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Southeast European and Black Sea Studies

ISSN: 1468-3857 (Print) 1743-9639 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fbss20

From Dayton to Brussels via Tuzla: post-2014economic restructuring as europeanizationdiscourse/practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Danijela Majstorović, Zoran Vučkovac & Anđela Pepić

To cite this article: Danijela Majstorović, Zoran Vučkovac & Anđela Pepić (2015) From Daytonto Brussels via Tuzla: post-2014 economic restructuring as europeanization discourse/practicein Bosnia and Herzegovina, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 15:4, 661-682, DOI:10.1080/14683857.2015.1126093

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1126093

Published online: 08 Jan 2016.

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From Dayton to Brussels via Tuzla: post-2014 economicrestructuring as europeanization discourse/practice in Bosnia and

Herzegovina

Danijela Majstorovića,b*, Zoran Vučkovacc and Anđela Pepića,b

aFaculty of Philology for Majstorovic, University of Banja Luka, Bulevar Vojvode PetraBojovića 1a, 78 000 Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina; bFaculty of Political Science forAndjela Pepic, University of Banja Luka, Bulevar Vojvode Petra Bojovića 1a, 78 000 BanjaLuka, Bosnia and Herzegovina; cDepartment of English and Film Studies, University of

Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

(Received 30 May 2015; accepted 21 October 2015)

The political and economic transformations of peacebuilding and state-buildingefforts in post-Dayton Bosnia–Herzegovina (BiH) have resulted in a dysfunc-tional, divided and impoverished country in social crisis. Both international andlocal political elites have tried to manage the crisis, the former through financialaid in combination with externally imposed measures and the latter throughinstitutionalized ethnic nationalism and clientelism; both approaches were madepossible by the Dayton Peace Accords. Articulating a demand for greater socialjustice, the 2014 protests and plenums rejected both ethnic division and the cor-ruption of post-Dayton political economy. This was rightfully seen as a threatby most Bosnian politicians, and appeared to represent an opening for a newreform agenda by the EU. This was most visible in its ‘Compact for Growthand Jobs’, which aimed to revitalize BiH’s path to European integration. Weargue that the Compact and the responses to it offer a useful diagnostic togauge how the post-Dayton political field has shifted since the events of 2014.In this article, we analyse the Compact and its critics, point out their blind spotsand discuss what this reveals about the possibility for wider social change inthe wake of the 2014 protests and plenums – in other words, thinking Bosnia’sfuture beyond Dayton and Brussels, via Tuzla.

Keywords: Bosnia–Herzegovina; discourse analysis; citizenship; neoliberalism

Introducing Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina

The General Framework Agreement for Peace (GFAP) in Bosnia and Herzegovina(BiH), also known as the Dayton Peace Accords or just ‘Dayton’, was signed inDayton, Ohio on 21 November 1995. The Agreement put an end to the 1992–1995war in BiH and formally divided the country into two entities, the Republic of Srp-ska (RS) and the Federation of BiH (FBiH), as well as the autonomous Brčko Dis-trict. Annex IV of the Agreement became the BiH Constitution, a consociationalpackage that established Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks as ‘constitutive peoples’ whilesimultaneously relegating all those who did not or could not identify as belonging

*Corresponding author. Email: danijela.majstorovic@unibl.rs

© 2016 Taylor & Francis

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to one of these groups to second-class status and barring them from fullyparticipating in the country’s political life.

Throughout the Dayton period, BiH has been in a state of perpetual transition(Pandolfi 2010; Buden 2012), on a presumed pathway to join the European Unionbut subject to an ever-changing message about how and under what terms. This isin part the result of the Dayton Agreement itself, which while it brought peace tothe country, its complex power-sharing mechanisms between and among differentlevels and jurisdictions of government (municipality, canton, entity, District andstate) produced a disorder that needed to be managed by both local and interna-tional elites. In other words, the Dayton Agreement is partly responsible for thesocial and political instabilities in BiH, blocking its EU integration and aggravatingthe lives of citizens in general.

Others have pointed out that one source of political dysfunction lies in theDayton Agreement’s constitutional consociationalism.1 There is broad consensusthat this may have been necessary to end the war, but it also helped cement thewar’s ethno-nationalist (dis)order and its foundation of social exclusion (Arsenijevićand Jovanović 2011; Mujkić 2011, 81–98; Sarajlić 2011, 61–80; Stojanović 2011,99–114) and exclusive ethno-nationalist power-sharing. This power-sharing alsoprecipitated BiH’s current socio-economic crisis and allowed very few avenues forcitizens to exercise any kind of political agency. Indeed, relations of politicalclientelism, created through party membership or affiliation, are often the only suchavenue, and because the price of membership is ethno-national identification,ethno-politics (Mujkić 2010) became the only politics in post-Dayton BiH:

Dayton–designed administrative organization, characterized by ethnicization of terri-tory and complex forms of power-sharing, has not only fortified but has also remadedominant political parties into major agents of socio-economic redistribution. In eco-nomically depressed areas of Bosnia, this political restructuring has made party mem-bership–either official or informal–both an important vehicle of social mobility and atactic for making communities more governable under the logic of Dayton Accords.(Kurtović forthcoming)

Various EU-backed initiatives aimed at amending or reforming the Dayton constitu-tion, such as the ‘April package’ of reforms,2 the ‘Butmir package’ and the ‘Prudprocess’3 (ICG Briefing 2012, 3), all collapsed. Although promoted in the name ofgreater administrative efficiency, each initiative threatened to deprive the negotiat-ing parties of significant instruments of their political power. Others have sought touse international law to amend the Dayton constitution and challenge the basis ofits ethnic exclusion. Most famously, the European Court of Human Rights’ judge-ment on the Sejdić–Finci case4 in 2009 ruled that the Dayton constitution shouldadd ‘Others’ as a constitutive people category, and European Union representativessubsequently made implementation of the Sejdić–Finci ruling a main preconditionfor accession. Since that time, there has been no movement to implement the rul-ing, and the path to Bosnian membership in the EU has stalled. Thus, despite along-standing sense that the Dayton constitution cannot remain as it is, substantivechanges to the Dayton order have come to be seen as ‘unthinkable’.

The last few years have witnessed forms of resistance to the Dayton system oflimiting political agency to party membership or affiliation, and of keeping theexercise of political will divided along ethno-territorial lines of difference. Thisbegan with the Banja Luka park protests5 in the spring and summer of 2012 and

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then later, more explicitly, during the June 2013 Bebolucija or ‘Baby Revolution’6

in Sarajevo. Both events were marked by significant ‘cross-entity’ relations ofcooperation and solidarity among activists in the respective cities, with the Bebolu-cija witnessing citizen demonstrations from around the country, crossing all admin-istrative and political boundaries of the Dayton order. These were importantprecursors to the protests in February 2014, which to date constitute the most sig-nificant bottom-up challenge to the ethnically constituted disorder, bypassing ethnicdivision in favour of a proto-civic sense of common citizenship and class solidarity.

Indeed, when the protests started in 2014, talk about Dayton was backgrounded.In personal discussions with many of the Sarajevo protesters, we were told thatactivists tried to suppress the so-called ‘Anti-Dayton group’ precisely because theydid not want debates on constitutional reform(s) to overshadow the new demands.This was particularly true because the issue of constitutional reform has often beenframed by nationalist political elites as a potential instrument of ethnic domination.7

Instead, February 2014 protesters focused on articulating claims for more social jus-tice, including the review and revision of the privatization of state companies andfirms, and the abolition of exorbitant severance packages for state employees (theso-called ‘white bread’ payments). Although no similar large-scale protests or ple-nums took place in the Republika Srpska, solidarity support groups were formed inBanja Luka, Gradiška and Prijedor.

