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Leaflet Policy Forum on Eusrs
Policy Forum “The role and achievements of EU Special Representatives in EU foreign policy” Friday, 15 June 2012, 11.40h – 14.00h Institute for European Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel Since 1996, the Council of the EU has deployed over 40 EU Special Representatives (EUSRs) to various crisis regions where they are involved in the European Union’s conflict resolution efforts. They also contribute to the formulation of the EU’s policies, to the coordination of EU actors 'on the ground' and to the EU’s cooperation with other international actors in the field. While Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission, initially intended to phase out the EUSRs, new officeholders have been appointed in 2011 and 2012. This demonstrates the added value of the EUSRs as a rather flexible tool in EU foreign policy. The Policy Forum focuses on the role and the achievements of the EUSRs in the implementation of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy in the past sixteen years. It looks at their contribution to conflict resolution, their interplay with other diplomats, their institutional setting within the External Action Service and their relations with the European Commission and the EU delegations. Speakers and discussants include acting and former EUSRs and officials from the External Action Service: § Ambassador Philippe Lefort (EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the crisis in Georgia) § Ambassador Pieter Feith (International Civilian -
The High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina
February 2021 KAS Office in Bosnia and Herzegovina ''Future as a duty'' – the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina Sven Petke, Suljo Ćorsulić A new High Representative will assume office in Bosnia and Herzegovina over the coming months. Valentin Inzko, an Austrian, has been holding this position since 2009. He made repeated efforts to maintain a diplomatic and fair relationship with the key political actors in Bosnia and Herzegovina. An important pre-requisite for the work of a High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina includes vast political experience and support by the international community. An important step for the second pre-requisite has been made with the inauguration of the US President Joe Biden: It is expected that the United States of America and the European Union will again closely coordinate their political engagement in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the neighbouring countries. Office of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina (OHR) The citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina have lived in peace for more than 25 years. Bosnia and Herzegovina consists of two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska. Bosnia and Herzegovina gained independence following an independence referendum in 1992 after the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Bosnian Croats, Bosnian Serbs and Bosniaks were the belligerent parties in the ensuing war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. After a four-year war with over 100,000 dead, hundreds of thousands of wounded and millions of refugees, the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement was facilitated by the international community. The Peace Agreement ended the war and guaranteed the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina. -
Bosnia: Current Issues and U.S
Bosnia: Current Issues and U.S. Policy Steven Woehrel Specialist in European Affairs August 27, 2009 Congressional Research Service 7-5700 www.crs.gov R40479 CRS Report for Congress Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress Bosnia: Current Issues and U.S. Policy Summary In recent years, many analysts have expressed concern that the international community’s efforts since 1995 to stabilize Bosnia are beginning to come apart. They noted that the downward trend has been especially evident since 2006, with the election of leaders with starkly divergent goals. Milorad Dodik, Prime Minister of the Republika Srpska (RS), one of the two semi-autonomous “entities” within Bosnia, has obstructed efforts to make Bosnia’s central government more effective and has at times asserted the RS’s right to secede from Bosnia. On the other hand, Haris Silajdzic, a member of the central government collective presidency from the Bosniak ethnic group, has condemned the Republika Srpska as an illegitimate product of genocide. He has called for the abolition of the entities and a dominant central government. Efforts to reform Bosnia’s constitution have made little progress. There has been a debate about the future role of the international community in Bosnia. The Office of the High Representative (OHR), chosen by leading countries and international institutions, oversees implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia. An EU peacekeeping force, called EUFOR, is charged with keeping the peace in Bosnia and overseeing the Bosnian armed forces. The international community has vowed to close OHR after Bosnia meets a series of reform objectives, ending direct international oversight. -
Javier SOLANA
