Building the Resistance. Confronting the Hybrid Hegemony
of local Ethnocracy and International Protectorate through
radical left politics in Banja Luka.
Master's Thesis
Felix Fritsch 10876987
felix.fritsch@gmx.at
Supervisor: drs. Courtney Lake Vegelin Second Reader: prof. dr. Dennis Rodgers
Abstract:
Following the 2014 uprisings for social justice in Bosnia and Hercegovina, the Banja Luka Social Centre (BASOC) was established as an incubator for critical political engagement in a heterogeneous left in and beyond Republika Srpska. Being a collective reflection on the first ten months of its existence, this thesis contributes to coming to terms as a group and to a joint understanding of interrelated challenges, obstacles and structural constraints BASOC is facing. The research process is based on a methodological framework that combines Participatory Action Research with elements of Constructivist Grounded Theory, aiming to jointly produce shared knowledge that is directly applicable in our struggle. This 'moving with the movement' is thought as challenging the divide between theory and action as well as neo-colonial, epistemic and other relations of inequality between researcher and co-researchers prevalent in contemporary academia. The historical context is assessed in depth starting with the anti-colonial character of Yugoslavia, to accumulation through dispossession constituting the new capitalist class, to post-socialist neoliberal 'transition' structured by Ethnocracy and supervised by the International Community, and civil society building as 'societal engineering' aimed to produce hegemony for prolonged neo-colonial intervention. Memory politics, feminism and social justice as the three main pillars of BASOC are discussed in relation to this complex context as necessitating an integrated approach that challenges prevalent civil society structures as building consensus around neoliberal hegemony. Tensions are found in a concurrent rejection and reproduction of the neoliberal civil society paradigm in the form of trends towards NGOization, furthermore in BASOC's disposition towards Yugonostalgia as a reflective versus a restorative use of memories of the past, and in the question of how to pursue an anti-colonial struggle in the 21st century without falling into the trap of reproducing nationalisms of
Acknowledgements
I want to thank all my comrades in Banja Luka and beyond for their friendship, for their patience with me and my questions, and for letting me be part of the BASOC experience. Samo Revolucije!
I would further like to offer special thanks to my supervisor Courtney, who provided me with help and guidance throughout the research, and yet gave me the freedom to write this thesis on my own terms.
Finally, I feel obliged to also mention the 'Social Crew' here, for giving me comfort and strength and keeping me sane during the last months of writing from the third floor of the UvA library. I will miss you guys.
Table of contents
Abstract ……….. 2
Acknowledgements ……… 3
Table of contents ……….. 4
Abbreviations ………. 5
1. Introduction and overview ……….. 6
2. Contextualization ……….. 9
2.1 The historical formation of Yugoslavia and its anti-colonial character ……….. 9
2.2 The return of ethnic nationalism – at the eve of war ……… 12
2.3 The political economy of war and its international bystander………. 13
2.4 Dayton: Ethnocracy and international protectorate by design ……… 15
2.4.1 Subjugating external pressure for neoliberal reforms to the local elites' needs ………… 18
2.5 The never-ending Transition: Civil Society as a tool of intervention ……… 21
2.5.1 Civil Society as non-coercive hegemony – in the footsteps of Gramsci ………. 22
2.6 Constitutional crisis, stagnation and international neglect ….……… 23
2.7 Breaking the silence – We are hungry in three languages! ……… 24
2.7.1 Feminism and women's movements before, during and after the 1990s war ………. 25
2.7.2 Contemporary struggles and movements – An activist CS in the making? ……… 26
3. Methodology ………. 30
3.1 Social Movement Studies: self-centred academia, insulated knowledge ………... 31
3.2 Being Part of the Movement: (Participatory) Action Research ……… 32
3.2.1 The SCHOLAR-ACTIVIST divide – locating the researcher's position ……… 33
3.2.2 Doing emancipatory PAR from an integrated SCHOLAR-ACTIVIST position ……… 34
3.3 (Constructivist) Grounded Theory – Building theory from scratch ……… 36
3.3.1 Classical, reformulated or constructivist Grounded Theory ……….. 36
3.3.2 Constructivist Grounded Theory in practice ……….. 37
3.4 Grounded AR or transformational GT – Mixing the approaches ……….. 38
3.4.1 Methodology in practice – Reflecting on data collection and analysis ……….. 40
3.5 Ethical considerations ………. 41
4. Empirical Part ……….. 42
4.1 The BASOC Experience – radical politics at the fringes of civil society ……….. 43
4.1.1 Genesis ……… 43
4.1.2 Aiming for the stars: Memory politics, feminism and libertarian socialism ……….. 45
4.1.2.1 On the necessity of revolution ……….………. 47
4.1.3 Spreading left positions in an emerging 'activist Civil Society' ……….………. 48
4.1.4 Deriving means from the threefold self-understanding of BASOC ……… 50
4.2 Problematizing BASOC ………. 54
4.2.1 Anti-colonial thought and practice ……….. 54
4.2.2 NGOization of movement, movementization of NGOs ……….. 55
4.2.3 Remembering Yugoslavia as a counter-hegemonic practice ……….. 59
4.2.3.1 Problematic aspects of embracing a Yugoslav identity ……… 61
5. Conclusion ……… 62
6. Bibliography ………. 66
7. Appendix ……… 75
7.1 Primary data ……… 75
Abbreviations
AR ……….………. Action Research BASOC ……… Banja Luka Social Centar BiH ……… Bosnia and Hercegovina CGT ……….. Constructivist Grounded Theory CS ……… Civil Society DPA ……….. Dayton Peace Accords GT ……… Grounded Theory IC ………. International Community IDS ……… International Development Studies IMF ………. International Monetary Fund NGO ……….…… Non-Governmental Organization OHR ……… Office of the High Representative PAR……… Participatory Action Research RoL ………... Rule of Law RS ………. Republika Srpska SFRY ………... Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
1. Introduction and overview
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it”1 (Marx & Engels, 1978:145).
This masters' thesis is an attempt to combine academic research and political activism in the spirit of academic revolutionaries such as Paulo Freire (1982) and Orlando Fals Borda (1979). I do so by researching the establishment of the Banja Luka Social Centre (henceforth BASOC), a new, left-leaning social and political centre in Banja Luka, capital of the Republika Srpska (henceforth RS), the Serb part of Bosnia and Hercegovina (henceforth BiH). The explicit aim of this research is to facilitate the coming to terms as a group regarding the substance of BASOC – its genesis, its aims, its self-understanding and the means at its disposal. Also, problems that arose during the first year of being active are stated and discussed in relation to their complex context to build the basis for overcoming them in future. In order to stimulate collective knowledge production as political self-education, the research process constantly encouraged participation of the 'researched', attempting to transcend the dichotomy of subject – object, academic – activist, researcher – researched in order to challenge neo-colonial research relations inscribed into the very foundations of International Development Studies (henceforth IDS) in the Global North. Following the above, famous words of Marx, the resulting thesis is therefore strongly guided by the will to change the world – both by direct, practical involvement in BASOC throughout and beyond the field research, and by offering an interpretation of the world aimed at adequately informing my own and others' future involvement.
