State Building and International Intervention in Bosnia

Roberto Belloni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415449250
• eBook ISBN: 9781134059676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The presence of international missions in weak and failing states across the globe confirms that multi-lateral involvement has become a strategic imperative to secure international peace and security. With demands for democratic governance and peaceful coexistence in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, the questions and issues addressed in Bosnia take on greater urgency.

Focussing on Bosnia after the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) in 1995, this book examines the role of the international community in state building and intervention. It makes two arguments that challenge conventional, power-sharing approaches to conflict management based on group representation and elite collusion. First, the author explores the idea that effective intervention requires moving beyond the dichotomy between international imposition of state-building measures and local self-government. When compromise among the former warring parties proves impossible and domestic institutions cannot autonomously guarantee efficient policy-making, the presence of international staff in domestic institutions can guarantee further democratisation and local ownership of the peace process. Second, this book argues that the long-term transformation of conflict requires the active involvement and empowerment of domestic civil society groups. Instead of considering domestic society as a desolate blank slate, international intervention needs to build on local resources and assets, which are available even in the aftermath of a devastating war.

Based on extensive field research this book will be of interest to students, scholars and policy makers struggling to understand and improve upon the dynamics of international intervention, and to those with a specific interest in the Balkans.

1 Introduction

The Bosnian peace process has transformed a bloody conflict into a cold peace, creating the conditions for the attenuation of historical ethnic and national rivalries. Yet, political antagonism between Muslims (often identified with the religiously neutral term Bosniak), Serbs and Croats remains severe. Bosniaks continue to see the strengthening of the central Bosnian state as their main political goal. Many Serbs and Croats prefer wide local autonomies and the development of further ties with neighbouring Serbia and Croatia respectively. The 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) aimed to manage such tensions by preserving the territorial integrity of the state while endorsing the internal separation of the three main groups into two semi-independent entities: the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the Serb Republic (Republika Srpska—RS). It was a settlement designed to end three and a half years of the most brutal conflict on European soil since the end of World War II.

A massive international military and civilian presence was deployed to secure the peace. From early 1996, Bosnia has been the theatre of one of the most complex and large-scale peace operations ever undertaken. At the outset, the primary aim of international intervention was to avoid the outbreak of a new war. To this end, international agencies endorsed the need to separate the parties physically in ethnically homogeneous enclaves and limit the frequency of contact among them. They endorsed the view that Bosnians of different ethnic and national groups should be kept entirely separate and each group left to govern autonomously its own political, social and economic life. This minimalist goal soon proved unsustainable, forcing international agencies to get involved increasingly in Bosnian affairs to remove obstructive politicians, arrest indicted war criminals, defend individual human rights, support civil society and promote economic development and regional cooperation. These broader goals required an intrusive and assertive international presence. Since late 1997, international intervention gradually evolved from a strategy of providing assistance to the local parties to a de facto protectorate.

However, despite considerable international involvement and investment, the continuing divisions between the three main national communities still threaten the peace process. While armed confrontation is not a realistic possibility more than a decade since the end of the war, Bosnia’s three main communities are profoundly divided and consider their mutual relations in zero-sum terms. Each community has been developing its own particular national markers (i.e. language) and denies the interdependence that characterised most of recent Bosnian history. Part of the Bosniak leadership has been flirting with the Islamic revival stimulated by the war—despite their stated commitment to the preservation of a multinational state. Radical, Wahabist Islamists are also growing increasingly bold, worrying both secular Bosnians and adherents of traditional Balkan Islam (Hećimović 2006). Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats alike still take the following view: dominate or be dominated, impose one’s will or withdraw. Bosniaks’ willingness to develop the state-wide institutions further make both Serbs and Croats fear the possibility of being dominated via institutional means.

Despite the international commitment to building and strengthening a multi-ethnic polity, the three main communities remain physically seperate in most areas. The political process has produced only modest gains for the (comparatively) moderate representatives of the three communities. The Party of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) and the Party of Democratic Progress (PDP) in the RS have made important gains at several electoral exercises but did not succeed in marginalising extreme nationalists. At the October 2006 elections, the SNSD was able to affirm itself as the most important RS party—but only after its leadership campaigned on a nationalist agenda of separation from Bosnia’s common institutions in Sarajevo. In the Federation, a Coalition for Change, including several moderate Bosniak and Croat moderate parties, was able to win the elections and rule between 2000 and 2002, but quickly lost the confidence of the electorate because of an overall weak and indecisive performance in office. At the October 2006 elections, the moderate Party for Bosnia (SBiH) achieved an important electoral success, thanks primarily to a sharp increase in its nationalist rhetoric. The SNSD in the RS and the SBiH in the Federation are mirror images of each other—political parties that moved across the ideological spectrum to become perhaps as nationalist as those radical parties that waged the 1992–95 war.

