harnessing serbian civilian capacity for peace support operations: a nascent community?

CONTENTS

The Past Is Not Yet Over: Remembrance, Justice and Security Community in the Western Balkans

The Western Balkans and the EU in Multilateral Organisations:Foreign Policy Coordination and Declaratory Alignment in the OSCE

Western Sahara: A Frozen Conflict

Communities of Security Practices in the Age of Uncertainty

Harnessing Serbian Civilian Capacity for Peace Support Operations: A Nascent Community?

Constructing Southeast Europe: The Politics of Balkan Regional Cooperation (Book Review)

JELENA SUBOTIC

FLORENT MARCIACQ

CAROLINA CHAVEZ FREGOSONIKOLA ZIVKOVIC

ALEXANDRA GHECIU

MARKO SAVKOVIC JOHN KARLSRUD

SELENA TORLAKOVIC UROS ZIVKOVIC

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Editors’ word

The Editorial Board has recently made a difficult decision to abandon open access approach due to increasing fund-raising challenges. From now on, JRS will be available either through CEEOL at www.ceeol.com (pay per article) or through an annual subscription. By introducing subscription fee, the Editorial Board aims to ensure survival of JRS but also to move its overall academic quality to the next level. Beginning in 2013, subscription fee for JRS will be 55 Euros per annum (print and electronic copy, postal costs included). Should you or your institutions be interested in receiving JRS in the future please contact us at jrs@fpn.bg.ac.rs. We sincerely hope that this decision is temporary and will be changed as soon as we succeed to secure financial means that will allow us to have an open access model without losing on the overall quality and publication dynamics.

This issue of JRS in most part resulted from academic sessions of the Belgrade Security Forum held in September 2012. The aim of the Forum was to bring academic and policy communities from the field of regional peace-building together in order to widen and deepen the knowledge and practice of security community building. In addition to studying how policy and academic security communities of practice overlap into constellations of practices, the Belgrade Security Forum aimed to build one such constellation. Articles in this issue cover various aspects of security practices, intersecting with different institutional and regional settings to illustrate the validity of this theoretical framework in analyzing international security phenomena.

In the opening article, Jelena Subotic argues there is a direct link between how states remember their respective pasts and the prospects for building of a security community in the Western Balkans. She specifically takes a look at the narratives of past violence and injustice committed during the wars of the 1990s. How the current state of affairs can be changed? Subotic maintains that “efforts to ‘clean up’ the past – through education reform and memorialization projects” are essential in pursuing “regional stability based on sustainable security community”. Following is the article by Florent Marciacq, which discusses multilateral diplomacy of the Western Balkan countries in the OSCE and its Europeanisation by looking at a “declaratory alignment of six Western Balkan states”. Author finds out that the declaratory behavior of those states in the OSCE mostly converges with EU positions, and accordingly offers three explanations: socialization of the Western Balkan countries, emulation of middle-sized states, while noting the role of coercion and persuasion is lesser than initially expected. The article written by Carolina Chavez Fregoso and Nikola Zivkovic deals with the case of Western Sahara as a frozen conflict. Authors underline how important it is to categorize the conflict as frozen for that bears on the possibility of its transformation and subsequent betterment of the security in the region of North Africa. Next up is the article by Alexandra Gheciu who discusses the emergence of a community of practices in the domain of peacebuilding and explores how security practices bring together NATO and the humanitarian community. Despite some initial success in establishing cooperation, the deeper process of building a community of

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practice “remains challenging and fraught with tension”. She argues that efforts to construct the community of practice contribute to debates among the very actors in the process regarding their identities and possible actions in the future. This issue’s article section is closing by the piece co-authored by Marko Savkovic and John Karlsrud on the emergence of a civilian capacity community in Serbia dealing with peace support operations. The two authors demonstrate that Serbia, given its experience in Security Sector Reform, can share a relevant experience with multilateral organizations such as UN, OSCE and EU in supporting countries that have emerged from conflict. Last but not least, Uros Zivkovic and Selena Torlakovic review the latest book by Dimitar Bechev Constructing Southeast Europe: The Politics of Balkan Regional Cooperation which represents a notable contribution to the understanding of a complex internal and external transformation of the region and its gradual evolution toward a security community after the warring 1990s.

For subsequent issues, editors of JRS are inviting prospective authors to submit papers dealing with regional security from sociology of professions point of view. We are specifically interested in how different professions such as diplomacy, military, police and intelligence contrubute to the construction of regions in general and to regional security dynamics in particular.

Editors Filip Ejdus

Marko KovačevićNikola Vujinović

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The Past Is Not Yet Over: Remembrance, Justice and Security Community

in the Western BalkansJELENA SUBOTIC*

Georgia State University, USA

Abstract: Twenty years since the onset of the wars of Yugoslav secession, the countries of the Western Balkans continue to nurture narratives of the past that are mutually exclusive, contradictory, and irreconcilable. In this essay, I argue that there is a direct link between ways in which different states remember their pasts and obstacles to the building of long-term regional security community in the region. I propose that remembrance of the past and historical justice for past wrongs shape choices policymakers make, by making some options seem unimaginable, while others inevitable. The power that narratives of past violence and injustice hold on policymakers is particularly significant as the region advances toward European integration. The efforts to “clean up” the past – through education reform and memorialization projects – should not be thought of as secondary initiatives, but as critically needed steps in pursuit of regional stability based on sustainable security community.1

Keywords: security community; remembrance; justice; Western Balkans

Introduction

On his very first day in office in June 2012, the newly elected Serbian president Tomislav Nikolić said that no genocide took place in Srebrenica, and that, in any case, genocide was “difficult to prove in court.”2In response, Bosnian Presidency Chairman Bakir Izetbegović responded that Nikolić’s statement was “untrue and offensive for Bosniacs, especially for the survivors of Srebrenica genocide.”3 But this was not Nikolić’s first entry into historical justice debates. Few months earlier, he declared that a “greater Serbia was [his] unrealized dream” and that “Vukovar was a Serbian town to which Croats should not return.”4 While he quickly backtracked, his original statement caused consternation in Croatia and was

1   Some of the material in this article appears, in a different form, in (Subotic 2012).2   B92, June 1, 2012.3   Ibid.4   Balkan Insight, May 28, 2012.

* jsubotic@gsu.edu

Original scientific paper Received: 05 September 2012 / Accepted: 29 November 2012

UDK: 327.56::351.88(497-15) ; 316.75(497-15) / DOI: 10.11643/issn.2217-995X122SPS24

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the subject of much debate on Croatian TV, including a firm response from Croatian president Ivo Josipović.5

The past in the Western Balkans, therefore, is not yet over. In fact, to paraphrase Faulkner, it is not even the past. Twenty years since the start of the Yugoslav wars, the countries of the region are stuck in public narratives of the past that are mutually exclusive, contradictory, and irreconcilable. Remembrance of the past and historical justice for past wrongs shape choices policymakers make, by making some options unimaginable, while others inevitable. This is why efforts to “clean up” the past – through education reform, memorialization projects, and commissions of inquiry – should not be secondary initiatives, but critically needed steps in pursuit of regional security based on trust, respect, and dignity.

Security Communities in International Politics

The concept of a “security community” in international relations goes back to Karl Deutsch, who defined it as a group with a sense of community and institutions and practices that guarantee peace among its members.6 Deutsch’s concept was resurrected by Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett who looked at ways in which states form security alliances based on shared understanding of norms, values, and trust, and not only calculations of strategic interest.7

Central to the concept of security community is the community feeling, which exists among members who share identities, values, and meanings, have multiple mutual relationships, and exhibit a sense of obligation and responsibility toward one another. The principal variables of the social construction of security communities, therefore, are intersubjective, collective representations that members are willing to share about themselves. Being a member of the community is determined not only by the state’s international identity, but also by its domestic behaviors and practices.

Out of this research program, further theoretical specifications arose that explain what, exactly, is needed for states to create a security community. Thomas Risse suggested a tripartite model: shared collective identity; stable interdependent interstate interactions; and strong institutionalizations of relations between states.8 This “thick” security community position makes a strong causal claim that state integration leads to the feeling of community, which in turn, leads to security.9

5   Ibid.6   Deutsch 1957.7  Adler and Barnett 1998.8   Risse 2004.9   Emmerson 2005.

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To defend itself from realist charges of idealism, security community scholars further specified that what makes a security community is not the absence of any conflict among its members, but instead the resolution of such conflicts through peaceful means.10 In other words, security community can be said to exist when diplomacy – not violence – becomes the obvious choice of leaders in solving disputes. This is why recent research in the security community framework has relaxed the assumption of collective identity as necessary for security, and allowed for states that do not share the “we-feeling” to still build trust that would make violence unfathomable.11 This “practice” turn in the study of security communities is welcome and more empirically grounded. In what follows, I contribute to this scholarship by expanding the repertoire of state practices that are necessary for the development of a sustainable security community, by focusing on state remembrance of past violence.

Remembrance, Justice, and Security Community

An important insight from the security community framework is that state identities are formed in relationship to other states, and that they depend on state interaction with others in the international system. It is the quality and depth of these interactions that is important, therefore, not only its frequency. This is significant because it indicates that security communities are not “found” or identified as such – they are actively created through social learning, socialization, persuasion, and institutionalization of intersubjective norms.

Adler and Barnett have already suggested that one way of researching shared identities is by looking at state narratives. These stories states tell about their pasts have multiple implications for their contemporary policies.12 We know that particular remembrance of past conflicts can cause misperceptions and increase threat perceptions between states. Denials about past atrocities create fear and distrust among former enemies. States that deny past violence appear hostile and threatening; those that admit past wrongdoing and apologize appear benevolent.13 Collective memories of past trauma can help explain causes of conflict, as well as its intractability.14 A particularly sinister interpretation of past events matters when popular historical beliefs are distorted in ways that glorify one’s nation at the expense of others, a practice that can lead to perverse understanding of national interests and open the domestic discursive space to justify conflict.15 Further, states over time develop particular “national security cultures,” which are partly constructed by

10   Pouliot 2006.11   Pouliot 2007.12   He 2009, Langenbacher and Shain 2010, Müller 2002, Zarakol 2010.13   Lind 2008.14   Long and Brecke 2003, Wittes 2005.15   Mendeloff 2008.

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national mythmaking about shared pasts and historical enemies.16 Political actors then use collective remembrance of state’s past to justify going to war to skeptical or ambivalent domestic publics, and can lead states into further violence.17

In such discursive environments, it is exceedingly difficult to build sustainable peace after a history of extreme violence between former enemies. Mistrust, doubt, and threat perception are high, intensity of inter-state communication low, the “we-feeling” nonexistent. Where the traditional security perspective would focus on changing threat perceptions and maximizing incentives for peace (including, for example, renewed emphasis on inter-state trade and other kinds of material benefits), the security community framework would stress narrative changes, communicative and rhetorical persuasion, and discursive community reconstruction.

While my arguments rests on the premise that some form of shared identity and intersubjective understanding is necessary for the creation of a security community, this does not mean that states and nations have to think of themselves as the same or interchangeable, or to completely subsume their identities onto one another. What is important for the building of a security community, however, is a commitment to manage disagreements peacefully, and to become communities of practice where hostility, mistrust, and intolerance cease to be legitimate forms of interstate behavior.

A particularly important element of community building is dealing with the mutually exclusive social needs for justice for past wrongs. Far from being only an administrative afterthought, systematic addressing of justice claims is essential for the construction of intersubjective understanding, the basis of a sustainable security community. Postconflict communities will not overcome distrust and feeling of insecurity until there is a mutually compatible, understood, and respected process of justice (acknowledgment of past wrongs, punishment of perpetrators, apologies of states, and restitution for victims). Justice is important for a state’s ontological security, for its sense of self, for its self-esteem. It is important for other states to recognize the “perpetrator” state has made amends, has expressed regret, has punished those responsible. Justice, therefore, is not an element of security; it is its foundational bloc. In the next section, I evaluate recent efforts at state remembrance of the past in the Western Balkans as preconditions for the construction of a sustainable security community in the region.

Remembering the Past in the Western Balkans

There are few better ways to reconstruct state remembrance of its past than analyzing history textbooks. History textbooks embody “lowest common denominator” history, a

16   Katzenstein 1996, Welch 2002, Berger 1998.17   Van Evera 1994, Krebs and Lobasz 2007.

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version of popular history and public memory that appeals to the broad national audience.18 History textbooks are important barometers of public remembrance because they are explicitly designed to inculcate particular views of the past into future generations.19

The problem with history education in the Western Balkans, however, is that region’s histories are multiple, contradictory, and mutually exclusive. Far from being a tool for social cohesion and security community building, they continue to be instruments of political othering, alienation, ethnification, and community destruction.

Serbia

While the language is cleaned up and some of the outrageous hate speech and rhetoric from the 1990s textbooks eliminated, contemporary Serbian textbooks continue with the fundamental narrative about the country’s past. The Serbian nation is still represented as a victim of selfish separatists in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, the narrative that frames the understanding of Serbian war crimes: victims of atrocities cannot be perpetrators themselves. This is the remembrance of the past that helps explain Serbia’s continuing reluctance to deal with war crimes of the past in any meaningful way.

This state effort at keeping silence about Serbian criminal past has been largely successful. Surveys consistently show that the public mostly refuses to believe that Serbs had committed war crimes, and Serbs blame other nations and ethnic groups for starting the wars. In a recent survey, only 34 percent of the respondents correctly identified the victims of Srebrenica as Bosniacs, and only 10 percent acknowledged that Croats, not Serbs, were killed in a major massacre in Ovčara, Croatia in 1991.20

In terms of official recognition of crimes of the past, Serbia has made a few contradictory moves. In March 2010, the Parliament adopted the Declaration on Srebrenica, which, while acknowledging the massacre, remains a very problematic document. The word “genocide” never appears in the text, which is significant because the crime of all crimes is reduced to a nondescript “crime against population.” This rhetorical ploy is an example of “interpretive denial,” where crimes of the past are not denied as outright lies, but are interpreted in a manner that changes the past and gives past events a very different meaning.21

Further, the Declaration never mentions who was responsible for this atrocity, what was the role of the Serbian state, or how did the massacre come about. Instead, the Declaration

18   Mendeloff 2008.19   Witness, for example, the recent discussion of the impact on history textbooks in “shaping na-tional attitudes” in The Economist, October 13, 2012.20   Manojlović Pintar 2010, 97.21   Cohen 2001.

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apologizes “for the failure to prevent the tragedy.” This is quite a cynical interpretation of the role of the Serbian state in the massacre – as much evidence collected during ICTY trials (specifically ICTY vs. Radoslav Krstić and ICTY vs. Slobodan Milošević) demonstrated, the Serbian state was instrumental in arming Bosnian Serb troops, providing logistical support and approving the Bosnian Serb masterplan in Srebrenica. The Declaration, therefore, represents a missed opportunity for the Serbian government to make a clean break and deconstruct the hegemonic remembrance of Serbia’s past. Instead, it is another example of how entrenched is the view of Serbian role in the region, its behavior in the recent wars, and its expectations of exoneration from others.

Croatia

The central premise of Croatia’s history education is that, “Croats never fought aggressive, but only defensive wars.”22 This view organizes the historical interpretation of Croatia’s Homeland War of the 1990s, which is taught exclusively as the consequence of Serbian aggression and terrorism, without a broader context of Yugoslav succession. Most textbooks discuss at length Serbian crimes against Croatian civilians, but only one textbook even mentions that thousands of Serbs were forced to leave Croatia in 1995 in the aftermath of Operation Storm.23

Many of the books in circulation still use extreme nationalist language and concepts, not much reformed since the early 1990s. The fascist Independent State of Croatia is often glorified, crimes of the ustasha regime marginalized or avoided. In fact, during a public debate over modernizing Croatian history textbooks, the establishment historians offered this bold statement: “history textbooks must take into consideration not only scientific and pedagogic standards, but also national and state criteria.”24 It is hard to find more direct evidence of the role history education plays in nation building projects than this attitude of the Croatian intellectual elite.

The Croatian Parliament had also directly legislated the memory of the war in Croatia and passed laws on how this event is to be commemorated, understood, and interpreted. Members of Parliament floated various proposals for how to appropriately memorialize the war, which ranged from the Declaration on Fundamental Values of the Homeland War to criticisms of Croatian contemporary artists for “failing to create works of art worthy of this magnificent event.”25 The Parliament adopted the Declaration on the Homeland War in 2000, which requests from “all officials and official organs of the Republic of Croatia to protect the fundamental values and dignity of the Homeland War,”26 which effectively

22   Agičić and Najbar-Agičić 2007, 204.23   Ibid.24   Agičić 2011, 362.25   Koren 2011, 135.26   Croatian Parliament 2000.

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discouraged any discussion of Croatian war crimes. The Declaration quite explicitly states that Croatia “led a just and legitimate, defensive and liberating, and not aggressive nor occupying war against anyone.”27 In 2006, the Parliament adopted another declaration, this time specifically legislating the memory of Operation Storm. The Declaration on Operation Storm requests from “the Croatian Parliament, Croatian scientific community, Croatian institutions of science and education, as well as media, to over time turn Operation Storm into a battle that will become part of Croatia’s ‘useful past’ for its future generations.”28 This is quite a remarkable example of direct state construction of collective memory. The interpretation of the past, therefore, has been made official and is not subject to further contestation and reinterpretation.

The way in which the recent (and distant) past is remembered makes state narratives in Croatia and Serbia incompatible. Croatia remembers Operation Storm as the pinnacle of its fight for independence, an event that made the contemporary Croatian state possible. Serbia remembers Operation Storm as a site of Serbian defeat, and a site of ethnic cleansing of Serb civilians. For the Croatian narrative, this criminalization of Operation Storm is inconceivable, because it criminalizes the Croatian state itself. The November 2012 ICTY acquittal of Croatian generals Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač for alleged war crimes committed in the aftermath of Operation Storm has produced further entrenchment of mutually contradictory public narratives about the nature of the Croatian war and its larger historical meaning. The two narratives therefore continue to be stories of exclusion and separation; these are not stories that build a sense of community.

