Southeast European and Black Sea Studies

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-2014

economic restructuring as europeanization
discourse/practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Danijela Majstorović, Zoran Vučkovac & Anđela Pepić
To cite this article: Danijela Majstorović, Zoran Vučkovac & Anđela Pepić (2015) From Dayton
to Brussels via Tuzla: post-2014 economic restructuring as europeanization discourse/practice
in 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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Download by: [68.51.87.73] Date: 25 March 2016, At: 19:56

Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 2015
Vol. 15, No. 4, 661–682, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1126093
From Dayton to Brussels via Tuzla: post-2014 economic

restructuring as europeanization discourse/practice in Bosnia and
Herzegovina
Danijela Majstorovića,b*, Zoran Vučkovacc and Anđela Pepića,b
a
Faculty of Philology for Majstorovic, University of Banja Luka, Bulevar Vojvode Petra
Bojovića 1a, 78 000 Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina; bFaculty of Political Science for
Andjela Pepic, University of Banja Luka, Bulevar Vojvode Petra Bojovića 1a, 78 000 Banja
Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina; cDepartment of English and Film Studies, University of
Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
Downloaded by [68.51.87.73] at 19:56 25 March 2016
(Received 30 May 2015; accepted 21 October 2015)
The political and economic transformations of peacebuilding and state-building

efforts in post-Dayton Bosnia–Herzegovina (BiH) have resulted in a dysfunc-
tional, divided and impoverished country in social crisis. Both international and
local political elites have tried to manage the crisis, the former through financial
aid in combination with externally imposed measures and the latter through
institutionalized ethnic nationalism and clientelism; both approaches were made
possible by the Dayton Peace Accords. Articulating a demand for greater social
justice, the 2014 protests and plenums rejected both ethnic division and the cor-
ruption of post-Dayton political economy. This was rightfully seen as a threat
by most Bosnian politicians, and appeared to represent an opening for a new
reform agenda by the EU. This was most visible in its ‘Compact for Growth
and Jobs’, which aimed to revitalize BiH’s path to European integration. We
argue that the Compact and the responses to it offer a useful diagnostic to
gauge 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 spots
and discuss what this reveals about the possibility for wider social change in
the wake of the 2014 protests and plenums – in other words, thinking Bosnia’s
future 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 in
Dayton, Ohio on 21 November 1995. The Agreement put an end to the 1992–1995
war 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 consociational
package that established Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks as ‘constitutive peoples’ while
simultaneously relegating all those who did not or could not identify as belonging
*Corresponding author. Email: danijela.majstorovic@unibl.rs
© 2016 Taylor & Francis

662 D. Majstorović et al.
to one of these groups to second-class status and barring them from fully
participating 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 Union
but subject to an ever-changing message about how and under what terms. This is
in part the result of the Dayton Agreement itself, which while it brought peace to
the country, its complex power-sharing mechanisms between and among different
levels and jurisdictions of government (municipality, canton, entity, District and
state) 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 the
social and political instabilities in BiH, blocking its EU integration and aggravating
the lives of citizens in general.
Others have pointed out that one source of political dysfunction lies in the
Dayton Agreement’s constitutional consociationalism.1 There is broad consensus
that this may have been necessary to end the war, but it also helped cement the
war’s ethno-nationalist (dis)order and its foundation of social exclusion (Arsenijević