While this research is somewhat different from conventional research in my field, its relevance for IDS is nevertheless far-reaching. This begins with the historical context of BiH's trajectory from an Austrian colony, to a state of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (henceforth SFRY) leading the non-aligned Movement throughout the Cold War, to becoming a de-facto protectorate at the European periphery, restricted in its sovereignty and fully dependent on continuous financial support. The political economy of war, ethnic cleansing and genocide, the inability of the UN to effectively provide protection for civilians against Serb military and affiliated, quasi-private militias and warlords, and the ways in which primitive ethno-accumulation transformed the economic and political elites point towards issues in IDS which, given the recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, prevail as its blind spots. This research's relevance for IDS further encompasses the liberal paradigm imposed on BiH by International Community (henceforth IC) actors, namely the International Monetary Fund (henceforth IMF) throughout the 1980s and diverse international bodies after 1995, sending the country on a never-ending 'transition' towards liberal peace, democracy and market economy under the label of 'Europeanization', with the distant goal of accessing the EU eventually. Also the task of positioning BASOC as an actor critical of these paternalistic interventions in the existing civil society (henceforth CS), shaped by neoliberal dogmas and dominated by professionalized non-governmental organizations (henceforth NGOs), can be interpreted in IDS terms. The struggle to avoid NGOization and instead push for the 1 For a short discussion on how this phrase can be understood and misunderstood, see Murphy (2013), 'What did
movementization, politicization and radicalization of CS actors adds the dimension of social movements as actors for political change. At the same time it opens the question of fighting neo-colonial structures of domination while being dependent on international financial support. Finally, the yet unanswered question of how to pursue an anti-colonial struggle that avoids the trap of reproducing nationalism as a uniting frame points towards the need for a contextualized understanding of local neo-colonial power structures and their relation to nationalism.
In order to touch upon both the task to produce BASOC as a shared idea and situate it in the complex historical and contemporary context, the research question needs to reflect an anti-essentialist, constructivist approach, a temporal dimension, and the aspiration to collectively produce practically relevant knowledge.
Research Question:
How can Banja Luka Social Centre (BASOC) be imagined and constructed collectively as an emancipatory actor on the fringes of civil society in relation to the complex historical and contemporary context of the post-Yugoslav space?
Subquestions:
- What is the relevant historical and contemporary context and how does it matter for BASOC?
- What does it mean to 'think and construct BASOC collectively'? How does this collective approach play out in practice?
- How is BASOC being thought and constructed? Which substance is it given, and which problems arise from this construction of substance?
Knowledge of the multi-layered context in which BASOC is situated is the first and biggest requirement for understanding its conduct as well as problems. Often enough, my initial ignorance towards local, regional and (inter-)national historical development put me in the position of a naive Western researcher assuming the world to fit his concepts and books, sometimes to the amusement, and sometimes to the annoyance of my comrades. In order to lessen my own ignorance and to spare my readers some misunderstandings, this thesis starts with a multi-layered contextualization, pointing out different historical developments and their relevance for understanding contemporary Bosnian-Hercegovinian society and political activism therein. It is noteworthy though that accounts of history are necessarily selective, and therefore never fully objective, but are rather shaped by implicit or explicit goals and always have political implications. The ambition guiding my choice of perspective is to carve out (neo-)colonial and class dimensions of power, at the expense of elements of national mystification and homogenization. This endeavour follows the explicitly political goal to shift political contestation from issues of ethnic identity back to the material base of society. I do not claim, therefore, to present a 'full truth', but rather a perspective on history that supports the political struggle this thesis is part of. In this spirit, CS as the 'associational ecosystem' (Edwards, 2009) of BASOC is traced in its historical development as a foreign-funded, artificial civil sector comprised of de-politicized NGOs. It is then conceptualized along the lines of Antonio Gramsci's (1971) ideas of hegemony – produced through the interplay of coercive political society and non-coercive CS – in order to lay the foundation for a counter-hegemonic strategy. Following this, social movement studies are reflected upon in short regarding their methodological choices in order to
justify an approach that addresses the same field from an alternative angle.
This alternative approach to social movements is then explained methodologically as combining participatory action research inspired by Freire and Fals Borda with elements of constructivist grounded theory as developed by Kathy Charmaz (2006). Positionality and ethical considerations are furthermore discussed to outline my self-understanding as being a politically engaged researcher applying and pursuing practical critique of academia as is. In the empirical sections, the genesis, the overall aims and their interrelations, the threefold self-understanding and some of the means of BASOC are introduced. The revolutionary approach, aiming to overcome the capitalist state and the influence of patriarchy and nationalism on society through one integrated struggle, is justified by reference to the historical, material and political context of Bosnia and Hercegovina (henceforth BiH). Based on an analysis of recent movements and protests, the relationship to NGOs and other liberal actors is configured as based on interaction and critique, with the explicit goal of co-opting and radicalising progressive parts of CS to become part of a wider movement. The self-understanding of BASOC is discussed as combining a political group, a physical space, and a platform for local CS, with each of them tied to specific, yet interlinked, activities and events. The second empirical part is then designated to systematize, contextualize and theorize complicated and at times problematic aspects of thinking and building BASOC. It opens with a brief assessment of the general anti-colonial disposition shaping rhetoric, practice and theory production, as well as of moments in which structural dependency undermines a stronger anti-colonial position. The process of NGOization and its rooting in neoliberal CS is then discussed as a trend that is concurrently rejected and reproduced in the practice of BASOC, reflecting the reciprocal relationship of agency and structure. Finally, the Yugonostalgia present in BASOC is operationalized as a reflective practice using memories of the past as an analytical lens on present and future, allowing for the contestation of the current hybrid hegemony of local nationalists and international colonizers from a trans-ethnic class perspective.
Both empirical chapters have to be considered in close relation to the multi-faceted context. The initial creation of the Yugoslav kingdom establishes the anti-colonial character of any Yugoslav endeavour. Its reincarnation as SFRY is the point of reference for memories of socialist Yugoslavia and their reflective usage as political tools allowing for the imagination of alternative futures. The history of war profiteers becoming a part of the new, ethnicized elites in the 1990s and the political economy of their reign since then is essential to any attempt of dealing with the past that aims at reaching a non-partisan understanding of the violent disintegration of the SFRY. However, as new capitalist class of BiH, the history of their ascendency is also relevant for the issue of social justice, which was sacrificed for their benefit. The role of international actors such as international financial institutions, the US, the EU and the UN before, during and after the war again feeds into the anti-colonial argument discussed throughout the second empirical chapter. Problematizing fundamental flaws of their engagement in building a Western CS is necessary to understand structural problems of the general associational ecosystem of BiH that BASOC has to work with. It justifies the rejection of CS as envisaged by neoliberal international actors and the need to radically change it towards self-determined mass participation of common people.
