Kurt Bassuener November 3rd, 2009
(posted for Bodo Weber):
The latest issue of the German weekly Die Zeit, published last week, carries an op-ed by me in which I argue that after the failure of the “Butmir process” initiated by the EU’s Swedish Presidency it is time for the EU to finally take serious course in its policy towards Bosnia and that such a turn will demand Germany to take the lead. You can go to the link here for the article. An English version of the text is below.
Suddenly there is talk about war again
Die Zeit, 29.10.1009 Bodo Weber
This week the trial against Radovan Karadzic finally opened. Bosnia-Herzegovina may reach the soccer world championship in South Africa. And in all postwar countries of the former Yugoslavia, politics revolves around EU-integration. Sounds like successful calming and stabilization of Europe’s most recent theatre of war? Wrong.
High-level representatives of the European Union and the U.S. are currently en route to Bosnia-Herzegovina as crisis managers. For three and a half years ethnonationalistic rhetoric is escalating there and preventing political reform. For the first time in over a decade, the terms “war” and “violent conflict” have been resurrected in public debate. In this process Milorad Dodik, prime minister of the Republika Srpska (RS), the Serb entity in Bosnia is acting as the most vociferous agitator. He maintains an authoritarian regime with nationalistic populist speeches and regularly snubs the international community.
The international community had planned to stabilize the post-war state with the help of a semi-protectorate, but then initiated a phase-out. Its rationale: Over a decade after ending the war it was time for Bosnians and Herzegovinians to take over full responsibility for their country. From this view, the existence of international watchdogs is itself basically undemocratic. This putatively self-critical argumentation obscures two crucial problems: First, the international community wanted to get rid of the Bosnian problem child. And second, it wanted to hide the fact that at no point over the last fourteen post-war years has it developed a strategy for a long-term political stabilisation of the country without authoritarian international control.
One of the causes of the problems lies in the very Dayton-Agreement that secured the ending of the war in 1995. The Dayton post-war order has contained the aggressive effects of ethnic nationalism, it restored security and freedom of movement. The war armies have been dissolved, the military removed as a conflict factor.
But peace came at a special price: Instead of a functional Bosnian post-war state Dayton created a weak, dysfunctional and unsustainably expensive state; a complex state structure in which the constitution secures the decentralization of power and the predominance of ethnic political parties. At the same time, it sets hurdles too high for reaching substantial constitutional change from within, even though the majority of the population has long turned its back on the political elites.
The international community had tried to take corrective action through the Office of the High Representative (OHR). Its head was equipped with the authority to enforce laws or suspend them and to fire state officials whose ethnonationalistic policy and rhetoric represented a threat to Dayton. But this strengthening of the OHR was less motivated by the will to develop a real strategy for political stabilisation than by the wish to end the expensive and not very effective engagement in Bosnia in the foreseeable future.
When the U.S. took the Balkans off its top priority list after 9/11, the complete responsibility for the region fell to the EU. Without further ado, it declared the EU integration process to be the new statebuilding strategy. The High Representative additionally became the EU Special Representative for Bosnia. Europe put the EUFOR military mission in place for securing peace, thus turning Bosnia into one of the first test cases for its common European foreign and security policy. This sounded good – except for one shortfall: Brussels never had a strategic discussion on whether the prospect of EU membership could be a sufficient incentive for the local political elites in the southeast European countries (especially Bosnia) to take on the necessary economical and political reforms.
As the gap between the EU’s pretension and the Bosnian reality widened, “Bosnia-fatigue” inside the union grew. Instead of reacting politically Brussels turned on the bureaucratic autopilot and in 2006 decided to flee forward: The EU ascribed political maturity to the domestic elites and announced the imminent closure of the OHR. As the political elites’ zeal for reform vanished with the announcement of the pullout the EU dropped a central condition for signing an association agreement with Bosnia. The immediate consequences were: The expected reform dynamics did not take place. Two High Reps perished, the OHR sank into ineffectiveness. The EU lost the rest of its authority in Bosnia.
Brussels takes comfort in stating that the outbreak of a new war is unthinkable, if not for other reasons then because there do not exist ethnic armies any more. That is correct but still diverts from the real dangers. Bosnia lacks reliable state actors that could prevent an outbreak of violence. Neither does there exist a de-politicized police nor a judiciary that could function in a way that guarantees the rule of law without external assistance. Without these instruments and a state monopoly on force, it is very realistic to imagine a local outbreak of violence as trivial as a clash between fans of two rivalling soccer teams to escalate into a regional ethnic conflict. And there is no lack of weapons in Bosnia even today.
Despite all that the EU remains politically motionless. Inside the union advocates of a harder approach (mainly Britain and the Netherlands) are standing vis-à-vis supporters of a softer course (lead by Sweden). But none of the European governments is prepared for a reinforced engagement in Bosnia. And yet the EU would neither need to reinvent the wheel nor invest additional resources. In Bosnia today, authoritarian-nationalistic forces are substantially weaker than they had been a few years ago. The recent political escalation is less the expression of a new strength of the political elites then of the power vacuum left over by the EU.
What then, should the EU do? It has to reengage. And it has to understand that both forceful interventions into the Bosnian sovereignty and the existing European military contingent will still be necessary through the course of the EU integration process. What is necessary is political will and a long-term perspective that will give the population security and curtail the elites’ space for manoeuvring and manipulation. With its current politics of ignorance, Europe risks generating considerably higher political costs in the long term.
Germany could take a leading role within the EU and thus bring the community back to a serious course in Bosnia. Both the emergence of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy and Germany’s pretension to become a global player are inseparably linked to the Srebrenica genocide and Europe’s failure in Bosnia. That should actually be motivation enough for Germany. It remains to be seen in the upcoming weeks and months whether the new conservative-liberal government is going to move away from the Bosnia-fatigue of its predecessor. It then also remains to be seen how big the discord between pretension and reality in the German foreign policy will be.
Bodo Weber is a Berlin-based Senior Associate of the Democratization Policy Council (DPC)
