Activist Forum Tuzla: "The Social Dimension" of the Berlin Process

The event represented the launch of a forthcoming series of “activist fora,” to be held in locations across the region, that will attempt to harness and invite the input of grassroots community organizers, activists, and leaders on the leading policy debates in southeastern Europe.

The central aim of these meetings is to work towards the creation of participatory and inclusive policy making fora in southeastern Europe. In effect, we want to create a platform for emerging social movement actors, established NGO activists, progressive political party, and development groups to collectively meet and formulate political and socio-economic priorities and demands.

The Socio-Economic Dimension of the Berlin Process

The forum took place on April 17th at the Atelier “Ismet Mujezinović” in Tuzla, which is a local community hall that previously served as one of the organizing centers during the plenums in in 2014. The day’s first session concentrated on a lively debate concerning the 2015 Social Cohesion paper, with one of the paper’s original authors, Dragan Tedovski, guiding the group through its composition and primary objectives.

The discussions quickly concluded that there is an evident need for the restoration and revitalization of the region’s indigenous history of “social” property and goods. Namely, a legal and socio-economic category as distinct from state and private property. The participants stressed both the economic and political (i.e. as an exercise of democratization) potential of a renewal of such traditions. Accordingly, co-operative economic models and participatory budgeting, and similar forms of public consultation, quickly emerged as major themes.

Visit to DITA

The forum also included a visit to the DITA chemical factory. A former industrial giant, the factory had become the go-to example of botched privatization in the region as a whole, and its striking workers were some of the key architects of the 2014 protests in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The visit was guided by one of the union leaders and provided a striking and hands-on example on the need for community-focused policy innovation and activism.

After the visit to DITA, the group broke into three small units in an attempt to identify key policy demands and priorities that had been neglected in the original Social Cohesion paper and were more generally excluded from the standard EU (and IMF and World Bank) discourse on socio-economic reform in the region.

The demands that were identified by the three separate groups were remarkably coherent and alike in both logic and objective(s). In short, however, the demands focused on two key areas; democratic inclusion and economic renewal.

In many key respects, the group did not distinguish between the process of political democratization and economic revitalization, seeing the two instead as two faces of essentially the same dynamic. In this respect, the added critical edge of the priorities in Tuzla only buttressed the primary thesis of the original FES paper; namely, the centrality of social cohesion in all development policies. That is, a prevailing concern with dignity and a robust concept of social development in the process of transition.

The key demands the group formulated are as follows:

• Poverty reduction; the implementation of a universal basic income or similar welfare payments, targeted at poorest citizens.
• Educational quality and accessibility; investment in public education, tackling educational corruption and diploma mills, and the development of critical-thinking oriented curricula.
• "Marshall Plan" style investment in rebuilding and strengthening public and communal infrastructure and goods; EU, IMF, and World Bank monies to be used to restore communal goods rather than privatization.
• Revitalizing existing socio-economic traditions in the region; co-operative economics (née workers’ self-management) and the mjesna zajednica (community council) as models for economic (and political) reform.
• Inclusive and participatory strategies for resource management and ecological preservation; natural resources as public goods rather than private property.
• Industrial planning and strategy; macro-economic planning for revitalizing industrial development in regional context.
• Improving wages, strengthening labor; adoption of wage-ratio policies and employer support for unions and unionization (e.g. corporatist socio-economic model).