Yesterday citizens across Bosnia and Herzegovina went to the polls to elect regional and national representatives (see Bosnian Elections). No one, least of all Bosnians and Herzegovinians themselves, believe that the elections will solve any of the nation’s most intractable problems. Indeed, most feel that the elections are likely to make these problems worse.
Although I am by no means an expert on Bosnian and Herzegovinian politics, I do believe that my year traveling throughout the region, speaking, teaching, but mostly listening between August 2013 and August 2014, might shed some light on why today’s elections will likely exacerbate these problems.
Reports in the Guardian, the New York Times, and even Al Jazeera will focus on persistent ethnic divisions and upon the entrenched oligarchy. And all will dutifully report how it was the US-brokered Dayton Accords that brought peace to the warring factions in 1995. Yet none I suspect will mention either the true cause for these wars — not ethnic conflict — or the true, long-term solution to the ongoing hostilities in the region: abandoning the neoliberal economic policies in the 1970s, and undoing the destruction produced by the economic downturn in the 1980s.
The persistent focus on ethnic conflict in the region known as Bosnia and Herzegovina is a relic of the nineteenth century, when, as Benedict Anderson reminds us, the emerging bourgeoisie imagined the nation as a counterpoint to the multi-ethnic (and therefore illegitimate and unnatural) monarchies of Europe. National bourgoisies created the new fields of national linguistics to “recover” “lost” stories from the past “proving” that beneath the accretions of nobility and monarchs there rested true, natural, and legitimate popular sovereigns — the peoples — which, of course, naturally excluded multi-ethnic monstrosities such as the Balkans. The only question remaining then concerned the true character of that “natural” underlying community.
Although the majority of communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina were Muslim, for centuries there had also been strong Croat (Catholic) and Serb (Orthodox) minorities whose representatives always maintained that it was “unnatural” for a European nation to be ruled by non-Christians. Thus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was argued should “naturally” be ruled by either Croats (Catholics) or by Serbs (Orthodox). This changed in 1945 when a coalition of Serbs, Croat, and Bosnian Communists successfully defeated Germany’s occupying Nazi forces and forged the first truly secular constitutional republic under Jozip Broz Tito. The secular and independent character of Bosnia and Herzegovina was further reinforced in 1950 when, in defiance of Joseph Stalin, the ruling Yugoslav Communists set out on an independent path of what Yugoslavs called self-governing socialism, in effect creating democratically managed cooperatives that enjoyed the authority to manage their own production, set their own wages, set their own prices, and, eventually, even trade with non-communist states. This explains how Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians in Yugoslavia, particularly in industrialized regions, increasingly came to view themselves not as Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims, but as Yugoslavs.
Yet, for much the same reasons that heavy industry in western Europe, Great Britain, North America, and Japan began to suffer from declining rates of profit in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so Yugoslavs also began to suffer the consequences of global competition. In some regions of the globe, most notably in northwestern Europe, the public elected to reduce its overall consumption, production, and demand and spread the shock of deindustrialization socially across the entire population. This contrasts with Great Britain and the United States where in order to maintain relatively high rates of return for investors, elected representatives were willing to subject voters to higher than average un- and underemployment, lower wages and benefits, while deregulating financial institutions and relieving wealth of its fair share of tax burdens. Collectively these policies, known as neoliberalism, had the effect of bunching wealth increasingly upward (as Thomas Piketty has documented in his runaway bestseller). However, the same policies, when applied to Yugoslavia, had even more damaging consequences.
In an attempt to maintain consumer expectations, the ruling Communists in the 1970s were compelled to borrow ever larger sums from western governments and financial institutions. (Such loans and consumption, it was felt, held out the promise of pulling Eastern Europeans into the western capitalist camp and isolating the communists.) But when the dollar was strengthened under Ronald Reagan, leading to unprecedented unemployment in the US, the consequences for the former Yugoslavia were ten times worse. In order to pay off their now inflated foreign debt, the government began selling off huge swaths of public assets, reducing worker wages and benefits, and laying off large segments of the population. Bosnia and Herzegovina, which, prior to 1945, had been largely an agricultural region, had always lagged considerably behind Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. The region was now plunged into levels of economic turmoil unseen since the end of World War II.
