A dialogue on Bosnia: why not lighten up?

Colleagues Matthew Parish and Kurt Bassuener, both long-term observers of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), clashed recently over at Balkans Insight in ways that I thought shed light on the situation, so I’ve invited them to continue the conversation here at peacefare.net  I get to pose the questions and post their answers, a privilege for which I thank them.

Here is the first question: 

International attention is no longer focused, as it was in the early 1990s, on Bosnia-Herzegovina.  Why can’t the international community lighten its presence in the country and move from the current High Representative, who has American and Russian as well as European Union backing and unusual powers to impose legislation and remove officials, to a European Union representative, who would no longer be expected to intervene but merely to encourage Bosnia’s preparations for European Union membership?

Matthew responds:

I think this question misstates the extent to which the international community is really involved at the current time. The principal step change was in January 2006, when the assertive and politically astute High Representative Paddy Ashdown retired and was replaced by Christian Schwarz-Schilling. Schwarz-Schilling is remembered as ineffective; but it is forgotten that by Ashdown’s departure the international community had already tired of Bosnia, in my view irreversibly. His explicit mandate – to close OHR – was supported by all members of the PIC at the time. That agenda triggered Dodik’s assertiveness, which rendered some western powers nervous. The policy since then has been to drag OHR out indefinitely in a half-hearted way, always suggesting it would be closed in the next six months but then finding another reason why it should continue for just a little longer.

In the mean time Bosnian politicians have mostly grown to ignore the Office, which is a shadow of its former self. Division between the European powers about the desirability of a heavy-handed presence in the country has enabled the Serbs, and to a lesser extent the Croats, to divide the PIC. The net result is that the organisation is now ignored. Dodik has publicly stated that High Representatives’ decisions will not have force in the RS. He could hardly more explicit.

Thus the notion that the international presence in Bosnia should become lightened assumes that it currently has extraordinary powers. It does not. OHR is a dead letter. The European Union mission cannot emerge from its shadow until the organisation formally closes; but the continued existence of OHR is only symbolic. No High Representative wishes to admit as much, lest they become the scapegoat for Bosnia’s future problems; they would rather pass the poisoned chalice onto the next incumbent. But the international community has ceased to be a significant political actor in Bosnia’s politics. We no longer make a difference.

Some have argued for rejuvenating OHR or some other kind of hard international power in Bosnia, urging that if this does not happen then the country’s existence and maybe even peace are in peril. Those warnings may or may not be auspicious; but I do not think it is realistic to revert to a stronger role. OHR’s authority was supported by recent memories of an atrocious war; significant numbers of foreign peacekeeping troops; and large quantities of aid money. All those things have gone. Moreover many in the EU remain deeply ambivalent about the anti-democratic nature of OHR’s authority and the way in which it exercised its authorities without regarded to fundamental legal standards. There is no appetite for returning to the old days of peremptory dismissals and unilaterally imposed legislation, drafted within the hallways of OHR and imposed upon Bosnian politicians in disregard of the ordinary legislative procedures. The international community created a constitutional structure in Dayton, and ultimately we will have to let that structure run its course.

I think the Dayton structure was inherently unsustainable and we are now in the midst of watching it fly apart. But the opportunity for the international community unilaterally to rewrite the Dayton constitution is long past; and OHR was just a sticking plaster.

And Kurt says:

The short answer to your question, Dan, would be that’s been the practical effect of international policy since 2006 – and look at where it got us.

The PIC Steering Board came to the conclusion that peace implementation was basically finished in 2005, aside from unfinished business like police restructuring and constitutional reform. The dominant view was that Bosnia was functional enough to propel itself into the Euro-Atlantic mainstream; it was just a question of time. So the EU would take on the pre-eminent international role, without need of any executive instruments. So the PIC could also choose someone like Christian Schwarz-Schilling to be a closer. “Ownership” and “partnership” – as well as the still undefined term “transition” – were the buzzwords. I think the assumption in Brussels was that, like the handover of military matters from NATO to the EU, this would be another low-risk way for the EU to build a track record for its Common Foreign and Security Policy with no risk. It was a sure thing.

This prevailing assumption was proven wrong within a span of four months in 2006, in a perfect storm that began with the departure of Ashdown at the end of January. Milorad Dodik became RS Premier in March and all cooperation on making the state more functional stopped. Then the “April package” of modest but constructive constitutional changes was shot-down in the BiH House of Representatives. The election campaign began in earnest that spring, with the Montenegrin independence referendum giving Dodik a talking point and returning “referendum” back into the political lexicon. It took some months for it to sink in that the reality didn’t fit the script. The international community has been consistently behind events ever since, begetting what amounts to a rules-free environment in Bosnia.

I disagree that the international executive tools of the OHR (and EUFOR) are irretrievably broken. They’ve just been allowed to become moribund because of a lack of collective will to employ them.

There is a larger philosophical – even theological – issue at play here when it comes to the EU role. The whole EU approach is based on assumptions of what incentives should be working, since BiH has an enlargement perspective. According to this framework, BiH politicians are representative of (and accountable to) the citizens and their interests, recognize the benefits of joining the EU, and are willing to do the heavy lifting of reform to join the club. Clearly this isn’t happening, but for the EU it doesn’t compute. Why not? Because their “partners” are those who benefit from the current system, and this gives them a better deal than what the EU is offering. These are the “owners” of the system over which the EU wants them to take “ownership.” The current drift toward violent dissolution into ethnocratic (and surely autocratic) fiefdoms is what happens when there is no external corrective to that incentive structure.

Instead of adjusting its approach and employing policy instruments outside the enlargement framework, the EU has instead opted to try to “restore momentum” by simply declaring progress in the vain hope that reality will follow. The grant of the SAA in 2008, despite police reform not being realized, is the most visible example of this dynamic. The rest of the PIC has essentially gone along for the ride on this. Though there is increasing disquiet at the lack of clear thinking of how to match the EU’s means to the situation at hand on the part of the US, Britain, Turkey, Japan, and Canada, there has not been an active counterproposal to the prevailing approach.

I guess the official version from Brussels would be that the EU can’t perform its alchemy because the big bad OHR and its wicked Bonn Powers get in the way, but the reality for five years just doesn’t bear that out.

Sounds to me as if Kurt and Matthew basically agree on the diagnosis, but they look in different directions for the cure. To be continued tomorrow. Tune in then!