and Jovanović 2011; Mujkić 2011, 81–98; Sarajlić 2011, 61–80; Stojanović 2011,
99–114) and exclusive ethno-nationalist power-sharing. This power-sharing also
precipitated BiH’s current socio-economic crisis and allowed very few avenues for
citizens to exercise any kind of political agency. Indeed, relations of political
clientelism, created through party membership or affiliation, are often the only such
avenue, 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 remade
dominant 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 a
tactic 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 ‘Prud
process’3 (ICG Briefing 2012, 3), all collapsed. Although promoted in the name of
greater administrative efficiency, each initiative threatened to deprive the negotiat-
ing parties of significant instruments of their political power. Others have sought to
use international law to amend the Dayton constitution and challenge the basis of
its ethnic exclusion. Most famously, the European Court of Human Rights’ judge-
ment on the Sejdić–Finci case4 in 2009 ruled that the Dayton constitution should
add ‘Others’ as a constitutive people category, and European Union representatives
subsequently made implementation of the Sejdić–Finci ruling a main precondition
for 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 a
long-standing sense that the Dayton constitution cannot remain as it is, substantive
changes to the Dayton order have come to be seen as ‘unthinkable’.
The last few years have witnessed forms of resistance to the Dayton system of
limiting political agency to party membership or affiliation, and of keeping the
exercise of political will divided along ethno-territorial lines of difference. This
began with the Banja Luka park protests5 in the spring and summer of 2012 and
Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 663
then later, more explicitly, during the June 2013 Bebolucija or ‘Baby Revolution’6
in Sarajevo. Both events were marked by significant ‘cross-entity’ relations of
cooperation 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 important
precursors to the protests in February 2014, which to date constitute the most sig-
nificant bottom-up challenge to the ethnically constituted disorder, bypassing ethnic
division 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 that
activists tried to suppress the so-called ‘Anti-Dayton group’ precisely because they
did not want debates on constitutional reform(s) to overshadow the new demands.
This was particularly true because the issue of constitutional reform has often been
framed 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 and
firms, and the abolition of exorbitant severance packages for state employees (the
so-called ‘white bread’ payments). Although no similar large-scale protests or ple-
nums took place in the Republika Srpska, solidarity support groups were formed in
Banja Luka, Gradiška and Prijedor.
These events were recognized and represented as a challenge to the prevailing
ethno-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 events
managed to displace the usual ethno-national discourse of grievances as the
language 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, a
chance to regain momentum for long-stalled but much-needed changes in Bosnian
politics and society. One international response to this moment was the ‘Compact
for Growth and Development’ (the Compact), issued in July 2014, and the British–
German Initiative, signed by Foreign Ministers, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Philip
Hammond in November 2014. Taken together, they signalled a renewed interna-
tional interest in post-Dayton BiH and an attempt to jump-start the stalled EU
accession process by avoiding talk of constitutional change in favour of economic
reform. For some scholars, the Compact and Initiative represented BiH’s last
chance to resolve its economic and political crises and bring the country closer to
the EU.8 Others saw it as rewarding irresponsible politicians and dangerously over-
looking Dayton’s structural shortcomings, which could only be ameliorated through
constitutional changes (Bassuener et al. 2014). A third perspective, mostly voiced
by activists and scholars with roots in the protest and plenums, also sidestepped the
issue of constitutional reform and instead evaluated the Compact and Initiative
according to whether they advanced the cause of social justice.
In this article, we argue that the Compact and the responses to it offer a useful
diagnostic to gauge how, or even whether, the post-Dayton political field has
shifted in the aftermath of the protests and plenums of 2014. Many scholars, local
and international alike, have tried to explain the post-Dayton condition not merely
by critiquing it but also by demonstrating its limits in spheres ranging from party
politics or citizens’ relationship to the state to public meaning-making and everyday
life (see Gilbert 2006; Arsenijević 2015; Hromadžic 2015; Jansen et al.
forthcoming; Kurtović forthcoming). Building upon this scholarship, we probe the
possibilities and limits represented by the Compact and the responses to it. We look
to see whether anything has changed in the debate about the international role in
BiH and examine whether there are any points of articulation between what
variously positioned individuals or institutions believe is desirable and possible in
BiH politics and society. In the responses to the Compact, we detect two sets of
critiques: the first we might call an international liberal critique and the second a
domestic leftist critique.9 As exemplary of the first critique, we analyse a set of
arguments expressed in two Democratization Policy Council (DPC) reports pub-
lished in 2014 and 201510; as exemplary of the latter critique, we analyse a series
of 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 first
discuss those transformations, paying attention to how they unfolded as part of the
relationship 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 attention
was 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, and
Islamic fundamentalism, on the other. We then analyse the Compact and the responses
to it against the background of the last 20 years and conclude with a brief discussion
on 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 into
three 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 many
branches of the UN did everything from providing peacekeeping forces, running
elections, supervising local police, sitting on the judiciary and caring for and
re-settling refugees. Foreign governmental and non-governmental aid agencies were
involved 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 or
appointed 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 dramatic
reduction in international involvement and a much diminished role for the OHR in
Bosnian politics (Parrish 2007), with the idea that international influence should be
exercised through the more indirect EU accession process. Consequently, this also
was a period that saw an increase in the power of ethno-nationalist political parties
and a sharpening of rhetoric designed to keep the population divided and fearful of
ethnic Others (or their self-declared representatives). Both phases witnessed wide-
spread political passivity and were accompanied by economic restructuring that led
to extensive impoverishment.
The protests of 2014 suggest that BiH has entered a new phase in which the
population is not as passive, the divisiveness of ethno-national rhetoric is less suc-
cessful at demobilizing political opposition, the impoverishment of the people has
politicized the economic restructuring that took place over the last decade and out-
side forces have focused greater attention on developments within BiH. Issues of
social 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 occurred
during the first two phases. The first is that it was part of a larger ideological shift
away from the values of Yugoslav socialism, including the principle of self-man-
agement of workers, socially owned property as a kind of commons, anti-fascism
and ‘brotherhood and unity’. Ethno-nationalist parties were hostile to these values
because they undermined their claims to legitimacy as ethnic representatives, and
they were an obstruction to their ability to enrich themselves through privatization
and extend control through relations of patronage and the ability to distribute jobs.
International forces were hostile to these values because they were associated with
socialism, against which Western countries defined their systems of political free-
dom (democracy) and prosperity (market-based economy based upon the value of
private 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-ethnic
social and political membership and collective action – particularly those of workers.
More specifically, the reality of socially owned property ended during the war when
socially owned property of self-managed companies and firms was declared to be
state-owned property, paving the way for the privatization processes that would
come in the post-Dayton period. This move undercut the ability of workers to inde-
pendently organize for their rights when nationalist political parties pursued their
goals through an aggressive identity politics. This was made even more difficult by
the dismemberment of Yugoslavia because the prosperity of industries and workers
were dependent upon networks of companies and consumers that ignored the bor-
ders of the Yugoslav republics. Thus, despite the so-called media freedoms, workers
encountered 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 the
value 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’ (Monument
Group 2011), always threatening the ethnic Self. The experience of ‘brotherhood
and unity’ was thus ignored and instead, the continuity of the threat of ethnic
Others 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 achieve
reconciliation. This resulted in some small attempts at the entity level to come to
terms 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 there
were more political gains to be had from demonizing ethnic Others. In what we
termed the second phase of post-Dayton history, they staked their legitimacy by
promoting irreconcilable visions of the future of BiH, built upon absolute denial of
genocide in the RS and in the Federation, a demand that the RS be abolished as a
genocidal creation. Demands by Bosnian Croat politicians for a ‘third entity’ only
extended 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 politicians
to carry out such measures under the threat of sanction. Although formally hostile to
the divisive nationalist rhetoric of local politicians, the OHR also relied upon an
image of ethnic enmity to justify the international presence (as peacekeepers) as well
as to justify ignoring local input on the future of BiH when exercising their state-like
powers to shape that future. The OHR and other foreign intervention agencies also
legitimized their perspective and actions by categorizing themselves, as well as the
people and politicians of BiH, according to binaries of difference, which were also
hierarchies: Europe vs. Balkans, international/local, civilized/non-civilized, normal/
abnormal, progressive/regressive, modern/backwards, etc. This allowed them to claim
to be serving the interests of ordinary citizens in BiH because who could be against
civilized, modern normal Europe? At the same time, the foreign presence had to work
within the nation state system of international order and thus recognize its privileged
forms of representation, i.e. elected politicians. This came to justify international
inaction in the second phase of post-Dayton history along the lines of ‘we may not
like these nationalists, but they are the legitimate representatives of the country as
elected 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 enterprises
was made possible in BiH, in the immediate pre-war period when it was still part
of Yugoslavia (the so-called ‘Marković privatizations’), it only really took off in
1997 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 party
control) (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 a
discount relative to the enterprises’ estimated values (based on the previous year’s
annual 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 attempt
at political as well as economic reorganization. Indeed, the essentialist claims that
insist that ethnic difference played the pivotal role in the dismemberment of
Yugoslavia (and BiH) elide the economic motives for it. During the war, what had
been defined as socially owned was declared by various laws as state-owned prop-
erty or private capital – a practice of dispossession through which the political
elites and warlords robbed Bosnian citizens of what had previously been under-
stood as common ownership. Legal validation of this dispossession came through
the USAID-guided privatization in 1997, as the privatizations of what were now
state-owned enterprises (meaning that they were owned either by the federal BiH
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 ‘contributed
to the consolidation of economic power in the hands of the few by enabling those
with the means, connections, and resources to engage in active secondary trading
of 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; Bayliss
2005). Instead, ownership was ‘widely dispersed in the hands of unsophisticated
and inexperienced shareholders’ (Bayliss 2005, 44–45), further entrenching the eco-
nomic positions of BiH’s nationalist parties and ‘reducing the prospects of ethnic
reintegration’ (Donais 2002, 8). The third (and ongoing) wave of privatization fur-
ther included the issuing of public tenders and bids, mainly intended for those
enterprises deemed to be of strategic value (such as telecommunications, electrical
companies 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 structure
opened a window of opportunity for these processes to be misused by the ruling
oligarchies and political parties. Additionally, the chosen privatization models (vou-
cher and direct tender) enabled the devastation of former industrial giants as well
as smaller enterprises that had contributed to the development of the BiH economy
after the Second World War. Finally, from a workers’ perspective, privatization
meant two things: first, stripping them of management and control over their enter-
prises and, additionally, depriving them of the material basis of their existence
through 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 key
component of market reform, all failed to take into account the social consequences
of 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 to
make themselves the proportionately highest paid representatives in Europe, to expro-
priate the country’s key economic resources with impunity, to take out staggering
loans 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 – most
experts would have dismissed such statements as ‘unrealistic’ and ‘impossible’. Yet
that 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 Dayton
Meantime, ‘a sense of living in a continuous suspension between a war that has
not quite ended and a future – widely held to be related to EU accession – that has
not quite been embarked upon’ (2015, 90). It is, as Jansen goes on to argue, a sta-
tus quo produced by consistent processes of depoliticisation:
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 livelihoods
through partocratic clientelism, and particularly the allocation of public sector jobs
and war-related assistance. (Ibid 90)
He continues that this
national-clientelistic machine feeds on the constitutional set-up of the country, where

