Security sector reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A case study of the Europeanization of the Western Balkans

Introduction

A robust security system is as important for a country as a healthy economy or a strong government. In post-conflict environments the significance of the security sector grows manifold.^[1] That is why the prominence of security sector reform (SSR) in the Western Balkans^[2] after the violent break-up of Yugoslavia is neither a surprising nor unusual development. After the end of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, the international community brought SSR to the region’s countries, with the Council of Europe, the EU, NATO, OSCE, the UN, and the US playing the most active roles. This paper will analyse the impact of the EU on security sector reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia or BiH) as an example of the Europeanization of a Western Balkan state. I offer here not a study of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) missions, as a wealth of material exists on this subject,^[3] but rather a broader examination of changes in two sectors of BiH’s security system, namely the police and the intelligence service, with the aim of improving understanding of the EU’s impact on the domestic environments of candidate states. By placing SSR in BiH in the context of Europeanization studies, I emphasize here how varied and multifaceted Europeanization is in the Western Balkans on the one hand, and, on the other, show how much the EU has evolved as an international actor.

I will evaluate the EU’s impact by examining the compliance with and internalization of externally induced security reforms in BiH. The Western Balkans, and Bosnia in particular, are exceptionally well positioned for an analysis of the EU as an international actor and agent of SSR. When conflict broke out in the region in the early 1990s, the EU had neither a foreign policy nor the military or civilian capability to help broker peace. It nonetheless reached out to the Western Balkan states. And although its first attempts during the infamous ‘hour of Europe’^[4] failed, the EU quickly managed to redeem itself and significantly improved its record. Having started by providing developmental aid, it then committed to strengthening the stability and security of Southeastern Europe (SEE). When this commitment was formalized with the promise of EU membership to the region’s countries at the Thessaloniki Summit in 2003, the EU had already developed instruments for reforming security systems outside its borders. These instruments were often tested and further adjusted to fit the context of particular states in the Western Balkans. The launch of the European Union Police Mission (EUPM) in BiH, the EU’s first civilian mission, is as an example of such developments.

Not least because of the region’s legacy of war, the EU made SSR one of its priorities in its approach to the Western Balkans. As the region had been recovering from years of conflict and instability, the EU needed a tool that would address the consequences of this turbulent period, contribute to the establishment of peace in the area, and, most importantly, turn the region’s states into effective actors, which could protect themselves and their citizens from modern threats and ensure sustainable development. As a cross-cutting issue—part of governance, development, and security frameworks—SSR fit this purpose. By supporting the reform of security systems in the Western Balkans, the EU has been engaging in the processes of democratization and state-building in the region. With the help of SSR, it has been trying to reduce the security risks emanating from the Western Balkans and minimize the differences among the states of the region and its own member states.^[5]

The present study offers food for thought not only for those interested in learning more about the implementation of Europeanization mechanisms in the EU candidate states, but also for anyone curious about the development of the EU’s security policy and the evolution of SSR within it. I pose the following research questions: How does SSR fit into the EU’s approach to the Western Balkans? What can the record of police and intelligence reforms in Bosnia tell us about the country’s compliance with the EU’s demands for change? What goals has the EU been pursuing with SSR in BiH? How successful has the SSR been in meeting those goals?

To answer these questions, the article is divided into three sections. The first explains the application of Europeanization to the Western Balkan context, the second explores the understanding of SSR in the EU, and the third combines the two approaches to study the specific police and intelligence-service reforms in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Europeanization of the Western Balkans

Having emerged as an independent research field only recently, the study of the Europeanization of EU candidate countries has seen considerable growth and development in recent years. In fact, it has quickly become one of the main tools for understanding the processes of transition in the EU candidate countries.^[6] Initially, the literature on Europeanization was focused exclusively on the study of the domestic impact of the EU (previously the European Community) in the member states. As the EU’s influence outside its borders intensified during the 1990s, the application of the concept was reconsidered. The states examined were members of the European Free Trade Association and the post-communist Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries.^[7] The Eastern Enlargement confirmed the extension of Europeanization; candidate countries became regular objects of analysis within the field. Sadly, the expansion of the research area did not lead to greater interpretive clarity. Twenty years later, there is still no single or at least generally accepted definition of the term ‘Europeanization’. The only consensus in the literature concerns the term’s usage as shorthand for the ‘influence of the EU’ or ‘domestic impact of the EU’.^[8] Since finding a universally accepted definition of Europeanization has turned out to be an insurmountable challenge for many distinguished researchers, I will here use the definition I deem most suitable for the Western Balkan context.

