Security Community Practices in the Western Balkans

Sonja Stojanović Gajić, Filip Ejdus, Sonja Stojanović Gajić, Filip Ejdus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317058083
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

In the early 1990s, the Western Balkans were the scene of prolonged and bloody inter-ethnic wars. Numerous issues remain unresolved; Bosnia is a dysfunctional state; Kosovo a disputed territory; Macedonia a fragile republic, however, it is hard now to imagine the renewal of inter-state armed conflict.

Investigating the causes and mechanisms driving peaceful transformation in the Balkans, this book examines developments in the region and contributes to discussions on security community building. Focusing on how different professional communities work together in the creation of regional peace and security, it sheds new light on how diplomats, policemen, soldiers and others brought about the transformation from conflict to peace through their everyday practices.

Conducted collaboratively by a research community based within the region, this volume will be highly relevant to scholars and researchers studying the Balkans, regional security, security communities and policymakers.

1

Professional Practices of Security Community Building

Theoretical introduction

Filip Ejdus

The conventional way of looking at security community building is to conceptualize it as a peace building process involving states and other actors such as international organizations (IOs). In this book we take a somewhat different approach, looking at how security communities are brought into existence by the talk and practice of communities of professionals bound by certain ways of doing things. Think of diplomats meeting on a daily basis at IO secretariats or policemen exchanging crime data with neighbouring countries. Think of soldiers preparing for a regional military exercise or intelligence officers making regional threat assessments. Think of regional networks of security experts meeting regularly to discuss how to achieve regional stability. Think of any other community of professionals who, by carrying out their work competently on a daily basis, actually contribute to a regional political constellation built on trust and ‘dependable expectation of peaceful change’, a security community. In particular, in this book we are interested in understanding how these various professional communities, through their day-to-day practices, are bringing about the transformation of the Western Balkans from a war-torn region into a security community. However, the case studies presented in this book are not ‘objective snapshots’ of a moving target taken by a detached group of scientists. Instead, the book presents a thick description produced by a regional network of scholars and experts who are themselves deeply involved in the process of security community building through the production of the academic discourse which is necessary both for regional transformation and in order to move away from the ethnic security dilemmas of the past.

In this chapter, the key literature which has illuminated our theoretical thinking will be brought together and discussed in order to set the stage for the empirical case studies which follow. However, this chapter will not set out a tightly coupled theoretical paradigm which will then bind all the case studies together in a single academic narrative. Instead, this chapter presents a quite diverse conceptual toolbox which has guided our empirical inquiry. Each chapter in this book was crafted with a similar but different set of analytical tools and instruments, as discussed at workshops convened in Tirana (Albania), Opatija (Croatia), Belgrade (Serbia) and Sarajevo (BiH) between 2010 and 2012. What follows is a summary of the literature which served as the backdrop to those memorable and thought-provoking meetings.

Security community

The concept of the security community was first introduced into IR in the 1950s by Karl Deutsch and his associates.¹ According to Deutsch, a security community can be defined by the existence of ‘dependable expectations of peaceful change’ (Deutsch et al., 1957: 5). The interest for security communities renewed following the end of the Cold War. Initially developed within the liberal paradigm, the concept was revived in the 1990s by social constructivists, in large part thanks to a volume co-edited by Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett (Adler and Barnett, 1998). The book offered a sociological and path-dependent understanding of security community building. The authors proposed to study the emergence and deepening of security communities historically as a process of imagination and institutionalization of dependable expectations of peaceful change (ibid.: 49). In line with this, Adler and Barnett distinguished three types of security communities: nascent, in which states cooperate and coordinate policies without seeking a security community; ascendant, with increasing institutional and cooperation networks and an embryonic sense of ‘we-ness’; and mature, with deep institutionalization, a well-articulated common identity and mutual expectations of peaceful resolution of disputes.

Following the publication of the Adler/Barnett volume, many constructivist scholars used the concept of security community to make sense of the changing world. Contrary to neo-realist predictions, the Euro-Atlantic security community did not collapse following the demise of the Soviet Union. Instead, it deepened and expanded geographically to envelop its former Eastern European adversaries. Understanding these developments required going beyond the neorealist distribution of material capabilities in the international system to include issues such as identity, norms and socialization (Neumann and Williams, 2000). Although the security community concept initially grew out of the North-Atlantic experience it was soon applied to a geographically wider Euro-Atlantic region (Pouliot, 2010; Adler 2008), the Persian Gulf (Barnett and Gause, 1998), Southeast Asia (Acharya, 1991, 1995, 2009; Garofano, 2002; Haacke, 2005), South America (Hurrell, 1998), Southern Africa (Ngoma, 2003; Nathan, 2006), and Southeast Europe (Vučetić, 2001; Cruise and Grillot, 2013; Kavalski, 2007). Only a relatively small number of works dealt with the geographical spread of security communities. Unsurprisingly, all these works were concerned with the spread of the liberal security community, institutionalized through the EU and NATO, to either Central and Eastern Europe (Adler, 2008) or Southeast Europe and more recently the Western Balkans (Vučetić, 2001; Kavalski, 2007; Grillot et al., 2010).²

