Transnationalism in the Balkans

Denisa Kostovicova, Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic, Denisa Kostovicova, Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317968535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Cambio de divisas

After a decade of exclusive nationalism, violence and isolation of the 1990s, the Balkans has seen the emergence of transnational links between the former ethnic foes. Do these new cross-border links herald the era of inter-ethnic reconciliation in place of the politics of ethnic exclusion? Are they a proof of a successful transition from authoritarianism and war to democracy and peace? Drawing on substantial empirical research by regional specialists, Transnationalism in the Balkans provides a sobering insight into the nature of cross-border links in the region and their implications. Several of the authors show how transnational connections in the context of weak states and new borders in the region have been used by transnational actors – be it in the politics, economics and culture -- to undermine a democratic consolidation and keep the practice of exclusive ethnic politics and identities alive. These findings make a strong case to go beyond the region and put forth a critical argument for rethinking the theories of transition to democracy in the post-Communist and post-conflict setting to incorporate a dimension of globalisation.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Ethnopolitics.

Europeanizing the Balkans: Rethinking the Post-communist and Post-conflict Transition

DENISA KOSTOVICOVA & VESNA BOJICIC-DZELILOVIC

The 2004 Eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU), in which eight post-communist states became members of the EU, changed the map of Europe profoundly. However, the European future of their counterparts in the Balkans is still uncertain, despite the unprecedented push the EU instigated to set the Balkan partners on the European path in 2005. It has given the go-ahead to accession negotiations with Croatia and kicked off negotiations on a Stabilization and Association Agreement with Serbia and Montenegro; meanwhile, Bosnia-Herzegovina has advanced internal reforms to be able to follow suit. Does this development lay to rest recent warnings that the Balkans, or, to be precise, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, Kosovo and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,¹ may become “an EU enclave” or a “ghetto” (Lehne, 2004, p. 123; ‘Breaking out of the Balkan ghetto’, 2005)? For a long time, the prospect of EU membership has failed to energize a large swathe of the Balkans to commit to an effective and focused reform programme, confounding expectations among policy makers and analysts. The latest engagement in the region has introduced a contractual basis for relations between the EU and the states and entities of the region. However, their profound political, economic and social transformation, dubbed Europeanization, has yet to take place. Crucially, this process will not be determined purely by domestic forces, but by transnational ones, too. The effectiveness of the EU's approach in the region will be determined to the extent that it successfully counters the interplay between internal and transnational dynamics at play. Only then will the fears of a ‘Balkan ghetto’ be dispersed.

We argue that globalization provides a missing link in an explanation of the troubled post-communist and post-conflict transition in the Balkans. Focusing on the impact of transnational networks as global actors that thrive in the permissive environment of weak states in the Balkans, the paper demonstrates that globalization is internal to the post-communist and post-conflict transition in the region. In sum, globalization is not just a context that moulds the unfolding transitions, but also a force that shapes them from within. Ultimately the paper argues that the Europeanization of the Balkans, which can be taken as a measure of success of the unfolding political and economic reforms, has been stalled because the transnational dimension of transition in the region has been underestimated in the European Union's approach to the Balkans.

In this paper we approach the transition literature as a dominant paradigm informing the EU's approach to the Balkans, and examine it with particular interest in terms of its application to the Balkan case. While agreeing with the scholars who identify ‘stateness’ and the international dimension as areas calling for further elaboration in the post-communist democratization literature applied to the Balkans, we show that this literature is chiefly characterized by an elaboration and expansion of analysed dimensions rather than by a radical rethink of their manifestation and impact on transition. The paper then examines the Balkan transnational space and the role of transnational actors in the process of transition. Lastly, it shows that, in a global age, transnational networks can thwart political and economic reform processes and, accordingly, the transformation of a weak post-communist and post-conflict state into a strong state, which, in turn, perpetuates the issue of state cohesion.