These events were recognized and represented as a challenge to the prevailingethno-centric Dayton logic in BiH. Despite attempts to dismiss the protests by dele-gitimizing the violence of the protestors (c.f. Kurtović this volume), these eventsmanaged to displace the usual ethno-national discourse of grievances as thelanguage of public political discussion in favour of a wide-ranging focus on socio-economic issues. Domestic and international actors alike saw this as an opening, achance to regain momentum for long-stalled but much-needed changes in Bosnianpolitics and society. One international response to this moment was the ‘Compactfor Growth and Development’ (the Compact), issued in July 2014, and the British–German Initiative, signed by Foreign Ministers, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and PhilipHammond in November 2014. Taken together, they signalled a renewed interna-tional interest in post-Dayton BiH and an attempt to jump-start the stalled EUaccession process by avoiding talk of constitutional change in favour of economicreform. For some scholars, the Compact and Initiative represented BiH’s lastchance to resolve its economic and political crises and bring the country closer tothe EU.8 Others saw it as rewarding irresponsible politicians and dangerously over-looking Dayton’s structural shortcomings, which could only be ameliorated throughconstitutional changes (Bassuener et al. 2014). A third perspective, mostly voicedby activists and scholars with roots in the protest and plenums, also sidestepped theissue of constitutional reform and instead evaluated the Compact and Initiativeaccording to whether they advanced the cause of social justice.

In this article, we argue that the Compact and the responses to it offer a usefuldiagnostic to gauge how, or even whether, the post-Dayton political field hasshifted in the aftermath of the protests and plenums of 2014. Many scholars, localand international alike, have tried to explain the post-Dayton condition not merelyby critiquing it but also by demonstrating its limits in spheres ranging from partypolitics or citizens’ relationship to the state to public meaning-making and everydaylife (see Gilbert 2006; Arsenijević 2015; Hromadžic 2015; Jansen et al.forthcoming; Kurtović forthcoming). Building upon this scholarship, we probe the

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possibilities and limits represented by the Compact and the responses to it. We lookto see whether anything has changed in the debate about the international role inBiH and examine whether there are any points of articulation between whatvariously positioned individuals or institutions believe is desirable and possible inBiH politics and society. In the responses to the Compact, we detect two sets ofcritiques: the first we might call an international liberal critique and the second adomestic leftist critique.9 As exemplary of the first critique, we analyse a set ofarguments expressed in two Democratization Policy Council (DPC) reports pub-lished in 2014 and 201510; as exemplary of the latter critique, we analyse a seriesof arguments laid out in a text entitled ‘Compact with the Devil’, published anony-mously by the Movement for Social Justice Sarajevo.

Of course, the possibilities and limits of the Compact and the responses to it can-not be understood unless you place them within the context of the political–economic transformations of BiH since Dayton. Thus, in what follows, we firstdiscuss those transformations, paying attention to how they unfolded as part of therelationship between the international community and BiH’s post-war political class.That relationship itself has long been shaped by forces and events both inside and out-side of BiH; for example, this most recent trend of increasing international attentionwas catalysed both by the protests of 2014 as well as by geopolitical concerns, includ-ing fears of growing influence in BiH from Putin’s Russia, on the one hand, andIslamic fundamentalism, on the other. We then analyse the Compact and the responsesto it against the background of the last 20 years and conclude with a brief discussionon what these texts reveal about the possibility for wider social change in BiH.

Post-2014 restructuring: bringing political and economic aspects together

For the purposes of our analysis here, it is useful to divide post-Dayton BiH intothree phases: the first, between 1996 and 2006, was a period of intensive and wide-ranging involvement of the international community in nearly every aspect of polit-ical and economic life. Institutions such as NATO, the OSCE and the manybranches of the UN did everything from providing peacekeeping forces, runningelections, supervising local police, sitting on the judiciary and caring for andre-settling refugees. Foreign governmental and non-governmental aid agencies wereinvolved in rebuilding the war-time destruction and reforming administrative capac-ities. Perhaps most prominently, the Office of the High Representative (OHR) exer-cised a set of powers normally associated with the state, such as promulgating law,reforming the constitution and creating a common currency and passport system;the OHR also exercised extraordinary powers, such as removing duly elected orappointed officials from office. This was carried out under the sign of democratiza-tion, Europeanization and creating a state that would not need international supervi-sion. The second phase, between 2006 and 2014, was a period that saw a dramaticreduction in international involvement and a much diminished role for the OHR inBosnian politics (Parrish 2007), with the idea that international influence should beexercised through the more indirect EU accession process. Consequently, this alsowas a period that saw an increase in the power of ethno-nationalist political partiesand a sharpening of rhetoric designed to keep the population divided and fearful ofethnic Others (or their self-declared representatives). Both phases witnessed wide-spread political passivity and were accompanied by economic restructuring that ledto extensive impoverishment.

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The protests of 2014 suggest that BiH has entered a new phase in which thepopulation is not as passive, the divisiveness of ethno-national rhetoric is less suc-cessful at demobilizing political opposition, the impoverishment of the people haspoliticized the economic restructuring that took place over the last decade and out-side forces have focused greater attention on developments within BiH. Issues ofsocial justice have become a constant presence in public discourse in ways unprece-dented in the post-Dayton history of BiH.

There are a few things to note about the economic restructuring that occurredduring the first two phases. The first is that it was part of a larger ideological shiftaway from the values of Yugoslav socialism, including the principle of self-man-agement of workers, socially owned property as a kind of commons, anti-fascismand ‘brotherhood and unity’. Ethno-nationalist parties were hostile to these valuesbecause they undermined their claims to legitimacy as ethnic representatives, andthey were an obstruction to their ability to enrich themselves through privatizationand extend control through relations of patronage and the ability to distribute jobs.International forces were hostile to these values because they were associated withsocialism, against which Western countries defined their systems of political free-dom (democracy) and prosperity (market-based economy based upon the value ofprivate property).

This resulted in a regime of selective remembering and forgetting of the past,and the attempt to delegitimize the material and ideological bases of non-ethnicsocial and political membership and collective action – particularly those of workers.More specifically, the reality of socially owned property ended during the war whensocially owned property of self-managed companies and firms was declared to bestate-owned property, paving the way for the privatization processes that wouldcome in the post-Dayton period. This move undercut the ability of workers to inde-pendently organize for their rights when nationalist political parties pursued theirgoals through an aggressive identity politics. This was made even more difficult bythe dismemberment of Yugoslavia because the prosperity of industries and workerswere dependent upon networks of companies and consumers that ignored the bor-ders of the Yugoslav republics. Thus, despite the so-called media freedoms, workersencountered an acute lack of public space suitable for the articulation and organiza-tion of their struggles (Dale and Hardy 2011, 259–260; Musić 2013, 10–11).

If this undermined the value and strength of working peoples, as one of consti-tutive social and political bases of Yugoslav state socialism, it also undermined thevalue and strength of ‘brotherhood and unity’, the Yugoslav state’s proclaimed poli-tics of national equality. Instead of existing in a fraternity of nations, ethnic‘Others’ became enemies and even ‘fanatacized as fundamentalist’ (MonumentGroup 2011), always threatening the ethnic Self. The experience of ‘brotherhoodand unity’ was thus ignored and instead, the continuity of the threat of ethnicOthers was explained by the ‘ancient’ ethnic hatreds thesis (Kaplan 2005). The vio-lence of the 1990s war seemed to confirm this thesis. In the first phase of post-Dayton BiH history, politically, there did seem to be some enthusiasm to achievereconciliation. This resulted in some small attempts at the entity level to come toterms with the nature of the divisive war, reflected in Dragan Čavić’s 2004 recogni-tion of the Srebrenica genocide. Such attempts were quickly abandoned, however,when the SNSD’s Milorad Dodik and SBiH’s Haris Silajdzić discovered that therewere more political gains to be had from demonizing ethnic Others. In what wetermed the second phase of post-Dayton history, they staked their legitimacy by

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promoting irreconcilable visions of the future of BiH, built upon absolute denial ofgenocide in the RS and in the Federation, a demand that the RS be abolished as agenocidal creation. Demands by Bosnian Croat politicians for a ‘third entity’ onlyextended the logic of ethno-national division, making efforts to reverse this logic –such as the Sejdić–Finci case ruled upon by the European Court on Human Rights– all the more difficult to achieve.