COUNCIL OF Brussels, 16 February 2008 THE EUROPEAN UNION S060/08 Javier SOLANA, EU High Representative for the CFSP, welcomes the appointments of Pieter FEITH as EU Special Representative in Kosovo and Yves de KERMABON as Head of Mission of EULEX KOSOVO Javier SOLANA, EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) made today the following statement on the decision by the Council to appoint Pieter FEITH as the EU Special Representative in Kosovo and Yves de KERMABON as EULEX KOSOVO Head of Mission. “I am very pleased that the Council has decided on the basis of my recommendation to appoint Pieter Feith as EU Special Representative in Kosovo and Yves de Kermabon as Head of Mission for the rule of law mission in Kosovo, EULEX KOSOVO. These appointments further illustrate the EU's enhanced engagement in the Western Balkans. Pieter Feith will in particular offer the EU's advice and support in the political process and promote overall EU coordination in Kosovo. I have known him for a long time and we have always worked very well together. I wish him all the luck in his new position. As Head of Mission for the biggest civilian EU mission ever, Yves de Kermabon, will have a crucial role in assisting the Kosovo police and justice enforcement agencies in their progress towards European standards. He has my full trust and support and I look forward to working with him. Both have an in-depth knowledge of the region and of EU policies there." The European Council on 14 December 2007 stated the EU's readiness to assist Kosovo in the path towards sustainable stability, including by an European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) mission and a contribution to an international civilian office as part of the international presences in Kosovo. -
State Building and Exit
State Building and Exit The International Civilian Office and Kosovo's Supervised Independence 2008 – 2012 Cover illustration: ICR Pieter Feith in Velika Hoča/Hoça e Madhe in October 2011. Photo by Atdhe Mulla. This book is a collaborative effort of a team of ICO staff members. It is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike License (refer to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/). Printed copies of the book can be ordered at cost price on the print-on- demand website www.createspace.com/4097025. Digital copies (pdf and epub) can be downloaded for free on the post-ICO website www.ico- kos.org. ISBN 978-9951-19-067-1 Pristina, Kosovo December 2012 CONTENTS Foreword by Pieter Feith v Executive Summary 1 I The Beginning 6 II The Constitution 18 III Reform and Stability 28 IV Challenges and Crises 39 V The Dual Mandate 56 VI The ICO Model 74 VII Deciding to End Supervision 85 VIII CSP Progress 2011-2012 101 IX Managing the End of Supervision 115 X Closing the Mission 129 XI Reality and Reactions 133 iv FOREWORD The International Civilian Office, which between 2008 and 2012 supervised the implementation of President Ahtisaari’s Comprehensive Proposal for the Kosovo Status Settlement,1 was an extraordinary international creation: a unique mission for a unique context in a young European state; and a mission that closed itself, in good time. The ICO was privileged to have been mandated to help implement such a clear and well-balanced blueprint for state-building as the Ahtisaari plan. -
The Balkan Summer of 2011
The Balkan Summer of 2011 by Michael Haltzel, Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations “Turning point” has become somewhat of a cliché as a description of where a country or a region stands at a point in time. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said “you cannot step twice into the same stream” and, to be sure, life is the story of constant change and turns. Nonetheless, individuals and countries are occasionally confronted with choices so important that the course taken will likely determine subsequent events for years, even decades. Several of the countries of the Western Balkans face these kinds of decision in the summer of 2011, as does the European Union, and to some extent, the United States. First, the exceptions. Slovenia, in the northwestern corner of the region, is solidly entrenched in NATO and the European Union. Once the most economically developed republic in the old Yugoslavia, it has retained that regional distinction twenty years into independence. Although the global financial and economic crisis has hit Slovenia hard, it is a member of the euro zone, and it continues to participate in Balkan peacekeeping and in the NATO operation in Afghanistan. In its vibrant democracy, which has seen orderly electoral changes of administrations, Slovenia’s populace has no hesitation about expressing discontent. In short, stable Slovenia is one of the success-stories of post-communist Europe. As it struggles to overcome its current economic difficulties, Ljubljana would not seem to be facing fundamental challenges. Slovenia’s neighbor Croatia is also on a positive path. Unlike Slovenia, however, after the break-up of Yugoslavia, Croatia did not immediately embark upon a democratic course, voting instead for a semi-authoritarian HDZ government under its first President Franjo Tudjman, himself an actor in Yugoslavia’s demise. -
Why EU Promotion Is at Odds with Successful