Following Claudio Radaelli, Europeanization is here understood as

‘processes of a) construction, b) diffusion and c) institutionalization of formal and informal rules, procedures, policy paradigms, styles, “ways of doing things” and shared beliefs and norms which are first defined and consolidated in the EU policy process and then incorporated in the logic of domestic (national and subnational) discourse, political structures and public policies’.^[9]

This definition’s major advantage lies in its emphasis on the interactive character of the process: Europeanization is seen as a project, built on the interaction between the EU and a particular state—member or non-member—experiencing the EU’s influence. To explain the current state of development of the security sector in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I approach both BiH and the EU as active agents of the reforms. For too long the Western Balkan states have been treated as passive recipients of European policies,^[10] and it is time that this was changed. The relationship between the two sides cannot be characterized as one of equals, since the EU has greater leverage. But BiH does not simply react blindly to the EU’s directives; it also influences EU policies. In what follows this reciprocal relationship will be shown via the example of BiH’s response to the EU’s demand to centralize its police forces: having rejected the idea of a single police agency, Bosnia managed to satisfy the EU requirements through the establishment of several coordinating police bodies on the state level.

Since it was the CEE countries which gave impetus to the separation of the Europeanization of candidate countries into an independent research field, the study of the Europeanization of the Western Balkans was first framed on the basis of EU-CEE relations—a framing analogous to that which has determined the EU approach to the region in general. However, accounting for the differences between the regions and the situation on the ground in the Western Balkans, it became apparent rather quickly that what had worked in CEE would not necessarily produce the desired effects in Southeastern Europe. It is possible to distinguish four main ways the EU’s treatment of the Western Balkans differed from that of the countries of the Eastern Enlargement. First, the agenda of Europeanization in SEE is much broader, which can be explained partly by the constant development of the acquis communitaire, and partly by more policy areas in need of reform in SEE. The current volume of EU demands is so colossal that SEE countries are often said to be ‘up against a moving target that runs faster and becomes more demanding day by the day’.^[11] Second, the EU has strongly emphasized peacebuilding, stability, and security issues because of the region’s legacies of war and ethnic conflict. Third, the SEE countries have a much higher record of poor compliance or non-compliance with EU policies than the CEE countries.^[12] And, finally, the effects of Europeanization in the region are mediated by the limited statehood of some of the Western Balkan states.^[13]

The EU’s involvement with the Western Balkans has gone through considerable transformations over the last several decades. If at the beginning of the 1990s, after the failure of ‘the hour of Europe’, the EU focused on humanitarian aid, crisis management, and other short-term but often urgent and reactive measures, by the end of the 1990s it had switched to a more proactive, longer-term approach.^[14] The launch of the Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP) in 1999 indicated that the EU was committed to assisting the region on the road to peace and stability; the Thessaloniki European Council in 2003 confirmed that the future of the Western Balkans would lie within the EU.^[15] Even as the promise of membership made the issue of integration central for EU-Western Balkan relations, the security issues that years of armed conflict and post-conflict tensions had brought to the surface did not lose their salience. Instead, these issues became part of a larger puzzle bound up with the questions of statehood and state capacity.

