Bosnia Between The Dayton’s Peace Straightjacket, Development, And Power Centers’ Moral Obligation; Solicitation To Biden
BOSNIA BETWEEN THE DAYTON’S PEACE STRAIGHTJACKET, DEVELOPMENT, AND POWER CENTERS’ MORAL OBLIGATION; SOLICITATION TO BIDEN
by Faruk Hadžić
Abstract
A rational analysis of the international community’s failure to prevent war crimes in BiH (Bosnia and Herzegovina) can be a lesson for the future’s morality model. The EU’s role in Southeast Europe is inconsistent between its normative potential and current problematic aspects of process implementation policies. The recognition of Dayton’s failure by the US, can pave the way for building a political community within the current “virtual entity” that does not possess vertical and horizontal legitimacy. It would be morally obligatory, even imperative, to build blueprints and state reorganization tools in the concrete. Dayton is non-functional, unsustainable, and socio-politically exclusionary. When there is a higher degree of internal democratization, economic-technological development, a higher degree of realization of human rights and freedoms, it moves the nature of the conflict away from the violent conflict. Prosperity and stability often coincide. It brings it closer to the conflict of development and human well-being. In this concept, war, nepotism has the meaning of losing any possibility of reaching the national interest, which automatically eliminates the possibility of manipulating one’s people’s national interests. The discourse “our vs. their sacred land” created unbearable ease of creating fear, manipulating, and motivating new crimes. Its absurdity was confirmed by the right of entity creation, given the prerogatives of statehood. Such principles could be used as a motive for new “territorial redistribution” and further violence in the Balkans. An active policy change is needed to sufficiently limit ethnic-nationalist domestic and global-interest ability to inflict harm.
Introduction
Citizens of states that emerged from Yugoslavia’s disintegration instead of democracies ended up in hybrid democracies, authoritarianism, and kleptocracies. Political elites have managed to reduce the democratic experience to a somewhat banal level.[1] Thus, it seems that even that banal level of democracy will not survive for a long time and that more countries are moving towards unequivocal authoritarianism and pure illiberalism. The Balkan conservative spirit’s ethnopolitics’ destructive power has already shown that it can destroy states, peoples, religious institutions, educational systems, scientific plants, and human dignity.
We have witnessed the continuous desecration, collapse, and destruction of individual and social moral values in BiH (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Europe, and the world. The crisis of morality is increasingly gripping modern society. In its development, society experiences various economic, political, and social crises, which last shorter or longer, but are never as profound and consequent as the crisis of morality, which affects all society segments.
Fear of losing identity within global communities, such as Yugoslavia, after disintegration led to the sudden “emergence” of antagonistic individual national identities, becoming indivisible and exclusive. [2] National identities built and consolidated with such confessional exclusivism (associated with ethnic) manifested themselves as extremely impermeable and inflexible, and the rivalry between their national umbrella projects was almost irreconcilable. Therefore, this form of nationalism maintained a firm position in these societies’ political processes. Thirty years since the beginning of the war, in BiH, there is no agreement on the date that would officially mark the beginning of the suffering of the people in this country. Politics of parallel memory and revisionist historical narrative spread influence among young people among whom ethnopolitical indoctrination has reception and is left to chance to create solid preconditions for hostilities in future generations to escalate into violence in specific political-economic circumstances. Throughout the world, attempts to revise World War II results in the falsification of historical facts are punishable. However, in the former Yugoslavia, collaborators of Hitler’s genocidal structures, members of political-military-paramilitary formations (including convicts of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia-ICTY), regularly receive pensions and medals. Schools and streets are named after them, and they are celebrated at rallies. The “culture of fear” grows into a powerful inspiration into the “culture of hatred,” which always quickly and effectively grows into a “culture of violence.” The existence of a “minority and majority” or “friend and enemy” relationship is the foundation of the symbiosis of the political, religious, and ethnonational factors in the ex-Yugoslav communities. With religious myths of their innocence, which are tirelessly disseminated, people are socio-politically prepared to adopt the nationalist-archaic constructions by leaders whose “amnesia” results from their national -religious narcissism. [3] These conflicts, supported by neo-Nazism, mythology, ethnic chauvinism, religious extremism, as a mobilizing ideology, have created an explosive, dangerous and traumatic environment in which the possibility of a multiethnic-religious dialogue in this area is increasingly being challenged. In the absence of global democratic order, the fluid, fragmented and old-fashioned fight against racial, interfaith and intercultural hatred and animosity remain, which is a time of digital-technological revolution and growing authoritarian populism, creates new multiple threats that could explode into a new escalation of conflict in the Balkans and could have dramatic consequences for all of humanity.
