Is Russia a partner to the EU in Bosnia? By Tomas Valasek ★ The EU and Russia are ostensibly partners in building a viable government in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), but for much of 2007-08, Moscow publicly opposed EU-sponsored police reforms and encouraged Bosnian politicians to resist the EU proposals. ★ Russian policy in BiH was fundamentally opportunistic – it was not about expanding spheres of influence but about using crises in the region to weaken the credibility of the West. ★ Russia’s ability to undermine western policies towards BiH would be greatly reduced if the outside powers replaced the multinational consortium that oversees Bosnia with an EU-led mission. ★ Western ambitions for integrating BiH into the EU are failing – but this is due not to Russia but to Bosnia’s and the West’s own errors. The EU needs to pay more attention to Bosnia and make clear that it will not tolerate talk of any part of it breaking away. Where do the Balkans fit in the broader picture of EURussian relations? Since the August 2008 war in Georgia, Eastern Europe – the borderland between the EU and Russia – has been at the centre of attention. In 2008, President Dmitry 1 Andrew Kramer, ‘Russia Medvedev declared Eastern claims its sphere of Europe Russia’s ‘sphere of influence in the world’, privileged interests’.1 And in the New York Times, same year the EU launched a August 31st 2008. new programme, an ‘eastern partnership’, to align the region’s economies and political systems more closely with the EU’s. Few people have paid attention to the impact that a more confrontational EU-Russia relationship could have on the Balkans. But it was here, in 2007, that European countries fell out with Russia over the question of Kosovo’s independence. And for much of 2007 and 2008, Moscow and the West also squabbled over the future of 2 While the country’s full Bosnia,2 which, more than ten constitutional name is years after the end of the civil ‘Bosnia and Herzegovina’, war, remains unstable and ‘Bosnia’ is widely used. poorly governed. This policy brief will focus on EU-Russian tensions in BiH in 2007-08. It argues that Russia sought to
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undermine western efforts to build a viable government in the country. But Russia’s actions were not the sole or even the main cause of Bosnia’s instability and its failure to make greater progress towards EU integration; local opposition and the shortcomings of western policy towards BiH are the chief reason. This brief concludes that Moscow’s policy towards Bosnia is not aimed at building any ‘zone of influence’ in the Balkans. Russia’s behaviour in the region in 2007-08 was fundamentally opportunistic: Moscow’s goal was to weaken the authority of NATO, the US and the EU, and the Balkans served as a convenient platform for this broader goal.
The EU’s stake in Bosnia The EU has taken the lead in efforts to rebuild Bosnia, in which a total of 55 countries and agencies have been involved. Since the end of the 1992-95 civil war, the EU has contributed billions of euros to Bosnia’s reconstruction. It commands the 2,500-strong peacekeeping mission in the country, called EUFOR. The international community’s ‘high representative’ to Bosnia doubles as the EU’s special representative. The high representative has vast powers under international law, including the right to impose or
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