For its part, the international presence in BiH, particularly during the first phase,promoted the country’s transition to parliamentary democracy and free-market capi-talism by implementing various laws and regulations or by prodding local politiciansto carry out such measures under the threat of sanction. Although formally hostile tothe divisive nationalist rhetoric of local politicians, the OHR also relied upon animage of ethnic enmity to justify the international presence (as peacekeepers) as wellas to justify ignoring local input on the future of BiH when exercising their state-likepowers to shape that future. The OHR and other foreign intervention agencies alsolegitimized their perspective and actions by categorizing themselves, as well as thepeople and politicians of BiH, according to binaries of difference, which were alsohierarchies: Europe vs. Balkans, international/local, civilized/non-civilized, normal/abnormal, progressive/regressive, modern/backwards, etc. This allowed them to claimto be serving the interests of ordinary citizens in BiH because who could be againstcivilized, modern normal Europe? At the same time, the foreign presence had to workwithin the nation state system of international order and thus recognize its privilegedforms of representation, i.e. elected politicians. This came to justify internationalinaction in the second phase of post-Dayton history along the lines of ‘we may notlike these nationalists, but they are the legitimate representatives of the country aselected officials so we need to accommodate their perspectives and actions’.

Perhaps more important were the ways in which internationally promoted eco-nomic restructuring served to redistribute public resources into private (or party)control. Although the privatization of formerly socially or state-owned enterpriseswas made possible in BiH, in the immediate pre-war period when it was still partof Yugoslavia (the so-called ‘Marković privatizations’), it only really took off in1997 under the guidance of USAID (in the phase of strong international interven-tion) and between 2006 and 2008 (in the phase of consolidation of nationalist partycontrol) (c.f. Donais 2002; Divjak and Martinović 2009). The first wave of Marko-vić privatization enabled workers of socially owned enterprises to buy shares at adiscount relative to the enterprises’ estimated values (based on the previous year’sannual balance sheets), but these shares could not be traded on the stock market(Bayliss 2005).11 However, this privatization was interrupted by the war, and previ-ously purchased shares were only partially recognized as worker owned in the sub-sequent privatization episodes.

As others have noted, it is important to see the war in BiH as both an attemptat political as well as economic reorganization. Indeed, the essentialist claims thatinsist that ethnic difference played the pivotal role in the dismemberment ofYugoslavia (and BiH) elide the economic motives for it. During the war, what hadbeen defined as socially owned was declared by various laws as state-owned prop-erty or private capital – a practice of dispossession through which the politicalelites and warlords robbed Bosnian citizens of what had previously been under-stood as common ownership. Legal validation of this dispossession came throughthe USAID-guided privatization in 1997, as the privatizations of what were nowstate-owned enterprises (meaning that they were owned either by the federal BiH

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state and/or its individual entities or cantons) continued through a voucher model.This policy enabled citizens to buy shares in state companies which were to be pri-vatized (Bayliss 2005) and in this way, the voucher-based privatization ‘contributedto the consolidation of economic power in the hands of the few by enabling thosewith the means, connections, and resources to engage in active secondary tradingof vouchers’ (Donais 2002).

Voucher privatization never became an engine of economic growth that con-tributed to the post-war economic restructuring of BiH (Donais 2002; Bayliss2005). Instead, ownership was ‘widely dispersed in the hands of unsophisticatedand inexperienced shareholders’ (Bayliss 2005, 44–45), further entrenching the eco-nomic positions of BiH’s nationalist parties and ‘reducing the prospects of ethnicreintegration’ (Donais 2002, 8). The third (and ongoing) wave of privatization fur-ther included the issuing of public tenders and bids, mainly intended for thoseenterprises deemed to be of strategic value (such as telecommunications, electricalcompanies and refineries). Already the problems with these processes were sig-nalled by the creation of laws meant to review privatizations that had already con-cluded but were deemed to have failed.12

The benefits of these privatization processes in BiH remain dubious. First,switching public enterprises from a socially owned to a state-owned structureopened a window of opportunity for these processes to be misused by the rulingoligarchies and political parties. Additionally, the chosen privatization models (vou-cher and direct tender) enabled the devastation of former industrial giants as wellas smaller enterprises that had contributed to the development of the BiH economyafter the Second World War. Finally, from a workers’ perspective, privatizationmeant two things: first, stripping them of management and control over their enter-prises and, additionally, depriving them of the material basis of their existencethrough mass layoffs (often without compensation). In short, as Venugopal (2011)notes, the international community and the donors who suggested plans and pro-grammes for ‘post-conflict reconstruction’, in which privatization would be a keycomponent of market reform, all failed to take into account the social consequencesof such privatization schemes.

Political and economic restructuring in post-Dayton BiH has gone hand in hand.As Edin Hajdarpašić remarks:

If someone had said in 1995 that the politicians of this small war-torn and impover-ished country heavily scrutinized by the international community would go on tomake themselves the proportionately highest paid representatives in Europe, to expro-priate the country’s key economic resources with impunity, to take out staggeringloans for unrealized projects, and to block any attempts at changing this situation –all in less than 20 years after the General Framework Agreement for Peace – mostexperts would have dismissed such statements as ‘unrealistic’ and ‘impossible’. Yetthat is precisely what happened with the formation of new political forces after GFAP.(Hajdarpašić in Arsenijević 2015, 105)

This has culminated in a status quo that Jansen (2015) has called the DaytonMeantime, ‘a sense of living in a continuous suspension between a war that hasnot quite ended and a future – widely held to be related to EU accession – that hasnot quite been embarked upon’ (2015, 90). It is, as Jansen goes on to argue, a sta-tus quo produced by consistent processes of depoliticisation:

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For two decades different sections of the ruling caste have largely successfully demo-bilized any stirrings of political unrest amongst ‘their’ respective ‘constitutive peoples’with calls for closing ranks in the face of outside threats to their ‘vital interests’.Within their own fiefdoms, they also offer a degree of shelter in terms of livelihoodsthrough partocratic clientelism, and particularly the allocation of public sector jobsand war-related assistance. (Ibid 90)

He continues that this

national-clientelistic machine feeds on the constitutional set-up of the country, whereeverything is organized ‘in three’. This is sanctioned by foreign supervision that con-tributes to the legitimisation of the ruling caste and further entrenches the loop ofdepoliticisation with ritual evocations of ever-postponed Euro-Atlantic integration asan overall remedy … that knows no alternative. (Ibid 90–91)

It was into this situation – and against this status quo – that the protests ofFebruary 2014 intervened. The protesters emerged as indignant subjects, who, likethe Spanish indignados who also felt they were not represented by any existingpolitical party, insisted on forms of direct action and direct democracy: partlythrough violence and partly through their ability to self-organize and independentlyanalyse the political and social hurdles the country was facing. In this respect, thepopular plenums that followed the protests offered a glimpse of new possibilities ofcollective action and decision-making as well as new possibilities of economicredistribution. With slogans like ‘we are hungry in three languages13’, citizensdemanded a general turn towards using the machinery of government to fulfil theaims of greater social justice. At the height of the plenums’ activities, the May2014 floods revealed the corruption and ineptitude of the government and chan-nelled the newly found sense of possibility achieved through self-organization intounprecedented grass-roots humanitarian work that crossed all ethno-territorialboundaries. This further destabilized the image of BiH society as hopelesslydivided into ethnically distinct moral and political communities.

