Tag: Balkans
Keep it clean
It’s unusual that I post three days in a row on the Balkans, but on reflection yesterday I did not emphasize enough how important it is that Kosovo’s elections be transparently clean. The 2010 parliamentary election had serious problems. There were fewer problems in last November’s municipal elections, but they were not perfect. I am told the issues often arise within political parties, with candidates trying to falsify preference votes. I have no way of independently judging that.
But I do know that it is vital to Kosovo’s most important ambitions–NATO and eventual EU membership–that this election go well. A democratic state has to be able to conduct an election well. It isn’t easy–we’ve still got problems in parts of the US more than 220 years after independence.
I am told the EU is sending some observers, and the Kosovo government is recruiting some in the US. But international observers are not nearly as important to a good election as local people, who can much more readily detect fraud and abuse, both at polling stations and away from them. I am told there will be a nongovernment telephone hotline for citizens to call to report problems. That strikes me as a fine idea.
What really counts in the end is the attitude of those who might try to abuse the electoral system. If they are convinced that not only the country’s best interests but also their own will be served by a good election, they will align their behavior accordingly. If they think their competitors will be able to cheat, they will respond in kind. Potential malefactors need to fear the consequences. A big turnout helps to ensure that polilticians know they are being watched, but it also strains the electoral mechanism.
The country’s best interests are clear. If this election goes badly, Pristina will have a harder time convincing Brussels that it merits goodies like the visa waiver program and a Stabilization and Association Agreement, which I am told should be ready for signature in January. A bad election would also give Serbs and other non-Albanians pause, raising once again the archetypal Balkans question: why should I live as a minority in your country when you can live as a minority in mine?
If the election goes well, whoever gains the largest share of seats will have a much easier road ahead. As always in Kosovo, gaining a majority will require a coalition, one that includes Serb and other non-Albanian participation. The capacity to form the government depends in part on everyone accepting the validity of the election results. If I think you may have cheated your way to victory, I’m far less likely to want to negotiate a pact with you to govern.
So yes, the Kosovo election may be dull. But it is important to those who live there. The good functioning of the electoral mechanism would itself be a key result.
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Dull
Kosovo’s election this coming Sunday has garnered virtually no ink (or electrons) in the United States. This is mainly due to the many other issues Americans are wrestling with. There is a long list of international issues before we even get close to the Balkans: withdrawal from Afghanistan, nuclear negotiations with Iran, failure of Middle East peace talks, Chinese naval challenges to US allies, the Syrian war and its spillover, Libya’s implosion, restoration of military autocracy in Egypt. Even within the Balkans, Bosnia’s stagnation would outrank any problem Kosovo is currently posing.
But inattention to Kosovo’s election is also merited: Kosovo is becoming a normal country. Why should Americans care who gets elected? Four major Albanian parties are contesting the election. Serbs and other minorities will participate, running for 10 guaranteed seats and hoping for a few more. The electoral mechanism, whose integrity was compromised in a number of places during the last poll, is thought to be in better shape. At their municipal elections last fall, the citizens turned out a lot of incumbents. It is unclear whether that will happen again. To me, not knowing the outcome of an election in advance is a good sign.
The big issue these days in Kosovo is creation of its armed forces, which will require a two-thirds majority in parliament. This gives the Serbs, who generally oppose Kosovo acquiring an army, a strong incentive to vote. They are unlikely to be able to block the constitutional changes required, but they could influence them. So could Belgrade: if it were to recognize Kosovo, or at least allow it to become a UN member, Pristina could settle for a smaller force less focused on the threat from Serbia, which has to be taken seriously so long as Belgrade has not recognized Kosovo’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
I don’t mean to say everything is hunky dory in Kosovo, or likely to become so any time soon. The economy is far from generating enough jobs for its young and growing population. Poverty and youth unemployment are high. Corruption is widely thought to be rife. Nepotism and cronyism are common. Inter-ethnic relations, though much improved since the war ended in 1999, are far from warm. Many Kosovo Serbs still do not accept the fact of Kosovo’s independence. Many Albanians see Serbs as disloyal to the now six-year-old state. Implementation of the agreements intended to reintegrate the four northern, Serb-controlled municipalities with the rest of Kosovo is lagging.