2. Contextualization
The following chapter aims to establish the context of socialist and (multi-ethnic) Yugoslav history, wartime political economy between 1992-1995 and its relevance for the present-day political and socio-economic situation, and most recent social movements breaking with the neoliberal paradigm of conventional CS. Starting with the outbreak of the first World War, I first direct attention to the anti-colonial character of Yugoslavism by addressing significant moments of resistance against foreign influence. Following this, I discuss the break-up of the SFRY from the perspective of political economy. A major aim here is to trace the local economic and political elites' accumulation through dispossession, disguised by nationalist rhetoric, as well as the unwillingness of the IC to interfere. The Dayton Peace Accords (henceforth DPA) are then analysed as institutionalizing ethnicity as the main political rationale and international supervision as ensuring the path to Europeanization. Attention is also paid to the ways the consociational structure of the state facilitates rent-seeking behaviour along ethnic lines and undermines the politicization of class-based antagonisms. The elites' ability to subjugate external pressure to their own needs is discussed as pointing towards significant flaws of the 'transition' paradigm guiding international peace-, economy-, CS- and state-building endeavours. In order to systematize these encounters, a short introduction to Gramsci's theory of hegemony is provided and applied to the situation of hybrid hegemony in political and civil society. The IC's gradual disengagement and the political stalemate starting in 2006 and the economic crisis since 2008 are then depicted in short as defining the dead end BiH politics are caught in, which sets the stage for increasing social and political discontent voiced by common people. An overview of recent protest movements, mainly including Picin Park protests in 2012, 'Babylution' protests in 2013, and the massive social revolts and subsequent plenum movement of 2014, rounds off the contextual chapter by tracing direct and indirect roots of BASOC and illustrating the activist environment it is part of. Finally, Social Movement Studies are reviewed in short regarding their methodological approaches including positionality and ethics of the researcher, upon which a point is made for developing an own, critically engaged methodology.
2.1 The historical formation of Yugoslavia and its anti-colonial
character
The history of BiH shares strong ties with the history of my country of birth, Austria, and especially with the imperial city of Vienna, which was built in all its beauty from colonial exploitation of its Crown lands. Even nowadays, Vienna is the main point of reference, and the 'centre of the periphery' for much of the West Balkans (BL#1, in FG#1). The recent systematic shut-down of the 'Balkan route' for refugees, orchestrated in large parts by the Austrian foreign and inner ministries and against the will of Germany's chancellor Merkel, underlines the strong influence that Austria continues to have in its colonial backyard, even a hundred years after the demise of its empire. Therefore, I feel the need to start this contextualization with an act of resistance to foreign domination and exploitation that like no other shaped the history of both countries during the 20th
On 28th June 1914, young militant Gavrilo Princip, member of the movement 'Young Bosnia', “a
multi-ethnic amalgamation of anti-colonial leaning intellectuals who valued the ideals of social anarchism” (Schuberth, 2014:1) shot and murdered Archeduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austo-Hungarian Empire, during his visit in Sarajevo. Later in court, Princip would explain his motivation as being “a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free from Austria" (Malcom, 1996:153). Stemming from the 1830s, by the early 20th century the narrative of Yugoslavism, to which Princip was referring,
had become the most relevant tool for united struggle against foreign domination. It had been applied by Serbia in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 to unite regional powers against Turkey as the longest-standing colonial power of the region (Tasopoulos, 2013:12f). In the first World War following Princip's attack, Yugoslavism became a channel for various local nationalists joining forces with their South Slav 'brothers' to fight for a united Yugoslav nation independent from outside forces (Ibd.). However, already then tensions existed between aiming for a decentralized federation, built on cooperation between rather autonomous equals and a multi-cultural approach of co-existence, and aiming for a centralized Yugoslav state in which cultural assimilation would create one Yugoslav People (Ibd.:74f). The latter vision was advocated for by Serbian nationalists, which saw themselves at the centre of the envisaged Yugoslavia. The 'Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes', renamed 'Kingdom of Yugoslavia' in 1929, was established in 1918, fulfilling both the desires of Serbian nationalists to be at centre and of Yugoslav nationalists to unite all South Slavs, and effectively ended the Austro-Hungarian supremacy over the region (Ibd.:14f).
Vastly different opinions exist on aims and character of Gavrilo Princip regarding his adherence to either Serb or Yugoslav nationalism, and his heritage continues to be interpreted differently by competing interests. Even today, both far-right Serbian nationalists (Tanjug, 2015) and (radical) leftists2 in Bosnia and Hercegovina give credit to his actions as an integral part of the struggle for
self-determination, while others, namely Austrian and Croatian, and to some extent Bosniak nationalists, continue to view Princip as a terrorist whose actions led to the first World War (Beasley-Murray, 2014). But regardless of calling him 'freedom fighter' or 'terrorist', the anti-imperial and anti-colonial character of his actions, undoubtedly motivated by the horrific social and economic situation in a feudal state subordinated to the interests of imperial Vienna, then flourishing centre of modern European life and thought, cannot be denied. Situated at the beginning of the short 20th century, this first wave of the Yugoslav movement was an early predecessor to national liberation movements using different, more or less violent means to fight for self-determination and against the materialization of racism in the exploitative structures that define the relation between colonizer and colonized (Balunovic, 2013).
Skipping almost 30 years, the next major incident of anti-imperial struggle against European imperialism leads us to the early 1940s. With the Axis powers seizing control of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941, splitting up parts among themselves and supporting the creation of the 'Independent State of Croatia' as a puppet state backed by Italian and German/Austrian fascism, the question of national self-determination once again came to the fore (Woodward, 1995:24f). Initially, 2 Comrades of mine welcomed a representative of Austria with Gavrilo Princip masks in 2014, celebrating his act of
both the Serbian nationalist Četniks, loyal to the Serbian King of Yugoslavia, and the communist Partisan movement fought the foreign occupants and their fascist Croat Ustasha allies. Soon, however, Četniks were drawn into selective collaboration with the Axis forces, while continuing to terrorize Croats, Muslims and multi-ethnic Partisans (Nezirović, 2011:24). The growing resistance of these Yugoslav Partisans, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia under command of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, aimed both at fighting the imperialist occupants and their local fascist allies and at creating a federal, multi-ethnic communist state (Magas, 1993:80). This aim directly opposed Četnik endeavours to create a Greater Serbia within Yugoslavia through large-scale ethnic cleansing of non-Serb population. Interestingly, both groups saw themselves in line with Princip, albeit based on rather differing interpretations of his motivation. Especially among Partisans, he soon became idealized as a role model for fighting foreign oppressors, which later on gave him the status of a national hero and unifying symbol of Communist Yugoslavia (Beasley-Murray, 2014:1).
