Keywords: BiH; Croatia; Serbia; policy; west; policy instruments; International Community; EU; US;
Bosnia Daily: October 24, 2012 – Croatian and Serbian Policy in Bosnia. Help or Hindrance?
More...
Keywords: BiH; Europeanisation; Croat question; Zagreb; EU;
Bosnia Daily: March 14, 2014 – Desperation and Attempts to Europeanize "the Croat question" What Gives, Zagreb?
More...
Keywords: BiH; new policy; strategy; EU; Peter Sorensen; international community; political elites; EU integration; IMF;
Bosnia Daily: May 20, 2013 – Proposal For a New Policy Approach. Revolution Is Not Required, but a Strategic Reassessment Is
More...
Keywords: Orange Revolution; Kyiv; protests; police forces; Revolution of Dignity; Ukraine;
“Compared with today's events in Kyiv, the Orange Revolution seems a children's party” – a foreign media outlet wrote when violent clashes on Hrushevskoho Street in Kyiv erupted between protesters and police and when the first blood was shed. And it's hard to disagree ... While the Orange Revolution of 2004 was a kind of joyful “festival of democracy” with songs, dances, humor, and blossoming of folk art, the "Revolution of Dignity" of 2013-2014, as it is now called, included tragic events of the kind that had never happened in the independent Ukraine. These two impressive popular revolutions in Ukraine do have a number of elements in common. They both started on November 21 (nine years apart), on the day of the Archangel Michael, the official patron saint of Kyiv and the head of the “heavenly army.” People often spoke about the mystical underpinnings of the protests, asserting that heavenly forces led by the Archangel Michael inspired people to fight against the regime. It is not surprising that the more than one hundred activists killed on the Maidan were promptly dubbed the “Heavenly Hundred.”
More...
Keywords: Iceland; BiH; reform; constitution; parliamentary elections; national referendum; political elites; consensus;
As angry Icelandic citizens prepare for early parliamentary elections this autumn, a bill to adopt the world’s first crowd sourced constitution sits on ice in Reykjavik. The bill, already approved by national referendum, has lain dormant since parliamentary elections ousted its sponsor parties back in 2013. The six-year history of Iceland’s constitutional bill, with all its twists and turns, is a practical case study for Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter BiH). Not only does Iceland provide workable models for the drafting phase, it, realistically, confronts the political setbacks inevitable in any constitutional reform effort. Both Iceland and BiH adopted their existing constitutions in wartime (World War II and the Bosnian War, respectively). While these wars and the constitutions of Iceland and BiH differ vastly, the political environment in which Icelandic lawmakers adopted their constitution, the constitution’s durability thereafter, and the country’s bottom-up reform process hold valuable lessons for BiH.
More...
Keywords: Mostar-Deal;
Last June, the ambassadors of the European Union and the US to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), together with the UK ambassador to BiH, struck a deal on Mostar with the main Croat and Bosniak parties, the Croatian Democratic Union of BiH (HDZ BiH) and the Party of Democratic Action (SDA). The agreement ended a ten-year deadlock on implementation of a Constitutional Court of BiH (CC BiH) ruling that suspended the Election Law of BiH and provisions in the Mostar city statute that regulated local elections on the grounds they were discriminatory, and returned the right to vote to the Herzegovinian city’s citizens, who on December 20 will vote for the first time in 12 years to elect their local representatives. The deal was praised by the West as a major breakthrough, a long-awaited return of local elites to a policy of compromise, and even an expression of a “thriving democracy.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
More...
Keywords: violent extremism; unrest in Bosnia;
This essay considers the “new” efforts aimed at preventing and countering violent extremism and argues that they are quite often the same kind of actions taken to establish the basic elements of democratic, resilient societies. Efforts aimed at post-war democratic consolidation or European enlargement support - ranging from strengthening local communities, working with youth, improving education systems, strengthening the independence of the police and justice sector and more – are becoming more overtly securitized. While such efforts in support of democratic reform have been viewed as a laudable goal in their own right for two decades, now they are linked to terror prevention. After an introduction on efforts to prevent and counter violent extremism, specific nuances in the Balkan region are explored. Three sets of challenges that limit genuine reform in the region – identity politics, the state of civic values and civil politics, and pervasive broken governance systems – are examined as both byproducts and drivers of unresolved conflicts.