EUC Working Paper No. 10 Working Paper No. 10, September 2012 Why EU promotion is at odds with successful crisis management: Public relations, news coverage, and the Aceh Monitoring Mission Stephanie Anderson Photo © Aceh Monitoring Mission ABSTRACT The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and its accompanying Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions can be tools used to increase the international profile of the European Union. Nevertheless, CSDP missions garner little news coverage. This article argues that the very nature of the missions themselves makes them poor vehicles for EU promotion for political, institutional, and logistical reasons. By definition, they are conducted in the middle of crises, making news coverage politically sensitive. The very act of reporting could undermine the mission. Institutionally, all CSDP missions are intergovernmental, making press statements slow, overly bureaucratic, and of little interest to journalists. Logistically, the missions are often located in remote, undeveloped parts of the world, making it difficult and expensive for European and international journalists to cover. Moreover, these regions in crisis seldom have a thriving, local free press. Using the Aceh Monitoring Mission (AMM) as a case study, the author concludes that although a mission may do good, CSDP missions cannot fulfil the political function of raising the profile of the EU. The EU Centre in Singapore is a partnership of 13 EUC Working Paper No. 10 Why EU promotion is at odds with how the very nature of CSDP missions undermines successful crisis management: Public their use as a political promotion tool. relations, news coverage, and the Aceh Visibility and the CSDP: Increasing the EU’s Monitoring Mission International Prestige and Support among its Citizens2 1 STEPHANIE ANDERSON The EU’s foreign and security policy is supposed to increase its profile both at home and abroad. -
Introduction
Introduction “As I have said time and again, my job is to get rid of my job. I am quite clear that the OHR is now into the terminal phase of its mandate”, said then High Representative for the international community in BIH Paddy Ashdown in his speech in front of the Venice Commission1 in October 2004. For over eight years now the international community has been discussing the downscale of its presence in Bosnia and Herzegovina2, which since the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995 has been run as a virtual protectorate. But not much has changed since Ashdown’s speech. Although the country has gone forward in all fields and the security situation has improved drastically since 1995, with the number of NATO peacekeeping forces decreasing from 60,000 to only 1,6003 and with BIH currently a temporary member of the UN Security Council, no arrangements have been made to grant more sovereignty to local politics. And due to recent negative developments in politics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the prospect of getting rid of the ‘informal trusteeship’ now seems more distant than it was at the time of Ashdown’s speech. The OHR, acronym for Office of the High Representative, is the international body responsible for overseeing the implementation of the civilian aspects of the treaty which ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is governed by a council of 55 countries and international organizations charged with overseeing Bosnia’s reconstruction, formally organized into an umbrella organization called the Peace Implementation Council (PIC). It is the PIC who 1The European Commission for Democracy through Law, better known as the Venice Commission, is the Council of Europe's advisory body on constitutional matters. -
Whole-Of-Society Peacebuilding
Whole-of-Society Peacebuilding Edited by Mary Martin and Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic First published 2019 ISBN13: 978-0-367-23688-5 Chapter 6 Coordinating international interventions in complex settings. An analysis of the EU peace and state-building efforts in post-independence Kosovo Chris van der Borgh, Puck le Roy and Floor Zweerink (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) LONDON AND NEW YORK Coordinating international interventions in complex settings. An analysis of the EU peace and state-building efforts in post-independence Kosovo Chris van der Borgh, Puck le Roy and Floor Zweerink ABSTRACT This paper assesses coordination as a salient capability of interna- tional interventions in complex settings characterised by weak states, the dominance of political elites whose interest in reforms is questionable and multiple local and international stakeholders. It focuses on the challenge of integrating a range of national and international actors and multiple policy domains, assessing this operational capability in terms of a Whole-of-Society approach. Using the example of the EU’s intervention in Kosovo through the mechanisms of the EULEX mission, and the EU-facilitated Dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo, the paper argues that the EU’s impact in Kosovo was weakened by its limited ability to include and engage a broad range of local stakeholders. While a Whole-of-Society approach could address this weakness, the paper also argues that a better understanding of the context-specific opportunities and limitations placed on international organisa- tions like the EU is needed. Introduction Over the past 20 years, the EU has transformed from an actor with limited leverage to a major player in Kosovo. -