Bosnia

In Bosnia, history has developed an “ethnicity” of its own. Like everything else in postwar Bosnia, education represents ethnic politics of the majority population in a particular region. Attempts at centralizing education have largely failed, a consequence of the Dayton political architecture that locked ethnic politics in its place and made two major Bosnian political entities into quasi-states.29

This ethnification of education created the environment in which history narratives in Bosnia are not only incompatible to those in Serbia and Croatia, but the three versions of the Bosnian past (Serbian, Croatian, and Bosniac) are incompatible with one another. Bosnian students still use three very different sets of history textbooks: Historija for the Bosniac students printed in Sarajevo, Povijest for the Croatian students and imported from Croatia, Istorija for the Serbian students published in Belgrade, with an additional Supplement written specifically for the Republika Srpska entity.30 This absurd arrangement

27   Ibid.28   Croatian Parliament 2006.29   Perry forthcoming, McMahon and Western 2009.30   Torsti forthcoming.

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results in the fact that only the “Bosniac” textbook reflects the history of Bosnia in any systematic way, while the Croatian and Serbian versions refer to Croatia and Serbia, respectively, as ethnic “homelands” and mostly build on Croatian and Serbian state narratives, different from, and mostly opposed to, the narrative of the unitary Bosnian state.

The way in which history is presented, interpreted, and understood in Bosnia then clearly led to further ethnic division and politicization of the past. Bosnian political straightjacket influenced history education, but history education also further perpetuated the political status quo – the persistence of ethnic difference, the weak efforts at reconciliation, the victimization of one’s own group and the complete absence of acknowledgment of the suffering of others.

Conclusion

This essay provided snapshots of contemporary state practices of remembrance in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, and made an argument for why these conflicting identities continue to be barriers to building a sustainable, viable security community in the region. This pessimism, however, does not mean that nothing should be done. Quite the opposite, much needs to be done. There are multiple available mechanisms of dealing with the past that have yet to be systematically implemented in the region.

All three states should accept an official regional commission of inquiry into past atrocities, as well as commit to broadly disseminate the results of the commission and implement its recommendations into state policy. The ongoing REKOM initiative has that potential but it will not accomplish enough without official recognition by regional governments – a key piece that is still missing.31

Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia should also implement comprehensive education reform, which includes textbook and curriculum reform that clearly presents evidence of crimes committed, the nature of the conflict, and the political environment that made the atrocities possible and even popular among wide segments of society.32 Serbia and Croatia especially should create national days of memory for victims of atrocities their own troops have committed, and set up museums or similar memorial sites to remember victims and survivors.

31   For more information on REKOM, see www.zarekom.org.32   A promising regional Joint History Project initiative did produce alternative history textbook supplements (see http://www.cdsee.org/projects/jhp). However, very few teachers in the region have adopted them, primarily because the state control of the textbook industry makes reform incredibly hard to initiate and maintain. History teachers, therefore, see no clear benefit to them of adopting textbook supplements that are not sanctioned or approved by the state.

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These memorialization efforts are important in their own right, but they are a necessary component of security community building. Security communities are built on trust, understanding, and a shared political culture that makes further violence unimaginable. The states of the Western Balkans are far from this sense of community, but revisiting how they remember their pasts is a key starting point.

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Subotic, Jelena. 2012. Remembrance, Public Narratives, and Obstacles to Justice in the Western Balkans. Atlanta: Georgia State University (forthcoming).

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The Western Balkans and the EU in Multilateral Organisations:

Foreign Policy Coordination and Declaratory Alignment in the OSCE

FLORENT MARCIACQ*University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg and University of Vienna, Austria

Abstract: This paper sheds light on the Europeanisation of Western Balkan states’ multilateral diplomacy in the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). More specifically, it enquires into the politics of declaratory alignment of six Western Balkan states. It analyses the frequency at which those states have aligned themselves with the statements of the European Union (EU) between 2004 and 2011, and researches qualitatively the motives of their alignment. The paper finds that the declaratory behaviour of most Western Balkan states in the OSCE has become distinctively convergent with EU positions. Although conditionality certainly fosters alignment, the paper shows that socialisation is a more powerful mechanism of diffusion for most Western Balkan states; that emulation should not be neglected amongst small-sized countries; and that coercion and, interestingly, persuasion do not play a significant role.

Keywords: Europeanisation, Western Balkans, European Union, alignment, foreign policy convergence

Introduction

With the gradual consolidation of EU structures of external governance and the intensification, in foreign and security policy matters, of the EU’s relations with its closest neighbours, Europeanisation has become a pregnant reality for all Western Balkan states. Located at an ever-shrinking institutional distance from the EU, these states now experience Europeanisation in policy fields that were once presumed impervious to exogenous pressures. The foreign policy of multilateral organisations is increasingly exposed to Europe’s “transformative power”,1 and the institutional process underpinning their gradual rapprochement often translates into convergent changes.

1   Börzel and Risse 2009.

* research@marciacq.org

Original scientific paper Received: 26 September 2011 / Accepted: 18 September 2012

UDK: 327.56::351.88(4-672EU) ; 005.575/.582:351.862/.863(497-15)DOI: 10.11643/issn.2217-995X122SPM20

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This paper, conducted under the auspices of Europeanisation research, investigates how sustained interactions with the EU and its member states in multilateral fora have affected the foreign policy of Western Balkan states, and why it is so. Its contribution is empirical, descriptive as well as explicative. The paper begins by discussing specific aspects of Europeanisation research and presenting the conceptual and analytical framework on which it relies. Then, it analyses quantitatively the foreign policy behaviour in the OSCE of six Western Balkan states between 2004 and 2011, or more specifically the frequency at which those non-EU states have aligned themselves with EU statements. It also assesses the level of regional cohesion of Western Balkan states’ foreign policy behaviour in the OSCE. Based on interviews, the paper finally explores the motives underpinning the Western Balkan states’ collective alignment with EU statements, and assesses the relevance of five mechanisms in this respect: coercion, manipulation of utility calculations (conditionality), socialisation, persuasion and emulation.

The Europeanisation Puzzle: Concept and Definitions

Despite an ever growing number of scholarly contributions, Europeanisation research remains an unconsolidated field of inquiry, approached by a variety of conceptual definitions, each shedding light on particular aspects of the phenomenon. Many of the conceptual issues that have tormented Europeanisation researchers for almost two decades have not been solved, and Europeanisation is mostly “what political actors make of it”.2 Scholars first defined Europeanisation as a bottom-up process ensuing through “the emergence and development at the European level of distinct structures of governance”.3 It could have, for instance, something to do with the formation of the so-called European foreign policy, i.e. with “aspects of foreign policy being ‘taken out’ of the exclusively national conduct of foreign policy and elevated to EU policy-making”.4 Such conceptions of Europeanisation raise interesting questions, but their conceptual field proves poorly differentiated from neighbouring concepts’ such as European integration. Meanwhile, new approaches to Europeanisation have been advanced which suggest inquiring into the “the domestic impact of European integration” in general,5 and the “domestic impact of EU foreign policy co-operation”6 in particular. Some studies accordingly define Europeanisation as “the growing influence of European treaties, directives and case law on the substance of domestic legal systems”,7 while others, relying on a wider ontology, examined all kinds of “pressures emanating […] indirectly from EU membership”.8

2   Radaelli and Pasquier 2007, 35.3   Risse et al. 2001, 3.4   Jørgensen 2004, 49.5   Börzel and Risse 2000, see also Green Cowles et al. 2001.6   Smith 2000.7   Smits 2004, 229.8   Featherstone 2003, 7.

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Europeanisation research now even crosses the borders of the European Union9 and, for instance, examines how non-EU states’ diplomacy changes over time as the EU asserts its international presence.10 Moreover, rather than being held captive by the European integration research agenda, Europeanisation increasingly builds conceptual ties with an overarching field of inquiry, the diffusion of ideas and policies, the domestic effect which it seeks to explore.11

Europeanisation researchers are yet reluctant to investigate what Europeanisation entails in terms of outcome. Often, they assume that Europeanisation has no proper phenomenological manifestation of its own (other than “change”), which they could generalise as definitional trait. Their conclusions on the nature of Europeanisation typically remain specific to their study. This scholarly caution sometimes appears as indecisiveness, as one can hardly research Europeanisation without knowing what it looks like.12 This paper, by contrast, defines Europeanisation as convergent changes in the states’ behaviour resulting from the adoption of ideas or practices which have been diffused by the EU. Its intent is, first, to assess the level of Europeanisation of Western Balkan states’ multilateral diplomacy in the OSCE, and second, to explore the motives underpinning their convergent behaviour. The paper thus researches Europeanisation both in terms of outcome (looking for convergent changes) and process (examining how diffusion has operated).

Operationally, it boils down, first, to documenting the occurrences of policy convergence, defined as “growing similarity of policies over time”,13 and second, to assessing which mechanisms of diffusion may therein be involved.14 As regards the first point (convergence), the paper distinguishes between σ-convergence, i.e. the regional-scaled “decrease in variation of policies”15 and δ-convergence, which is operationalised “by comparing countries’ distance changes to an exemplary model”.16 Whereas σ-convergence is merely a measure of change in regional cohesion, δ-convergence indicates how individual Western Balkan states have come closer to the EU’s preferences, which it considers as pivots. As regards the second point (mechanisms of diffusion explaining convergence), the paper briefly examines the relevance of the following mechanisms: coercion, manipulation of utility calculations, socialisation, persuasion and emulation.17 The analysis then relies on

9   Schimmelfennig 2009.10   Marciacq 2012.11   Börzel and Risse 2009.12   Buller and Gamble 2002, 4.13   Holzinger and Knill 2005, 776.14   Following Börzel and Risse 2009, 9–12.15   Knill 2005, 769.16   Ibid.17   Börzel and Risse 2009.

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the qualitative analysis of a large set of EU enlargement documents18 and a dozen semi-structured interviews conducted between March and October 2011 with diplomats from the EU and the Western Balkans.19

Although Europeanisation has become a mushrooming field of inquiry, very little attention has been paid to it with regards to Western Balkans’ foreign policy. This paper contends that lessons can be learnt in this respect from the systematic examination of Western Balkan states’ multilateral diplomacy in the OSCE.

Measuring Europeanisation in Multilateral Organisations

Declaratory Politics in the OSCE and the Alignment Mechanism

Born in Helsinki as a Conference (in 1973), the OSCE has become an intergovernmental organisation in which intense diplomatic activities are deployed in the pursuit of security-oriented goals in Europe. A Vienna-based organisation, the OSCE counts a membership of 56 participating states, including EU actual and prospective member states. At the strategic level, the OSCE is aimed at promoting, through diplomatic means, a comprehensive approach to European security in three dimensions of security: politico-military, economic and environmental, and human. Its scope of activities is broad enough to be representative of states’ key foreign policy interests in both EU and non-EU Europe. Therein, states are free to express their views by issuing their own declarations or aligning themselves with others’. Endowed with substantive, rather than procedural powers, their declaratory might is used as an instrument of their foreign policy and can thus be coordinated. Amongst the various modes of coordination, declaratory alignment plays a peculiar role, not least because it has been extensively supported by the EU in its external relations. Not all OSCE participating states have the possibility to align themselves with the EU – in 2005, alignment was offered to two non-EU states (Croatia and Turkey) plus Bulgaria and Romania; in 2011, it was offered to 17 non-EU states, including all Western Balkan states.20 Since the EU cannot voice its positions in the OSCE (it is not a participating state), it is the Presidency, speaking on behalf of the EU, that reads out EU statements. The list of non-EU states that align themselves with the statement is then added at the bottom end of the EU statement.

18   Depending on the Western Balkan state concerned and its progress towards the EU between 2004 and 2011, the following documents were reviewed: EU-Western Balkan states’ joint declarations on political dialogue, European partnerships, stabilisation and association agreements, Opinions of the Commission on the application for membership, Progress reports. 19   The set of interviewees include 1) OSCE diplomats posted in Vienna from Albania, Bosnia-Her-zegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia; 2) high officials responsible for multilateral diplomacy in Serbia and Macedonia’s foreign ministries; 3) diplomats from the EU delegation to the OSCE in Vienna; 4) officials and diplomats from the delegations of EU member states that recently held the Council’s Presidency.20   Marciacq 2011.

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The mechanism of EU alignment in the OSCE has been routinised in Vienna.21 The Permanent Council (PC) is the primary locus of declaratory politics in the OSCE, and its regular meetings take place every Thursday. Intense consultations precede these meetings, first to coordinate the positions of EU member states internally, and then to manage alignment with non-EU states externally. The decision, by the EU, to make a statement at a PC meeting is usually taken on Mondays during the internal coordination meeting. A draft statement is elaborated by the Presidency on Tuesdays, and circulated for approval amongst EU member states. On Wednesdays afternoon, a meeting is held at the deputy-ambassadorial level to pre-finalise the negotiations, and consensus is finalised at the latest at the ambassadorial level on Thursday morning, shortly before the PC meeting. Western Balkan states do not participate in this process of internal coordination, nor are they allowed, when they are offered to align themselves with EU statements, to formulate suggestions or amendments. What they ultimately face is a “take it or leave it choice”.22 Informal briefing meetings with candidate states are nonetheless held every Tuesday. However, the proposition to align comes only after a consensus has been reached amongst EU members, i.e. at the earliest on Wednesday afternoon.

Until 2009, alignment was perceived as normative compatibility with EU positions. It did not prevent the states from issuing their own statements, in their national capacity, in addition to aligning, although this possibility was rarely used in practice.23 Western Balkan states could therewith clarify their view or express nuances whilst acknowledging the correctness of EU statements. Alignment thus preserved, at least conceptually, the separateness of two modes of declaration – individual and collective. With the Lisbon Treaty, however, this interpretation shifted to the more exclusive understanding of alignment. The new (informal) norm, introduced during the Spanish Presidency, provides indeed that states that align may no longer speak in their national capacity.24 Although the EU delegation has kept some latitude in implementing it, this new practice of alignment places Western Balkan states in the face of severed choices, since their alignment automatically implies their individual behaviour being fused into collective action.

Data and Method

This paper assesses the Europeanisation of Western Balkan states’ multilateral diplomacy based on the (changing) frequency at which these states chose to align themselves with EU statements in the OSCE. It measures δ-convergence by comparing Western Balkan states’ declaratory behaviour in the OSCE with an exemplary model (EU member states’

21   EU diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 1 August 2011); Official from the delegation of the member state holding the Presidency of the Council (personal interview in Vienna, 1 August 2011).22   Macedonian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 7 July 2011).23   Diplomat from the delegation of a member state that held the Presidency of the Council in 2010 (personal interview in Vienna, 26 April 2011).24   Official from the delegation of the member state holding the Presidency of the Council (per-sonal interview in Vienna, 1 August 2011).

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internally coordinated positions, aggregated as EU positions) and it gauges σ-convergence by evaluating Western Balkan’s regional cohesion. The temporal scope of the study starts after the 2004 enlargement wave, and ends with the end of the Hungarian Presidency in 2011. The dataset consists of 1188 statements issued, mainly at PC meetings, by the EU in the OSCE. For each statement, a quantitative study examines the positions towards alignment of six Western Balkan states participating in the OSCE (Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia). Alignment only occurs when the alignee expressly communicates to the EU its desire to align itself with a given statement. The analysis computes these occurrences to evidence possible patterns of declaratory convergence over time.

How Convergent is the Western Balkan states’ Declaratory Behaviour in the OSCE?

Western Balkan states, overall, align themselves with EU statements at a remarkably high frequency. Over the past 6–7 years, their alignment rate has generally been higher than 90 per cent, except for Serbia which constitutes a striking exception (see Table 1). Certain Western Balkan states (e.g. Croatia, Albania) have adopted a relatively stable declaratory behaviour characterised by quasi systematic alignment with EU statements for the entire period under consideration. Little variation in the frequency of their alignment with the EU can be observed, unlike in other countries (e.g. Montenegro, Macedonia) where a positive progression was noted, culminating with close-to-100 per cent alignment. For these states, δ-convergence towards EU positions has thus been slightly more marked, not least because they started at lower levels of alignment (Figure 1). For others (above all Serbia), speaking of δ-convergent behaviour in the OSCE may be questionable. Between 2006 and 2009, Serbia’s rate of alignment with EU statements fell from 91 to 56 per cent, never reaching the 90 per cent threshold again despite a fragile recovery in 2009–2010. In winter 2010–2011, Serbia’s alignment rate fell again.

At the regional level, Western Balkan states’ cohesion in alignment with the EU is also relatively high (between 88.4 and 95.8 per cent), which shows that Western Balkan states often more willingly align themselves as a group, in a cohesive manner, rather than heterogeneously (Table 1). However, Serbia’s dis-alignment between 2006 and 2009 and 2010–2011 has negatively affected the region’s σ-convergence and weakened its cohesive alignment.

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Year/semester/Presidency

δ-convergence %δ-convergence

(regional cohesion) %

CRO MAC ALB BOS MNG SRB

2004/2-NTH 98

2005/1-LU 99

2005/2-UK 97 84 91 67 84.0

2006/1-AT 99 97 94 95 91 95.2

2006/2-FIN 99 94 97 94 78 88 93.9

2007/1-DE 98 96 97 98 88 85 93.5

2007/2-PT 90 98 96 96 94 78 91.8

2008/1-SLV 98 92 96 90 99 72 91.2

2008/2-FR 98 92 86 91 94 68 88.4

2009/1-CZ 97 96 96 99 97 56 90.3

2009/2-SUE 97 96 99 99 99 72 93.5

2010/1-SP 98 97 95 91 94 84 93.3

2010/2-BEL 98 99 96 98 98 85 95.8

2011/1-HU 98 98 93 86 94 77 91.1

Table 1: Degree of convergence towards EU positionsSource: OSCE primary data retrieved and complied by the author

90%

CROALB

MAC

MNG

SRB

BOS

70%

50%2004/2 2005/1 2005/2 2008/1 2005/2 2007/1 2007/2 2008/1 2008/2 2009/1 2009/2 2010/1 2010/2 2011/1

Figure 1: δ-convergence of Western Balkan states’ declaratory behaviour in the OSCSource: This graph is a rendition of Table 1

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Explaining the Western Balkan states’ Declaratory Alignment in the OSCE

Since the EU communicates its position and offers alignment to Western Balkan states before the statements are read in the OSCE, convergence may be understood as resulting from the external diffusion of the EU’s ideas on a series of security-related issues. In order to understand the motives underpinning alignment, the following section assesses the relevance of the five mechanisms of diffusion proposed by Börzel and Risse (2009). It also attempts to explain why Europeanisation has been less successful in this respect in Serbia than in other states.