The security community in the Western Balkans

Only three decades ago, most of the region which is today known as the Western Balkans still constituted the majority of Yugoslavia, a federal state which was thus itself already an amalgamated security community. At the time, the only region which was discussed in the dominant discourse was Southeast Europe (SEE). When Yugoslavia collapsed in 1991, the term Balkans gained dominance because it better captured the orientalist overtones of the Western portrayal of the ensuing conflict. Once the Eastern Balkan countries, Bulgaria and Romania, began EU accession talks in 1998, SEE was replaced by a narrower term – the Western Balkans (WB). It was coined by the EU and introduced during the Austrian presidency to denote the Western part of the peninsula which remained outside the European integration process. The term included all former Yugoslav republics minus Slovenia plus Albania. Although it was initially invented as a kind of Brussels speak for the purpose of EU enlargement policy, the term soon became a common political label, which ultimately outgrew its political meaning and entered the wider cultural discursive space. This is best exemplified by the 2006 publication of Lonely Planet’s Western Balkans Travel Guide.

Today, however, to talk about security community (re)building in the Western Balkans makes perfect sense to academics and policy-makers alike. When Yugoslavia broke up in 1991, a decade of armed conflicts ensued, first in Slovenia (1991), then Croatia (1991–5), BiH (1992–5), Serbia/Kosovo (1999) and finally Macedonia (2001). By 2001, the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, as they are sometimes called, were put to an end with a robust military and diplomatic support of NATO and the EU. A security regime was installed through a set of peace deals, including the Dayton Peace Agreement for Bosnia (1995), the Erdut Peace Agreement for Croatia (1995), the Kumanovo Military-Technical Agreement and UNSC Resolution 1244 for Kosovo (1999) and the Ohrid Framework Agreement for Macedonia (2001).

The first progress in moving from this security regime to a nascent security community was made not by the Western Balkan states themselves but by the EU in devising the Stability Pact during Germany’s presidency in 1999. Perhaps even more important were the June 2000 European Council meeting in Santa Maria De Feira, when it was decided to open the door to the potential future accession of the Western Balkan states, and the November 2000 Zagreb Summit, when the Stabilization and Association Process was endorsed. NATO followed suit by opening first its Partnership for Peace (PfP) program and then the prospect of full membership to Western Balkan states. Another step towards a nascent security community was made in April 2013 when Belgrade and PriÅ¡tina signed the EU facilitated Brussels Agreement thus setting in motion a normalisation process between Serbia and Kosovo. With the sole exception of Serbia, all countries in the region are either NATO members – such as Croatia and Albania – or have made significant progress towards joining the alliance. After Croatia’s July 2013 accession to EU membership, the Western Balkan region has now shrunk as the EU expanded. Despite the enlargement fatigue caused by the Euro crisis, external region building and the expansion of the western security community into the Western Balkans will undoubtedly continue beyond this point, but the pace at which this will happen is yet to be established.

All this has so far been the object of analysis of a handful of academic studies. The first author to study security community development in Southeast Europe (SEE) and the Western Balkans was SrÄ‘an Vučetić (2001). In his piece, Vučetić demonstrated that at the outset of the twenty first century, the region well fitted Adler and Barnett’s description of a ‘nascent’ security community. Vučetić identified the EU as the main extra-regional hegemonic region-builder and the Stability Pact (SP) as the main vehicle for the inclusion of SEE in the wider European zone of peace. More specifically, he argued that the SP was diffusing norms and practices of common and comprehensive security which were initially developed within CSCE rather than the EU and NATO (ibid.: 119). However, as Vučetić noted, the missing link preventing the SEE security community from moving into the ‘ascendant’ phase was the fact that regional identity was ‘minimal’ (ibid.: 124).³ The main impediment to this is not only the lack of a common understanding of history but also the internalization of a negative self-image stemming from the Balkanist discourse, to use Todorova’s term (ibid.: 125; Todorova, 1997). Vučetić rightly pointed out the role of external region-builders such as the EU and the CSCE as the formative practice producers. However, Vučetić’s state-bias captured only part of the equation while leaving out societal interactions and professional practices which occur outside state bodies and their intergovernmental settings.

