Europeanization by Decree? The Case of Police Reform in Bosnia*

Abstract

Police reform demonstrated the fragility of the transition process in Bosnia and the limitations of the prospect of European Union membership. To the two mechanisms of conditionality and socialization commonly mentioned in the Europeanization literature, this article adds a third -external imposition -which is specific to the case of Bosnia. The fact that the High Representative resorted to coercive measures in order to implement European conditions needs to be accounted for in any explanation of Bosnia's Europeanization. In the case of police restructuring, conditionality was monopolized by the High Representative and socialization did not take place because the reforms were not perceived as legitimate by at least one of the parties. Domestic factors, including the complex governance system introduced by the Dayton Agreement and recalcitrant nationalist elites, also hindered the Europeanization process in Bosnia.

EU security sector reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Reform or resist?

“…The police reform process started in 2005 and it became one of the main objectives of the EU in Bosnia at the time. The EU even made it a condition before signing the important Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) between the EU and Bosnia (Juncos, 2011). The lack of agreement over the centralization of the police forces and the reorganization of the country's police forces on the basis of functional criteria rather than ethnic ones (including the crossing of the Inter-Entity Boundary Line by the police forces) led to a political stalemate between the Bosnian political elites and the EU negotiators One of the main reasons behind the 2005-2007 stalemate was the fact that Bosnian Serbs rejected the so-called three "European principles": (1) all legislative and budgetary competences vested at state level; (2) no political interference with operational policing; and (3) functional police areas determined by technical policing criteria (European Commission, 2006, p. 48).…”

“…Indeed, nothing is said in the EU rulebook about a centralized state-level police, exclusive competences for the state, or that police regions should be determined by technical policing criteria. This created enormous problems for the European Commission which could not justify the three criteria (see Juncos, 2011). For their part, local politicians in Bosnia also referred to the diversity of models in the various EU member states to reject the imposition of these principles.…”

The Public Administration Reform in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Reform Process Embedded in a Sovereignty Paradox

“…Much of the recent literature on Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has been mainly focusing on issues such as the recent developments in the European Union (EU)-BiH relations, EU conditionality and European integration (Dimitrova, 2011;Juncos, 2011;Noutcheva, 2006;Subotić, 2011). It is therefore in our opinion that little scholarly attention has been paid to a very important and on-going reform in BiH, namely its public administration reform (PAR).…”

Untitled

“…member states attempting to upload their policy agendas to the EU level, are beyond the scope of the paper. The two main mechanisms for explaining this rule adoption process are conditionality (based on rationalist institutionalism) and socialization (based on constructivist institutionalism), and have been documented extensively in the literature (see for example Checkel, 2001;Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier, 2005;Juncos, 2011).…”