everything 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 of
depoliticisation with ritual evocations of ever-postponed Euro-Atlantic integration as
an overall remedy … that knows no alternative. (Ibid 90–91)
It was into this situation – and against this status quo – that the protests of
February 2014 intervened. The protesters emerged as indignant subjects, who, like
the Spanish indignados who also felt they were not represented by any existing
political party, insisted on forms of direct action and direct democracy: partly
through violence and partly through their ability to self-organize and independently
analyse the political and social hurdles the country was facing. In this respect, the
popular plenums that followed the protests offered a glimpse of new possibilities of
collective action and decision-making as well as new possibilities of economic
redistribution. With slogans like ‘we are hungry in three languages13’, citizens
demanded a general turn towards using the machinery of government to fulfil the
aims of greater social justice. At the height of the plenums’ activities, the May
2014 floods revealed the corruption and ineptitude of the government and chan-
nelled the newly found sense of possibility achieved through self-organization into
unprecedented grass-roots humanitarian work that crossed all ethno-territorial
boundaries. This further destabilized the image of BiH society as hopelessly
divided into ethnically distinct moral and political communities.
So, how did the international community react to this moment of protest and
political experimentation? The EU response came that same summer, in the form of
the Compact, backed by the British–German Initiative. This clearly signalled a shift
from the political to the economic: the Compact sidestepped the question of consti-
tutional reforms to instead focus on economic reforms, seeking to modernize and
reignite the BiH economy and to ‘spur investment and create jobs’ (see more in
U.A. 2014; U.A. 2015c). It also re-sequenced the EU’s conditionality programme
for BiH by removing the Sejdić–Finci requirement for the EU Stabilization and
Association Agreement to come into force. We now turn to examine more closely
the 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 the
European 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:
Bosnia and Herzegovina needs to reform. Otherwise it risks falling further behind her
neighbors in terms of the business environment and other policies necessary to spur
investment and create jobs. Already the overall unemployment rate stands at over a
quarter 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 in
Sarajevo. 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 lives
and prospects. (The Compact for Growth and Jobs, U.A. 2014, 3)
The Compact thus relies upon the same rhetorical framing and legitimation strategy
as before: note the categorical distinction of progress/regression (‘falling further
behind’, ‘every future member state of the EU’), the presupposition of agreement
with its diagnosis (‘you know this’ ‘you know that reform is needed’) and how it
bases its legitimacy in the claim to represent the perspectives and desires of
experts, both domestic and international. Evidence of the former is said to lie in the
fact that a broad spectrum of civil, academic, business and political members of
society attended the Forum and identified a package of six concrete and urgent
measures; evidence of the latter lies in the fact that these measures were also
endorsed by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, USA and other con-
cerned nations, organizations and visiting experts.14 Yet, when a BiH journalist
who had also been active in the plenums and protests, Nidžara Ahmetašević,15
asked the Dutch Ambassador, Jurriaan Kraak, about which Bosnians had been
invited 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 sessions
with 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 input
from Bosnians,18 the six urgent measures are not all that different from previous
statements made by previous European representatives. Perhaps what is more
important were the shifts in the geopolitical context and the moves of politicians in
BiH than the opening provided by the protests and plenums.
For example, the European Foreign Policy Scorecard19 covering events of 2014
gave BiH a C grade, unambiguously stating that Europe had to ‘tailor its policies
to the challenges at play’. One such challenge, the Scorecard suggested, was
‘Moscow’s support for Republika Srpska’s Milorad Dodik, who toyed with a
Crimea-style independence declaration’. Another challenge was the threat of ‘ISIS
terrorism’, which became especially significant after a gunman, shouting ‘Allahu
Akbar’, killed a police officer in a Zvornik police station and wounded two others
on 27 April 2015. Note that neither of these events have anything to do with
economic issues or issues of social justice.
Perhaps what makes the Compact and Initiative most noteworthy is that they
amounted to a policy shift, removing implementation of the Sejdić–Finci judgement
as a precondition for moving forward on the European integration process. The