So, how did the international community react to this moment of protest andpolitical experimentation? The EU response came that same summer, in the form ofthe Compact, backed by the British–German Initiative. This clearly signalled a shiftfrom the political to the economic: the Compact sidestepped the question of consti-tutional reforms to instead focus on economic reforms, seeking to modernize andreignite the BiH economy and to ‘spur investment and create jobs’ (see more inU.A. 2014; U.A. 2015c). It also re-sequenced the EU’s conditionality programmefor BiH by removing the Sejdić–Finci requirement for the EU Stabilization andAssociation Agreement to come into force. We now turn to examine more closelythe text of the Compact and Initiative and the responses to it in order to gauge con-tinuities and discontinuities in how political possibility is imagined in BiH.

The compact and its dis/continuities

The online brochure containing the Compact opens with a foreword by Ambas-sador Sorensen, EU Special Representative and Head of the Delegation of theEuropean Union, who simulates solidarity and cooperation – but also distinction –through a careful use of the direct address ‘you’ to BiH citizens, and an exclusive‘we’, referring to the EU:

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Bosnia and Herzegovina needs to reform. Otherwise it risks falling further behind herneighbors in terms of the business environment and other policies necessary to spurinvestment and create jobs. Already the overall unemployment rate stands at over aquarter of the workforce and the rate of youth unemployment is the highest in Europe.But you know this. And you know that reform is needed….

We set out to answer this question at the Forum for Prosperity and Jobs in May inSarajevo. We did so to assist Bosnia and Herzegovina to fulfill the Copenhagen eco-nomic criteria, which require every future member state of the EU to have a function-ing market economy as well as the capacity to cope with competitive pressures. But,more importantly, we did this to help the people of BiH to improve your own livesand prospects. (The Compact for Growth and Jobs, U.A. 2014, 3)

The Compact thus relies upon the same rhetorical framing and legitimation strategyas before: note the categorical distinction of progress/regression (‘falling furtherbehind’, ‘every future member state of the EU’), the presupposition of agreementwith its diagnosis (‘you know this’ ‘you know that reform is needed’) and how itbases its legitimacy in the claim to represent the perspectives and desires ofexperts, both domestic and international. Evidence of the former is said to lie in thefact that a broad spectrum of civil, academic, business and political members ofsociety attended the Forum and identified a package of six concrete and urgentmeasures; evidence of the latter lies in the fact that these measures were alsoendorsed by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, USA and other con-cerned nations, organizations and visiting experts.14 Yet, when a BiH journalistwho had also been active in the plenums and protests, Nidžara Ahmetašević,15

asked the Dutch Ambassador, Jurriaan Kraak, about which Bosnians had beeninvited and suggested that the nature of their participation was limited,16 he dis-agreed but provided no specifics:

I completely disagree. I was in Ilidža17 at the presentations. Those were long sessionswith many participants. Present were representative of international financial institu-tions and foreign experts, sure. But the Compact is formulated with a substantial par-ticipation by Bosnian authorities, syndicate representatives, different non-governmental organizations…

Aside from the rhetorical framing of the Compact and the uncertain nature of inputfrom Bosnians,18 the six urgent measures are not all that different from previousstatements made by previous European representatives. Perhaps what is moreimportant were the shifts in the geopolitical context and the moves of politicians inBiH than the opening provided by the protests and plenums.

For example, the European Foreign Policy Scorecard19 covering events of 2014gave BiH a C grade, unambiguously stating that Europe had to ‘tailor its policiesto the challenges at play’. One such challenge, the Scorecard suggested, was‘Moscow’s support for Republika Srpska’s Milorad Dodik, who toyed with aCrimea-style independence declaration’. Another challenge was the threat of ‘ISISterrorism’, which became especially significant after a gunman, shouting ‘AllahuAkbar’, killed a police officer in a Zvornik police station and wounded two otherson 27 April 2015. Note that neither of these events have anything to do witheconomic issues or issues of social justice.

Perhaps what makes the Compact and Initiative most noteworthy is that theyamounted to a policy shift, removing implementation of the Sejdić–Finci judgement

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as a precondition for moving forward on the European integration process. TheSAA, which had been signed 7 years previously, had been ratified by all EU mem-ber states but had not been implemented due to BiH’s failure to implement therequired reforms. A written commitment to implement all the necessary socio-economic reforms was signed by BiH leaders on 29 January and was approved bythe parliament of BiH on 23 February 2015. As a result, the Council of Europeunfroze the SAA on 16 March 2015, stating that BiH had fulfilled the necessaryrequirements to start actually implementing it.

It thus appears that the saber-rattling of Dodik and the isolated acts of ‘Islamicterrorism’ played the larger role in the decision to regain momentum on a stalledEuropean integration process by foregrounding economic reform and ignoring out-standing constitutional questions. It could be said that this was not the only wayforward. For instance, the EU could have seized upon the protests and plenums asevidence that large segments of BiH society were ready to reject the Dayton divi-sions and thus could have declared the moment ripe to find a way forward onconstitutional reform precisely by making it an issue of social justice. So, who wasthe international community, in fact, rewarding with the Compact and Initiative: theindignant subjects, or the politicians or themselves? What is the likelihood that theeconomic reforms outlined in the Compact will be implemented, and what likeli-hood that even if they are implemented, that they will respond to the social andeconomic crisis that prompted the protests? Two sets of critiques are available toaddress this question. One critique is international, dubbed the ‘liberal’ critique inthis paper, stemming from within the EU establishment itself and focusing more onthe political aspects of the Compact. The other is domestic, relating more to theeconomy, and because of its concern with workers is here termed the ‘left’ critique.Both are important, not just in how they treat the Compact, but also in how theyrelate to workers and the Dayton-based state. A critical analysis of both can simul-taneously point out their blind spots and offer potential alternatives.

Defining the sticks: a liberal critique of the 2014 British–German initiative

The two policy papers20 under analysis represent a policy criticism which objectsto the EU’s new change of gears and the British–German Initiative’s failure todefine any ‘red lines’. The basic claim here is that there are no proverbial ‘sticks’(as opposed to ‘carrots’) in case the new reforms are not implemented, and that theCompact ignores the previous EU conditions too lightly. These criticisms shouldnot be too surprising, given that they were issued by the DPC, an initiative that fea-tures the analysis of foreigners with a long history of working within the foreignintervention community in BiH.21 Note that the criticism is not concerned withworkers or the potential economic consequences of the Compact. Instead, it arguesfor a robust and deeper intervention in BiH political affairs through stricter EUinvolvement and greater strengthening of BiH state institutions while defining aclear set of regulations for governing BiH. In many ways, it echoes the OHR’s dis-course in the first phase of post-war democratization and restructuring in BiH(Majstorović and Vučkovac 2016). The political rhetoric visible in the DPC papersabound in the same directive speech acts as EU rhetoric about BiH, thus demon-strating that the conversation is less about social justice or even economic restruc-turing and moreover a one between foreigners about how to structure the relationsbetween foreign powers and BiH political authorities and administration.

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The first DPC report regarding the Compact, published in November 2014,suggested next steps for the EU before the Foreign Affairs Council meeting on 17November as follows:

(1) Refrain from lowering the bar on conditionality once again by removing theSejdić–Finci condition for the SAA’s entry into force.

(2) Set the initial reform agenda instead of allowing political leaders to do itaccording to their own interests.

(3) The agenda should contain institutional and other reforms conditioned inthe 2008 Partnership Document.

(4) Specific steps to reverse the reform and institutional rollback tolerated by theEU since 2008 (e.g. the BiH Conflict of Interest Law, RS Law on Courts,RS Law on Police Officials, Canton 7 Privatization Agency Law, etc.).

