Published in P. Siani-Davis (ed.), International Intervention in the Balkans since 1995. London, Routledge, pp. 136-157. ISBN 0-41529834-2.

From Kanun to Capacity-Building: The ‘Internationals’, Civil Society Development and Security in the Balkans

Steven Sampson

INTRODUCTION

Any development organisation operates with certain ‘articles of faith’. In the opaque world of Balkan democracy assistance, one encounters an almost religious belief that civil society organisations will help create dialogue, reconciliation, and stable institutions. From the perspective of ‘Balkan security’, the building of civil society is supposed to generate more internal security in the region. A ‘healthy’ civil society sector - often equated with a large number of NGOs - is supposed to provide the proper ‘climate’ for the development of democratic culture, for the promotion of human rights, and for an effective, accountable government. Civil society development, it is argued, will help communities take more control over their lives. Civil society will act as a watchdog on irresponsible or incompetent officials, and civil society development will empower groups to make decisions and improve their lives. In this sense, a healthy civil society is supposed to enhance individual and group security. Following this line of thinking, civil society development makes political life more secure. It enables and pushes governments to respect human rights. Civil society development is seen as a win-win solution.

This chapter argues that such efforts to build civil society also create new forms of tension: both internal tensions within Balkan societies and tensions between the various local and international actors. Paul Stubbs has gone so far as to call international interventions to build civil society a form of ‘colonialism’.1 Inasmuch as colonialism is a source of insecurity, a more serious reflection on foreign interventions is certainly called for. Regrettably, such reflection tends to take the form of ‘donor bashing’ in which donors are criticised by Western scholars or by disgruntled locals for being uninformed, patronising, naive or corrupt. This critique fails to problematise the complex links between donors, recipients and the many intermediaries in the democracy assistance ‘chain’. Understanding these linkages can help elucidate those factors that increase or imperil the security climate in the Balkans. Civil society development, then, is not a win-win solution. There are costs, and a failure to understand these may ultimately impede the development of Balkan societies toward long-term political stability, social justice, and non-violent conflict resolution.

Civil society programs, I argue, may in fact stimulate new kinds of tensions and fissures in these societies. My conclusion will be that we must deal better with the contradictions generated by local social structures. The same social mechanisms which create trust and solve

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problems, the ‘homegrown models’, are also those which may create uncertainty and anxiety in the Balkans. The same social structures which provide people with security in an otherwise insecure social and political environment may also create the climate for insecurity and perpetuation of tensions in other contexts. The same informal loyalties which help groups survive oppression and resist authority are also those which carry out smuggling operations, corrupt police, erupt into ethnic violence and keep silent at the suffering of others. To put it more concretely, the Balkans – so well known for family loyalty, effusive hospitality, blood brotherhood, the customary law such as the Albanian kanun, the colourful weddings, quaint traditions, intense friendship networks, and ethnic solidarity – the Balkans also contains eternal blood feud, vicious banditry, pervasive baksheesh, endemic corruption, murder for revenge, and ethnic cleansing. Civil society development projects are supposed to eliminate the latter as threats, replacing the dominance of primordial ties with ties of interest and citizenship. Such changes do not come about without costs, and invariably lead people to stubbornly, even violently, defend the maintenance of these ties. Programs to alter tradition, I will argue, create new tensions, and these tensions may even aggravate the security situation. Dealing with this problem requires a new understanding of ‘homegrown models’. It requires an understanding of how to establish trust between donors and recipients and how to maintain this trust. It is, after all, trust which resolves conflicts, and it is a failure of trust which allows them to get out of hand. Understanding how these structures of trust operate can help elucidate the costs involved in even the most well-intentioned civil society development schemes.

This chapter focuses, therefore, on the nature of civil society development and its dual role in both enhancing security and insecurity in the Balkans. It begins by outlining an anthropological concept of security. It then describes the ways in which civil society projects, with all their laudable intentions, can also generate insecurity, especially for those groups who feel themselves (or are pushed) outside the Balkan development process. Finally, it offers some conclusions about how our Western models can be combined with home-grown models of Balkan associational life. Many of my examples and the analysis come from my own participation in various civil society development projects in the region, where I have worked for various agencies in Romania, Bosnia and Albania, and where I am currently researching democracy assistance in Kosovo. CIVIL SOCIETY INTERVENTION

As is the case with so many international empowerment discourses, civil society is replete with virtue.2 Programs emphasising ‘openness’, ‘accountability’, ‘transparency’, ‘good governance’ and ‘community empowerment’ via ‘advocacy’ are so unimpeachable that no one could possibly oppose them in principle. All that’s needed, in the language of international aid, is to ‘build capacity’. Building capacity requires a concerted effort from the various actors in the ‘donor community’. These capacity-building efforts take the form of projects, programs and training. Successful mobilization of these resources requires continuing ‘donor coordination’.

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Foreign interventions for democracy operate on the premise that something is missing. That ‘something’ is ‘civil society’. In fact, civil society, here understood as informal groups and independent formal civic organisations, existed in the Balkans even in the socialist period (notably in Yugoslavia). Many operated as opposed or subversive to the state (the parallel institutions of the Kosovar Albanians; various groups of intellectuals, sports clubs, etc.). In this sense, civil society had the characteristics of being oppositional or underground. The interventions that we now term ‘civil society development’ began in earnest immediately after the end of the cold war, partly financed by the EU-Phare program in Eastern Europe. What began as post-communist development initiatives in the early 1990s evolved into post-conflict assistance after the wars in Bosnia and in Kosovo. Post-communist assistance appeared in Albania in 1994 and more recently in post-Milošević Serbia (it should be remembered that the Soros Foundation, as usual, was far ahead of similar EU and USAID initiatives).

The results of civil society development are impressive if one peruses the statistics, websites and other activities. In Romania, a country now governed by some of the same people who crushed the civil society movements of early 1990 and allowed for ethnic riots and miners’ rampages in the country, civil society and NGO development has been proceeding apace for nearly a decade, so that the country has 25,000 registered NGOs and several hundred high profile organizations.3 In Bulgaria there are 7,000. At last count, Albania had abut 900 NGOs, Bosnia some 1,500 and Kosovo about 700. The figures are meaningful only as an indicator of legal registrations, but do form some kind of index of organized social activity in which foreign grants also play a role.

There exist innumerable studies of the civil society sectors in all these countries. I have personally participated in some of these and am familiar with numerous studies, as well as critiques.4 After years of assessing, planning, implementing, and evaluating, some reflection on these efforts is sorely needed. From a security standpoint, such reflection is also imperative, since security in the Balkans now involves not so much the security of national borders and territories, but also more everyday problems of human security: protection from ethnic violence, and the ability to control one’s own future by having a secure home, adequate health, education, environment and civil administration. As borders become stabilized and the various governments establish their EU accession schedules, their association agreements and their NATO cooperation plans, the non-military, human security aspects have taken on more importance. Like ‘human rights’ and ‘development’, the concept of ‘security’ has now become ever more inclusive. In this sense, a ‘vibrant civil society sector’ is now perceived not only as a precondition for democracy, but also as a precondition for ensuring security, as, for example, in the Stability Pact for South-Eastern Europe.