SAA, 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 the
required reforms. A written commitment to implement all the necessary socio-
economic reforms was signed by BiH leaders on 29 January and was approved by
the parliament of BiH on 23 February 2015. As a result, the Council of Europe
unfroze the SAA on 16 March 2015, stating that BiH had fulfilled the necessary
requirements to start actually implementing it.
It thus appears that the saber-rattling of Dodik and the isolated acts of ‘Islamic
terrorism’ played the larger role in the decision to regain momentum on a stalled
European integration process by foregrounding economic reform and ignoring out-
standing constitutional questions. It could be said that this was not the only way
forward. For instance, the EU could have seized upon the protests and plenums as
evidence 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 on
constitutional reform precisely by making it an issue of social justice. So, who was
the international community, in fact, rewarding with the Compact and Initiative: the
indignant subjects, or the politicians or themselves? What is the likelihood that the
economic 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 and
economic crisis that prompted the protests? Two sets of critiques are available to
address this question. One critique is international, dubbed the ‘liberal’ critique in
this paper, stemming from within the EU establishment itself and focusing more on
the political aspects of the Compact. The other is domestic, relating more to the
economy, 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 they
relate 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 objects
to the EU’s new change of gears and the British–German Initiative’s failure to
define 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 the
Compact ignores the previous EU conditions too lightly. These criticisms should
not 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 foreign
intervention community in BiH.21 Note that the criticism is not concerned with
workers or the potential economic consequences of the Compact. Instead, it argues
for a robust and deeper intervention in BiH political affairs through stricter EU
involvement and greater strengthening of BiH state institutions while defining a
clear 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 papers
abound 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 relations
between foreign powers and BiH political authorities and administration.
The first DPC report regarding the Compact, published in November 2014,
suggested next steps for the EU before the Foreign Affairs Council meeting on 17
November as follows:
(1) Refrain from lowering the bar on conditionality once again by removing the
Sejdić–Finci condition for the SAA’s entry into force.
(2) Set the initial reform agenda instead of allowing political leaders to do it
according to their own interests.
(3) The agenda should contain institutional and other reforms conditioned in
the 2008 Partnership Document.
(4) Specific steps to reverse the reform and institutional rollback tolerated by the
EU 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 single
economic space, including suspension of RS activities on South Stream until
there 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 the
Ministry for Foreign Trade and Economic Relations (MOFTER) and return
of the Directorate for European Integration (DIE) to ministerial status. Return
to 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 to
include civil society representatives throughout, and that key judicial and
legal reform issues – BiH Law on Courts, Law on the HJPC, etc. – cannot
be compromised.
(7) Establishment of a Privatization Review Panel to meet citizen demands from
7 February protests (Bassuener et al. 2014, I).
The rhetoric critically addresses the EU’s engagement in BiH, and its main concern
is the most recent ‘lowering of the conditionality ban’ following the removal of the
Sejdić–Finci condition. The critique warns against any further weakening of the
state (line 5 presupposes the integrity of the state has been undermined), urging
the EU to take a more stringent attitude when it comes to the reforms (lines 2, 3
and 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 February
2014 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 initiative
should do (Bassuener et al. 2014, II) through a series of imperatives followed by
ideologically loaded assertions:
(1) Re-establish red lines, noting clear consequences, jointly articulated not just
by Berlin and London, but also by the EU and the USA. There can be no
toleration of further steps to undermine the country’s territorial integrity in
the guise of fragmentation or partition disguised as ‘decentralization’ or
‘federalism’. Maintenance of international Dayton responsibilities will
remain until a post-Dayton order, accepted by each self-defined group of
citizens, is determined.
(2) Develop a real compact with BiH citizens to forge a direct alliance with
citizens for meaningful reform, where it is necessary confronting recalcitrant
elites from both above and below. Support to citizens should not be
confused 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 of
politicians to dispense with the proceeds of privatized enterprises at whim,
and to instead channel dedicated funds for economic development and
needs-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 leaders
publicly state they do not support RS secession. Insist that both Croatian
Government officials and opposition parties’ representatives cease their
ethno-national approach to BiH and adopt an EU approach.
(6) Ensure the appointment of a politico for the vacant post of EUSR who is
comfortable 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 Council
should give its Special Representative real power by stating outright that it
will follow the EUSR’s lead on when to apply ‘restrictive measures’ (asset
freezes, visa bans and funding stoppages).
Above all, the six measures outlined above foreground the reassertion of
international influence and conceive of power as located with a rather narrow
party-political elite – hence, this is where influence ought to focus. This becomes
particularly clear if we look at what the document is specific about and what it is
vague 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 a
post-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 important
requirement for constitutional reform is an assertive outside force to discipline
recalcitrant 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 just
because of the lack of political will to give up key instruments of power. It is also
difficult because of the extensive network of people that the Dayton order sustains.
In circumstances of economic poverty, where most strategic enterprises have
already been privatized and most money is in the hands of relatively few individu-
als, everyday party clientelism, especially in the most dominant ethno-nationalist
parties, 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 creating
authorities that are independent of BiH politics and governmental structures. For
example, take the call for an Independent Privatization Agency. Not only would it
require more bureaucracy (one of the elements otherwise seen as problematic in
post-Dayton BiH), but with most of the privatization money already spent, it is
hard to see where its power might come from. In the past, ‘independent’ has often
been a code-word for ‘not Bosnian’, leaving us to wonder just who would run such
an Agency and with what kind of results.
The critique presented in this document also works to create relations of

