Together with the Slovenian EU Presidency and the Mission of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the EU, ESI showed the film “Bosnia - A Miracle that does not shine”, part of the documentary series “Return to Europe”, in Brussels on 28 May 2008. This 52-minute documentary shows both the achievements made and the difficulties that still exist in this country that experienced a brutal war between 1992 and 1995.

So far the achievements outweigh the difficulties and that Bosnia suffers from a bad image that is no longer justified. ESI research conducted in Bosnia over the last two years shows that Bosnia’s peoples have found ways to live, work and do business together again and that particularly at the local level things work rather well - which is a miracle given Bosnia’s war legacy, but a miracle that has not yet begun to shine.

I advocated that Bosnia consider applying for EU membership soon, given that Montenegro and Albania plan to do so in a few months and Serbia will do so if a pro-European government is formed following the 11 May elections. Otherwise Bosnia risks becoming the last in the queue of Western Balkan countries striving to join the EU.

In recent months, there has been progress in Bosnia’s integration process. In mid-April, the political parties agreed on two police laws that have opened the way to the signing of a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the EU, now scheduled for 16 June. The associated trade-related Interim Agreement will then go into effect on 1 July. On 26 May, the European Commission launched a visa liberalisation dialogue with Bosnia, which will lead to the abolishment of the visa requirement for entry in the Schengen area once Bosnia meets a series of benchmarks. Such dialogues are conducted with all Western Balkans countries.

Some 60 people attended the event. The screening of the film was followed by a reception with drinks and Bosnian culinary specialties, offered by the Slovenian Permanent Representation and the Mission of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Bosnia documentary will be broadcast by 3sat, a satellite channel shared by German-language public broadcasters from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, on Sunday, 1 June, at 21:00. The series “Return to Europe” aims to familiarise viewers with the Balkan region and its people, their dreams and hopes, and their struggle for a better future. ESI has contributed its research, contacts and expertise to this series, which is one of the most comprehensive and ambitious European TV project about the Balkans in recent years.

Part of ESI’s recent Bosnia research has been published in the report “A Bosnian Fortress”, which takes a look at the situation in Republika Srpska. A second report examining the state of affairs in the Bosniak-Croat Federation will be published in the coming months.

Audience

Gerald Knaus

Audience watching the film

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Ljubljana is a fantastic place, it truly is. I have been here before but rarely has it struck me as forcefully as this time how pleasant the capital of Slovenia can be.

This was a short trip indeed, and I spent little more than 30 hours here, but there was no shortage of the most pleasant sensations: sitting in the evening near the main church in an outside cafe along the river, listening to a musician playing love songs on his guitar; walking through the old town in the early evening, up the hill to the medieval castle, to enjoy a view of the mountains that are so close to the city; listening to an orchestra performing classical music on a huge square in the middle of the old town; or simply eating Slovenian ham or Austrian rolls (Semmel) in the morning. All this makes life appear easy indeed: and the fairy-tale atmosphere of the old town compounds this sense of Lebensfreude. I had no profound thoughts here, except that sometimes it does not take much to be happy and to enjoy beauty and peace. And that this town is certainly worth coming back to for a slightly longer stay than this.

Of course, what added to Ljubljana’s charm on this special occasion was the fact that due to the Slovenian presidency - for a few months - this capital had become one of the centres of Europe. For this very reason the annual WDR Europaforum was held here, bringing an interesting mix of people to the medieval castle overlooking the town. Here they gathered, and from over-heared conversations it seemed that almost all were as impressed by the town as I was: there was Barroso, Poettering, the Turkish foreign minister Ali Babacan, Kosovo’s new premier Hashim Thaci, prominent Slovenes (well, I knew two of them) and even more prominent Germans. WDR (part of the big ARD network, but in its own terms one of the biggest TV companies in the world) had turned the interior of the castle into a huge TV studio, to host its guests, thinking and debating the future of Europe.

Living in Istanbul, one often feels that there is little solid to hold on to, that the earth can shake (literally or politically) at any moment. This is even more true in this extraordinary spring. But is most of Europe today not more like Slovenia, from Portugal to Sweden and from Ireland to Estonia, than Turkey? Slovenia was part of a police state only two decades ago, embroiled in a bitter confrontation with Slobodan Milosevic. And today it is Slovenian diplomats chairing the gatherings of the European Council, speaking with confidence in the name of the hundreds of millions of EU citizens.

It is never good to be romantic in politics, and to some this may well appear a cliche, but in fact this is an extraordinary turn of events. And it is worth remembering that the overall trajectory of Europe since 1990 has been more like that of Slovenia than even an optimist could have expected then. So can one be anything but an optimist when one looks at the continent from the Slovenian capital, in itself one of the finest illustrations of the success of European enlargement?

(You can judge for yourself if I got carried away by the positive atmosphere, commenting on the challenges facing Europe today for WDR in the clip below.)

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