Office Of The High Representative Research Articles

A Unique European Governance Structure : Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina Basis of Its Legitimacy and Controversial Accountability

In order to assess the successes and failures of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s (BiH) challenging road towards a fully functional democratic state aiming at membership in the European Union (EU), this paper examines the state-building process in BiH, and the transition from the post-Dayton political development, the work of the interim, ad-hoc political institution of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in BiH, as well as the justification – if any - of its future existence and operation. Guided by the coordination dilemma, the research question of this paper is a reflection on the challenges of self-enforcing democratic institutions and how the OHR substitutes for it. This paper claims that the original purpose of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) was to create a powerful yet limited institution of the OHR, one that is to be given sufficient power to institute behaviour, but is prevented from abusing its power. However, this purpose deviated in the years that followed the signing of the DPA, creating and institution which doings resemble liberal imperialism. The hypothesis of the paper is that the OHR has been abusing its power and that it is time to close it because it is no more a substitute for the self-enforcing democratic institutions. This paper claims that the problem of political officials’ lack of respect for the political and economic rights of citizens they administer, as investigated by Weingast, is one of the central features of the operation of the OHR in BiH. The novelty of the paper lies in the attempt to test if OHR could be a case that could serve as a very good field to test Weingast’s model (1997).

Culture of Dependency and Federal Spirit in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Almost thirty years after the General Framework for Peace (DPA) was initialled in Dayton and then signed in Paris, Bosnia and Herzegovina has not taken full ownership over its governance. The Office of the High Representative (OHR), which has been given the responsibility to oversee the civilian implementation of the DPA, has been heavily criticized for being controversial, undemocratic, illegal, and it has been seen as an obstacle to the EU integration of the country. This paper analyses the effects of civilian international presence on the governance of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It argues that such strong and long-lasting international control fosters a culture of dependency in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which in turn jeopardizes the creation of federal spirit in the country.

THE HIGH REPRESENTATIVE IN BOSNIA‐HERZEGOVINA

How difficult it is to introduce democratic institutional arrangements in a territory that had mainly experience with authoritarian government is illustrated by the case of Bosnia‐Herzegovina (BH). The Dayton Peace Accord of 1995 established the (Office of the) High Representative (OHR) to help the new republic of BH develop into a democracy. After more than 25 years, one cannot but conclude that the creation of democratic institutions has not worked for lack of collaboration between the three most important ethnic groups. At best, BH is a controlled democracy, held together by OHR. The development of this office is analyzed in terms of a neo‐institutional framework. We argue that the republic survives so far on the basis of negative legitimacy (accepting the OHR as the binding institutional arrangement). This also suggests that neither developments in a past long gone nor more recent developments (i.e., ‘strong’ path‐dependency) prohibit a development toward positive legitimacy (i.e., ‘lean’ path‐dependency). The case of BH also illustrates that democracy is hard, if not impossible, to establish when people are internally divided and where (some) domestic and international actors exploit these divisions in the international arena.

Dejtonska i postdejtonska koncepcija upravne vlasti Bosne i Hercegovine - dvadeset i pet godina nakon Dejtonskog mirovnog sporazuma

The Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995 established today's Bosnia and Herzegovina as a multiple, complex, specific, and unique state with international legal subjectivity with regard to state law, constitutional law, and administrative law. As a result, the form of socio-political order such as it exists in Bosnia and Herzegovina is unknown in modern political systems. From the initial minimum competences granted to state-level institutions as regulated by the Dayton Constitution, there have been, over the course of twenty-five years, significant amendments made in this respect. With the intervention of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) into the constitutional and legal framework, and, to a lesser extent, by consensual transfer of jurisdiction from the entity level to the state level, administrative capacities of Bosnia and Herzegovina have been strengthened in organisational and functional terms, thus significantly derogating the respective administrative authority of the entities of the Republic of Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is accompanied by strong hyperinflation of the administrative bodies and organisations at the state level, mostly of unstable legitimacy, which, along with the existence of administrative structures at the remaining thirteen levels of government, classifies the post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina as a complex, segmented, and dysfunctional state. The subject of this paper is an analysis of the Dayton and post-Dayton conceptions of the administrative power of Bosnia and Herzegovina twenty five years since its establishment. The paper, using methods of qualitative analysis of legal acts, legal exegesis, as well as comparative and axiological methods, and relying on the theories and conceptions of the distribution of competences in a complex state, seeks to present the Dayton and post-Dayton conceptions of the administrative power in Bosnia and Herzegovina from a twenty-five year distance. The basic research hypothesis is that states with complex organisational structure, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, require decentralised organisational and material structures in the executive branch both from the aspect of functionality and economy and the aspect of their sustainability.