From a security standpoint, the many civil society initiatives in the Balkans - foreign, local, governmental, multilateral and private - present us with a paradox. On the one hand, there is a large, prominent NGO sector, with dedicated activists passionately trying to achieve community improvements or influence decision-makers. These people have their own networks of cooperation, as well as their everyday competitions and conflicts. These NGO

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activists speak their own language, the language of projects and donors, and they interact regularly within the plethora of projects, meetings, conferences and training seminars which characterize NGO life.

On the other hand, despite the prominence of the NGOs, many security problems seem to persist, in many ways untouched by this intervention. In other words, the creation of civil society organisations in these countries, while it may create new opportunities for selected individuals and groups (Anglophone intellectuals familiar with Western donor concerns), civil society development, may also create insecurity for those who see themselves ‘outside the loop’. Let us examine, therefore, how civil society development as a Western project affects the security situation. In pursuing this discussion, I will begin by presenting my own anthropological view of a security environment in the Balkans.

AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF SECURITY

Security has to do with perception of capacities and threats. In this sense, any definition of a specific security situation - individual, group, national or regional - is linked to the factors which cause a person, group or state to view their environment as insecure. Hence, to understand what creates a ‘sense of security’ requires an understanding of the sources of ‘insecurity’. Insecurity is not an objective, observable state. It is an interpretation. Insecurity hinges on the perceptual state of the actors involved. It is about perceptions of external threats and the way these particular perceptions, fears and threats become sources of action. What the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires saw as a state of insecurity in the Balkans a century ago, what today’s international community regards as insecurity, and the kinds of insecurities perceived by people living in the Balkans differ substantively. It is only in times of international crisis – when several international actors must react quickly to social movements, revolutions, wars, campaigns -- that these perceptions coalesce.

Let me provide an example of how the security situation was viewed by a particular set of actors known as “the international community” in Kosovo. The setting is a provincial town in Kosovo in late 1999, where I was carrying out an NGO survey. In order to meet various aid organizations working with local NGOs, I would attend aid coordination meetings. In most of the these meetings, a key topic included a ‘security briefing’ for the international aid workers. ‘Security’ in this context was understood simply as personal safety. Breeches of security had to do either with strangers disrupting international aid work or with unreasonable risk-taking by foreign personnel, such as not reporting itineraries, driving around alone at night or not wearing plastic ID badges. This was the security situation for ‘the internationals’ The ‘security situation’ for minority Serbs at that time was rather different. They were complaining that their houses were being set on fire, there were drive-by shootings, stoning of their escorted buses, kidnappings and murders, and fortified checkpoints beyond which they could not go. Finally, Kosovar Albanians talked about their security in terms of robberies and violent crimes, as well as the security of Kosovo from Serb military intervention if NATO withdrew its forces. In post-conflict Bosnia and Kosovo, then, the security environment was different for ethnic majority, minority and international

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populations. These differences are founded on both objective and subjective factors, with assessments being considered by others accurate, understated or exaggerated.

Zygmunt Bauman, in discussing the human consequences of globalisation, has tried to explicate the various understandings of security and insecurity. Bauman’s discussion has relevance for the current Balkan situation, and for the way in which internationally funded civil society initiatives in the region affect security perceptions.5 Bauman distinguishes between three understandings of security/insecurity. First, there is an understanding of insecurity as ‘uncertainty’, as a cognitive state of affairs in which we are unable to adequately assess those factors in our environment which affect our behaviour. The solution to the problem of uncertainty is knowledge, especially knowledge about risks. In Bosnia in 1997, security assessments had changed drastically compared to a year earlier. The risk of violence was assessed as acceptable by hundreds of Serb youths who came to Sarajevo to attend a rock concert by the group ‘U2’,and indeed, there were no incidents. Today in Pristina, some Serbs may walk, still escorted, from the Grand Hotel a few metres down the main street to a pizza restaurant, something extraordinary compared to two years ago. An assessment of their security situation would not permit much more, however. As some Kosovar Serbs have cynically remarked, the threat to Serbs in Kosovo has been reduced because so many Serbs have simply left. The point here is that risk, uncertainty and security are viewed as cognitive and evaluatory processes.

Of course, all security assessments are not equally authoritative. Ultimately, interpretations of security/insecurity reflect the authority of those carrying out the risk assessment. An assessment becomes accurate insofar as it is given legitimacy by others. Authority derives from the ability to control the assessments of others, to dismiss or censure the assessments of those who may not have a ‘full understanding of the entire situation’.

Where security is seen as an evaluative assessment, knowledge about the world is supposed to make us realistically understand risks. With more certainty, we achieve more control, therefore less fear, and we act in ways which do not intimidate others, hence less violence. This is the logic of pursuing security understood as certainty. It is the work of think tanks, public policy institutes, risk assessment exercises and consulting tasks. Enhancing security is also the work of the various ‘dialogue’, ‘reconciliation’ and ‘confidence-building’ measures, so beloved by international development projects, in which efforts are made to change the perceptions of others so that they obtain a realistic picture of their potential sources of insecurity.

Bauman’s second understanding of security is emotional. Here insecurity comes from anxiety. This anxiety results from a lack of control over our environment and produces emotional rage, hatred and a desire for revenge on others. It leads to violence and even genocide, conceived as a form of self-defence. Since these fears and anxieties are also interpretations, albeit intensely meaningful ones, they can be allayed by providing certain symbolic markers. In Bosnia and Kosovo the various military checkpoints and patrols of the international security forces (SFOR/KFOR) are supposed to ease fears and create a climate of

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security. They do this not so much by preventing actions as by creating a tone. The resultant reduction in angst is supposed to enable a better judgement of the uncertainties of a situation, insofar as control over fears enables a more objective assessment of risks. Emotionally insecure environments – those which produce anxiety -- are therefore also environments of uncertainty. And uncertainty makes us fearful. At the cognitive level, it leads to explanations which focus not on causes but on scapegoats, and it produces understandings which are conspiratorial. ‘Why is this happening?’ invariably becomes ‘Whose fault is it?’. Seen in anthropological terms, the search for scapegoats is a modern form of witchcraft accusations.