More...
Keywords: violent extremism; unrest in Bosnia;
This essay considers the “new” efforts aimed at preventing and countering violent extremism and argues that they are quite often the same kind of actions taken to establish the basic elements of democratic, resilient societies. Efforts aimed at post-war democratic consolidation or European enlargement support - ranging from strengthening local communities, working with youth, improving education systems, strengthening the independence of the police and justice sector and more – are becoming more overtly securitized. While such efforts in support of democratic reform have been viewed as a laudable goal in their own right for two decades, now they are linked to terror prevention. After an introduction on efforts to prevent and counter violent extremism, specific nuances in the Balkan region are explored. Three sets of challenges that limit genuine reform in the region – identity politics, the state of civic values and civil politics, and pervasive broken governance systems – are examined as both byproducts and drivers of unresolved conflicts.
More...
Keywords: Syrian War; Muslim foreign fighters; Salafism;
BiH was the first country in the region to amend its criminal code to prohibit joining “foreign paramilitary and para-police formations” which it did in June 2014 and it has since joined the international coalition against ISIL. Operation Damask, undertaken by the State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA), the BiH Intelligence and Security Agency (OSA), and the BiH Prosecutor’s Office in late 2014 through early 2015, targeted those suspected of recruiting or financing BiH citizens to go to Syria and Iraq. The BiH Prosecutor’s Office for its part formed a new task force to deal specifically with these types of cases. The entities have created specialized police bodies to counter terrorism and extremism. But, as is well known and has been demonstrated previously, most visibly during the February 2014 protests, cooperation and coordination among these various structures is ad hoc and sporadic at best – not based on any institutionalized mechanisms, but rather often dependent on personalities and individual initiative.
More...
The European Stability Initiative recently published a troubling report on Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) called “Lost in the Bosnian Labyrinth - Why the Sejdić-Finci case should not block an EU application.”1 ESI argues that “non-implementation of the Sejdić-Finci decision cannot justify blocking Bosnia and Herzegovina’s application for EU membership,” noting that the reforms the EU expects from Bosnia have not been required of other EU applicants, much less its own member states.2 ESI argues that a ground-breaking legal ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)3 should not impede Bosnia’s integration into the EU, but instead the EU should quickly give BiH candidate status and expect the constitutional revisions demanded by the ECHR to take place while BiH negotiates with the EU about membership. The paper justifies this with the claim that other countries (including EU member states) include de facto discriminatory provisions in their constitutions and are not sanctioned by the EU or the Council of Europe. // As will be shown in this text, that argument is not only highly flawed, but also demonstrates a troublingly lack of understanding of the fundamentals of BiH politics, as well as constitutional power-sharing arrangements in the member states of the EU. As such, the paper appears to be an effort to provide an ideological framework for the EU to move beyond its continuing failures in BiH that have enabled local politicians to undo many of the highly-touted reforms put in place prior to 2006, when the EU assumed policy leadership. If Brussels uses the ESI paper as ideological justification for dropping conditionality, it would enable the Brussels bureaucracy to move ahead with its “one size fits all” cookie-cutter enlargement policy and pretend that “progress” is occurring, when at best a standstill can be observed, and at worst, previous achievements are slowly being reversed by local party elites.
More...
Keywords: Serbia and EU; Serbia and Kosovo; Conditionality;
In the space of less than a year, relations between the EU and Serbia’s new government have undergone a remarkable transformation. The government’s intentions appeared suspect, or at least uncertain, to most foreign observers. Yet in the end the concessions and compromises offered by Belgrade went far beyond what Brussels ever got out of the Tadić government over four years of a supposedly close partnership. The government has not only stayed the course of EU integration, but has also taken bold steps and taken the EU process more seriously than its predecessor. The agreements Belgrade signed in Brussels in April and May this year will, if implemented, lead to the integration of the Serb enclaves in north Kosovo into the Republic of Kosovo and the dismantling of any institutions of the state of Serbia on Kosovo’s soil.
