Internationalized State-Building after Violent Conflict

Bosnia Ten Years after Dayton

Marc Weller, Stefan Wolff

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317969709
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Previously published as a special issue of Ethnopolitics, this volume analyzes various dimensions of the internationalized state-building process in Bosnia and Herzegovina since 1995.

In December 1995, the Dayton Agreements ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and established a fragile peace between the former conflict parties. The settlement seemed morally wrong and politically impracticable, but still necessary in order to end violence of a scale and intensity not seen in Europe since the end of the Second World War. The leading contributors conclude that internationalized state-building can only serve well in the stabilization of states emerging from conflict if it draws on a well-balanced approach of consociational techniques, moderated by integrative policies, tempered by a wider regional outlook and sustained by resourceful and skilled international involvement. The experience of Bosnia and Herzegovina may not have scored full marks in all of these categories, but important lessons can be gleaned for other similar contemporary and future challenges that the international community no doubt will have to face.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international organizations, civil wars and ethnic conflicts, international law and peace studies.

Bosnia and Herzegovina Ten Years after Dayton: Lessons for Internationalized State Building

MARC WELLER & STEFAN WOLFF

The Dayton Agreements have been widely regarded as both a blessing and a curse from the very beginning. More formally known as the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the agreement was initialled, together with 11 annexes and associated documents, at Dayton, OH on 21 November 1995, and formally signed in Paris some three weeks later. The termination of active hostilities in Bosnia and Herzegovina that ensued was greeted with tremendous relief, both inside Bosnia and Herzegovina and on the outside. After all, Bosnia and Herzegovina had been subjected to an armed campaign characterized by ethnic cleansing and genocide. Over 100 000 civilians had been killed and half of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s population displaced. However, there was also a sense of great reluctance. The Dayton settlement seemed to freeze the situation on the ground to the benefit of those who had conducted the armed campaign against the Bosnian state and imposed such tremendous suffering on its population. Most observers doubted whether the constitution for Bosnia and Herzegovina, contained in Annex 4 of the Agreement, could last. Instead, there was a general sense that Bosnia and Herzegovina would fall apart, as soon as the quite vast international military presence deployed to the territory was withdrawn. In short, the settlement seemed morally wrong and politically impracticable, but still necessary in order to end violence of a scale and intensity not seen in Europe since the end of the Second World War.

Against this background the obstacles to success for (re)building Bosnia and Herzegovina into a secure, stable and dependable member of the international community appeared overwhelming. In addition to its dubious moral value, given that it apparently rewarded ethnic cleansing, the agreement also lacked domestic legitimacy, but not for this reason alone. It had been negotiated in far-away Dayton, OH, on a US air force base subjected to a state of quarantine until an agreement had been hammered out. The Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat communities were not even direct parties to the agreement, which was instead signed by the leaders of the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) and Croatia in their stead. These leaders, Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman, were thus given an opportunity by the international community, albeit grudgingly, to portray themselves as the guarantors of peace and stability in Bosnia and Herzegovina, rather than as key players in, and sponsors of, the conflict during the previous three-and-a-half years. Given the inability and unwillingness of all the parties to settle the conflict peacefully among themselves, the agreement reflected significant input from the international negotiators. Instead of creating a sense of ‘local ownership’, there was, not wrongly, a widespread feeling of imposition in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

A further difficulty lay in the structure of the agreement. It appeared to deny to all sides that which they had vigorously sought to achieve during the war. Republika Srpska, the mainly ethnic Serb entity, was denied statehood or association with the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The mainly ethnic Croat entity had already been tied in the Washington Agreement of 1994 into an uneasy ‘federation’ with the mainly Muslim part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. All three communities were loosely bound together in the shape of a state that appeared to be lacking in most of the powers and institutions necessary for its functioning. At least two of its constituent communities—Serbs and Croats—thus had little if any real interest in making Bosnia and Herzegovina work as an independent and sovereign member of the international community.

In the following we will discuss three specific dimensions of the internationalized state-building process in Bosnia and Herzegovina over the past 10 years. First, we examine the complexity of the conflict settlement established by the Dayton Accords and the wide range of factors within Bosnia and Herzegovina affecting their success or failure. However, this level of analysis cannot be regarded as sufficient to achieve a full understanding of the dynamics and outcomes of the internationalized state-building process that Bosnia and Herzegovina has undergone over the past 10 years. Thus, we turn our attention to two further dimensions—the nature and mechanisms of the international community’s post-1995 involvement in the country and the regional context within which this internationally driven, -resourced and -guaranteed state-building venture took place.

