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Applying

A Facebook friend wondered over the weekend whether I was being skeptical or just superficial when I tweeted:

The one thing on which #Bosnia‘ns agree is that the country is not qualified for EU membership. So what do they do? Apply.

Skeptical was more like it. All you have to do to understand in depth why is take a glance at last year’s European Commission progress report on Bosnia and Herzegovina. Guess what? It shows little progress.

Brussels reads its own reports, so we can be sure the Europeans know that. The European Union remedy has been to push a “Reform Agenda” that starts with labor market reform. The reasoning is that only by lowering labor costs and increasing labor flexibility will Bosnian companies be able to compete effectively and expand in the future.

So far so good, but that is an indirect way of attacking Bosnia’s problems, which lie in a political economy that enriches politicians and impoverishes most of the population. I don’t say labor market reform won’t help, in particular if it reduces costs, increases competition and makes it harder for politicians to exploit patronage, but it is far from sufficient.

Bosnia needs prosecutions. The rip-offs are well-documented. It seems to me inconceivable that professional prosecutors would not have sufficient evidence. The international community should be able to help by tracing the tycoons’ finances and freezing ill-gotten gains. Precious little of that has been done.

The only really high-level prosecution these days is directed at an upstart politician, Fahrudin Radoncic, not for ripping off the state but rather for witness tampering in a Kosovo drug investigation. I don’t have any idea whether Radoncic is guilty or innocent (and he should be presumed the latter of course), but I am pretty sure that case will not do much to undermine the web of corruption and misappropriation of state assets that plagues Bosnia. The prosecutors’ use of wiretaps, however, demonstrates unequivocally that the judicial system in Bosnia has the means, but not the will, to attack other high-level corruption.

I’d be the first to admit that the United States suffers from high-level corrupt practices as well. A year doesn’t go by without charges against a governor here, a couple of members of Congress there, and dozens of state legislators, including in states far larger and with bigger economies than Bosnia. You need to be worried not when such cases are pursued but when they aren’t.

That’s the situation in Bosnia today. Despite a newly inked anti-corruption plan, the European Commission reports:

Organized crime cases in 2015 led to the confiscation of 550,000 euros. That’s peanuts. Hundreds of millions if not billions would be more like it.

If Bosnia and Herzegovina is serious about getting into the EU, it will need to skip confiscating the peanuts and trap the elephants. If the application for membership helps to mobilize the political will required, it’s all for the better. But it is far more likely to amount to nothing more than a maneuver to convince an already disheartened electorate that progress is being made.

Bosnia needs not only to apply to the EU, but also to apply itself to qualifying for membership.