Coercion

A possible explanation for Western Balkan states’ systematic alignment is coercion, i.e. convergence “forced by the threat or the actual use of physical violence”.25 This mechanism would imply that the EU could forcibly undermine Western Balkan states’ external sovereignty, e.g. by exercising supreme authority over national prerogatives. Although the EU continues to assume key functions in the Western Balkans (especially through its Special Representatives), it does not (and cannot) impose its preference for alignment in the region. EU representatives in the Western Balkans do not, indeed, hold executive powers in this respect which they could exert to enforce foreign policy convergence. Even the softer form of coercion, i.e. through the exercise of the EU’s jurisdictional supremacy, bears inconclusive results. EU law lacks specificity in this matter, and EU supra-national bodies (especially the European Court of Justice) have virtually no legal jurisdiction to enforce obligations pertaining to foreign policy coordination.26 In a word, the Western Balkan states’ alignment with EU statements in the OSCE is not triggered by coercion.

Manipulation of utility calculations – conditionality

More than elsewhere, the EU has woven in the Western Balkans a series of contractual relations which extend the realm of its governance beyond its institutional borders. These relations promote a strategy of “reinforcement through reward”27, offering incentives to Western Balkan states in exchange for their adoption of EU norms. Starting from the 1996 Regional Approach, its conditionality-based approach has been developed over the years so as to encompass the EU’s acquis communautaire, including in CFSP matters. Their conditionality regime now comprises rules and norms pertaining to foreign policy coordination in multilateral fora like the OSCE. Compliance with them is fostered by the “European perspective” promised to Western Balkan states at the Thessaloniki summit in 2003. These in fact convey two kinds of “soft” obligations, usually enshrined in a relatively

25   Börzel and Risse 2009, 9.26   Foreign policy coordination with the EU falls under the CFSP pillar, which is out of the ECJ’s jurisdiction.27   Börzel and Risse 2009, 10.

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uniform wording as part of EU’s political dialogue with Western Balkan states (see Table 2 for the legal references). One is an obligation de moyens regarding foreign policy coordination in international organisations; and the other is an obligation de résultat regarding foreign policy convergence.

The obligation de moyens provides in substance that political dialogue with the EU shall “tak[e] full advantage of diplomatic channels between the Parties, including appropriate contacts in the bilateral as well as the multilateral field, such as the United Nations, OSCE meetings and elsewhere”.28Cooperation should furthermore ensue through “providing mutual information on foreign policy decisions” or “inform[ing] and consult[ing] one another on important matters of common interest”. 29 The obligation de résultat, which applies to Western Balkan states, finally provides that these should ensure an “increasing convergence of positions on international issues, and in particular on those matters likely to have substantial effects on one or the other party”. 30 The Commission is responsible for assessing the states’ compliance with this obligation, e.g. in its pre-accession Questionnaire. Can compliance with any of these rules account for the distinctively high levels of Western Balkan states’ declaratory alignment in the OSCE?

Obligation to coordinate

Obligation to converge Legal basis

Croatia 2001 2001Joint Declaration on Political Dialogue (13344/01, Annex) Thessalonica agenda (doc. 10369/03) SAA (OJ L 26, 28/01/2005)

Macedonia 1997 1997Joint Declaration on Political Dialogue (20/04/1997, Annex) Thessalonica agenda (doc. 10369/03) SAA (OJ L 84, 20/03/2004)

Albania 1992 1992Joint Declaration on Political Dialogue (6166/92, Annex) Thessalonica agenda (doc. 10369/03) SAA (doc. 8164/06)

Bosnia 2003 2003 Joint Declaration on Political Dialogue (OJ C 240, 07/10/2003) Thessalonica agenda (doc. 10369/03)

Montenegro 2007 2007 Joint Declaration on Political Dialogue (doc. 11575/06) SAA (doc. 11566/1/07)

Serbia 2003 2003Joint Declaration on Political Dialogue (OJ C 240, 07/10/2003) Thessalonica agenda (doc. 10369/03) SAA (16005/07)

Table 2: Western Balkans states’ obligations with regards to foreign policy coordination

28   See for instance the EU-Serbia Joint declaration on political dialogue of 17 September 2003 (doc. 12616/03). 29   Ibid. 30   Ibid. 

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Interviews with EU and Western Balkan diplomats indicate that the importance of compliance as a motive for alignment should not be overestimated. The interviewees (Western Balkan states’ diplomats and EU officials) all testify to the absence of direct pressures for alignment from the side of the EU, and concur in dismissing the view that the EU demands alignment on contractual grounds. As explained by a diplomat from Bosnia-Herzegovina: “we are free to express dissenting opinions if we have them – which we mostly do not”.31 Although many acknowledge that “there is a rule that we must align”,32 alignment, in the Western Balkans, is not perceived through the logic of consequentiality as being a sine qua non condition for reaping the benefits of European integration. It is not even presented as such by the EU, which prefers to focus on political dialogue (the multifaceted process) rather than alignment (the specific outcome). As explained by an EU diplomat, “alignment is a signal; it is not so much an instrument, unlike political dialogue that is pursued per se […]. So, we do not focus very much on alignment. For us, it is a routine we carry out and a minor part of our business”.33 If alignment is not directly driven by EU incentives, non–alignment is still avoided among Western Balkan states for fear of hypothetical sanctions. It is indeed assumed amongst most Western Balkan states that “every non-alignment is recorded by Brussels”,34 “analysed by the EU”35 and that, at some point, these should be accounted for.36 This perception is especially strong in Serbia’s diplomacy, where it is also seen more critically: “there is usually a person in Brussels or in Belgrade that is putting a plus and a minus when we align and when we do not”.37 This idea of being subject to conditional sanctions for non-alignment is, however, largely ungrounded. First, in case of non-alignment, EU diplomats may at best ask “out of curiosity”38 for reasons that prevented alignment. These reasons are usually known in advance, and non-alignment thence does not cause turmoil. Second, alignment rates are not scrutinised in the EU delegation or in Brussels on a regular basis.39 Third, even though a list of statements with which EU applicants have not aligned is to be provided to the EU in response to the Commission’s questionnaire, it is highly doubtful that some occurrences of non-alignment would bluntly disqualify the applicants.

Even though concerns over alignment may occasionally be formulated by Western Balkan states’ diplomats in terms of compliance, they in fact pertain to a more elusive will to

31   Bosnian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 2 May 2011).32   Montenegrin diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 21 April 2011); quoted in a similar vain by a Macedonian, Serbian and Albanian diplomats.33   EU diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 1 August 2011).34   Croatian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 28 April 2011).35   Bosnian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 2 May 2011).36   Montenegrin diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 21 April 2011).37   Serbian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 17 October 2011).38   Official from the delegation of the member state holding the Presidency of the Council (per-sonal interview in Vienna, 1 August 2011).39   EU diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 1 August 2011).

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“demonstrate one’s ability and willingness to adopt the CFSP acquis” altogether.40 Rather than stirring up fears of hypothetical sanctions for breaching EU obligations, the act of non–aligning goes hand in hand with the apprehension of being seen by the EU as lagging behind or lacking political will. Only in this sense do some candidate states concede that “non–alignment should be the exception”.41 This assessment is valid for nearly all Western Balkan states, the strategic utility of which is closely linked to the EU. Serbia, by contrast, has a larger propensity for supporting third countries the approaches of which sometimes conflict with EU preferences. Its strategic partnership with Russia, its active participation in the Non-Aligned Movement and its special relations with Iran or Belarus may occasionally cause it to face difficult choices. In exchange for third partners’ support against the declaration of independence of Kosovo in 2008, Serbia accordingly chose not to align with some of the statements issued, for instance, by the EU against Russia.42 As explained by a top-level diplomat in Belgrade, Serbia’s “relations with many countries are directly linked with Kosovo. If the EU speaks about countries that did not recognise Kosovo, then we are very careful”.43 The decrease in Serbia’s alignment rates should thus partly be understood as the need to reciprocate non-EU partners’ support, the value of which at times exceeds the value of the incentive promised by the EU.

Socialisation

Unlike conditionality, which is driven by the logic of consequentiality, socialisation follows the logic of appropriateness and appeals to normative rather than instrumental rationality.44 This mechanism may lead to alignment, provided that the states no longer align because they benefit from it in terms of utility calculations, but because it is what is most appropriate in a given context, having internalised the markers of the normative community to which they belong. Socialisation then implies that states’ national interests come to be redefined in collective rather than individualistic terms – a trait that characterises Western Balkan states to a large extent, despite the fact that they do not belong to the EU (yet).

Most Western Balkan states characteristically define the national interest they pursue in the OSCE as primarily collective and consubstantially linked to EU accession. Unlike other non–EU states, which tend to insulate their national priorities from the EU’s, and with the exception of Serbia, for which national approaches remain prevalent on some issues, Western Balkan states usually do not seek to upload their national priorities in the

40   Croatian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 28 April 2011).41   Macedonian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 7 July 2011).42  For  instance,  in  2008  alone:  PC.DEL/46/08,  PC.DEL/66/08,  PC.DEL/181/08, PC.DEL/209/08,  PC.DEL/324/08,  PC.DEL/348/08,  FSC-PC.DEL/29/08,  PC.DEL/605/08, PC.DEL/620/08, PC.DEL/712/08, PC.DEL/722/08/Rev.1, FSC.DEL/170/08, PC.DEL/918/08, PC.DEL/1057/08, PC.DEL/1081/08.43   Serbian official (personal interview in Belgrade, 12 September 2011).44   Börzel and Risse 2009. 

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OSCE. Macedonia, for instance, does not prioritise the pursuit of its naming issue policy in the OSCE, although the issue is central to its foreign policy.45 Like others, its diplomats declare that what primarily counts is that it “shares the same values, the same objectives and principles”46 as the EU, fully adheres to EU collective approaches and therefore aligns itself with EU statements: “alignment is a means to demonstrate our European way of thinking and cooperating”.47 More than the expression of an individualistic position towards a particular statement by the EU, alignment is thus given a collective teleology: its intent is to demonstratively participate in European foreign policy. Although Western Balkan states cannot contribute to European foreign policymaking on an equal-footing as EU member states, they can nevertheless increase the EU’s international presence by joining EU statements, including on issues in which they “would otherwise not have been interested”.48 This certainly requires a certain level of socialisation, for them (non-EU states) to claim (and gain) social acceptance from the EU.

In order to foster this process of diffusion, the EU exerts normative pressures on Western Balkan states regarding the appropriateness of alignment. Rather than negotiating alignment (e.g. allowing amendments to the planned statement), EU diplomats, for instance, assert that “we have an EU standard. And in an optimal world, we would like to see this standards shared [by others], but we do not want to negotiate the EU standard [… ]. [Western Balkan states] are welcome to share it, which means that they come onboard, but it is an EU position”.49 The normative precedence of EU approaches over national positions in the OSCE has been internalised by most Western Balkan states to a very large extent. Many view alignment as a norm, i.e. a position that is applied “by default” 50 as the most appropriate behaviour in the OSCE. The cognitive process leading to alignment is not the one of comparing EU statements with national positions on an equal-footing. It is a “bureaucratic approach”51 that presupposes the correctness of the transmission, and consequently, the appropriateness of alignment. As expressed by a diplomat, “we do not read EU statements wondering whether we have the same position, because we assume that we do”52; alternatively “we read it as we were going to align”53, or “we have ex ante the same position”.54 Diplomats thus approach the text transmitted by the EU with highly positive

45   Macedonia could for instance be more reluctant to join statement criticising states (like Russia), which recognised it under its constitutional name. But it is not, since alignment is primarily viewed as a collective instrument. Macedonian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 7 July 2011). 46   Serbian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 17 October 2011).47   Bosnian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 2 May 2011).48   Croatian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 28 April 2011); Montenegrin diplomat (per-sonal interview in Vienna, 21 April 2011).49   EU diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 1 August 2011).50   Macedonian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 7 July 2011).51   Ibid.52   Montenegrin diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 21 April 2011).53   Serbian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 17 October 2011).54   Albanian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 29 April 2011).

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assumptions regarding its content, and typically find it hard to conceive any instance of non-alignment, even though their actual positions, expressed in official discourses, go slightly further than those of the EU (e.g. on Kosovo for Albania), or admit substantive nuances (e.g. on Kosovo for Bosnia Herzegovina). While considering alignment, what they wonder, then, is rather: “is there any why I should not align?”55 Besides, Western Balkan states’ delegates in the OSCE often rely on an informal mandate from their capital, stating that alignment should ensue whenever “there is no dispute within the EU”, “topic is not that important”, or “topic has been discussed earlier”. 56 This informal mandate shows how effective the normative pressures exerted by the in EU in terms of alignment have been in the Western Balkans.

In the praxis, socialisation in the OSCE is fostered by the intensity of contacts between the EU and Western Balkan states’ delegations. Croatia, Macedonia and Montenegro (i.e. EU candidates until 2011) meet the EU delegation and the Presidency every week in an EU candidate group format and exchange information on relevant issues. These informal meetings present opportunities for non-EU states to “speak out concerns without renouncing alignment”.57 They increase the likelihood of alignment by improving communication, and they are viewed by all as “very important” and “very useful”. The states that are deprived of such meetings (because they are/were not EU candidates), openly regret their being “really neglected in this respect”58, or seek compensation by exchanging more intensively with particular EU member states (e.g. Slovenia or Italy).59 Western Balkan states, finally, meet informally in an ex-Yugoslavia format every month. In this context of regular encounters, socialisation is also encouraged by the fact that decisions are taken by most Western Balkan states’ delegations in Vienna rather than in the capitals. This finding echoes other researchers’ claim on the unprecedented decentralisation of foreign policy making as a result of intense interactions on the spot, in Vienna, with the EU. Because they often face very tight deadlines for replying to EU’s alignment proposals, most delegates from the Western Balkans take decisions locally i.e. in an environment that is very prone to socialisation, rather than requesting instructions from their capitals.

The analysis of the role of socialisation as the driving force of Western Balkan states’ alignment may finally shed some light on Serbia’s peculiar behaviour in the OSCE. First, Serbia is committed to two different sets of priorities in the OSCE: one is European integration (like other Western Balkan states) and the other is defending Serbia’s stance against Kosovo independence.60 Whereas the former facilitates the redefinition of national interests in collective rather than individualistic terms, the latter, turning individual

55   Montenegrin diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 21 April 2011).56   Bosnian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 2 May 2011); Montenegrin diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 21 April 2011).57   Croatian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 28 April .2011).58   Serbian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 17 October 2011).59   Albanian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 29 April 2011).60   Serbian official (personal interview in Belgrade, 13 September 2011).

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interests into sanctuary, rather acts as a factor that is constraining Europeanisation. Second, given the salience of the Kosovo issue for Belgrade and despite the internalisation of alignment as a norm, Serbian diplomats are more prone to switching back to utility calculations than those of other Western Balkan states. Keywords in EU statements evoking the Kosovo issue or states that oppose recognition trigger the cognitive switch of rationality, although these do not automatically lead to non-alignment. Finally, the lesser frequency of Serbia’s meetings with the EU, the feeling that it is not sufficiently informed on EU approaches, and the necessity for Serbian diplomats to seek instructions from the capital on most statements undermine the depth of Serbia’s socialisation.

Persuasion

Persuasion enables the diffusion of ideas based on communicative rationality. Ideas are accordingly promoted through reason-giving until a reasoned consensus is reached.61 This may occur if the EU, challenging the normative claims initially held by Western Balkan states, succeeded in presenting its own norms as more legitimate, which would command alignment. There is, interestingly, little evidence of this mechanism of persuasion in the OSCE gremium as far as Western Balkan states are concerned. Amongst EU member states, coming to terms regarding a common statement certainly ensues through negotiations. It supposes arguing and persuading. But since Western Balkan states are excluded from internal coordination meetings and the elaboration of EU statements, there is no reciprocal exchange of arguments, no reason-giving, and therefore, no persuasion. Rather than political dialogue primus inter pares, the alignment mechanism as it is operated (especially after the Lisbon Treaty) fosters a monolog. Most of the Western Balkan states deplore that they cannot substantively contribute to European foreign policymaking, especially in cases when they do have the proper expertise (e.g. on regional or post-conflict issues). In Macedonia, for instance, one regrets that “the EU has a general lack of interest towards Macedonia’s positions” in the OSCE62; in Croatia, that the EU promotes “a certain type of dialogue where we cannot make important contributions”63; and in Montenegro, that “small countries cannot influence the policy process”.64 EU diplomats are well aware of the communicative pitfalls of the alignment mechanism. But they argue that alignment is not the alpha and omega of political dialogue; that it only reflects a “definite way” of communicating; and that most of the communication with Western Balkan diplomats takes place regardless of alignment in an “informal, discursive way at the bilateral or trilateral levels” and “behind the scene”.65 Persuasion, thus, may not be relevant as a mechanism of diffusion in explaining alignment in the OSCE, but it arguably plays an important role in traditional diplomacy.

61   Börzel and Risse 2009, 11.62   Macedonian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 7 July 2011).63   Croatian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 28 April 2011).64   Montenegrin diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 21 April 2011).65   EU diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 1 August 2011).

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Emulation

Emulation is a mechanism of diffusion that “does not require an active promoter of ideas, but relies on indirect influence”.66 Borrowing from normative rationality, it is expressed through mimicry, or behavioural imitation. The motives of Western Balkan states’ alignment with EU statements in the OSCE are not completely devoid of mimicry. Some diplomats do occasionally express a sheer desire for conformity with the EU, arguing for instance that “the EU is a perfect forum that has brought democracy, prosperity and stability to Europe” whilst the region has only experienced despotism, war, instability67. Alternatively, they state that the EU “represents for us the highest standard of democracy” (which is odd considering the democratic deficit from which it suffers).68 For these diplomats, alignment, then, is the logical consequence of their commitment to their idealised picture of the EU: by aligning, they seek to become more like the EU. Yet, the salience of mimicry as a mechanism of Europeanisation should not be overestimated. Few diplomats gave signs of mimicry, and the majority of the interviewees had a deeper understanding of the alignment mechanism. The normative rationality upon which they legitimised alignment bore more hallmarks of socialisation than sheer imitation.

