In search of responsive government: State building and economic growth in the Balkans

Abstract

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the real challenge of reconstructing Southeast Europe is reinventing Southeast Europe. The "Agenda for Civil Society in Southeast Europe" was a three year research project coordinated by the Center for Policy Studies at the Central European University, Budapest and involving the New Europe College in Bucharest, the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and others. The project started with the assumption that the region’s invention requires the construction of a common regional vision and the emergence of a regional public debate. The project - surrealistically nicknamed Blue Bird - was an attempt to formulate such a vision and to assist the emergence of a civic regional debate. Until now, the region has been perceived in the terms of risks; the idea of the project was to reformulate the debate on the future in terms of opportunities. The project’s primary ambition was to reflect on the reconstruction of Southeast Europe, both as an intellectual challenge and a policy challenge. The current debate has never addressed the production of knowledge and innovative ideas about the region as a distinctive problem. The international community fails to recognize the lack of local knowledge as a specific and powerful obstacle for the region’s development. This is one of the reasons why the academic community and the intellectual community in general remained marginal in the initial stages of debate about what to do in the Balkans. The urgency of the problems and the extremely limited time for debate on what should be done resulted in the recycling of the old ideas and approaches. This policy document aims to serve as a vision paper for development of the region. The paper addresses both governments and publics and tries to offer coherent policy strategies. The paper is aimed to be a stimulus for opening the discussion to different sectors of society and for initiating regional policy debate.