The dual understanding of insecurity as uncertainty and anxiety, says Bauman, is most apparent when we try to concretise these existential fears. This is the discourse of personal safety, and for Bauman ‘safety’ is the third understanding of security with which we operate. A quest for physical safety in the form of safe spaces, of bodies kept safe from the violence of others, is our concrete response to the more abstract forces of uncertainty and anxiety. The Yugoslav wars were often about turning ambiguous, co-inhabited spaces into ethnically cleansed areas, places safe for Serbs, or for Croats or for Muslims, since mixing itself was perceived by some actors as a source of insecurity. The military solutions inflicted in the Serb enclaves of Croatia, throughout Bosnia, and in Kosovo were all about banishing uncertainty and insecurity through the creation of safe, physically demarcated space. The contradictions of this creation of safe spaces is no more graphically illustrated than in Mitrovica, the divided city in northern Kosovo, where the UN administration, with KFOR military support, has established a ‘zone of confidence’ in which Albanians, Serbs, Roma, and Slavic-speaking Muslims known as Bosniaks, and Roma, can meet members of other groups. The problem is that this small area near the bridge separating the largely Albanian south and the largely Serb north, is surrounded by barbed wire and military guards. The confidence zone, adjoining the bridge, is also monitored by the so-called Serb ‘bridge watchers’, who may attack Albanians who try to visit the Serb side or Serbs who have been in the zone or seem to be too friendly with their Albanian guests. Anyone in this zone can be seen by their co-ethnics as “consorting with the enemy”. The militarised ‘zone of confidence’, ostensibly a place of safety, has made life insecure for those who walk across the bridge back to the Serb enclave, or who leave the zone to rejoin the Albanian community in the south of Mitrovica. Security and insecurity are contextual, linked in the spatial and social perceptions of the various actors.

An anthropology of security and insecurity would therefore have the following elements: instead of a top-down analysis of capacities and desires by various parties, it would seek to describe how the actors themselves experience fears and threats to their person, group, or political environment. An anthropology of security and insecurity would seek to describe how people articulate these fears: the kinds of explanations (or conspiracies) they offer to account for uncertainty or insecurity. An anthropology of security and insecurity, therefore, would describe the relationship between how people view the world and how they act upon it, i.e. the kind of cultural practices intended to deal with pervasive uncertainty, existential anxiety and personal safety. It would attempt to understand how people try to control their world through manipulating concepts, how they legitimise or undermine the authority to

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certain discourses, and how they act to make their world more certain, less intimidating and more safe. This understanding of security presented here is both larger and smaller than the kind of understandings normally purveyed in ‘security studies’. The ‘world’ in security studies is a geopolitical one of interests, political units (nations, states, regions), of threats to these units, and of global forces. The security I speak of here, anthropologically, is about an experiential world, in which certainty, emotional tranquillity and safety may coexist in time and space with other people’s interpretations of uncertainty, anxiety and danger. The same setting or event (a KFOR police unit searching a car in a minority enclave on a dark night) may generate security or insecurity depending on the actors and the context. Security is not a property of a given space or territory but of a social group. ‘Balkan security’ is therefore a misnomer. The question is not security in region ‘X’, but security for whom. Security is never a property of individuals, since individual understandings of security are always articulated in terms of a social world. Security is ‘in the head’, to be sure, but there are social factors which cause some perceptions to be interpreted in security/insecurity terms. In Albania, for example, thousands of villagers cannot leave their homes because their families are in a blood feud with another family; they do not have the same security environment as their neighbours in the same villages. However, all of them share the same security perceptions in terms of personal safety: that if you are ‘in blood’, it’s not good to leave your home. Similarly, the thousands of Serbs in Kosovo whose daily life is now limited to a stroll between two KFOR checkpoints at each end of the village perimeter, with the occasional military-escorted bus trip, are in a security environment quite different from the Kosovo Albanians who live in the same area. The same is true for the Muslims who have now returned to communities in eastern Bosnia. They have their homes, but not much of a public life. The Roma in their various quarters on the margins of Romanian, Macedonian or Kosovo towns live in different security environments from their neighbours, and from Roma elsewhere, and reveal this in their safety practices.

We thus need to understand the various sources of uncertainty, anxiety and danger in order to produce the kind of certainty, tranquility and safety which is supposed to accompany any process of stabilization. The research task, then, is to discover what it is that makes people insecure in their daily lives, to understand their perception of fears and threats. Since these will differ for various social and ethnic groups as well as outside actors, a full understanding of the security situation in the Balkans will require a mapping of the kinds of uncertainties that exist, the types of anxieties which these generate and the concrete safety problems that must be addressed. This “security map” would be a complex patchwork of uncertainties, anxieties and safety dilemmas overlapping ethnic and social groups and social classes.

In those post-conflict settings subjected to international intervention - Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan - security perceptions differ not only among the various social (citizens/political leaders) and ethnic groups (majorities/minorities) but also reflect the interaction of these perceptions with those of outsiders (aid personnel, international organisation functionaries, peace-keeping forces, etc.). In the Balkans, as elsewhere, both the

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very presence of outsiders and the outsiders’ authoritative perceptions of uncertainties, anxieties and safety risks affects how local groups view their own security environment. The hasty departure of foreign observers before the Kosovo bombing in 1999 was a signal of profound insecurity to the local population, just as their return afterwards signalled a new security environment.

CIVIL SOCIETY AND SECURITY

At the local level, the problems generated by uncertainty, anxiety and safety/risk/danger are the spark that mobilises people to join forces and find solutions, what we now call ‘civil society’. In this definition, civil society may comprise local initiatives among specific groups, informal community associations, political parties, and all the associational forms which lie above the ascriptive family, below the regulatory efforts of the state, and alongside the ruthless market. Understood as social activity rather than as a specific form of organization, civil society is nothing less than social problem-solving. It is a practical means of alleviating what people regard as their own insecurity and enhancing their security as they themselves see it. Such solutions for one group, of course, may entail increasing insecurity for others. Hence the need for a neutral public sphere to articulate and negotiate these needs.

A vibrant civil society can exist only if its political and resource environment is stable: if there is a state apparatus able to deliver basic services, a genuine public sphere, and a viable economy which can create a middle class. A society where people feel they have something to lose can create the support for associational life and institution-building. Under conditions of political chaos or economic downturn, which creates insecurity (anxiety), social self-organization takes on more desperate, subversive, even violent forms. These types of solutions, characterized by a lack of trust in institutions, are what we could call ‘uncivil society’. Where social life becomes a battleground between the forces of uncivil and civil society, civil society may be viewed as ‘weak’.

It is this latter situation which has characterized many transitional and post-conflict societies. The solution on the part of the international community is therefore to ‘build’ civil society. The question however, is ‘to build on what?’. The conceptual question is whether there are ‘foundations’ on which to ‘build’ civil society, or whether civil society has to be or, indeed, can be ‘imported from outside’. While all development actors (foreign and local) agree on the need to locate indigenous foundations, i.e., to mobilise the home-grown models for finding solutions, the practice of civil society development reveals a tendency towards implanting, exporting, or even cloning ‘outside models’ onto local realities. It is precisely this gap between idea and reality which forms the source of so many donor bashing discourses.

