Download Article (PDF)

Südosteuropa 60 (2012), H. 4, S. 526-535 reSeArch On StAte-BuILDInG FLORIAN BIEBER Reconceptualizing the Study of Power-Sharing Abstract. This article argues for re-conceptualizing the study of power-sharing in post-conflict state-building. In Southeastern Europe, as elsewhere, power-sharing has become the most widely employed approach to accommodate the competing demands of ethnonational groups. As a result, the Southeastern European cases of power-sharing have been important for the larger study of power-sharing and post-conflict state-building. This article argues that in order to draw meaningful conclusions from these cases, the study of power-sharing needs to become more multi-dimensional, moving away from the study of formal institutional rules to include historical context, local debates, the strength of the state and the performance of the formal procedures to derive a more meaningful picture of power-sharing. Such reconceptu- alization will not just enhance our understanding of power-sharing in Southeastern Europe, but contribute more broadly to a more nuanced debate on this subject. Florian Bieber is Professor for Southeast European Studies and Director of the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz. Since the collapse of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars, over a dozen new states and para-states have been built and wiped out on the territory of the socialist federation. Today, there are seven post-Yugoslav states, comprising all the former republics plus Kosovo. The states that were proclaimed, and which were based on ethno-territorial lines but did not follow the republican boundaries of Yugoslavia, remain phantom states, like the Ilirida in Western Macedonia, or suffered military defeat, such as theRepublika Srpska Krajina in Croatia. At best, they could establish themselves as an autonomous region or entity such as the Republika Srpska within Bosnia and Herzegovina. The new states were established either as (aspiring) nation states with varying degrees of the exclusion of others or as multinational power-sharing systems. The latter was not the result of domestic negotiations, but rather of external imposition. In effect, the default model of external state-building has been power-sharing. Not only states that came into existence, but also numerous unimplemented plans, such as the Carrington Plan for Yugoslavia in 1991 or the Z4 Plan for Croatia in 1995 or temporary political settlements such as the short-lived State Union of Serbia and Montenegro (2003-2006), contained Reconceptualizing the Study of Power-Sharing 527 strong power-sharing features, such as veto rights, autonomy and proportional representation. Today three political regimes in Southeastern Europe display features of power-sharing, namely Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Macedonia. These have been shaping academic debates on consociationalism for the past decade well beyond Southeastern Europe. Among proponents of power-sharing, these cases, in conjunction with other examples of post-conflict power-sharing, have advanced the inclusion of third parties, as an integral aspect in the establish- ment and maintenance of power-sharing systems. Thus, international organizations in particular have taken on a supervisory function and have been institutionally embedded into the system, through, for example, the inclusion of international judges in the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The power-sharing systems, drafted largely by external planners, have been labelled “complex power-sharing” because the institutional tools employed extend beyond the narrow understanding of consociationalism as defined by Arend Lijphart in his studies on West European Consociational systems. Complex power-sharing also incorporate forms of territorial autonomy and centripetal tools.1 Critics of power-sharing have, on the other hand, taken the performance of power-sharing systems in Southeastern Europe as evidence of the inappropriate- ness of power-sharing and its role as “part of the problem” by facilitating state capture and the ethnification of society and the political system.2 In response to the obvious flaws of rigid power-sharing systems, such as the one in Bosnia and Herzegovina, advocates of consociationalism have begun distinguishing between liberal and corporate consociations to allow differentia- tion between systems which are rigid and reify ethnicity and those which can co-exist with liberal democracy.3 In the context of the experience of power-sharing in Southeastern Europe, I will argue that some aspects have been neglected in the larger scholarly debates that merit our attention. Rather than just seeing the cases as evidence for or against power-sharing, which is not a very fruitful venue of inquiry, the cases need first to be properly understood. Rather hant just noting that “context 1 Stefan Wolff, Complex Power-Sharing and the Centrality of Territorial Self-Governance in Contemporary Conflict Settlements,Ethnopolitics , 8 (2009), n. 1, 27-45, 29. 