The Partisan Movement, driven once again by severe exploitation of the local population by occupants and their local allies, cumulated in Europe's most effective antifascist resistance against the Axis powers and finally in the creation of the SFRY in 1945. It is notable here that the most severe fighting throughout the insurgence took place in Bosnia and Hercegovina (Hoare, 2013:1), where the Partisans' struggle depended on support from all three main local ethnicities for a multi-ethnic country, guaranteeing equality of all groups in freedom and brotherhood (Ibd.:3-4). In some areas, however, the multi-ethnic character of the resistance was much less explicit, and as the largest ethnic group within Partisans were Serbs, they often took a central role (Ibd.). Adding to this, in 1944 and 1945 Četniks were offered amnesty for joining forces with the Communists, which resulted in an influx of Serbian nationalists into Partisan lines (Kranjc, 2013:158). While initially being contained well through the strongly advocated narrative of multi-ethnic brotherhood3 and
unity, both Serbian and Croatian nationalism ultimately managed to survive the defeat that Partisan forces and trans-ethnic Yugoslav nationalism had dealt to them (Magas, 1993:80f). However, it took them more than 40 years to fully regain their destructive potential, in the bloodiest war on European soil since World War two, which will be discussed further down.
Soon after the end of the war, Tito's SFRY cut bonds with Stalin's USSR in order to stay independent rather than become a colony of the East (see Kullaa, 2011, chapter 2). This position was soon strengthened by establishing diplomatic relations to different countries of the West and by co-founding the Non-Alignment Movement of countries rejecting the Cold War dichotomy (Ibd.:177). This diplomatic strategy significantly deepened the anti-colonial character of Yugoslavia in a region that for hundreds of years had served as a battlefield of competing interests of different colonial powers. After Stalin's death, relations with the USSR normalized and for decades, Yugoslavia maintained friendly relations to both Western and Eastern powers and used its special status as tip on the scale to negotiate relative independence (Lampe, Prickett, & Adamović, 1990:47f; Silber, 1996:65).
2.2 The return of ethnic nationalism – at the eve of war
While being suppressed, different ethnic nationalisms continued to play a role in the SFRY from its creation until its demise. The League of Communists of Yugoslavia officially opposed ethnically connoted nationalisms as separating the South Slavs perceived as brothers, and advocated for a Yugoslav socialist patriotism, stressing it to be unrelated to nationalism (Ramet, 1995; see also Tasopoulos, 2013:16). Ethnic nationalism long stayed suppressed under the communist narrative of brotherhood and unity, and its adherents faced discrimination, persecution and incarceration. However, the constant oppression of different nationalists positioned them as the primary ideological alternative to communism, and nationalist underground movements started to gain increasing relevance from the late 1960s and early 1970s on (Tasopoulos, 2013:41f). Additionally, foreign debt started to rise significantly throughout the 1970s and culminated in a fiscal debt crisis in the 1980s. These pressures, in conjuncture with the death of the country's long-term leader and uniting figure Marshal Tito in 1980, lead to increasing political tensions between the different republics, each representing their majority ethnicity (Magas, 1993). Once again, the tension between centripetal and centrifugal interests materialized along ethnic lines, with the respective ethnic party elites discovering their role as defenders of their Peoples' interests. Slobodan Milošević's turn from old-school Communist opposing nationalism to defender of Serb interests in the 'anti-bureaucratic Revolution' (Magas, 1993:165; Silber, 1996:63) in 1987 serves as the most prominent contemporary testimony to this breakdown of inter-ethnic cooperation and the embrace of nationalism by formerly communist elites.
At the end of the 1980s, additional pressure erupted from the sudden end of the Cold War and the resulting devaluation of Yugoslavia's status, from an important neutral actor that both sides paid court to, to an anachronism that had missed the 'end of history' (Fukuyama, 1989) and required correction. It gave further leverage to nationalist and anti-communist forces and allowed the IMF to pressure for profound reforms of the state's institutions, its finances, and its economic policies through shock therapy and structural adjustment programs (Woodward, 1995:22f). What Schuberth, participant in the 2014 plenums in BiH, reminds us of in this regard is the overarching purpose of
“..the system that has for thirty years stoked the fire needed to clear the land and make it fertile for making profit. This criticism has for long been discarded as unreasonable left-wing radicalism, until the former main economist of the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz, now in the role of whistle blower, came out with the same position. In 1989, when the IMF and the World Bank prescribed for the Yugoslav government the austerity programme with all its ‘pleasantries’: currency devaluation, freezing of salaries, reduction of government spending, liquidation of self-managed national companies – more than 600.000 people lost jobs. Milošević and Tuđman could then get to work and in a few months turn that human mass into nationalists following the local recipe” (Schuberth, 2014:1).
The dissolution of the all-Yugoslav Communist Party in 1990 as a result of power struggles between different republics' fractions within the party coincided with international pressure and the 'tide of the time' and led to the first multi-party elections in 1990. Successes of nationalists in the Croatian and Slovenian republics only accelerated the signs of disintegration and spurred nationalist
resentments among Croatian Serbs. Increasingly frequent clashes, political and paramilitary stand-offs ultimately resulted in both Slovenia and Croatia declaring independence in June 1991 (Tasopoulos, 2013:85f). The following wars – first between the Serb-dominated rest of Yugoslavia and Slovenia, soon and much longer between the former and Croatia, and from 1992 on also in BiH between Bosnian Croats supported by Croatia, Bosnian Serbs supported by Belgrade and the remainders of the Yugoslav Army, and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) – resulted in the biggest atrocities on European soil since the second World War until today. Between one and two hundred thousand persons were murdered; genocide, ethnic cleansing and organized mass rapes were used as strategic weapons of war; large parts of the industrial capacities were systematically destroyed; and land mines were deployed in such numbers that until today, they pose a serious danger in BiH that inhibits agriculture, tourism and generally free movement in nature4.
2.3 The political economy of war and its international bystanders
“The aim of war is a suspension of civil order and a creation of lawless space which can be stripped bare thanks to military intervention. The only victors emerging from the war were profiteers on all warring sides who accumulated their initial capital from the suffering of the rest of the population. They are the core of the new entrepreneurial elites, into whom the EU and the IMF invest billions” (Schuberth, 2014:1).
While I want to refrain from going into depth regarding the conduct of war and its atrocities5, I do
devote attention to the political economy of war and genocide and the role of the IC during and after the war. These factors set the terms for BiH's development into an Ethnocracy and international protectorate that's fully dependent on its neo-colonial masters, in which local compradours have gained immense riches through primitive accumulation/accumulation through dispossession6 at the
cost of severe poverty, atomization, alienation and depression of millions of common people. Looking at the political economy of war means tracing who benefited from which processes related to the war, and how they did so. It serves to dissolve the imagination of homogeneous ethnic blocks, fighting solely for the benefit of their own ethnicity, ostensibly driven by 'ancient hatred' towards their others as infamously suggested by Kaplan (see e.g. Cooper, 1993, critically reviewing Kaplan, 1993), or as part of a 'clash of civilizations', as suggested by Huntington (1993). Such a class-based analysis, focusing on clandestine activity during war, its logics and its beneficiaries, roots "our understanding of the postwar order (...) in an analysis of the wartime dynamics where new political alliances and social relations are forged and cemented" (Andreas, 2004:49; also advised by Pugh, 2002). It diverts attention from the sole focus on ethnic cleansing as (alleged) war purpose to 'economic cleansing' as an integral part of primitive accumulation (Pugh, 2002:470), which radically transformed ownership structures in BiH within few years' time. In the Bosnian case, 4 Of course, there are many more effects of the war than listed here, such as the thorough destruction of the social
tissue, of inter-personal and societal trust, the loss of a whole generation, PTSD, a boost to mafia structures capitalizing on wartime economy, drugs and arms trade, and many more.