Even more important is the question of whether a vibrant civil society can in fact be created by the kinds of outside interventions associated with ‘civil society development’ schemes. Usually following on the heels of humanitarian or emergency assistance, civil society development is supposed to improve the security environment. Insofar as it identifies problems, it is supposed to facilitate a more rational understanding of the world. Insofar as it

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creates dialogue, it should facilitate common understandings among competing parties, or common knowledge of the perceptions of others. Insofar as it produces initiatives to cope with problems, it is also supposed to reduce anxiety by organizing citizens into purposeful activity. Civil society thus counteracts uncertainty/anxiety/risk and danger by creating zones or contexts of predictability/security/tranquillity. Civil society is supposed to make the world safer (Bauman’s third understanding of ‘security’), thus reducing the possibility of social conflict or violence. However, this effort can succeed only if those intervening to improve civil society understand the pre-intervention situation, including the locals’ own interpretation of their past, their social memory.

1 P. Stubbs, ‘Partnership or colonisation: the relationship between international agencies and

local non-government organizations in Bosnia-Herzegovina’ in Bob Deacon (ed.) Civil

Society, NGOs and Global Governance, Sheffield: Globalism and Social Policy Programme

(GASPP), 2000, pp.23--32.

2 M. Ottway and T. Carothers (eds) Funding Virture: Civil Society and Democracy

Promotion, Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001.

3 Foundation for Civil Society Development, Geographical Distribution of NGOs in

Romania, 2001. Available HTTP: <www.fdsc.ro> (ACCESSED); D. Petrescu, ‘Civil society

in Romania: from donor supply to citizen demand’, in M. Ottoway and T. Carothers (eds)

Funding Virtue, pp.217--42.

4 I. Smillie, Service Delivery or Civil Society? Non-Governmental Organisations in Bosnia

and Herzegovina, Zagreb: Care Canada, 1996; D. Bekkering, The World of Bosnian NGOs,

Sarajevo: UNOV Bosnian NGO Development Unit, 1996; Dialogue Development, Survey of

Bosnian Civil Society Organisations: Mapping, Characteristics and Strategies, Consulting

Report, EU Commission, Phare 96-1024.00, 1996. (dialogue@development.dk); Dialogue

Development, Bosnia Civil Society Development, Mapping Analysis, Strategy Options and

Programme Priorities, Consulting Report, EU Commission/Phare, 1997

(dialogue@development.dk); Dialogue Development, Kosovo Civil Society Development.

NGO Mapping Analysis, Consulting Report, EU Commission, 1999

(dialogue@development.dk); S. Sampson, ‘The social life of projects: importing civil society

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Probably the greatest error made in civil society development in the Balkans is the assumption that there was no social problem-solving prior to the arrival of foreign civil society development programs in the early 1990s. Balkan societies have often been interpreted as atomised, disorganized, tribalised or corrupt, and therefore lacking the institutions for problem-solving, conflict resolution or coalition-building which is the goal of so many civil society programs. In fact, Balkan societies have always contained mechanisms for dealing with everyday problems of uncertainty and insecurity, mechanisms based on kin groups, clan alliances, village communities, social networks, informal associations, charities, patron-client relations and strategic alliances of various kinds and duration. Such alliances hinge on the exchange of resources and relations of trust. As such, they closely resemble civil society practices. In contrast, an uncivil society is one of isolation and lack of trust; it is atomised, or molecular. Its security perceptions are articulated not as assessments but as accusations or conspiracy theories.

An appraisal of ‘the state of civil society’ in a given country is an assessment of whether the mechanisms for finding solutions (i.e., those listed above) are equipped to deal with problems generated by uncertainty, anxiety or risk/danger. At the most tragic level, the recent wars and conflicts in the Balkans revealed that traditional mechanisms lacked the capacity to operate in situations of extreme uncertainty (political and economic), social anxiety, and the kind of dangers produced by nationalist politics, pervasive media manipulation and ruthless repression. During the communist era, the elites sought to subvert or destroy social self-organisation. In Yugoslavia, unresolved ethnic tensions only made this task easier. Different ethnic groups might have lived side-by-side in the past without violence, as is so often commented upon, but the public sphere was apparently limited to solving local problems in locally approved ways. Existing institutions - political, economic, legal, social - were unable to provide certainty and security. Under such crisis conditions, people were left with the social mechanisms of kin and network, which were effective to solve individual problems or detour around state institutions (honor/shame, informal economy, black markets, etc.) Civil society was strong in terms of individual problem-solving (networks, etc.), but impotent in affecting government policy. Understanding of problems was limited, and solutions could not be implemented because the institutional environment was also unstable. Major economic crisis and the political opportunism of ex-communist leaders made local communities (both multi- and monoethnic) vulnerable to state-nationalist mobilisation, diaspora extremist ideologies, and mass media manipulation. People became Others. Neighbours turned on each

to Albania’, in C. Hann and E. Dunn (eds) Civil Society: Challenging Western Models,

London: Routledge, 1996, pp.121--42; S. Sampson, Human Rights Assessment for Albania,

Copenhagen: Danish Center for Human Rights Project Dept., 2000, P. Stubbs, ‘Partnership or

colonization’.

5 Z. Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, London: Polity Press, 1998.

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other and thousands were killed and exiled. The purpose of foreign military and then civilian intervention has been to create stability by creating a viable civil society: building an appropriate institutional environment, a strong state, viable market, social safety net, the rule of law, etc.

NEW ACTORS

Throughout the last decade, various local estimations of the security environment in the Balkans have been supplemented by the security perceptions of a whole new set of actors coming from abroad. These international actors have entered the scene with their own concepts of uncertainty, anxiety, risk, security and insecurity, and their own resources to make their concepts authoritative. The Balkans has become an arena of contest between various security perceptions; not only between local groups, divided by class, religion, ethnicity and place of origin and residence (urban/rural); but also contests among various global actors, be they European or American, large multinational organisations or individual donors, humanitarian aid organizations or grass-roots oriented NGOs, foreign governments or private foundations. Added to this are the ‘network contests’ between competing alliances of outside donors and their local implementing clients in government ministries or in the NGO sector. In sum, there are new sets of conflicts in the Balkan societies which create an uncertain environment for local communities.

The uncertain environment comes to the fore when donors suddenly change priorities, or when they simply pull up stakes and go elsewhere, abruptly breaking the chain. To understand the depth of feelings one only needs to hear the frustrations of local officials or community residents when a security force is suddenly reduced, a local OSCE office closed down, or a Scandinavian assistance project phased out (as for example, Denmark is doing in Albania). At the local level, these moves are interpreted as ‘betrayal’ by the West, and this rhetoric, frequently voiced in Bosnia, is now also increasingly heard among frustrated local cadres in Kosovo.

