Efendić: Before Abolishing the OHR, We Must Establish ‘Functionality Fuses’

Bosnia and Herzegovina does not need a perfect constitutional system, but a functional one. That is how Kenan Efendić, editor-in-chief of !Odgovor, defined one of the key political dilemmas facing Bosnia and Herzegovina today during a wide-ranging conversation for Balkanomnicon on the future of the Office of the High Representative (OHR), Bosnia’s constitutional deadlocks and the growing crisis of political imagination among Bosniak elites.

Ovaj članak dostupan je i na bosanskom jeziku

Speaking in the context of Christian Schmidt’s departure as High Representative, Efendić argued that Bosnia and Herzegovina’s core problem is no longer simply foreign intervention or Dayton itself, but the absence of internal mechanisms capable of preventing permanent institutional paralysis.

“We have to have some kind of functionality fuses,” Efendić said in the podcast hosted by Jasmin Mujanović.

For Efendić, the key question is not whether Bosnia and Herzegovina should remain a state based on power-sharing between its three constituent peoples.

“We have to admit that we live in a specific country which we constitutionally share with two other constituent peoples,” he said. “This is not going to change anytime soon.”

But, he argued, Bosnia’s current constitutional structure overwhelmingly favors blocking mechanisms over state functionality.

“You cannot use that right to block everything you don’t like,” Efendić said, referring to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s institutional system.

Efendić argues that Bosnia and Herzegovina needs mechanisms similar to those used in other complex multinational systems, including the European Union itself: layered voting procedures, qualified majorities and institutional safeguards preventing deadlocks from becoming permanent.

“You need some kind of insurance that deadlock is not going to last forever,” he said.

However, the crisis of Bosnia and Herzegovina — particularly of Bosniak politics — is not merely constitutional, but also political and intellectual.

Efendić describes it as the inability of Bosniak political elites to articulate concrete internal political goals beyond broad references to NATO, the European Union and state sovereignty.

“We are discussing what others are doing,” he said. “We are not discussing what we ought to do. All we discuss are external goals. NATO, EU — those are external goals,” Efendić said. “But before we come to that moment, there are issues that we need to resolve.”

Efendić describes the current moment as a turning point shaped by changing global realities and an openly transactional international environment.

“These people are taking something and giving something,” Efendić said of the new Trump administration. “This is brutal transactionalism — and Bosniaks don’t know what to transact.”

Still, Efendić does not advocate the immediate dismantling of the OHR. Quite the opposite.

“Until we establish internal local functionality fuses, the OHR should remain,” he said.

For now, he argues, the High Representative and foreign judges on Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Constitutional Court remain the only mechanisms capable of breaking severe institutional deadlocks.

But the long-term goal, in his view, should be integrating those safeguards into Bosnia and Herzegovina’s own constitutional system.

“We don’t want the country for ourselves,” Efendić said. “We accept that we share power.”

What Bosnia and Herzegovina needs, he concludes, is not an endless constitutional war between maximalist visions, but a functional political system.