Emulation can also borrow from instrumental rationality, in which case it ensues through lesson-drawing, i.e. the search for more effective policy solutions. And indeed, for small-sized countries from the Western Balkans, alignment with EU statement should be understood in a context of structural shortages in diplomatic resources. International expertise is often the critically missing element that is needed in order to allow for informed decisions. Drawing from the EU’s extensive resources sometimes emerges as a rational response to the considerable limitations faced by most Western Balkan states. As expressed by a diplomat, “in terms of first-hand information, our relationship to the EU is highly asymmetrical”.69 Alignment therefore appears as a valuable opportunity to get informed about the world affairs at minimal cost, to extend one’s foreign policy scope of action, and to gain in international visibility. More generally, alignment can be analysed as a very pragmatic response to critical restrictions in the smallest delegations regarding human resources. In delegations like Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania, which only comprise five diplomats in charge of all multilateral affairs in Vienna (i.e. UN, OSCE, IAEA, CTBTO…), human resources are very scarce and cannot handle extensive OSCE politics. Under such conditions, alignment represents an economy of time and labour, and can critically help small-sized delegations, e.g. by sparing them the redundancy of drafting national statements that convey the same message as the EU. Of course, in this case, lesson-drawing is more relevant for Montenegro or Macedonia than for Serbia which can rely on a vast diplomatic network worldwide, has inherited a solid

66   Börzel and Risse 2009, 12.67   Albanian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 29 April 2011).68   Montenegrin diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 21 April 2011).69   Montenegrin diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 21 April 2011).

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diplomatic tradition and has access to alternative sources of information (through its non-EU partners).

Conclusions

As Western Balkan states are drawing closer to the EU, so is their foreign policy behaviour in international fora. In the OSCE, most of them already act as if they were EU member states – they join EU statements systematically, as if they were theirs. Their alignment pattern certainly testifies to their readiness to actively engage in European foreign policy and enter the Union as dedicated member states. Only Serbia displays a lesser degree, and a more unsteady pattern, of declaratory convergence. Its wavering behaviour reveals the ambiguity its foreign policy is imbued with, torn between two priorities: Kosovo and the EU.

Whereas Europeanisation in the East is often found to be driven by conditionality, in foreign policy matters, the motives for Western Balkan states seem more diverse. Conditionality certainly plays a certain role therein. It provides a framework for political dialogue with the EU, commands foreign policy convergence, and above all, conditions the progress made by would-be member states on their road towards the EU. But in practice, this institutional setting, this formal obligation and this prosperous incentive do not drive the states’ decision to align. They are, at best, passively acknowledged, or substituted by the (partly ungrounded and certainly self-magnified) fear of being seen as lagging behind and of being sanctioned in case of non-alignment. It is in this light that Serbia’s peculiar behaviour in the OSCE can be understood. Non-alignment, at times, enables Serbia to reciprocate the non-EU partners’ support of its Kosovo policy. The fear of being pilloried by the EU does not always exceed the fear of losing others’ support. However, conditionality, with its limitations, does not explain the whole picture. Other mechanisms are also at play – especially socialisation. Most Western Balkan states define the national interest they pursue in the OSCE not in individualistic but in collective terms. They rarely seek to project their own priorities in this forum, rather settling for joining the EU in the conduct of its European foreign policy. In so doing, they favourably respond to the EU’s normative pressure for alignment, and adopt the EU’s preference because they deem these appropriate. This process of socialisation is fostered by the environment in Vienna in which EU and non-EU diplomats are immersed. Europeanisation also ensues through emulation, although this mode of diffusion rather affects only the smallest-sized countries of the Western Balkans. Coercion and persuasion do not seem to play a significant role – because of the jurisdictional limitations of supranational bodies in foreign policy matters in case of the former, and owing to the lack of communicative rationality embraced by the EU in case of the latter.

The success of the EU’s alignment policy in the Western Balkans certainly shines on the EU’s international actorness in world politics. By speaking on behalf of non-EU states and acting in the region as a rallying point on European security-related issues, the

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EU demonstrates its capacity for leadership. This, however, comes at a price. First, the EU’s alignment mechanism is a one-size-fits-all device. It is offered to all without the opportunity to participate in the debates preceding the elaboration of the EU’s statement, although the EU (and European security) could arguably gain even more from non-EU states’ insights and experience. Second, it is operated under time constraints in Vienna and in conditions that do not foster the exchange of ideas. Some alignments therefore occur despite informational deficits, fuelling the risk of shallow Europeanisation. Finally, it is operated so as to deter the states that are willing to align from speaking in their national capacity. This restriction meets some resistance amongst the Western Balkan states and barely conceals the EU’s uncertainties regarding its new status: the EU “urges us to see regional affairs in black and white terms, an approach that is not always very much adapted. The EU is not confident enough as it fears that letting states speak may lead to contradictions”.70

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors of the Journal of Regional Security as well as the reviewers for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions. He gratefully acknowledges the comments made by the participants at the Belgrade Security Forum 2011, (Belgrade, 14–16 September 2011), the assistance of Ms. Alice Němcová from the OSCE Office in Prague (coordinator of the OSCE researcher-in-residence programme), and the continuous support of the National Research Fund of Luxembourg (AFR 2718121).

70   Macedonian diplomat (personal interview in Vienna, 7 July 2011).

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References

Börzel, Tanja A., and Thomas Risse. 2000. “When Europe Hits Home: Europeanization and Domestic Change.” European Integration online Papers 4 (14).

———. 2009. “The Transformative Power of Europe: The European Union and the Diffusion of Ideas.” KFG Working Paper Series. Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin.

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Green Cowles, Maria, James A. Caporaso, and Thomas Risse-Kappen, eds. 2001. Transforming Europe: Europeanization and domestic change. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Marciacq, Florent. 2011. “Foreign policy coordination and diplomatic alignment in the OSCE: Differential patterns of Europeanisation in non EU-Europe.” Paper presented at the 6th ECPR General Conference, August 25-27th, Reykjavik, Iceland.

———. 2012. “Europeanisation at work in the Western Balkans and the Black Sea Region: Is there an all-European way of voting in the United Nations General Assembly?” Perspectives on European Politics and Society 13 (2): 169–86.

Radaelli, Claudio M., and Romain Pasquier. 2007. “Conceptual Issues.” In Europeanization: New Research Agendas, edited by P. Graziano and M. P. Vink, 35–45. Houndmills; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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domestic change, edited by M. Green Cowles, J. A. Caporaso and T. Risse-Kappen, 1–20. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Smith, Michael E. 2000. “Conforming to Europe: the domestic impact of EU foreign policy co-operation.” Journal of European Public Policy 7 (4):613–31.

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Western Sahara: A Frozen ConflictCAROLINA CHAVEZ FREGOSO

Polisario Front to Europe

NIKOLA ZIVKOVIC*University of Cologne, Germany

Abstract: The conflict in the Western Sahara is one of the oldest and most neglected. It is a conflict that moves yet fails to transform. It includes a number of internal and external traits, a high involvement of external actors and, apparently, no real desire to negotiate, impeding the disputing parties from transforming their initial positions that render this conflict frozen. It is a conflict in which, despite decades of negotiations and the expressed desire to reach a resolution (whether by autonomy, annexation or independence), economic and political interests, identities and the influence of foreign relations seem to obstruct rather than contribute to the conflict transformation. This article offers arguments that explain the Western Sahara conflict as a frozen one, and argues that acknowledgment of this reality is necessary to enable a conflict transformation that would contribute to the security of the region of North Africa.

Keywords: Frozen conflict, conflict transformation, Polisario Front, Western Sahara, self-determination

Introduction

In 1975 Spain resigned ‘Africa’s last colony’, a territory that for more than three decades has been submerged in a conflict that some viewed as secessionism, and others as illegal occupation. The Western Sahara conflict remains one of the oldest and one of the most neglected despite its being an important cause of instability in the Maghreb, a reason for the lack of successful regional integration, and a possible threat to the region’s security.

Opinions and studies addressing the conflict are torn between the Saharawi point of view of Morocco illegally taking control of its territory and resources, and the Moroccan view of the Western Sahara historically belonging to the Kingdom’s sovereignty. Regarded by the

* nzivkovi@smail.uni-koeln.de

Original scientific paper Received: 12 September 2012 / Accepted: 26 December 2012

UDK: 323.26/.27(213.522.2-15) ; 316.48(213.522.2-15) / DOI: 10.11643/issn.2217-995X122SPZ21

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conflicting parties as a zero-sum game where negotiations appear useless since it seems impossible for either actor to win; it is a conflict that moves but does not transform1, a conflict that maintains a stalemate and is still as far from being resolved as it has always been. The conflict in Western Sahara is a frozen conflict.

What Makes a Conflict Frozen?

The term ‘frozen conflict’ does not stand for a determined concept, with a shared definition and specific traits. The term has become a category or a political concept that is more frequently used to refer to those conflicts that persist over the years, even decades, and therefore give the impression of stagnation.2 The term “frozen conflict” assumes that the conflict is paused, which is misleading. Still, such conflicts are referred to as being frozen because throughout the years, despite negotiations and armed events that took place, there is still a situation of status quo without a clear end to the conflict, creating ‘no peace no war’ situations. In frozen conflicts the positions of the actors usually revolve around the core demands of independence versus territorial integrity. Therefore, a structural change is needed for a transformation of the conflict, which would involve a transformation of the underlying conditions that gave birth to the initial conflict.

Conflict transformation involves changing positions from an antagonistic and incompatible point to the one of compatibility. This means that unless the positions of the actors, their behavior and perspectives about each other and themselves change, there can be no real transformation of the conflict, for every step forward in practice means no step at all. Deriving from the depicted concept of ‘frozen conflict’ this article offers several arguments that portray the Western Sahara conflict as frozen, and recommends possible approaches that could result in conflict transformation.

Historical Overview

Spain resigned its last colony in the Western Sahara in November 1975 by signing the Madrid Agreement (or Accords) with Mauritania and Morocco. However, lacking any previous consultation of the Saharawi population; the act was challenged by the UN Security Council and the ICJ which rejected Morocco’s claim of historical attachment

1    Movement  is  inherent  in  every  conflict  because  opposing  opinions  lead  to  negotiations,  dia-logues,  interventions (whether successful or not), and/or armed events happening even at a small level, which  in  turn have consequences. No conflict  can be paused. Thomas Diez defines  conflict transformation “as the transformation of subject positions from incompatibility/antagonism to com-patibility/tolerance”  (Diez 2003,  1). A conflict  can witness  escalations  and de-escalations, but  can remain without transformation if the positions of the parties involved do not change. 2   This concept was  initially used to describe the conflicts that appeared after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and is commonly applied to the conflicts that rose in Eastern Europe and the southern Caucasus region. Other conflicts as the one in Cyprus, East Timor, Palestine, Kosovo, and the case of Ireland have been referred to as frozen conflicts, too.

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to the Western Sahara territory. The UN then urged for the respect of the right to self-determination of the Saharawi people and called for a referendum in which independence would be one of the offered outcomes.

The referendum was first postponed due to differences among the parties’ opinions regarding the eligibility to vote, but there were also further incompatibilities that characterized the relation between the Polisario Front3 and Morocco, driving the parties through decades of conflict, negotiations, clashes and changing demands. However, no transformation has yet occurred, allowing for the the impression that “no party feels an urgent need to (truly) negotiate”.4 Since 2007 dialogues and rounds of talks have taken place with no successful conclusion. The last negotiations that took place from 11 to 13 March 2012 were no exception. In the armed arena, violent events such as clashes between the Saharawi population and Moroccan authorities, numerous cases of torture and killings on both sides occur on a regular basis.

Despite its claims in support of a referendum, Morocco has used any conceivable obstacle to prevent it from happening. Instead, it has promoted its interests through the option of autonomy, though without a Saharawi consultation. Polisario, on the other hand, refuses to take the principle of self-determination off the table and maintains its firm claim that the Saharawi population has the right to decide their own future.

What Makes the Western Sahara Conflict a Frozen One?

In the Western Sahara conflict movement does exist (formal and informal negotiations take place, armed events occur, and the conflict is prone to a sudden escalation) but there is no transformation because the positions of the actors are constrained by several factors.

The lack of transformation can be seen as a way for both Polisario and Morocco to seek time to leverage international opinion and the UN’s support for their own causes. Both actors have focused their efforts on exploiting their location and its importance to the West “to be considered trustworthy and deserving support of all sorts”.5 If both parties ‘behave’, avoid an armed conflict and pretend to commit to a dialogue, they believe they will receive the external political and diplomatic support necessary to outdo the opposing party.

As a frozen conflict, the Western Sahara case involves a secessionist party that has established control over a territory, creating a de facto state that is not entirely recognized

3  National Liberation Movement of Western Sahara. POLISARIO stands for Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Rio de Oro; for its Spanish acronym, Frente Popular de Liberacion de Saguia el-Hamra y Rio de Oro.4  Alterman and Malka 2006, 2.5  Shelley 2004, 7.

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neither by the main state nor by the international community. Since the Western Sahara is not recognized as an independent state by many countries nor recognized as belonging to Morocco’s sovereignty, the conflict relies solely on international and humanitarian law (although both of these have been violated by the parties on several occasions).

The disputing parties are also affected by lack of recognition, for neither Morocco nor Polisario have any legitimacy in each other’s eyes, and therefore refuse to recognize the opposing actor’s demands. To Morocco, Polisario, as a secessionist movement, has no legitimacy as a government or representative of the Sahrawi people. Moreover, they claim the Western Sahara conflict is an internal matter that should be treated as such and resolved by Morocco without external intervention. On the other hand, it does not recognize the legitimacy of Morocco over the territory and its resources, or over the Sahrawi people, because it views Moroccan presence as an illegal occupation.

The stalemate is further reinforced by the clashing identities contained in the positions of the actors. Contrasting identities see the opponent as a threat that challenges the sovereignty and legitimacy of the other. There is a fear that if Morocco loses control over Western Sahara, the survival of King Mohammed VI as the head of state would be threatened6 and that the referendum could not only provide results against Morocco’s interests but could also trigger further discontent that may threaten the central government. While Morocco’s identity, national unity and the monarchy’s leadership significantly rely on the successful occupation of the Western Sahara, the Saharawi identity is one of the strongest means of resistance that the Sahrawi people have at their disposal. Loss of this territory would signify Polisario’s failure and the destruction of a common culture of resistance that has been forged for years inside the refugee camps based in Algeria.

Decades of conflict have caused, and resulted in, a lack of trust that now exists between the parties. While Morocco has presented the topic as a threat to the existence and survival of the Kingdom, experience has made Polisario lose all trust in Morocco, believing that it had been overly patient without receiving anything in return neither from Morocco nor from the international community. Consequently, negotiations take place in bad faith. Both parties evade negotiations, and the few times they have agreed to them, they did so with no intention of reconsidering their positions.

Inflexibility is also influenced by the role played by natural resources. The Western Sahara region is considered second largest regarding phosphate deposits, oil and natural gas, while it also possesses a coastline rich in fish. Nonetheless, the desire to own and control the riches of the Western Sahara is in the interest not only of the actors in conflict but of exogenous actors as well. The fate of Western Sahara “continues to be hostage to the geopolitics of the interests of regional and international actors”.7

6  International Crisis Group 2007b, 6.7  Ghettas 2010, 1.

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The involvement of external traits, defined mainly by the influence of external actors, increases the complexity of the Western Sahara as a frozen conflict. The international community, with the exception of few countries and organizations, has maintained (or pretended to maintain) a neutral stand towards the conflict. Nevertheless, exogenous actors have been actively involved in the , providing military and economic aid while maintaining an image of impartiality, or simply oscillating between diplomatic recognition and non-recognition. Accordingly, “where there is international competition, the opposing parties gravitate into the economic, security and political sphere of their protecting power”.8

The Algerian open support to the Western Sahara derives from a long-standing ideational support of self-determination as the basis for solving decolonization issues. This support has also cooled the Moroccan-Algerian relations and encouraged further competition over influence in North Africa. With the occupation of Western Sahara, Morocco not only enlarged but also gained access to valuable natural resources, This threatened the position of Algeria in the region. If the Western Sahara became a recognized state, it would, consequently, become an important client or satellite state that would give Algeria access to the resources and the Atlantic Ocean, something that would be unimaginable if Morocco was to control the territory.

France’s position has been markedly inclined towards supporting Morocco. Historical connections between these two countries, their commercial interdependence (since the 1990s, France has been the leading trading partner, providing public development, military and economic assistance to Morocco) and their close diplomatic ties have made France a key actor for Morocco. In the eyes of the French, the loss of Western Sahara represents a threat of political and social unrest, from Islamist groups in particular.9 However, France has been careful not to upset Algeria, for this country is also rich in resources and is regarded as essential for security and strategic reasons. Although France has never officially recognized the sovereignty of Morocco over the Western Sahara, its behavior negates juridical neutrality; France remains one of the main supporters of the proposal of autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty, and has rarely criticized Morocco’s violations of human rights.

The United States have also provided military and diplomatic aid to Morocco; during the Cold War period, Morocco represented an “extension of the administration’s support for governments that share its fierce ideological hostility to the Soviet Union and local ‘proxies’ ”,10 while its location has always been strategic to American interests. Nonetheless, the US has preserved a friendly relationship with Algeria (rich in natural gas and hydrocarbon resources), which became instrumental in the American battle against terrorism following the events of September 11, 2001. The US fears that a transformation

8  Noutcheva, et. al. 2004, 1.9  Zoubir and Benabdallah-Gambier 2003, 10.10  Wenger 1982, 25.

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could create further instability in the region of North Africa and hence become an obstacle for regional economic integration which, in turn, could jeopardize the conditions for a bigger market that could satisfy its interests in investment.

The European Union has played an increasingly important role as a result of the trade agreements signed with Morocco concerning fishing and agriculture. Although the EU has tried to maintain an impartial role towards the conflict and the parties in order to maintain good diplomatic relations and economic benefits, the EU has shown more support towards Morocco, the latter being the major trade partner. Inside the EU, positions towards the conflict are divided, particularly concerning the human rights situation, although this never prevented the EU from pursuing its economic interests.

The UN has played one of the most important roles in the conflict. It has conducted negotiations and promoted dialogue between the parties, helped them achieve a ceasefire, and provided the conflict with a special mission - MINURSO. Nevertheless, despite promoting the idea of a fair and free referendum, the UN has accepted Morocco’s objections by postponing it. The fact that the UN has defined the conflict as one of decolonization has also kept other governments from having the opportunity to exert pressure over Morocco. Additionally, it has never punished any of the conflicting parties for breaching the agreements or for violating international law, nor exerted any kind of pressure on them to commit. The UN’s approval of Morocco’s proposal for autonomy is also viewed as “a clear concession to Moroccan intransigence after more than a decade of deadlock, (coming) at the expense of international law and UN resolutions,”11 while the role of MINURSO may be criticized for being the UN’s only mission that does not have include responsibility of human rights.

The involvement of exogenous actors has proven counterproductive. These actors have taken advantage of their relationships; by providing material and financial aid, they have kept the dispute alive without providing assistance needed to make either party sufficiently strong to crush the opponent.