These foreign development actors on the Balkan security scene are usually termed ‘the international community’, a convenient term which masks the variety and even contradictions within the group. In the Balkans, the international presence takes on a myriad of different forms. There are the military/security forces in the form of armed units and international police. There are bilateral assistance programs, such as the Swedish SIDA or USAID, and inter-governmental organs, such as the OSCE missions. There are also the foreign or multinational aid organizations, who not only try to ameliorate humanitarian problems but also attempt to build community organization. These can be large bureaucracies, such as UNHCR or UNDP, or well-endowed NGOs such as Care International, Catholic Relief Services, Oxfam, Save the Children or Danish Refugee Aid. These international NGOs often set up local offices or chapters, creating their own chains of assistance and training. There are also private foundations, such as the Soros/Open Society Foundation, as well as Western government funded NGOs which carry out institution-building on contract, such as the American National Democratic Institute and the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law,

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or the British Westminster Foundation and the many German political-party affiliated foundations. Finally, the international community taps the resources of consulting NGOs, private companies and one-man development entrepreneurs, all of whom compete for EU or other aid funds and who then hire local staff or contract local NGOs as staff. Calling these varied organisations and the individuals within them the ‘the international community’ hides more than it delineates. Locals usually understand this, so they use the term ‘internationals’, which may mean either foreign organisations or foreigners themselves. The behaviour and mistakes of ‘the internationals’ is a frequent topic of conversation in any gathering of local Balkan staff members, and is a common scandal-making headline at public meetings or in the press.

Those individuals who form part of the international scene are usually easily identifiable from a distance by their white jeeps, busy schedules, and the plastic ID cards hung around their necks.6 Some of the jeeps may have bigger antennas, some of the offices are more well-equipped, some of the people do more foreign travelling, and some have more ID cards than others but there is usually little doubt about their ultimate affiliations. The ID cards are supposed to provide foreigners with more security - like fetish objects, they are supposed to protect from getting harassed by local bandits or unscrupulous police. Hence the international outrage when humanitarian aid workers are robbed or attacked in conflict zones such as Chechnya or Afghanistan, and most recently, in Kosovo’s capital of Pristina . (Local staff also bear such paraphernalia, and for minority group members they are often the only real security they have).

This ‘foreign presence’ in the Balkans can thus be analysed at two levels: institutions, which normally employ both outside supervisors and local staff, and the foreign individuals, ‘the internationals’, who who have their own work routines, social life and daily practices. Traditionally, the internationals have come from Western Europe or the United States but in international protectorates with UN operations, such as Bosnia and Kosovo, they may also come from West Africa, South Asia or elsewhere; the relatively high salaries and per diem payments are attractive incentives.

The foreign presence - both institutional and personal - is highly varied and it would be presumptuous to assume that all internationals operate with the same mind-set, despite locals’ perceptions. The variation among the foreigners is tremendous: there are American, Romanian, Ghanaian and Pakistani policemen currently patrolling Kosovo’s towns together with their Albanian Kosovar counterparts; there are young activists from Minnesota or history Ph.D.’s from Berlin working for the OSCE, and there are career diplomats and foreign ministry officials from Denmark, Slovakia, Bulgaria and elsewhere who are ‘seconded’ to the various international institutions and UN missions; all of whom interact with fly-in fly-out consulting teams from Brussels, Strasbourg, Washington and other capitals.

6 P. Stubbs, ‘Partnership or colonization’.

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Nevertheless, it is unmistakable that ‘the internationals’ have some commonalities in their discourse, perceptions and daily practices. Obviously, they do not live permanently in the Balkans. They are stationed there on a mission, to do good. Some are also very well paid to do good, as local Kosovars or Macedonians may remark. But there are in fact very few foreign businessmen there. The most precise concept with which to describe the mission of the internationals is ‘benevolent colonialism’. ‘Colonialism’ because, despite the rhetoric of ‘partnership’ with local actors, there is an unequal relationship between the foreign donor and the local supplicant. Colonialism also, because the project is to intervene in these societies to make them more amenable for Western interests. ‘Benevolent’ because the relationship is not based on exploiting the locals and plundering their resources, but on converting them to ‘our’ way of thinking for their own good; to ‘hand-over’ capacity. One might think of this as a civilizing mission, as did the French and British in their respective colonies, but in these cases, colonization was also tied to ruthless exploitation of natural and human resources. In the Balkans, these material and human resources are simply not utilized. The locals may be well educated but, if they are working at all, it is as drivers, translators, secretaries and low-level functionaries. Large portions of the skilled work force have already emigrated, while many of the remainder are unemployed or live off remittances. Those in the larger towns - Pristina, Sarajevo, Tirana, Skopje - are increasingly adapting themselves to a service economy built on the foreign missions. Like the old style colonies, visible foreign enclaves have started to appear with their associated lifestyles. Balkan capitals once viewed as hardship posts are now quite comfortable. The irony is not lost on either the internationals or the locals.

The primary mission of many of those working within the international community, the purpose of all these hundreds of organizations containing managers, staff and their affiliated retinue of advisors, translators, drivers and secretaries, is ‘institution-building’. Applied to the development of civil society, institution-building entails identifying the correct people to implement civil society development projects, determining the most efficient way to donate money, establishing or identifying the appropriate organizations and making sure that they operate in the right way. It is these activities which form the basis of ‘project life’.

PROJECT SOCIETY

Civil society in the Balkans once existed as an outgrowth of social life, of kinship, of customary law such as kanun, of social communities and local associations. Building civil society involves quite different kinds of structures. It is about formulating and executing ‘projects’. The practices of building civil society in the Balkans create a project society.7 The Balkans has become a veritable world of projects. The family conflicts of kanun are now being replaced by the project applications for capacity-building.