This is what relative success looks like in international interventions and statebuilding. Perfection is far off. Differences are settled by political rather than military means. Responding to the needs of citizens becomes a priority, even if one observed more in the breach. To see relative failure, you need only look as far as Bosnia and Herzegovina, where its multiple governments have failed utterly to meet the serious challenge of its recent floods. Serbia, whose governments are well-established if not well-resourced, has also had difficulty with the response and relief effort. Kosovo was fortunate. The rains didn’t hit as hard there.
The question Kosovo citizens should be asking themselves as they go to the polls is who can ensure that their state will respond well if catastrophic floods, or a big earthquake, or an epidemic, were to strike? Who will increase accountability and transparency? Who will crack down on corruption and nepotism? Who will enable the economy to generate more jobs? Those are not a heroic questions. Some might even consider them dull ones. They won’t much interest Americans, but I hope they still interest Kosovo’s electorate. They are what governance should now be about.
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Bosnia and Herzegovina adrift
I spoke last night at the Austrian Cultural Center in New York City, in an event presided over by Tim Judah, who has been covering Ukraine lately but cut his teeth in the Balkans. The panel included Damir Arsenijevic, Atilla Aksoj, and Wolfgang Petritsch. Here are my talking notes:
1. I confess I’ve been tempted to do a John Cage this evening, but that would require I stand here for four minutes and thirty-three seconds completely silent, as the composer once did.
2. I haven’t got that kind of discipline. So you’ll have to settle for something less edifying and not much longer: warmed over ideas from someone who can’t remember when he last had a good one on the subject.
3. Let me start with the conventional wisdom, which I think is correct: Bosnia is stuck because the Dayton agreements, while ending a war, ensconced ethnically nationalist political parties and politicians in positions of power from which only more nationalist parties and politicians are be able to remove them.
4. The fault lies in the country’s constitution. Dayton ended the war but failed to provide Bosnia with a functional governing structure capable of negotiating and implementing the requirements of NATO or European Union membership.
5. This didn’t matter much for the first decade after the war. There were lots of things that needed doing. NATO and EU memberships were not much of an issue.
6. But in 2005/6 a team of Americans, with European support, tried to start fixing the constitutional problem by facilitating preparation by the Bosnian political parties of constitutional amendments later known as the April package.
7. The package clarified group, individual and minority rights, as well mechanisms for protecting the “vital national interests” of Bosnia’s constituent peoples. It also included reforms to strengthen the government and the powers of the prime minister, reduce the president’s duties, and streamline parliamentary procedures.
8. The April package narrowly failed in parliament to achieve the 2/3 majority required by two votes. The responsibility was clear: one political party that had participated fully in the negotiations blocked passage, in order to ensure its leader election to the presidency.
9. Whatever the faults of the April package, its passage would have opened the way for a different politics in Bosnia, one based less on ethnic identity and more on economic, social welfare and other issues of common concern to all its citizens.
10. I confess I thought its defeat would only be temporary. For sure the package would be reconsidered the next year and passed.
11. I failed to understand that the moment was not reproducible. Damage was done. Defeat of the April package ushered in a period of virulent ethnic polarization. Over the past eight years, the situation has deteriorated markedly. Only one constitutional amendment has passed during that period, under intense international pressure, to codify the status of the Brcko District in northeastern Bosnia.
12. Meanwhile, the country has fallen further and further behind most of its neighbors in the regatta for EU membership and now looks likely to end up in last place, with little hope of entering the EU before 2025 or later.
13. Those who advocate, as I trust Wolfgang will, that the High Representative responsible for interpretation of the Dayton agreements be removed and Bosnia’s problems be left to the EU accession process for resolution have little evidence that mechanism will work.
14. All the leverage of EU accession did not work to get Bosnians to align their constitution with a decision of the European Court of Human Rights. Nor has it accelerated the adaptation of Bosnia’s court system to European standards.
15. So what is to be done?
16. I think there is no substitute for the Bosnians solving their own problems, even if the internationals helped to create them. The recent “Bosnian spring” plenums are for me a positive sign. So too is the interethnic cooperation in response to the recent floods, which demonstrated clearly that Bosnia’s many governments are unable to serve its citizens well.
17. But the plenums have so far focused on local issues, not national ones. At some point after October’s elections, Bosnians will have to try to fix its constitution. They could do worse than return to the April package and get on with the process of constitutional revision.
