Dr Denisa Kostovicova and Dr Luke Cooper - Written Evidence (RUI0021)

 

Reconstruction of Ukraine: Priorities, Approaches and Recommendations through the lens of the Western Balkans

Evidence for the House of Lords European Affairs Committee: Implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for UK-EU relations

Dr Denisa Kostovicova and Dr Luke Cooper

10 November 2023

Denisa Kostovicova is an Associate Professor of Global Politics and Director of LSEE, the Programme on South East Europe, at the European Institute, the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the Principal Investigator of the project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) ‘Justice Interactions and Peacebuilding.’ Her research on post-conflict reconstruction focuses on accountability for human rights violations and political economy of transition. She is the author of Reconciliation by Stealth: How People Talk about War Crimes (Cornell University Press, 2023).

Luke Cooper is the Director of PeaceRep’s Ukraine programme and an Associate Professorial Research Fellow in International Relations with the Conflict and Civicness Research Group based at LSE IDEAS, the in-house foreign policy think tank at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has written extensively on nationalism, authoritarianism and the theory of uneven and combined development and is the author of Authoritarian Contagion (Bristol University Press, 2021).

We are submitting evidence based on the potential of our academic research about the European accession and post-war stabilisation of the Western Balkans and about the effects of the war on Ukraine from the political, economic and security perspective to inform the Inquiry’s examination of Ukraine’s reconstruction, addressed in questions 4 and 5 in the guidelines on contributing evidence.

Summary: Recommendations

 

 

 

 

 

1)  EU Accession and Post-Conflict States: multiplying policy instruments, minimising chances of success

When the war in Ukraine ends, Ukraine’s post-conflict transition will present a similar set of challenges as those that the European Union has encountered in the Western Balkans, and that it has addressed with various degrees of success and failure. Prior to the war (specifically, prior to 2014 annexation of Crimea and the onset of fighting in Donetsk and Luhansk), Ukraine’s potential EU accession and areas of reform to be addressed through the European integration process were akin to the accession of Central and East European candidates (such as, Slovakia, Czechia or Hungary, and others). These challenges would have been focused on the building of the strong and functioning democracy, market economy and the rule-of-law. They would have been aligned and evaluated through the prism of the Copenhagen criteria.

However, the impacts of the recent conflicts in Ukraine, culminating with Russia’s invasion in 2022, have changed the complexity of Ukraine’s European transformation required to fulfil conditions for EU membership. Post-war Ukraine will present a challenge of an entirely different order. This is because problems related to war legacies, that are political, economic and social, will overlay and intersect with challenges related to Ukraine’s post-Communist transition. The EU has thus far not found an effective way to address the problem of dual (post-Communist and war) legacies, and support effectively the alignment of the Western Balkan countries (notably, Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and North Macedonia) with the EU.

Over twenty years after the cessation of hostilities in the Western Balkans, most indicators of political and economic progress indicate regressive trends (e.g. democratic backsliding and entrenchment of corruption). The ‘hot peace’ marked by frozen and unresolved conflicts threatens to turn into a ‘hot conflict’ in the context of a new global geopolitical realignment prompted by the Ukraine war, as a recent outburst of violence in Kosovo demonstrated.

The biggest risk is that the process of Ukraine’s reconstruction under EU’s auspices, like that of the remaining Western Balkan aspirants (after Croatia’s accession in 2013), will be ridden with inequalities, blind spots and unintended consequences, leading to protracted domestic instability, with implications beyond Ukraine. In the highly fragmented geopolitical conditions emerging over the last decade, this brings significant risks of negative feedback loops.

Unless Ukraine’s integration with the European governance system is managed in a way sensitive to the risk of economic dislocation, prioritising building effective public institutions and supporting the wellbeing of the population, then there are clear downstream risks for the EU. When designing the approach to Ukraine’s reconstruction, while mobilising existing and designing new policy instruments, the EU needs to avoid the scenario whereby its involvement leads to post-conflict Ukraine’s greater divergence instead of convergence with the EU. This is a powerful lesson from the post-conflict reconstruction of the Western Balkans. 

The unique scope of transition challenges presented by the post-war Balkans, undergoing both the post-Communist transition and the post-conflict transition, have forced the EU to develop its policy instruments reactively. This has resulted in reinforcing the EU Accession process with the Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP), effectively a pre-accession process, while adding a dimension of Regional Cooperation and the cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, while, at the same time, also leveraging Foreign and Security Policy instruments and approaches to address unresolved conflicts, notably Kosovo but also lingering tensions in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

But, multiplying policy instruments has neither increased the chances of success nor accelerated reform processes required for progress on the path to EU membership, despite some wins, such as the resolution of North Macedonia’s name dispute. There are two key reasons for such a development: 1) EU’s policy instruments have not provided an effective policy framework for addressing the negative effects of the societies’ war-time transformation. The political economy of war has led to forging new relationships between political, economic and military elites. These informal relationships have been entrenched in the post-war period. They were exploited for the benefit of elites at the expense of building market economy and the rule of law, undermining the development of democracy along the way in the context of weak institutions, and 2) multiple instruments employed by the EU have often worked across purposes. They have often undermined progress in the EU accession process and security stabilisation, instead of working together to resolve conflict(s) while accelerating the candidates’ EU accession.