Project society entails a special kind of activity: short term, with a budget and a time schedule. Projects always end, ostensibly to be replaced by policy, but normally to be

7 S. Sampson, ‘The social life of projects’.

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replaced by yet another project. Project society entails a special kind of structure, beginning with the donor, the project identification mission, the appraisal, the selection of an implementing partner, the disbursement of funds, the monitoring, the evaluation, and of course, the next project. Project society is about the allocation of resources in an organized, at times bureaucratic, fashion. There is no project without a project application, a waiting period, a preliminary assessment, and the monitoring and accounting procedures that follow. The practices of project society demand a special kind of language, almost like the wooden language of Stalinism. Passing on knowledge is called ‘training’. Passing on knowledge to selected cadres is called ‘training of trainers’ or TOT. Getting better at something is called ‘capacity building’. Being able to say what you want to do is a ‘mission statement’. When we understand what’s going on we speak of ‘transparency’. Trying to find out what’s going on is called ‘networking’. Figuring out who will benefit is ‘stakeholder analysis’. Finding the money is called ‘fund raising’. Making sure you don’t waste it is called ‘donor coordination’. Surviving after the money runs out is called ‘sustainability’. People with money who don’t see results are suffering from ‘donor fatigue’. Taking your money somewhere else is an ‘exit strategy’. Failure to find a recipient is called ‘absorption problems’. And when there are too many donors and not enough recipients, you have ‘donor constipation’. Participation in this world of projects requires knowledge of the latest key words and concepts capable of magically generating money: this year its ‘empowerment’, then ‘good governance’, now ‘income generation’, but don’t forget ‘trafficking’ and ‘anti-corruption’; and of course, there is the ubiquitous ‘partnership’. In civil society development, the ultimate goal is to create NGOs which are not only service providers but can also carry out ‘advocacy’, i.e., influence decision-makers. In trying to help people in the Balkans solve problems, what I call ‘civil society’, international intervention has now re-created ‘civil society’ as a bureaucratic funding category.

Project society is about the traffic in money, knowledge, people, and ideas. Project life is about what people do with these resources. It is a world with a premium on the most abstract of knowledge. Hence, those who manipulate symbols and concepts can occupy strategic positions in the chain of resource allocations; they become as important as those donors and programs which actually help people with concrete problems. If businessmen and Mafiosi manipulate money, project managers manipulate money attached to concepts, with the key term being ‘increasing capacity’. Since ‘capacity’ is never absolute, it can continually be built. And building capacity requires training. Trainers used to be brought in from the West. Now the trainers can come from other Balkan countries or they can be Western-trained locals who have passed the TOT courses. One of the key elements of development is to assess needs, including ‘training needs’; hence the emerging industry known as ‘training needs assessment’ (TNA).

It is this world of projects which ‘the internationals’ bring into the Balkans, and it is the ideas and practices of this world which are utilized by a specific group of Balkan project managers and staff, their ‘local partners’ or ‘counterpart organisations’. It would be premature to call these hundreds of local project staff a ‘class’ or an ‘elite’, even though some of them clearly live differently, act differently and think differently from their fellow citizens. Many were

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activists in another era before the conflict or the post-socialist transition. Others have been fortunate enough to work as translators and then acquired organizational skills or been sent on training courses. The local staff have their own private projects of career, family or emigration , and these private projects entail holding open as many options as possible. Being Western oriented or educated, many of them have passports or permanent residency privileges in the West, and virtually all their children are studying or will study in the West. As a strata with a specific lifestyle, they distinguish themselves by an attentiveness to what is new in the West, by their relations with actual and potential foreign donors, by intense relations (cordial or hostile) to specific internationals, and by an insecurity about what will happen when the donors leave.

Most local staff are working on projects of one or two years duration, having jumped from one project to another for career, salary or personal reasons. Unlike NGO staff in the West, however, they have little aspiration to obtain employment in the state or private sector. Jobs in the state sector in the Balkans are generally low paid and hold low status, while the private consulting market is virtually nonexistent, though Romania and Bulgaria are exceptions. The problem for these local project elites is assessing the donors’ future plans and strategies in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Foreign staff may themselves be uncertain of what their donors back home are planning; and they may not communicate this information to the local staff. Even a major international actor such as the World Food Program or the OSCE can make drastic cuts in staff in just a few months; sometimes closing down entire departments. Internationals can be replaced by local staff. At the OSCE missions in Bosnia and Kosovo, for example, the foreign (or ‘international’) staff running the democratisation program have been replaced by Bosnians and Kosovars, who are called ‘national democratisation officers’. Changing the staff, however, usually comes with a reduction in the budget for activities and resources, giving the impression that the priority of a project or program is measured by the number of international staff rather than by its importance in building democracy or civil society.

This world of projects, project resources, project hierarchies, project ideologies, discourses and practices has been exported to the Balkans. Like any such world, it operates with premises and assumptions that provide benefits to some and disenfranchise others. The world of projects rests on several assumptions. The most basic of these is that practices of democracy and models of civil society can be exported from one society to another. It also operates on the belief that the models of civil society exported are based on the realities of its own societies. The problem for civil society development is that those who formulate the projects, those who are implementing them and those who are the targets have swallowed the whole model in an unreflective way. This is hardly surprising, since posing questions could result in a donor taking his money elsewhere.

The world of civil society projects operates with other premises as well: there is the illusion of the ‘international community’, which is neither international nor communal; the illusion that Western NGOs and international organizations cooperate effortlessly with each other and with their home governments; the illusion that professional Western NGOs are based on

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voluntary commitment rather than paid staff, and that requests by Balkan NGOs for paid staff are somehow selfish; the illusion that the activities of Western NGOs are based on the formulation of long term strategies rather than improvisation and following the money when new funding categories suddenly appear; the illusion that the right technique can somehow replace the missing social self-initiative which lies at the basis of civic movements; the illusion that because people are constantly busy that they must also be efficient, conveniently overlooking the proliferation of wasted trips, delayed decisions, unread reports, and useless meetings common to virtually any large organization; the illusion that the only capacities that need building are those ‘down there’, and not their own; the illusion that organizations ‘down there’ are chaotic rather than adaptations to changing uncertainties (how many Western NGOs could survive very long on unclear laws, two or three accounting systems, political harassment, electric blackouts, computer viruses, jealous citizens, unscrupulous journalists and inadequately translated jargonistic project proposals, and doing all their activity in a language which is not their native tongue); finally, there is the illusion that the number of foreign-funded NGO organizations is some kind of index of democracy.

DOES CIVIL SOCIETY DEVELOPMENT MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

How much has the Western-inspired civil society intervention improved the security climate in the Balkans? In some ways, the Western projects have done little to alter the basic relationship between an inefficient, at timesofttimes incompetent, administration and a sceptical society.8 The low level of impact reflects the initial assumption that building more NGOs was the solution for a weakly developed society However, since these programs were dominated by Western donors’ priorities and models, many NGOs tended to focus their energies on pleasing their donors instead of connecting with the public. They became an enclave within society.

Throughout the Balkans, the boundaries between institutions - public/private; state/civil, formal/informal - have often been so imprecise as to make these societies both mysteriously opaque and extraordinarily resilient. Foreign interventions and democracy assistance, here in the form of civil society development, attempt to clarify and demarcate these institutional boundaries. Rights and obligations are now spelled out via contracts and terms of citizenship, and governments are made responsive to advocacy programs or forced to adhere to their promises of accountability and transparency. Opacity is seemingly simplified, as each actor - individual, group, institution - becomes aware of their respective rights, obligations and interests. The complication comes from the fact that there is also contestation about how these rights, obligations and interests are determined. In simple terms, it is a contestation between the demands of foreign donors versus those of local authorities. These external demands of benevolent colonialism intersect with the local structures, partly changing them, partly being absorbed by them. This leads to the kind of uncertainties which create a climate of insecurity in these rapidly evolving societies. The enclavization of the NGO sector is one indicator of this climate of insecurity.