2 Donald Rothchild / Philip Roeder, Dilemma of State-Building in Divided Societies, in: ibidem (eds.), Sustainable Peace. Power and Democracy after Civil War. Ithaca/NY, London 2005, 1-26, 5; Anna K. Jarstad, Power-Sharing: Former Enemies in Joint Government, in: Anna K. Jarstad / Timothy D. Sisk (eds.), From War to Democracy. Dilemmas of Peacebuilding. Cambridge 2008, 105-134. 3 Brendan O’Leary, Debating Consociational Politics: Normative and Explanatory Argu- ments, in: Sid Noel (ed.), From Power-Sharing to Democracy: Post-Conflict Institutions in Ethnically Divided Societies. Montreal, Kingston 2005, 3-43. 528 Florian Bieber matters” or that one needs to know more, this article argues that there are five strands of knowledge when it comes to power-sharing that have been neglected and need to be brought back into the study of power-sharing and institutional design in order to assess these institutional solutions and derive informed case studies for larger scale comparisons. Historical Context Recent literature on institutional design has been largely devoid of historical context. This is the result of the evolution of the debate on consociationalism, which originally focused extensively on historical context. They sought to ex- plain the origins of power-sharing institutions through an elite bargain and were interested in the broader social traditions of compromise and accommodation. This focus has been abandoned due to a shift in the debate from consociationalism as an empirical description of the political system of a set of countries (commonly Benelux, Austria and Switzerland) towardsa prescriptive approach.4 I believe that historical experience with different forms of compromise and accommodation in former Yugoslavia is necessary for our understanding of contemporary institutions, highlighting the need to bring the past into the analysis of power-sharing. Yugoslavia itself had strong power-sharing features, as did some of its republics, especially Bosnia and Herzegovina and to some degree Croatia. Dur- ing the first decades of socialist rule, the institutions of power-sharing were not necessarily matched by power-sharing practices, as the ruling elites of the republics were not motivated by ethnicity or even primary republican loyalty, but sought the devolution of the system as a tool to secure legitimacy. How- ever, by the 1970s and especially after Tito’s death, the system had gravitated towards power-sharing with strong effective veto rights of the republics and a weak centre, with republican interests becoming a more prominent feature of the system. Thus, the post-war institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Mace- donia may have been drawn up by international mediators, but the institutions they set up often resemble the Yugoslav ones, and institutional practices, such as the state presidency in Bosnia and Herzegovina, have to be seen not just in terms of ruptures, but also in terms of continuities. As Donald Horowitz noted in 1993: 4 The importance of historical context has been part of the debate of consociationalism, see Arend Lijphart, The Evolution of Consociational Theory and Consociational Practices, 1965-2000, Acta Politica (2002), special issue, n. 1/2, 11-22, 14. Reconceptualizing the Study of Power-Sharing 529 “One of the ironies of democratic development is that, as the future is being planned, the past intrudes with increasing severity. In this field, there is no such thing as a fresh start.”5 The impact of past experience is hard to quantify, which is one of the reasons that the past has often been ignored in the literature on power-sharing. The lack of experience of cooperation and of power-sharing institutions is often said to be an obstacle for setting up power-sharing systems. In this sense, the post-Yugoslav cases of power-sharing would be expected to do better than elsewhere. However, this experience is not always an obvious asset. The failure of Yugoslavia and its break-up have also been a source of scepticism towards power-sharing and federalism. Rather than reducing the past to a beneficial or negative factor with regards to power-sharing, it needs to be considered in its complexity. State Strength Power-Sharing as part of a post-conflict state-building strategy also needs to be understood in the context of state capacity, state contestation and state strength. Without these dimensions, there is a risk that power-sharing is decontextualized from other features of the state. In his work on state-building, Francis Fukuyama argued that states should be considered in terms of both their strength, i.e. the ability to enforce policies and the scope of their functions, i.e. the “ambition” of the state in terms of the fields in which it engages (i.e. social services, health care).6 It matters profoundly whether the state that is governed through power- sharing is a state with large enough scope and sufficient strength, i.e. whose impact is widely felt and with the capacity to take decisions in a large number of policy areas. or whether the state is a state with few competences and pos- sibly a limited reach and where, in effect, little power is shared.

Load more