Introduction
In February 2014, in the town of Tuzla, an industrial city in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1 workers took to the streets and protested against restructuring schemes that had left them unemployed or without any decent wage for several months.Reference Lippman 2 What began as a peaceful demonstration in a town known for its tradition of multiculturalism and tolerance soon turned violent. There were clashes with the police and some buildings were set on fire. Other cities in Bosnia, including the capital Sarajevo, followed suit and saw a similar succession of protests and clashes. What did this sudden fit of collective anger mean? For many Bosnians these events had to be read against a larger background of failed transition and halted democratization. The protests were not merely about growing dissatisfaction with the economic policies and privatization schemes that had left some firms in the hands of corrupt elites that took decisions against the interests of their employees; they were also about the state of the democracy more broadly, the general alienation that people felt from those who were elected to govern the country. For many Bosnians they signalled the bankruptcy of 20 years of intense and internationally guided democratization. The violence was not something Bosnians endorsed, but many weren’t surprised by it either: in a post-war country where corruption is rife and electoral competition is universally based on ethnic mobilization there seems to be a general expectation that social unrest can derail quickly.
It is with this context in mind that we have to understand the events that happened soon after the violent incidents: the swift organizing, by groups of volunteers, of a number of citizens’ assemblies. These gatherings were called ‘plenums’ and functioned as temporary and improvised channels of political participation for ordinary citizens. Radically bottom-up, radically open to every citizen, explicitly not tied to any ethnicity, economic sector or interest group, and not aimed at any direct engagement with the classic channels of political participation, these plenums were a new form of civic action in Bosnia. Everyone who wanted to participate was welcome, and everyone who wanted to speak was welcome to do so. This was politics outside anything usually seen as politics – outside of elections and even outside the world of organized civil society.
In this article we focus on the potential value of incident-driven forms of civic democratization, of which the plenums in Bosnia are an important – albeit temporary – example, in the context of post-conflict democratization attempts.
So far, democratization literature has focused mostly on the classical channels of political participation, especially in the context of discussions on international democracy promotion and state-building.Reference Belloni 3 – Reference Manning 6 In places that have experienced ethnic conflict, such attempts usually mean the formation of a system of government that tries to appease the formerly warring factions. Such strong emphasis on (one might even say preoccupation with) conflict-settlement comes at a price: lessons from democratization processes in more established and peaceful democracies are usually not considered relevant. It is as if only advanced democracies should engage in new forms of citizens’ participation, and as if only established democracies could afford to think about how to move beyond the limits of elections, party politics and organized civil society. Post-conflict societies apparently need to stick to old recipes for democratization, even if they don’t lead to much of a result. We believe, however, that the plenums in Bosnia demonstrate the importance of imagining democracy differently in post-conflict places. Moreover, they give us cause to give more attention to democratic experimentation in post-conflict places in our thinking about democracy more generally. Violent incidents in post-conflict societies expose the need to introduce new forms of democracy there, and they show how urgent it might be to critically assess current notions of democracy and democratization even in established democracies. In the case of Bosnia, we see how new forms of democratization are enacted and staged by citizens themselves, outside of any initiative by the state, international community or organized civil society. Of course, these plenums alone couldn’t be expected to constitute a sufficient remedy for the dysfunctions of the Bosnian state. But they did show that experiments in citizens-driven democracy are not merely the expression of a naïve longing for some far-off ideal; they can be practical ways to set minds in motion and move matters forward towards that ideal, even in the most unlikely of circumstances.
In the next section of this article we reflect on why the classical recipes for democratization have failed in Bosnia. We start with the Dayton accords but also take a broader literature on civil society and international supervision into account. Not only has democratization been halted by ethnic constitutionalism and the politics of transition, corruption and ‘partycracy’ that has emerged from it; it has also been hindered by the narrow ways in which organized civil society, supported by international agencies, has operated so far.
In the third part, we offer an overview of the developments after February 2014. What were the plenums, and how should we understand their value in the context of the constraints inherent to classic democratization strategies? Our comments are based on fieldwork in Sarajevo and Tuzla in February 2014 – work that included interviews with activists and participant observation at the Sarajevo plenum meeting of 17 February and the street protests in the days following. We also conducted interviews with Bosnian activists involved in the protests and plenums on several occasions over the course of 2014. 7
In the fourth section, we broaden the scope, offer a theoretical interpretation of the problem of democratic exhaustion, and see the case of Bosnia in the context of a wider reflection on the role of incidents and imaginations in the advancement of democratization in Europe and beyond.