Turning International Intervention into Domestic Cooperation in Post-War Societies

ABSTRACTInternational intervention is widely considered to stabilize peace in post-war societies. Its effects on democracy are more contested. External intervention risks reinforcing, rather than resolving deadlocks in domestic politics. This negative effect is not inevitable. This article proposes a new, theoretical model of political peacebuilding, based on a spatial model of politics in post-war democracies. In the classical model, the peacebuilding mission has an own political agenda, which relieves the domestic political actors of their political responsibility and deepens the domestic deadlock. In the arbiter model proposed in this article, the peacebuilding mission uses its powers to push for compromises between the domestic actors. This enables democratic decision-making within the domestic institutions. Empirically, the paper studies the impact of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia–Herzegovina with its power to issue binding decrees. The paper analyses the role of former High Representatives, using the authors’ original interviews with the office-holders and over 2700 press releases. As the results show, periods when the OHR acted as an arbiter were rewarded with a higher degree of cooperation between domestic elites. These findings corroborate the usefulness of the arbiter model as a new strategy of international intervention in post-conflict societies.

The Same Old Story of Peacebuilding: Institution Building, Legitimacy and Global Governance

The year 2015 marks the twentieth anniversary of the creation of the hybrid state of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), half international administration, half federal state. For almost 20 years the Office of the High Representative (OHR) has been effectively ruling over a state that does not want to be one. In its annual report to the UN, the OHR repeats the same refrain every year: ‘Bosnia and Herzegovina has come a long way since then [the war] [ … ] However, progress will require concrete results to be delivered. Some of the reforms will be very difficult, but they will deliver new opportunities for the country and its people.’ 1 For 20 years, the claim that statebuilding has been successful has been contradicted by this constant promise of progress to come.

Reclaiming the Political in Bosnia: A Critique of the Legal-Rational Nightmare of Contemporary Bosnian Statehood

Across the asphalt and concrete of our raped land, comes a band of profiteers, carrying away our wealth.. .Flags have been sown, the children convinced, the knives distributed, our graveyards divided.Damir Avidic, Po Asfaltu i Betonu2There a popular joke in concerning the dealings of Milorad Dodik, the President of the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska (RS) entity within Bosnia-Herzegovina, which says as much about Dodik as it does about the general state of affairs in the country as a whole. As the story goes, Dodik visits the (now former) Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, in a fabulous villa just outside of Rome. Dodik dazzled by the splendour of the Prime Minister's manse and inquires how, as a public servant, Berlusconi had managed to live in such luxury. Berlusconi takes Dodik to a secluded balcony and shows him a sprawling highway off in the distance. He explains that through some clever bookkeeping, he and his associates had managed to shave two centimeters off each side of the road from what the original blueprints had called for, and in the process had saved millions - which they had then pocked for themselves and hence his impressive home. A few months later, it Berlusconi visiting Dodik and upon his arrival, the Italian can scarce believe his eyes; Dodik's mansion easily twice the size of his own and immeasurably more luxurious. Berlusconi pleads with Dodik to explain how he managed to find the funds to build such a home and, obliging, taken to a large bay window overlooking the countryside. Do you see our fabulous new highway, Silvio? No, all I see empty fields. Exactly!The above as telling and succinct of a narrative about the general state of Bosnian society as one likely to find. After all, BosniaHerzegovina a country where even respected academics and policy analysts are forced to concede that it is a great place to be a politician but a shitty place to be a citizen (Siddiqui 2011). Yet with more government ministers, bureaucrats and international administrators of various sorts than countries many times its size, trudging across its cities, towns, villages and hamlets, utterly lacks any meaningful, popular mobilization. The weight of post-war Bosnian politics has instead served to depoliticize the people of the area; it has made them beholden to the machinations of local and foreign oligarchs.Newspapers in Bosnia's three main cities (Sarajevo, Banja Luka and Mostar), most catering to one of the country's three constitutive peoples (Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats), report with breathless regularity on the latest in scandalous pronouncements. The bombastic nationalist rhetoric of Dodik a popular theme amongst the Sarajevo papers, for example, who react with fury at his weekly suggestions that Bosnia a failed experiment or his frequent negations of genocide in the country during the 1990s (Dervisbegovic 2011). These statements are declared as unacceptable, in turn, by the representatives of the international community in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Office of the High Representative (OHR) as well as the European Union Special Representative, and the subsequent exchanges reported on with equally repetitive and vapid zeal (Tanjug 2011). The process begins anew the next week.Meanwhile, substantive dialogue or mobilization almost entirely absent, despite the steadily deteriorating standard of living for all Bosnians, regardless of ethnicity. The handful of dominant parties in the country, most of which are exclusively ethno-nationalist in orientation, have managed to sequester the realm of political action to their theatrical antagonisms - what locals refer to as nacionalisticko prepucavanje: hackneyed nationalist bickering or trolling. Said theatrics, of course, and as our earlier joke suggested, are widely understood to be the front operations for the actual day-to-day routine of Bosnian economy: corruption on an endemic scale, orchestrated by nationalist oligarchs, which has resulted in the systematic dispossession of even the meagre social wealth and infrastructure that survived the war (Corruption 'Humongous' in 2008). …