(5) Annulment of all legal acts undermining the integrity of the State as a singleeconomic space, including suspension of RS activities on South Stream untilthere is a state-level energy policy, a state-level gas law and a state-level reg-ulatory agency. Restoration of the roles of state-level institutions such as theMinistry for Foreign Trade and Economic Relations (MOFTER) and returnof the Directorate for European Integration (DIE) to ministerial status. Returnto recognition of the Council of Ministers as BiH’s ‘coordination mecha-nism’ for EU matters.

(6) Confirmation that any continuation of the Structured Dialogue needs toinclude civil society representatives throughout, and that key judicial andlegal reform issues – BiH Law on Courts, Law on the HJPC, etc. – cannotbe compromised.

(7) Establishment of a Privatization Review Panel to meet citizen demands from7 February protests (Bassuener et al. 2014, I).

The rhetoric critically addresses the EU’s engagement in BiH, and its main concernis the most recent ‘lowering of the conditionality ban’ following the removal of theSejdić–Finci condition. The critique warns against any further weakening of thestate (line 5 presupposes the integrity of the state has been undermined), urgingthe EU to take a more stringent attitude when it comes to the reforms (lines 2, 3and 5) and not to ‘tolerate’ misbehaviour of BiH politicians who act according to‘their own interest’ (line 2). The only matter addressed relating to the February2014 protests is a privatization review panel (line 7) and inclusion of more mem-bers of civil society (line 6), although it is not clear which ones.

Later in the document, the authors set out what the supporters of the initiativeshould do (Bassuener et al. 2014, II) through a series of imperatives followed byideologically loaded assertions:

(1) Re-establish red lines, noting clear consequences, jointly articulated not justby Berlin and London, but also by the EU and the USA. There can be notoleration of further steps to undermine the country’s territorial integrity inthe guise of fragmentation or partition disguised as ‘decentralization’ or‘federalism’. Maintenance of international Dayton responsibilities willremain until a post-Dayton order, accepted by each self-defined group ofcitizens, is determined.

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(2) Develop a real compact with BiH citizens to forge a direct alliance withcitizens for meaningful reform, where it is necessary confronting recalcitrantelites from both above and below. Support to citizens should not beconfused with the cultivation of EU-funded client NGOs who serve as EU-implementing partners or service providers.

(3) Establish an Independent Privatization Agency to remove the ability ofpoliticians to dispense with the proceeds of privatized enterprises at whim,and to instead channel dedicated funds for economic development andneeds-based social welfare.

(4) Marry IFI22 funding to the reform agenda and thus move the use of finan-cial leverage to the core of the EU conditionality policy.

(5) Adopt a strategic approach with BiH’s neighbours. Demand Serbia’s leaderspublicly state they do not support RS secession. Insist that both CroatianGovernment officials and opposition parties’ representatives cease theirethno-national approach to BiH and adopt an EU approach.

(6) Ensure the appointment of a politico for the vacant post of EUSR who iscomfortable with taking a leadership role and is willing to act as an execu-tive, working to help define EU policy in BiH. The Foreign Affairs Councilshould give its Special Representative real power by stating outright that itwill follow the EUSR’s lead on when to apply ‘restrictive measures’ (assetfreezes, visa bans and funding stoppages).

Above all, the six measures outlined above foreground the reassertion ofinternational influence and conceive of power as located with a rather narrowparty-political elite – hence, this is where influence ought to focus. This becomesparticularly clear if we look at what the document is specific about and what it isvague about. It is specific about making the reforms and international funding con-ditional on Serbia and Croatia ‘staying away from BiH’, establishing ‘red lines’and securing the territorial integrity of BiH at all costs. It is vague about how apost-Dayton order will be determined, only that it must be shaped by an assertive,yet unknown ‘self-defined group of citizens’. This suggests that the more importantrequirement for constitutional reform is an assertive outside force to disciplinerecalcitrant elites. What this focus on elites and valourization of presumably non-elite citizens overlooks is that doing away with the Dayton order is hard not justbecause of the lack of political will to give up key instruments of power. It is alsodifficult because of the extensive network of people that the Dayton order sustains.In circumstances of economic poverty, where most strategic enterprises havealready been privatized and most money is in the hands of relatively few individu-als, everyday party clientelism, especially in the most dominant ethno-nationalistparties, is an agentive and pragmatic choice as well as a survival principle, regard-less of whether people subscribe to the divisive ideology of those parties.

Another blind spot in the critique has to do with the fantasy of creatingauthorities that are independent of BiH politics and governmental structures. Forexample, take the call for an Independent Privatization Agency. Not only would itrequire more bureaucracy (one of the elements otherwise seen as problematic inpost-Dayton BiH), but with most of the privatization money already spent, it ishard to see where its power might come from. In the past, ‘independent’ has oftenbeen a code-word for ‘not Bosnian’, leaving us to wonder just who would run suchan Agency and with what kind of results.

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The critique presented in this document also works to create relations ofobligation between the EU and BiH by drawing attention to how the EU’snon-strategy is an attempt to elide any responsibility for political or economic con-ditions in BiH. For example, the text observes that the absence of the kind of exter-nal pressure that was exercised by the OHR in the high interventionist phase has infact served as a ‘convenient tool for deflecting and dismissing any critique of theEU’s demonstrated ineffectiveness’.

The second document, entitled ‘Making Market on Constitutional Reform inBiH in the Wake of the EU initiative’, continues the criticism of the EU butfocuses more squarely on the issue of constitutional reform. Their critique is notjust about the inability to come up with a ‘Dayton 2’ but about the ineffectiveimplementation of the existing constitutional order. Again, it is largely an argumentfor a more assertive role for the European Union by arguing that it is, in essence,in a relation of responsibility for the political problems in BiH. This report thuscriticizes ‘the weak state’ in BiH, the EU’s complicity with BiH ethno-nationalistelites and the weakness of the international community’s 20-year-long engagementwith BiH, which has resulted in its ‘fragmented, divisive and discriminatory consti-tutional structure’. The advice is for all international actors to in fact include ‘morestick’ in their approach to BiH and ‘to refocus coordinated and coherent effortstoward constitutional reform by spelling out clear rewards for compliance (e.g. EUcandidate status) and clear sanctions for non-compliance (e.g. suspension of EUfunds, suspension of CoE membership’ (Fernandez et al. 2015, II). The sticks alsoinclude recommendations for the suspension of BiH’s voting rights in the CoE, ifSejdić–Finci has not been resolved in time for the next general election in 2018.

One blind spot or contradiction that is common to such policy criticism thaturges a renewed willingness to apply sanctions and empower the OHR is theeffects that this has on the ability of ordinary citizens to exercise any degree ofpolitical agency outside of relations of party patronage. The high interventionistphase of international intervention was hardly an era of political engagement bycivil society. In fact, one might argue that extensive intervention had a part in pro-ducing the political passivity that reigned in BiH until very recently. It is thushighly dubious that ‘reforming the OHR into a last resort enforcer of Dayton’ isconducive to ‘support efforts to develop bottom up alternatives that can garner sup-port throughout BiH’ (Fernandez et al. 2015, II). Like the first report, which wantsto see more the EU engage in more social dialogue with BiH citizens and ‘forgedirect alliances for meaningful reform’ – rather than having ‘a plan to engage aWestern PR company’ (Bassuener et al. 2014, 8) – this policy paper does not pro-vide any real guidelines for doing so. It also overlooks the fact that there has beenquite a lot of discontent regarding some major local NGOs who are often critiqued– fairly or not – as being nothing more than project- and money-driven interestgroups.