Europeanization of the Balkans: Approaches to Post-communist Transition

With its legacy of communism and conflict, the European integration of the western Balkans has posed a unique policy challenge to the EU. Transition and stabilization have been set as two explicit aims for the region's European integration process. Consequently the EU has developed a strategic enlargement as well as a security concept for the Balkans, along with the corresponding instruments (Lehne, 2004). The cornerstone of this policy has been the Stabilization and Association process (SAp). As a policy instrument, the SAp has been tailored since 1999 to match the double challenge of post-communist and post-conflict transition in the Balkans. It has built on the accession approach applied to Central and Eastern Europe with a policy of enhanced conditionality and regional cooperation. Both these instruments have proved wanting.

What we call ‘enhanced conditionality’, spanning political, economic and ‘acquis’-related requirements of membership, as well as conditions emanating from peace agreements and political deals (Anastasakis & Bechev, 2003; Smith, 2003, pp. 113–114), has favoured states that have made the greatest progress in reform. This, in turn, has created a new line of division in the region between Balkan candidates and ‘potential candidates’. No policy follow-up was designed to fill the vacuum created by the success of the individual aspirants (Papadimitriou, 2001). Nor, as van Meurs points out, could tensions and asymmetries thus caused be compensated by regionality (van Meurs, 2000, p. 22; cf. Demetropoulou, 2002).

Indeed, from the start of the process, the European integration of the Western Balkans has been characterized by the ‘stability dilemma’, i.e. of those countries that suffer from the greatest stability deficits not qualifying for the EU's initiatives (Wittkowski 2000, p. 85). Calic went even further in a critique of the SAp (2003, p. 121). According to Calic, accession-oriented instruments are ill-suited to tackling the region's key problems of state building, conflict resolution and economic growth. In fact, the EU has tackled state building and conflict resolution in the western Balkans, but did so primarily through the evolving tools of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), such as its police and military missions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia. Scholars have seen the EU's twin approach to the western Balkans, embodied by the SAp and the ESDP mechanisms, as a demonstration of the EU's growing strength in projecting stability into the region (Vachudova, 2003, p. 157; Yusufi 2004). By contrast, we argue that it has introduced another level of separation of the EU's policy instruments, often interfering with the SAp—as Serbia and Montenegro's example illustrates powerfully. That country's European integration process has been hindered by tensions resulting from the application of the agreement on state union brokered by the EU as a part of the ESDP.

The vacuum created by the EU's approach to the Balkans has crucially benefited a particular group of transnational actors, which has posed a threat to security and has spoiled transition efforts, thus undermining the Europeanization of the Balkan states. The effectiveness of criminal networks thriving on the weakness of the Balkan states springs from the fact that they are “multi-ethnic, cross-border and integrated in Europe” (Anastasijevic, 2004). The EU approach, for all its nuances, has not been able to match the sources of strength of the spoilers of Europeanization. Arguably their biggest strength is the exploitation of the weakness of the state and the new borders in the region, including, importantly, those between successful EU candidates and aspirants. The EU's statebuilding agenda, to the extent that it can be formulated in the variety of instruments that have been used, is ill equipped to address this complex reality on the ground. The EU's regional approach has been piecemeal at best and, essentially, sub-contracted to the Stability Pact, while key initiatives with regional implications, such as local war crimes trials, remain confined within state borders. In addition, the EU's engagement in the western Balkans through the ESDP has had an ambiguous effect on advancing European integration precisely because it was not integral to the SAp.

The EU's policy approach has been framed by a conceptual approach to transition, in which, as we show, the role of transnational actors in the post-communist and post-war transition has not received adequate attention. The field of transitology has been informed by the study of transitions from authoritarianism. With its legacy of total state control over politics, economy and society dating from the communist period, the democratization of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union raised a question: can the existing scholarship on transition be applied to its post-communist variant?² This debate had not yet been resolved when a new challenge was thrown up: a striking divergence in the transitional experience of Central and Eastern Europe, on the one hand, and of the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, on the other, cried out for an explanation. Post-communism as a common denominator of all these states itself failed to provide an answer.