The problem with the influence of external actors like France and the United States lies in the fact that they not only contribute with the supply of aid, but that they are at the same time dominant actors in the UN Security Council, therefore influencing the stalemate from two different directions. Besides, transforming the conflict would also require high levels of resources and investment in a conflict that, so far, has shown not to affect their interests or security. The lack of escalation also gives the impression that there is no need to intervene. Since no interests seem to be at risk, and the conflict does not give the impression of being a security threat, the Western Sahara continues to remain a topic that is constantly postponed on the global agenda. It remains a conflict that receives scant attention of the media and, consequently, of the international community.

11  Zoubir and Benabdallah-Gambier 2003, 8.

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Furthermore, the long duration of the Western Sahara conflict has caused the manifestation and worsening of other disputes that contribute to the freezing of the conflict. While the Western Sahara dispute has been the main issue to impede the North African regional integration, the cost of the occupation of the territory has also represented an obstacle to economic growth and development.12 Social, political and economic inequalities as well as unemployment affect the Moroccan population in many regions of the country; while in the liberated territories and refugee camps people live constrained by harsh desert conditions and poverty.

Continuation of this conflict could likewise pose a threat to the security in the region. The lack of transformation has resulted in the lack of trust between the parties and in increasing levels of frustration that could make violence seem as the last resort for calling on international attention and speeding up the process of a resolution. Moreover, the influence of the Arab Spring, the presence of terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, and the neighboring conflicts as the one in Mali can absorb the Sahrawi people13 and further destabilize the region, not only in political and economical terms, but predominantly with regard to its security.

What does being frozen imply for the future of this conflict?

Defining the conflict as frozen does not mean that there is no possible solution for it; nor does it mean that the conflict will remain at the same stage forever. Inherently, a frozen conflict can escalate at any point; if born in mind and managed adequately, this characteristic can prevent a future conflict. At the same time, defining the conflict as frozen is a useful step to approach the conflict and the parties from different angles.

The proposal of autonomy, in general, seems plausible and rational; in particular, however, it will not lead the conflict closer to a resolution as long as autonomy is offered instead of independence. This violates the UN’s definition of the conflict as one of decolonization, the basic right of the people to self-determination, and above all, the Polisario’s original demand and condition for negotiation: the right to vote about one’s own future. If autonomy is chosen; would it work in the long term to maintain peaceful relations that satisfy both actors?

A resolution by way of autonomy would mean giving political, social and economic rights not only to the Sahrawis, but also to the new autonomous government which is doubtful that Morocco will allow to be conducted by the Polisario Front. Autonomy would mean transferring the control and management of natural resources to the new autonomous region. If the autonomy option does not consider these points, it is highly improbable that

12  International Crisis Group 2007b, 12.13   Several sources claimed that ex-Colonel Muammar Gaddafi used Sahrawis mercenaries against the Libyan population.

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Polisario will agree to the Moroccan ‘third-way’. “What guarantees would there be that Rabat would not subsequently go back on its initial autonomy deal – either by reducing the devolved powers or by harassing, destabilizing or even banning the Polisario Front?”14

Internal changes and the development of democratic institutions open to the participation of Sahrawis without discrimination could loosen the tight positions of Polisario. Political, economic and social reforms could be introduced to include the assurance of the Sahrawi population’s rights and liberties. Polisario could also contribute by offering certain benefits to the Kingdom, i.e. special agreements concerning natural resources, trade, and security.

The problem is not only current but spans into the future as well. As John F. Kennedy once said, “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”. Younger generations of Saharawi people who have been born and raised away from their land or deprived from their rights could turn to violence in response to frustration. In addition, a regional context of revolution, terrorism and armed conflict could push both the Moroccans and the Sahrawis into demanding a change through violent means, or into adopting such activities as means of survival. The duration of the conflict and its lack of transformation influence the minds of the population, which in turn can act as a future barrier for the resolution of the conflict.

14  International Crisis Group 2007a, 7.

* All the opinions stated in the article are the authors’ personal opinions, and not the opinions of the institution where they are employed.

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Communities of Security Practices in the Age of Uncertainty

ALEXANDRA GHECIU*University of Ottawa, Canada

Abstract: This paper examines some of the challenges involved in recent efforts to create a new community of practice that brings together – within the domain of peacebuilding – NATO and humanitarian actors. In recognition of the need to promote systematic cooperation between the alliance and the humanitarian community, NATO has launched several initiatives aimed at constructing a domain of shared knowledge and common procedures, and, on this basis, cultivating mutual trust and a sense of membership in the same community between representatives of the alliance and members of the NGO community. While these initiatives have enjoyed a certain degree of success, at the deeper level the process of forging a new community of practice among these actors remains challenging and fraught with tension. This process has been rendered particularly complicated by the fact that some of the new initiatives challenge fundamental assumptions about self-identity and purpose both in NATO and within the humanitarian community. Indeed, efforts to construct a new community of practice in the domain of peacebuilding both reflect and contribute to intense debates and contestations within the Atlantic Alliance as well as among NGOs about their evolving identities and, linked to that, appropriate logics of action in the future.

Keywords: communities of practice, NATO, NGOs, peacebuilding

Introduction

Since the end of the Cold War, NATO – often portrayed as a key institutional expression of the transatlantic security community – has become increasingly involved in practices of intervention and post-conflict reconstruction in regions that stretch from the Balkans to Afghanistan. These practices have involved an explicit attempt to re-articulate NATO’s relationships to a wide range of actors and to seek to construct new communities of practice that incorporate some of those actors. According to NATO documents, this is necessary because, in an age marked by fluidity and uncertainty in the security field, NATO may well be called upon to carry out more non-conventional missions in the future, and if/when that happens it will be crucial for the alliance to be able to act in smooth partnership with other actors. From this perspective, in order for that partnership to be effective, it is important to have in place a significant degree of trust, shared knowledge, clear procedures, as well as sufficient experience of working together so that NATO and a

* agheciu@uottawa.ca

Original scientific paper Received: 02 September 2012 / Accepted: 01 December 2012

UDK: 327.51 / DOI: 10.11643/issn.2217-995X122SPG22

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host of other institutions can adapt rapidly to a complex security environment anywhere in the world.

This paper provides a brief analysis of some of the challenges involved in efforts to create a new community of practice that brings together NATO and humanitarian actors in the domain of peacebuilding.1 As we shall see, while some limited successes have been achieved in this area, at the deeper level the process of forging a stable new community of practice among these actors remains challenging and fraught with tension. This process has been rendered particularly complicated by the fact that some of the new initiatives challenge fundamental assumptions about self-identity and purpose both in NATO and within the humanitarian community.

Redefining NATO after the Cold War

There is a growing body of literature that explores the ways in which NATO, as a key institution of the Euro-Atlantic security community, has sought to re-define its identity and reinvent its mandate in an effort to demonstrate its relevance in the post-Cold War era. 2 One of the most interesting aspects of NATO’s reinvention process concerns a new focus on practices of peacebuilding, which are ostensibly aimed not simply at stabilizing war-torn regions or countries, but also at turning them into democratic polities. In recent years, the alliance’s emphasis on becoming a prominent player in the domain of peacebuilding has entailed systematic efforts to build a new community of practice that would bring together the alliance and at least certain segments of the humanitarian world.

I treat practices, following Adler and Pouliot, as competent performances and socially meaningful patterns of action. A community of practice is “a configuration of a domain of knowledge that constitutes like-mindedness, a community of people that creates ‘the social fabric of learning’ and a shared practice that embodies the ‘knowledge the community develops, shares and maintains.”3 As scholars who work in this area have repeatedly argued, the activities carried out by communities of practice are grounded in background knowledge: practices rest on a stock of intersubjective background knowledge that is generally speaking practical, oriented towards competency and skill.4 While those taken for granted background assumptions enable members of a community to perpetuate a particular set of practices over time, significant change can occur when – usually in response to problems or crises which challenge existing background knowledge – some members of the community begin to push background knowledge into the foreground in

1   The emphasis in this paper is on efforts to create—and challenges of creating—a community that brings together NATO actors and members of the humanitarian community—but this can be seen as part of a broader project of re-articulating the relationships between NATO and a host of other actors involved in the field of security. 2  See for instance Adler 2008, Gheciu 2005; Williams 2009.  3   Adler and Pouliot 2011, 174   See in particular Pouliot 2008.

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an effort to examine what they have been doing, and potentially to explore the desirability of engaging in different types of practices.5

Security communities, as Adler has pointed out, are but one type of communities of practice. As the institutional expression of the Western security community, NATO has historically been able

to carry out a wide set of practices based on (socially constructed) background knowledge about “the way we do things” given “our” identity.6 In part, that knowledge has been grounded in the assumption that NATO had competencies and carried out activities that were clearly differentiated from the activities of other types of institutions present in the field of security. One set of actors widely perceived – both within and outside the Atlantic Alliance – as clearly different in terms of their identity, mandate, and types of practices they routinely performed was the humanitarian community. In IR parlance, the humanitarian community can be conceptualized as the community that has always prioritized human security at the expense of conventional (state-centric) definitions of security embraced by NATO, and historically dominant in the field of international security. As Janice Gross Stein has pointed out, “the modern humanitarian community constituted itself from its earliest days as a ‘community of practice’”.7 That community, currently consisting of “tens of thousands of NGOs and individuals,” defines itself around several fundamental principles: “humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary service, unity and universality.” 8

Crossing Boundaries in the Changing Domain of Peacebuilding

The neat distinction between the humanitarian community and the Atlantic Alliance, however, came under severe strain in the 1990s, following a series of transformations in the field of peacebuilding—and particularly the launch of complex peace-enforcement and post-conflict reconstruction missions.9 One of the implications of the growing complexity of peacebuilding operations was that actors with different identities and modus operandi were increasingly put in situations in which they were expected to systematically collaborate in the name of ensuring sustainable peacebuilding.10

Yet, it soon became clear that such systematic collaboration would be more difficult to achieve than many policy-makers had expected. Consider, for instance, the difficulties that plagued attempts at coordination between NATO and the humanitarian community

5   See especially Stein 2011. 6   I discuss this in Gheciu 2005.7   Stein 2011, 87.8   Stein 2011, 92.9   See Gheciu 2011.10   See in particular Paris and Sisk 2010.

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in post-conflict reconstruction efforts in Kosovo, following the establishment of the UN Interim Administration Mission in 1999.11 NATO’s discourse on Kosovo was based on the assumption that, by virtue of a) its unique material (particularly military) capabilities, and b) its knowledge, experience and skills acquired in previous peace-support operations, coupled with the vast knowledge possessed by its members in the area of protecting liberal democracy, NATO was in an uniquely privileged position to assume a key role in peacebuilding operations.12 In other words, NATO officials and leaders of key allied states repeatedly invoked the alliance’s material as well as cultural-symbolic capital (knowledge and expertise)13 in an effort to secure recognition–in the eyes of their own publics, the international community as well as the eyes of Kosovars–of NATO as a competent peacebuilder.

However, NATO’s involvement in humanitarian relief and reconstruction activities was greeted by many NGOs with suspicion and, in some cases, even open hostility. According to many of those organizations, the alliance’s involvement in direct assistance to civilians in reconstruction activities undermined the NGOs’ position, and made it virtually impossible to establish an impartial humanitarian space–which is seen by the NGO community as vital to the effective provision of assistance to civilians.14 Under those circumstances, it was not surprising that, despite some instances of successful collaboration between NATO and certain NGO representatives, the goal of systematic collaboration between the alliance and the humanitarian community was not achieved.15

The limitations and challenges of NATO – NGO coordination in the Balkans prompted the allies to argue that lessons would be learned, best practices would be developed and collaboration would occur in a smoother fashion in future missions. But did it? Evidence from NATO’s largest contemporary mission—in Afghanistan—suggests that, at least in the first years of that operation, coordination and cooperation between NATO and the humanitarian actors was limited and fraught with tension. In many instances, NGO representatives accused the alliance of a lack of willingness to engage in meaningful cooperation with civilian (including non-governmental) actors, and argued that the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was “trying to take over everything”.16 In the eyes of many NGOs active in Afghanistan, far from contributing to

11   See, e.g. Minear, van Baarda and Sommers 2000.12   Author’s interview with NATO senior official, Brussels, May 27, 2000.13   I use these terms in a Bourdieu-an sense, to refer to the military capabilities of the alliance (‘ma-terial capital’) as well as its authority grounded in perceived expertise, specialized skills and experi-ence (cultural-symbolic capital). For a broader discussion see Gheciu 2008. 14   Author’s communication with ICRC official, Oxford, September 2003.15   See Gheciu 2011 and Rollins 2001. 16   Author’s interviews with officials from OXFAM and Medicins sans Frontieres, December 15–18, 2007, London. See also Fox 2011. 

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sustainable peacebuilding ISAF activities often had adverse implications for development and reconstruction activities.17

New Questions about Old Assumptions

The above-mentioned failures or limitations of cooperation, coupled with the critiques articulated by NATO’s peacebuilding partners created a credibility problem for the alliance. The difficulty for NATO was that its often-repeated claims that it had the competence to perform peacebuilding operations in the complex, frequently fluid security environment of the 21st century were systematically contested by other participants in post-conflict reconstruction missions. That process of contestation threatened to destabilize NATO’s discourse about its ability to reinvent itself in the new century, and thus to make it more challenging for the alliance to secure the political support needed within allied and partner states in order for the alliance to avoid lapsing into irrelevance. To deal with those recurring contestations, allied officials had to shift away from the type of background assumptions that had underpinned peacebuilding practices conducted in the 1990s and early 2000s. They had to engage—and be seen to be engaging—in a more reflective mode, in which questions could be raised about previously taken-for-granted assumptions about the alliance’s expertise and skills in the domain of peacebuilding.

In other words, faced with the prospect of possible failure in its peacebuilding efforts, NATO officials started to advocate the creation of a new community of practice, which would bring together allied representatives and humanitarian actors , uniting them around a shared body of knowledge, a sense of trust, and joint everyday practices. The project to establish such a community of practice is grounded in assumptions that complex operations of today and tomorrow—in Afghanistan and elsewhere—require skills/knowledge/expertise that can only be secured through the participation and systematic cooperation of multiple civilian and military actors. It is also grounded in assumptions that, given the fluidity and unpredictability of the security field, much of this cooperation needs to take place with little prior planning. As Paul LaRose–Edwards has pointed out, NATO is developing “more of an understanding of the nature of civilian operations, and an enduring awareness that just-in-time working interactions will remain a consistent reality in crisis response. Success is premised upon key civil-military partners having the right attitudes and sufficiently common business practice to enable just-in-time interactions that minimize time requirements for collaboration and maximize the attainment of common objectives.”18

17    Author’s  interviews  with  representatives  of  OXFAM,  Save  the  Children  and  Médecins  Sans Frontières, summer 2007, London.18   Paul LaRose Edwards 2008, 30. This concern was echoed in the author’s interviews with three senior NATO officers involved in peacebuilding operations, summer 2011, London.

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In practice, this translated into an effort on the part of NATO to learn from its mistakes. In part, the project of learning new ways of doing things has involved efforts to forge new communities of practice with other actors, including members of the humanitarian community, in order to acquire new competencies from interactions with those actors, and thus respond to crises in a more efficient fashion. The commitment to transcend old ways of doing things, acquire new competencies and create new communities of practice with non-military actors, including NGOs, became particularly important in the strategic review of Afghanistan carried out by the US in 2009. This was reflected in various statements issued by then ISAF commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal19, and by the NATO Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. In Rasmussen’s words, “NATO’s experience over the past years, notably in Afghanistan, underscores that successful crisis management requires a new compact between all the different civilian and military actors...”20 Importantly, this has involved the re-articulation of the relationship between NATO and NGOs, so as “to improve the frequency and quality of the dialogue between NATO and the NGOs […] drawing from our common experience of Afghanistan and of other crisis areas.”21

Towards a New Community of Practice?

In an effort to build a new community of practice that includes humanitarian actors, NATO launched several initiatives in the past few years. A full exploration of those initiatives is impossible within this paper’s space constraints, but let us briefly examine a few of the recent programmes/projects launched by the alliance.

In recent years, several new programs were launched aimed at changing the ways in which civilians and military personnel preparing for deployment in Afghanistan are educated. Especially interesting is the growing emphasis on educating military and civilian actors (including NGO representatives) together22—for instance within the framework of multiple conferences and workshops--in an attempt to socialize them into shared norms and principles of cooperation, building trust prior to deployment, create anew ‘common sense’ understandings of reality and develop shared practical knowledge about how to operate in Afghanistan. Such practical knowledge is expected to enable military actors and members of the humanitarian community to tackle shared tasks in ways that are well understood by all the actors involved, and following procedures that are –if not uniform—at least not mutually incompatible.23

19   McChrystal 2009.20   Rasmussen 2010. 21   Ibid.22   Author’s interview with an ISAF official, September 7, 2011, Ottawa.23   Author’s  interviews with  two  senior NATO officials  involved  in organizing a  conference  for NGOs at the NATO HQ in November 2010 (interviews conducted  in Brussels, December 12–15, 2011). 

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Linked to this, NATO has also implemented a number of structural changes in the name of facilitating the socialization of a range of civilian actors and military personnel into a particular set of norms, principles and procedures of action in peacebuilding activities. For instance, under the umbrella of the Allied Command Transformation (ACT), the Joint Force Training Centre (JFTC) was set up to support training for NATO and Partner forces in an effort to improve joint and combined tactical interoperability, and more broadly to enhance NATO’s competence in contemporary operations. Over the past couple of years, the JFTC has placed special emphasis on training together soldiers and civilians prior to their deployment in Afghanistan. To take just one example, in June 2012 more than 550 soldiers and civilians from 22 NATO and Partnership for Peace nations took part in pre-deployment course for the next rotation of the ISAF Regional Command North members.24 Via a combination of academic lectures and exercises based on practical working situations, the training was aimed at creating effective teams, whose members knew and trusted one another, who knew how to work together, who had practised communication between different areas of ISAF as well as with non-ISAF actors (including humanitarian organizations), and who—presumably—would be able to support the Regional Commander in the decision-making process and in fulfilling his duties in Afghanistan.

At this stage, the question that arises is: did any of these initiatives and programs make any difference? Of course, these are still early days—not enough time has lapsed since the launch of the new programs to justify a definitive statement regarding their success or lack thereof. Nevertheless, preliminary assessments—primarily based on anecdotal evidence provided by military officers and civilians deployed in Afghanistan—suggest that this type of joint civilian/military training did have an impact in terms of reducing mistrust and facilitating day-to-day interactions across the military/civilian divide.

