Constitutional law professor Siniša Karan stated that the conclusions of the European Council today openly call for a violation of the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), and thus the entirety of the Dayton Agreement.
Reacting to a conclusion in which the European Council reportedly prioritizes citizens over constituent peoples in BiH, Karan told Srna that European integration cannot and must not justify going against the Constitution and Dayton by disrupting the internal balance based on ethno-entity principles, collective rights, and the equality of constituent peoples and citizens.
Karan emphasized that the constitutional positions of the entities and the constituent peoples, as holders of sovereignty in a complex federal, multiethnic community like BiH, must be respected.
In the absence of valid political and legal arguments, Karan explained, the guise of democracy is used to cover everything, aiming to criticize the ethno-entity foundations of BiH’s state structure.
“Invoking democracy and the protection of individual human rights and freedoms (citizens) is a classic centralist and unitarist aspiration originating from the most numerous ethnic group, while in practice it is not about democratization but about creating conditions for majoritarianism,” Karan pointed out.
He stressed that complex state communities characterized by multireligiousness, multiculturalism, and multiethnicity require a complex democratic identity and legitimacy corresponding to such a multifaceted state structure.
In addition to individual, civil, and personal legitimacy, Karan noted, the ethnic-constituent segment of the complex community appears as an independent political subject with distinct political demands.
“The citizen does not have exclusive authority for absolute democratic representation. They do not have the capacity to absolutely represent themselves as an individual and the collective to which they belong. While advocating for their inalienable individual rights, they must not simultaneously deprive the social, political, and state collective of its rights,” Karan said.
The collective represents itself and does not seek to realize its collective interests indirectly. The articulation of the collective, he added, is a constitutional category and an essential, original element of the state structure, not an auxiliary one.
Stripping the collective of this right, Karan warned, would remove the pillar upon which BiH’s state structure rests.
“Support for a civic BiH and the abuse of the general trend of societal democratization have hidden motives,” Karan stated, adding that these include creating a centralist and unitarist BiH, majoritarianism by the majority ethnic group, and depriving other constituent and state-forming peoples of their rights. This, he said, is part of a continuous policy of attacking Republika Srpska.
Through the so-called “endangered democratic rights of the citizen,” Karan claimed, the same actors obstruct the functioning of the state and directly violate the Constitution of BiH and the entirety of the Dayton Agreement. They argue that the need for societal democratization in the form of a “one person, one vote” system is the only correct democratic system while characterizing the participation of collectives alongside citizens in political life as undesirable and undemocratic.
Professor Karan concluded that unitarist ideas must be countered with “genuine” federalism as an expression of unity in diversity.
Source: RTRS