In BiH, all three ethnopolitical structures pursue containment policies, so “hybrid wars” prevent their necessary transition into three political communities and adopting the applicable rule of law. [4] Here it is the political elite that forms the basis of the political system, and “peoples” are only fragments of the political formula, the power that the political elite justifies and generates its social (economic, cultural) and political power.
The Dayton Peace Agreement suspended and “annulled” the Constitution of BiH (Annex 4 ) – that is, as a list of fulfilled wishes Milosevic and his aggressor allies in the BiH, and imposed its Annex 10, established an institutional novelty in contemporary (post-Cold War) international relations, the Office of the High Representative (OHR). The basis on which the “Serbian Republic” was established on the BiH state’s territory is the genocide and the destruction of the Constitutional Order of the BiH, an internationally recognized and independent state. Dayton Accords created a fragile state, centrifugal nationalism, religious exclusivism, and the worlds most complex public administration; 14 government, 180 ministers, two entities, „three languages“, one district, ten cantons, with 207 active political parties (on 3.5 million people) where pre-election campaigns last permanently, and it has become a barrier to the progress of the country. The Constitution defines Bosniak -Croat-Serbs as a constituent people. For the most part, a mere constitutional decor appropriately enshrined in the last article of the Preamble of the discriminatory BiH Constitution. Therefore, the term “Others” in the formulation of “hybrid” identities (mixed ethnic marriages, other ethnicities, and those who declared themselves as Bosnians) is an unsentimental description of their position in this ethnoreligiously divided society. Those who do not belong to one of the three religious groups or do not want to show affiliation are considered a foreign element; they cannot elect representatives and are barred from running for office at any state level. The constitution of semi-presidential the system in which the executive branch is not any real power, and at its disposal blocked is a system veto.
The issue of responsibility for the war puts in the center of attention and responsibility of the international community, i.e., those of its members who had a significant influence on the course of events in this region. In terms of creating the conditions for starting a war and the way it was conducted, and especially the question of how that war was treated by the international political and diplomatic public, is very carefully avoided in all analyzes of the war written so far. This role was defined by the strategy of world capitalism, led by the US, to overthrow communism from within and not from without, i.e., without external action, preferably based on internal difficulties, primarily economic, which it could not overcome with constant pressure from the West on the issue of human rights. The EU’s real role, which was an exceptional negotiator in Dayton’s policy towards BiH, reflects a great deal of indifference, maintaining the status quo, and a policy of non-interference, instead of a prompt and effective reaction, in a state where genocide has been committed. Does the question arise whether the EU has done everything in its power to build BiH into a modern, democratic, and legal state? As a post-genocidal society, BiH is left to “independently lead and monitor ” the peace implementation process in an ethnically-religiously divided state. Overlapping with the meaning of the term “international community,” the EU has always been seen as an insufficiently defined and alien, yet powerful geopolitical entity with the potential to change the course of history and influence politics. In this sense, the distinction between the “international community” the EU and the US is not clear in BiH today; where does one end and the other begin?
The internal logic of the “Balkan security dilemma” involved the mass execution of members of another national-religious group and their forcible mass expulsion from the “sacred land”, with severe moral and political consequences was always a common side effect of brutal war conflicts over territorial redistribution. Some sought the right to self-determination of their people, emphasizing secession from the mother country and separation from others, while others emphasized the right to defend the shared state’s territorial integrity. The fact that Bosnians were a “unique” people from the 10th to the 20th century, which had three religious denominations, is wholly ignored.
Is BiH physically distant from the conflict today? Extremist ideologies are, in fact, just a continuation of the war by other means. They have entered education and beginning to metastasize and affect the entire social tissue, becoming “naturalness”, supported by different mythopoetic narratives of a particular nation. In an environment where politics is extreme, many avoid concerns about the very nature of extremism and the process of radicalization within the discourse of “peacetime” extremism. [5] Thus, an artificial circle of collective interethnic “culture of fear” was created under the indigo of the highest international law and moral norms.