The transitions in CEE demonstrated that only functioning states with ‘unchallenged jurisdiction within secure borders’ could join the EU.^[16] The Western Balkans could not meet this requirement at the beginning nor at the end of the 1990s. Even now, most of the states in the region are still grappling with the concept of statehood: for example, Kosovo’s status has not yet been resolved, Bosnia is still in search of a post-Dayton constitution, and the very name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) is still in dispute. The only country to have consolidated its statehood is Croatia; the rest are often referred to as ‘unfinished states’.^[17] By opening up membership negotiations with the Western Balkans, the EU has found itself, for the first time in its history, engaged in the formation of new states that aspire to be its new members,^[18] a process that Keil and Arkan call member state-building.^[19] The post-conflict environment in the region has added to the challenge: dysfunctional security systems, unable to deal with modern threats such as organized crime or terrorism, introduced another dimension to the EU’s state-building efforts, which it decided to address via security sector reform. SSR, as a tool which aims to improve the efficiency of security sectors and simultaneously ensure their management according to principles of good and democratic governance, is well suited to prevent conflicts, manage crises, and help maintain peace, development, and state-building.^[20] In this paper, SSR is analysed as an instrument of state-building that the EU has applied to Bosnia and Herzegovina within the framework of Europeanization.

The literature has distinguished two mechanisms applied by the EU to encourage domestic change in candidate states: conditionality and socialization, also known as social learning.^[21] Yet the situation in the Western Balkans offers a space for the EU’s more direct involvement in the domestic affairs of the region’s states. It can directly impose its influence on the region’s weakest countries, such as those with protectorate status (Kosovo). Following Gergana Noutcheva’s analysis, this paper identifies three main approaches to the Europeanization of the Western Balkans: conditionality, social learning, and legal coercion.^[22]

Conditionality is understood as a rationalist bargaining model, where domestic change is based on the cost-benefit calculations of reward-seeking domestic actors.^[23] According to this model, the EU offers incentives—first and foremost membership, to candidate countries—in exchange for institutional reforms and political transformations. Non-compliance with the EU reform agenda results in the withdrawal of benefits and, less frequently, the imposition of punishments. Socialization is a normative model, which assumes that the countries experiencing the EU’s influence follow not the logic of consequences but the logic of appropriateness.^[24] According to this approach, norms, values, and identities dictate domestic change.^[25] States go through structural transformations and the implementation of reforms to become not just similar to the EU, but part of it. Social learning presupposes a deeper and more profound change, which if not irreversible is at least exceptionally difficult to undo. Finally, the EU, as well as other external actors, applies legal coercion when the candidates for accession show themselves lacking the capacity to act as sovereign states. In the aftermath of the Balkan wars and the break-up of Yugoslavia, the international community has been able to continuously intervene in the internal governance of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.

The internal sovereignty of the BiH, for instance, has been limited due to the presence of a High Representative (HR) of the international community, who acts on behalf of the Peace Implementation Council (PIC) and, since 2002, the EU as well.^[26] The semi-protectorate status of BiH makes it a perfect case study for the analysis of all three mechanisms of Europeanization. To make this analysis meaningful, however, the mechanisms of Europeanization need to be assessed from the point of view of their implementation. This task can be aided by another model devised by Noutcheva, which uses three variables to explain the patterns of accession states’ compliance with EU demands: the costs of compliance, legitimacy, and the coercive power of the EU.^[27]

An evaluation of the costs of compliance, which can be either high or low, enables domestic changes in candidate states to be regarded as a response to material and social rewards offered by the EU, while an assessment of legitimacy, measured on a similar scale from weak to strong, provides a normative explanation of compliance: states, mainly through their leadership, choose to embark on the road to reforms because ‘this is the right thing to do’.^[28] The EU’s coercive power provides compliance through direct intervention in the domestic affairs of the candidate states with limited sovereignty.^[29] Depending on the pervasiveness of one or several of these variables, one can distinguish five types of compliance in the EU accession states: substantial, partial, imposed, fake, and reversed.

Substantial compliance occurs in contexts of high legitimacy, where the EU’s actions are not viewed sceptically and the costs of compliance can be either high or low. In the latter instance, domestic change is slow, yet still profound. Partial compliance results from low legitimacy contexts where benefits outweigh costs. In the reverse situation, with costs being higher than benefits, the EU can resort to the direct imposition of its policies on candidate states. If the EU’s will and capability to apply coercive power are strong, compliance can be identified as imposed. If the EU lacks either the will or the capability to apply direct pressure, there is a high probability that compliance will be faked by the candidate states, and in time can even be reversed.^[30] My main argument here is that the EU used police and intelligence reforms in Bosnia, both of which were part and parcel of the SSR efforts in the country, as state-building tools. But because domestic competence was lacking in Bosnia and the EU was a new SSR actor, the reforms have had a mixed record of success and reveal the limitations of the region’s Europeanization. Before setting out to prove this claim, a brief explanation of the concept of security sector, as understood by the EU, is called for.