8 D. Petrescu, ‘Civil society in Romania’.

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THE PROBLEMS OF NGOS

The presence of hundreds of NGOs in the Balkans has led to some notable successes. There are many organizations. They meet in larger forums. The state pays attention to them. Some are known to the public (though not always positively). The NGOs provide some employment, and they often act as a moral force in debates on human rights, social welfare or combating corruption. They link society with Western donors. However, the NGO scene in the Balkans is beset with problems as well, some of which create the perception of fears and threats which we may term ‘insecurity’. Let me comment on a few of these.

Jealousy from the state. State officials continue to be jealous of the resources given to NGOs in terms of equipment, training, trips, and foreign attention. NGOs are seen as competing with ministries for aid. And the NGOs’ easy cooperation with Western donors, their relative ease of communicating with Westerners and the more relaxed, alternative nature of the sector all leads to a certain degree of jealousy on the part of government officials. There are complaints from local government officials that ‘they’ (the NGOs) are spending ‘our money’, that ‘we’ (in the government) need to ‘control’ them.

Elitism within the NGOs. Among many NGOs, there continues to be a lack of understanding of how government actually works, of how policies are formulated and implemented. NGOs seem to think that if policies are not working then the government must be sabotaging them. Such accusations overlook the fact that most government officials are young and inexperienced, having had to learn on the run during the rapidly evolving ‘foreign assistance’ climate of ‘EU integration’.

Gaps between the professional, well funded NGOs and all the rest. There continues to be a major gap between the small number of professionalized NGOs with good connections to Western donors and the newer, more grassroots organizations which see themselves as being cut off from funding. Since donors like to go with winners (less risk, less work) and since NGOs themselves are in competition for funds, the gap between the elite NGOs and the rest is perpetuated. It is a local conflict between NGOs who insist that ‘we are really doing something’, while the other, upstart NGO ‘does nothing.’ The gap reflects the difference between those who have a long-term donor commitment (and then receive funds and professional training in the world of projects) and those who do not. The complaints of the upstart NGOs are not without merit. One notices the same old faces and organizations at the conferences, partly because the Balkans lacks the natural mobility whereby competent NGO administrators would move to jobs in the state or private sector, leaving spaces open for newcomers.

A continuing scepticism among the public. The opaque character of project society is reflected in numerous public opinion surveys, which show that all too many citizens view NGO development as something external, and just another means of personal enrichment used by that segment of the population who cannot work with their hands or will not risk

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starting a business. Indeed, working for a foreign-funded NGO can be relatively lucrative in Balkan terms. The fact that so many NGOs in Eastern Europe operate as foundations - i.e. as non-member organizations with only a board and staff - only increases the scepticism of the public and reinforces their misgivings about voluntarism in general.

Lack of voluntary elements or scepticism about voluntarism. With NGOs increasingly seen as echoes of Western aid organizations, there is a prevalent view among locals that projects can only be carried out by paid staff equipped with jeeps and similar accoutrements (the Oxfam model). While many local staff are dedicated to their jobs and work long hours, the mobilizing of volunteers remains a problem.

NGOs in the Balkans remain crucially dependent on foreign funds. Neither government donations nor private philanthropy has filled this gap. In the light of donor fatigue and the shift of interest elsewhere by the Soros Foundation and others, the lack of permanent local income sources remains a serious problem. The issue here is not that the funds come from abroad, but the fact that outside funding is contingent on foreign perceptions of local needs. It is the donors who determine which region or which issue is ‘sexy’, and which region or issue represents a ‘security’ problem. The capriciousness of such judgements has serious consequences at the local level. One can conclude that the numerically strong Balkan NGO sector, with its thousands of organizations, remains very much foreign-focused and foreign-funded. The foreign donors and their agents determine the priorities and the use of funding resources. The real question, regardless of sets priorities, is whether all these organizations actually make civil society stronger. The optimistic view, prevalent among many donors, is that substantive change has taken place, although more commitment must now come from the locals to make the changes sutainable. The pessimistic view, often held by local citizens and even some frustrated NGO activists, is that the local NGOs remain a foreign enclave in the midst of societies where there is increasing alienation and disillusionment with the West, where uncivil populist organizations persist, and where NGO staff are seen as only highly paid functionaries holding elite seminars for visiting foreigners.

The situation is most acute in Kosovo, where the influx of hundreds of foreign organizations rapidly generated an aid-dependent culture and hired away potential local NGO activists as staff, leaving local Kosovar NGOs extremely underdeveloped and donor-dependent. By 2002, many of the original humanitarian aid donors were leaving the country, reducing their staff as they turn to Serbia, Afghanistan or other new aid frontiers or trouble spots. This reduction in foreign inputs has occurred after the new NGOs and the new interim government structures had effectively supplanted the former parallel structures which had existed under the Milošević regime. The result is that some of the social energy and voluntary initiative which would have been used to develop an independent locally grounded civil society has been dissipated: the newly created aid-dependent NGOs are searching for funds, and the UN-Kosovo government is unable to provide sufficient welfare services. The situation in Bosnia resembles that of Kosovo, inasmuch as the state institutions and market forces remain weak,

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and NGOs via their donors, continue to supply a host of social services which in normal situations would be provided by government agencies. However, these NGOs, too, are threatened by loss of donors. In Romania, Macedonia and Albania, we find a schizophrenic situation, an island of about 10 per cent well-functioning organizations, many of them supplying services, and a state which remains sceptical of NGOs, creating its own rival quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organizations (QUANGOs) and cooperating with NGOs only to attract donors.

CONCLUSIONS: ‘FOREIGN MODELS’ AND SECURITY

NGOs are now part of the local democracy assistance landscape throughout the Balkans. Is uncertainty and anxiety reduced? Security enhanced? Civil society stronger? Social capital – the capacity of people to find solutions to their problems - increased? Is there more trust ‘out there’? The answer to all these questions seems to be ‘No’. Part of the problem lies in the way Western democracy models have been exported. We tend to believe that the export of ‘foreign models’ is problematic because they are foreign, i.e., that they must be adapted to local conditions. I would argue, however, that the real problem is that they are models, i.e., that they are simplified representations of reality, or worse, models for what we would like NGOs to be. Were we to study how our own Western NGOs really work, instead of accepting our idealised representations of them, we would discover that many of our organisations suffer from the same dysfunctions seen in the Balkans. West European NGOs also display nasty signs of careerism and opportunism, experience problems working together, and receive nearly all their funds from the state, which in another context would lead us to call them ‘fronts’. The Western NGO scene, too, is replete with organisations which exist in name only, and which dissipate as soon as funding dries up.