So, what is the likelihood that the kinds of changes demanded in this critiquewill meet the aspirations of the protestors from February 2014, or the young peoplewho are disproportionately affected by the state of the economy? BiH boasts oneof the largest jobless population of youth in Europe, currently estimated at 62.7%and falling within the age range between 15–24 (U.A. 2015b); these young peoplewere born either during or immediately after the war, and their only reality is thatof post-Dayton poverty and the lack of opportunities. A new twist in politics, oreven a new class of politicians, will not just suddenly emerge financed by the

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international community and engage in redistribution nor can we expect theexisting class to surrender without a fight. The current liberal, international critiqueof post-Dayton BiH does not have much to say about how to create relations ofaccountability between citizens and government, about how to encourage BiH’spolitical classes to respond to the emerging bottom-up grass-roots perspectives gen-erated by the protests and plenums, which is beginning to reverse the ethno-politics(Mujkić 2010) of Dayton, precisely by pressing for socially inclusive reforms andgreater social justice.

Towards a left criticism or what we have learned from Tuzla

While the foreign critics of the Compact and the Initiative bashed the Initiativeitself for sidelining unresolved political matters rooted in the Dayton constitutionand the EU for not drawing any red lines, a different domestic critique took adetour away from Dayton altogether. Instead, it focused on the detrimental socio-economic effects that the austerity measures proposed by the Compact could haveon the general population, especially its most vulnerable members. Interestingly,the arguments of both the international liberal and domestic leftist critiques overlapin several respects, such as the vagueness of the suggested measures and their criti-cisms of the weak state. The left critique obviously has a different vision in defin-ing the role of the state, but leaves un-discussed how; given the fragmented anddysfunctional collection of governments created by the Dayton Agreement, onemight create a strong state that could realize its demands for greater social invest-ments and a fairer redistribution.

Exemplary of this critique of the Compact is the document entitled ‘Compactwith the Devil’ (U.A. 2015a.) published in the spring of 2015, authored anony-mously by the Movement for Social Justice Sarajevo,23 an organization of promi-nent Sarajevo intellectuals and activists with roots in the 2014 protests. Thedocument critically assesses the set of reforms foreseen in the Compact, singlingout its vagueness and questioning its purported Europeanness. We take it as astarting document for the analysis which we then expand by further analysing theCompact’s measures in terms of their relationship to Dayton-based governance.This is in fact an oppositional reading, a reading against the DPC’s documents andtheir concerns about the new EU approach insofar as it dwells on the actual ramifi-cations of these measures for BiH workers who bear the brunt of market and labourreforms.

The Movement’s document argues that the Compact itself discounts the needfor a strong state that is more than just a regulator; it noted that its reforms wouldnot by themselves attract investors who would then employ people en massebecause workers in BiH were still paid more than those in African and Asiansweatshops. It further observed that investment takes time, particularly the kind thatwould put a serious dent in unemployment because industry was no longer a veryprofitable sector. Moreover, the general global financial situation was seen as dis-couraging investment, thus making such investment an unlikely candidate to jump-start economic recovery. Instead, it is only likely that state-driven social investmentcould perform that role. This document’s criticism thus brings ‘socialist discourse’back into the picture while also redefining the meaning of being European. In otherwords, it contextualizes its response to the Compact in the ‘tectonic changes’ thatare shaping ‘future European politics’ (Kovras and Loizides 2015) particularly in

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Greece and in the wake of the pending Syrian refugee crisis. In an unambiguouscall for redistribution, it calls for a combination of a Keynesian-style control overjobs and employment to secure more egalitarianism while advocating thenationalization of key industries:

In order for the economy to recover, the income of those who have the least will haveto grow as they are the pillars of public spending, not the rich ones, since income isnot just cash but also social contributions into healthcare, education and other servicesof common interest. (U.A. 2015a)

The MSJ critique of the Compact brings it into conversation with the calls forsocial justice voiced in the protests and the plenums, and notes that while it waspitched as an EU response to recent struggles in BiH, it actually fails to accountfor workers’ demands. For instance, the Movement’s critique notes that the Com-pact does not address any economic policy targeting industrial (under)development,but rather only offers austerity measures and even those are relatively vaguelydefined. While labour costs are seen as a major impediment to growth and develop-ment, the broadly defined measures of the Compact all go towards lowering gov-ernment spending, thus completely ignoring underdevelopment or similar socialobstacles. For the measures relating to labour market reforms, entitled ‘taxes onjobs’ and ‘barriers to jobs’, the Compact simply proposes a reduction of labourcosts from the current 40% to the average among the new EU member states set at35%. This is to be achieved through ‘reducing current government expenditures;broadening the tax base to include more sources of revenue; efficiency improve-ments in the health and pension systems; and substituting a share of financing withother revenue sources (like VAT)’ (U.A. 2014, 11).

The MSJ critique thus highlights a blind spot in the Compact, if the goal is toalleviate the burden felt by the impoverished population of BiH (although it shouldbe noted that much policy is vague in the means it outlines to reach the specific endsthat it defines). There is no reference to what the potential taxable areas are orwhether and to what extent this measure would be a further burden on low-incomeworkers. For example, the parallel decrease of income tax and increase of VAT couldreduce the tax burden on labour, but would simultaneously mean consumers (includ-ing pensioners and low-income workers) paying more for various products, even sta-ple goods. Although there is no objection to the finding that the tax burden on labouris high, there is reasonable doubt that the proposed measures would be able to ade-quately resolve the problem without additionally impoverishing the working popula-tion in BiH. The measures proposed in the Compact would at first provide employerswith less expenditures for workers’ salaries while simultaneously overburdeningworkers (and other citizens) with additional increases in prices and living costs.

Instead, an actually constructive way to ensure new revenues and at the sametime protect workers and the rest of the population in the country would be tointroduce a differentiated tax on income, abolishing taxation of the minimum wage,differentiating VAT rates for basic products relative to other goods and introducinga luxury tax that would be directed towards health and pension funds. All of thiswould be boosted through intensely monitoring the tax collection process, includingtax breaks for good practice and long-term sanctions for offenders, without cuttinglabour costs. As Stigliz (2010) claims, the mere focus on reducing budget deficitvia budgetary cuts has proved incapable of generating sufficient economic growth

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to finance public spending necessary for development, while it can cause majorharm to public workers outside the administrative sector and to the sociallydisadvantaged.

Furthermore, the Compact stresses a need for market reform in order to createjobs. The set of reforms include several steps that would

promote wage setting based on skills and performance instead of on seniority; reduceadministrative disincentives to hiring and harmonize labor legislation; reform theprocess of collective bargaining and of setting minimum wages; and actively promoteinclusion of young people in the workforce and enable temporary jobs.(U.A. 2014, 11)

Again, if the aim is to offer a pathway forward for some semblance of prosperityin BiH, this reform is based on a terrible misreading of the contemporary balanceof power in labour relations. Given the current level of clientelism, corruption andexploitation both in public and private sectors, a salary system that discards senior-ity and gives employers power to arbitrarily evaluate individual work ends up dis-carding one of the few protections workers still have in the employmentrelationship. Performance-based regulation of salaries is already active in the BiHtextile industry, where labour rights and union rights have been regularly violatedby employers setting performance-related pay. In particular, employers have setextremely high-performance targets to the mainly female workforce, with no incen-tive to pay them more than the minimum wage due to there being an entire armyof reserve labour in BiH. A similar could be said about the proposed austerity mea-sures aimed by the Compact at BiH public administration. Though many agree thatthe BiH budget is burdened by the bulky public sector, the core of the party-regulated workforce could hardly be tackled even by the most thorough of reformmeasures. Instead, the cuts threaten to become another tool in politicians’ hands, aspoor performance becomes the ultimate fuel for clientelism.

Another part of the MSJ criticism focuses on how the Compact assumes thateconomic development will happen through the inflow of foreign investments.What the EU disregards, the Movement says, is the fact that foreign investor logicaims to maximize gain in the shortest time and with the lowest risk. Foreign invest-ment is thus the wrong tool to achieve the long-term stability and secure employ-ment that BiH requires. Thus, the Compact signifies a further push of neoliberalpolicies in BiH without taking into account the BiH social and economic contextsor the wider implications of what implementing these measures would entail forworkers. As an example of the kind of measure that could have an immediate effecton employment, they propose a redistribution plan that paints a silver lining on thetragedy of the heavy floods of May 2014:

Mass post-flood employment would be a good way to go because a lot of peoplewould get jobs and that money, provided they are paid at least minimum guaranteedincome, would go back to the economy.

