Open parliament more positive than BiH Parliamentary Assembly

Bearing in mind the importance of state-building in BiH with all its specifics, the goal of the Open Parliament is to open a debate on the successes of this process thus far, by analysing the results from the viewpoint of the key participants: national institutions, international community but also the state-building experts, as well as by offering recommendations for the challenges BiH faces in this complex endeavour.

Despite over a decade of reforms, enormous foreign aid and an intensive international presence in the country that often resorted to the ‘authoritarian methods of state-building’, BiH still faces the challenge of building functional and sustainable institutions. Fulfilling the conditions to joining the European Union assumes capacities of the country to face the painful reformist challenges and change management. Formally, all political and social groups endorse this process. In practice, the country lags in reform changes behind the other transition economies of Eastern Europe, burdened by the legacy of the war, deep ethnic divisions and serious corruption problems. One of the underlining dilemmas around the world is to what extent this process may be governed from the outside and at which point does it become necessary that the domestic forces take the ‘ownership’ and thus responsibility for the process in order to mitigate the risk of creating virtual institutions that have no legitimacy and capacity to govern effectively.

In his introduction remarks H.E. Matthew Rycroft, United Kingdom Ambassador to BiH stressed “the importance of strengthening the rule of law as a key condition for any reform that are to result in formation of sustainable and functional state”. Ambassador Rycroft elaborated that “strengthening of the institutional capacities of the state has no alternative if the reforms are to be conducted from within, leading BiH to its ultimate goal – joining the family of European countries”.

In the first part of the Open Parliament, participants from State institutions had an opportunity to hear the presentation of Prof. David Chandler from the Westminster University, a leading global expert in state-building, who paid much attention to the Bosnia case-study in his valuable research. "It is striking how the question of corruption has become the dominant framing in which issues from unemployment and poverty to the public's disillusionment and alienation from governing institutions has been discussed”, underlined Prof. Chandler. “This has produced a very unhealthy political climate, where there is a growing idea that all Bosnia needs is a few technical fixes, rather than addressing fundamental social, economic and political problems", concluded Chandler. In the second part of the event, an open panel discussion followed, with eminent experts from BiH and abroad taking an active part, including representatives of the institutions, academia and civil society, who sought responses to the question: how can Bosnia do better?