Building Impossible States? State-Building Strategies and EU Membership in the Western Balkans

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Notes

The agreement clearly stipulated the succession in the case of state dissolution, thus making Serbia the successor of SCG and FRY and transferring the commitment to autonomy of Kosovo within FRY to Serbia (Belgrade Agreement 2002).

At first, state building in both Bosnia and Kosovo was primarily driven by the US. Gradually, the EU has taken over in both countries.

As Susan Woodward argues, the countries of South-Eastern Europe do not qualify as fragile or failed states by any measure as their rankings, according to different measures of state fragility, do not place the countries into a particularly vulnerable category (Woodward 2009, pp. 160–62).

Ken Menkhaus aptly observed in the case of Somalia that a minimalist state might be the only viable form of state-building yet the expectations of elites (and probably also of the population) is of a more ‘maximalist’ state, able to provide benefits and services (and patronage) (Menkhaus 2006/2007, p.95).

Sherill Stroschein argues that the state structures proposed in the Ahtisaari plan constitute a form of ‘dispersed control model’ where the state is weakened in a non-hierarchical manner by overlapping structures of power. I would argue that institutional reality after independence and the lack of control of the state over parts of its territory is closer to the model than the institutions drafted in the Ahtisaari plan (Stroschein 2008).

In Bosnia, the state-level VAT has also come under pressure by the government of Republika Srpska (Parish 2011).

This term is used in the context of the EU to designate a person performing two roles.

NATO and the Council of Europe have also imposed pre-accession and post-accession conditions on the Western Balkans. In addition, the USA imposed conditions with regard to financial assistance, significant in the 1990s in Bosnia, and later in Serbia.

There is, of course, a broader question to the commitment of parts of the elite to any form of institution building.

Arguably EU state building also failed in 2004 when it came to the efforts to unify Cyprus; however, the failure of the EU and the UN was largely due to the fact that EU accession was not conditioned on the Greek Cypriots voting in favour of the Annan Plan.

Nezavisne novine, 24 February 2011.

This has been argued particularly by the European Stability Initiative; see their reports available at: www.esiweb.org, accessed 11 July 2011.

See Marlene Spoerri's discussion in this collection.

The Prime Minister of Montenegro, Milo Đukanović, for example, noted on 7 May 2006 that ‘Montenegro is in the position of a hostage and has to suffer the consequences for a situation it did not create’ (Pobjeda, 8 May 2006).

See the essay by Gülnur Aybet and Florian Bieber in this collection for a more detailed discussion.

‘Lajčák: Reward BiH in Line with Progress on Reforms', OHR/EUSR, 29 March 2008, available at: http://www.ohr.int/ohr-dept/presso/pressr/default.asp?content_id=41510, accessed 11 July 2011.

This has been most pronounced in the field of police reform, where the EU has insisted on a particular outcome which is not a reflection of any EU policy or even a shared EU member state pattern.

The municipality of Brčko was not allocated to either entity at the Dayton peace negotiations. In an international arbitration decision in 1999, Brčko was established as a district separate from the two entities.

The main focus since December 2009 has been the constitutional reform to accommodate the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in the Sejdić-Finci case that found the constitution violating human rights of communities excluded from high offices on the basis of their ethnicity (Milanović 2010).

‘Dodik: BIH je zemlja apsurda’, Blic, 29 September 2010, available at: http://www.blic.rs/Vesti/Politika/209379/Dodik-BIH-je-zemlja-apsurda accessed 11 July 2011.

Only majority Serb municipalities in the south were included (Štrpce, Ranilug, Parteš and Gračanica). In the north, Mitrovica is excluded as the municipal boundaries encompass both Albanian and Serb populated regions. The municipalities of Leposavić, Zubin Potok and Zvečan are included (Central Election Commission 2010). (I use the term Serb to designate ethnic predominance, whereas I use Serbian to designate affiliation with the Serbian state.)

During the other years (2003, 2004 and 2006) no separate data for funding of the State Union institutions were available.

See Vedran Džihić and Angela Wieser's discussion of this dynamic in this collection.

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Notes on contributors

Florian Bieber

I would like to thank the British Academy which has supported research for this essay.