Our examination of these three levels of analysis—local, regional, international—and the relationships between them enables us to contextualize the individual contributions that follow this introduction and to emphasize that, while the experience of internationalized state building in Bosnia and Herzegovina may in many ways be unique, it also offers important lessons for this kind of activity, now conducted by the international community across quite a wide range of cases. Yet these are also lessons that can (and should) still be applied to Bosnia and Herzegovina both to entrench the successes of the past decade and to move forward to overcome remaining obstacles.

Conflict Settlement, Dayton Style

The chances for success—the full implementation of the Dayton Accords leading to a secure and stable state in Bosnia and Herzegovina—appeared to be bleak at best when confronted with the reality in the country and the wider region in 1995 and the years thereafter. The region was characterized by several other unresolved and interlocked self-determination conflicts (Kosovo, Montenegro and Macedonia), persisting poverty, economic crises, corruption, organized crime, and continuously high numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) unable to return to their homes.

Such pessimistic assessments were also shared widely in academic debates on the viability and long-term suitability of the agreements reached in Dayton. Some pointed to recent failures in ambitious international constitution- and peace-building operations, most spectacularly in the case of Somalia. Most conventional wisdom at the time would have suggested that settlements of this kind—regardless of their precise institutional arrangements—can only succeed under one of two conditions. In the first, one party to the conflict must have achieved a decisive battlefield victory. The contest for power that fuelled the conflict thus having been essentially resolved, a settlement might then be able to support post-conflict stabilization. Alternatively, peace and stability might be possible if all parties were persuaded that a long-standing mutually hurting stalemate¹ could only be overcome through a settlement. With no prospect of victory in sight for anyone, a new constitutional consensus might then be generated.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, neither of these two conditions was present at the time that the Dayton Accords were finalized at the end of 1995. The mainly Muslim government felt that it had been forced to settle at a time when it was finally gaining ground militarily and would have had the chance to roll back ethnic Serb forces. The latter, for their part, still felt frustrated in their main ambition of independence or integration with Serbia. The ethnic Croat group had even been denied its own formal ‘entity’ that would at least have given it a state-like identity akin to Republika Srpska. Instead, it was composed of an informal association of cantons that were nominally united with the mainly Muslim ones under the terms of the Washington Agreement. Accordingly, NATO’s military intervention of September 1995, which led to the summons to Dayton and the eventual settlement achieved (or imposed) there, had arrested the conflict at a point when no party had either fully achieved its war aims or had been comprehensively defeated in military terms. And, while all parties had greatly suffered during the conflict, the situation on the battle-field in late 1995 was still fluid, with none of the parties convinced that its aims had become unattainable and that a settlement was preferable to continuing hostilities. Hence no mutually hurting stalemate was in evidence.

The Dayton settlement is therefore rightly seen as an example of a conflict that was not really settled when the peace agreement was concluded. Instead, the conflict had essentially remained unresolved—both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table. The big question was whether life under the settlement could take on a transformative role, whether the implementation of the agreement could resolve the issues that were left unresolved or inadequately addressed in the settlement, and whether an international peace-keeping presence could provide the essential security guarantees to allow the conflict parties to achieve this.²

Dayton therefore pioneered what one might call transformative conflict settlements, that is, agreed institutional arrangements bolstered by international security guarantees that enable the conflict parties to strive towards gradually transforming the conflict between them by peaceful, political and increasingly democratic means and to find mutually acceptable solutions for those issues that underlie their conflict. Such transformative conflict settlements are thus fundamentally different in nature from both interim and transitional settlements. Interim settlements establish the relevant secessionist unit as a constitutional self-determination entity, which, however, having won its case for self-determination in principle agrees to freeze the implementation of that right for a certain agreed period until a referendum on independence takes place in the self-determination entity whose result will be binding on both the self-determination entity and the overall state in question. Implicit in this is that, during the period leading up to the referendum, a self-governance regime is developed and applied in good faith, with a view to demonstrating that this solution sufficiently answers the requirements of the self-determination entity. Interim settlements thus differ from transitional settlements that may be agreed in instances when it is clear that secession will take place (as in the case of Eritrea’s secession from Ethiopia) or when a transitional period leads to full reintegration of a previously secessionist entity (as was the case with Eastern Slavonia in Croatia). A transformative conflict settlement, as in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, does not offer entities the option of unilateral secession, nor does it give the central government free reign in how it treats the self-determination entity. Rather, it establishes institutions, of a more or less permanent nature, that can trigger a complex process of socialization in relation to the elites, pushed by the ever broader bases of non-divisive community interests that develop over time. Thus the initial settlement offers the framework for accommodation of, and compromise on, the interests and demands of the conflict parties and provides the basis on which a more advanced constitutional arrangement can emerge, preserving the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the overall state.