The following paragraphs provide a brief overview of approaches to post-communist transition to democracy in general, and to transition in the Balkans in particular. We argue that the troubled transition in the Balkans can be explained by analysing it in conjunction with globalization. Without an agreed definition of globalization (cf. Held & McGrew, 2000), for the purpose of our argument, two aspects of globalization—conceived of as a complex process unfolding in politics, economics and culture—are particularly relevant: interconnectedness and transnationalism.³ Interconnectedness is closely related to the erosion of the boundary between the domestic and the external aspect of politics in the global age, while intensification of transnational relations creates not only transnational spaces of politics but also transnational networks that permeate the domestic political arena (Beck, 2000; Kaldor, 2003; Giddens, 2002). Globalization, which has not been theorized in the transition literature, arguably has a decisive impact on transition in post-communist countries because transnational actors, and the relations they create, encroach on the domestic sphere and become innate to transition. Furthermore, a transnational perspective allows us to explain why a ‘stateness’ issue persists in the Balkan case. Linz and Stepan note that there is a ‘stateness’ problem “when there are profound differences about the territorial boundaries of the political community's state and profound differences as to who has the right to citizenship in that state” (1996, p. 16). Specifically we posit that state weakness needs to be theorized as a key issue in the transition in the Balkans and as an explanation for a persistent question of state legitimacy deriving from a nationalist challenge to the territorial framework of the state.

Very soon after the demise of communism, Offe (1991) summarized the complexity of the post-communist transformation succinctly, dubbing it a ‘triple transition’ that encompasses democratic and economic liberalization coinciding with a quest for the creation of new nation-states. Subsequently the literature has built around the approach focused on the mode of transition, the design of democratic institutions and the political elites and participation, and the approach emphasizing the impact of the communist legacy on shaping the political, economic and social transition in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.⁴ These approaches are distinguished by the thrust of their respective arguments rather than by a complete exclusion of competing explanations. Common to both has been an awareness of the interconnectedness of multidimensional processes of post-communist democratic consolidation, including the challenge posed by their simultaneity (Pridham, 2001). Nonetheless, three key themes have emerged from this literature: simultaneous democratization and marketization; ‘stateness’; and the international dimension.

Post-communist democratization literature on the Balkans built on the East and Central European literature in two directions. A comprehensive analysis of democratization in the Balkans, in an edited volume by Pridham and Gallagher, highlighted the impact of the historical legacy alongside the simultaneity of three types of transformation: political, economic and that linked to nation building (Pridham & Gallagher 2000). This dimension encompasses both the pre-communist and communist legacy. As the authors demonstrate, it affects the transition through various forms: political culture, civil society (and a lack of it), political leadership, prior democratic experience, etc. To capture diverse transitional paths in the Balkans, Pridham advocates an interactive approach with a “dynamic potential that is particularly attractive as it allows us to bring into play such determinants as the historical and how legacies from the past impact on the present as well as the interplay between top-down dictates and bottom-up pressure” (2000, p. 6; Cf. Vučetić, 2004).

The other line along which post-communist democratization literature has been adapted to account for the Balkan ‘anomaly’ problematizes the ‘stateness’ dimension (cf. Szabo, 1994; Sekelj, 2001). Kopecký and Mudde (2000) called for a better understanding of the distinct processes of state- and nation building and of the international dimension, encompassing both the context and the actors, and their role in post-communist democratization. Echoing Offe's approach, Kuzio (2001) proposed a ‘quadruple transition’, advocating a separate analysis of ‘stateness’, interpreted as state-institution building, and ‘nationness’, deemed civic nation building. Indeed, the stability of a state's political and territorial framework, whether theorized in terms of Linz and Stepan's ‘stateness’ or in terms of state-destroying ethnic nationalism (Parrott, 1997), is one of the key distinguishing features of post-communist democratization. Nevertheless, the unanswered question in the Balkan case is: why do the issues of ‘stateness’, national cohesion and state weakness persist? Are they related and how? Does multi-ethnicity a priori thwart the prospects of democratic consolidation (cf. Roeder, 1999)?

The focus on the pre-communist and communist legacy singles out a set of dimensions that prominently figure in Balkan democratization. Even though it was bumpy, Romania's and Bulgaria's road towards European integration provides a sobering view of the constraining impact of these legacies. However, it also brings to the fore the impact of war in the Balkans as a post-communist legacy on post-communist democratization. Arguably the wars in the 1990s shaped both the pre-communist and communist legacy in politics, economics and society in the Balkans. Enumerating war-related difficulties of tra...