A holistic approach needs to be adopted in the reconstruction of Ukraine via the EU integration process to address appropriately the combined legacy of post-Communist and post-conflict transition. However, this approach needs to ensure that different policy instruments trigger positive feedback loops and put the country on the trajectory of convergence with the EU. For example, the investment in rebuilding of infrastructure needs to spread the benefits of reconstruction equally rather than promote distinct market players and their monopolies.

2)  EU’s new approach to European Accession

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has been met by considerable resistance from Ukraine’s state and society. As Ukraine has hitherto maintained its cohesion as a sovereign entity, the war has retained its conventional character. This means, like other conventional wars in history, it should come to some form of conclusion (and avoid a situation of intractable violence like we see in other conflict sites when authority breaks down and a multitude of armed actors proliferate). Much of the intergovernmental debate – from Ukraine’s economic recovery to its security and trade relationships – seeks to prepare for this ‘day after’ the war. There is a danger, in this context, that Ukraine may prematurely adopt economic liberalisation measures in preparation for future EU membership which are very unsuitable to the reality of a war situation. The latter poses a need for significant state intervention at the level of supply and demand to offset the freezing up of markets seen in wartime.

Sympathy for Ukraine’s goals, in tandem with the geopolitical impacts of the war, has also generated political pressure for Ukraine’s EU membership. Yet, Ukraine’s geographical size combined with the complexity of its internal economic development (with highly productive largescale agriculture co-existing with large numbers of subsistence farmers and a labour-intensive industrial sector) presents tremendous challenges for integration into the European single market. While there is a recognition that European governance will need to transform in order to address this, presently this conundrum tends to be viewed from the perspective of the interests of EU states, i.e. the impact that Ukraine’s membership will have on fiscal flows without changes to the rules (turning large numbers of EU states from net receivers into contributors), the difficulty in applying the Common Agricultural Policy to a country with such large farms, and the risks of paralysis in the EU decision-making structures.

To address these problems, a recent Franco-German policy paper, has proposed a range of reforms including a more flexible use of opt outs (what historically had tended to be seen as an exceptional concession would now become more normalised), an expanded fiscal capacity for the EU budget and reform of the distributive mechanisms of the EU's Multiannual Financial Framework. While these are all important issues, it is too often automatically assumed that rapid integration into the single market will ipso facto generate positive development outcomes. This is not the case. In fact, Ukraine’s economic integration into the EU has to be carefully designed and managed to avoid unintended consequences. A very rapid accession of an economy with an overall low productive capacity and where the majority of the population are ‘just getting by’ into the very competitive environment of the single market could compound Ukraine’s economic difficulties, especially in a situation, in which the risk environment for investment remains difficult due to the Russian threat.

In this context, priority should be given to the following issues:

Furthermore, the EU needs to carefully consider how it will coordinate and support parallel accession processes in the South East (the Western Balkans) and in the East (Ukraine and Moldova). Russia’s war on Ukraine has turned the accession process into the EU’s strategic priority. The war has accelerated Ukraine’s European integration as well as forced the EU to reengage with the Western Balkans politically, diplomatically, and strategically. After years of deadlock in the EU accession, Accession negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia, were formally opened in July 2022 and Bosnia and Herzegovina was granted candidate country status in December 2022 on the heels of the EU’s decision to grant candidate country status to Moldova and Ukraine in June 2022. At the same time, the EU has approached the stalled Serbia-Kosovo dialogue with a renewed vigour. The EU has backed its re-engagement with a new, significant financial package for the Western Balkans.

The EU needs to be vigilant about how the European integration processes in both regions intersect. They will not necessarily be mutually reinforcing and complementary. The news of Ukraine’s and Moldova’s accelerated EU accession was met with a considerable degree of resentment in the Western Balkans, even among the region’s Europeanists. The speed of Ukraine’s accession path is viewed against the background of the region’s two decades of being in the EU’s waiting room (despite half-hearted reform efforts). Importantly, although the EU insists on the merit-based accession in all cases, some in the Western Balkans take the EU’s geopolitical reason for embracing EU’s enlargement as a signal of laxer conditionality going forward, and, others even as a carte blanche to continue to feign reforms while benefiting from EU funds. Furthermore, envisaged disparity in financial support from the EU going towards Ukraine’s reconstruction may further entrench views about EU prioritising Eastern partners and embolden efforts in the Western Balkans to turn to conditions-free funding from other sources, e.g. China, Russia, Turkey, and others―the trend that has already started prompted in part by the perceived lack of political will in the EU for enlargement prior to Ukraine’s war.

