As Bosnia-Herzegovina’s (BiH) application for membership in the European Union (EU) keeps moving towards acceptance, restrained optimism is in order. This is not an automatic process, something clearly demonstrated by Turkey’s long teetering on the fence of the EU-project. The process is not even guaranteed to bring positive change. Evangelical declarations of salvation through “the light of European integration” and liberal capitalism, even the slightly more humble assertion of a European “Community”, has been exposed as inflated rhetoric by the Eurozone crisis and the recent exodus of a powerful member state.
BiH does not, however, have much to lose. The state is held back by a dysfunctional political architecture produced by the war in the 1990’s and subsequently institutionalized by an “international community” trying hard to avoid costly involvement in BiH.[1] Milorad Dodik, leader of Republica Srpska (RS), remains uncommitted to the idea of a unitary Bosnian state,[2] and continues to pursue trappings of state sovereignty for RS.[3] This all too common disposition has long been an obstacle in day-to-day politics.
The hope now is that the EU-accession process, with its focus on political and economic reform, can drive through positive change in this situation. Recent meetings between BiH top politicians indicate that this has already started.[4] EU-officials have been quick to welcome this advance, but just as quick to add their ever present mantra: there is still much work to do.[5]
In the official language of the EU, and in the language of academics allowing the EU itself to define proper terminology for the study of the EU, this work is described as “Europeanization” of presumably un-European outsiders.[6] In this narrative, deviation from the Western ideal is considered highly problematic, prompting profuse deployment of spatial and temporal metaphors highlighting the need for those not like the EU to “catch up” or “return” to Europe, as if they had not been there all along. This attitude is made problematic not only by its semi-racist connotations and the power-asymmetry that it naturalizes, but also because it severely limits the possibility for the EU to understand and learn from those not like it.
This is nothing new. European politicians and intellectuals have always used negative images of its outside to simulate and stimulate internal cohesion,[7] creating largely unflattering portraits of the East in general[8] as well as the Balkans more specifically[9] in the process. Broadly speaking, the relationship has not been one of mutual exchange. When “dealing” with the Balkans, the West has brought with it its preconceived notions, perhaps most tragically so to the war in Bosnia. The international community drew heavily from a discursive tradition painting the Balkans as an uncivilized place filled with irrational people constantly fighting each other. The conflict was described as a confusing civil war without obvious victims or perpetrators, sometimes even as a “blood feud” rising out of ancient tribal animosities. Bosnia itself was portrayed as an impossible place to live, a tinderbox waiting to explode, a morass in which intervening westerners risked being stuck forever.[10] Mediators adopted the nationalist assumption that the ethnically mixed Bosnia was “impossible” and that the only way to stop the war (without getting too involved) was to consent to the contrived multiethnicity of a weak central state divided into separate enclaves. This happened even though the severity of the violence itself could be seen as a clear indication that this reorganization of Bosnian space went against deeply engrained ways of life.[11]
Whether such clichés about the Balkans reflected true ignorance or merely constituted a cynical rhetorical strategy to limit involvement, Western inaction continued during years of ethnic cleansing. Finally, the Bosnian tradition of entangled multiculturalism had been replaced by a new apartheid geography. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost and millions of people were forced to leave their homes as refugees. Adding to this loss, Bosnia was robbed of the opportunity to reinvent itself as a sovereign, unitary and multiethnic polity.
Had the West been less occupied with its own geopolitical imaginings, and paid more attention to how and by whom the ethnically mixed BiH was made “impossible”, some of this could have been avoided. Hopefully, the EU will now make a break with tradition and use this renewed interaction with BiH as an opportunity to learn. This requires a change in the logic of Europeanization. Luckily, there is already another understanding of the concept operating in political science research, for instance that on the development of a common EU foreign policy. Possibly because this mainly concerns states that are already members, and therefore already “European” by nature or nurture, Europeanization is here conceived as a reciprocal interaction between member states and the EU, creating European harmonization by reshaping policy preferences at both ends.[12]
If the EU can adopt this latter approach to Europeanization in its dealings with BiH, it stands to benefit greatly. In at least one regard the EU and BiH are in the same situation: They are both multi-entity polities struggling to balance the sovereignty of the parts with the functioning of the whole. Potential benefits from further integration include smoother functioning of the BiH political system and a greater ability to effectively confront EU-wide issues like the Eurozone crisis. Bringing this about is to no small part a question of creating a common political identity that justifies further transfer of sovereignty to the larger polity.[13] Such a shift is only deemed socially legitimate when, as stated by an expert on EU constitutional law, “the electorate accepts the new boundary of the polity and then accepts … being subjected to majority rule in a much larger system comprised of the integrated polities”.[14] The EU and BiH are thus joined in their need of identity projects that transform them from containers of discrete ethno-territorial entities into truly multicultural and polyethnic unitary polities. Having failed to find and employ a common European culture separated from national identity,[15] this is where the EU should start to pay attention to BiH.
