Bosnia and Herzegovina’s 142 municipalities are key to the success of the country’s European integration effort, the EU Special Representative, Miroslav Lajcak, told a conference of mayors and local community groups in Sarajevo today.

He said that until now European integration has been handled almost entirely by the upper levels of government and administration, and that “this is the wrong way round – not least because well over half of EU directives are implemented at the municipal level. This means that municipalities are not bit players in the EU integration process. They have a central role.”

The EUSR acknowledged that many overburdened municipal officials might be inclined to look at EU integration as something remote from their day-to-day concerns. But he argued that “in fact, the opposite is true: European integration offers huge opportunities to municipalities, and in many cases these opportunities can deliver benefits in the near and medium-term.”

He pointed out that EU assistance programmes are routinely channelled through municipalities, citing the example of Bulgaria and Romania, where 400,000 project proposals from local councils are now being funded or are set to be funded by the EU. At the same time, poverty rates in both these countries have been slashed as a result of accession-related reforms.

“Because of the specific challenges associated with the EU accession process in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the prospect of this kind of quick and dramatic progress is often obscured,” he said. “We have become accustomed to describing reforms as ‘painful’; we talk endlessly about EU ‘requirements’. Unfortunately we don’t talk enough about the real and rapid benefits that EU integration can deliver to citizens.”

The EUSR said reforms in BiH have often been painful and protracted because of acrimonious political disagreements, and that “implementation is apt to be slow and incomplete and the result is that citizens routinely experience the pain and then have to wait much too long for the consequent gain.”

In response to this, he said, “we must do a better job of communicating the whys and wherefore’s of integration – if citizens can see the point of reforms then a groundswell of popular support for change can be built up, and that is something which even a flawed political establishment will not be able to resist.”

The EUSR concluded by calling on municipalities and other local community organisations to make their voice heard, “so that those at the state level who are dealing directly with the EU will act with the knowledge, the support and the detailed input of local communities.”

Today’s conference was organised by the Netherlands Development Organisation in cooperation with the BiH Directorate for European Integration and the associations of municipalities.