Particular emphasis should be placed on the existence of a kleptocracy and “corrupt mentality.” Based on the OSCE report [6] about the condition of judicial response on corruption from 2017 to 2019, I maintain that the report was crucial evidence of how the systemic corruption has entered the judiciary and burdened mutual clan and politically-judicial settlements. It is essential to point out a relatively robust and secure connection between criminality and the political class. There is almost no prominent politician in the region who has not been accused of abuse of power. Investigations are mostly not completed, and even if there is a trial, it ends with an acquittal. [7] The lack of supranational and non-party-based civic movements (gathered around the universal values of human and civil rights) affect resistance to the government’s ideological-interest manipulation. Moreover, outside the ritual, political matrix framework, concentration on specific programs to stimulate economic, technological, social, human development growth, and regional integration is not progressive.
1. Dayton‘s straightjacket
Through intensive geopolitical and religious interventions throughout its history, from the beginning of the 20th century, BiH is under pressure from the neighboring Serbian or Croatian national idea. As a reminder, the Dayton Peace Agreement, “legitimized” by the international community, is unjust and senseless, as it was, the war, as an armed territorial-expansionist attack internationally recognized country, although late and with incredible difficulty. Practically, that means that, with that interruption, war tasks, ideologies, and contractors of the war remained unfinished. Most importantly, Dayton became the “sacred letter” of most political elites, preserving the status quo and lacking qualitative changes, maintaining political-interest structures, and utterly independent of differences in their proclaimed political-ideological goals. At any point in any political process in institutions, concerning any issue, politics can face a wall of “vital national interest” as absolute inviolability, which paralyzes politics, deprives it of meaning and purpose. The public, ideological-formal advocacy and “defense” of Dayton is a way of reactively covering up its actual non-implementation. The purpose is to defend the indefensible as obstructing everything possible (politics is the “art of the possible”). This mechanism of Dayton’s irrational “defense,” as a rationalized derivative of its initial denial, is called reaction formation in psychology. [8]
In addition to the constant secessionist explosive rhetoric, the recent threats of SNSD party President Dodik that he would deny financial support in “his” entity-level due to the election defeat of the entity capital in the local elections in November 2020 shows the core of autocracy. It prepares the mayor’s function’s disempowerment to concentrate all power in the city assembly, which it controls. More than statistical data, the perspective of young people and their position in society speaks to which it is at 2018, at the youth gathering, a current chairman of the tripartite Presidency Dodik: “You can be the best student or the best an expert in a field, but if you are not in the system of government, it is all in vain.” [9] The same matrix is tied to other ruling parties regardless of ethnic-ideological orientations.
The public sphere represents an open and pluralistically organized field in which individuals of the same status and power (citizens) form a particular species horizontal consensus and agreement plow (common good). Public debate is how the common interest is reached and decided, and here the public sphere reveals a landscape of emptied civic, national, state politics.
Implementation of the Dayton Agreement, paying close attention to equidistance, left the same policies that are up to brought it. Although the BiH constitution was written in opposites, all good conventions about human rights are now politically derogatory because he disrespects human rights. Legislative power is trapped in ethnic consensus, leaving the state itself without clearly prescribed jurisdiction and demarcations jurisdiction relative of the entity. Dayton made a “front” in which the state must fight for powers with high representatives’ aid. Dayton’s definitions of peoples, nations, three languages, citizens, “Others” must be questioned (both scientifically and functionally-practically). It does not tolerate either scientific or practical criteria, and in the practice of other countries, there are no such questionable denominations of critical terms. [10] Dayton created a fragile state, centrifugal nationalism, and religious exclusivism where pre-election campaigns last permanently, and it has become a barrier to the country’s progress. Decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (cases Sejdic, Finci, Zornic [11]), showing the fundamentals of socio-political exclusions climate.
As a complete and sovereign state, I suggest that BiH get a completely new connotation and content. To gain the right to count on this possibility, RS should rise to the highest level of social, economic, technological, and human development with the highest standards of human rights and freedoms, which also applies to the Bosnian Croats. On the other hand, as far as the Bosniak people, as the most numerous nation that is interested in the survival of BiH as a single sovereign state, it would have to achieve even higher standards of social, economic, technological, and human development and respect for human rights and freedoms than the Serbs and Croats in BiH.