It is now perhaps commonplace to point out that the construction of political identity is an active social process. States and nations do not “naturally” materialize onto the surface of the earth. This initial insight is highly important, among other reasons because it problematizes nationalist claims that ethno-territorial division of space is somehow natural. But the fact that we create our own identities does not imply that they are not necessary. There is a need not only to deconstruct essentialist identity, but also to produce alternative stories of political communities, based on a fundamental openness towards the identities of others.[16]
The “Sarajevo Cube” tells one such story. The Cube is, as one is informed by the label, the official souvenir of Sarajevo’s Old Town. Closed, it looks almost like a wooden Rubric’s Cube. Opened like an Easter egg, the Cube reveals a miniature model of the Old Town skyline: the Catholic and Orthodox cathedrals, the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque and the old Jewish synagogue are all cleverly fitted into the spaces left open by the architecture of the others.
Like any map,[17] the Cube serves its hard truths with a fictional chaser. The scale and placing of buildings is not correct. There are also considerable omissions. While the Cube shows us the physical manifestations of Sarajevo’s largest confessional communities, it simultaneously hides the modern city’s atheists, ambassadors, Buddhists, bankers, punks and drunks. The promotion of Sarajevo’s multicultural image takes precedence over cartographic accuracy. The Cube – talkative for a piece of wood – tells a certain story of the city. It is a story of several conjoined but distinct communities, each retaining its own shape while making room for others in the puzzle of Sarajevo.
The Sarajevo Cube is a self-conscious promotion of multiculturalism in a city where the wartime experience of a long and brutal siege has provided plenty of material for separatist narratives. The determined choice to endorse multiculturalism and polyethnicity makes it possible to read this little souvenir as a crude roadmap for both BiH reintegration and the wider geopolitical project of European integration. The point made here is not that the EU should learn from some “true” Bosnian legacy of multiculturalism, but rather from attempts, like the Cube, to actively create an identity based on a normative commitment to accept persistent otherness. To paraphrase a paraphrase: the truth about political identity will not make us free, but taking control of the production of identity will probably help.[18]
The European-wide incorporation of this openness toward the other could be especially beneficial now, when a fear of minorities, perceived to thwart the “purity” of the nation, seem to be making a comeback.[19] Such nationalist claims hides the fact that there are always considerable internal fractures, which are merely being externalized onto the Others accused of standing in the way of the community’s “full potential” or “true identity”.[20] One concrete example of this is found in my own country, Sweden, where anti-immigration parties have attracted voters by connecting immigration to a perceived weakening of social welfare.[21] In this propaganda construct, our declining ability to “take care of our own” is blamed on refugees fleeing for their lives, as a substitute to problematic questions about our own tax morals and the causal link between western-dominated capitalism and the dismantling of the welfare state. If the open ethos of the Sarajevo Cube was Europeanized, the debate would be about redistributive policy, not ethnocentric identity.
This is perhaps a utopian vision. Realistically, one can expect the EU to rely on external incentives and active leverage to create political structures of rewards and reprimands, aimed at encouraging political and economic reform in BiH throughout the accession process.[22] It is possible that this may bring about a gradual normalization of relations between the entities of BiH, slowly eroding the effect of the inter-entity boundary lines, perhaps even encouraging accelerated processes of intermingling of BiH’s “constituent nations” and thus assist BiH in approximating the unitary polity the Dayton agreement so unconvincingly pretended to establish.[23]
However, even though such a notion may appear slightly fantastical, one should not lose hope that the EU will also use this process to do some “lesson-drawing” of its own – turning it into Europeanization in the sense of mutual influence. In a best case scenario, the EU could come to realize the importance of telling itself stories that promote the accommodation of persistent otherness. Incorporating the ethos displayed in the Sarajevo Cube could be a decisive factor in turning the EU into a more effective multinational polity and a more hospitable place for those drawn to it by the self-congratulating image of prosperity and peace being projected through official rhetoric. This could also be a useful attitude in the EU:s external dealings. Again confronted by the results of the Wests failure to see BiH for the ethnically mixed place that it once was, the EU could come to adopt some humility when interacting with its outside, manifested in, among other things, a reduced reliance on its own geopolitical macronarratives and an increased respect for local idiosyncrasies. Going even further, the EU could use BiH and the Cube for inspiration in reconsidering its commitment to the nation state and ethno-territorial “belonging” as the most natural form of socio-spatial organization, and renew those discussions of post-national citizenship that has been around at least as long as the EU itself.[24]
This general approach could have helped save a truly multiethnic BiH in the 1990’s. Now, it can perhaps be used to reinvigorate the wider project of European integration.