Democratization Failed
A Constitution and its Discontents
A number of social scientists have suggested the term ‘ethnopolis’ to describe the internationally supervised constitutional arrangements made through the Dayton Peace Agreements (and adjusted in later stages) and the constraining features of the electoral competition that has been built on that basis. Mujkić,Reference Mujkic 8 for example, uses this term to describe the tendency towards exclusive collectivist representation and the strong emphasis on ethnic affiliation that is pervasive across the political system. These traits discourage civic initiatives that bridge ethnic divides, and as a result citizens feel disempowered. Free and fair elections only encourage them to frame their political preferences even more in ethnic ways.
How has Bosnia arrived in this situation? After the war, Bosnia was given a system of ‘power-sharing’, a form of democracy that guaranteed the different recognized groups an equal share of power (our discussion is based on a more elaborate treatment of the topic in Ref. Reference Touquet and Vermeersch9). We can characterize the system by locating it on a spectrum between two ideal-type systems of power-sharing: consociationalism (a term mostly associated with the work of Lijphart)Reference Lijphart 10 and integrative power-sharing (a term mostly associated with the work of Horowitz).Reference Horowitz 11 – Reference Caspersen 13 These two ideal types differ mostly as to whether and how ethnic differentiation is built into the electoral system. Lijphart has generally emphasized the importance of recognizing ethnic groups as the cornerstones of government. Ethnic conflicts, in his view, need to be solved by stimulating processes of cooperation between elites organized in institutions that explicitly acknowledge the differences between ethnic groups. In a consociational system, therefore, governmental power is shared by the different ethnic groups that were previously part of the conflict, and sharing happens through, for example, a grand coalition in parliament or a common presidency. Each group has a certain degree of autonomy (groups decide for themselves on issues that are not of common interest). There is proportionality on all levels, including in the civil service and the distribution of public funds, and there is veto power for minorities. Horowitz’s integrative option, on the other hand, starts from the premise that institutions need to be designed to encourage intra-ethnic competition and, therefore, he advocates a system that forces ethnic and nationalist parties to soften their stances and tout voters from across the ethnic spectrum before government formation.
Although some of the provisions of the Dayton Agreements could be read as an attempt to introduce integrative elements (such as, for example, its provisions dealing with the importance of the return of refugees in order to restore the multi-ethnic composition of certain regions), on the whole the system is mainly consociationalist. This solution was preferred on the basis of the dominant view that the nature of the conflict had been ethnic and that none of the ethnic parties could claim a victory. The negotiators at the time tried to meet the wishes of the Bosnian Serbs on the one hand (who wanted a republic of their own) as well as the Bosniaks and the Croats on the other hand (who were in favour of a multi-ethnic state). The most significant consociational element introduced by Dayton was the strong decentralization of government. As a result, the central institutions of the Bosnian state are very weak, whereas the regional entities (the Bosnian-Croat Federation, and within that the cantons of the Bosnian-Croat Federation, and the Republika Srpska) have relatively wide powers. The system introduced a collective presidency, a bicameral federal parliament, and a council of ministers, the most important governing bodies at the federal level.
Through its emphasis on power-sharing mechanisms Dayton pragmatically recognized segregated ethnic enclaves as the central loci of political authority. The structure of the Bosnian state turned out to be highly decentralized and asymmetrical: the Federation has been split up in cantons and municipalities, whereas there is no such division in Republika Srpska. 14 The overall result is that the strongest concentration of power is to be found at the levels that are deemed the most ethnically homogeneous and where the chances of conflicts arising are deemed to be the smallest: the level of the entity in Republika Sprska and the level of the cantons or municipalities in the Federation. Other elements of the power-sharing principle that make Bosnia an ethnicized state are the minority veto for vital issues and the principle of proportionality on all levels. 15
It is clear that we need to understand the introduction of this complex power-sharing system with its fine-tuned territorial divisions and ethnic rules as related to an overwhelming concern to tame ethnic groups and end (and prevent) ethnic conflict. But with this taming and prevention has come a deeply entrenched ethnicized institutional framework that has not only turned out to be useful for those who want to build their power on ethnic constituencies but is also spectacularly ill-fit to foster further democratization and crassly inapt to create country-wide programmes for socio-economic justice. As a result, mass discontent and protest has emerged on themes that crosscut ethnic divisions. And, not surprisingly, any insurgency against any type of policy, no matter on what level of government, has often been faced with ethnic recuperation on some level. Even when concerns underlying protest movements have not been inspired by any ‘ethnic claims’, they have been easily translated or reduced into such ethnic claims by governing elites and the media. Translating social dissatisfaction into ethno-national resentment has been a key strategy for the governing elites throughout the post-Dayton era,Reference Jansen 16 and one can easily see why this has been the case. The current system simply encourages such translation because through such an operation contentious issues can be evacuated outside of the domain of country-wide responsibilities and solidarities. And this, in turn, allows politicians to refocus on the competition between the territorial units of the Bosnian state – the building blocks of the electoral system, which are also ethnic units.