Political Rituals and Discourses: the Case of Carinthia
doi:10.7592/FEJF2015.60.fikfak POLITICAL RITUALS AND DISCOURSES: THE CASE OF CARINTHIA Jurij Fikfak Abstract: This article discusses selected ritual practices in Klagenfurt (Sln. Celovec), the capital of the southernmost Austrian state of Carinthia (Germ. Kärnten). The first ritual is connected with October 10, when the 1920 plebiscite is commemorated on the streets of Klagenfurt. In this plebiscite, the majority of people voted for remaining a part of Austria, the successor state to Austria-Hun- gary. The second ritual is a more recent one, known as the Memorial Walk (Germ. Gedenkgehen, Sln. Spominska hoja). Various cultural practices are analysed, as well as the use of symbols and space, media, state, and national discourses. Keywords: alternative practice, memorial walk, Nazism, plebiscite, ritual prac- tices, use of discourse Political rituals are practices set in concrete chronotopes. They express and materialise a sense of belonging, the formation of identities, and the establishment of local, regional, ethnic, national, or state entities. They also represent an area of social cohesion, self-identification, the marking of social affiliation and the exclusion of the Other. Political rituals are unavoidable in social integration (Lukes 1975), socialisation of hierarchies, relations, and the use of power. They are used repeatedly, year after year, to define, embody, and materialise ethnic, language, and other barriers which do not allow a single person, socialised in any community, to remain unaffected or undecided. As Steven Lukes has put it, political rituals mobilise bias, but they also raise questions about the relationships between different discourses, for example, between the official political discourse of the ruling parties, media discourses, the so-called common sense discourse, and the subcultural discourse present mainly among various extremist groups. -
Bosnia-Herzegovina by Dino Jahic´
Bosnia-Herzegovina by Dino Jahic´ Capital: Sarajevo Population: 3.8 million GNI/capita, PPP: US$9,650 Source: The data above are drawn from the World Bank’sWorld Development Indicators 2014. Nations in Transit Ratings and Averaged Scores 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 Electoral Process 3.25 3.00 3.00 3.00 3.00 3.25 3.25 3.25 3.25 3.25 Civil Society 3.75 3.75 3.50 3.50 3.50 3.50 3.50 3.50 3.50 3.50 Independent Media 4.00 4.00 4.00 4.25 4.50 4.50 4.75 4.75 4.75 4.75 National Democratic Governance 4.75 4.75 4.75 5.00 5.00 5.25 5.25 5.50 5.50 5.75 Local Democratic Governance 4.75 4.75 4.75 4.75 4.75 4.75 4.75 4.75 4.75 4.75 Judicial Framework and Independence 4.25 4.00 4.00 4.00 4.00 4.00 4.25 4.25 4.25 4.25 Corruption 4.50 4.25 4.25 4.25 4.50 4.50 4.50 4.50 4.75 4.75 Democracy Score 4.18 4.07 4.04 4.11 4.18 4.25 4.32 4.36 4.39 4.43 NOTE: The ratings reflect the consensus of Freedom House, its academic advisers, and the author(s) of this report. The opinions expressed in this report are those of the author(s). The ratings are based on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 representing the highest level of democratic progress and 7 the lowest. -
Aldo Ajello Was Appointed EU Special Envoy for the African Great
Pieter Feith was appointed appointed European Union Special Representative in Kosovo on 4 February 2008. His current mandate, which runs until 30 April 2011, includes the tasks of offering the EU's advice and support in the political process and of promoting overall EU political coordination in Kosovo, thereby implementing the policy objectives of the EU in Kosovo. This includes the aim of developing a stable, viable, peaceful democratic and multi- ethnic Kosovo. Mr Feith is also "doubled-hatted" as the International Civilian Representative. 1. Pieter Feith, EU Special Representative in Kosovo Mr Pieter Feith EUSR website Mission Statement - International Support for a European future The objective of the EU in Kosovo is to support and assist the Kosovo authorities in developing a stable, viable, peaceful and multi-ethnic society in Kosovo, cooperating peacefully with its neighbours. These aims are high and I believe they are rightly so. The EU will offer a multifaceted approach in assisting Kosovo's security and development. We will make use of all our political, financial and security mechanisms in a unified and coherent manner with the aim of reaching this objective. My tasks will be to assist the political process and to promote coordination of all these efforts, including by providing local political guidance to the EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo. I believe that the future of Kosovo is of immense importance to the European Union and in my role as EU Special Representative in Kosovo I will tirelessly assist the local authorities by offering the EU's advice and support. My aim is a Kosovo that is committed to the rule of law and to the protection of minorities and of cultural heritage.