[1] Dahlman, C.& Ó Tuathail, G. 2011. Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and its Reversal. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
[2] Al Jazeera interview with Dodik, accessed 2016.08.10 at http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/talktojazeera/2013/01/201315105658725780.html
[3] http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/bosnian-serbs-celebrate-day-of-rs-01-10-2016-1. Accessed 2016-08-10.
[4] https://sarajevotimes.com/?p=103698. Accessed 2016-08-10.
[5] https://sarajevotimes.com/?p=103763. Accessed 2016-08-10.
[6] Kuus, M. 2004. “Europe’s eastern expansion and the reinscription of otherness in East-Central Europe” in Progress in Human Geography 28,4 2004. Pp. 472-489.
[7] Delanty, G. 1995. Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke; Neumann, I.B. 1999, Uses of the Other. The ‘East’ in European Identity Formation. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Wolff, L. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
[8] Said, E. W. 1978. Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books.
[9] Todorova, M. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[10] Ó Tuathail, G. 1996. Critical Geopolitics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Chapter 6.
[11] Campbell, D. 1998. National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
[12] See, for instance, Wong, R. 2005. ‘The Europeanization of Foreign Policy’, in Hill, C. & Smith, M. ( eds). International Relations and the European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[13] On the importance of transnational solidarity to justify large scale redistributive policy in the EU, see, among others, Hall, P.A. 2014. “Varieties of Capitalism and the Euro Crisis.” In West European Politics, vol 37, no. 6, pp. 1223-1243; and McNamara, K. R. 2015: “The Forgotten Problem of Embeddedness. History Lessons for the Euro.” In Matthijs and Blyth (ed.), The Future of the Euro, Oxford, pp. 21-43.
[14]Weiler, J. 1999. The Constitution of Europe – do the New Clothes have an Emperor? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quote from p. 84.
[15] Delanty 1995.
[16] This argument is advanced in Campbell 1998 and Neuman 1999.
[17] Black, J. 1997. Maps and Politics.London: Reaktion Books; Wood,D.1992. The Power of Maps. New York & London: The Guilford Press.
[18] Hardt, M & Negri, A.2002. Empire. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press. P 156.
[19] Appadurai, A. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
[20] Žižek, S. 1990. ”Beyond discourse analysis” in Laclau, E. (ed) New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso. Pp 51-62.
[21] Parties like Sverigedemokraterna are following a tenacious discursive tradition noted, for instance, in Balibar, E. 1991. “Racism and Crisis”, in Balibar, E. & Wallerstein, I. (eds) Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso. Pp. 217-228.
[22] As it did in previous rounds of enlargement. This process is described in the more traditional view of “Europeanization” as an uneven teacher-student relationship in, among others, Schimmelfennig, F. & Sedelmeier, U. 2004. “Governance by conditionality: EU rule transfer to the candidate countries of Central and Eastern Europe”, Journal of European Public Policy, 11(4).
[23] But we should also not forget that separatist within BiH might have a great deal to gain from the country joining the EU, if this in the future softens the borders with those neighboring countries that they wish to anchor “their” ethno-territorial enclaves to. On this, see Ó Tuathail, G., O’ Loughlin, J. & Djpa, D. 2006. “Bosnia-Herzegovina Ten Years After Dayton: Constitutional Change and Public Opinion” in Eurasian Geography and Economics, 2006, 47 (1) pp. 61-75.
[24]For an example of this argument, see Delanty 1995.
Written by: Daniel Andersson
Daniel Andersson is a student of geopolitics, trained in history and geography, watching with great interest as Europe’s fuzzy eastern border is being renegotiated.