Civil Society and Transitions in the Western Balkans

V. Bojicic-Dzelilovic, J. Ker-Lindsay, D. Kostovicova, V. Bojicic-Dzelilovic, J. Ker-Lindsay, D. Kostovicova

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780230292895
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137296252
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the ambiguous role played by civil society in the processes of state-building, democratization and post-conflict reconstruction in the Western Balkans challenging the assumption that civil society is always a force for good by analysing civil society actors and their effects in post-communist and post-conflict transition.

Part I

State-Building

1

The European Commission, Enlargement Policy and Civil Society in the Western Balkans

John O’Brennan

The European Union’s enlargement policy is universally recognised as contributing decisively to the transformation of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in the two decades following the end of Communism. With the historic enlargements of 2004 and 2007 the EU extended its borders to the east and to the southeast. As a result, the EU is now a neighbour of the Western Balkans. Utilising the different templates employed in the design of the successful eastern enlargement policy, the EU is now engaged in a similar process of negotiations with the Western Balkan states. This is intended to lead to membership and full incorporation in the institutional and policy regimes of the EU.¹ However, this process has developed along a separate and very different trajectory to CEE. As CEE drew closer to the EU, the Western Balkan region was inflamed by a series of conflicts that splintered the old federal state of Yugoslavia. Since the Dayton Agreement in 1995, EU engagement with the region has been fashioned, if fitfully and unevenly, through a familiar mix of political, economic and institutional instruments. Gradually the EU has become the most important point of reference for the countries of the region as they recover from the conflicts of the 1990s and seek to integrate into the EU. Indeed, just as the countries of CEE sought to ‘return to Europe’ in the 1990s, the EU’s gravitational pull has been the most important factor in the reconstitution of economic, political and civic life in the Western Balkan region over the past decade.

This chapter examines the relationship between the European Commission, the EU’s principal actor within the enlargement process, and civil society in the Western Balkans. It aims to understand how the Commission engages with civil society, and what, if any, role civil society has played within the unfolding Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP) and EU enlargement. The Commission’s engagement with civil society stems from an understanding that the enlargement process, although principally an elite-driven process, derives at least some measure of legitimacy from the input of non-state actors and groups which are closer to the citizens of prospective member states. Civil society support has been part of the EU accession framework since the mid-1990s and has developed in quite specific ways as a result of different but quite purposeful types of engagement on the part of both EU and other external actors. The Commission’s approach to enlargement and SAP is highlighted as the most important element of the EU’s ‘Europeanisation’ strategy for enlargement candidate states, which has seen an effort to ‘modernise’, ‘democratise’, ‘pluralise’ and transform the most fragile part of Europe and progressively connect it to the mainstream landscape of EU politics. The chapter argues, however, that the Commission’s approach to the Western Balkans, consistent with that employed during eastern enlargement and the ‘output’ legitimacy model of EU governance, has ultimately been a top-down one, with a preference for engagement with state actors and hierarchical rather than horizontal modes of communication and decision-making. Although civil society has featured strongly in Commission rhetoric about the ‘transformative potential’ of an EU-oriented Western Balkans, EU policy has in fact helped to neutralise any meaningful contribution by civil society actors as a substantive partner in governance. And although the Commission has at least broadened out the circle of participation in enlargement/SAP to include civil society as a stakeholder, the Commission’s engagement with the Western Balkans has been accession driven rather than community centred. This means that civil society has continued to play a subordinate part in transforming landscape within the region.

Civil society and European integration

Although the EU is often identified as an elitist structure of power, scholarship has increasingly focused on transnational advocacy networks centred on the EU, and both the horizontal and vertical interactions provoked by civil society activity. The concept of civil society entered the debate on EU governance comparatively late and largely as a result of the EU’s extended legitimacy crisis from the early 1990s on.² The EU here is understood as a transnational and multilevel political opportunity structure (POS), which acts to structure patterns of civil society mobilisation and access to decision-makers.³ One of the most sophisticated recent contributions to the literature comes from Beate Kohler Koch⁴ who analyses the multiple functions performed by civil society organisations (CSOs) across the European Union. In particular she identifies a ‘performative function’ centred on the formation and reformation of civil society ‘through discourse and interaction in the public sphere’. Accompanying this there is a ‘representative function’, which involves ‘making civil society visible and giving societal interests a voice’. Here CSOs are understood as mediators between the local and the supranational centre in Brussels, echoing local points of view and policy concerns, bringing a diversity of views to the policymaking table, and thus contributing both to input and output legitimacy. Civil society actors face considerable constraints, however, when seeking to influence EU policy. They are constrained by the significant level of resources required to cultivate relations, prepare policy submissions and attend meetings. Although the European Commission has consistently held to a pluralist understanding of civil society, which includes all voluntary and non-profit organisations that give voice to the concerns of citizens in addition to market-related actors, the evidence from the integration process suggests that this pluralism is a highly qualified and narrowly interpreted one. Research indicates that there is a significant gap between the official EU discourse about its relationship with civil society and its actual practice of consulting citizens and their representatives. Civil dialogue, for example, has seen a tendency on the part of the Commission to avoid interaction with civil society on controversial issues.⁵