The question then is, to what extent does the straitjacket of the institutional system in Bosnia still allow room for further democratization? Or, more accurately, what types of political or social action may escape or move beyond the logic of the ethnopolis? Perhaps there is something to be expected from non-ethnic political parties and civil society initiatives?
Outside the Ethnopolis: Attempts to move Politics and Social Protest beyond Ethnicized Structures
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a large literature discussed recipes for democratization and market transition. Linz and Stepan,Reference Linz and Stepan 17 for example, talk about five necessary domains: a free civil society, an autonomous and valued political society (with parties, elections, legislatures, etc), the rule of law, a usable bureaucracy, and an institutionalized economic society that mediates between the state and the market. But, in several ways, the Bosnian story shows that, today, 20 years after Dayton, democratization needs to be regarded as a much more elusive affair. We need to look beyond Linz and Stepan’s checklist.
This is clear, for example, from considering parties and elections. Party politics and elections in Bosnia have been overseen and monitored by international agents for two decades now, but still party competition can hardly be seen as a key contributor to the further development of a healthy democracy. Party membership in Bosnia may be relatively widespread, but this is obviously linked to the large amount of clientelism and corruption that happens through political parties. 18 At first sight, the country does not appear to suffer greatly from the mass withdrawal from electoral politics and political parties that has characterized Western liberal democracies in recent yearsReference Mair 19 (turnout figures during Bosnian elections may be low but not as low as in Western liberal democracies); but what has come instead is not less worrying – party involvement for the wrong reasons.
There have been attempts to escape this vicious circle, notably some political parties themselves. Some political parties have sought to go beyond ethnic divisions (and beyond the ethnocratic logic of party competition), but they have generally not fared well. While the Social Democratic SDP has had members in both entities and has nominally been multi-ethnic for quite some years now, its major bases of support have remained limited to the urban centres of the Bosniak-Croat Federation; in 2008, it effectively sided with the Bosniak political parties SDA and SBiH during constitutional reform talks.Reference Touquet 20 Opposition party Naša Stranka (NS) so far represents the most successful attempt at mobilizing cross-ethnically – it entered politics during the local elections of 2008 and went on to make a difference in some municipalities – but on a country-wide scale the party has remained firmly stuck in the margins. Interestingly, NS has tried to mobilize citizens not only cross-ethnically but also against Bosnian party politics as a whole or, more precisely, against the system of ethnicized clientalism, patronage and corruption that, on a practical level, party politics has become. This has proven a difficult and paradoxical stance for NS to uphold: while being a political party itself it tried to mobilize on the basis of a call of resistance against all party politics. 21
One could therefore argue that the problem of Bosnian party politics deepens the problem of ethnicization – the ramifications go much further and must make one wonder if any type of democratizing reform can ever be expected from a political party. The parliamentary elections of October 2014, for example, brought some of the usual elites back to power, and these were to a large extent once again those elites supported by the same ethnic constituencies as in previous elections. But the deeper issue is that even if those in power were not genuine ethnonationalists, they still would have almost no incentives to break the logic of the ethnocratic system; it simply offers them too much of a comfortable array of possibilities to gain access to power. And hence the policy-making status quo remains. As Bieber formulated it in the aftermath of the 2014 elections: ‘A central feature of Bosnian politics that has contributed to the sense of disempowerment among many citizens has been the perception that nobody ever loses office and everybody is in power somewhere’.Reference Bieber 22
If party politics doesn’t hold much promise for the advancement of democratization, perhaps we should look at civil society? But a solution providing civic empowerment does not seem to be found in the world of organized civil society either. Not only have many NGOs, like political parties, been obsessed by identity politics,Reference Arsenijević 23 they have also created a self-sustaining economic system that has lost the ability to critically address the shortcomings of party politics. Some speak of the ‘NGO-ization’ of Bosnia – i.e. the expansion of an internationally supported NGO sector that has come to fill the gap of a lacking civil sphere with massive international support and has thereby also, in a way, created the impression that the only legitimate way of organizing such a civil sphere is through foreign aid programmes.