2. Moral obligation of the international community
The crisis of morality is increasingly gripping modern society. In its development, society experiences various economic, political, and social crises, which last shorter or longer, but are never as profound and consequent as the crisis of morality, which affects all society segments. Morality (or immorality) is the force that moves the whole world in the direction of good or evil. Unfortunately, individual and social morality standards are less and less critical. Universal essential human values are neglected and rejected. Society falls under the strong political, economic, cultural, ideological influence of retrograde systems. Individualism and materialism become the dominant philosophy of living. One of the reasons for such a situation is the global lack of moral role models, which have been the main drivers of progress in every age and every society.
I maintain that the international community did not support some, but supported some parties in political and later armed struggles in Yugoslavia. It did not appoint its representatives as mediators in disputes and as mediators in seeking a solution to disputes that directly affected the war’s outcome. The EU Community, its most influential members at that time, the UK and France, and then the US, played a significant role in the political turmoil that led to the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. This role was defined by the strategy of world capitalism, led by the US, to bring down communism from within and not without external action, preferably based on internal difficulties, primarily economic, which he could not overcome with constant pressure from the West the problem of human rights. Another aspect of the international community’s role in creating the conditions for the overthrow of communism in Yugoslavia can be seen in the active role that the Western bloc countries played in the country’s internal political confrontations itself.
They reinforced every movement that led to the loosening of internal relations in the country (Nixon’s visit to Croatia in 1971), notably when the reform movement, led by the last Prime Minister of the former Yugoslavia A. Markovic, adopted the plan for reforms originated in Western economic-political laboratories (the economist Sachs), the operation of exiting the schemes of communism and seducing some institutions and forms of economic relations characteristic of neoliberal capitalism began. This assumption was immensely strengthened by the action of the President of France Mitterrand, who, after his one-day visit to Sarajevo, cynically stated that the case of war in BiH was not political and military. However, humanitarian issue case and, consequently, Western countries reduced their action in BiH to humanitarian action. His response to growing pressure from the European and world public to seek Western intervention in that war was because it was genocidal, and it took place in the center of Europe, forgetting from its unfortunate history under Nazism. It resulted in that completely immoral action of forming troops (UNPROFOR), UN peacekeeping troops, which had the only role in protecting the war and enabling aggressors, who would complete their genocidal action. Since such a policy only stimulated aggression and only let the aggressor know that international politics did not intend to prevent aggression and genocide, one can rightly speak of the existence of great responsibility of these countries for the war in BiH. Disturbed by the conflict in the immediate neighborhood and preoccupied with its reorganization, the EU considered keeping the war within BiH’s borders an absolute priority. In the US, the Bush administration’s departure, for which the BiH war was too distant and too critical to be declared an essential strategic and moral issue, the Clinton administration in early 94. did not yet have a long-term approach to solving the problem. Humanitarian aid and the neutrality of peacekeepers have become an international response, also its moral alibi in the face of everyday images of horror. It is indisputable that specific actions could have been taken to prevent the siege of Sarajevo, or genocide in Srebrenica, for which the international community bears tremendous responsibility because it was a zone under the protection of the UN.
Moreover, the post-war political and interethnic conflicts can be attributed to the international community and its different views on the former Yugoslavia crisis. The international community’s project in BiH consisted of the constant favoring of the representatives of ethnic parties, whose philosophy of survival in power is precise to encourage insecurity, conflict, and instability. Besides, it did not recognize that the signing of the Stabilization and Association Agreement was aimed at concealing the continuity of ethnopolitics. It came about precisely because of a combination of political conformism and contradiction. [12] The international community’s apparent failure in BiH is reflected in the controversial support for ethnopolitical discourse (war parties) and ethnic-religious political organization – “tribal and antagonistic identity politics.” I suggest that the International Community “naively” supported ethnopolitics in BiH as if it were a saving model of political life for its citizens who emerged from the war apocalypse organized by ethnopolitics and great state hegemony on the soil of the missing Yugoslav-spaces. BiH and the former Yugoslavia area with a nationalist ethnopolitics and a continuous conflict, as a dangerous “barrel of gunpowder,” become a scene of competition, collisions, and competition between most influential actors of the modern world in the first decades of the 21st century. In this constellation, bloodthirsty hegemonic nationalism in the Balkans partly serves as a space of displaced European horror in which clashes of “great powers” take place, while a small number of South Slavic peoples manically exterminate each other, demolish places of worship, expel the population, commit mass crimes, destroy they are renaming ethnically homogeneous and clean spaces. Besides, the entities have become a brake on the development of the state. The RS entity was realized as a genocidal creation in the real sense of the word, and the political plans for BiH, which are being created in Serbia and Croatia, are menacing and lead to new disasters.