For instance, the civilian and military ‘students’ who participated in the JFTC courses, as well as PRT personnel who had the opportunity to interact with those graduates in Afghanistan have indicated that the bonds and shared knowledge acquired in the course of the JFTC training did make a difference in terms of enabling the alumni to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the Afghan environment even prior to their deployment, and making it easier for them to cooperate—on the basis of procedures learned prior to their deployment-- both with other ISAF actors and with non-ISAF individuals and institutions.25

Yet, in spite of these achievements, significant problems continue to plague the relationship between NATO and the humanitarian community, especially in Afghanistan. One of the key obstacles seems to be that the effort to (re)construct a community of practice that brings together NATO and NGO actors has destabilized prevailing

24   Interview with NATO officer involved in organizing the June course, July 2, London.25   Telephone interviews with two senior NATO officers, one NATO civilian official, and two rep-resentatives of international NGOs active in Afghanistan, May 2011 and July 2012.

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understandings regarding military and humanitarian identities and proper competencies, and have generated difficult debates on those issues both within the alliance and among humanitarian actors.

Within NATO, doubts continue to be expressed–in private, if not in public–by some allied officials about the wisdom of even trying to construct this new type of community of practices.26 These doubts and concerns are linked to broader debates about the extent to which NATO should be doing out-of-area peacebuilding at all. Thus, in spite of NATO’s public statements of support for the ISAF mission, among the allies there continue to be difficult questions about the proper future direction of the alliance.27 For instance, officials representing some of the newer (ex-communist) allies have repeatedly argued that NATO has already gone too far in the direction of global policing—particularly in a situation in which, as the 2008 war in Georgia and the recent Russian assertiveness demonstrate, “old” types of dangers have not disappeared. Representatives of this school of thought advocate a return to collective defence as the key competence of NATO, and claim that recent efforts to build a new community of practice that includes actors such as NGOs amount to a potentially dangerous turn away from the types of defence practices at which the alliance can excel, and which can truly protect the territories, populations and shared values of the allied states.28

Disagreements within NATO over the desirability of forging a closer relationship to NGOs have been paralleled by debates about identity and desirable competencies within the humanitarian community. As Janice Stein has explained, among NGOs a difficult dialogue started in the 1990s and became even more acute in recent years about the extent to which NGOs needed to rethink the meaning of ‘doing good.’29 As part of a process of rethinking their role and their competencies, some NGOs have started to work more closely with military actors like NATO. In Afghanistan, for instance, many NGOs–including a series of Afghan NGOs that provide crucial medical and educational services to poor Afghans–have come to work systematically with the alliance, and depend heavily on the funding provided by foreign donors and often channelled directly through PRTs.30 By contrast, other NGOs insist that they can only perform their proper roles and remain true to their humanitarian identity if they maintain a clear distance from NATO.31

In conclusion: although it is still too early to seek a definitive assessment of the impact of recent NATO initiatives, preliminary evidence suggests that, despite some successes, the

26    Interviews with NATO officers  involved  in peacebuilding operations, London, Brussels,  and Ottawa, 2009–2011.27   I discuss this, most recently, in Gheciu 2012.28   Author’s interview with senior officials from Poland and the Baltic states, summer 2011, London and Ottawa. 29   Stein 2011. 30   Ibid.31   Médecins Sans Frontières 2011, 14.

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project of constructing a new community of practice that includes humanitarian actors remains more challenging than official statements of the alliance would suggest. To a significant extent, difficulties in this area stem from the fact that community-building practices have triggered difficult debates and contestations regarding identity and suitable competencies both within the alliance and in the humanitarian community. This is not necessarily to say that the project is inherently doomed. From the point of view of NATO, if the allies decide that they do wish to be able to carry out complex peacebuilding missions in the future, they will likely have little choice but to continue efforts to build new communities of practice that transcend old institutional boundaries. But the evidence that we have so far suggests that if the alliance decides to pursue this goal it will need to go further than it has gone so far in questioning its background knowledge and established procedures, and in learning new ways of doing things. More broadly, there needs to be a recognition that community-building initiatives that aim to bring together NATO and NGO actors need to be addressed in the context of larger efforts to address fundamental questions about identity(and competencies associated with those identities), appropriate institutional roles and logics of action in the twenty-first century.

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References

Adler, Emanuel. 2008.“The Spread of Security Communities: Communities of Practice, Self-Restraint, and NATO’s Post-Cold War Transformation.” European Journal of International Relations 14(2): 195–230.

Adler, Emanuel and Vincent Pouliot, eds. 2011. International Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fox, Edward. 2011.“Preparing Civilians for Deployment to Civilian-Military Platforms in Combat Environments: The Evolution of Staffing and Training for the Civilian Mission in Afghanistan.” In Towards a Comprehensive Approach: Strategic and Operational Challenges, edited by Christopher Schnaubelt. NATO Defence College Forum Paper no.18.

Gheciu, Alexandra. 2005.NATO in the ‘New Europe’. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Gheciu, Alexandra. 2008. Securing Civilization? Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gheciu, Alexandra. 2011.“Divided Partners: The Challenges of Civil-Military Cooperation in Peacebuilding Operations.” Global Governance15 (1): 95–114.

Gheciu, Alexandra.2012. “ In Search of ‘Smart Defence’”. CIPS Policy Brief, University of Ottawa.

Gross Stein, Janice. 2011. “Background knowledge in the foreground: conversations about competent practice in ‘sacred space.’” In International Practices, edited by Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

LaRose-Edwards, Paul. 2008.“NATO and Militaries as Trusted Partners in Civil-Military Interaction.”The Pearson Papers 11 (1): 22–43.

McChrystal, Stanley. 2009. Initial United States Forces–Afghanistan (USFOR-A) Assessment. Memo to Secretary Gates.

Médecins Sans Frontières. 2011. Humanitarian Action: At Any Price? Paris: Annual Report.

Minear, Larry, Ted van Baarda and Marc Sommers. 2000.“NATO and Humanitarian Action in the Kosovo Crisis.”Occasional Paper, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University.

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Paris, Roland and Timothy D. Sisk, eds. 2009. The Dilemmas of Statebuilding: Confronting the Contradictions of Postwar Peace Operations. London: Routledge.

Pouliot, Vincent.2008. “The Logic of Practicality: A Theory of Practice of Security Communities.” International Organization 62: 257–288.

Rasmussen, Anders Fogh. 2010.“ NATO and NGOs.”In Voltaire Network, available at: www.voltairenet.org/a164724

Rollins, John W. 2001.“Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) in Crisis Response Operations: The Implications for NATO.”International Peacekeeping8 (1): 122–129.

William, Michael J. 2009. NATO, Security and Risk Management: From Kosovo to Kandahar. London and New York: Routledge.

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Journal of Regional Security (2012), 7:2, 163–186 © Belgrade Centre for Security Policy

Harnessing Serbian Civilian Capacity for Peace Support Operations: A Nascent Community?

MARKO SAVKOVIC*Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, Serbia

JOHN KARLSRUDNorwegian Institute for International Affairs, Norway

Abstract: The article will explore the possible emergence of a civilian capacity community in Serbia comprised of Serbian policymakers, researchers and practitioners who are interested in peace support operations and willing to deploy Serbian experts through multilateral organizations such as the European Union, United Nations and the Organization of Security and Co-operation in Europe. Having recently undergone a security sector reform, Serbia can offer to share relevant experience and expertise with these organizations through secondment or direct hire, in order to support the countries experiencing complex crises or those that are emerging from conflict. Serbian expertise can serve to soften some of the criticism leveled against peace support operations and provide relevant expertise to those in the field.

Keywords: Civilian capacity; peacekeeping; peace support operations; Serbia; community of practice

Introduction

The article aims to bridge the existing gap between theory and practice of Serbia’s contribution of civilian capacities1to the peacebuilding process and provide policy-oriented recommendations to the emerging community of scholars and practitioners who are willing to become involved in this area. As practice of civilian contributions to peace support operations is underdeveloped in the entire area of Western Balkans, the same recommendations may be taken forward by the neighboring countries as well.

With the development of peace support operations, including the increased focus on peacebuilding tasks, the role of civilians has shifted from a peripheral support role to the heart of contemporary peace support operations.2 However, peacekeeping and peacebuilding efforts have come under fire during the last decade for being a neo-colonialist

1   For the purpose of this article, civilian capacities will be defined as civilian expertise in peace sup-port operations, including the police. 2   Bellamy, Williams and Griffin 2010. * marko.savkovic@bezbednost.org

Original scientific paper Received: 29 august 2012 / Accepted: 19 November 2012

UDK: 327.56::351.88(497.11) ; 355.357(=163.41) / DOI: 10.11643/issn.2217-995X122SPS23

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enterprise and not understanding and taking into account the local circumstances.3 There is a growing number of critical studies that argue in favor of the importance of external actors being more context-sensitive and supportive of local ownership.4 Concurrently, civilian capacity reform initiatives in the UN have emphasized the need to come up with more contextualized solutions for the use of capacities from post-conflict countries with relevant experience.5 There is thus a growing recognition among scholars and practitioners of the knowledge that countries with recent experience in conflict, such as Serbia, possess and are able to share.6

With the provision of a military hospital to the UN Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad (MINURCAT), deployment of Serbian Armed Forces (SAF) to Cyprus, continuous deployment of Serbian special purpose police unit to the UN Police contingent in Haiti, and the 2011 Contribution Plan,7 Serbia has stepped up its engagement in peace support operations – mostly those led by the UN – during the last few years. Since 2011, key policymakers have suggested a possible change of policy, strengthening the civilian contribution to peace support operations, and underscoring the importance of sharing the experiences that Serbia had gained in the security sector, jurisdictional and institutional reform. Sending civilian capacities to peace operations was explicitly mentioned for the first time at a workshop hosted by the Ministry of Defense in November 2011.8 The ambition was hinted at again in December 2011 by the then State Secretary Zoran Jeftic.9 For the time being, it consists of a limited form of contribution, training and deploying civil-military cooperation –or CIMIC – teams, and is viewed as a potentially “suitable export product”10 to be sent to peace support operations. It should be noted that CIMIC-teams would represent an outlier in terms of civilian capacities, as their function is primarily a military one.

3   Chandler 2006; Autesserre 2010.4   Pouligny 2006.5   Guéhenno et al. 2011.6   De Coning, Karlsrud, and Breidlid (Forthcoming).7   Parliament decisions regulating the participation of Serbian personnel are adopted under the title “Plan of Using Serbian Armed Forces and Other Forces of Defense in Multilateral Operations”. We will use “Contribution Plan” as a short and more precise term. 8    The  awareness-raising  workshop  for  senior  decision-makers  on  the  need  for  participation  of civilian personnel in peace support operations (PSOs), hosted by Ministry of Defense, Belgrade, 2–3 November 2011. Participants from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Interior, Police Di-rectorate, and other relevant ministries and departments attended.. A Report from the workshop in Serbian language is available at http://www.mod.gov.rs/novi_lat.php?action=fullnews&id=39559    Jeftic attended the opening of  the exhibition “Through Australian Eyes” on Australian civilian work in Afghanistan. He used the opportunity to state that “Peace operations in Serbia are primarily observed through the role played by the military. However, the role of civilians may be even more important. Australian experiences may help us assess the capacities of Serbia and the eventual partici-pation of our experts in peace support operations”. See: Ministarstvo odbrane Republike Srbije 2012. 10   Jeftić 2009, 108.

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Individuals who undergo training in order to be deployed to peace operations form the core of the nascent civilian capacity community. Policymakers and researchers occupied with the question of supporting and improving peace support operations also represent a part of this community. Using the theoretical framework of Djelic and Quack, we will take a closer look at how communities develop and how they can exert influence on national and transnational governance.11 Transnational communities are “social groups emerging from mutual interaction across national boundaries, oriented around a common project or “imagined” identity.”12 Methodologically, in order to examine the development of a transnational community on civilian capacity in peace support operations, we will examine the competent practices and performance in this field. In a process reminiscent to training and deploying military capacities, individuals who are working in various ways with peace operations are “bound by a shared interest in learning and applying a common practice.”13 We understand this common practice as “competent performance” which may present “the dynamic material and ideational process that enables structures to be stable or to evolve – and agents to reproduce or transform structures”.14 Therefore, explaining this process requires us to “place practices in the driver’s seat.”15 What are, then, the practices with regards to civilian capacity in peace operations in Serbia and the region today?

To fill the gap pointed out by the peacebuilding critique literature, the article will argue that Serbia may be able to provide more relevant experience to peace support operations precisely because of its experience with conflict; and that due to specific obstacles this had not been the case so far. The article will highlight the challenges involved in this endeavor, as well as some of the potential benefits, and lastly, how the provision of civilian capacities by countries such as Serbia can address some of the criticism leveled at liberal peacebuilding.

The article will proceed in five parts. First, we will present a general introduction to the development and current status of civilian capacities in peace operations. Then we will outline certain theories on communities, and the reach and explanatory use applied to civilian capacities for peace support operations in Serbia. We will continue by discussing its relative relevance to the discourse on peace support operations in Serbia and the Western Balkans.

11   Djelic and Quack 2011, 73–109.12   Ibid, 75. 13   Adler 2005, 15.14   Adler and Pouliot 2011, 4.15   Adler 2008, 196.

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Civilian Capacities in Peace Support Operations

Since the end of the Cold War, civilians have gone from peripheral to playing a central role in peacekeeping operations. This change has come about as mandates shifted from monitoring military ceasefires to supporting the implementation of comprehensive peace agreements, and rebuilding state institutions in countries ravaged by wars. 20,647 civilians are now deployed in peacekeeping operations, representing 17.5 per cent of the 118,100 UN peacekeepers currently deployed to 16 peacekeeping missions.16 In addition, the UN’s 13 special political and peacebuilding missions have also taken on an increasingly important role, currently deploying further 4,410 personnel, 3,963 of which are civilians.17

Civilians perform a wide range of tasks in multilateral deployments to conflict and post-conflict zones. Civilian components in UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations include, inter alia, political officers, civilian affairs officers supporting local level administrations, human rights officers, gender officers, and officers working on judiciary and security sector reforms. In EU Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) operations, civilians also play an increasing role, i.e. deploying judges and other civilian staff to the EULEX in Kosovo, police officers to Afghanistan and security sector reform specialists to the Democratic Republic of Congo.18 The EU now has more than 20 different ongoing operations,19 and more than 4,000 seconded and contracted experts were deployed in 2010, of which 191 were seconded from 3rd party states.20 Serbia signed a Framework Agreement on the participation in EU crisis management operations on 26 May 2011,21 and is now able to provide not only military and police capabilities, but civilian experts to EU CSDP missions as well. In a recent discussion on the role of civilian CSDP capabilities, the Council of the European Union stressed the need “to strengthen cooperation with third countries”22 such as Serbia. In times of financial austerity, the EU has also seen the need and potential for better integration of civilian and military capabilities, e.g. setting up a common pool of security sector reform experts,23 in which Serbian experts would be eligible to participate.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) also deploys a significant number of police and civilian experts in a wide range of fields including arms control, border management, education, elections, human rights, good governance, gender equality, minority rights and so forth. The majority of experts are seconded from member states, while others are contracted individually. However, experts of Serbian

16   UN DPKO 2012. 17   UN DPA 2012.18   European Union External Action Service 2012. 19   European Union 2012.20   European Union 2011.21   The Delegation of the European Union to the Republic of Serbia 2012.22   Council of the European Union 2011.23   European Union External Action Service 2012.

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nationality have been contracted directly more often than they were seconded to OSCE field missions.24 Information referring to the secondment of MFA personnel that is available on the Internet is clearly outdated.25

This shows that there is a demand for civilian expertise in a wide range of areas and through several mechanisms, either seconded to multilateral organizations, or hired directly by them.. Some countries such as Norway have established rosters of available experts. The Norwegian government seconds some of the staff through in-house mechanisms of its various ministries, but most secondments are handled by semi-autonomous institutions. The NORCAP–roster, managed by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), a nongovernmental organization, is the largest in Norway and seconds more than 180 persons totaling 1500 man-months per year.26 The NORDEM–roster, managed by the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, seconds 80 persons totaling 300 man-months per year.27

Community in Social Sciences

Community is a concept that is oft-used in the social sciences to mark groups that are joined by a common project. Communities have traditionally been formed within the states, but can also be formed across them, and in this paper we will call these the ‘transnational communities’.28 In the extant literature, a number of authors have pointed to the role of communities such as ‘transnational advocacy networks’29 and ‘policy networks’30 impact on decision-making at national and international levels. Haas and others have examined the role of ‘epistemic communities’ in transnational governance.31 However, the focus on technical expertise limits the ability of this theory to grasp how policymakers and other actors who are not necessarily experts on a topic can also wield influence and act as part of a transnational community. According to Djelic and Quack, transnational communities are “actively constructed and shaped by people with multiple group affiliations interacting across societal and national borders.”32 The heterogeneity displayed among the actors can

24   One expert who was seconded by the Serbian MFA to OSCE Mission to Georgia, having gained significant experience in working with civil sector in Serbia is Zarko Petrovic, ISAC Fund Research Director.25   Serbia Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2012.26   Norwegian Refugee Council 2012. NRC has MoUs or Letters of Assist with 17 different UN agencies. The NORCAP–roster is also open to nationals from countries other than Norway, predomi-nantly from the Global South.27   NORDEM 2012. In addition, there are several smaller rosters and secondment mechanisms for e.g. humanitarian, security sector and judicial reform expertise.28   Djelic and Quack 2011, 75. 29   Keck and Sikkink 1998.30   Stone 2008.31   Haas 1992.32   Djelic and Quack 2011, 75.