Muscular Interventionism

This article highlights the centrality of gender to the liberal peacebuilding agenda in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It examines the discourses and practices of liberal interventionism, focusing on the Office of the High Representative (OHR) as a crucial site for the constitution of gendered subjects and agents in this post-conflict zone. Drawing on poststructural theories and representations of Balkan identity, it explores the gendered articulations of Paddy Ashdown, first during his wartime visits to Bosnia-Herzegovina, and second, during his tenure as High Representative. A discourse-theoretical analysis highlights how Ashdown rationalized his involvement in wartime Bosnia-Herzegovina through a powerful self-identification with an ‘interventionist model of masculinity’ which equates manliness with a responsibility to protect a vulnerable/backward/feminized Balkan ‘other’ from violence and harm. Moreover, gendered discourses helped to conceptualize and legitimate the peace implementation role of the OHR, allowing the organization to position coercive strategies and policies as appropriate and necessary for creating sustainable peace. Overall, this article highlights how gender is mobilized to promote and impose liberal policies and norms, with significant implications for the quality of peace being (re)constructed.

Function Follows Form: The Organizational Design of Peace Operations

This article challenges the view that peace operations are rationally designed to select an optimal organizational structure for operational performance. Instead, two dynamics lead to the adoption of dysfunctional organizational structures. First, different preferences among state and organizational actors involved in planning a peace operation (‘heterogeneity of the sponsoring coalition’) lead to diffused authority (‘heterarchical design’) in peace operations structures. Second, characteristics of the organizational environment (‘ambiguity’ and ‘stickiness’) in which peace operations are authorized and planned cause the adoption of dysfunctional organizational structures. Investigating briefly the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), and the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET), the article finds the hypothesized relationships consistent with the finding of the cases. While function does not always follow form there are strong indications that it often does in the international context.

Governing through Crime Internationally? Bosnia and Herzegovina

The article adapts and applies the governing through crime framework to analyse the EU and Office of the High Representative (OHR) as international governing actors in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Limited, ambiguous and opportunistic use of techniques associated with governing through crime are most evident in relation to OHR, but only as one of a wider range of governing logics, and are linked to specific challenges of legitimation. The outward spread of criminal justice models and metaphors proposed by Simon is shown to be problematic in light of the breadth of activities that such a stance might admit to the framework.

Transitional Exceptions to the Rule of Law in International Administrations: The OHR in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Right to Due Process

The Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia and Herzegovina has been mandated to guarantee that full compliance with the Dayton Peace Agreement is achieved, including respect for the essential elements of rule of law as a key condition for lasting peace. However, the power to vet, dismiss and ban public officials from public life at the OHR's discretion seems to be exercised in increasing tension with some essential due process requirements. According to the UN peacekeeping conceptual framework, this anomaly could be explained by the need for some transitional exceptions to the rule of law in conflict and post-conflict societies. Furthermore, emergency derogations are usually allowed for in all functioning international human rights systems. Nevertheless, the absence of a public and thorough revision of the harshness of some derogations, together with their connection to global economic and strategic objectives beyond the strict Dayton framework, raises suspicions about their compliance with the substantive and procedural safeguards against such exceptions required by the international human rights systems. After 13 years of exceptional rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), could this be the time for revision? The article offers reflections on possible legal scenarios.