The ICCY found Serbia, Montenegro guilty of violating the Genocide Convention for not preventing the genocide committed by the military and political structures of the then self-proclaimed RS against the non-Serb population of BiH or punish its perpetrators. There is no doubt that former Croatian President Tudman guided Herceg-Bosna, a self-proclaimed, internationally unrecognized territory (ICTY convicted its Six leaders in 2017). The politicization of religion occurred in the region, highlighting the identities formation, which strengthened the war climate. The first president of BiH and SDA party Izetbegovic, also bore some guilt on the eve of the war, as the party at the roots derived political views from religious beliefs as the other political structures in the Balkans after the fall of socialism. However, Bosniaks required a Bosnian, democratic, and secular party.
The international community has abdicated its moral and legal responsibilities towards BiH for not stoping genocide and not allowing the sovereign state to defend itself against it (arms embargo). The Court’s decisions oblige the international community to make up for this moral decline by assisting BiH to annul the results of the genocide and restore the multiethnic character.
How to step out of the internal international legal rationalism of conflict? It is evident that in current international law, disputes between the legal principle of self-determination of the people and the principle of territorial integrity of the state, related to the internationally equal principle of humanitarian intervention in internal affairs, can provoke such brutal and inhumane conflicts between national/religious communities. In this legal dispute between ethnic/religious groups, each has the right to invoke one of these lofty principles that are inherently mutually exclusive. In contrast, the international community has the right to intervene in this conflict only after mass executions and genocide. Moreover, instead of contributing to peace, as is their fundamental purpose, thus unhappily united, they inevitably lead to internal conflict and the legalization of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Populism, on the other hand, services the political system, the political structures, and for all the troubles that citizens find themselves in, the systems find excuses for rationalization and ways of justification.
The “Balkan security dilemma’s” internal logic involved the mass execution of members of another minority national/religious group and their forcible mass expulsion from the “sacred land”, with severe moral and political consequences. Stimunously, I maintain that distrust, hatred, and exclusivity fixed on national and religious identity are not naturally and historically inherent in the Balkan peoples but are politically fabricated social categories that serve as an internal stimulus to create fear and mistrust among peoples/religious groups.
The society itself is structured as a series of variously connected associations of citizens that should grow into a strong partner of the government and state institutions, which, by vigilantly observing the numerous currents of the social community’s social and economic movements, directly influences government plans decisions. By the awakening of civic conciseness, the previous model of absolute power and subject morality give way to liberation, the morality of civic initiative, and democratic participation.
3. Lack of EU perspective and the new US administration
Overlapping with the meaning of the term “international community,” the EU has been seen as an insufficiently defined and alien, yet powerful geopolitical entity with the potential to change the course of history and influence politics. In this sense, the distinction between the “international community”, the US and the EU is not clear in BiH today; where does one end and the other begin? Also, the High Representative status – as the head of the “international community”- contributes greatly to this uncertainty. Simultaneously, the international community’s very consent to an extra-institutional pact with BiH’s political elites greatly weakens legal institutions. It creates political insecurity that provides nationalist parties with long-term support from voters who, without confidence in state institutions, vote for nationalist parties, believing that they will protect them from “the others.”
