Borders, Security, and Welfare

York Hall B206. Discussant: Prof. Dagmar Soennecken

Security Sector Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Limitations of ‘Europeanization’

Ayla Sljivar

Security sector reforms (SSR) generally refers to a process in Western-based international development and democratization to make changes to the security sector of a state towards good governance and its principles, such as freedom of information and the rule of law. SSR has become a vital part of the European Union’s (EU) efforts to transform the Western Balkans from a conflict-ridden area into a stable and democratic part of Europe. This paper will focus on SSR in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) as a case study of the multidimensional and complex Europeanization policies employed by the EU in the region. The research will examine the changes in two sectors of BiH security system with the aim of providing understanding of the EU’s impact on the domestic environments of candidate states. The main argument is that the EU used police and intelligence reforms in BiH (both of which were part of the SSR efforts in the country) as state-building tools. However, due to Bosnia’s lack of domestic competence and the inexperience of the EU to properly and effectively implement SSR, the reforms have had a mixed record of success and demonstrate the limitations of the region’s Europeanization.

Ayla Sljivar was born in Toronto, Ontario and proudly raised by Bosnian parents. She is currently completing her undergraduate degree in International Studies with a minor in French Studies at Glendon. Her field of interests include migration studies and refugee protection.

How to Stop It: Has the EU met its Goals to Halt Terrorism?

Anahid Najafizadeh

This paper will describe and analyze the goals of the ‘Pursue’ commitment under the European Union (EU) Counter-Terrorism Strategy, which employs the governance of the European Commission, European Parliament, and the Council of the EU to prevent terrorism for European community safety. Given the rise of attacks in Europe, this investigation will reveal insight on the EU’s compliance to security commitments. As one of the commitments in the Strategy, Pursue aims to impede terrorist activity, with goals including pursuing terrorists, coordinating police and judicial efforts, implementing legislation among Member States, impeding the access to weapons and financing for terrorists, and helping national counter-terrorism projects. To analyze whether the EU met, fully or partially, the Pursue goals of the Strategy, this paper will investigate the actions of the EU and its governing institutions following the recent wave of attacks in Europe, starting in 2015 in Paris to 2017 in Barcelona. This paper argues that given the series of events that occurred preceding and following the 2015 to 2017 terror attacks, Member States failed to share information, use important data systems, and decrease the access to weapons, which then aided terrorist activity and movement across borders. However, while there were failures, the Pursue commitment should not be abandoned, as many successes in fighting terrorism can be attributed to it and the Strategy as a whole. A set of important questions arise from this paper regarding the foundations of such an effort to combat terrorism, which can be the focus of further research. These include normative questions, such as whether the EU ought to have a counter-terrorism mandate, given its supranational nature, as well as questions regarding the extent to which such a mandate would require the EU to supplement national efforts without blurring lines of sovereignty.

Anahid Najafizadeh is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto. She is pursuing a specialist in political science with a minor in European Union studies. Her academic interests include researching and analyzing European affairs, counter-terrorism, populism, migration, welfare systems, and integration with the European Union. Anahid plans on completing a master’s degree and working at an international level. At the University of Toronto, she has been involved in competitive debate, the G7 and G20 Research Groups, Students for Partners in Health Canada, and the StarLab for Mind and Development. Anahid spends her free time playing tennis, acting, and worrying about graduate school applications.

Policy discussion regarding climate migration in the European Union

Charlotte Schwarz

The link between climate change and migration is receiving increased attention from scholars, policymakers and NGO’s. While much theorization exists on the concept ‘climate refugee’, few studies focus on policy discussion and development. This project examines policy discussion regarding climate refugees within the European Union. The overarching question is as follows: how has the discussion regarding climate refugees developed from the period of 1999-2019? I place particular focus on how discussion regarding climate refugees evolved before and after the 2015 migration crisis. To answer this question, I surveyed the website of the European Parliament, European Commission and European Council to look for documents that discuss, or are dedicated to, climate refugees. The project then analyses key documents published by the European Union that discuss climate migration. It then looks at all Parliamentary debates on migration from 1999-2019 to examine at how climate induced migration has been brought up in discussions on migration. Using the Advocacy Coalition Framework as a guide, I examine how ideas and groups are beginning to form around climate migration in the EU. With help from the literature on climate migration, and on the EU’s external approach to migration, I develop three primary frames which I use to analyze the discussion at the EU level. These are the preventative/adaptive frame, the securitization/crisis rhetoric frame and the calls for protection frame. I hypothesized that the preventative/adaptive frame would be dominant in policy discussion before the migration crisis. However, I anticipated that there would be a shift toward the securitization/crisis rhetoric frame after 2015 – in line with an overall increase in securitization of migration. By providing a detailed account of the state of the debate at the EU level, and an analysis of how the debate has progressed over time, I provide some preliminary insights into where policy development may occur at the EU level.

Charlotte Schwarz holds a Master’s degree in Political Studies from Queen’s University. She was awarded the Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGSM) for her major research project which focused on policy discussion regarding climate refugees in the European Union. She pursued her undergraduate degree at St. Thomas University, in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where she completed a double-honours in Political Science and Great Books with a minor in International Relations. She had the opportunity to present her undergraduate thesis topic, which focused on Canada’s Arctic policy and its relationship with Russia, at a conference at Hokkaido University.  Throughout her Master’s degree she has become increasingly interested in migration, integration, nationalism and the politics of changing borders.

Beyond Welfare Nationalism and Liberal Transnationalism? Habermas vs. Streeck and the Future of the European Monetary Union

Igor Shoikhedbrod

The Eurozone crisis has been marked by economic devastation in Greece and the ongoing phenomenon of BREXIT. These turbulent events have spawned a normative debate about the tension between democratically-enacted law and the imperatives of financial markets. The most vocal contributors to this debate have been two eminent German intellectuals, Jürgen Habermas and Wolfgang Streeck, who have offered competing proposals for either reforming or dissolving the European Monetary Union (EMU). Streeck has been critical of the EMU and the transfer of democratic sovereignty to capital-friendly officials in Brussels, prompting his proposal for dissolving the supranational union. Habermas, for his part, has observed that the crisis of the European Union is one in which technocrats lack sufficient pressure for taming financial markets in accordance with popular demands for social justice. Rejecting Streeck’s yearning for a strong nation state, Habermas has called for constitutional reform at the supranational level. Habermas’s plea for an enlarged Europe has been met by a scathing critique on the part of Streeck, who contends that technocracy belies the asymmetrical power relations imbricated in the governing structure of the EMU. In this presentation, I will explore the following questions: are democracy and capitalism drifting further apart and thwarting the pursuit of social justice within the EMU, as Streeck contends? Can the balance between democratic constitutionalism and markets be reinstated in the transnational vision suggested by Habermas? Is there an  alternative to welfare nationalism and liberal transnationalism in the era of global financialized capitalism?  Renewed anxiety about the rise of various forms of nationalism and populism cannot be examined in abstraction from the economic debts and burdens confronting individuals and states. My presentation aims to illuminate the normative stakes of the Habermas-Streeck debate in the context of economic precariousness and resurgent nationalism.

Igor Shoikhedbrod received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto. He is currently adjunct professor in the Ethics, Society & Law Program at Trinity College and Postdoctoral Fellow the University of Toronto Centre for Ethics.