The problems Bosnia has in its efforts to procure vaccines against COVID-19 represent another sign of “how the state is not functional at all,” and for this to be fixed, a consensus on what the state should look like must be reached, Former Director for Western Balkans in the European Commission’s Directorate General for Enlargement, Pierre Mirel, told N1.

Mirel called the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina in light of the country’s difficulties in procuring vaccines “really depressing.”

He noted that in its recommendations for Bosnia’s path toward EU candidate status, the EU Commission called for the country to become more functional and to “accept that some competencies be transferred to the state level if it is essential for progress toward the EU.”

“It does not mean that the EU has asked Bosnia to be a unitary state,” he explained.

He stressed that political groups in Bosnia have been arguing over one key question since the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement was signed – whether the country should be a unitary state or a federal one.

“If a consensus would be reached at that point, then it would be easier to agree on making the state more functional,” he said.

Mirel argued that Bosnia should be structured as a federal state.

“We have Germany as a federal state, we have another form of federalism in Spain, why not Bosnia as a federal state?,” he said.

“But then, you need to have all groups and parties and ethnic groups agreeing on that,” he added.

“Once it’s agreed, I’m convinced that ways could be found to make the state more functional, so as to avoid these kinds of terrible situations that we’ve seen over the past weeks and months,” he said.

He argued that the narrative of ethnic divisions has been helping Bosnia’s political leaders stay in power, and that “maybe it was a mistake” that the country held its first elections after the war so soon “so that the people who had been part of the events managed to get power.”

Mirel also spoke about the EU’s vaccine procurement efforts and the challenges in the process, the recent ‘Sofagate’ diplomatic protocol incident in Turkey, the ‘vaccine diplomacy’ of China and Russia and many other topics.

The full interview can be viewed in the video above.