Innocents abroad: Reflections from a public administration consultant in Bosnia

Public Administration Review

Volumn 59, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 147-158

  Huddleston, Mark W ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0040811302     PISSN: 00333352     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/977634     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. For an excellent overview of the literature in comparative and development administration - recent and otherwise -see Ferrel Heady, Public Administration: A Comparative Perspective (NY: Marcel Dekker, 1996).
2. The most linear and comprehensive treatment of the Yugoslav war is Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (New York: Penguin, 1997). Among the scores of other excellent books on this conflict, three provide especially good overviews: Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin, 1993), David Reiff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Touchstone, 1996), and Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (New York: Vintage, 1996).
3. The most linear and comprehensive treatment of the Yugoslav war is Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (New York: Penguin, 1997). Among the scores of other excellent books on this conflict, three provide especially good overviews: Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin, 1993), David Reiff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Touchstone, 1996), and Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (New York: Vintage, 1996).
4. The most linear and comprehensive treatment of the Yugoslav war is Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (New York: Penguin, 1997). Among the scores of other excellent books on this conflict, three provide especially good overviews: Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin, 1993), David Reiff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Touchstone, 1996), and Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (New York: Vintage, 1996).
5. The most linear and comprehensive treatment of the Yugoslav war is Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (New York: Penguin, 1997). Among the scores of other excellent books on this conflict, three provide especially good overviews: Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin, 1993), David Reiff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Touchstone, 1996), and Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (New York: Vintage, 1996).
6. A few basic statistics help put the war in perspective. Half of Bosnia's prewar population of 4.3 million remains displaced by the conflict, either internally or in refugee camps abroad. More than 250,000 people died in the war -roughly 1 in 16 inhabitants. Economic activity remains at a near standstill, with estimates of unemployment ranging over 50 percent. For an overview of economic activity in postwar Bosnia, see Bosnia and Herzegovina: Toward Economic Recovery (Washington, DC: The World Bank, June, 1996).
7. The six republics of the former Yugoslavia were Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. The country also included two "autonomous regions," Kosovo and Vojvodina. As of this writing, Yugoslavia now comprises the republics of Serbia and Montenegro, plus the two above-mentioned regions (no longer autonomous).
8. Bosnia is properly known by its full name, Bosnia and Herzegovina (abbreviated "BiH"). In this article, I follow the common practice and use them interchangeably.
9. Whatever meaning the word "ethnicity" retains in our modern lexicon, it is seldom aptly applied to Bosnia-Herzegovina or to the former Yugoslavia more generally. Newly forged nationalist myths notwithstanding, almost all Yugoslavs come from the same stock, their ancestors having migrated to the Balkans from southern Russia in the sixth and seventh centuries. Residents of the region-whether Croat, Serb, or Muslim - come in all sizes, shapes, and colors, and are physically indistinguishable as groups one from the other. Group divisions are rooted in religion, Croats being predominantly Roman Catholic and Serbs Orthodox Christians. Bosnia, per se, has substantial representation of all three "ethnic" groups. It should be pointed out that especially before the war, and to a considerable extent even today, Bosnia has been a highly secular society. Intermarriage rates amongst Yugoslavs, especially among Bosnians, have traditionally been very high.
10. Strictly speaking, the Dayton Constitution represents an overlay on the March 1994 "Washington Constitution," which formally created the Muslim-Croat Federation.
11. The Serb Republic - Republika Srbska in Serbo-Croatian (itself a problematic term now, with each nationality insisting that it speaks a distinct language, Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian) - is an "Entity" of the "State" of Bosnia-Herzegovina. It should not be confused with the Republic of Serbia, which is the heart of rump-Yugoslavia.
12. Karadzic himself no longer holds office. Moreover, as of this writing, an intense power struggle is underway between Karadzic supporters, centered principally in the eastern Serb Republic, and supporters of Biljana Plavsic, the nominal president, whose base of support is largely limited to Banja Luka and a few other areas of the western part of the republic. Plavsic has received active support from NATO and the West in recent months, despite her history of near-hysterical nationalism, on the theory that she is less undesirable at the helm than Karadzic.
13. Strictly speaking, the capital of the all-but-nonfunctioning State is also Sarajevo.
14. The number has now been stabilized at ten. The original proposal was for six, with later versions projecting eight, nine, and various other numbers of cantons. The ten cantons are: Sarajevo, Una-Sana, Hercegbosnia, Neretva, Middle Bosnia, Zenica-Doboj, Tuzla, Posavina, Gorazde, and Grude.
15. Many critics, the author included, believe that Bosnia's confederal framework was foisted on the country by Western mediators who wrongly assumed that segregating "warring ethnic factions" into semiautonomous cantons was the only way to end the conflict. The perverse result has been to harden and reinforce communal animosities.
16. Fear of exactly the sort of rampant nationalism that resulted in the 1991-95 war was a major reason for Belgrade's tight grip. For an excellent treatment of the role of the architect of this policy, Josip Broz Tito, see Richard West, Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1994).