Therefore, the severance of the Alliance means the return of politics from the secret, anti-institutional to the public sphere. By agreeing to “a method of political decision-making in which the leaders of leading nationalist parties play a major role as ethnonational leaders and not as the leading people of the institutions” instead of the reconstitution of BiH into a state, which is, it supports semi-institutionalism” and contributes to the further perception of essentially undemocratic forms of political relations in the country.” [13] Such an approach is utterly complementary to the approach of ethnonationalism political elites in BiH because” ethnopolitics operates most efficiently in a semi-institutional way.” [14]
The current constitutional solution cannot produce a functioning state and stop hypocritically insisting that domestic political elites develop a constitutional solution independently. Dayton’s everyday life empirically proves that ethnonationalism elites are not ready for a compromise that would be acceptable to all because any compromise that would mean a way out of the current state of emergency would mean the departure of ethnonationalism from the political stage. If, on the other hand, the international community continues to treat BiH as a “real, normal and de facto state, before it is, (the international community op.a.) stops its state-building development and prevents it from joining the EU.” [15]
Besides, a particular type of three collectives have multiplied, and it is a species that has taken place in the system, positioned itself, and follows social trends and phenomena as a predator, but only from the point of view of private interest. Political structures in the region are left or right-wing, sometimes opposing each other and sometimes cooperating in networked mutual support systems. However, very often, abuse by the government destroys the essence of democracy. The dominant mantra, which is continuously repeated in the region’s politics, is “Europe-Europeanization,” and the moral content of “European-Europeanization” is primarily pushed into the background vaguely present or completely lost. The state and the political system turns into “private property,” utterly insensitive to the common good. From this insensitivity to their people and state arises the biggest issue for the Bosniak people because those who are thought to represent and defend the Bosniak interest are, in fact, actively cooperating in affairs with those who are destroying BiH according to plan and continuously. It is evidenced by the process of post-war ethnic privatization, looting of state-owned enterprises and facilities, state property, under feudal-Ethno-clerical seduction of people. Actors within each of the three major ethnic groups have established their spheres of interest and enriched themselves within the current system. (highest-paid politicians in Europe; eight average salaries).
Under President Trump, US influence in the region has diminished, as the administration has identified the EU as a strategic adversary and questioned the value of NATO. Despite the differences between Trump and Biden, there is no change in the US course regarding several key issues. That is strong support for BiH’s NATO path, and the Trump administration confirmed Obama’s sanctions against Dodik and Spiric (leading RS political figures). A new US administration should be committed to multilateralism and find a way back to established and more predictable forms of foreign policy, including the Balkans. During the recent US presidential campaign, Biden outlined his vision for US’s future relations with BiH in “Biden’s Vision for Friendship with BiH,” which had previously rarely played a role in US election campaigns. In addition to a stronger focus on the Alliance, more sensitive Washington action in BiH would contribute to a return to the Dayton Accords, but would also be an incentive for reformist political forces as the essence. Unlike Trump, who had no direct experience with the Western Balkans, and with the generous support of the Balkan ethnonationalism leaders, Biden began to deal with the region as early as the first signs of the war crisis in the 1990s as a senator at the time. Biden was a significant “actor” to change BiH soil dynamics and convince the US government and key European allies to stop Milosevic in his genocide campaign. Thus, President Biden is no stranger to the region. He visited Sarajevo during the siege and, in the lengthy report, condemned the Serbian aggression and expressed support for the victims. The Obama administration, in which Biden was vice president, was the one that imposed sanctions on current BiH Presidency member Dodik in 2017 for obstructing the Dayton‘s implementation. Those punitive measures, which include banning Dodik from entering the US and freezing his property, are still in force, and an integral part of Biden’s current campaign is the message that it was “was” a strong message that the US will not tolerate threats to BiH’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Furthermore, if the rules of the Dayton happen to be applied so firmly that they are unquestionable, then the policy of secessionism will seem utterly impossible for domestic actors; the story about the future independent RS entity will be implausible, which should change the political dynamics.
Representatives of the EU, international and non-governmental organizations have lost a quarter of a century repeating political slogans about the EU integration of the region, although, in reality, this integration has not had a chance to be implemented. With the arrival of president Biden, there is a need for a greater possibility of cooperation and “pushing” the EU towards a greater interest in BiH, i.e., towards a more functional path. The goal should that BiH become a fully functional state committed to achieving EU membership and meeting the needs of its citizens, regardless of their nationality. It is crucial to implement the European Court of Human Rights decisions and the Dayton Constitution’s reform, which would abolish the entities and significantly reduce the right of veto and vital national interest. Given the rapid regression of society, the kleptocracy in the Western Balkans as a whole, the Trump administration’s unbalanced policy toward Kosovo and Serbia, it is crucial to work with the EU reach an agreement between the two countries, given the unstable US policy. With the Trump administration’s departure, ideas such as replacing territories based on dominant ethnic-religious matrices and ideologies should not be on the agenda within the discourse for multicultural coexistence in Southeast Europe.
Western democracies should work on transparent goals through their partnerships and alliances. Although there has never been complete harmony between Washington and its European partners, the new US government should offer its allies more serious and transparent ways of behaving. Biden has already signaled a willingness to engage in Europe, and EU officials should seize this opportunity and join.