Small wonder then that social protests have become so important for many people who hope for some kind of democratic culture on a larger scale. Until recently, however, the story of mass protests as a potential source of democratization was not a happy story either. The trouble with social protest was that it was easily stripped of its power to build cross-ethnic support by media and politicians who reframed such protests as ethnic. They could, in many cases, do this so easily because the causes brought to the fore by these protesters were issues that had already been framed in ethnic terms through party competition; these were issues that were, on a deeper level, already ethnicized before they could even become a source of protest. In June 2013, for example, there were mass protests against the government’s failure to adopt legislation on citizens’ ID (the so-called ‘JMBG movement’, named after the name of the law on jedinstveni matični broj građana – unique citizens’ ID number). But this had already been an ethnically contentious issue in parliament (a dispute between politicians of the Republika Srpska and the Federation about whether the new regulation should include references to entity borders) before the protests started; and while the protests explicitly sought to overcome ethnic divisions, they didn’t manage to maintain this image in the context of strong party recuperation tactics.Reference Toè 24
Incidents, Accidents and Plenums
How are the plenums that began in February 2014 different? Did they offer more hope and make the advancement towards a fully functioning democracy more realistic?
The incidents that preceded the plenums did not, at the time, give much reason to suspect that they would increase chances for substantive democratic reform. To be sure, they were large-scale and massive, but that wasn’t what made them qualitatively different from previous protests. Indeed, in some ways, the protests of February 2014 and the violent clashes that followed can still be catalogued under the same rubric as earlier episodes of social unrest. What drove these protests might not have been in the first place a direct attack on Dayton as a principle, but like earlier instances of protest, they were expressions of a deep distrust in government as a whole and, in particular, in the principles and practices of economic policy implemented by these governments. The demonstrations and strikes started in response to dysfunctions at specific factories (especially in Tuzla, in companies such as Dita, Polihem, Guming and Konjuh), but they soon took on a larger symbolic meaning as anti-government protests. They started to represent general feelings of discontent not only with factory management boards but also with the economic and political transition policies of the various governments that had allowed and stimulated dysfunctional governance at the level of the companies. Earlier protest movements in Bosnia had followed a similar trajectory: dissatisfaction with a particular issue had merged into broader protests directed against (local, entity-level, state-wide and international) governmental agencies.
But in this case, partly because of the heavy violence – which was much heavier than in any earlier episode of social unrest – and partly because of the concern of various activists who had been close observers of new styles of protests in other post-Yugoslav countries (student demonstrations and ‘Occupy’ movements in Zagreb and Belgrade), the trajectory didn’t stop there. The short wave of demonstrations and violence was followed, not only by the usual attempts at ethnic reframing by powerholders and other ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, but also by a sustained attempt at building a novel tradition of democratic politics parallel to elections, party politics and mass protest – primarily in Tuzla, where the strikes of workers had started and where the violence had been most visible, but later on also in Sarajevo, Zenica, Mostar, Jajce and Brčko.