Money for such programs would be secured by taxing the richest, VAT differentiation,taxation of luxury goods, reducing salaries of high ranking public administrationofficers, nationalization of industries most relevant for development etc. All this runsagainst austerity measures while it is reiterated in Europe that there are ‘noalternatives to the politics of social exploitation’. (U.A. 2015a)

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While we are sympathetic to such an approach, the question remains how thiswould look in Dayton-based practice since organizing mass post-flood recoverythrough more job opportunities and even the taxation of the richest or the national-ization of key industries would all run along Dayton-based entity lines. Indeed,what would ‘nationalization’ look like in a Dayton-based state system? The floodsof 2014 and the response to them reveal that the true challenge may be coming upwith a plan for economic and social recovery that goes beyond both Dayton andthe Compact. Even though the flooding rivers did not follow inter-entity boundarylines, the flood management was to a great extent contained within the entity orlocal government jurisdiction; yet, the ineptitude and incapacity of the governmentto respond to the disaster led to the unprecedented solidarity of affected people andthe self-organization of activists on the ground. If organized according to the dam-age done by the floods (rather than Dayton-based jurisdiction), a mass employmentprogramme to rebuild could have the effect of overcoming the divisions wroughtby Dayton and enforced by the political parties who thrive on them.

Concluding remarks

So where does this leave us? Has the political field shifted much since the protestsand plenums of 2014? Are there any points of articulation between the demandsfor social justice and critique of the ethno-national clientelism of political partiesvoiced by the protestors, on the one hand, and the debates about the foreign policyof the European Union, on the other? It does appear that certain forces within theEuropean Union took the protests and their aftermath as an opening to attempt torestart momentum on the integration process, but that that attempt had more to dowith geopolitical concerns than with responding to the demands of protestors. Infact, we detect very little change either in the framing of the EU policy, its legiti-mation strategy, its targets or indeed its prescriptions for what ails BiH except forremoving the requirement that BiH implement the Sejdić–Finci ruling as a prerequi-site for moving forward within the SAA framework. What we are calling thedomestic leftist critique of the Compact has pointed out that there are very fewpoints of articulation between the socio-economic concerns articulated by the pro-testors and plenum participants and the Compact. What we are calling the interna-tional liberal critique seems to have taken the Compact as an occasion to restatelong-held criticisms of and recommendations for European and US foreign policyapproaches to BiH, criticisms and recommendations that contain few very points ofarticulation with the concerns of protestors. There is one underlying implicit pointthat all do seem to agree on, and that is for a stronger role for the state, but whatthat role ought to be and how one would get there – presumably through some sortof constitutional reform process that would revise Dayton – are only vaguely ges-tured towards, if identified at all.

The post-2014 phase of post-Dayton BiH still appears to be indeterminate, andthe analysis of the Compact and the responses to it suggest that the future of BiHcould develop in any number of possible directions. Both the liberal and the leftcriticism of the Compact address a range of issues from the BiH state structure tothe Compact’s actual ramifications for the country’s working population. In BiH,political elites have managed to stay in power by pandering to popular interestswhile making sure that no joint vision of BiH emerges. Such a joint vision wouldhave to provide some minimum consensus on the past, thus securing some

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semblance of historical justice, or provide a sustainable, socially responsible planfor economic recovery, thus securing some semblance of social justice. The unwill-ingness to produce a joint vision finds no remedy in the politicization of condition-ality (Bechev 2011), as BiH could be an ‘eternal EU candidate’ or couldalternatively be accepted based on political expediency rather than the fulfilment ofits obligations. In this regard, the 2014 Compact could be taken as evidence foreither of these eventualities. The Compact is sufficiently vague, however, that itseffects would depend upon how it is implemented. If it were implemented in a waythat built upon the socialist values reintroduced by the protestors and plenums, andstrengthened the capacity of the state to pursue a politics of redistribution, we couldsee BiH progressing towards something like the European left-wing, anti-austerityalliances such as the Greek Syriza and the Spanish Podemos. If, however, it wereimplemented without directly challenging economic and political conditions thatproduced the violence of the protests, we could see BiH take a turn in the directionof the growing European Right.24

This is a difficult position, one that truly discloses the problems of ‘illiberaldemocracy’ in a war-torn, corrupt and impoverished economy. What, if any, kindof social change is possible in a society that still operates under the Dayton logic,given its complex, socialist legacies, and the new ‘baja class’ interests? There is alack of a unifying narrative, not just in BiH but in the whole of Europe, whichmore than ever needs a different narrative. A new politics in BiH is also required,one that will be attuned to the commons, the things that belong to all of us andnone of us, from factories and enterprises to monuments and museums. This mustalso be a politics of equality for all the ‘losers’ of the post-Dayton transition in atime when the shortage of resources is becoming ever more apparent. Perhaps,somewhere between failed nationalist phantasies that have only left us empty-bel-lied on the European semi-periphery, we can realize our post-Dayton predicamentas a starting point, and look at the plenums and protests as a spark of hope forsome future solidarity awaiting us.

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes1. A consociational political framework rests on four main principles of power-sharing –

group autonomy, broad coalitions, proportional representation and veto toaccommodatecultural claims in multicultural and complex societies, avoiding potential conflicts (seemore in Lijphart 2008).

2. The Venice Commission did much of the technical work, while US diplomats shep-herded the amendments through negotiations with Bosnian leaders. ‘Draft amendmentsto the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina’, 24 March 2006, available at www.ustavnareforma.ba.

3. The cornerstone of the Prud Process was the principle that BiH should have threelevels of government – state, regional and municipal – with executive, legislative andjudicial branches at every level. This would have meant abolishing either the FBiHentity or its 10 cantons, as the three-level structure would not have accommodated boththese levels. Later disclosures revealed a tentative agreement to replace the FBiH withseveral regions, one of which would have been predominantly Croat; but controversyover this concession doomed the process, which died out in early 2009. See more at

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http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/europe/balkans/bosnia-herzegovina/b068-bosnias-gordian-knot-constitutional-reform.pdf.

4. The Sejdić–Finci case refers to a 2009 ruling of the European Court of Human Rightsbrought by Dervo Sejdić, a Roma activist, and Jakob Finci, a Jewish politician, whoargued that the Bosnian constitution negotiated as part of Dayton was discriminatorybecause certain electoral posts could only be held by Serbs, Croats or BosniakMuslims.

5. ‘The Park is Ours’ [‘Park je Naš’] protest organized in May 2012 aimed to stop realestate developers in cahoots with the municipal government from illegally destroyingand building over a public park in the city.

6. The JMBG (‘Unique Master Citizen Number’) protests escalated because babies bornsince February 2013 had not been given social security numbers because the relevantlaw had lapsed and not been renewed because of parliamentary squabbling. Being bornwithout a JMBG meant one could not get a passport and this led to a public outcrywhen Belmina Ibrišević, a 3-month-old girl in urgent need of a bonemarrow transplant,couldn’t go to Germany.

7. For example, ‘abolishing the Republika Srpska entity’, a popular demand of theanti-Dayton group, has been routinely held up by Serb politicians as evidence thatconstitutional reform is just a smokescreen to deprive Serbs of their right toself-determination.

8. Adam Fagan in a conference ‘Western Balkans Between Authoritarianism andDemocratic Tendencies’. Ohrid, May 2015.

9. The Compact was critiqued from different perspectives; what we call ‘the liberal’ cri-tique is a response from a US and Western Europe think-tank associated with theDemocratization Policy Council that advocates a functional liberal democracy in BiHthat would still be based on Dayton. The ‘left’ critique has more ‘grassroots’ originsand advocates greater social justice and workers’ rights in BiH.