obligation between the EU and BiH by drawing attention to how the EU’s
non-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 in
fact served as a ‘convenient tool for deflecting and dismissing any critique of the
EU’s demonstrated ineffectiveness’.
The second document, entitled ‘Making Market on Constitutional Reform in
BiH in the Wake of the EU initiative’, continues the criticism of the EU but
focuses more squarely on the issue of constitutional reform. Their critique is not
just about the inability to come up with a ‘Dayton 2’ but about the ineffective
implementation of the existing constitutional order. Again, it is largely an argument
for 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 thus
criticizes ‘the weak state’ in BiH, the EU’s complicity with BiH ethno-nationalist
elites and the weakness of the international community’s 20-year-long engagement

with BiH, which has resulted in its ‘fragmented, divisive and discriminatory consti-
tutional structure’. The advice is for all international actors to in fact include ‘more
stick’ in their approach to BiH and ‘to refocus coordinated and coherent efforts
toward constitutional reform by spelling out clear rewards for compliance (e.g. EU
candidate status) and clear sanctions for non-compliance (e.g. suspension of EU
funds, suspension of CoE membership’ (Fernandez et al. 2015, II). The sticks also
include recommendations for the suspension of BiH’s voting rights in the CoE, if
Sejdić–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 that
urges a renewed willingness to apply sanctions and empower the OHR is the
effects that this has on the ability of ordinary citizens to exercise any degree of
political agency outside of relations of party patronage. The high interventionist
phase of international intervention was hardly an era of political engagement by
civil 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 thus
highly dubious that ‘reforming the OHR into a last resort enforcer of Dayton’ is
conducive 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 wants
to see more the EU engage in more social dialogue with BiH citizens and ‘forge
direct alliances for meaningful reform’ – rather than having ‘a plan to engage a
Western 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 been
quite 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 interest
groups.
So, what is the likelihood that the kinds of changes demanded in this critique
will meet the aspirations of the protestors from February 2014, or the young people
who are disproportionately affected by the state of the economy? BiH boasts one
of 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 people
were born either during or immediately after the war, and their only reality is that
of post-Dayton poverty and the lack of opportunities. A new twist in politics, or
even a new class of politicians, will not just suddenly emerge financed by the
international community and engage in redistribution nor can we expect the

