bodo Weber is a
Berlin-based Senior Associate of the Democratization Policy Council,
a global initiative for accountability in democracy promotion.