5 For a detailed account see Mike Karadjis, 'Bosnia, Kosovo and the West. The Yugoslav Tragedy: A Marxist View' (2000).
6 A term coined by David Harvey in 'The New Imperialism' (2003), with which he aims at modernizing Marx' understanding of 'primitive accumulation' (Mujanović, 2014:137).
criminalized aspects of conflict have had profound effects on the postwar social order, as they resulted in the rise of a new elite coming at least partly from the margins of society (Andreas, 2004; Pugh, 2002), and forging lasting bonds with remaining parts of the old political elite.
The IC, both through issuing an arms embargo (Begić, 2014; Woodward, 1995) and through the common recognition of the conflict as intra-state, civil war (instead of a Serb aggression) significantly influenced the course of the war by becoming part of its clandestine political economy. The embargo effectively "locked in the military advantage of the Bosnian Serbs" (Andreas, 2004:33), which could count both on the Yugoslav People's Army and on extensive trafficking networks connecting them to Belgrade. Their opponents, especially Sarajevo-based Bosniaks, initially lacked both regular army structures and ways to obtain heavy weapons due to lack of access to the international black market and insufficient diplomatic ties to secure stronger support from the West (Begić, 2014:35f). Furthermore, initial tendencies to render the conflict intra-state both diminished chances of decisive international support for BiH's central government and restricted Belgrade's official role to being a bystander rather than a warring party (see Woodward, 1995, chapter 6). Also, as Begić (2014) argues, the hesitant engagement of the UN, especially the proclamation of a 'safe zone' in combination with its insufficient protection, ultimately made genocide possible. Letting this 'happen' strongly affected the political economic landscape during and since the war by carving ethnic hatred into the stone of Srebrenica's graveyards and by hugely deepening the emotional cleavage along ethnic lines for decades to come (Hodžić, 2014).
In this setting, smugglers, arms traffickers and private combatants were not simply by-products of the war but integral to its conduct. However, initially they took rather different roles among the warring parties. Belgrade, interested in obscuring its involvement in the conflict, first relied on underground networks to prepare the fast initial advancements of the Bosnian Serbs in 1992 by strategically deploying weapons in Bosnia throughout 1991 (Tasopoulos, 2013:90-96). During the war, irregular militias continued to be recruited and equipped in Serbia, often directly from criminal gangs, out of prison, from football hooligan clubs etc., that is, often from the margins of society. Headed by private warlords, they mostly sustained themselves through illicit activities such as looting, theft, robbery, ransom, and trafficking, and were effectively conducting "low-risk robbery in patriotic costumes" (Andreas, 2004:35).
While quasi-private militias paved the way for warlords to quickly amass riches, gain influence in politics and supporters in society on the Serb side, Sarajevo's relationship with organized crime took a different trajectory. Andreas explains the "unexpected ability of the Bosnian government to defend itself with the help of criminal combatants and underground supply networks" (Andreas, 2004:31). For Sarajevo, contributions of criminal actors were part of an initial survival strategy. Upon attack, major players of the criminal underground quickly organized private combatants, black market traders and arms embargo-busters that became crucial in enduring more than three years of siege (Ibd.). The UN aid flights into the city, being too little to feed all, soon became supplemented by large-scale clandestine commerce and arms trade, which also crossed siege lines. Criminal structures became entrenched in the city's material sustenance and entangled with its political elite in complex exchanges (Andreas, 2004:32).
The smuggling structures at the base of this cooperation, ultimately necessary to shift the military balance on the ground and stop the (Bosnian) Serb invasion, resulted in a thorough social transformation. Parts of the old elite vanished and new actors rose from the margins of society to its centres of power (Andreas, 2004:49, also a recurrent topic in Arsenijevic's [ed.] (2014) 'Unbribable Bosnia and Hercegovina: The Fight for the Commons'). Their continued relevance showed in an "expansive postwar smuggling economy based on political protections and informal trading networks built up during wartime" (Andreas, 2004:31). Interestingly, these networks frequently transcended ethnic borders, both during and after the war. Accounts of large-scale wartime inter-ethnic economic cooperation in the form of clandestine trading support the thesis that instead of 'ethnic warfare', this war should rather be understood as largely driven by “small groups of politically empowered thugs” (Andreas, 2004:32), who, in cooperation with their respective political class, aim to improve their status in the turmoil of war. Absurd situations, such as besiegers sustaining the besieged in Sarajevo, Serb military officials selling huge amounts of arms to their enemies just to be attacked with these same arms, or forces fighting each other during day and doing business together during night, hold account to how individual utility maximization often countered the imagined ethnic group interests (Andreas, 2004:38-40). While it is assumed that these activities in effect prolonged the war and increased its victims, criminal actors on all sides profited from the prolonged stalemate in Sarajevo and frequent shifts of the front line, creating evermore misery to exploit (Andreas, 2004; Pugh, 2002).
Having established access to the political sphere, the war-time criminal ties and networks never left the halls of power in Sarajevo and Banja Luka again. They gradually turned their criminal capital into economic and political capital and so became part of a complex of nationalist politicians, security apparatus and criminals forming the new post-war elite (Andreas, 2004:44; Pugh, 2002). Surging clandestine economic activity as expression of the economic power of the new elite soon became key to the daily survival of common Bosnians as well as to the power bases of local politicians, critically undermining state institutions and the rule of law (Andreas, 2004; Divjak & Pugh, 2008; Pugh, 2002). This thorough “criminalization of the state and economy in the postwar period" (Andreas, 2004:44) ensured the ongoing looting of the country years after the war, benefiting from a situation of constant instability and incapability of the state, as will be shown in the next sections.
2.4 Dayton: Ethnocracy and international protectorate by design
The aim of this sub-chapter is to roughly sketch out the institutional context of post-war BiH. It is necessary for understanding the political economy of primitive accumulation under the constraints of internationally pressured neoliberal transition, which will be discussed thereafter. First, I will outline the basic state structure set by the DPA. Following this, BiH will be identified as Ethnocracy (see below) with limited democratic substance. The results of constitutional fragmentation will be discussed as beneficial foremost to local, rent-seeking elites. Finally, the effects of running BiH as an international protectorate will be problematized in terms of neo-colonial and neoliberal cooperation between international overseers/colonial masters and their local compradours.
“For the international community, BiH has been an ideal test case for the ‘liberal peace’ and its utopian vision of harmony based on democratization, rule of law and market liberalization," (Divjak & Pugh, 2008:380)7.