More...
Keywords: North-Macedonia; Republic of Macedonia; VMRO-DPMNE, Nikola Gruevski; Western Balkans;
The Republic of Macedonia, once considered an island of relative stability in a troubled region, is now once again in the news, for the first time in almost a decade and a half, on account of internal turmoil. The hostility or opportunism of Macedonia’s neighbors has in the past decade abetted the degeneration of an already clientelistic domestic political culture into one in which neo-authoritarianism has taken strong hold. The Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM), the political opposition to Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and his ruling party, the nationalist Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization-Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (VMRO-DPMNE), has for months been releasing voice recordings which appear to record internal government deliberations – and demonstrate widespread (and widely believed) malfeasance. Public dissatisfaction with malgovernance has led to demonstrations, while an ethnic separatist narrative which had been in remission for over a decade has been revived with a bloody – and still opaque – security operation against armed ethnic Albanians in the northern town of Kumanovo in early May.
More...
Keywords: Kosova state-building; Kosova and Serbia; Kosova and EU; Western Balkans;
Through their single-minded focus on the Dialogue, driven by tactical, short-term and short-sighted considerations, the EU and the US have directly and consistently contributed to worrying trends in Kosovar politics. Less than a year after the EU supported the coalition deal designed to get the Belgrade-Prishtina Dialogue back on track, Kosovo is again in the throes of an institutional crisis with recent opposition protests and blockage of the parliament’s work. The irony is that the damage inflicted on Kosovo’s already-fragile democracy by the EU and the US now threatens the very progress achieved in the Dialogue. In order to prevent a further deterioration of the situation and strengthen democracy and rule of law in Kosovo, the EU and the US must undertake a number of policy adjustments.
More...
Keywords: 2015 migration crisis; Turkey and EU; Turkey and migration; Balkan-Route;
Over the course of 2015, an estimated 1.5 million people – the bulk of them refugees from Syria – made their way from Greece to Western Europe via the Balkan route. The shift to this previously marginal route for irregular entry of refugees and migrants into the EU led to the collapse of the EU’s external border in the Aegean and turned the long-standing problem of the EU’s deficient common asylum policy, which disproportionately affected the southern member states, into a full-fledged crisis. As late as early autumn 2015, the refugee crisis was still fully manageable. The EU’s immediate response followed the playbook used in various crises from the eurozone crisis onwards – a combination of reactive German leadership supported by a coalition of willing member states. On September 4, Chancellor Merkel, supported by her Austrian counterpart Werner Faymann, arranged with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán for the transit of refugees and migrants from Hungary with the aim to avert an escalation of the situation in that country. Merkel assembled a coalition of willing states that accepted to receive the bulk of refugees and migrants and worked with the countries on the Balkan route to avoid regional tensions over the wave and to achieve an initial smooth transit free of major human rights violations.
More...
Keywords: Donald Trump; Western Balkans;
Donald Trump has broken with almost seven decades of unwavering US commitment to Europe’s defense – to ensure a “Europe whole, free, and at peace” – by refusing to commit to NATO’s Article 5 – that an attack on one is an attack on all. The unreliability of that backstop will increase tensions and amplify the potential for continued escalation and dangerous miscalculation by Western Balkan actors. Doubt has crept into the transatlantic relationship from multiple directions, not least from the still murky, but highly disturbing, Trump-Russia relationship. American officials and legislators – especially those Republicans willing to put the interests of country before party – must demonstrate steadfastness in the face of destructive and erratic ambiguity at the top. But EU leaders cannot afford to leave Europe’s interests and the future of the Western Balkans to chance. The EU has the potential leverage and the capability to reverse the negative dynamic in the Western Balkans, both for its own benefit and for that of the peoples of the region. But to do so, it must acknowledge the vacuum its policies have enabled – and act decisively to fill it. If ever there was a real “hour of Europe,” it is now. In this context, DPC is presenting in this report a list of recommendations.
More...