Generic characteristics of the Office of the High Representative's press releases

This study looks into the hybridity of a particular political discourse format by exploring different sets of characteristics of the press release genre published by the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1996 and 2005. In an integrated approach preceded by a substantial contextualization of the problem, the genre is analyzed in terms of its activity, social relations (colonizer and the colonized) and communication technology. Particular political communication strategies the genre is meant to accomplish, such as legitimization, coercion and representation, are also anlayzed in terms of their linguistic realizations such as lexical and semantic content, metaphors, metapragmatic features, perlocution and construction of social hierarchy/distance towards recipients.

EU Enlargement and the Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Brief Historical Sketch

This paper examines Bosnia and Herzegovina’s integration process to the European Union (EU), by combining a historical outline, with an analytical description of the ever growing impact of the EU, both in the country, as in the whole region. Major steps done both by domestic government and the international community, in particular the Office of the High Representative (OHR), to ease and facilitate Bosnia and Herzegovina´s road to the EU will be presented. At the same time the major obstacles toward being accepted as an EU member are identified, such as structural insufficiencies, the specific postwar-situation and the ethnic fragmentation of the country.

Construction of Europeanization in the High Representative's discourse in Bosnia and Herzegovina

After the Bosnian war 1992—5, the Office of the High Representative (OHR) was assigned as the most powerful international body in the country regarding implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement and the subsequent accession of Bosnia and Herzegovina into the European Union. This study focuses on the semiotic elements of discourses of Europe and Europeanization constructed by the OHR in Bosnia and Herzegovina only to reveal more problematic relations of the OHR's dominance in a sovereign country. By analyzing regularly published press releases aimed at the Bosnian public in the process of transition and Europeanization, it looks at the ways in which this organization represented, legitimized and coerced Europeanization in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

After Dayton, Dayton? The evolution of an unpopular peace

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Dayton Peace Agreement has been surprisingly flexible and institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina have evolved significantly over the past decade in both implementing the agreement and moving beyond the agreement in key aspects. While much of this evolution has been driven by the Office of the High Representative (OHR), recent years have seen the rise of domestic constituencies which invest in the institutions and the state set up at Dayton. Much of the criticism of the rigidity of the original peace agreement remains valid, but the gradual success of the institutions it set up or legitimized speaks in favour of a gradual evolution of the institutional system, rather than whole-scale changes.

Agriculture and Public Information in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina

Since the Dayton Agreement on Bosnia of 1995 there is peace between Croats, Bosnians and Serbs. Whether this is a lasting situation remains to be seen (de Rossanet, 1997). Pessimists refer to Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” and argue that because Bosnia is situated on the fault line of the Western and Orthodox civilizations and on top of that has a large muslim minority a new war can not be avoided (Huntington, 1997). Others don’t accept this and are of the opinion that rational governance will overcome the problems of the multicultural society. In this view the restoration of the country’s economy is a major priority. However, on the long run, a peaceful outcome is not to be taken for granted.At present, the international community represented by the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) controls the political situation and the three ethnic groupes are forced to cooperate. To sustain a lasting peace in the future without the guidance of the OHR the reconstruction of the Bosnian economy starting with the agricultural sector is a precondition. This paper reports on a quick scan carried out in the period 15-19 April, 2002, in order to evaluate the possibilities of the agricultural sector as an economic booster in the post war situation. The quick scan was necessary to evaluate and give advise with respect to the plans of the OHR to engage in a public information campaign in order to stimulate the transformation of subsistence farming into commercial agriculture, and to encourage young urban Displaced Persons (DP’s) to consider life as a farmer as an option for their future. The campaign will include a number of sub-regional radio and television series, and a booklet and videos for distribution among the target groups.

Postwar Political Economy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Spoils of Peace

In postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), international and local captains maneuver to assert control and negotiate areas of collaboration. In each of the Croat and Bosniac areas of the Federation and in the Serb-controlled Republika Srpska (RS), the major political elements that took Bosnia into war now also enjoy the economic spoils in their geographical sectors. Central institutions remain weak in BiH, undermined by war entrepreneurs and patrimonial elites that interact with international organs and external capitalist institutions, adapting their clientism to externally imposed conditionalities. A pseudo international protectorate is operated through the executive management of the external actors: the Office of the High Representative (OHR) of the Peace Implementation Council; the United Nations; the missions of both the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the European Union (EU); the International Management Group (an EU-funded body that undertakes reconstruction evaluations) ; aid agencies; and international financial institutions (IFIs). They provide executive governance that reflects the values and norms of the powers that dominate the global economy. (1) For example, at the end of 2000, the OHR introduced wide-ranging laws and amendments concerning privatization, wages, and financial operations designed to maintain market reforms that would meet the demands of the IFIs for the privatization of public enterprises and socially owned assets. (2) Indeed, the external actors are drawn into micromanagement in their efforts to implement this vision because they encounter resistance and prevarication. (3) Obviously, the clientist and neoliberal mechanisms for managing investment, shares, and profits are dissimilar. But the normative assumptions of the external actors and the interests of domestic elites coincide in extracting profit from public goods and in fostering opportunities from privatization and discrimination against social ownership. In this there is common ground between in ternational and domestic parties as well as friction and resistance. There has been limited critical research on the political economy of war-torn societies or on the dysfunctional aspects of neoliberalism in peace building. (4) However, a critical theory perspective shows that the maneuvering and collaboration in BiH highlights not only contradictions in the practice of neoliberalism but also the limitations of a paradigm that configures society as an adjunct of the market. It contests the neoliberal discourse of norms that privilege global markets, the noninterventionist state, and the discounting of political and social dynamics. (5) Further, external micromanagement stems from seeing collapsed statist economies as the dysfunctional other, and from attempts to modify the corporatist systems and criminal behavior of local war entrepreneurs. But the external actors juggle between nation building and diminishing the state as an economic actor by privatizing essential services and shifting responsibility for employment and welfare from the state to the individual. This has hardly alleviated a grim social and economic situation that differentiates markedly between participants in the entrepreneurial economy and the excluded poor, unemployed, and welfare dependent. In the first part of this analysis I present a snapshot of the BiH economy after six years of peace. I then examine the prewar and wartime aggrandisement of nationalists that carried over into the postwar settlements. In the next section I deal with the goals and basic mechanisms of the external protectors and the interaction of neoliberalism and clientism, with a particular focus on the privatization process. Finally, I contend that the neoliberal model is dysfunctional in providing the social protection that war-torn societies such as BiH lack. A Dire Economy In 2001, six years after Dayton, the economic situation was officially described as dire. …

Warnings from Bosnia: The Dayton agreement and the implementation of human rights

The Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) of 21 November 1995 was able to secure a halt to hostilities between the warring Serb, Croat and Bosniac parties in Bosnia and Hercegovina. However, the plan that emerged from the peace negotiations - to create stability, restore human rights and build enduring peace in the devastated state - might well be judged a monumentally difficult task. It is now over four years since the signing of the agreement (known formally as the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Hercegovina - GFAP) and while there have been some advances toward an integrated society, over a million refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) are yet to return home, ethnically motivated violence continues, and politically and ethnically biased officials and police forces hamper the integration process. Moreover, the international community’s effort has come under criticism for the extent to which it has allowed the Office of the High Representative (OHR) to increase its powers of intervention in Bosnia, a shift in policy which, it is alleged, has restricted the civil and political rights of the Bosnian people.

Office of the High Representative (OHR): Statute of the Brčko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Office of the High Representative (OHR): Statute of the Brčko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia 2000

The Dayton Peace Agreement was intended to signify a break with the usual pattern of Balkan history, where war begets war. In the aftermath of the Bosnian war, a massive international effort was launched involving billions of dollars and thousands of soldiers, administrators, aid workers, and diplomats. The aim was to supplant militant ethnic nationalism with pluralism and economic liberalism. Bosnia was not just to be rebuilt; it was to be re-created transformed into a stable, prosperous democratic society. Nearly five years after the Dayton Peace Agreement, much has been accomplished in this odd demi-protectorate of the international community. The military side of the effort has been a resounding success, having achieved all of its major goals. The guns are silent, the respective local armed forces are corralled back at their bases, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers have been demobilized. The civilian effort, loosely coordinated by the international Office of the High Representative (OHR), has proved a much more arduous task, although the list of achievements is significant. State institutions at all levels have been created from a tripartite presidency and joint parliament on down to local civic councils. A new national currency, a new flag, and even a Bosnian state seal and anthem are in place. Several internationally monitored elections have been held. Only last summer, over 30 world leaders attended the Stability Pact Summit in Sarajevo, providing further proof of how far things have come. Symbolically, it was held in a stadium outside the city that had once been completely decimated by cannon fire and was now rebuilt.