18. I also think there are directions that would not be fruitful. Some would like to see even greater group rights and ethnic separation than provided for in the Dayton agreements. That is not in my view a fruitful direction. Apart from its impact on Bosnia, it would have the undesirable effect of encouraging separatism in Ukraine and elsewhere.
19. Others would like to further weaken the central government or allow the entities to negotiate separately their entry into the EU. Those in my view are not fruitful directions.
20. There is a simple test for any proposal for reform in Bosnia: will it make the government in Sarajevo more functional? The corollary question is whether it will accelerate Bosnian entry into NATO and the EU.
21. The April package would have done that. The time is coming to return to it and get the difficult job of constitutional reform done.
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Memorial Day for the people
I have little to add to what I said the past three years on Memorial Day, so I am republishing what I wrote originally in 2011 with slight updates and a short additional paragraph:
I spent my high school years marching in the Memorial Day parade in New Rochelle, New York and have never lost respect for those who serve and make sacrifices in uniform. Even as an anti-war protester in the Vietnam era, I thought denigration of those in uniform heinous, not to mention counterproductive.
It is impossible to feel anything but pride and gratitude to those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Kosovo, Bosnia, Panama and Somalia during the previous decade. Nor will I forget my Memorial Day visit to the American cemetery in Nettuno accompanying Defense Secretary Les Aspin in the early 1990s, or my visit to the Florence cemetery the next year. These extraordinarily manicured places are the ultimate in peaceful. It is unimaginable what their inhabitants endured. No matter what we say during the speechifying on Memorial Day, there is little glory in what the troops do and a whole lot of hard work, dedication, professionalism and horror.
That said, it is a mistake to forget those who serve out of uniform, as we habitually do. Numbers are hard to come by, but a quick internet search suggests that at at least 2000 U.S. civilians have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus quite a few “third country” nationals. They come in many different varieties: journalists, policemen, judges, private security guards, agriculturalists, local government experts, computer geeks, engineers, relief and development workers, trainers, spies, diplomats and who knows what else. I think of these people as our “pinstripe soldiers,” even if most of them don’t in fact wear pinstripes. But they are a key component of building the states that we hope will some day redeem the sacrifices they and their uniformed comrades have endured.
Iraqi and Afghan civilians killed number at least 100 times the number of American civilians killed. Numbers this large become unfathomable. Of course some–and maybe more–would have died under Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, but that is not what happened. They died fighting American or Coalition forces, or by accident, or caught in a crossfire, or trying to defend themselves, or in internecine violence, or because a soldier got nervous or went beserk, or….
Memorial Day in this age of “war among the people” should be about the people, civilian as well as military, non-American as well as American, not only about the uniform, the flag or the cause.
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Belgrade starts down a difficult path
After weeks of post-election negotiations, Serbia has a new government. Except for the addition of an ethnic Hungarian minority party – the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians (SVM) – the ruling coalition essentially consists of the two major parties that formed the previous one: Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) and Ivica Dačić’s Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). The most visible difference is that Vučić has replaced Dačić as prime minister, while Dačić will hold the positions of vice-premier and foreign minister.
While Vučić was de facto the most powerful figure in the previous government as well, the acquisition of almost two thirds of parliamentary seats through a sweeping electoral victory by his party allows him to formalize his status and continue the consolidation of power more freely. This has caused many to wonder why he nevertheless chose to incorporate SPS into the government even though SNS could have comfortably ruled alone.
Part of the explanation lies in the severity of proposed economic reforms. Vučić wants to reach as broad a political consensus as possible in order to neutralize potential opposition once the reforms start to hurt large portions of people. SPS would be a far more dangerous opponent than the Democratic Party (DS) or the New Democratic Party (NDS), not only because it enjoys considerably greater public support but also because DS and NDS are deeply embroiled in mutual rivalry, as they compete for more or less the same voters.
Despite his current popularity, Vučić is aware that he will be blamed if reforms fail to yield expected results. He also knows his popularity will inevitably decline with the implementation of each new unpopular measure. The only question is how much. The success of reforms does not depend solely on Vučić’s or anyone’s individual will but rather on a variety of impersonal factors, both internal and external.
In order for structural reforms to succeed, they have to be both comprehensive and carefully timed. Partial implementation, with too many compromises in the process, will not suffice. Positive effects will not be felt in the near term. It will take years before people see tangible improvement in their quality of life, and only on condition that the government does not give up in the meantime in the face of strong public resistance.