Keywords: Bosnia and Hercegowina and EU; economic development; corruption;
This Policy Paper is a Reform Agenda & Questionnaire Monitoring Report. The new EU BiH initiative did yield some initial successes in 2015 and 2016. BiH authorities agreed a ‘Reform Agenda 2015-18’ with the EU and International Financial Institutions (IFIs), a broad blueprint for socio-economic reform that, if fully implemented, could have broken the country’s patronage system. Some initial implementation of the Reform Agenda and the formal fulfillment of some additional EU conditions prompted the EU’s General Affairs Council in September 2016 to grant the final reward in EU integration envisioned in the initiative – a referral of BiH’s membership application to the European Commission for its Opinion on granting candidate status. In December 2016 the Commission took the next step and handed over its Questionnaire to BiH. More significantly, the International Monetary Fund signed a loan arrangement with BiH in September 2016 designed to support the Reform Agenda, based on exceptionally strict financial conditionality and prompting the governments in BiH to concede on some previously unimaginable reforms. However, these successes were short-lived, limited and superficial. From early 2017, it became evident that the initiative would be a failure when it formally concludes at the end of 2018. Throughout 2017, implementation on all fronts came to an almost complete standstill, although EU representatives and other international officials continue to pretend the initiative is still alive.
More...
Keywords: legal development in Bosnia and Hercegowina;
Three legal cases/political scandals during 2018-19 grabbed the attention of the domestic public and the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The first two concerned the unresolved deaths of two young men, Dženan Memić in Sarajevo and David Dragičević in Banja Luka. The improper investigative conduct of the police and judiciary regarding their deaths raised suspicions of cover-ups and political interference. The third concerned corruption allegations against Milan Tegeltija, then president of the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina (HJPC), the BiH judiciary’s self-managing body. The three cases marked the nadir of a steady decline of the rule of law institutions in BiH over the last decade and a half, and stand in stark contrast to 2005 when BiH was a frontrunner among Western Balkan countries aspiring to European Union (EU) membership. Rule of law achievements until then had been the result of substantial and systematic judicial and (to a lesser degree) police reform carried out during the immediate post-war period under the leadership of the international community. This paper serves as an introduction to a policy paper/note series entitled “The Decline of the Rule of Law in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Role and Responsibility of the International Community” that constitutes a central component of a project launched in 2019 by the Democratization Policy Council (DPC) with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation office in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is aimed at initiating a dialogue among Western diplomats and officials on the international community’s co-responsibility for the decline of the rule of law in BiH – with each subsequent paper covering one of the key episodes stated above – focused on how the damage done can be repaired, and how international actors can contribute to a re-strengthening of the rule of law institutions in BiH.
More...
Keywords: EU-Enlargement; Western Balkans;
Immediately prior to the November meeting of the EU’s General Affairs Council, France released a non-paper that underscored that the enlargement halt was not really about enlargement at all. The non-paper was rife with contradictions and redundancies. Its main proposed innovation is a rejiggering of the enlargement policy into seven sequential phases. But the document also demonstrated a worrisome elite orientation, and was void of reference to or grounding in the EU’s foundational source code: the primacy of liberal democratic values and standards. This portends ill for Macron’s vision of the EU more broadly ... DPC recommends a different course to EU member states committed to enlargement and the EU-wide reinforcement of liberal democratic values, at a time when they are challenged both within the Union and from east and west. This does not require any major changes to mechanics, mandates, or procedures, but rather a philosophical shift in approaching the countries of the Western Balkans. The 2015-17 breakthrough in North Macedonia demonstrated two things: a) that the EU’s institutional default setting has for too long been on the side of illiberal elites; and b) the reality that in the expansion of a values-focused EU in the Western Balkans, citizens – not elites – are the Union’s real allies.
More...
Keywords: BiH and EU; state-development in BiH;
This policy note dispels with the facile and simplistic myth that the only way for the international community to engage in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is through either imposed solutions, or through an ownership policy of reliance on local elites - the current default setting. What the situation calls for is employing the coercive advantage of a transatlantic consensus to create an environment in which focused engagement by citizens to define a vision for a new social contract can be articulated. This top-down, bottom-up dynamic can be described as a “pressure sandwich” aimed at squeezing an elite that has no incentive to change the status quo.
More...