existing class to surrender without a fight. The current liberal, international critique
of post-Dayton BiH does not have much to say about how to create relations of
accountability between citizens and government, about how to encourage BiH’s
political 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 and
greater 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 Initiative
itself for sidelining unresolved political matters rooted in the Dayton constitution
and the EU for not drawing any red lines, a different domestic critique took a
detour away from Dayton altogether. Instead, it focused on the detrimental socio-
economic effects that the austerity measures proposed by the Compact could have
on the general population, especially its most vulnerable members. Interestingly,
the arguments of both the international liberal and domestic leftist critiques overlap
in 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 and
dysfunctional collection of governments created by the Dayton Agreement, one
might 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 ‘Compact
with 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. The
document critically assesses the set of reforms foreseen in the Compact, singling
out its vagueness and questioning its purported Europeanness. We take it as a
starting document for the analysis which we then expand by further analysing the
Compact’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 and
their 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 labour
reforms.
The Movement’s document argues that the Compact itself discounts the need
for a strong state that is more than just a regulator; it noted that its reforms would
not by themselves attract investors who would then employ people en masse
because workers in BiH were still paid more than those in African and Asian
sweatshops. It further observed that investment takes time, particularly the kind that
would put a serious dent in unemployment because industry was no longer a very
profitable 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 investment
could perform that role. This document’s criticism thus brings ‘socialist discourse’
back into the picture while also redefining the meaning of being European. In other
words, it contextualizes its response to the Compact in the ‘tectonic changes’ that
are shaping ‘future European politics’ (Kovras and Loizides 2015) particularly in
Greece and in the wake of the pending Syrian refugee crisis. In an unambiguous
call for redistribution, it calls for a combination of a Keynesian-style control over
jobs and employment to secure more egalitarianism while advocating the
nationalization of key industries:
In order for the economy to recover, the income of those who have the least will have
to grow as they are the pillars of public spending, not the rich ones, since income is
not just cash but also social contributions into healthcare, education and other services
of common interest. (U.A. 2015a)
The MSJ critique of the Compact brings it into conversation with the calls for
social justice voiced in the protests and the plenums, and notes that while it was
pitched as an EU response to recent struggles in BiH, it actually fails to account
for 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 vaguely
defined. 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 social
obstacles. For the measures relating to labour market reforms, entitled ‘taxes on
jobs’ and ‘barriers to jobs’, the Compact simply proposes a reduction of labour
costs from the current 40% to the average among the new EU member states set at
35%. 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 with
other revenue sources (like VAT)’ (U.A. 2014, 11).
The MSJ critique thus highlights a blind spot in the Compact, if the goal is to
alleviate the burden felt by the impoverished population of BiH (although it should
be noted that much policy is vague in the means it outlines to reach the specific ends
that it defines). There is no reference to what the potential taxable areas are or
whether and to what extent this measure would be a further burden on low-income
workers. For example, the parallel decrease of income tax and increase of VAT could
reduce 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 labour
is 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 employers
with less expenditures for workers’ salaries while simultaneously overburdening
workers (and other citizens) with additional increases in prices and living costs.
Instead, an actually constructive way to ensure new revenues and at the same
time protect workers and the rest of the population in the country would be to
introduce a differentiated tax on income, abolishing taxation of the minimum wage,
differentiating VAT rates for basic products relative to other goods and introducing
a luxury tax that would be directed towards health and pension funds. All of this
would be boosted through intensely monitoring the tax collection process, including
tax breaks for good practice and long-term sanctions for offenders, without cutting
labour costs. As Stigliz (2010) claims, the mere focus on reducing budget deficit
via budgetary cuts has proved incapable of generating sufficient economic growth
to finance public spending necessary for development, while it can cause major
harm to public workers outside the administrative sector and to the socially
disadvantaged.
Furthermore, the Compact stresses a need for market reform in order to create
jobs. The set of reforms include several steps that would
promote wage setting based on skills and performance instead of on seniority; reduce
administrative disincentives to hiring and harmonize labor legislation; reform the
process of collective bargaining and of setting minimum wages; and actively promote
inclusion 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 prosperity
in BiH, this reform is based on a terrible misreading of the contemporary balance
of power in labour relations. Given the current level of clientelism, corruption and
exploitation 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 employment
relationship. Performance-based regulation of salaries is already active in the BiH
textile industry, where labour rights and union rights have been regularly violated
by employers setting performance-related pay. In particular, employers have set
extremely 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 army
of 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 that
the 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 reform
measures. Instead, the cuts threaten to become another tool in politicians’ hands, as
poor performance becomes the ultimate fuel for clientelism.
Another part of the MSJ criticism focuses on how the Compact assumes that
economic development will happen through the inflow of foreign investments.
What the EU disregards, the Movement says, is the fact that foreign investor logic
aims 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 neoliberal
policies in BiH without taking into account the BiH social and economic contexts
or the wider implications of what implementing these measures would entail for
workers. As an example of the kind of measure that could have an immediate effect
on employment, they propose a redistribution plan that paints a silver lining on the
tragedy of the heavy floods of May 2014:
Mass post-flood employment would be a good way to go because a lot of people