Conclusion
The discourse “our vs. their sacred land” created unbearable ease of creating fear, manipulating, and motivating new crimes. Its absurdity was confirmed by the right of entity creation, given the prerogatives of statehood. Such principles could be used as a motive for new “territorial redistribution” and further violence in the Balkans.
A rational analysis of the international community’s failure to prevent war crimes in BiH (Bosnia and Herzegovina) can be a lesson for the future’s morality model. The EU’s role in Southeast Europe is inconsistent between its normative potential and current problematic aspects of process implementation policies. The recognition of Dayton’s failure by the US can pave the way for building a political community within the current “virtual entity” that does not possess vertical and horizontal legitimacy. Determined US leadership is required to drive reform for free and peaceful Balkans and Europe as a whole. The genocide and ethnic cleansing leveled the moral foundations that should be the basis of moral life. It would be morally obligatory, even imperative, to build blueprints and state reorganization tools in the concrete. In recent decades, justice and guilt, morality and immorality have become more uniform on the scales. What is more, guilt and immorality are increasingly prevalent. We should be met and distinguished by morality’s standards in honesty, justice, responsibility, and solidarity instead of populism, and hypocrisy. A moral man never asks for the price of his nocturnal peace.
Dayton is unsustainable and socio-politically exclusionary; it cannot be (most notably economic) functional. Since the last thirty years of political activity based on ethnic-religious paradigms, have not yielded democratic results, it is necessary to open discourse of changing the political paradigm. Domestic government, i.e., rather politics, grew up in an imposed framework and fused with it. It requires a systemic transformation, and progressive dialogue is critical.
The freedom of the individual, the citizen, has been neglected. It offered collective freedom within the framework of “tribal identity.” From such a basis, the historical necessity of shaping a policy that goes beyond the ethnic-religious political organization and offers openness to the political philosophy of statism or an EU democratic statist policy is imposed. BiH is the ethnoreligious policy, i.e., ethnicism, great-power hegemony and military expansionism, accumulation of identity issues, targeted production of hatred, imprisonment, and dictatorship. When there is a higher degree of internal democratization, economic and technological development, and who can more guarantee a higher degree of realization of human rights and freedoms, it moves the nature of the conflict away from the violent conflict. It brings it closer to the conflict of development and human well-being. In this concept, war, nepotism has the meaning of losing any possibility of reaching the national interest, which automatically eliminates the possibility of manipulating one’s people’s national interests.
Creating a project that would eliminate the conflict’s internal rationality would not be a significant issue as long as the general social awareness would be created that a way out of the current hopelessness, depression is possible. Finally, prosperity and stability often coincide. An active policy change is needed to sufficiently limit ethnic-nationalist domestic and global-interest ability to inflict harm. The higher level of human welfare development (as a new principle of international law that conditions the right to secession and the right to state integrity) concerning one’s environment would attract Bosnian Serbs and Croats to remain in sovereign BiH.
References
[1] Hadzic, F. (2020). Post-Yugoslav spaces between defective democracies, authoritarianism, and kleptocracies, International Affairs and Global Strategy,Vol.86
[2] Hadžić, F.(2020). The Politicization of Religion and the Sacralized Balkan Nations Regarding Bosnia and Herzegovina, Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe: Vol. 40 : Iss. 7 , Article 8. https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/ree/vol40/iss7/8
[3] Ibid (2)
[4] Hadžić, F. (2020). The European Union (EU) Political Identity within the migrant crisis, and the Balkan – Bosnian route; xenophobia and religious identity. Research, Society and Development, 9(10), e4809108685. https://doi.org/10.33448/rsd-v9i10.8685
[5] Hadžić, F. (2020). The political psychology of extremism; “naturalness" of the phenomenon in the Western Balkans. Technium Social Sciences Journal, 11(1), https://doi.org/10.47577/tssj.v11i1.1519
[6] OSCE, Report, (2019). https://www.osce.org/bs/mission-to-bosnia-and herzegovina/417731
[7] Ibid (1)
[8] Bajtal,E. (2010). Psihosocijalni kontekst političkih elita u BiH, Almanah,Časopis za proučavanje, prezentaciju I zaštitu kulturno-istorijske baštine Bošnjaka
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