Initially being celebrated as unexpected success and victory of diplomacy over guns, severe shortcomings of the DPA, which ended the war in December 1995, soon surfaced. Negotiations had been conducted solely by representatives of the nationalist warring parties, while local CS, especially the anti-war movement, and other multi-ethnic groupings had been left out completely (Belloni, 2001; Bougarel, Helms, & Duijzings, 2007; Vetta, 2009). The resulting negative peace (see various works of Johan Galtung, e.g. 1967) was basically a freezing of the conflict along demarcation lines, dividing the country into the Republika Srpska (henceforth RS) as centralized entity with a large Serb majority (achieved by thorough ethnic cleansing), the Federation of BiH as federal entity consisting of ten rather autonomous cantons populated mostly by Bosniaks and Croats, and Brcko, a small autonomous district under international control (Divjak & Pugh, 2008; Majstorović & Vučkovac, 2016). International supervision of the implementation of the DPA was delegated to the Office of the High Representative (henceforth OHR) and the Peace Implementation Council, and peacekeeping was to be ensured by initially 60.000 military forces of the NATO-led Implementation Force. Following the state-building concept of consociationalism – which in Encyclopaedia Britannica is defined as a “democratic system in deeply divided societies that is based on power sharing between elites from different social groups” (Britannica, 2016) – power sharing between rather autonomous ethnic elites was inscribed into the state by tripartition of all relevant state institutions along ethnic lines and extensive veto rights for each ethnic group's leaders (Belloni, 2004; Howard, 2012; Touquet & Vermeersch, 2008).
This institutionalization of ethnicity as the single guiding rationale of politics (Touquet & Vermeersch, 2008) has resulted in BiH being an 'Ethnocracy' – defined by Lise Howard as “a political system in which political and social organizations are founded on ethnic belonging rather than individual choice” (2012:155) – with rather limited democratic substance. It has inscribed a logic into the state that benefits ethno-nationalist parties by constructing ethnic groups as homogeneous blocks led by their respective elites. This set-up has often been interpreted as a concession to Kaplan's pseudo-scientific theory of 'ancient ethnic hatreds' (1993) popular among Western policy makers at that time (Woodward, 1995). The emphasis of the ethnic in the construction of the Bosnian-Hercegovinian state has thoroughly impeded the politicization of class antagonisms with the potential to bridge ethnicities by obscuring material conditions and processes during and after the war8. For two decades, the ethnic card, based on memories of ethnic cleansing
and genocide and the fear of their repetition, has been used successfully by the respective elites, highlighting the long-standing political economy of these war crimes as tools producing fear and thereby control (Arsenijevic, 2014:46). Even in 2014, it was invoked successfully by RS officials to prevent massive social justice protests in the Federation from spilling over to the RS – a topic I will turn to later.
7 For a detailed treatise on the liberal peace concept, its implementation in BiH and its shortcomings see Farrell (2009:6f).
8 Or, as one observer blatantly puts it: “[N]ationalist fervor is dust in the eyes of the ordinary folks, distracting them from the rip-off” (Lippman, 2012a).
As the DPA were drafted during war, significant concessions were made towards all three warring parties to reach an agreement. Extensive veto rights for the respective actors and the lack of an inscribed automatism forcing them to agree on a proper constitution within a set time frame resulted in the DPA still being the (insufficient) legal basis of BiH. Overtly complex administrative mechanisms, multiple layers of government with overlapping and often unclear responsibilities, and the resulting fragmentation of authority supported the entrenchment of wartime clientelist structures in the post-war bureaucracies (Pugh, 2002:477) and opened chances for rent-seeking and abuse of public office (Divjak & Pugh, 2008:374-375). Administrative positions in bureaucracy, but also in public enterprises, and strategically relevant positions in privatization and regulatory councils etc. were distributed along party lines loyal to their respective party elites. Fighting over control of industries, profitable public positions as well as over tools of repression and domination thereby continued war with economic and political means. Different departments of the financial police can be named here as example, as they soon got co-opted by the respective nationalist parties to protect their own informal or outright criminal structures and oppress any political opposition or economic competition within their sphere of influence (Pugh, 2002:471). Summing up, the complicated and inefficient structure of the state apparatus, especially in the decentralized Federation, allowed political elites to “siphon off proceeds from the national treasury and transform government bureaucracies into bribe-collection agencies that impede business" (Divjak & Pugh, 2008:376). The resulting endemic corruption on all levels is controlled by top levels of power residing within individual figures in the ethnic parties, who have long established their own networks of power and control within their wider party organizations, making smaller party members victims as much as perpetrators of systematic extortion structures. In practice, lower and intermediate positions in administration have to be 'bought' from senior officials, which both helps channelling up revenues from every-day corruption and strengthening control over the lower ranks of administration9.
While many of above-listed contemporary problems in BiH indeed result from the structure of local, more or less criminal political circles, critical scholars have long argued that solely blaming irresponsible ethno-nationalist elites, and indirectly the public which continues to elect them into power, lets the IC and its representatives on the ground get off too lightly (Belloni, 2001; Belloni, 2004; Chandler, 2006; Divjak & Pugh, 2008; Kappler & Richmond, 2011; Pugh, 2002). While the problematic role of the IC in ending the war and building the state cannot be limited to introducing consociationalism, this essentially identity-based approach crucially reinforced ethnic extremist and separatist positions and undermined moderation and genuine reconciliation (Brass, 1991; Horowitz, 1985). It separated a potentially united working class while building on elitist cooperation negotiated behind closed doors (Daalder, 1974; Dix, 1980; Horowitz, 1985; Macková, 2009). As Arsenijevic argues, the IC's endorsement of "the ideology of “reconciliation,” which imposes an “ethnic” logic on the loss resulting from the war and genocide" (Arsenijevic, 2014:46) and 'identity politics' as its interpretive framework have proven a dead end ultimately reinforcing nationalisms by strengthening ethnicity as the one and only rationale. They are obscuring class antagonisms that lie at the base of inequality, both in terms of socio-economic status and in access to decision-making. As Divjak and Pugh argue, the real dichotomy characterizing Bosnia and Hercegovina should 9 Stories proving these practices are common knowledge in BiH and were reported to me on multiple occasions –
even standard jobs like retail salesman in private enterprises can require high bribes, plus loyalty to the controlling party (see also Anonymous, 2015:6; or UNODC, 2013 for a more detailed report).
therefore rather be understood as one between domestic and international power brokers and a "pliant, impoverished population in the economic sphere that could be exploited for nationalist loyalty (by the war entrepreneurs) and moulded for modernization (by the international community)" (2008:380).
