The question in the title implies to whom the High Representative is accountable. Some elementary logic would suggest that he is accountable to those who appointed him. By his own admission, the High Representative is appointed by the Steering Board of the Peace Implementation Council, which consists of: France, Italy, Japan, Canada, Germany, the USA, Great Britain, the Presidency of the European Union, the European Commission and the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) represented by Turkey.
But is this really the case and why is it not?
As reported by the media on January 9, 2024, a spokesperson for the European Commission stated that it, namely the EC, had taken note of the announcement by High Representative Christian Schmidt that he had graciously decided to impose amendments to the Election Law of BiH.
If we look at the composition of the Peace Implementation Council, out of ten council members, five are EU representatives, either member countries or institutions of the EU itself, thus a majority. So how then does the High Representative inform the body that is superior to him about what he has graciously decided to do, does not the logic of things require the opposite, that the body to which he is accountable instructs him what to do, because the powers of the Steering Board of the Peace Implementation Council state “the Steering Board provides political guidelines to the High Representative.”
In the report on BiH for 2023, the European Commission refers to the OSCE/ODIHR mission report that the decisions imposed by the High Representative changing the Election Law and the Constitution of the Federation of BiH resulted in undermining legal certainty. True, the European Commission failed to give its position on this issue in the report, but the fact that it cites the OSCE/ODIHR report implies that even if it is not necessarily completely in agreement, such a finding has some foundation.
When making decisions that, according to OSCE/ODIHR qualification, undermined legal certainty in BiH, the EU Delegation in BiH announced “that it had taken note of them, and that these are exclusively OHR decisions.”
Of course, after the above, it would be blasphemy to expect mention of the Venice Commission’s opinion from as far back as 2005 on the “incompatibility of the High Representative’s role with the democratic structure of the country.” It would be even more bizarre in this context to mention the Copenhagen criteria or the “fundamentals first” principle.
Even if we grant credence to the school of thought about the need for a pragmatic approach, the question remains why the High Representative does not impose all laws and strategies from the 14 priorities, with which BiH has been struggling for the fifth year now, having fulfilled only 2 priorities of a formal nature, so that the agony would end and negotiations would begin, and then in negotiations cluster by cluster, chapter by chapter, and where it gets stuck, the High Representative would impose again.
Well, it is clear even without such caricaturing of the already tragicomic reality that this is not a solution, no matter how much we try to play the role of either the mad or the confused. But neither is this existing one, which has lasted too long, and which amounts to a sad and boring political charade. This charade amounts to secret and semi-secret deals of ethnopolitical elites among themselves and with the EU, while in public an illusion of reforms and progress is produced, while in the background it smolders, and from time to time a political crisis flares up, but essentially nothing changes.
As a very good illustration of this state of affairs, an insight from Žižek’s now distant but excellent text in The Guardian from 1992 “Ethnic Macabre Dance” can serve, which goes roughly like this:
An expedition of European anthropologists in New Zealand in search of a tribe for which there were legends that it performed a terrible dance of death, discovered the tribe and made contact with them, asking them to perform that terrible dance of death for them. The tribe members complied with the request and performed the dance, which corresponded to the expedition’s prior knowledge. The expedition returned to civilization, publishing a notable report about it.
Soon after, another expedition came again to investigate the tribe and customs in more detail, including the dance of death. After learning the language and getting to know the tribe in more detail, it turned out that this dance as such had never existed and that they had actually invented it for the needs of the first expedition’s visit when they realized what they wanted.
Essentially, the expedition returned with the prejudice with which it had departed. As then, it seems that now too some other tribes are performing the ethnic dance of death before some other expeditions..
It seems illustrative enough that it could not be more illustrative, whether mad or confused..