People gathered in public spaces where they could speak their mind before a public of peers on any topic they deemed important. The technique was akin to that of ‘open space technology’, 25 but it also relied implicitly on some deliberative traditions from Yugoslav times (the self-management board meetings). One of the facilitators of the meetings in Tuzla has described these plenums as ‘public gatherings, open to any citizen, through which collective decisions and demands can be made and action taken, beyond guarantees of leadership. They are open, direct, and transparent democracy in practice’ (Ref. Reference Arsenijević23, emphasis in original). Every citizen was invited to participate, and everyone was given the right to speak for two minutes about anything they wanted. The method chosen for this political action, and the radical openness undergirding its organization, made it stand out from the earlier protest repertoire. Eric Gordy describes the importance of the plenums as follows:
Through the formation of citizens’ plenums generating and articulating demands by means of a direct democratic procedure, the protest movement achieved two milestones: it moved protests away from the streets where they were vulnerable to being discredited, and it took the production of the movement agenda out of the hands of the dominant political parties where they could be detourned and deprived of significance.Reference Lippman 2
Of course, this did not mean that there were no attempts to bring the incidents, the clashes and the plenums back onto more familiar ethnic terrain. As Emir Hodžić writes: ‘politicians [were] fostering ethnic tensions and most of the mainstream media [were] reporting on hooliganism, attacks on democracy, coups d’état and other types of insidious nonsense, [while] volunteers proceeded to find a location for the first citizens’ plenum’.Reference Arsenijević 23 But what made matters different for the plenums was that they had something more to offer then merely mass protest and party politics, and for that very reason they managed to escape some of the preformatted protest-politician scenarios.
During the gatherings citizens talked about policies and reforms – most notably they brought socio-economic issues to the top of the agenda – and recommendations were made and communicated to government representatives (and in some cases they had some level of influence); but the significance and importance of the plenums also lies with their format: the fact that they offered a novel method of politics – indeed redefined politics – created trust among participants, and provided the space to facilitate talk among equal citizens. However brief, they managed to create a specific site for democratic politics – a place of democratic refuge – where ‘the position of victimhood was discarded’ and where a ‘renewed enthusiasm and energy’Reference Arsenijević 23 for politics was created and experienced.
Incident-driven Democratization: From Pressure Valves to Imagining Democracy
It’s worthwhile to try to read the story of the plenums against the background of the traditional literature on democratic participation. For many scholars the creation of a democratic system by necessity entails the incorporation of various ‘pressure valves’. Even if social movements or protest groups were mostly ignored in the initial drawing plans for the democratic edifice, they are by now considered essential coping stones at the central axis, preventing it from collapse. In his book Contre-démocratie, the French political theorist Pierre Rosanvallon,Reference Rosanvallon 26 for example, argues that countervailing powers are necessary to compensate for the low levels of faith contemporary citizens have in traditional forms of democratic representation. If we have social movements to keep tabs on political parties or successfully monitor corruption, we can trust that the ‘rascals’ will restrain themselves. 27 We find a similar line of thinking in the work of Harvard scholar Pippa Norris,Reference Norris 28 who made the point that data displaying diminishing voter turnout or decreasing political trust do not tell us the whole story; there has been a steep increase in other forms of political activity, such as petitioning or demonstrating. Norris speaks of a ‘democratic phoenix’ that rises from its ashes: this is democracy, but in a new form. Although none of these authors discards the need to have a well-functioning traditional representational system, they claim that if such a system is encapsulated in a thick duvet of other political activities, it will keep functioning even if it is trimmed to the bone.
But what does that say about Bosnia? It seems the main currents of thinking about the hidden resilience of democracy are empirically based on western democracies, and some of their central tenets seem to come down when we try to apply them to new democracies.
First of all, authors such as Pippa Norris 27 or Russel DaltonReference Dalton 29 insist (on the basis of elaborate survey material) that, even though citizens are less likely to vote or participate in traditional political forms, their distrust only pertains to those who do the governing (the actors); their faith in the underlying democratic structure, in contrast, is stable, or even increasing. Indeed, they find that young citizens in the US and Europe are among the most ardent adherents of the democratic ideal. But as we explained earlier, in Bosnia there are multiple indicators to show that many citizens have few illusions about the system as a whole. A survey from 2014, conducted with support from the EU, shows that in Bosnia distrust of the state government was at almost 80% and distrust of political parties at almost 90%. 30 Such high numbers indicate a deep malaise in the functioning of current democratic institutions in Bosnia.
Second, even though citizens in Western Europe will act through organizations and movements that are not part of the national political system sensu stricto, the aim in the end is still to influence traditional political representatives. Swedish political scientists Narud and EsaiassonReference Narud and Esaiasson 31 use the term ‘between-election democracy’ to refer to the kind of democracy that lets citizens interact with their elected representatives through all kinds of parallel channels. This implies that these channels (such as NGOs or institutionally sanctioned social movements) are considered legitimate second-order representatives and that political representatives will listen to citizens’ demands voiced through them. When citizens lack faith in social movements and discern no possibility to have any impact through them, this alternative route to democratic representation becomes a very dusty road indeed.