Adding to this misconception, the Western liberal paradigm – understood in this thesis as a combination of liberal state building (see e.g. Farrell, 2009) aiming at a 'neutral' state “open to and under the control of civil society” (Belloni, 2001:170), 'liberal peace' concept focusing on democracy, Rule of Law (henceforth RoL) and Human Rights (Kappler & Richmond, 2011:262; Divjak & Pugh 2008:380), and the mobilization of neoclassical economic theory as political ideology through neoliberalism – ignored the potential influence of existing power structures on the new state and fundamentally misinterpreted the political economies established during war. In an attempt to build a (neo-)liberal state and society from scratch as a future prototype for liberal peace making, the architects of Dayton and the international overseers supervising its implementation deliberately broke with pre-war traditions of socialism regarding social security based on solidarity, workers' control over the means of production and Yugoslav identity (Bougarel et al., 2007). In doing so, they supported and strengthened the grip of the respective ethnic elites, who shared the West's interest in vilifying the remnants of the multi-ethnic socialist past. Aside of radically transforming society's ethical and material base, the IC's numerous interventions through the OHR and other agencies arguably weakened the responsibilities of the new political elite by undermining the results of democratic processes (Chandler, 2006). At the same time, this 'informal trusteeship' (Chandler, 2006:18) stabilized local rule by sustaining it economically throughout two decades, and legitimized the thorough looting of society by systematically turning a blind eye on economic crimes (Arsenijevic, 2014a), while pursuing liberal shams in the realms of identity politics, liberal democracy, RoL and Human Rights. Furthermore, the IC's frequently reported tactic of negotiating deals with respective party leaders behind closed doors rather than with governments in a transparent fashion further undermined democratic structures, contributed to a political culture of cronyism, and entrenched the stronghold of these few individuals on their parties, on their spheres of influence and on the country as a whole (Begić, 2014:40).
2.4.1 Subjugating external pressure for neoliberal reforms to local elites' needs
This sub-chapter is devoted to local elites' reactions to international pressure for market liberalization and privatization. I will argue that the dominant political class managed to subvert and incorporate these reforms to serve their economic and political stronghold. Starting with the nationalization and then privatization of the means of production, the accumulation of capital by the new elite is explained as mainly built on dispossession of formerly common property. The major weakness of the IC's liberal paradigm is then identified as a persistent naivety towards the reality of authoritarian structures of power utilizing multiple formal and informal dimensions of control. Finally, the neoliberal economic reforms are diagnosed a thorough failure in terms of their official goals and benchmarks.
primitive accumulation of capital based on dispossession, taking "a significant role in the development of political economies, and of political community" (Divjak & Pugh, 2008:380) therein and thereafter. This process, concomitant with a societal transformation of the elite(s) – from high-ranking communist party members to ethnically defined patriarchs supported by equally ethnically framed criminal entrepreneurs benefiting from the conflict – soon became aided by increased processes of economic 'transition', a narrative that would hold society hostage for decades to come (Stiks & Horvat, 2014). The nationalization of the means of production, previously owned by factory workers themselves, had been passed as a law on Ownership Transformation in 1994 by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Begić, 2014). While it had gone completely unnoticed under the circumstances of fiercest warfare, it had laid the legal foundation for “the biggest robbery ever witnessed in this territory” (Begić, 2014:36), which was to come after the war in the form of increasingly widespread privatizations.
Officially, these were pushed for by different bodies of the IC as a prerequisite for sustained financial support and often publicly contested by local elites (Pugh, 2002:474). Initially, the respective elites therefore deferred these privatizations as far as possible, resulting in only one being finalized by the year 2001 (Ibd.). However, so it seems, the purpose was not to fundamentally oppose market liberalization, but rather to capture unavoidable processes of change to fit local needs by securing profitable business opportunities against foreign investors (Divjak & Pugh, 2008:377). The initial delay was used to develop party-family structures aiming to obtain strategically relevant positions in public companies' management boards, privatization councils and state supervising bodies (Begić, 2014:37). Under wary supervision of the Peace Implementation Council and the OHR as its executive organ, these preparatory operations, as well as the first privatizations, were carried out rather cautiously to prove that 'everything was perfectly legal'. However, as professor Zlatan Begić, himself Bosnian constitutional expert and long-term activist argues, after the OHR quit its active supervision in 2006, “the local powerful political figures began to impudently and publicly do the things they had once done subtly and gradually” (Begić, 2014:38).
Eager to white-wash the fortunes they had made, well-connected members of the 'nouveau riche' (Andreas, 2004:46) were among the first to invest, as soon as the basic conditions allowed so. While also aiming to diversify their sources of power and becoming 'legitimate businessmen', the overwhelming majority of privatized companies was bought suspiciously cheap and encumbered with mortgages for alleged 'modernization'. Instead, they were used for money-laundering for a while (Anonymous, 2015; Arsenijevic, 2014a), after which many were asset-stripped and bled dry in processes of criminal bankruptcy (Begić, 2014; Busuladžić, 2014; Ibrišimović, 2014)10. In many
of these factories, workers as the former owners were exploited one last time before losing their worker identity for good (Anonymous, 2015; Arsenijevic, 2014a). Under the threat of insolvency, they often delivered free labour for years, always in hope for a better future for their company (Busuladžić, 2014). What they often got instead was the bitter realization that not only their pending wages were lost, but also that their social security contributions had not been paid for years 10 See
(Ibrišimović, 2014). Being a clear case for labour courts in any functioning legal state, I will refrain from explaining in detail why the legal way is no option for workers in BiH11, and instead quote one
of the few persons who try to understand the legal system and its shortcomings, Zlatan Begić: “The judiciary in Bosnia and Herzegovina is indeed “independent”—“independent” of any connection to legality and completely untouchable in its idleness, corruption and servicing of the interest of the criminalized political elites and the structures they have built. It is not “independent” in anything else. This claim is supported by the miserable results of the work of judicial institutions, but also the fact that no one has been prosecuted for the looting that has accompanied privatization, for corruption or serious crime, and numerous other egregious failures.” (Begić, 2014)
The fatal mistakes of the IC's appliance of de-contextualized liberal dogmas in rebuilding BiH have become increasingly clear in the last years. Instead of forcing the political elite to become more accountable, implement RoL and democratization, the often short-sighted and contradictory interventions helped to divert local responsibility for the overall situation, create ever more opportunities for rent-seeking, subvert the legal and institutional framework and weaken the few functioning public institutions (Chandler, 2006). In this context, neoliberal economic reforms pushed for by the IC, which even in a functioning framework of RoL, transparency and accountability tend to benefit the rich and powerful, became easily captured by the respective elites. Using them to boost "[e]ndless over-accumulation by conglomerations of political and economic power" at rather meagre over-all growth rates resulted in evermore "dispossession of the most vulnerable sections of society" (Divjak & Pugh, 2008:380). In a situation where corruption, informal and outright illegal economy have become integral to the state's functioning (Anonymous, 2015), continuous international attempts to pressure its main beneficiaries to 'fight corruption' show the fundamental incapability, but also unwillingness of Western liberalism to acknowledge and deal with existing power inequalities and resulting political economies that define opposing class interests. Contrary to the assumption of corruption being a marginal phenomenon that will be eradicated with growing maturity of the state, "corruption as organised through these clientelist networks may be effectively the form the state takes in Bosnia, the way it (dys)functions (…) as a last-instance mode of taxation" (Anonymous, 2015:7).