10. ‘Report for Progress in BiH? – The German-British Initiative’ by Kurt Bassuener,Toby Vogel, Valery Perry and Bodo Weber published in November 2014. (http://www.democratizationpolicy.org/pdf/briefs/DPC%20Policy%20Paper%20-%20Retreat%20for%20Progress%20in%20BiH.pdf) and ‘Making the Market on Constitutional Reform inBiH in the Wake of the EU Initiative’ by Oscar Fernandez, Valery Perry and Kurt Bas-suener published in March 2015 (http://www.democratizationpolicy.org/pdf/briefs/DPC%20Policy%20Brief%20-%20CR%20after%20the%20new%20EU%20initiative.pdf).

11. A total of 585 (5.24%) socially owned companies carried out these privatizations,affecting organizations that employed 98,494 (12.87%) of BiH’s workforce at the time.

12. For example, the Law on the Revision of Privatisation of State Capital and Banks inFBiH was adopted in 2012, establishing an Agency for Revision of Privatization inFBiH that would review failed and suspicious privatizations. However, the Agency didnot start its actual work until the first quarter of 2015 and thus has so far been unableto provide any tangible results.

13. Although linguistically it is one language, which everyone speaks and understands,peoples in BiH insist on calling it Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian language.

14. The six measures were stated as follows: (1) BiH needs to spur employment andimprove competitiveness by reducing the cost of working to a far lower percentage oflabour costs – from levels close to 40% towards the average for new EU memberstates of 35%. (2) BiH needs to enact a set of labour market reforms to increase jobcreation, including revitalizing the collective bargaining process, reducing disincentivesfor hiring and, in particular, promoting the inclusion of young people in the workforce.(3) BiH needs to boost competitiveness by approving a results-based plan aimed atimproving the conditions measured by Doing Business indicators to match the regionalaverage. (4) Bosnia and Herzegovina has a weak private sector and serious difficultiesin attracting investors. Better investor protection laws and practices are needed, includ-ing corporate governance, strengthened risk management practices to improve accessto financing (especially for new enterprises) and a more efficient insolvency frame-work. (5) Bosnia and Herzegovina needs stronger adherence to the rule of law anddeep public administration reform. In the short term, there should be a comprehensivepublic listing of para-fiscal fees and other costs, permits and licenses with a view to

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elevate their transparency. (6) Bosnia and Herzegovina must improve the targeting ofsocial assistance through a set of measures that would make social protection policiesmore effective, efficient and equitable. Social protection needs to work for those whoreally need it – or who pay for it – and must be put on a sustainable financial footing.

15. The interview with Ambassador Kraak is available at http://bosniaherzegovina.nlembassy.org/news/2014/august/interview-with-ambassador-kraak.html.

16. Who are the Bosnians who were consulted in the making of the Compact? I (NidžaraAhmetašević) tried to find some of them in the spring, when the forum was held, buteven the ones I managed to find told me that they were invited to the meeting, but thatthey had no opportunity to speak and they did not have the feeling they were listenedto. There have been many projects in the past which were imposed by the internationalcommunity, claiming that they are the result of consultations, but the projects neverwere realized.

17. A Sarajevo neighborhood and a spa.18. The impression that debate about EU policy towards BiH is a conversation that

excludes Bosnians was reinforced by a conference held in March 2015 in Oxford (in)-conveniently titled New International Thinking on South-Eastern Europe. Out of morethan 20 participants, the conference included only one member of the BiH civic sectorand not a single Bosnian public intellectual or activist. http://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/ke-special-collection/new-international-thinking-on-south-eastern-europe.html

19. The European Foreign Policy Scorecard provides a systematic assessment of Europe’sforeign policy performance, analysing the performance of the 28 member states andthe EU institutions on 65 policy areas arranged around 6 key issue areas: Russia; theUSA; Wider Europe; Middle East and North Africa; Asia; and China; Multilateralissues (http://www.ecfr.eu/scorecard/2015).

20. See more in footnote 9. Two DPC papers are produced by a number of scholars andpolicy makers and we herewith refer to them as Bassuener et al. (2014) and Fernandezet al. (2015).

21. Authors of these policy papers worked for the OHR, OSCE, UNDP, the Open SocietyInstitute, International Rescue Committee, the Boell Foundation, and a USAID-fundedprojected aimed at engaging civil society in the constitutional reform process.

22. International Financial Institutions.23. The Movement for Social Justice was created as a spin-off from the protests gathering

prominent Sarajevo intellectuals and activists.24. The challenges of Europeanization discourse when it comes to Greece are well illus-

trated in an interview with Greek MP Costas Lapavitsas, available at: http://www.thepressproject.net/article/74,530/Costas-Lapavitsas-The-Syriza-strategy-has-come-to-an-end.Notes on ContributorsDanijela Majstorović is Associate Professor of Linguisticsand Cultural Studies at the University of Banja Luka’s English department teachingDiscourse Analysis and Cultural Studies. She was a Fulbright fellow at UCLA in2012-2013 and Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at theUniversity of Alberta in 2014. Her research interests involve discourse studies, criticaltheory, gender and feminism, postcolonial and post- communist studies.She publishedover 25 journal articles, co-authored a monograph Youth Ethnic and National Identityin Bosnia and Herzegovina: Social Science Approaches (Palgrave, 2013),and authoredDiskursi periferije (Biblioteka XX vek, Beograd 2013) and Diskurs, moći međunaro-dna zajednica (Filozofski fakultet u Banjoj Luci, 2007). She edited two volumes: Liv-ing With Patriarchy: Discursive Construction of Gendered Subjects Acros Cultures(John Benjamins, 2011) and Kritičke kulturološke studije u postjugoslovenskom pros-toru (Filološki fakultet u Banjoj Luci, 2012). Zoran Vučkovac holds an MA in Englishand Film Studies and has published several papers in local and international journals.He runs the Banja Luka Social Center (BASOC) and his research and activism concernfeminism, class and labor, social justice and politics of memory. Anđela Pepić holdsan MA in economics and pursues another one in political science. She is a projectmanager at the Faculty of Political Science’s Institute for Social Research. Her researchinterests involve labor, social and economic rights, socially responsible enterpreneur-ship and Marxism.

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Notes on contributorsDanijela Majstorović is an associate professor of Linguistics and Cultural Studies at theUniversity of Banja Luka’s English department teaching Discourse Analysis and CulturalStudies. She was a Fulbright fellow at UCLA in 2012-2013 and Canada Research Chair inCultural Studies postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta in 2014. Her researchinterests involve discourse studies, critical theory, gender and feminism, postcolonial andpostcommunist studies. She published over 25 journal articles, co-authored a monographYouth Ethnic and National Identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Social Science Approaches(Palgrave, 2013)and authored Diskursi periferije (Biblioteka XX vek, Beograd 2013) andDiskurs, moći međunarodna zajednica (Filozofski fakultet u Banjoj Luci, 2007). She editedtwo volumes: Living With Patriarchy: Discursive Construction of Gendered Subjects AcrosCultures (John Benjamins, 2011) and Kritičke kulturološke studije u postjugoslovenskomprostoru (Filološki fakultet u Banjoj Luci, 2012).

Zoran Vučkovac holds an MA in English and Film Studies and has published several papersin local and international journals. He runs the Banja Luka Social Center (BASOC) and hisresearch and activism concern feminism, class and labour social justice and politics ofmemory.

Anđela Pepić holds an MA in economics and pursues another one in political science. Sheis a project manager at the Faculty of Political Science’s Institute for Social Research. Herresearch interests involve labour, social and economic rights, socially responsibleentrepreneurship and Marxism.

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