Due to the pervasive ethnicization of all public life in Bosnia, these movements there, including broad forms of ‘civil society’, are seldom seen as representative of any group broader than an ethnically defined constituency. Moreover, due to the colonization of civil society by international organizations and donors, faith in these movements and organizations is much lower than in Western democracies, and often they are seen as representatives of the interests of these international organizations rather than of those of the citizens of Bosnia. In former communist states, civil society in general has less support and impact on politics and policymaking than in Western societies, but even by those standards the problem in Bosnia is stark. As RupnikReference Rupnik 32 remarked with regard to CEE countries, the lack of corps intermédiaires in these countries means there is no real counterweight when things go wrong within formal institutions or when the country takes a more authoritarian turn. In CEE countries, the focus has been on installing constitutional democracy and free markets, but without citizens’ participation and a strong civil society, the democratization process becomes a precarious exercise. Both organized civil society and citizens’ participation are indispensable for perpetuating democracy after it is formally installed. In the Bosnian case, the survey mentioned above also found that half of the population has only ‘low’ or ‘absolutely no’ faith in NGOs or humanitarian organizations. In Bosnia the so-called democratic phoenix has clipped wings.
All of this is to show that the literature on democratic representation and social movements seems to have no real answer as to what happens if a crisis occurs in a situation where the ‘pressure valve’ option is not present. In situations where the state is not receptive to input by movements (or in this case, movements are just not deemed relevant for policy drafting), social movement literature predicts a higher occurrence of more intense and possibly even violent protest.Reference Kriesi, Koopmans, Duyvendak and Giugni 33 This is exactly what we have seen in the Bosnian case, where workers took to the streets in an unorganized fashion and some rioters attacked government buildings. But the demonstrations of February 2014 – and indeed, all the social protests that had preceded them – hardly gave hope to democratic activists that they would enable them to break the existing gridlock of the ethnopolis.
Hence the current stalemate: the social crisis has mobilized people in various ways but has offered them few (perhaps no) democratic tools to send their contention into the channels of the policymaking process that might lead to meaningful reforms. One could call this a situation of ‘democratic exhaustion’:Reference Rupnik 34 the belief in democracy as an ideal is still somehow present, especially among activists, but after many years of all sorts of movement activities, citizens feel they have not moved much further in the direction of a well-functioning democratic state.
Usually, when an incident or social crisis occurs in a political environment that suffers from ‘democratic exhaustion’, it leaves activists with two options: they can either persevere in their hope of the traditional linkage function between movement and political representational system, or they can divert from democracy as an ideal. In Bosnia the attempt has been to find yet another way.
This has hardly been self-evident. During a workshop in Amsterdam, activists and scholars Nenad Stojanović and Svjetlana Nedimović 35 described in stark terms the disillusion with democratization in Bosnia present among those who took part in the demonstrations in Tuzla and other cities. On top of their discontent with national institutions has come their despair with regard to the democratic deficit in international organizations present in the country. Moreover, part of the economic crisis that triggered the unrest was related to diminishing international aid and the retreat of organizations, which took with them the jobs that they had created earlier (from administrators to cleaners). So why should citizens have faith in policy statements issued through these national and international institutions? What is remarkable about the plenums in Bosnia is that they showed that many people still believe in democracy as an end goal – even when they are fed up with democratization as it has happened so far.
The Bosnian activists who were committed to the plenums have understood that to start restoring democratic faith it is necessary to step out of the existing political order (even if only for a limited time) and to reinvent the democratic process in a way that reflects deeper democratic hopes. In a situation where repetitive actions have led to few results, citizens need to see the democratic ideal materialized; only in this way can they keep believing that the ideal somewhere at the horizon still exists and is not just a mirage. Anthropologist Donald Graeber has described a similar process in the run-up to Occupy Wall Street: activists had tried in vain to use traditional linkage methods in what he calls ‘endless attempts to kick off a national movement’.Reference Graeber 36 The only possibility left over was to persuade fellow citizens that a truly democratic society was still possible. Graeber describes how the core activists realized that simply talking about this would not be sufficient.
But it was possible to show them. The experience of watching a group of a thousand, or two thousand people, making collective decisions […] motivated only by principle and solidarity, can change one’s fundamental assumptions about what politics […] could actually be like.