The Commission’s preference for working with and through elites within civil society organisations has been well documented. Thus EU NGOs, despite achieving visibility and prominence in carrying out their performative and representative functions, have also been categorised as lacking the critical distance required to mobilise for a radical shift in EU policy and of participating in consensus-oriented consultation processes devoid of substantive opportunities for deliberation. EU social NGOs in particular have been characterised as elite focused with weak links to grass-root constituents. Scholars have also demonstrated that EU funding and project support to NGOs has often proved both conditional and highly selective.⁶ For sceptics of civil society efficacy, this provides evidence of civil society co-optation and an inability to maintain independence from EU policy imperatives. Eriksen and Magnette, for example, both point to the insufficiency of output legitimacy within EU structures and highlight the need for substantive societal autonomy from EU decision-making authorities.⁷ This implies the need for more genuinely authentic forms of participation than those encouraged by the Commission and a move towards governance ‘by the people’.⁸ Cullen⁹ also argues that many Commission officials remain sceptical of NGO claims to represent the public interest and rather view them as primarily lobbyists representing narrow constituencies and as sources of expert or technical information which can be fed into the policy process and – in output terms – as ‘vehicles’ to sell EU policy to its citizens. Broader research also supports this interpretation of the Commission viewing civil society as one of ‘Communicating Europe’. For Eriksen this is problematic because the democratic division of labour between the state and civil society is endangered when voluntary associations are used as mere instruments of EU policy implementation. In this view, the Commission’s approach does not involve stakeholders in any meaningful or robust way. Rather, civil society is conceived as ‘occasional consultations and cheerleaders for European integration’, or service providers as Armstrong¹⁰ put it. NGOs and civil actors become vehicles for pronouncements on the positive projects being overseen by Brussels. Thus the Commission’s approach to civil society has been at the same time open and pluralist and yet deliberately constructed as limited and utilitarian. This is not to argue that civil society has proved incapable of exerting pressure for policy change within the integration process. Rather the environment in which it operates is one which overwhelmingly favours the structural preferences of ‘insider’ institutional actors like the Commission.

The nature of the EU’s political influence is now widely discussed. It constitutes a given in the analysis of EU external relations, even if the claims made for the nature and reach of that influence are contested. Scholars have focused on the EU’s ‘soft power’, ‘civilian power’ and ‘power of attraction’ in arguing for the impact of the normative content of EU policy and politics.¹¹ This, it is argued, is especially evident within the enlargement process where the asymmetric nature of the regime provides ample opportunity for ‘social learning’ and ‘socialisation’, or the effectiveness of EU ‘rule transfer’ through conditionality norms and practices. For our purposes the important element of this is how, and under what circumstances, membership political conditionality demands convert into Europeanisation of domestic political structures and arrangements in candidate states. Within that context, how does conditionality and Europeanisation impact on civil society and what role does the European Commission play in encouraging a substantive civil society contribution to enlargement politics and policies?

The Commission and enlargement

The EU’s effort to successfully enlarge to the Western Balkans involves a complex division of labour (internally) among the EU institutions. Although the Commission plays a central bureaucratic role in the enlargement process this is balanced by the (territorial) input of both the Council and the (representative) functions of the European Parliament. The Commission’s influence within enlargement politics stems principally from two sources. The first is its formal power to initiate policy proposals, which helps it to set and shape the enlargement policy agenda. Although, as in the general integration framework, it seeks to anticipate, incorporate and adjust for the specific concerns of member states, and increasingly the European Parliament, it has often found itself to be, almost by default, the sole policy entrepreneur and thus the best-placed EU actor within the enlargement process. It is important to understand that much of the Commission’s power within the contemporary enlargement process evolved out of the early (uncertain) response by the EU to events in CEE in the early 1990s.

The extraordinary challenge that confronted the European Commission when it took on the task of managing EU relations with the new democracies of CEE was quite unlike anything the Commission had previously faced in EU enlargement history. Although at many levels the Commission acted in conformity with Article 49 of the treaties – and thus as a classic bureaucratic agent of the member states of the EU – it seems clear that the Commission also managed to carve out for itself a very significant independent role within the eastern enlargement. In the first place it is responsible for most of the important formal policy proposals that shape the deepening of relations with candidate and prospective candidate states. The Commission is both able and willing to act as an agenda setter and so frame the parameters of EU policy towards the Western Balkan states. And although more often than not its choice is to operate through coalitions within the Council, it also frequently drives the EU agenda on key parts of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction: Civil Society and Multiple Transitions – Meanings, Actors and Effects
• Part I State-Building
• Part II Democratisation
• Part III Post-Conflict Reconstruction
• Conclusion
• Index