Security Sector Reform and the EU

Although the concept of security sector reform was introduced only in the late 1990s,^[31] the EU has not only managed to make it an integral part of its policy toolbox, but has actively been involved in promoting and implementing it around the world. In many respects the concept has been developed and tested in the Western Balkans. SSR is based on the principle that ‘societies are better off with a security sector that is an asset, not an obstacle, to peace, security, development and stability’.^[32] The idea, first formulated in 1998 by the then British International Development Secretary Clare Short, has been broadly applied to a variety of developing and post-conflict countries in different corners of the world to boost their economic development and to speed up democratization. The EU developed its understanding of SSR through practice, mainly via the actions of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and its key instrument, the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), initially ESDP. Over time the concept has been incorporated into all major EU policy areas, such as justice and home affairs, development, democratization, enlargement, and human rights.^[33] This progress notwithstanding, today the EU still lacks a strategic framework for SSR.

The EU’s vision of the concept can be extracted from the European Security Strategy (ESS) and several subsequent policy documents by the Council and European Commission. The ESS, released in December 2003, acknowledged for the first time the connection between security and development, and recognized that the building of security in the EU’s neighbourhood (in particular, the Balkans, the Southern Caucasus, and the Mediterranean) was one of the EU’s priorities.^[34] Inspired by the ESS, the Council released its EU Concept for ESDP Support to Security Sector Reform in 2005, which a year later was followed by the European Commission’s Concept for European Community Support for Security Sector Reform. Both documents, together with the 2006 Council Conclusions on a Policy Framework for Security Sector Reform, are the only official EU documents explicitly devoted to SSR. All three use the definition of SSR developed by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD DAC), which covers all actors which provide security and the institutions that manage them.

According to the OECD DAC, the security sector of a country includes the following set of actors and institutions, all of which can be subject to reform: core security actors (e.g., armed forces, police service, gendarmerie, border guards, intelligence and security services); security management and oversight bodies (e.g. ministries of defence, internal affairs and foreign affairs, financial management bodies, and civil society organizations); justice and law enforcement institutions (e.g., the judiciary, prisons, criminal investigation and prosecution services); and non-statutory security forces (e.g., liberation armies, guerrilla, armies, private security and military companies).^[35] Having used the OECD DAC definition, the Council and the European Commission, on the one hand, subscribed to the holistic and comprehensive approach to SSR, and, on the other, failed to take into account the specificities of the EU.^[36] Their approaches have emphasized the importance of SSR for a wide variety of policy areas, including inter alia good governance, the rule of law, peace and stability,^[37] conflict prevention, democratization, state-building, and sustainable development.^[38] Each was designed so as to complement the other’s approach and to simultaneously highlight its particular institution’s competences. Thus, the Council document focused more on CSDP missions, while the Commission paid attention to rule-of-law issues and the long-term impact of SSR-related activities.^[39] In general, the EU has adopted a broad approach to SSR, trying to accommodate all possible readings of the concept. Such a state of affairs, in the absence of a single SSR framework, allows considerable freedom of interpretation, which also runs the risk of being abused, if understood too broadly.