17. Indeed, the non-Serbian republics - particularly Slovenia and Croatia - especially resented what they saw as massive imbalances in revenue generation and expenditure, with their industrious economies subsidizing what they viewed as an indolent Serbia. This resentment was one of the underlying causes of the split in 1991, and hence of the war.
18. The consequences of this system - with the inevitable mismatch between resources and "needs" - will be discussed below.
19. The ZPP - Zavod za Platni Promet - is the traditional nerve center of Bosnian budgeting - part bank, part finance ministry, and part revenue police.
20. It is a measure of the value of the "What Do We Know?" document that a member of the ICMA team now working in Poland has drafted a similar compendium for that mission.
21. I lost a contact lens in Spain once. By confusing the verbs "to look" and "to see," instead of explaining the difficulty with my vision, I began emphatically telling anyone within earshot not to look at me.
22. As noted earlier, ICMA was supposed to have five resident advisors on the ground. In fact, owing to recruitment and other personnel problems, from late-1995 to mid-1997, there were never more than four; on occasion, there were even fewer. Even a full complement of five advisors would have been unable to serve all ten cantons.
23. The tenuous character of the Muslim-Croat Federation requires a system of dual "ethnic" appointments to office. If the chief minister of a particular department is a Muslim, his deputy must be a Croat; if the chief is a Croat, the deputy must be a Muslim. Depending in part on the state of intergroup relations at any particular time, the level of intraministerial cooperation could range from minimal to nonexistent. At the time of our appointment, cooperation was nearly nonexistent, so the deputy simply didn't bother coming to work.
24. This refers to the (well-founded) sense that the West did so little to assist Bosnia during the war, and thus helped to create the massive problems that it now faces, that it owes the Bosnian people a huge debt. The guilt factor obviously does not extend to the Serb Republic - at least not as long as it is seen to be governed by those primarily responsible for the war's worst atrocities.
25. COFOG stands for Classification of Functions of Government. UN-COFOG codes are widely used in international financial reporting.
26. These are terms drawn from the work of Fred Riggs, the most original and influential scholar of development administration. The centerpiece of his prodigious work is Administration in Developing Countries: The Theory of Prismatic Society (Boston: Mifflin, 1964).
27. USAID enforces its will in this regard, by the way, through a system called "country clearance." Each overseas staff member whom a contractor wishes to deploy -long term or short term - is subject to USAID approval via the country clearance process. Thus, even if a contractor were to take the position that the strongest premium should be placed on in-country experience, the staff member would still have to negotiate the shoals of USAID. Even after my experience in Bosnia, for instance, I have twice been denied country clearance after having been selected by a contractor for other financial-management-related assignments in the former-Yugoslavia because my skills-fit wasn't quite close enough for USAID; in both cases the assignments went to US practitioners with no Balkan experience.
28. There is, for better or worse, something of the air of the French Foreign Legion among the cadre of consultants available for long-term assignments: In addition to the outright aventurers, one finds men and women escaping domestic unhappiness, soured careers, midlife angst, etc.
29. Recent assignments I have undertaken in Southern Africa, Mexico, and Central Asia have lent credence to this speculation. While they have all been interesting, even exotic, places to work, none has had the "edge" of Bosnia. My expectations about what I might accomplish in each setting have been correspondingly more sensible - though how much of this is a function of what I learned in Bosnia and how much a reflection of the less intense work environment is difficult to say.
30. A useful overview of the literature in this area may be found in Stephen D. Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). Another important treatment is Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence, 2nd Ed. (NY: Harper Collins, 1989). Some interesting administratively relevant case studies of the norms argument may be found in Mark W. Zacher, Governing Global Networks: International Regimes for Transportation and Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
31. A useful overview of the literature in this area may be found in Stephen D. Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). Another important treatment is Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence, 2nd Ed. (NY: Harper Collins, 1989). Some interesting administratively relevant case studies of the norms argument may be found in Mark W. Zacher, Governing Global Networks: International Regimes for Transportation and Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
32. A useful overview of the literature in this area may be found in Stephen D. Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). Another important treatment is Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence, 2nd Ed. (NY: Harper Collins, 1989). Some interesting administratively relevant case studies of the norms argument may be found in Mark W. Zacher, Governing Global Networks: International Regimes for Transportation and Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
33. For instance, see Ozay Mehmet, Westernizing the Third World (London: Routledge, 1995) and Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalisation of Poverty (London: Zed Books, 1997).
34. For instance, see Ozay Mehmet, Westernizing the Third World (London: Routledge, 1995) and Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalisation of Poverty (London: Zed Books, 1997).
35. For an encyclopedic overview of the normative implications of intervention and nonintervention in a world of still-sovereign states, see Terry Nardin and David Mapel, eds., Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).