Sara Elizabeth Williams

This is part two in a series of two. Part one is entitled Bosnia: why we just can’t learn.

There is no one act of rebuilding after conflict, just as there is no linear path. In Bosnia’s case in particular, beyond the personal experiences of conflict and reconciliation, there are national and international political issues to be reckoned with. 

What path out of conflict?

One thing this talk emphasised — something I feel should be emphasised more around the subject of life post-conflict — is that rebuilding and reconciling are processes, not events. What’s more, these processes are unique to the conflicts they serve to resolve — or, depending on your view, absolve. 

For Pervanic, the admission of involvement is critical: people need to tell their stories without fear of being attacked of judged. They need to say, ‘yes, we did this’ in order for all parties to come to an agreement of what happened, and then move on. To me, there is something very personal about this take on reconciliation.

For Ashdown, the focus is less on personal experience and more on the mechanisms of societal transition. Education — “the thing we fought the war for” — is a force of change, but it’s a slow process hampered by the beliefs and nomenclature children absorb everywhere outside of the classroom. The creation and maintenance of multi-ethnic spaces is also a huge part of this process.

And this is a fundamental difference between the two viewpoints. Ashdown, perhaps because his involvement was less personal and because he isn’t still penalised for his nationality, as Pervanic maintains he is (Bosnians face restricted travel in Europe), is willing to let things take a little longer, whereas Pervanic — again, likely due to his own very immediate involvement — isn’t willing to wait and hope and see. His stance is that education and other grassroots efforts are not enough — that change must come from leadership.

National problems…

Ashdown kept coming back to the theme of ethnic separation as a causative agent in conflict like that experienced in Bosnia. Mono-ethnic spaces can too quickly become rational vacuums: 

“Some madman starts putting together hunting parties in the forest and it turns into a nationalist movement…. [it is a] flimsy veil that separates us from brutality.”

Ashdown — a man on whom I must admit to having a massive intellectual crush — quoted from a poem on diversity as a sort of creed for our time, that we must always resist the urge to create mono-ethnic spaces. So far, so applicable to so many national and international conflicts. 

But there is a horrific hangover to the region’s disastrous experience with ethnic segregation and conflict: ethnicity still matters, too much. Pervanic spoke of his frustration as a Bosnian voter: 

“I have to vote for a Muslim, for a Serb, for  a Croat — I don’t want to do that.”

What Pervanic wants is to vote for the person or the policy, but it’s all stained by ethnicity. Is this a phase in the region’s recovery, something people will evolve past as successive generations grow up together, out from under the nationalist beliefs that that led into the fire in the first place? Or is it evidence that Bosnia is stuck and needs help from an outside agency to extricate itself from the legacy of its past?

International solutions?

If insider/outsider status (or, perhaps, personal/professional involvement, although I mean in no way to imply Ashdown didn’t feel personally, emotionally involved) informs expectations of how long reconciliation and rebuilding should take and what those processes should look like, so too does it inform one’s attitude to international involvement in Bosnia’s political reconstruction.

Pervanic’s contention is that change, for Bosnia, can only come from the outside — specifically, through admission into the EU.

Yet although Bosnia and the Balkans are part of Europe, geopolitically speaking, EU membership is unlikely to come any time soon. The Balkans are Europe’s unloved stepchild. In Ashdown’s words, 

“Bosnia is the black hole in the middle of the Balkans: we cannot leave it but we can’t move forward without it, either.”

Bosnia is a potential candidate state but has not yet submitted its bid for EU membership  whereas Serbia has: Bosnia simply doesn’t have the functioning low-level government to be admitted. 

Here, again, a difference: Pervanic insists that change will come after Bosnia is admitted into the EU. Such a move would involve a major policy breach, and Pervanic knows it — his case runs along the lines of ‘change the rules this once and take Bosnia in’. For a national of a state widely regarded as Europe’s orphan, the position is understandable… but for Ashdown, it’s untenable: 

“You can’t run politics on guilt.”

Brussells must realise they need to risk a short-term crisis if they are going to avoid a long one. They can’t bend the rules, even ‘just this once’. Ashdown readily admits that Europe dropped the ball, handing the critical role of creating a functioning state over to the half-formed Bosnian state, which both men agree remains unrealised. 

So who is to blame? As Ashdown points out, the Bosnian government consented to the international involvement that led to the treaty that is in place now. Did it have another choice? I don’t see one. Is the issue of informed consent [to govern] applicable here? More than likely. But the fact remains that Bosnia is where it is — outside the EU, self-governing in the absence of European-directed regional policies — and it cannot look to Europe to help it out. The money isn’t there, and I don’t think the will is, either. 

Bosnia is continuing its — slow, admirably self-propelled — progress towards EU readiness. But the EU has a role, too. It must be clear and consistent and set out the standards of functionality Bosnia must reach at the state level in order to be a viable candidate for member status. This, as Ashdown points out, means moving beyond Dayton, and that won’t be easy.

The days of the old ‘lower the bar until they get in’ approach are over. With a larger EU and a single currency — and a million other factors — the stakes are too high for the EU to be flexible with accession rules. This is the long game, not the usual approach for politicians or political instruments. It requires a willingness to risk short-term, national crisis in hopes of ensuring long-term, international stability. 

 A middle way? 

It struck me that the viewpoints put forward in this discussion, while mutually agreeable to some extent, kind of leave us in deadlock. Does leadership need to be pressured from outside to bring about constitutional changes? If not, must it wait for change from within? Or is there another way? Could we let this new generation of Bosnians into Europe and allow them to absorb thinking there and create change out of that? This came from an audience member who cited Nasa Stranka.

Or maybe, as suggested by another audience member who had lived in Bosnia for many years, we’re expecting too much, too soon. Maybe reconciliation and reconstruction are slower processes than we or Pervanic might like, each a journey of a thousand baby steps, none in a very straight line.

The Serbs and the Bosniaks in Srebenica are not cooperating, but they are cohabiting. Maybe that is enough for now. The software of war is in people’s heads, and it takes a long time to undo it. Ten or 15 years is unreasonable; we need to give it time. Taking this viewpoint, the next step is for the region to learn together, whether that takes a generation or more. Fully-functional statehood and EU accession may take much longer.

Still, if the peace deal holds, it will be well worth the wait.

Photo credit: PnP! via Flickr courtesy of a Creative Commons licence