Bosnia and Herzegovina adrift

I spoke last night at the Austrian Cultural Center in New York City, in an event presided over by Tim Judah, who has been covering Ukraine lately but cut his teeth in the Balkans.  The panel included Damir Arsenijevic, Atilla Aksoj, and Wolfgang Petritsch.  Here are my talking notes:

1. I confess I’ve been tempted to do a John Cage this evening, but that would require I stand here for four minutes and thirty-three seconds completely silent, as the composer once did.
2. I haven’t got that kind of discipline. So you’ll have to settle for something less edifying and not much longer: warmed over ideas from someone who can’t remember when he last had a good one on the subject.
3. Let me start with the conventional wisdom, which I think is correct: Bosnia is stuck because the Dayton agreements, while ending a war, ensconced ethnically nationalist political parties and politicians in positions of power from which only more nationalist parties and politicians are be able to remove them.
4. The fault lies in the country’s constitution.  Dayton ended the war but failed to provide Bosnia with a functional governing structure capable of negotiating and implementing the requirements of NATO or European Union membership.
5. This didn’t matter much for the first decade after the war. There were lots of things that needed doing.  NATO and EU memberships were not much of an issue.
6. But in 2005/6 a team of Americans, with European support, tried to start fixing the constitutional problem by facilitating preparation by the Bosnian political parties of constitutional amendments later known as the April package.
7. The package clarified group, individual and minority rights, as well mechanisms for protecting the “vital national interests” of Bosnia’s constituent peoples. It also included reforms to strengthen the government and the powers of the prime minister, reduce the president’s duties, and streamline parliamentary procedures.
8. The April package narrowly failed in parliament to achieve the 2/3 majority required by two votes. The responsibility was clear: one political party that had participated fully in the negotiations blocked passage, in order to ensure its leader election to the presidency.
9. Whatever the faults of the April package, its passage would have opened the way for a different politics in Bosnia, one based less on ethnic identity and more on economic, social welfare and other issues of common concern to all its citizens.
10. I confess I thought its defeat would only be temporary. For sure the package would be reconsidered the next year and passed.
11.  I failed to understand that the moment was not reproducible.  Damage was done.  Defeat of the April package ushered in a period of virulent ethnic polarization. Over the past eight years, the situation has deteriorated markedly. Only one constitutional amendment has passed during that period, under intense international pressure, to codify the status of the Brcko District in northeastern Bosnia.
12. Meanwhile, the country has fallen further and further behind most of its neighbors in the regatta for EU membership and now looks likely to end up in last place, with little hope of entering the EU before 2025 or later.
13. Those who advocate, as I trust Wolfgang will, that the High Representative responsible for interpretation of the Dayton agreements be removed and Bosnia’s problems be left to the EU accession process for resolution have little evidence that mechanism will work.
14. All the leverage of EU accession did not work to get Bosnians to align their constitution with a decision of the European Court of Human Rights. Nor has it accelerated the adaptation of Bosnia’s court system to European standards.
15. So what is to be done?
16. I think there is no substitute for the Bosnians solving their own problems, even if the internationals helped to create them. The recent “Bosnian spring” plenums are for me a positive sign.  So too is the interethnic cooperation in response to the recent floods, which demonstrated clearly that Bosnia’s many governments are unable to serve its citizens well.
17. But the plenums have so far focused on local issues, not national ones. At some point after October’s elections, Bosnians will have to try to fix its constitution. They could do worse than return to the April package and get on with the process of constitutional revision.
18.  I also think there are directions that would not be fruitful. Some would like to see even greater group rights and ethnic separation than provided for in the Dayton agreements. That is not in my view a fruitful direction.  Apart from its impact on Bosnia, it would have the undesirable effect of encouraging separatism in Ukraine and elsewhere.
19. Others would like to further weaken the central government or allow the entities to negotiate separately their entry into the EU. Those in my view are not fruitful directions.
20. There is a simple test for any proposal for reform in Bosnia: will it make the government in Sarajevo more functional? The corollary question is whether it will accelerate Bosnian entry into NATO and the EU.
21. The April package would have done that. The time is coming to return to it and get the difficult job of constitutional reform done.