The results of misguided state-building and co-opted economic reforms have been devastating for the common population. Modest improvements of the economic situation since 1996 were halted by the economic crisis since 2008 and international and diaspora transfers diminished gradually as well (Anonymous, 2015:6). Unemployment, “estimated at 44% overall and 60% for young people” (Ibd.:5) and lacking social security leave almost one third of Bosnians in or on the verge of poverty (Ibd.). Inter-personal, inter-ethnic and societal levels of trust are among the lowest in Europe (Whitt, 2010:274), and depression and disengagement from society are widespread (Arnautovic & Sindelar, 2016). It comes as no wonder, then, that around 80% of young people would leave BiH tomorrow if possible (Jukic, 2013), which has severe effects on society in terms of brain-drain, but also regarding the general lack of young people in society.
11 Although many of my comrades have tried, many for years, to follow the procedures, they were humiliated by courts over and over again (TU#1 in Interview#4; TU#2 in Interview#5).
2.5 The never-ending Transition: Civil Society as a tool of intervention
The severe shortcomings of Dayton – “designed to end a war, not to build a state” (Chandler, 2006:17) – and the inability of the liberal paradigm and its underlying assumptions to adequately assess reality in post-war BiH became evident after the first dust had settled. Already in 1999, around one billion dollars of international aid had gone 'missing' (Divjak & Pugh, 2008:375; Pugh, 2002:472), nationalist parties continued to control politics with secessionist rhetoric (mounting up to a permanent crisis of government from 2006/2007 on), constitutional reform was as far as ever and democratization lagged behind expectations as well (Lippman, 2001). However, the IC's reaction was not so much to adapt their assumptions, but rather to try and change society's value base by 'social engineering' (Belloni, 2001:165) to make it fit. As Sampson stated at the eve of the new century, “the effort by Western democracy and civil society programs is to transplant our models so that local cultural traditions remain unused” (Sampson, 2002:1). 'Civil society building' became the shibboleth of the early 2000s (Nezirović, 2011:1), perceived as an easy way to bypass 'uncooperative' local elites without having to resort to enforcement by the OHR, which was increasingly perceived as detrimental to democratization goals. By the mid-2000s, CS-building had become key to the international endeavours of post-conflict transformation of BiH (Fagan, 2006), “and a developed CS was seen a conceptual core in mainstream democratization literature as a hallmark for successful state-building” (Puljek-Shank & Fritsch, forthcoming:4; see also Fagan, 2006; Chandler, 2006; Farrell, 2009).
The plan to build a 'vibrant civil society' (Vetta, 2009:27) generally followed a de-contextualized, Western vision of BiH on its inevitable way to becoming a member of the EU. Once again, the IC neglected decades and centuries of 'organic' development of Western democracies and their civil societies (see, for example, Edwards, 2009) – often through the forces of struggle, contention and conflict "at the heart of any democratic society” (Mujanović, 2014:138) – by uncritically applying a ready-made script from top-down (Nezirović, 2011:42). The establishment of a 'civil sector' was supported generously by Western donors using a system of financial incentives to promote liberal values and concepts such as RoL, Human Rights, free markets, active citizenship, multi-culturalism, identity politics etc. Within few years, over 10,000 local NGOs were jump-started (Arsenijevic, 2014a; Sejfija, 2015:172), most of which are highly professionalized, policy-oriented, and at the same time utterly a-political in their approach (Sejfija, 2015:173) Driven by project logic, benchmarks, competition for funds and the foremost need for self-sustenance, many of them became accountable to international donors much rather than to the population they were thought to represent (Puljek-Shank & Fritsch, forthcoming; Sejfija, 2015:183). At the same time, socialist Yugoslav forms of CS pre-dating war, such as local assemblies, 'zadrugas' (a local form of cooperative), and the strong (but ultimately unsuccessful) peace movement of the early 1990s were deliberately left out and denounced as old-fashioned and detrimental to democratic development (Bougarel, Helms, & Duijzings, 2007:31). This approach of liberal peacebuilding endeavours to limit CS-building activities to Western NGOs has been criticized abundantly for limiting local agency, producing a self-centred third sector that is often perceived as artificial by the local population (Ramovic, 2016:433).
necessary to support the envisaged radical societal transformation – led to a thorough detachment of many NGOs from on-the-ground realities. This is reflected in a generally bad image of NGOs among the wider public in BiH, which often see CS professionals as self-serving quacks, naive dreamers or 'merchants of fog' (Kurtovic, 2014:98). What also contributed to CS's bad reputation are many cases of reported corruption, money laundering, in-transparent processes, nepotism, party-affiliated NGOs etc. (Sampson, 2002). As with liberal state-building, the underlying liberal assumption of the state being “open to and under the control of civil society, [and] responsive to the advocacy campaigns of the local civic groups” (Belloni, 2001: 170) proved wrong, as in many cases political elites managed to either co-opt, silence or ignore CS actors, and often even cash in on this additional influx of foreign money. While there have been individual successes of engaged NGOs working with local communities, providing necessary services and changing the minds of individuals for the better, the wider picture, after twenty years of CS-building, is one of failure. As local authors and activists argue (see various texts in Arsenijevic, 2014b, all written by local academic activists), the NGO sphere has not only failed to deliver in terms of positively affecting politics. It has also captured public space with the liberal dogmas of democratic and economic 'transition' and 'liberal peace', voiding it from peoples' every-day experiences of injustice that could instigate class antagonisms and thereby effectively silencing them in their misery. As discussed above, it has deepened the primacy of the ethnic by running in endless circles of 'ethnic reconciliation' and identity politics which ultimately only benefit those capitalizing on ethnic divide (Arsenijevic, 2014:46-48; Hodzic 2014:51). Furthermore, it has stabilized the status Quo and further promoted the neoliberal framework, allowing the state to outsource its obligations regarding welfare and social security provision and reformulate them as non-enforceable charity guided by donor caprice (Kappler & Richmond, 2011:266; Arsenijevic, 2014:48) and by discrediting voluntarism and activism as part of a dubious 'civil society sphere' ridden of any politically transformative ambitions.
2.5.1 Civil Society as non-coercive hegemony – in the footsteps of Gramsci
It seems necessary here to discuss the role and configuration of CS on a more abstract level before continuing the historical review of its development in BiH. 'Civil society' is often uncritically understood as a more or less non-political 'associational ecosystem' consisting of NGOs, initiatives, and other formal and informal groups, discussing and promoting visions of 'the good society' they aim their work at in a 'neutral' public sphere constituted by them (Edwards, 2009). This perspective tends to ignore power structures shaping each of these components, and the role their currently prevailing forms take in globally reproducing neoliberal hegemony. Building instead on Antonio Gramsci's (1971) power-focused understanding of CS as the non-coercive part of institutions creating and reproducing hegemony, the current CS in BiH, same as power within the state itself, has to be understood as fragmented. The Western, international fraction – justifying, advertising and entrenching the ideational influence of 'universal' liberal standards and their perpetuated control by international actors – can be seen competing with three local “homogenous national-religious communities” (Sejfija, 2015:167), aligned with and supporting the respective ethnic elites. As Choudry states with regard to international CS discourses, “[t]he dominant notion of “civil society”
