Reclaiming the Political in Bosnia: A Critique of the Legal-Rational Nightmare of Contemporary Bosnian Statehood

"Across the asphalt and concrete of our raped land, comes a band of profiteers, carrying away our wealth.. .Flags have been sown, the children convinced, the knives distributed, our graveyards divided."Damir Avidic, "Po Asfaltu i Betonu"2There is a popular joke in Bosnia concerning the dealings of Milorad Dodik, the President of the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska (RS) entity within Bosnia-Herzegovina, which says as much about Dodik as it does about the general state of affairs in the country as a whole. As the story goes, Dodik visits the (now former) Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, in a fabulous villa just outside of Rome. Dodik is dazzled by the splendour of the Prime Minister's manse and inquires how, as a public servant, Berlusconi had managed to live in such luxury. Berlusconi takes Dodik to a secluded balcony and shows him a sprawling highway off in the distance. He explains that through some clever bookkeeping, he and his associates had managed to shave two centimeters off each side of the road from what the original blueprints had called for, and in the process had saved millions - which they had then pocked for themselves and hence his impressive home. A few months later, it is Berlusconi visiting Dodik and upon his arrival, the Italian can scarce believe his eyes; Dodik's mansion is easily twice the size of his own and immeasurably more luxurious. Berlusconi pleads with Dodik to explain how he managed to find the funds to build such a home and, obliging, is taken to a large bay window overlooking the countryside. "Do you see our fabulous new highway, Silvio?" "No, all I see is empty fields." "Exactly!"The above is as telling and succinct of a narrative about the general state of Bosnian society as one is likely to find. After all, BosniaHerzegovina is a country where even respected academics and policy analysts are forced to concede that it "is a great place to be a politician but a shitty place to be a citizen" (Siddiqui 2011). Yet with more government ministers, bureaucrats and international administrators of various sorts than countries many times its size, trudging across its cities, towns, villages and hamlets, Bosnia utterly lacks any meaningful, popular political mobilization. The weight of post-war Bosnian politics has instead served to depoliticize the people of the area; it has made them beholden to the machinations of local and foreign oligarchs.Newspapers in Bosnia's three "main" cities (Sarajevo, Banja Luka and Mostar), most catering to one of the country's three "constitutive peoples" (Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats), report with breathless regularity on the latest in scandalous political pronouncements. The bombastic nationalist rhetoric of Dodik is a popular theme amongst the Sarajevo papers, for example, who react with fury at his weekly suggestions that "Bosnia is a failed experiment" or his frequent negations of genocide in the country during the 1990s (Dervisbegovic 2011). These statements are declared as "unacceptable," in turn, by the representatives of the international community in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Office of the High Representative (OHR) as well as the European Union Special Representative, and the subsequent exchanges reported on with equally repetitive and vapid zeal (Tanjug 2011). The process begins anew the next week.Meanwhile, substantive political dialogue or mobilization is almost entirely absent, despite the steadily deteriorating standard of living for all Bosnians, regardless of ethnicity. The handful of dominant political parties in the country, most of which are exclusively ethno-nationalist in orientation, have managed to sequester the realm of "political action" to their theatrical antagonisms - what locals refer to as nacionalisticko prepucavanje: hackneyed nationalist bickering or "trolling." Said theatrics, of course, and as our earlier joke suggested, are widely understood to be the front operations for the actual day-to-day routine of Bosnian political economy: corruption on an endemic scale, orchestrated by nationalist oligarchs, which has resulted in the systematic dispossession of even the meagre social wealth and infrastructure that survived the war (Corruption 'Humongous' in Bosnia 2008). …