Such a moment of democratic imagination, or rather imagining democracy, can be found in several movements now that have faced a gridlock in the political order or experienced a complete lack of responsiveness of the political system. The G1000 in Belgium in 2011, a national citizens’ summit, came about only when traditional channels for political participation – in this case, the federal elections of 2010 and the party talks about institutional reform that followed it – had left the country stuck in a situation of seemingly endless government negotiations.Reference Vermeersch 37
There is a dialectical relationship between the far-off democratic ideal and its practical implementation that becomes highly visible at specific moments and in specific places, such as during the plenums, the G1000 or the deliberative meetings in Zucotti Park. The distant democratic ideal is what inspires the concrete manifestations of these processes. Even if they are short-lived or do not achieve specific policy results, they have given an inward message that might re-inspire activists and a message to the outside world that some alternative form of political order can not only be dreamed of, but is actually realizable.
Of course, such initiatives have not remained without serious criticism, even from supporters. One complaint with regard to the Occupy movements, for example, is that they were, as Lawrence Weschler has formulated it,
unable (and indeed intentionally, theoretically, insistently unwilling) to coalesce around a unified set of demands that might in turn force a brace of legislative ultimatums, which in turn might set the stage for electoral contests with the horizon of any sort of real contest for power.Reference Weschler 38
True as this is, deliberative settings such as the plenums are not aimed to engage people in the power struggle of elections; they want to realize another form of politics, create a new arena and turn that into the ‘real contest’. They aim to legitimize, and ultimately give power to, forms of democratic participation outside elections.
Conclusion
What we have observed in Bosnia has implications for broader debates about democracy and democratization.
In recent years, several instances of social protest in Europe have transformed into new initiatives for citizens’ participation and experiments of direct democracy. In Greece, for example, public squares became, first, sites of protest, but later spaces to hold popular assemblies, not unlike what happened in Turkey during the 2013 protests in Gezi Park in Istanbul. In Belgium and Ireland, citizens’ summits, such as the G1000 (Belgium 2011) or the Constitutional Convention (Ireland 2013) became new large-scale forms of deliberative democracy after episodes of crisis and protest. While still involving parliamentary-like settings, these incident-driven forms of democracy were attempts to reinvent the political engagement of citizens beyond protest and outside the classic institutions of representative democracy – often also outside elections, and outside the realm of the national state, or at least in response to a heightened awareness of critical needs on the local, regional or global scale outside the national state institutions. These instances came about after serious strain was put on the existing political system in these countries, sometimes as a result of these countries’ involvement in the global system. But rather than entering the institutionalized politics of strategic bargaining and fixed collective preferences, citizens searched for new opportunities to engage with politics through their voice, their arguments and narratives.
While many may deplore increasing citizen disengagement from and disillusionment with the formal structures of representative democracy or the lack of enthusiasm of citizens for elections and political parties in a democratizing state (or these citizens’ interest in political parties only for reasons of clientelism and personal gain), it is exactly such frustration, disengagement and disillusionment that may be the beginning of an alternative form of democratic engagement. Incident-driven civic actions and spaces can let people experience democracy in new ways and set it as an example to populations who do not yet live in a democracy. This is exactly what happened in the case of the Bosnian plenums in 2014. These actions reified, even if only for a brief moment, a possible political future. In a state where classical recipes for democratization have failed, they were a visible instigator of further democratization. They were a bold stride towards a democratic model that still needs to be created.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was presented at the 22nd International Conference of Europeanists, Council of European Studies, Paris, Sciences Po, 8–10 July 2015. The authors would like to thank the participants of the panel on ‘Innovations in Democratic Governance: The Role of Crises and Incidents’ for their comments and reflections.
Yves Dejaeghere is a senior researcher and lecturer at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He was previously affiliated with the University of Leuven (Belgium). His work is published in, among others, the European Journal of Political Research, Party Politics, Scandinavian Political Studies, Canadian Journal of Political Science, European Union Politics, Social Behaviour & Personality and International Journal of Intercultural Relations.
Peter Vermeersch is a professor of politics at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium. Previously he was, among others, a visiting scholar at Harvard University. His articles have appeared in a wide range of books and journals including The European Journal of Sociology, Europe-Asia Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, The Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and East European Politics and Societies. He is the author of The Romani Movement: Minority Politics and Ethnic Mobilization in Contemporary Central Europe (Berghahn Books 2006). He is also a widely published writer of essays and literary non-fiction.