Although the EU treaties do not directly mention SSR, they refer to it implicitly, mostly through provisions relating to foreign policy and defence. For instance, the Treaty of Maastricht created CFSP, and the Treaty of Amsterdam codified CFSP structures and tasks, indicated the need to set up a common defence policy (now CSDP), and defined a range of military tasks that the EU could undertake.^[40] In addition, the Lisbon Treaty, with its creation of the European External Action Service (EEAS) and the post of High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, has offered opportunities for better coherence and coordination in SSR.^[41] The achievement of coordination and coherence as well as harmonization in SSR is of utmost importance to the EU, especially now, when it is part and parcel of so many of its policies and financial instruments. Among the former there is Enlargement, the Stabilisation and Association Process, and the European Neighbourhood Policy, just to name a few, while the latter encompass the European Development Fund, the Development Cooperation Instrument, the Instrument for Stability, and many others. Given this diversity, CFSP actions and ESDP/CSDP missions present the best ground for studying the impact of the EU’s SSR activities. This is due to the high status attached to such operations by the EU and its member states’ active involvement in them.^[42]

In an environment where it is much harder than ever before to draw a line between internal and external security, the significance of SSR for the EU has been rising steadily. Through launching CSDP missions and conducting SSR-related activities within other policy areas, the EU has been aiming to protect individuals and institutions, while contributing to the building of transparent and accountable security sectors that are based on internationally recognized values and standards.^[43] In general, it can be said that by supporting security system reform, the EU seeks to contribute to the development and democratization of non-EU countries, many of which are weak and fragile. One such state and the EU’s role in its development will be analysed in the next section.

The EU and SSR in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Question of Compliance in the Police and Intelligence Sectors

As shown above, SSR is a rather broad and complex concept, which can be applied to a range of policy areas. Since analysing all these areas, even within one state, would hardly be feasible within one article, the focus here is limited to reforms in two sectors of BiH’s security system: police and intelligence. On the one hand, they represent core security bodies, as outlined by the OECD DAC definition. On the other, both have developed under the direct influence of the EU, and their examples enable the study of a Western Balkan state’s compliance with the demands of Europeanization.

Conclusion

At present, due to its broad and comprehensive approach to SSR, developed over the years, its access to an arsenal of civilian and military instruments, and considerable experience in the area, the EU is almost ideally placed to promote and implement security sector reforms around the world. Things were different at the end of the twentieth century, however: in the aftermath of the Balkan wars, the EU was a new actor in the field of external security and SSR. The Western Balkans has served as a testing ground for many EU policies, and SSR is no exception. Bosnia and Herzegovina was the first country where the EU launched its CSDP civilian mission, and exercised legal coercion in the intelligence sector of a non-EU state.

The EU’s involvement in the police and intelligence sectors of BiH was part of its enlargement strategy towards the Western Balkans. Stabilizing the country and strengthening its security sector were seen through the prism of its future, though distant, membership in the EU. These measures were part of a member state-building process. Thus, it is not surprising that the EU’s main goals in the police and intelligence reforms were practically identical: to strengthen BiH’s capacity to fight organized crime, corruption, and terrorism and therefore to contribute to its emergence as an effective state, capable of protecting its citizens from modern threats and ensuring sustainable growth and development. Since both reforms have formally been completed, one might assume that these goals have been achieved. Yet the situation in Bosnia, like that of any other Western Balkan state, is not that simple. The formal completion of a given reform on paper does not mean that work has ended in the security sector on the ground. With regard to the police forces, there has been, mainly, a continuation of efforts to achieve better coordination among multiple police bodies and moves towards their possible unification, while in the intelligence sector the new Agency still needs to win the trust of other state bodies. Thus, both reforms have had mixed results, which can be explained by a lack of domestic competence in Bosnia and by the EU being a new actor in SSR.

The study of SSR in Bosnia and Herzegovina proves that Europeanization is a complex and interactive process, which can be adjusted to fit the local context of the country the EU is trying to have an impact on. Like SSR, it is a long process. So far, with the police sector and the intelligence service, Bosnia has demonstrated partial compliance with the EU’s demands, yet in time the country’s responsiveness to the EU requirements could change: depending on the country’s development and the EU’s stance on the future of the accession, it might either evolve to substantial compliance or devolve to imposed or even fake compliance. More time is needed to decide which scenario is more likely to come true. However, with the EU now being torn by a series of crises, there is a danger that SSR in BiH and the European integration of the Western Balkans in general might slip down the list of the EU’s priorities. Many issues, of course, require an EU response at the moment, but nevertheless the EU should not reduce its pressure on the Western Balkan countries to continue their reforms if it wants them to be part of the European security community in the near future.