would get jobs and that money, provided they are paid at least minimum guaranteed
income, 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 administration
officers, nationalization of industries most relevant for development etc. All this runs
against austerity measures while it is reiterated in Europe that there are ‘no
alternatives to the politics of social exploitation’. (U.A. 2015a)
While we are sympathetic to such an approach, the question remains how this
would look in Dayton-based practice since organizing mass post-flood recovery
through 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 floods
of 2014 and the response to them reveal that the true challenge may be coming up
with a plan for economic and social recovery that goes beyond both Dayton and
the Compact. Even though the flooding rivers did not follow inter-entity boundary
lines, the flood management was to a great extent contained within the entity or
local government jurisdiction; yet, the ineptitude and incapacity of the government
to respond to the disaster led to the unprecedented solidarity of affected people and
the 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 employment
programme to rebuild could have the effect of overcoming the divisions wrought
by 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 protests
and plenums of 2014? Are there any points of articulation between the demands
for social justice and critique of the ethno-national clientelism of political parties
voiced by the protestors, on the one hand, and the debates about the foreign policy
of the European Union, on the other? It does appear that certain forces within the
European Union took the protests and their aftermath as an opening to attempt to
restart momentum on the integration process, but that that attempt had more to do
with geopolitical concerns than with responding to the demands of protestors. In
fact, 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 for
removing the requirement that BiH implement the Sejdić–Finci ruling as a prerequi-
site for moving forward within the SAA framework. What we are calling the
domestic leftist critique of the Compact has pointed out that there are very few
points 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 restate
long-held criticisms of and recommendations for European and US foreign policy
approaches to BiH, criticisms and recommendations that contain few very points of
articulation with the concerns of protestors. There is one underlying implicit point
that all do seem to agree on, and that is for a stronger role for the state, but what
that role ought to be and how one would get there – presumably through some sort
of 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, and
the analysis of the Compact and the responses to it suggest that the future of BiH
could develop in any number of possible directions. Both the liberal and the left
criticism of the Compact address a range of issues from the BiH state structure to
the Compact’s actual ramifications for the country’s working population. In BiH,
political elites have managed to stay in power by pandering to popular interests
while making sure that no joint vision of BiH emerges. Such a joint vision would
have to provide some minimum consensus on the past, thus securing some
semblance of historical justice, or provide a sustainable, socially responsible plan

for 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 could
alternatively be accepted based on political expediency rather than the fulfilment of
its obligations. In this regard, the 2014 Compact could be taken as evidence for
either of these eventualities. The Compact is sufficiently vague, however, that its
effects would depend upon how it is implemented. If it were implemented in a way
that built upon the socialist values reintroduced by the protestors and plenums, and
strengthened the capacity of the state to pursue a politics of redistribution, we could
see BiH progressing towards something like the European left-wing, anti-austerity
alliances such as the Greek Syriza and the Spanish Podemos. If, however, it were
implemented without directly challenging economic and political conditions that
produced the violence of the protests, we could see BiH take a turn in the direction
of the growing European Right.24
This is a difficult position, one that truly discloses the problems of ‘illiberal
democracy’ in a war-torn, corrupt and impoverished economy. What, if any, kind

of 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 a
lack of a unifying narrative, not just in BiH but in the whole of Europe, which
more 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 and
none of us, from factories and enterprises to monuments and museums. This must
also be a politics of equality for all the ‘losers’ of the post-Dayton transition in a
time 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 predicament
as a starting point, and look at the plenums and protests as a spark of hope for
some future solidarity awaiting us.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. A consociational political framework rests on four main principles of power-sharing –
group autonomy, broad coalitions, proportional representation and veto toaccommodate
cultural claims in multicultural and complex societies, avoiding potential conflicts (see
more 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 amendments
to the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina’, 24 March 2006, available at www.us
tavnareforma.ba.
3. The cornerstone of the Prud Process was the principle that BiH should have three
levels of government – state, regional and municipal – with executive, legislative and
judicial branches at every level. This would have meant abolishing either the FBiH
entity or its 10 cantons, as the three-level structure would not have accommodated both
these levels. Later disclosures revealed a tentative agreement to replace the FBiH with
several regions, one of which would have been predominantly Croat; but controversy
over this concession doomed the process, which died out in early 2009. See more at
http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/europe/balkans/bosnia-herzegovina/b068-bos
nias-gordian-knot-constitutional-reform.pdf.
4. The Sejdić–Finci case refers to a 2009 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights
brought by Dervo Sejdić, a Roma activist, and Jakob Finci, a Jewish politician, who
argued that the Bosnian constitution negotiated as part of Dayton was discriminatory
because certain electoral posts could only be held by Serbs, Croats or Bosniak
Muslims.
5. ‘The Park is Ours’ [‘Park je Naš’] protest organized in May 2012 aimed to stop real
estate developers in cahoots with the municipal government from illegally destroying
and building over a public park in the city.
6. The JMBG (‘Unique Master Citizen Number’) protests escalated because babies born
since February 2013 had not been given social security numbers because the relevant
law had lapsed and not been renewed because of parliamentary squabbling. Being born
without a JMBG meant one could not get a passport and this led to a public outcry
when 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 the
anti-Dayton group, has been routinely held up by Serb politicians as evidence that
constitutional reform is just a smokescreen to deprive Serbs of their right to