Models travel. They travel in the heads and in the practices of those policy experts, project managers and staff members who decide what kinds of programs and projects are to be carried out. Those who participate in the export of democratic models should be cognizant of what happens to these models when they reach their destinations, i.e., the context. Yet, it is not simply a problem of implementing the models correctly. Equally significant is the lack of critical reflection about what these models are all about. Are they models of civil society? Models for civil society? I would argue, in fact, that they should simply be convenient devices for making local practices more adaptable to new conditions. What creates a climate of security is the ability of local, home-grown structures to deal with uncertainty and insecurity. Replacing these local structures, denying their ambiguous character to produce both security and violence, or dismissing them as tradition, features which are often the result or policy of many civil society development programs, leads only to further uncertainty and insecurity. Hence, without meaningful discussion between donors and recipients on these issues, NGOs and civil society development remain rituals of capacity-building according to the donor’s definition, with projects and reports substituting for the mobilization of social self-initiative. Only through greater reflection about models can civil society become more than a grant category or a project. In the rush to make application deadlines and fulfil the benchmarks for the quarterly reports, we are missing this more profound reflection of how

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civil society should develop. The real ‘dialogue’ and ‘reconciliation’ is not so much a problem for locals - they can figure things out when conditions are right - it is dialogue and even reconciliation between the internationals and the locals. This is the overlooked element in creating more security in the Balkans. As one OSCE staff member complained about their efforts to build democracy in Kosovo, ‘How do we know when it’s time to leave?’. As another complained after being scolded by a ministerial functionary for having done nothing for two years, ‘Well, now the local are taking revenge, it’s time to leave.’

Let me return to the problem of civil society and security. The import of foreign models and their appropriation by a small clique of isolated individuals has been a continuing process in Balkan and East European history. Models of French constitutionalism, of Western liberalism, of Italian/Spanish corporatism, of Soviet Stalinism, of third world national liberation, of the virtue of ethnic purity in a single territory, all were outside models introduced into the Balkans in order to modernize the region. The foreign character of these models generated a climate of insecurity throughout society, a situation that the Romania literary scholar and politician Titu Maiorescu, a century ago, called ‘form without foundation’. And this continues to be present under the conditions of today’s humanitarian-oriented benevolent colonialism.

The imposition of Western civil society based on the presumed effectiveness of NGOs is the latest such foreign model. Like so many other schemes for social development, civil society development came with the benevolent intentions of foreigners who persuaded an enthusiastic cadre of local advocates to follow a new an exciting path, the path of NGO project life. Overlooked was the fact that new inputs, however laudable, also fed resources into existing political conflicts and spawned new forms of competition. It is not that the models destabilize a tranquil society. Rather, it is that new resources are pumped in, while unresolved power differentials remain. Competition over these resources in the absence of transparent power relations thus generates a climate of insecurity on the part of the aspiring elites and in other segments of the population. The competition for resources leads to the perversion of the NGO models: NGOs become sycophants for donors, the NGO staff pursue their own private projects, or the NGO resources are used as political platforms, market possibilities or substitute services for an underdeveloped state. Uncertainty and anxiety about Western models is thus not a symptom of cultural lag. It is a product of the concrete conditions of democracy assistance. The power differential between foreign donors and local Balkan recipients generates conflicts and jealousies among NGOs and within Balkan societies. There are conflicts between NGOs and the state, the public remain suspicion of NGO activists and their motives, and ultimately, there is donor fatigue and exit.

From the donor perspective, their rhetorical reaction to this situation are the passionate appeals for ‘more donor coordination’, ‘more transparency’ and ‘more partnership’. Yet donors already spend inordinate amounts of time sharing information and coordinating. ‘Transparency’ is useless if the interests are in conflict. ‘Partnership’ is meaningless when donors are beholden to their donors back home, and where recipients’ own perception of needs are far down the chain of priorities and information.

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It has been a longstanding feature of Balkan political rhetoric to blame problems and tensions, including security problems, on the machinations of outsiders. Today these outsiders are ‘the donors’ or ‘the internationals’. They may have noble intentions, with the discourse of civil society development emphasising empowerment, participation, accountability and democracy. Yet they fail to see that the people in the Balkans grow ever more disillusioned with the very NGOs that are supposed to help them. Civil society groups are criticised as instruments for individuals trying to ensure their own personal projects, and leaving the rest of society out in the cold.

We all know what happens when broad social groups feel frustrated and isolated. Hence the need to re-evaluate the kind of models that are being exported and how they can be linked to the existing structures of Balkan society. Indigenous development models would seek to resonate with people’s everyday lives and with local concepts of uncertainty and anxiety, of fears and threats. In the Balkans, such models may entail forms of associational life which take their point of departure in kinship, family, informal networks, friendship, religious organizations and community, even the much maligned ‘ethnic community’. Up to now, these types of organizations, often based on codes of trust, honour and shame, have been seen as a survival of the past, or as the nucleus of uncivil, even criminal, activity. Yet trust, honour and shame are also the pillars of alliance, the very values which form the social capital so desired by the civil society program managers.

In Balkan history, primordial structures of kinship, ethnicity, religion and community provided high levels of security and fulfilled social needs. They produced trust. If we were to conceive of these primordial structures in civil society terms, we would discover that they can contribute to building security instead of threatening it. Civil society would not be a foreign model but a home-grown Balkan one. Such an approach would produce the capacity building and generate the sought after sustainability. But it would also mean that donors would have to adjust their practices: awarding grants to such anomalous entities as a kinship group or an informal network. It would mean extending concepts of trust to go beyond the signing of grant contracts or quarterly monitoring reports. It would entail Western donors and recipients working as equal partners, sharing risks and accepting moral relationships. It remains to be seen whether Western project organizations can deal with such partnership arrangements and the risks they entail. Uncertainty and insecurity are often depicted as ‘regional issues’ far from everyday concerns. In fact, the lack of knowledge which we call uncertainty, and the emotional ‘dis-ease’ which we call insecurity are always based on locally grounded interpretations of people’s existential conditions. The policy statements of Brussels and Washington and the human rights declarations from Geneva are our own interpretations of security issues. But to fully resolve dilemmas of uncertainty and insecurity, it is best to start with the local Balkan interpretations. Hence, we must devote more energy to examining how trust is constructed among the primordial organizations which have formed the fabric of Balkan societies. Security in the Balkans will not be achieved by creating 2,000 or even 20,000 new NGOs, nor by everyone

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attending yet another a training session in conflict management. Security is not created by organisational capacity-building but by building structures of trust. As long as power differentials between donors and recipients remain as great as they are, constructing this trust will remain difficult, and the climate of security in the Balkans fragile.

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