1.1 Introduction
In the summer of 2017, when I was in Sarajevo to participate in a seminar on Bosnian politics, a Bosnian friend told me a joke which went roughly like this:
A man is grazing his sheep when another individual shows up:
‘I know exactly how many sheep you have in your flock. Do you want to bet? If I win I’ll leave with one of your sheep’.The shepherd is puzzled by the question, but decides to go along.‘Ok, let’s see if you know the exact number’.‘Well, you have 132 sheep in your flock’.‘Wow, that’s quite impressive, you won!’ The man picks up a sheep and starts walking away, when the shepherd calls him back.‘Well, let’s do it again: I bet I can guess your job. If I win, you give me my sheep back’.‘Ok, go ahead’.‘You are an international official working for a peacebuilding organization’.‘That’s right! This is amazing! How could you guess?’‘You see, it was easy: you came to me uninvited, you told me something I knew already, and then you left with my dog’.
As with most jokes, this one is unfair. Since the 1990s thousands of international officials have worked in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and elsewhere in the region, contributing in very significant ways to processes of stabilization, reconstruction and peacebuilding. The overwhelming majority of these officials are extremely smart, hardworking, and committed individuals who have dedicated their time and energies to address often very complex problems in an extremely challenging environment. At the same time, while certainly one sided, this joke expresses a widespread sense of frustration among Bosnian citizens for the glaring gap between the promises of liberal peacebuilding activities undertaken since the mid-1990s and the realities of everyday life (Sheftel 2011). This book examines the peacebuilding evolution from the initial optimistic belief that international intervention in the Balkans would build liberal and democratic states modelled on their western European neighbours to the growing disappointment with external involvement in the region. Peacebuilding’s focus on formal institutions, political elites and externally driven policy frameworks has led to various levels of stability but at the cost of increasing citizens’ dissatisfaction.
Thus, mocking expresses the disappointment with the outcome of more than two decades of liberal peacebuilding. In Bosnia-Herzegovina a peace agreement, internationally brokered in 1995, was followed by the deployment of both international military and civilian forces. This large community engaged in a number of very familiar activities typical of liberal peacebuilding, including the organization of internationally monitored elections, the protection of human rights and of minorities, the promotion of gender equality, the restructuring of the economy along neo-liberal lines, the promotion of rule of law and security sector reform, and the containment and restraint of the use of force by parties to the conflict (Jarstad and Sisk 2008; Mac Ginty 2015). In addition to Bosnia-Herzegovina , at least some of these activities have been carried out in most states which emerged from the process of violent dissolution of Yugoslavia since the early 1990s, including Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM ), Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.
Peacebuilding in the Balkans began with so much promise, only to fall to cynical calculations about stability by international actors and widespread popular disappointment by local communities. Since the early 2010s a wave of protests putting forward social, economic and political demands have erupted throughout the region. In Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina , protests have denounced the political system, political elites, corruption , mismanagement, and deteriorating economic and social conditions. Similar instances of discontent, but with a different intensity, emerged in Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia. In some of these protests, Europe has been the direct target of public scorn and on a few occasions, the European Union (EU) flag has been burned. More commonly, protests have been directed against various governmental levels, which are seen locally as implementing the EU’s state-building and peacebuilding agenda.
These instances of discontent reflect the deteriorating economic, political and social conditions that the region has been experiencing at least since the outbreak of the global economic and financial crisis in 2008. A decade later, the economy continues to stagnate, while unemployment leads many young people to leave the region. Institutions are seen locally as either unrepresentative or corrupt—or both. The Transparency International Corruption Perception Index regularly ranks states in the region among the most corrupt in Europe. Patterns of semi-authoritarian political rule involving the exercise of power through party dominance and patron–client networks are ever more common (Bieber 2018). The process of Euro-Atlantic integration (i.e. EU and NATO membership) has not significantly changed the structural political and economic dynamics of the region (Mujanović 2018).