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bring challenges when a group is creating a common agenda for transnational governance reform, but it can also be counted as strength, as it allows for more pragmatic approaches, cutting across “entrenched perceptions and interests.”33

Djelic and Quack argue that transnational communities represent background processes of limited liability. Limited liability is originally a legal concept, meaning that there is a limit to the degree to which a person would be financially liable in a given venture.34 A member of a transnational community has a similar limited engagement in advancing a certain issue. International communities are dynamic processes in which members are engaged for shorter or longer periods and with varying degrees of engagement. Participants also come from various backgrounds, finding a common issue to rally around, such as “common interests, projects, values, or constructed identities.”35 Djelic and Quack identify six roles that transnational communities can play in processes of cross-border governance:

First, transnational communities contribute to the definition and framing of governance issues. Second, transnational communities mobilize collective action. Third, they help delineate public arenas. Fourth, they have an impact on preference transformation. Fifth, they are instrumental in the process of rule-setting. Sixth and finally, they can play a role when it comes to sanctioning and control.36

Transnational communities are able to identify and structure the debate on a particular issue, and thus frame the debate.37 This is a key role, as it also frames the participation of actors who are not necessarily part of the community. The next step would be to define common goals and generate the requisite strategies and resources to reach them. Thirdly, an international community can, itself, act as an arena for the debate around the issue area, thus managing the debate, but also managing the conflict around key concepts and challenges, while also organizing consultations, expert advice and other compromise mechanisms. In this way, transnational communities are fostering preference transformation among some or all of their members through mutual learning, peer pressure, and soft coercion. From this process, coordination of policies and rules will start to emerge along with the establishment of joint principles and doctrines. Finally, the community will try to ensure the compliance with the established principles through monitoring, informal sanctioning, peer pressure and penalization mechanisms.

According to Djelic and Quack, transnational communities can be built bottom-up, progressively and often slowly around issues of common concern across borders, or

33   Ibid, 96.34   Ibid, 77.35   Ibid, 86.36   Ibid, 93.37   Ibid, 93–98.

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top-down, focused around “problems of global concern.”38 Bottom-up processes involve mutual learning and the slow adoption of common goals as well as the “acceptance of a fair degree of remaining heterogeneity.”39 We will now turn to Serbia and the wider region to see whether or not the seeds of a national community on civilian capacity for peace support operations may be found therein.

A Serbian Civilian Capacity Community?

To date, Serbian participation in peace support operations has been focused on the participation of the military and the police. However, applying the concept of communities to the field of civilian capacities in Serbia, we are noticing a growing awareness and recognition of the fact that civilian capacities represent an important constituent factor in supporting peace support operations. The first workshop concerned with the raising of awareness regarding the importance of civilian capacities in peace support operations was held in Belgrade on 2-3 November 2011. It was attended by government officials from the MFA, MoD, Ministry of the Interior, Police as well as other ministries. State Secretary Tanja Miscevic noted that “we are starting something that is completely new to Serbia, something that represents a wider partnership with international community”.40 She added that Serbia, “having gone through 11 years of institution-building at home […] has created capacities […] which may be offered and used in establishing a system of training and deploying civilians in peace operations [… and that the] list of reform processes that can and should be presented to others does not only refer to the defense reform, but also intelligence, police and justice reform”.41

The new Government of Serbia has only been in place for a few months, and it appears that it has taken a more hostile stance towards NATO than the government that preceded it. If there is to be a focus on civilian capacities, it is more likely to occur in the context of UN, EU and OSCE peace operations. Nevertheless, the impetus for considering development and deployment of civilian capacities has come precisely from Serbia’s cooperation with NATO, within the Partnership for Peace (PfP) Program.

The 2011-2012 Individual Partnership Program (IPP) mentions contribution by civilian capacities to peace operations as one of the “partnership goals“; for this reason, Serbia has promised to establish, select and train its own “functional specialists”.42 A “functional specialist” (within the CIMIC discourse) may be any individual – enlisted, on reserve, or

38   Haas 1992, 1.39   Djelic and Quack 2011, 89.40   Awareness-raising workshop for senior decision-makers on the need for participation of civilian personnel in peace support operations (PSOs).41   Ibid.42   It is, however, as stated by an interviewee, “only a grade 3 (a relatively low priority) goal“. Source: Interview with MoD official, 16 July 2012. 

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a civil servant – possessing specific civilian expertise that can be utilized in the context of a military operation. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, functional specialists within SFOR were organized into teams specialized in specific areas (i.e. infrastructure). These teams were supposed to assist the governmental institutions and NGOs in their efforts, but also to transfer knowledge.43

MoD and MoI employees have attended numerous training programs, at home and abroad. Since 2008, nine Serbian civilians have participated in the training courses organized at the German Center for International Peace Operations (ZIF): four have attended the Field Security Training (two in 2008, one in 2009 and one in 2011), four the Core Course Peace Operations (three in 2011 and one in 2012), and finally, one has attended the Short Term Election Observation Course.44

Bilateral Plans of Military Cooperation, signed annually by the Serbian MoD and other countries’ respective ministries, entail provisions regarding different types of training45 for participation in peace operations. More recently, such plans were signed with Austria (February 2012), Denmark (February 2012), Norway (March 2012), Poland (May 2012), Czech Republic (May 2012) and Croatia (June 2012). Since the contents of these plans have not been posted online, it is difficult to understand exactly what kind of training will be undertaken. Denmark, for instance, plans to assist Serbia in sending MoD and SAF personnel to the Baltic Defense College.46 This institution has, since 2001, organized the “Civil Servants Course”, with the aim “to improve the skills of the students as policy advisors and to deepen the understanding of their role as civil servants in defense and security community”. The 2012 edition of the Civil Servants Course will give special attention to “building skills and knowledge necessary for contributing to the international operations, both at the strategic and operational levels”.47 According to the syllabus, one of learning outcomes for attending civil servants will be to “understand the contemporary operational environment”, while one learning objective falling under this specific outcome is “to interpret the capabilities and responses of joint forces in operations other than war/peace support operations”.48 The aim of one of the planning exercises is to “improve understanding of concepts and procedures in planning Combined Joint Peace Support

43   NATO 2000. 44   Communication with Head of Training, ZIF. [Email]. 10 August and 5 September 2012. Most of these were already hired in OSCE missions. A detailed overview of ZIF courses is available at http://archiv.zif-berlin.org/fileadmin/uploads/training/dokumente/ZIF_Course_Overview_2012.pdf.  A substantial number of  individuals  from  the Former Republic of Macedonia  and Croatia have also participated in trainings at ZIF.45   MoD also uses the euphemism „exchange of experiences“, which amounts to training.46   Ekapija 2012. 47   Baltic Defense College 2012.48   Baltic Defense College 2011, 8.

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Operation at the operational level”.49 However, it remains unknown how many servicemen and civil servants – if any – will be sent to this Estonia-based college.

The MoD has also decided to begin the development of two advanced distributed learning (ADL) courses designed to “educate applicants to participate in peacekeeping operations mandated by the United Nations”. To this end, a group of Serbian experts attended a course at the Norwegian Defense International Centre (NODEFIC) in March 2012.50 Once completed, e-courses should be made available via the MoD’s ADL portal to military and civilian personnel working in the defense system.

Meanwhile, out of six courses planned by the SAF Center for Peacekeeping Operations (CPO) in 2012, two are nominally open to civilian experts working in any of the Government ministries and agencies. In April 2012, CPO has organized the “Basic Course for Participation in Multilateral Operations”, while it is currently preparing the “Law of Armed Conflicts Course”, scheduled for October.51 CPO also organizes training exercises attended by servicemen and civil servants. In June 2011, it has hosted the “CARANA” exercise, with the stated goal of “training military, civilian and MoI personnel in disarmament, demining, force protection and protection of population”.52 Primarily intended for students of the SAF General Staff Course, the exercise was attended by representatives of the MoI and the Gendarmerie – Ministry of Interior’s heavily militarized, special purpose, battalion size unit. However, they were not invited to participate actively, but only as observers.53 It is encouraging, however, that lecturers and professors working at the Military Academy of the SAF have underwent ‘practical training’ so that they could, given reasonable time, organize identical or similar exercises themselves. Experts from Netherlands, Germany, Norway and the UK were invited as trainers.54 The Nordic Coordinated Arrangement for Military Peace Support (NORDCAPS)55 was also present, co-organizing two tactical-level courses on CIMIC with the CPO.

It is clear that the bulk of the training provided in Serbia is intended primarily for military personnel. Civilian capacities are discussed almost exclusively in the context of CIMIC, and are included primarily in order to further military goals. This may very well be one of the reasons why some of our respondents argued that there was still no community

49   Ibid, 13.50   Ministry of Defense ADL 2012.51   Vojska Srbije – Centar za mirovne operacije 2012.52   Ministarstvo odbrane Republike Srbije 2011.53   Ibid.54   Ibid.55   NORDCAPS “aimed at strengthening and expanding the existing Nordic co-operation in the field of military peace support operations, focusing on the foreseen requirements for political as well as military timely consultations and co-ordination”. It was guided by a Steering Group “of Director General or Deputy Permanent Secretary of State for Defense level”. As part of long standing Nordic Defense Cooperation (NORDEFCO), NORDCAPS activities were concluded by July 2010. 

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interested in civilian capacities, and that those who were interested in this issue were “few and far between.”56 The scope and purpose of the training has since 200157 been shaped and directed by the SAF. The General Staff (GS) J-9 (CIMIC) Department has been tasked with laying the foundation for the deployment of civilian capacities. After all, CIMIC is concerned with same set of issues – internally displaced persons, damaged infrastructure, non-existent basic services, absence of the rule of law, and a great number of actors rarely working in concert.58

The ‘case of Serbia’ is somewhat specific not only because the MFA has been absent from the process, but also because the MoD does not have a department corresponding to GS’s J-9; “it’s all left to the uniforms.”59 With almost a decade of peacekeeping practice under its belt, Serbia should finally reconsider the role played by the MFA; especially in light of the fact that this Ministry is leading the process in many countries, deciding what to fund and where, and providing functional specialists.60

The head of the J-9, Colonel Pesic, explained that the principal motivation behind the development of CIMIC within the defense system was “to become interoperable with modern armies”; and that this function was “not set up in order to resolve issues and problems of civilian population, but to help commanding officers in their decision making; and finally, to execute mission tasks within a civilian environment with minimal engagement of military capacities for solving civilian problems.”61 All this is in line with the NATO doctrine proscribed by its „Military Policy on Civil-Military Cooperation”. The shortfall of such an approach is that civilian capacities are being considered only within the context of deploying CIMIC teams.

With its 2012 Action Plan, the J-9 Department has aimed to “inform different state institutions and train potential candidates for CIMIC specialists”, while hoping to reach “other […] representatives of defense system, […] individuals outside of the system, who may later be called to deployment if such need arises.”62 The Department has produced a “Doctrine of Civil-Military Cooperation” and is preparing the “Rules for Civil-Military Cooperation”, with similar regulations adopted by Canadian, Japanese and Austrian armed forces taken as models.63

56   Interview with MoD official, 16 July 2012.57   Since the establishment of the CPO and its Training Unit.58   Jeftić 2009, 108.59   Interview with a Minister-Counselor working in MFA’s Multilateral Cooperation Sector. 5 May 2011.60   Jeftić 2009, 108-109.61   Vojska Srbije 2011.62   Vojska Srbije 2011.63   Ibid.

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According to one of our respondents, it is expected to have its functional specialists selected and trained by 2014. However, in the MoD’s operationalization of the Partnership Implementation Plan there is no reference to whether this will happen by 1 January or 31 December 2014.64 It is also interesting to gain a glimpse of what the MoD and the SAF perceive as Serbia’s niche capability: provision of humanitarian assistance; expertise in “culture”; and “languages”.65 At best, the training might commence sometime in 2013.66 Prior to this, a new bylaw regulating civilian contribution to peace support operations must be adopted in the National Assembly. The bylaw in question will regulate “everything… from conditions, procedures, means, training, incentives, to benefits for civilians willing to participate”67, and is to be structured in accordance with a similar bylaw adopted in Slovenia.

The first challenge the J-9 Department will face will be to define their future civilian experts. In our paper we are confronted with the same dilemma: the need to identify members of a nascent community on civilian capacity for peace support operations. To our understanding, the community should include policy makers from member states and from international organizations; practitioners in the field, particularly mid-level professionals working in ministries and agencies involved with the planning and executing one nation’s contribution to peace operations; members of the wider research community, including journalists, independent commentators and analysts; as well as members of civil society organizations, think-tanks and research institutes who are working on this topic.

If we view our “nascent community” from the standpoint of Djelic and Quack’s concept, we can note several issues. According to Djelic and Quack, the common identity of our nascent community could be constructed either bottom-up or top-down. The empirical material gathered to date seems to indicate a combination of these. Internationally, there is already a transnational community dealing with these issues, the UN having identified the topic as one of the key areas of reform. As we have discussed, other international organizations and member states are also working on this issue. In Serbia, donors have supported trainings and awareness-raising, and national authorities have been implementing international standards and policy. Bottom-up impetus is being generated by Serbian citizens who have participated in trainings and are doing research on the topic. However, many of the opinion makers we have encountered, working within their respective administrations, found little support for what they saw as an effort to follow contemporary trends in armed forces reform.68 In the post-conflict context of Western Balkans, they had to initiate and run two processes simultaneously: disseminate knowledge among the lower ranks; and, re-establish ties broken by the war. To some extent, the latter process was aided by common socialization. Officers who took charge of international

64   Interview with MoD official, July 16, 2012.65   Ibid.66   Ibid.67   Ibid.68   Interview of an Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina Brigadier, 14 December 2011.

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military cooperation in early 2000s went to same military schools, underwent the same training, and moved up the ladder in more or less the same way.

If there is one significant goal or project our community could be “structured around”69, then it is the need to “modernize armed forces” and “align them with NATO standards”. For policy and decision makers from countries that are in transition towards becoming consolidated democracies, participation in peace support operations presents, all in one, (a) the impetus, (b) a shortcut and (c) a formative experience in the (democratic) reform and modernization of armed forces. It presents an impetus since it offers a promise of tangible foreign policy benefits; and it is both a shortcut and formative experience because it raises important issues of interoperability.70 What stays with individuals who return from operations, ideally, is a sense of “shared values, knowledge and skills”.71 In terms of our analytical framework, we see the combination of peer pressure by other member states and international organizations, and the individual incentives creating both push- and pull-factors for the strengthening of a civilian capacity community in Serbia.

As the transnational civilian capacity community already exists, a Serbian community needs to sustain no formal organization.72 It is not entirely a “virtual”73 community. Its members meet at regional forums, there are structured mechanisms of cooperation on ministerial or General Staff level, such as SEDM or SEEBRIG initiatives; the training events organized by RACVIAC Centre for Security Cooperation, for instance, present a good example of this. Also notable is the practice of Peace Support Operations Training Centre (PSO TC).

Janowitz’s “limited liability” concept implies only a “certain level of personal engagement” with a certain community, not achieving an “unshakable collective identity”.74 This is mostly true for the Serbian civilian capacity community, where members would have to rationalize their commitment, given that “membership” in other communities may prove to be more rewarding; or simply because they are positioned higher on the list of policy priorities. Also, potential member of the community would hardly be able to associate, or dissociate freely from different communities, precisely because he or she must act within a given policy framework. This would go against the proposition that “in a highly mobile society, people may participate extensively in local institutions and develop community attachments, yet be prepared to leave those communities if local conditions fail to satisfy their immediate needs or aspirations.”75

69   Djelic and Quack 2011, 87.70   Savkovic and Milosevic 2011, 22.71   Djelic and Quack 2011, 87.72   Djelic and Quack 2011, 75.73   Ibid, 87.74   Ibid, 76.75   Kasarda and Janowitz 1974, 329.

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Again, according to Janowitz and Suttles, community could survive with a small minority of “active custodians”, while the rest of the membership would remain connected “in a more passive manner”76. In the case of a Serbian civilian capacity community, this depends on just how long the opinion makers would be able to endure internal power struggles within their respective administrations. The other distinction made by Janowitz – between the elite nucleus and the elite cadre – is hardly applicable in our case; not only can the nucleus members be imposed by foreign (international) actors and donors, and have little or no legitimacy within the ranks; the cadre is also always in fluctuation, looking for a new secondment or promotion.

As for potential roles the Serbian community might play operationally, first, at the time of their deployment, servicemen and women as well as police officers were mid-level professionals, staff officers, or police inspectors at best. As we have learned from our conversations with MoD and MoI personnel, experience gained abroad has done little for their advancement through the ranks.77 These individuals do take part in drafting strategic documents and action plans for their implementation, since they are the only ones who possess expert knowledge. However, they are not that influential in regard to prioritization of certain issues. That role, which carries more political weight, is played by a group of officials close to the Minister’s cabinet who select problems from a list compiled by experts working in the ministries. One process through which we may understand how this works is the Serbia-NATO Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP).78 Practitioners’ input may therefore be held in high regard yet have little influence on the process as a whole. And this influence is instrumental in changing the ruling elites’ preferences.

“Collective action” may be possible if what was achieved in PSO could receive greater public recognition, leading to a community where there are more actors involved; such as media personalities or aspiring politicians. This “coalition building” may not be an easy feat to accomplish. First, in their access to other stakeholders, the above mentioned mid-level professionals are restrained by tight internal rules regulating public appearances and communication with other actors in the policy process.79 Second, Serbia lacks skilled

76   Suttles 1972, 9.77   Good result on half-year’s physical may contribute more to one officers’ scorecard than spend-ing six months in Lebanon. 78    Available  at  http://www.mfa.gov.rs/Srpski/spopol/Prioriteti/prezentacioni_dokument(PzM).pdf79   Article 14a of the 2007 Law on Serbian Armed Forces, incorporated in October 2009, explicitly prohibits servicemen and women from ”taking part in activities of associations which have follow-ing goals: reform of defense system and Serbian armed forces, alignment with standards and rules of the European Union, creation of the Strategy of Defense and Doctrine of the Serbian Armed Forces (as documents) which decide on composition (and) organization of the Serbian Armed Forces; their operational and functional capability; armaments and military equipment; command and manage-ment of the defense system; participation in multilateral operations (sic!) and internal relations in the Serbian Armed Forces”. BCSP researchers and colleagues from different NGOs have criticized this article repeatedly, but to no result. 

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journalists who are trained in following different security policies (deployments to PSO being one of them). More importantly, these individuals lack dedication; for many of them, issues surrounding participation in PSO are only used in the context of a wider argument, say, pro et contra Serbia’s deeper cooperation with NATO. Same can be said for young, aspiring politicians. In a recent meeting with the representatives of youth movements, active on behalf of Serbia’s parliamentary parties, BCSP researchers were surprised to find just how low, in terms of policy priorities, security cooperation has fallen.80 Most influential political commentators (called analysts, analitičari by the Serbian media) are shallow in their understanding of the contribution’s scope and purpose; and interpret it in line with their preferred political options.

With doubtful chances for collective action, “delineating public arenas” seems improbable. However, this is precisely where further action coming from non-governmental actors is necessary. With the deployment of Serbia’s first company-sized unit to Lebanon expected in September,81 and the new minister outlying his defense priorities82, there is an opening for a more focused discussion on the contribution that Serbia is making to peace support operations, including their civilian dimensions.