The next comprehensive attempt to approach the security dynamics of the Balkans through the security community concept was made by Emilian Kavalski (2003; 2004; 2007). Kavalski’s main concern was not how security communities evolve and transform, but how they get off the ground in the first place. Combining liberal and constructivist paradigms in a single framework, he argued – much in line with Vučetić – that the expansion of the Western ‘hegemonic peace order’ to the Balkans after the 1999 Kosovo war was initiated by extra-regional actors such as NATO and the EU through the socialization of decision making elites in IOs. Kavalski pointed out an important difference between the deepening and the expansion of the liberal security community. While in the former IOs develop as a result of peaceful patterns of interstate relations in the Deutschian fashion, in the latter IOs are the cause of such peaceful relations.

Kavalski distinguished two types of international socialization. The first is the socialization of Balkan state-elites by NATO and the EU, which takes place as a result of conditionality policy. Backed by the prospect of membership, conditionality pushes prospective members to embrace regional cooperation, thus helping the embryonic security community get off the ground (Kavalski 2007: 62). In contrast, Kavalski posited socialization within those two organizations through various programs wherein Balkan states learn security community norms because they are in a situation similar to membership, such as the PfP program. Although his interest in hegemonic socialization is very useful and telling, Kavalski ignored the role of professions and communities of practice. By the same token, while focusing on the resources utilized to attain compliance with western hegemonic norms and practices (Ibid: 70) he failed to analyze how knowledge of those norms and practices is socially constructed and expanded geographically.

Further study of the promotion of the security community in the Western Balkans by NATO and the EU was undertaken by Grillot, Cruise and D’Erman (2010). The three authors’ article confirmed Kavalski’s thesis that the EU and NATO served as the key external third parties for the socialization of Western Balkan state-elites, thus precipitating the nascent phase of security community building in the region. In addition, they argued that IOs had socialized states individually into the European rather than into a Western Balkan commonality, at least at the very outset of promotion of the liberal security community. This changed in 2005, when the EU adopted a new policy insisting on regional cooperation as a precondition for future enlargement (European Commission, 2005). This external move in the direction of greater regional ownership created the potential for the security community in the Western Balkans to move from the ‘nascent’ to the ‘ascendant’ phase. However, as the authors noted, the practice of security community construction had yet to trickle down to the general populations and translate into a norm internalized by ordinary citizens. Unfortunately, as they argued, feelings of trust and belongingness are still very much lacking among the general population of the Western Balkan region, thus preventing further development and consolidation of the security community (Grillot et al., 2010: 62). Grillot, Cruise and D’Erman advanced an academic insight into the gradual inclusion of the Western Balkans into the Euro-Atlantic security community. However, their work suffered from similar limitation as the two above mentioned authors in assuming the central role of states and IOs.

The security community literature analysed thus far by and large focuses on what states and IOs do at the regional level of analysis. This is a valid approach in its own right. However, scholars investigating security communities have rarely gazed beyond and below states and IOs into professional and epistemic communities and their everyday competent practices of building regional trust. In order to fill this gap, this research brings to the table a discussion of the role of professional communities in the process of security community building. In order to do this, it is appropriate to examine the relevant literature on professional practices.

Professional practices of security community building

Systematic study of professions dates to the early twentieth century. Carr-Saunders and Wilson, pioneer authors of The Professions, defined professions as organized bodies of experts who apply esoteric knowledge to particular cases (Carr-Saunders and Wilson, 1934). The authors argued that professions have elaborate systems of instruction and training, along with entry examinations, formal prerequisites and peculiar codes of ethics. There are two distinct approaches to professions in sociology: functionalism and structuralism. Functionalists define a profession as ‘a relatively homogeneous community whose members share identity, values, definitions of role, and interests’ (Bucher and Strauss 1961). Structuralists, on the other hand, consider professions to consist of institutions, personnel, organizations, recruitment policies, standards and codes as well as their relations to the public (Abbott, 1988). This research will look at a number of professions, including the police, diplomats, the military and intelligence services and will examine the way the practices of these professions bring the security community into existence. But in order to capture the professional practice of security community building, this research will draw neither on functionalism nor on structuralism but rather on the ‘practice turn’ in social theory in general (Schatzki et al., 2001) and in IR in particular (Neumann, 2002; Adler, 2005; Pouliot, 2010; Adler and Pouliot, 2011a, 2011b; Andersen and Neumann 2012).

Instead of focusing either on practitioners’ discourses or on their institutional setups, the ‘practice turn’ attempts to bring materiality back into the analysis of world politics, directing attention onto what practitioners do, in other words focusing on the quotidian unfolding of their professional life. Adler and Pouliot offered a definition of practices as ‘competent performances’ (Adler and Pouliot, 2011b: 4). In contrast to ‘behaviour’, which denotes any material doing, or ‘action’, which refers to meaningful behaviour, ‘practices’ are patterned actions ‘socially developed through learning and training’ (ibid.: 5). Practices...