The government plans to execute two sets of reforms. The first and more urgent pertain to fiscal consolidation aimed at preventing a looming financial default. The second, and in the long term more important, includes a radical change in business philosophy to make it much more friendly to private entrepreneurship. Adding to the complexity, economic reforms will have to be accompanied by a complete institutional overhaul, with emphasis on the judicial system.
On the foreign policy front, Kosovo will remain a top priority for Serbia’s European partners. In one way or another, the Brussels agreement will reverberate throughout the accession talks. With EU membership years away, Serbia’s formal recognition of its former province should not be expected any time soon. For one thing, Belgrade sees Kosovo as a useful lever in shaping its broader relationship with the West. The pace of Serbia’s EU integration will also hinge on how the lingering European crisis affects general sentiment within member states regarding enlargement policy.
On Ukraine, the government has tried to remain neutral. While analysts are warning that Serbia will not be able to maintain such a position for long, that may not necessarily be the case. The West is unlikely to place too much pressure on Belgrade for fear that it could undermine cooperativeness in dealing with Kosovo. Furthermore, even EU countries are divided on how to respond to Moscow’s latest actions. Last but not least, the EU understands Serbia’s vast energy dependence on Russia. Belgrade is particularly worried about the potential impact of the dispute between Russia and the West on the future of South Stream. Vučić’s government is pinning great hopes on the project, expecting the pipeline construction to boost economic activity and thus facilitate critically important job creation. However, if the crisis over Ukraine escalates further, pressure on Belgrade to take sides will grow accordingly.
The new government has chosen the path of serious reform. But given the challenges lying ahead, nothing can be taken for granted.
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Why Putin maybe blinked
It is easy to predict how many babies will be born next year. It is hard to predict who the individual mothers will be. That’s one of the important lessons in international affairs, where the decisions of unique individuals often matter.
Forty-eight hours after I posted that we should expect worse in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin decided to lower the tension. He claims to have withdrawn Russian troops from the Ukrainian border and to have asked the Russian-speaking insurgents in eastern and southern Ukraine not to conduct a May 11 referendum on independence. The US and NATO are saying they’ve seen no evidence of either claim. He is also sounding amiable about the May 25 presidential election that Kiev is organizing.
What made Putin blink? I don’t know. Maybe the significant declines in Russia’s credit rating, stock market and currency since he started up the Ukraine crisis. Maybe some of the sanctions are starting to bite. Maybe the withdrawals from his St. Petersburg economic forum weighed heavily. Maybe the Swiss President, who met with Putin just before he made his comments about Ukraine, said something about personal or institutional finance that gave the Russian President pause. Maybe it’s all a ruse to catch the West off balance and tomorrow he’ll invade.
Whatever his tactical maneuvers, Putin will not lose sight of his strategic goal: to dominate the Russian-speaking areas of eastern and southern Ukraine and deprive Kiev of the authority it needs to counter Moscow’s preferences, including its opposition to Ukrainian membership in NATO and a closer relationship with the EU. The cheapest and easiest way to achieve his purposes is autonomy for the Russian-speaking provinces, and some sort of “entity” binding them together. He is all too familiar with recent precedents for this: Republika Srpska in Bosnia and the Association of Serb Municipalities in Kosovo.
No doubt some degree of decentralization will be part of the solution in Ukraine. It is not only American communities that want to run their own schools, provide services, maintain their own infrastructure and manage their own revenues. The Federal government has little to say about my daily life. I interact far more often with the District of Columbia, which collects much of its own revenue and in many respects governs itself, despite the residue of Congressional oversight that no state has to put up with.
What Kiev has to be careful about is to maintain its authority over foreign affairs, defense, the judiciary and at least some of the forces of law and order. It also needs a supremacy clause, like the one in the existing constitution, that enables it to override local decisions that threaten the integrity of the state, including the holding of referenda on independence.
Putin is not going to be interested in decentralization, which would block him from the kind of dominant position in Ukraine that he seeks. Decentralization to provincial administrations will make it more difficult for Russian-speakers to unify and fight Kiev, even if it enables them a wide margin of control over the services provided within the provinces.
My best guess is that Putin blinked to provide some time for negotiations to produce the result he wants. President Obama is not the only one who prefers not to use military force but instead accomplish his ends by diplomatic means.
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