Contents

Challenges for Political Theory

• Invisible Walls of Europe
• Der Untergang: 1989-2009 – 20 Years of Liberalisation or Cannibalisation?
• Continuity versus Reference – Rhethorics versus Habitus

Transition Experiences in the European Countries

• Transition Experiences: The Dissolution of the Czechoslovak Federation and Slovakia’s Road to the European Union
• 1989: What Really Came Down With the Fall of the Berlin Wall?
• The Dynamics of Changes: How different are the Transformation Results in Post-Yugoslav Countries
• Western Balkan Troubles with Transition: Between Conformism and Collecivism

European Integration: Between Transition and Identity

• The Western Balkans is in the South: Discourses on the Western Balkan Countries’ EU Accession
• A Third Europe and the European Union Metaphysics
• Bosnia's Phony Transition: The Mirage of Bosnian Democracy and False Assumptions of the EU
• 1989-2009: From Exclusion to Integration (case of Serbia)

Conclusions
About the authors

Preface

The year 2009 is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and also the 20th anniversary of the peaceful revolution. These events caused far-reaching changes across the whole world. They marked the end of the Cold War and divisions across Europe. Many people still have vivid memories of the harrowing days in the autumn of 1989. The fall of the Berlin Wall was the new beginning for Germany, and also for the whole of Europe. Also, twenty years ago, the countries of Central, East and Southeast Europe embarked on transition which implied rejection of the old and acceptance of the new system of government, economy and society.

But what exactly happened during those years in the former Yugoslav countries and especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina? And what is still going on in Bosnia and Herzegovina? Instead of radical changes, instead of a new beginning and new chances, Bosnia and Herzegovina saw a horrible war on its soil, a violent break-up of the country, divisions, genocide – in the very heart of Europe.

Here, on the soil of Bosnia and Herzegovina, nationalist and ethnic policies were destroying bridges, mosques, churches, synagogues, city halls, libraries, factories, hospitals... all those institutions which once symbolized a cross-cultural life in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). ‘Unrestrained freedom’, left in the hands of the nationalist forces, turned BiH into the largest concentration camp in Europe.

Today, twenty years later, we can only ask: was the general ‘space of freedom’ conquered with the fall of the Berlin Wall? If it was, what kind of freedom do we enjoy here? The freedom to segregate children along ethnic lines, the freedom of ignorance, freedom in conformism, freedom in opportunism? Unrestrained freedom which resembles anarchy ever more?

“Bosnia and Herzegovina continues to experience divisions instead of integration; the walls which came down in other countries of Europe twenty years ago continue to be erected within Bosnia and Herzegovina, even at present day“, was said, among other things, at the two-day international conference on “1989-2009: Years of Upheaval: Beginning of Inclusion or Exclusion“, which took place in Sarajevo on 19-20 June, 2009. It was organized by the Heinrich Böll Foundation Office for BiH and the Association for Political Science in BiH. Željko Komsić, member of the Presidency of BiH, who opened the conference, reminded the participants that there are many walls across BiH which separate us from the European Union and our selves. “The journey we embarked on leads us to the European Union; how long it is going to last does not depend solely on us. The question is how much we are indeed prepared for the European Union and the EU for us“, Komsić asked.

Twenty years ago, it was necessary to knock down the walls in order for the countries outside the European Community to integrate into the present-day European Union. Also today, it is equally necessary to remove the walls within and around Bosnia and Herzegovina in order for this country to move forward towards the EU accession as quickly as possible. Bosnia and Herzegovinas EU accession process, the process which other countries of the region have successfully completed or they are moving along the road to success, looks – paradoxically – like the process at a distance.

These conference proceedings of academic papers by Ugo Vlaisavljević (Sarajevo), Asim Mujkić (Sarajevo), Wolfgang Klotz (Belgrade), Kurt Bassuener (Sarajevo), Pavol Demeš (Bratislava), Gajo Sekulić (Sarajevo), Nenad Zakošek (Zagreb), Tanja Petrović (Ljubljana), Nerzuk Čurak (Sarajevo) and Vladimir Pavićević (Belgrade), are published in an attempt to analyze the process of transition and to launch a broader discussion on the processes of transition from authoritarian towards democratic systems in Europe.

The authors provide the convincing comparative analysis of transition experiences with a special reference to Bosnia and Herzegovina and stress the need to develop a vision of the future of the whole region of Southeast Europe.

We are glad to present the findings and attempts of the conference to you.

Conclusions

The year 1989 marked the beginning of inclusive processes in the former socialist countries of East, Central and Southeast Europe. Still, it can be concluded that those were not unequivocal processes. Inclusion implies, as the twenty-year-long transition has shown, also the micro-strategies of exclusion (Vlaisavljević and Mujkić), of which the most conspicuous are the anti-migration policy and the approach to the West Balkans. This complexity of the inclusive-exclusive processes may be considered as a reflection of Europes search for its own political and cultural identity, resulting in the new walls built with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Of them, the most impressive is the Schengen wall; in other words, with the annulment of Division, another process was launched, that of creating new divisions the multiplication of which has no end in sight (Mujagić). This is why a kind of dialectics between inclusion and exclusion, the continuity which is based on discontinuity (Klotz), is awaiting its solution in the narration which Europeans will have to produce on their identity.

Joining the ranks of “successful democracies” implied, within the process initiated in 1989, the process – as understood in the old terms – of consolidating national states and their free markets on the basis of the concept of the right of the people to self-determination. At the same time, that area sparked the old ethnic myths, animosities and conflicts the accommodation of which depended primarily on the action by political elites – different directions of action by those elites are most visible in the example of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – and especially on the will of the Serb political elite, in the case of former Yugoslavia, so that the source of crisis and deviation of the democratization process in the West Balkans may be understood from the context of a failure to define the state borders of Serbia (Pavićević). It is in this context that a different course of “transition processes” in Southeast Europe should be interpreted. This is the reason why it is extremely important to analyze action and value orientations of the political elites (Zakošek).

Accepting Etienne Balibars statement that the fate of the European identity is being solved in the Balkans, the upheavals in the articulation of the European identity are closely related to the absence of a connecting narration of the social hope which was a motivating power of the 1989 Revolution. There are no narrations of hope (Demes) or narrations of social justice which we link to Rawls teaching (Sekulić) without an emancipatory discourse, which has been in crisis ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hope is closely linked to freedom, while freedoms appear today, in a neo-liberalist context, assuming the shape of an ideological system, in the form of consumer freedoms and the freedom of movement of capital. Today in particular, there is a need for a ‘disruptive thought’ (Čurak) which could oppose the dominant, largely Orientalist discourses of the European Union towards this part of the world (Petrović), opposite to such a disciplining opinion which is imposed, for example, through the Bologna higher education reform. If, as Bogdan Denitch concludes, “genuine democracy requires at least the minimum of commitment to social justice“, room has to be found for that discourse in the entire area of the former communist bloc, and in the West Balkans in particular.