self-determination.
8. Adam Fagan in a conference ‘Western Balkans Between Authoritarianism and
Democratic 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 the
Democratization Policy Council that advocates a functional liberal democracy in BiH
that would still be based on Dayton. The ‘left’ critique has more ‘grassroots’ origins
and 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 in
BiH 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 in
FBiH was adopted in 2012, establishing an Agency for Revision of Privatization in
FBiH that would review failed and suspicious privatizations. However, the Agency did
not start its actual work until the first quarter of 2015 and thus has so far been unable
to 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 and
improve competitiveness by reducing the cost of working to a far lower percentage of
labour costs – from levels close to 40% towards the average for new EU member
states of 35%. (2) BiH needs to enact a set of labour market reforms to increase job
creation, including revitalizing the collective bargaining process, reducing disincentives
for 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 at
improving the conditions measured by Doing Business indicators to match the regional
average. (4) Bosnia and Herzegovina has a weak private sector and serious difficulties
in attracting investors. Better investor protection laws and practices are needed, includ-
ing corporate governance, strengthened risk management practices to improve access
to financing (especially for new enterprises) and a more efficient insolvency frame-
work. (5) Bosnia and Herzegovina needs stronger adherence to the rule of law and
deep public administration reform. In the short term, there should be a comprehensive
public listing of para-fiscal fees and other costs, permits and licenses with a view to
elevate their transparency. (6) Bosnia and Herzegovina must improve the targeting of
social assistance through a set of measures that would make social protection policies
more effective, efficient and equitable. Social protection needs to work for those who
really 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.nlem
bassy.org/news/2014/august/interview-with-ambassador-kraak.html.
16. Who are the Bosnians who were consulted in the making of the Compact? I (Nidžara
Ahmetašević) tried to find some of them in the spring, when the forum was held, but
even the ones I managed to find told me that they were invited to the meeting, but that
they had no opportunity to speak and they did not have the feeling they were listened
to. There have been many projects in the past which were imposed by the international
community, claiming that they are the result of consultations, but the projects never
were 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 more
than 20 participants, the conference included only one member of the BiH civic sector
and 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’s
foreign policy performance, analysing the performance of the 28 member states and
the EU institutions on 65 policy areas arranged around 6 key issue areas: Russia; the
USA; Wider Europe; Middle East and North Africa; Asia; and China; Multilateral
issues (http://www.ecfr.eu/scorecard/2015).
20. See more in footnote 9. Two DPC papers are produced by a number of scholars and
policy makers and we herewith refer to them as Bassuener et al. (2014) and Fernandez
et al. (2015).
21. Authors of these policy papers worked for the OHR, OSCE, UNDP, the Open Society
Institute, International Rescue Committee, the Boell Foundation, and a USAID-funded
projected 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.thep
ressproject.net/article/74,530/Costas-Lapavitsas-The-Syriza-strategy-has-come-to-an-
end.Notes on ContributorsDanijela Majstorović is Associate Professor of Linguistics
and Cultural Studies at the University of Banja Luka’s English department teaching
Discourse Analysis and Cultural Studies. She was a Fulbright fellow at UCLA in
2012-2013 and Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the
University of Alberta in 2014. Her research interests involve discourse studies, critical
theory, gender and feminism, postcolonial and postcommunist studies.She published
over 25 journal articles, co-authored a monograph Youth Ethnic and National Identity
in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Social Science Approaches (Palgrave, 2013),and authored
Diskursi 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 English
and 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 concern
feminism, class and labor, social justice and politics of memory. Anđela Pepić holds
an MA in economics and pursues another one in political science. She is a project
manager at the Faculty of Political Science’s Institute for Social Research. Her research
interests involve labor, social and economic rights, socially responsible enterpreneur-
ship and Marxism.
Notes on contributors
Danijela Majstorović is an associate professor of Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the
University of Banja Luka’s English department teaching Discourse Analysis and Cultural
Studies. She was a Fulbright fellow at UCLA in 2012-2013 and Canada Research Chair in
Cultural Studies postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta in 2014. Her research
interests involve discourse studies, critical theory, gender and feminism, postcolonial and
postcommunist studies. She published over 25 journal articles, co-authored a monograph
Youth Ethnic and National Identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Social Science Approaches
(Palgrave, 2013)and authored Diskursi periferije (Biblioteka XX vek, Beograd 2013) and
Diskurs, moći međunarodna zajednica (Filozofski fakultet u Banjoj Luci, 2007). She edited
two volumes: Living With Patriarchy: Discursive Construction of Gendered Subjects Acros
Cultures (John Benjamins, 2011) and Kritičke kulturološke studije u postjugoslovenskom
prostoru (Filološki fakultet u Banjoj Luci, 2012).
Zoran Vučkovac holds an MA in English and 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 concern feminism, class and labour social justice and politics of
memory.
Anđela Pepić holds an MA in economics and pursues another one in political science. She
is a project manager at the Faculty of Political Science’s Institute for Social Research. Her
research interests involve labour, social and economic rights, socially responsible
entrepreneurship and Marxism.
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ISSN: 1468-3857 (Print) 1743-9639 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fbss20

From Dayton to Brussels via Tuzla: post-2014

Danijela Majstorović, Zoran Vučkovac & Anđela Pepić

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

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Download by: [68.51.87.73] Date: 25 March 2016, At: 19:56

From Dayton to Brussels via Tuzla: post-2014 economic

(Received 30 May 2015; accepted 21 October 2015)

The political and economic transformations of peacebuilding and state-building

Introducing Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina

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

© 2016 Taylor & Francis

war’s ethno-nationalist (dis)order and its foundation of social exclusion (Arsenijević

Dayton–designed administrative organization, characterized by ethnicization of terri-

Various EU-backed initiatives aimed at amending or reforming the Dayton constitu-

Post-2014 restructuring: bringing political and economic aspects together

He continues that this

national-clientelistic machine feeds on the constitutional set-up of the country, where

The compact and its dis/continuities

as a precondition for moving forward on the European integration process. The

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

The critique presented in this document also works to create relations of

elites and the weakness of the international community’s 20-year-long engagement

international community and engage in redistribution nor can we expect the

Towards a left criticism or what we have learned from Tuzla

Mass post-ﬂood employment would be a good way to go because a lot of people

semblance of historical justice, or provide a sustainable, socially responsible plan

democracy’ in a war-torn, corrupt and impoverished economy. What, if any, kind

constitutional reform is just a smokescreen to deprive Serbs of their right to

and not a single Bosnian public intellectual or activist. http://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/ke-

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