Why did Yugoslavia’s leaders not adopt the northwestern European model and spread the effects of deindustrialization more broadly? Two answers. First, because the lion’s share of its debts were with nations that had now adopted neoliberal economic philosophies (the so-called Washington Consensus), their creditors would accept nothing short of privatization, deregulation, and austerity. Second, because of the unequal distribution of burdens in Yugoslavia, where Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina had always been compelled to endure far more hardship than Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, or Slovenia, any attempt to further redistribute the social product from these relatively more prosperous regions to Bosnia and Herzegovina would in all likelihood have provoked civil war much earlier than 1991, the year civil war in fact broke out.
Yet, it was actually not until 1995 and 1996 and the end of the conflict that neoliberal privatization, bolstered by the Dayton Peace Accords (and hastened by the chaos that reigned during and following the war), had the effect of creating a lasting Bosnian and Herzegovinian oligarchy in both of its entities and among all three of its ethnic communities; political and economic oligarchies ready to receive and bank on World Bank, IMF, EU, and US financial assistance. Western financial institutions, eager to promote the neoliberal dream in Bosnia and Herzegovina, channelled resources into the oligarch’s bank accounts, with or without assistance from state intermediaries. When assistance went to states, such assistance was sure to promote state corruption. When it went to “private” interests, here too the aid went directly into the accounts of the oligarchs.
For example, this Spring when the World Bank, the EU and the US organized meetings in Sarajevo to address Bosnia and Herzegovina’s financial woes, the organizers completely overlooked the civil sphere that had taken shape in February through the formation of Plenum throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, extending invitations exclusively to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s entrenched and corrupt oligarchy. But it was the neoliberal dream, first forced upon Yugoslavia in the 1980s and then again in the late 1990s as a virtual condition of Dayton, that all but ensured a quarter century of political and economic dysfunction.
This helps to explain why democracy cannot succeed under present conditions in Bosnia and Herzegovina. No matter who runs, under whatever colors, it is the oligarchy and not the people who win.
What is the solution? First, just as they imposed neoliberalism and an utterly dysfunctional Dayton Agreement (because it establishes an ethnically defined political system in BiH, Dayton automatically excludes BiH from membership in the EU) on Bosnia and Herzegovina, so now the international community needs to step in to undo both. This will not be easy. The Republik Srpska will accept nothing short of complete independence from BiH as a precondition. And many Croats feel the same way about Croatian areas of BiH. Which is why, second, the international community needs to identify and freeze the assets of members of BiH’s oligarchy. Of course, the international community has already identified the members of the BiH oligarchy. (These are the individuals they invited and continue to invite to the table whenever they claim they are meeting with BiH “leaders.”) Third, the international community needs to redirect its attention, energy and resources to the extensive network composing civil society in BiH, in particular to representatives and spokespeople of Plenum and of the independent (non-SDP) labour movement. Finally, the international community needs to strengthen and support public institutions, such as BiH’s public schools, that represent the future of multi-ethnic BiH. (We were baffled during our visit to find the US Embassy lavishing support on private, ethnically defined schools in BiH while completely neglecting public, multi-ethnic schools.)
Of course, the international community is likely to turn a blind eye to these concerns. After all, BiH is a small nation (3.4M people), with virtually no economy. Let the Bosnians work out their own problems. Just give it some time. However, members of the international community must know that its periphery is fraying, that the tinder is dry, and that the fuel of nationalism is quite potent. Letting these sores fester on Europe’s “shatter zone” is unwise and untenable. Better to intervene now than to let this wildfire go unattended.
(At latest report, the nationalist candidates are all winning in the polls.)