The way in which the peace process has developed, with both advances and setbacks, has raised a number of debates. To begin with, international commentators wonder whether or not Bosnia can survive as a multinational state. Can Bosnia’s three main communities, deeply divided by profound mutual distrust, manage their differences peacefully and continue to live in the same geographical and political space? Or should political boundaries be re-drawn to create new nation-states, each with a clear ethnic majority? Whether the state should fit the people, or the people should fit the state, is a question that has divided liberals for a long time. While Lord Acton believed that the coexistence of several national groups in the same state is the best guarantee of its freedom, John Stuart Mill argued that a necessary condition for preserving and developing free institutions is that the boundaries of government should coincide with those of nationalities. Similarly to MilP’s view, some analysts, whom we can identify as ‘historical determinists’, argue that the internationally led enterprise of supporting a state with limited legitimacy among its citizens is doomed to fail. The longterm political future of Bosnia, they argue, lies in the inevitable creation of ethnically homogeneous nation-states (Hayden 1999; Stokes 2003; Kaufmann 1999; Waters 2004). Others have pointed out how the continuing uncertainties about Bosnia’s future are due not to the obvious fact that multi-national states are hard to preserve in the aftermath of a bloody conflict, but rather that the preservation of national diversity requires a more assertive international role (Caplan 2005; Cousens and Cater 2001; Donais 2005; Paris 2004).

Theoretical discussions on multi-ethnicity have led to a debate about which institutional arrangement can best accommodate the different needs of the three main Bosnian communities. Is consociationalism, a form of power-sharing widely adopted in conflict areas, the most appropriate institutional design to further the Bosnian peace process? The DPA is a prototypical consociational agreement, since it requires political elites to share power, in addition to prescribing proportionality in government and guaranteeing mutual veto rights and communal autonomy (Bieber 2006a; Bose 2006). Critics of consociationalism, however, question whether making ethnic differences integral to institutional design and relying on national elites’ willingness for cooperation is an appropriate long-term strategy (Belloni and Deane 2005; Roeder and Rotchild 2005). Critics have also argued that the implementation of consociational principles is responsible for at least some of the setbacks in the peace process, in particular continuing segregation among the different communities.

The next main debate, closely linked with the first one, concerns the role of international intervention in preserving multi-ethnicity, building viable and legitimate state institutions, and, more broadly, furthering and sustaining the peace process. How can international organisations best contribute to the implementation of the DPA and the deepening and strengthening of peace? How to ensure that local mechanisms are in place gradually to hand over governing responsibilities to local institutions? Again, slow progress has led some observers to criticise the work of international interveners. ‘Strong interventionists’ argue that the establishment of a full-blown international protectorate and the presence of an assertive international force to protect liberal and multi-ethnic values at an early stage of the peace process could have brought about important beneficial results (see Donais 2005 and various reports from the influential think-tank, International Crisis Group).

‘Autonomists’ have taken the opposite stand, highlighting how postDayton international interventionism achieved some success but at grave cost. International agencies often imposed decisions on recalcitrant local parties, overturned policies taken by democratically elected politicians; removed elected officials (including serving presidents and prime ministers) and generally undermined the domestic capacity to formulate and implement public policy. While it is undeniable that the work of international organisations served a useful purpose primarily in preventing a return of armed hostilities, ‘autonomists’ argue that Bosnia as a whole should be given full ownership and control over its own political destiny (Bose 2002; Chandler 1999; Ivanić 2005; Knaus and Martin 2003). The autonomist position is useful in terms of underscoring the limits of international intervention, but less so in identifying a workable alternative. Although the need for greater local autonomy and democracy has intuitive appeal, it is not a blueprint for what should replace international assertiveness. Rather, to the extent that a possibly premature departure of international organisations is likely to lead to the further entrenchment of nationally homogeneous statelets, the autonomists’ view is consistent with that of historical determinists, and might lead to the ethnic partition of the country.