The influence of the civilian capacity community grows as we turn to roles “5” and “6”: since relevant capacity can be found nowhere else, there is no competition with regard to rule setting, sanctioning and control, while external frameworks are readily imported. The IPAP framework we have mentioned is moving forward by meeting different priorities. For instance, one such priority stipulates that Serbia defines the framework for deploying civilian experts. General Staff Department for CIMIC is tasked with providing information containing basic requirements of such process and with drafting secondary legislation that would, eventually, regulate all issues concerning the deployment of civilians. In performing this role, General Staff’s Department for Civil-Military Cooperation (J-9) faces no competition and acts as the facilitator of foreign best practices. With deployment characterized as a highly technical process, activities which are sanctioned by these rules will not be questioned by political elites.

Other issues are of more practical nature. With the new Government of Serbia formed in July 2012, it will likely take new leadership “from three to six months to get a hold on what has been done so far.”83 In regard to training, the course outline and syllabus are still in the works and many difficulties are yet expected to arise. As our respondent had

80   Belgrade Centre for Security Policy 2012.81   Politika 2012. 82   In his first month as Minister of Defense, Aleksandar Vučić seems to has invested more effort in his other position – ”First Vice-President of the Government in charge of defense, security and fight against corruption and organized crime”. 83   Interview with the MOD official, July 16, 2012.

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noted, “humanitarian assistance in NATO understanding stands for much more than we in Serbia think”.84

Several important decisions have to be made; first and foremost, the exact model of engagement. Should Serbia simply include civilian capacities in its “stand-by” commitment, in accordance with the UN practice? Or should it opt for some kind of “active reserve” that would complement the available military personnel? No final decision has been made. The stand-by system, however, with a number of selected individuals under contract seems more plausible.85 It is here that the issue of hiring people outside the government system will have to be resolved. Only in Italy, over 200 individuals are directly hired as functional specialists, and many of them were deployed.

Once the new Government begins to decide on further engagements, financing will have to be addressed as well. So far, Serbia has financed its contribution to international peacekeeping efforts rather traditionally, from the MoD and MoI’s annual budget. This allows for little flexibility in case of unexpected circumstances, and provides no insight into how civilian experts on secondment will be paid. In Hungary, there are two sources of financing of all CIMIC-related projects: one is “military”, where part of the funds is provided from the MoD’s budget, another is the MFA’s budget; while yet another, called “civilian“, is provided jointly by the MFA and the government’s humanitarian institutions - organizations (such as National Red Cross).86

Serbia and the Transnational Civilian Capacity Community

Continuously present in Afghanistan and Kosovo, Croatia has been the one country in the region that has acquired the most experience in deploying civilian capacities. Also, it was the first country to encounter some of the difficulties awaiting its neighbors in relation to planning and implementing civilian contribution.

Since 2005, a senior MFA official (equivalent to Minister-Counselor) has performed the role of Deputy Head for Civil Affairs in German-led Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), situated in Feyzabad. He was appointed to the same position for the second time in 2010. The time spent in one of the PRTs is important, since they may well represent the “most sophisticated and important way of implementing CIMIC in peace operations”.87 As a second Croatian civilian official deployed to ISAF, Ivan Velimir Starčević remains an

84   Interview with the MOD official, July 16, 2012.85   Ibid. Again in his view, concept of active reserve will be difficult to implement, since private businesses will not be ready to allow their employees to leave without significant compensation being paid.86   Jeftić 2009, 115.87   Jeftic 2009, 112.

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important opinion maker, region-wise, in debates on contemporary engagement.88Croatia has also been an active contributor to EULEX – the EU rule of law mission in Kosovo – as the first and so far only country in the Western Balkans to send judges and prosecutors.

Including civilians in PSO was highlighted by Foreign and European Affairs Minister Vesna Pusic as one of Croatia’s foreign policy priorities. For this reason Croatia has joined the United Nations’ CAPMATCH initiative –a “self-service online platform [...] whose purpose is to better match the demand and supply of specialized civilian capacities for countries emerging from conflict”89 .In May 2012, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Civilian Capacities, Sarah Cliffe, visited Croatia and met with Minister Pusic.

According to Mr. Starcevic, the Croatian Government is considering seconding civilians to PSOs from e.g. the business sector and civil society. Yet in doing so it has encountered problems similar to those of Serbia. First, the existing legal framework has to be amended; and second, a ‘pool of experts’ must be created. The latter issue could be properly addressed by the Government adopting a Regulation in order to create a database of available experts.90 Starcevic argues that any country willing to deploy civilians should first make an assessment of what her niche capabilities are. With such an assessment under way, Croatia is planning to focus its civilian contribution on the areas of education, health and empowerment of women and girls.91

This country is also considering ways to improve the process of planning its contribution to international peacekeeping. At the moment, each ministry decides for itself when sending people abroad, provided that it has received the Government’s approval. This issue should also be resolved by specific Government Regulation, with the prevailing opinion being that the central role should be played by Croatia’s Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs.

Finally, in terms of financing its contribution, Croatia is moving closer to creating a dedicated development agency based in the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs. It is important to note that in these four processes – drafting of new legislation; creation of databases; assessment of niche capabilities; and lastly, financing – civil society organizations are welcome to take part; according to Starcevic.92

88   A simple Google search shows Mr. Starčević being perhaps the most prolific presenter in re-gional fora regarding PSO; and with his Ph.D. “Peace Operations in Post-Modern Era”, he was, to the best of our knowledge, the first researcher in the region who has earned his PhD degree in a field of study concerned with civilian capacities.89   NUPI 2012.90   Communication with H.E.  Ivan Velimir Starčević, Ambassador of Republic of Croatia to the Hellenic Republic, [E-mail]. September 5, 2012.91   Ibid.92   Communication with H.E.  Ivan Velimir Starčević, Ambassador of Republic of Croatia to the Hellenic Republic, [E-mail]. September 5, 2012.

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As for the rest of the region, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), as well as Croatia, all have dedicated training centers. So far, however, only the Peace Support Operations Training Centre (PSO TC) based in Butmir (BiH), has been accredited by NATO as a “Partnership Training and Education Centre”. The need for coordination between the regional peace support operations training centers was recognized by NORDCAPS in 2009-2010, when it initiated a series of “Western Balkans Regional Training and Education Meetings”.93

In December 2011, in cooperation with RACVIAC – Centre for Security Cooperation and PSO TC, the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy (Serbia), organized a seminar “SSR in the Context of PSO” which dealt – among other issues – with the potential role of civilian capacities.94 The seminar concept and outline was taken forward by the Center for Security Studies Sarajevo (BiH) which, again in cooperation with the PSO TC, arranged two additional courses for security sector reform (SSR) experts in peace support operations.95 Both of these seminars were, however, intended for BiH students only.96

Internationally, we have already detailed the UN Secretary-General’s reform process initiative to make better use of civilian capacities in peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations, and the EU’s efforts in the same area. Communities of practice (CoPs) have been established across borders to inform of developments within the field and discuss practices and policies. In the area of civilian capacities, the “Stabilization and Peacebuilding Community of Practice” is one of several.97 Other communities of practice are more narrow, focusing on practitioners within an organization,98 and perhaps limited to a particular group of experts such as the “ISSAT Security and Justice Reform Community of Practice.”99

Non-governmental actors are also active – the Norwegian rosters NORCAP and NORDEM are important examples, as is the website civcap.info, supported by Germany.100 This website hosts a CoP on civilian capacities, as well as International Stabilization and Peacebuilding Initiative (ISPI), “an informal, working-level network of governments and international organizations that have joined together in their commitment to enhance

93   NORDCAPS 2012.94   Belgrade Centre for Security Policy 2011.95   Centre for Security Studies 2012.96   Peace Support Operations Training Centre 2012.97   Stabilization and Peacebuilding Community of Practice (CoP) 2012.98   E.g. the UN Rule of Law Network. For a list of CoPs in the area of Rule of law, see http://www.unrol.org/article.aspx?article_id=39 99   ISSAT Security and Justice Reform Community of Practice CoP. Available at http://issat.dcaf.ch/Home/Community-of-Practice/100   The initiative is supported by the German Federal Foreign Office, see http://www.civcap.info/. 

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civilian capacity globally and increase interoperability among international actors.”101 There should, thus, be ample evidence for a transnational community emerging on the topic of civilian capacities.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Looking at the practices related to peace support operations in Serbia and neighboring countries, we have only found moderate evidence for an emerging community on civilian capacities in Serbia, as well as in the Balkans. The awareness raising workshop held in November 2011 was a positive first step, but so far there seems to be a lack of concrete follow-up and implementation of recommendations. This may be due to the change of government during the summer of 2012, or the very nature of policy change which takes time. However, the fact that a number of Serbian nationals have undergone training and the continuous deployment, signal that Serbia might become increasingly engaged in peace support operations with civilian capacities as well.

There is no doubt that there are many Serbian nationals who possess expertise that would be valuable in international peace support operations, and that expertise from Serbia can be particularly appreciated as these individuals have had recent experience in security sector reform and other relevant areas. So far, there is no information regarding the number of Serbian civilians who have served in peace support operations, and in which capacity. Serbia may have, and has had, a number of civilians deployed in multilateral operations, but this would have to be mapped in order to obtain a good picture of the their areas of expertise and the organizations in which they worked.

Under the previous government, there have been signs that Serbia may form a strategy and approach this issue in a more concerted manner. However, with the new government in place, this process is now at a standstill. The fact that the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Ivan Mrkić, has received United Nations Disarmament Fellowship (1979) and worked at the Permanent Mission of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to the United Nations (1982–86) could contribute to greater knowledge and interest in providing civilian expertise to peace support operations. This, however, remains to be seen. The framework agreement with the EU enabling the provision of Serbian civilian expertise to CSDP missions is another step that provides an agreeable environment for secondment of Serbian civilian capacities.

This article is also a testament, however minute, to the fact that the research community in Serbia is now becoming more interested in this topic. Hopefully this could mark the beginning of additional research on how Serbia and other states in the Balkans might

101    ISPI.  Available  at  https://www.civcap.info/home/international-stabilization-and-peacebuild-ing-initiative-ispi.html 

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be able to contribute with their expertise and experience to peace support operations, whether they be managed by the EU, UN, OSCE or NATO.

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Savkovic, Marko and Marko Milosevic. 2011. “A More Determined, If Not Coherent Policy? Republic of Serbia and Contribution to Multinational Peace Support Operations in 2011.” Analytical 4 (7): 20–33.

Serbia Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 2012. „Informacija o sekondiranju državljana Srbije u misijama OEBS na terenu.“ Accessed on 10 August 2012. http://www.mfa.gov.rs/Srpski/spopol/Multilaterala/OEBS/sekondiranje_oebs_s.html

Stone, Diane. 2008. “Global Public Policy, Transnational Policy Communities, and Their Networks.” Policy Studies Journal 36 (1): 19–38.

Suttles, Gerald D. 1972. The Social Construction of Communities. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

The Delegation of the European Union to the Republic of Serbia. 2011. “European Union and Serbia sign the agreement on Serbia’s participation in EU security and defense missions.” Accessed on 7 August 2012. http://www.europa.rs/en/mediji/najnovije-vesti/1038/European+Union+and+Serbia+sign+the+agreement+on+Serbia%27s+participation+in+EU+security+and+defence+missions.html

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Bechev, Dimitar. 2011. Constructing Southeast Europe: The Politics of Balkan Regional Cooperation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 232 pp., £63.00

Not many people would readily associate the term “Balkans” with “cooperation”, “interdependence” or “collective action”, for this term still carries the burden of negative context related to the conflicts from the beginning of the 1990s. Is it, nonetheless, possible to believe that countries that constitute this region have managed to overcome their antagonisms? What are the forces that are pushing them towards cooperation? What is the construction of South East Europe based on? These are some of the key questions that Bechev is attempting to answer in this book.

Explaining the course of regional cooperation, the author endeavors to identify both the driving forces and the areas of cooperation since the 1990s. Bechev offers an analysis of the functional and security interdependence, the effects of external actors and, finally, a connection between the Balkan regionalism and the identity politics. He then proceeds to examine the three most significant areas of cooperation: economy, security and politics, attempting to establish the motivators for cooperation depending on the specific contexts in which the actors happen to find themselves.

Bechev claims that researchers had already approached the issue of regionalism from different perspectives and that their one commonality was that they all considered interdependency a key factor pushing for collective action. He argues that geography plays an important role in the creation of this interdependency and explains it through the concept of Buzan’s “regional security complex”. The Yugoslav conflict had been a key trigger for new regional dynamics and the author analyzes the functional aspects of interdependence in the Balkans by ascertaining the lack of economic and trade cooperation that had been caused by the region’s extensive economic fragmentation, inadequate infrastructure and the influence of EU. The problem of inadequate or non-existing infrastructure, along with the fact that the Yugoslav wars changed the pattern of regional transport and energy trade, actually forced the countries to cooperate more extensively in the areas of transport and energy. Providing an analysis on economic cooperation in the second chapter of the book, Bechev states that since Balkan countries were all committed to EU integration, the commitment to cooperation legitimized the external initiatives while simultaneously limiting the states’ abilities to create their own institutional designs.

Unlike that of the trade, the dynamic of the regional security made the region look like a

* uros_ziv@yahoo.com

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single geopolitical space. European reminiscence of the turbulent history of the Balkans made it interfere in an attempt to pacify the region through the encouragement of regional cooperation. This was done under the assumption that the Yugoslav crisis represented a part of a wider regional puzzle; instead, it proved to have consisted of a number of small contained conflicts rather then a single big one. Following the conclusion of the conflicts, the real problems of the region became transnational organized crime, human trafficking, corruption, the influx of refugees and migration. All these issues extended beyond what the individual countries were capable of coping with on their own; as a result, they tried to cooperate amongst themselves as well as with interested external actors. Exploring the area of security cooperation, Bechev shows that even though regional institutions and initiatives have indeed emerged as part of NATO and EU integration tendencies, the desire of the governments to shed their respective negative images created in the 1990s remained the truly important factor.

Bechev also offers a wide historical background of international interventions in the Balkans. Denoting the US, NATO and EU involvement, he argues that the “outside push” was of utmost importance for the conclusion of the conflicts and the beginning of regional cooperation. In this part of the book we are presented with the history of regional cooperation in South East Europe through the development of regional initiatives and financial incentives like SECI, Stability Pact, Stabilization and Association Process, Partnership for Peace, CARDS, IPA, etc.

In the final section Bechev discusses the main theoretical approaches to identity studies (essentialist and social-constructivist), providing a connection with the studies of regionalism. Taking into account the constructivist approach, he contemplates the actors and discourses that have constructed the Balkan identity by guiding us through the relevant literature on the subject. Bechev then gives us an insight into the identity creation in the Balkans and the discourses of domestic (inside-out approach) and external actors (outside-in approach).

He concludes that outside actors, especially EU, NATO and the US had played a major role in the creation of contemporary regional identity through normative, transformative and socializing power or, in his own words: “To put it crudely, being a person from the Balkans means being a European who falls short of the normative expectations that make up ‘Europeanness’” (p.80). Relating the identity perspective to that of political cooperation, Bechev proffers that the key turning point that lead towards the creation of good neighborly relations occurred when the authoritarian regimes in both Serbia and Croatia collapsed and when the governments of these countries proclaimed their ‘return to Europe’ (p.150). At that point, Southeast European Cooperation Process (SEECP) symbolized the “region’s transformation from a volatile semi-European ‘powder keg’ to a community governed by ‘European’standards and practices.”

Dimitar Bechev’s book provides a basic analysis of regional cooperation in the Southeast Europe, giving a wide perspective on grounds and motives for its development. Even

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though this work, as the author himself emphasizes, can not be used to provide empirical support for the theories of regionalism because of the geographical magnitude of the region and the altering presence of certain countries, as regards regional issues it is still a valuable case study in IR analysis, showing the effects of the integration processes and the shifting of powers within the state politics, as well as the importance of identity creation. This book can not be described as one that offers a deep analysis on the subjects like regionalism, Balkans identity or the processes of Europeanization in the South East Europe. However, it presents a fairly good description of the history of regional cooperation and the basic theoretical approaches.

Selena Torlakovic and Uros Zivkovic are master students of International Security at Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade. E-mail: uros_ziv@yahoo.com

About the Journal of Regional Security

The Journal of Regional Security will be the first peer-reviewed journal specializing in the field of regional security studies. Subject areas will include: security communities, regional security complexes, regional security sector reform and governance, security regimes, regional conflicts, security integration, region-building and comparative regional security research. The JRS is intended for international security scholars and policy makers from South East Europe but also from other established or emerging regions of the world. It aims to bring academic security studies communities from the Western Balkans not only closer to each other but also closer to security studies and security policy communities from other regions of the world thus enabling smarter and more sustainable regional policy solutions. Journal of Regional Security was established in 2006 by the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy and took its present title in 2012.

For further information please visit: http://www.bezbednost.org/BCSP/2206/Journal-of-Regional-Security.shtml

About the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy

The Belgrade Centre for Security Policy was established in 1997 as the Centre for Civil-Military Relations and took its present name in 2010. Belgrade Centre for Security Policy (BCSP) is an independent research centre based in Belgrade and dedicated to advancing security of the citizens and society they live in on the  basis of democratic principles and respect for human rights. In the midst of the Centre’s interest are all policies aimed at the  improvement of human, national, regional, European, and global security. BCSP supports consolidation of security sector reform and integration of Western Balkan countries into the Euro Atlantic community through research, analysis and policy recommendations, advocacy, education, publishing, expert support to reforms and networking of all relevant actors. Specifically, BCSP probes into the dynamics and achievements of reform of Serbia’s state apparatus of force, as well as problems of placing this sector under democratic civilian control and oversight.Many of the Centre’s activities are directed at research, and concerned with raising the stakeholders’ awareness of the needs and prospects for integrating Serbia in the processes of regional and global security cooperation.

For further information please visit: www.bezbednost. org

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JOURNAL of Regional Security /editor-in-chief Filip Ejdus. - Vol. 7, N° 1(2012)- . - Belgrade : Belgrade Centre forSecurity Policy : Faculty of PoliticalSciences, University of Belgrade, 2012-(Belgrade : Čigoja štampa). - 24 cm

Dva puta godišnje. - Je nastavak: WesternBalkans Security Observer = ISSN 1452-6115ISSN 2217-995X = Journal of Regional SecurityCOBISS.SR-ID 193262092