The political crisis in Bosnia-Herzegovina is back on the international agenda, and the focus of intense European and U.S. diplomatic efforts. The U.S. administration will “sustain and re-energize its commitment to Europe,” Vice President Joseph Biden recently told the Bosnian parliament. “We are back, we will stay.”
But democracy advocates are concerned that speculation about partition in the West’s policy debate reflects a lack of commitment that could yet lead to renewed violence.
The U.S. ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina Charles English cautioned on November 17 that the west “cannot sustain this level of attention over the long haul” and that the country needs “to make progress towards a European and Euro-Atlantic future” since “the status quo will not hold.”
Reportedly, U.S. and E.U. emissaries have been less diplomatic behind closed doors, threatening to block Bosnia’s NATO Membership Action Plan – they did so – and withholding visa-free E.U. travel for Bosnian citizens as a bargaining chip while publicly insisting that the issue is purely technical.
The E.U. and U.S. are trying to secure the extension of the Butmir process, which many Bosnians consider to have already failed, and recently persuaded the Office of the High Representative to reconsider extending the mandates of international judges and prosecutors.
Civil society groups are mobilizing pressure, including public protests, on the OHR to extend the mandates. Other commentators see the OHR as more of a problem than a solution:
According to some international observers, the major issue however is not the ineffectiveness and self-imposed paralysis of Bosnian institutions, but the continued, counterproductive international tutelage of the country. The U.N. high representative has significant powers in the political process, including the power to remove elected officials, and to veto legislation adopted by Bosnian legislative bodies.
The current crisis follows the failed application of two standard toolboxes for democratizing and state building, writes Bodo Weber, a Berlin-based associate of the Democratization Policy Council – picking individuals rather than building institutions and relying on the incentives of EU accession:
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 was EU integration:
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.
But the democratic West need not accept Bosnia’s disintegration, he argues. The West needs to correct the “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, [and that] has led to the unnecessary escalation of rhetoric and risk”.
“Much remains to be done” to advance stable democracy in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the European Union’s new foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton concedes.
The constraints of the country’s post-war and post-communist legacies are highlighted in a new report from the National Democratic Institute. Institutional reforms are essential, but not sufficient not sufficient to address the continuing obstacles to sustainable democratic transition, it finds.
But when it comes to the Balkans, the usual paradigm of democratic transformation confronts acute problems of ethnic conflict and state-building.
“For a polity to democratize, it should first be acknowledged as one by its entire population and granted the same recognition by the international ‘powers’,” a recent analysis suggests. There is a prior need to “reshape the basic foundations these states are built upon, namely their political identities and cultures.”
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