While transformative conflict settlements thus predetermine international status, they do not, by default, establish the nature of the institutional arrangements to be set up to provide mechanisms within which the interests and demands of the conflict parties can be accommodated and compromised on within the boundaries of an existing state. And this is the point at which the architects of the Dayton constitution for Bosnia and Herzegovina were confronted with the perennial dispute between advocates of consociationalist and integrationist power sharing. Consociationalists would argue that conflict settlements need to accommodate the realities of group division, to generate space for ethnic self-governance, allow the ethnic communities to represent their interests through their respective elites as group interests, and offer protection for these interests through guaranteed representation in decision-making bodies and veto mechanisms.³ Integrationists would, on the contrary, argue that such an approach will entrench, rather than overcome, ethnic division. Instead of focusing on the maintenance of particularist group interests, one should instead offer incentives to elites to moderate their stances and offer political platforms that have broad appeal beyond one’s own ethnic group.⁴

Dayton, clearly, is a consociational agreement. In fact, one might argue, Dayton represents two consociational settlements within the boundaries of a single state—the sovereign consociation of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the regional consociation of the Federation. As Florian Bieber analyses in great detail in his contribution, both incorporate the classical features of consociations outlined by Lijphart more than 30 years ago: mandatory grand-coalition governments, wide-ranging autonomy (for the Republika Srpska and the cantons in the Federation, respectively), proportional representation of the relevant community groups at all levels of government, and pronounced co-decision or veto mechanisms. As Bieber emphasizes in his analysis, contrary to conventional wisdom and critiques of allegedly overly rigid consociational structures, the constitution provided by the Dayton Peace Agreement for Bosnia and Herzegovina has been surprisingly flexible and the country’s institutions have evolved significantly over the past decade as a result of both the process of implementing the Dayton Agreement and moving beyond it in some key aspects. Much of this evolution has been driven by the Office of the High Representative, and been made possible by strong continued international engagement. Yet, in accordance with our assumption of the transformative nature of the conflict settlement that Dayton represents, domestic constituencies have emerged in Bosnia and Herzegovina over the past several years which invest in the institutions and the state set up according to Dayton. Gradual evolution of the institutional system, rather than large-scale changes, emphasizes the transformative effects of the institutional arrangements agreed at Dayton.

This view of the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina benefits from taking a long-term perspective and having the advantage of looking back over a period of 10 years since the Dayton Accords were finalized. Initially, however, critics of the consociationalist approach to institutional design appeared to be confirmed in their mistrust of such arrangements. The Bosnian institutions of governance appeared to be constantly unable to function. Elite cooperation simply did not set in for a long time. Excessive executive representation of all the main communities at all levels led to an ineffective, but tremendously bloated state apparatus. And the entities/cantons administered themselves in a way that appeared to undermine further the claim that Bosnia and Herzegovina could continue as a state.

The fragile existence of the state only seemed to be prevented from spiralling downwards into (potentially violent) disintegration by the large international military presence that provided effective security. Moreover, the Office of the High Representative, originally intended to exercise an advisory and monitoring role in relation to civil affairs, took on important functions of government where the local institutions failed to deliver. True, some important legislative and institutional reforms were possible, relating to customs, security services and a number of other significant areas. While these were invoked, at times, as an example of the local communities taking ownership of Dayton and developing their state, one also had to note that these innovations were in fact generally the result of international action.

The extent of international involvement in governance in Bosnia and Herzegovina has frequently been criticized. It has allowed the local political actors to evade the need to take political responsibility themselves, forcing the High Representative to take decisions they might regard as essential, but from which they could distance themselves in public. Moreover, the lack of local or international accountability mechanisms establishing checks and balances in relation to this exercise of public power has been frequently noted. Indeed, the source of the powers of the High Representative is legally somewhat disputable, as it appears to be rooted principally in the pronouncements of the quite informal Peace Implementation Council, rather than in a formal UN Security Council resolution adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Yet, as Rebecca Everly demonstrates, as the High Representative has come to play an increasingly active role in the exercise of governmental power, a complex system of ‘public power regulation’ has simultaneously developed as well. Pursuant to this system, the public power exercised by domestic governmental authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina is regulated both through local checks and constraints (e.g. democratic electio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Bosnia and Herzegovina Ten Years after Dayton: Lessons for Internationalized State Building
• 2. After Dayton, Dayton? The Evolution of an Unpopular Peace
• 3. Complex Public Power Regulation in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the Dayton Peace Agreement
• 4. The ICTY, War Crimes Enforcement and Dayton: The Ghost in the Machine
• 5. Economic Reconstruction of Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Lost Decade
• 6. Building Trust in Public Institutions? Good Governance and Anti-corruption in Bosnia-Herzegovina
• Index