Assessing the political future of Bosnia is inextricably intertwined with evaluating the progress made since the signing of the DPA in late 1995. As this book will show, despite persisting sectarianism, there have been major changes—many of them attributable to international intervention. More than a million displaced people were able to return home after the end of the war; many indicted war criminals have been arrested and tried; the state has grown considerably in both strength (the capacity to plan and execute policies and enforce decisions) and scope (the number of functions and goals taken on by the government); and Bosnia has begun the first steps towards membership in the European Union—an achievement that looks even more impressive when considered in the light of the situation of the country at the end of the war in 1995. Yet, many Bosnian citizens still see their state as alien and unrepresentative. Bosnia suffers from a ‘stateness problem’ (Linz and Stepan 1996: 16), whereby profound disagreements about the territorial boundaries of the political community and who has a right to citizenship remain. Tellingly, national symbols remain contested. Bosnia’s national anthem, for example, is purely instrumental, since the three main communities could not agree on the lyrics. Even in this watereddown form, only the Bosniaks find the anthem reflects their patriotic attachments. Ninety-three per cent of Serbs prefer the Serb national anthem Bože pravde (God of Justice) while 76 per cent of Croats fell that the Croat national anthem Lijepa naša domovino (My Beautiful Homeland) best captures their national identity.¹

Overall, the Bosnian experience raises important question about the ability of international intervention to transform weak and failing states into autonomous and self-governing political entities. How can international involvement influence local political and social processes in the direction of inter-ethnic cooperation and compromise? What, if any, long-term benefit does such involvement have? Is intervention prolonging the agony of those involved and delaying the inevitable demise of the Bosnian state? Or is it an indispensable component of a long-term democratisation process whose benefits need more time to become irreversible? What lessons can post-settlement international intervention in Bosnia teach to other cases of intervention in weak and failing states worldwide?

The arguments of this book

This book makes two main arguments, both of which address directly the debates briefly outlined above. The first major argument of this book involves the role of international agencies in sustaining and deepening the peace process. Post-Dayton international intervention has not been as successful as hoped for—at least in light of the high level of international political, economic and financial involvement. The criticism of international intervention put forward by historical determinists, strong interventionists and autonomists has at least some degree of justification. The compelling question is why intervention has been somewhat disappointing and how it could be restructured to meet the expectations and needs of other similar cases of multilateral intervention in weak and failing states.

Three main lessons can be drawn from more than a decade of experience in Bosnia. First, third parties’ multiple objectives complicated the overall effectiveness of international intervention. International agencies have been oscillating between accepting the social disorder which emerged from the war and promoting diversity, pluralism and coexistence. In practice, this range of objectives delayed and complicated the local adoption of democratic reforms. Second, despite the robust and assertive international presence, intervention had a bias towards maintaining the status quo. The focus of international actors has been to preserve stability as much as possible while neglecting the more important need for change. This focus led international actors to support the dysfunctional political structures that emerged from the war, while failing to buttress the development of alternative political and social projects in civil society. Third, the focus on stability went hand-in-hand with a preoccupation with achieving visible and concrete short-term results. International agencies often focused on topdown discrete projects leading to clear and measurable outputs which could be touted as a ‘success’ (such as organising elections), instead of long-term structural initiatives (such as reforming the political system to make elections more than an ethnic count). In the process, they dictated priorities and forms of implementation—imposing short-term deadlines, preventing the development of meaningful partnerships between international and local actors, and blaming Bosnians for delays and setbacks.

The limits of international intervention in Bosnia point to the second main argument of this book. It is the vision and strategic commitment of international interveners that improve the chances that intervention will have a deeper and more lasting impact—not the mere amount of economic and financial resources involved. Such a vision and strategic commitment must include the careful consideration of at least two aspects. First, international agencies need to give far greater attention to the impact and sustainability of their actions—particularly on local institutional development. In the name of ensuring short-term efficiency, international agencies have often intervened to remove obstacles to peace implementation, thus creating a domestic culture of dependency and delaying the development of local political and institutional responsibilities. Although there is no easy solution to the dilemma between efficiency and domestic capacity building, between international assertiveness and the need for local autonomy and democracy, some version of ‘shared sovereignty’ (Krasner 2004) between international and domestic actors is the best option available. When domestic institutions cannot autonomously guarantee efficient policymaking, they can benefit from the presence of international staff guaranteeing professional standards and technical support. Shared sovereignty institutions are the alternative to both neo-colonial interventions relying on extensive international executive and legislative powers, and to naive calls for domestic autonomy.