While post-Brexit, the UK has lost credibility in the Western Balkans as a backer of the region’s EU integration, in the current geopolitical moment, the UK may act as a ‘translator’ of the EU’s policies towards Ukraine and Moldova in the Western Balkans, while providing an outside perspective on the perils of possible negative interaction of the two European parallel integration processes in its interactions with the EU.

3)  Economic Marginalisation of Women and the Continuum of Gender-Based Violence

The UK is uniquely positioned to advocate and advise on centring gender-sensitivity into the programming of reconstruction efforts, drawing on its expertise of driving of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda globally. This is essential to avoid marginalisation of women through the reconstruction, including violence against women.

Wars have contradictory impacts on women. On the one hand, the experience of war can lead to the political and economic empowerment of women, as women take over some of traditional male roles and jobs. On the other, women have a different experience of violence, for example, as victims of wartime sexual violence. The benefits of women’s wartime empowerment are often lost during the post-war transition, while women victims of sexual and gender-based violence find themselves in even more precarious position. In the Western Balkans, women’s post-war marginalisation has been enhanced by a combination of the effects of free-market reforms instituted through the EU accession process and free market reforms at the top-down end of the EU accession, and inadequate attention to civil society support in this area at the bottom-up end of the EU integration process. As a consequence, women have found themselves in a precarious position socially and economically, while women victims of violence have been most likely to be victims of violence after conflict (both intimate partner violence and violence in the informal economy). Alarming numbers of women killed through post-conflict violence, for example in Serbia, has been labelled ‘femicide’.

In short, women are marginalised by masculinisation of societies through war, which is exacerbated by gendered effects of neoliberal economic reforms that affects women adversely. Hence, the Western Balkan experience demonstrates the need to pay attention to how different approaches to reconstruction, both its political, economic and social dimensions integrate policy calibrated to enhance gender equality, e.g. inclusion of women in the labour market, in general, and how they address trauma caused by the gender-based and other violence, where the intervention should not only focus on the victims but also on broader micro-level (family and community) systems of support and rehabilitation. This includes paying attention and supporting local actors and their capacity to formulate and back gender-sensitive policies, e.g. women members of parliament on how to effectively support the needs of women, especially in relation to gender-based violence.

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda developed out of the activism of global civil society at the United Nations from 2000 onwards against the backdrop of gender-based violence in the wars of the 1990s, including but, of course, by no means limited to the Western Balkans. Through the multilateral governance space, it has since been adopted by numerous states, governments and international organisations. Ukraine adopted its first National Action Plan for Women, Peace and Security in 2016 in the context of the first Russian invasion of Ukraine, which was focused largely on women serving in the military, and its second in 2020, which was subsequently revised in 2022 following the full-scale Russian invasion. While these developments are all positive, there remains gaps and weaknesses in how WPS is interpreted which point to the need for a focus on a more holistic account of security and wellbeing. As Christin Chinkin and Oksana Potapova have argued in a 2023 report for the London School of Economics, this points to the need for several elements: 

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Further reading

Bojicic-Dzelilovic, V., Kostovicova, D. and Suerdem, A.K., (2022). “Persistence of informal networks and liberal peace-building: evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina”. Journal of International Relations and Development, 25(1), pp.182-209.

Chinkin, C., and Potapova, O. (2023). Women, Peace and Security: National Action Plans in the UK and Ukraine (PeaceRep Policy Brief). Conflict and Civicness Research Group, London School of Economics.

Cooper, L. (2023). Insourcing the war-economy: Building a resilient Ukraine means maximising its domestic output (PeaceRep Ukraine policy brief). Conflict and Civicness Research Group, London School of Economics.

Cooper, L. (2022). Market economics in an all-out-war? Assessing economic and political risks to the Ukrainian war effort. Conflict and Civicness Research Group, The London School of Economics.

Kostovicova, D. Bojicic-Dzelilovic, V. and Henry, M., (2020). “Drawing on the continuum: A war and post-war political economy of gender-based violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 22(2), pp.250-272.

Kostovicova, D. and Popovski, V., (2023). “Women’s discursive agency in transitional justice policy-making: A feminist institutionalist approach.” Review of International Studies, 49(4), pp.721-740.

Vlasiuk, V., and Milakovsky, B. (2023). “Insourcing” the Recovery: Maximizing engagement of Ukrainian manufacturers in reconstruction efforts (PeaceRep Ukraine policy brief). Conflict and Civicness Research Group, London School of Economics.

 

Received 10 November

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