The EU’s foreign policy uncertainties, which ultimately are expressed in its inability to provide a reliable enlargement perspective to the Balkans, have facilitated the rise of Turkey, China, the Gulf states and, above all, Russia as realistic competitors for influence. Most notably, Moscow has been supporting the Bosnian Serbs’ challenge to the authority of the central state in Bosnia-Herzegovina ; it has engaged in a profound security and defence cooperation with Serbia—the only country in the region not seeking full NATO membership; and, according to the government in Podgorica, it even supported a failed coup in Montenegro in October 2016 aimed at disrupting the country’s accession to NATO.
Why has internationally led liberal peacebuilding failed to live up to expectations? There are several reasons for this, including liberalism’s narrow focus on political institutions, a complacent and paternalistic attitude by external interveners, the presence of domestic clientelistic structures preserving inequality and privilege, and the limited attention to the socio-economic needs of the population. These limited results of liberal peacebuilding in the Balkans are similar to disappointing peacebuilding outcomes elsewhere in the world, and have given rise to extensive critiques. A ‘problem-solving’ approach has sought to improve the efficiency of peacebuilding activities. Accordingly, a large number of ‘lessons learned’ exercises aim at ‘fixing failed states’, in particular by attempting to identify the timeliness and the correct sequencing of liberalization policies (Grimm and Mathis 2015; Paris 2004; Langer and Brown 2016). A ‘critical theory ’, or paradigm-shifting approach, has criticized the ideological foundations of liberal peacebuilding, arguing that intervention in conflict areas is dominated by western neo-colonial interests that reproduce the sources of conflict intrinsic to the existing, and unequal, international economic order (Duffield 2007; Pugh 2005; Richmond 2014). While this critique shed light on the structural inequalities of liberal peacebuilding and its prioritization of western interests and agency, it has been rebutted by ‘problem-solvers’ for not identifying viable policy alternatives (Paris 2010; for a reply, see, Cooper et al. 2011).
This chapter discusses both the rise of liberal peacebuilding to the centre of international policy concerns since the early 1990s and how the Balkans became a target for liberal interventionism. Liberal peacebuilding in the region went through several phases, from an initial optimistic belief that liberal institutions and norms could be spread everywhere, to a gloomy assessment about the possibility of influencing the deeper political, economic and social structures of Balkan states . What follows does not aim to provide a full account of the rise of peacebuilding and the related debates and counter-debates on the liberal peace. Rather, it shows how peacebuilding, while progressively losing its transformative edge, has become a powerful discourse institutionalized in the activities of international organizations, states and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (Jabri 2013), and has emerged as the conceptual reference point for international actors intervening in the region.
1.2 The Rise of Liberal Peacebuilding
The end of the Cold War led to a widespread optimism among western political elites about the possibility of exporting liberal values and institutions to states emerging from decades of socialist rule. In the transition from totalitarianism to democracy, several of these states became engulfed in vicious wars with often significant international dimensions threating the stability and prosperity of neighbouring states, such as migration flows, illegal trade, human trafficking and the like. Thus, the post-Cold War world order was still menaced by nonliberal actors, institutions and practices, which required an active and purposeful effort to achieve the universal realization of liberal norms and principles. No longer was the main obstacle to the realization of these norms and principles the alternative model of society advanced by the Soviet Union but so-called ‘weak and failing states’ (Woodward 2017).
In his 1992 Agenda for Peace, then UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali provided the normative justification for intervention in this type of state: ‘the time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty… has passed; its theory was never matched by reality’ (Boutros-Ghali 1992: para. 17). Accordingly, the UN (as well as other actors subscribing to the liberal template, including security organizations, international financial institutions and NGOs) claimed it could legitimately intervene in the domestic affairs of formally sovereign states in order to support post-war transitions and the development and strengthening of democratic institutions. The assumption that democracy offers a non-violent way of managing domestic conflict through rule-based political competition (Bobbio 1990) made the development of democratic ins...