Second, in addition to developing viable domestic institutions with international support, international intervention should encourage grassroots or bottom-up peace building initiatives aimed at re-establishing economic and social ties across different communities. As the experience of Bosnia confirms, physical separation in a context of massive human displacement caused by the war is only a temporary solution. Shifts in international policy following the signing of the DPA confirm that the separation of individuals into ethnic enclaves complicates the furtherance of peace. The first two years of post-DPA transition, when Bosnians displaced by the war could not repossess their properties and return to their homes, were particularly difficult and unstable. The precariousness of the situation led international agencies to increase their commitment to reserving at least in part wartime ethnic cleansing, and to re-creating a degree of ethnic inter-mixing. The very fact that, over time, international agencies were drawn deeper into local politics in order to remove obstacles to the implementation of the DPA indicates the non-sustainability of division as a solution to ethnic conflict and the need to move towards a more integrative model of intervention. Rather than providing the solution to conflict, ethnic segregation and partition risk perpetuating the problem.

In practice, the experience of Bosnia demonstrates that the preservation and strengthening of multi-ethnic and multi-national states requires a careful balance between group and individual rights. It is often noted that consociationalism guarantees group rights and a considerable number of self-governing prerogatives, but at the cost of immobility and inflexibility (see for example Reilly 2001). Less appreciated is the extent to which group rights and self-government over ethnically defined territories have other, negative far-reaching consequences. They entrench the power of those nationalist elites responsible for war and complicate the emergence of moderate political alternatives; they undercut the exercise of individual rights, particularly the right of ethnic minorities to return home after war; and they create considerable hurdles in undermining zero-sum notions of identity and establishing civic notions of citizenship (Bell 2000; Wippman 1998). Individual human rights, on the contrary, are an important means for challenging the ethno-national divisions that emerged from the war—in so far as they can provide an avenue for reforming the social disorder created by years of conflict. As Chapter 6 will show, the return of refugees and displaced persons to areas under the control of another ethnic group has often contributed to the marginalisation of extreme ethno-nationalists and the softening of tensions between different communities.

The analysis of international intervention in Bosnia generates broader hypotheses as to how international intervention in weak and failing states could be made more effective, as well as what lessons Bosnia can offer for other similar operations worldwide. While there is no single set of answers applicable to all cases, a few general principles can be identified. First, no long-term political solution to conflict can emerge from local ethnonationalists (Kaldor 1999). As the case of Bosnia demonstrates, their proposed ‘solutions’ perpetuate the problem, and delay the implementation of local conflict-regulating practices. To the extent that international agencies accept domestic nationalist claims at face value, they ratify the status quo and prevent the development of those political alternatives international interveners attempt to strengthen. An alternative approach should attempt to transform the conflict by challenging ethno-nationalism and by promoting participatory democracy and individual human rights. Second, successful intervention needs more than the implementation of a set of discrete projects, which are typically implemented independently of each other. The ability to move from a short-term perspective to a long-term structural approach can make the difference between success and failure. Third, the long-term transformation of conflict requires the strengthening of local institutions, together with the active involvement and empowerment of domestic civil society groups. Instead of considering domestic society as a desolate blank slate, international agencies need to build on local resources and assets, which are available even in the aftermath of a devastating war. The involvement of civil society is not only a prerequisite for conflict transformation but also a strategy for avoiding the transformation of international intervention into an instance of Western neo-colonial control strategy of troubled frontier zones (Duffield 2001).

The problems posed by weak and failing states since the end of the Cold War have become the single most compelling issue on the international agenda. These states often abuse their own citizens, cause humanitarian disasters with cross-border repercussions (ranging from massive refugee flights to destabilising criminal activities) and even pursue aggressive foreign policies. The events of 11 September 2001 highlighted how weak and failing states can also be hijacked by terrorist networks and used to launch devastating attacks well beyond their immediate neighbourhoods. In sum, learning how to promote effective and legitimate governance in weak and failing states, improve their democratic legitimacy and strengthen their institutions has become one of the main projects of contemporary international politics. With increasing demands for democratic governance and peaceful coexistence in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, the questions and issues addressed in Bosnia take on greater urgency (Nazi and Rutzen 2003). The presence of international missions in war-torn areas across the globe confirms that multilateral involvement has become a strategic imperative to secure international peace and security, and is possibly an effective tool available in the fight against terrorism. Significantly, in late 2005 the United Nations (UN) approved the creation of a new Peacebuilding Commission with the task of facing these new global challenges. More than a decade of experience in Bosnia can provide important lesson...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Bosnia and international intervention
• 3 Democracy from scratch
• 4 Elections and electoral engineering
• 5 The limits and virtues of civil society
• 6 The antinomies of refugee return
• 7 From NATO to the EU
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography