The vision of BiH’s future is neglected and deliberately obscured by daily political turmoil, is one of the conclusions from the analysis of “European integration of BiH under the threat of securitization” by an assistant professor at the Department of International Relations and European Studies at Burch International University Lejla Ramić Mesihović, presented today as part of an online panel discussion organized by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the BiH Foreign Policy Initiative.
She emphasized that the alignment of BiH with the EU is indeed necessary because new challenges, both procedural and geopolitical, are developing and growing every year.
“The vision of the future of BiH has been neglected and deliberately obscured by daily political turmoil, which deals more with the relations of the current political elites in different parts of BiH, rather than with progress and the process of European integration,” Ramić Mesihović pointed out in the analysis.
She underlined that there remains a need for the adoption of the BiH program for the adoption of the EU acquis, with a specific definition of obligations, and the order and dynamics of the transposition of the EU acquis into the BiH legislation.
“Until then, additional awareness must be given to the fact that BiH will only be able to act on an ad hoc basis and that all its activities will be hampered by day-to-day political tensions related to sterile, unproductive appropriations of jurisdiction. Also, this way of working brings an optional understanding of obligations, a non-standardized contribution to the process and when it happens, and everything that is initiated and done can be difficult to measure under these conditions. Legal uncertainty, which is generated by the permanent questioning of constitutional and institutional competencies, remains extremely problematic,” believes Ramić Mesihović.
Finally, as she says, what appears to progress in the process on the wings of securitization, the process and context in which the European Union switches from political to security issues in its relations with BiH, is of limited scope and largely depends on external factors.
She points out that the context, which would turn the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement into a state of frozen conflict while meeting the minimum of predictability and stability, proves to be more of a convenient response to the needs of daily politics, than an adequate environment for the requirements of long-term, consistent and strategic action, which is the backbone of integration in the EU.
