COMMENTARY: IPAP is not MAP's twin brother, it is BiH's abandonment of NATO

By Amina Čorbo-Zećo

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Bosnia and Herzegovina can abandon the Membership Action Plan (MAP) and turn towards the Individual Partnership Action Plan with NATO (IPAP). This story has been getting louder in recent days among politicians, or rather, political partners who have the obligation to form a government at the state level in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the October elections last year.

MAP is NATO's program of consultations, assistance, and practical support tailored to the needs of countries wishing to join the NATO alliance. Bosnia and Herzegovina, through previous laws and a decision of the Presidency of BiH, committed itself to wanting to become a member of the NATO alliance, and thus received guidance from the world's largest military bloc on the conditions to be met before joining the Alliance.

IPAP, on the other hand, has different essential characteristics. It represents the most intensive form of bilateral cooperation between NATO and countries that are not members of this alliance and do not aspire to become one.

Dodik does not want MAP, meaning he does not want NATO, but he wants cooperation with NATO, while for his partners from the SDA, joining NATO is the issue of all issues. NATO is not just a country's mere membership in that military alliance – NATO is a matter of the survival of the statehood and sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina and a definitive rejection of the possibility of renewed aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina by its neighbors.

Therefore, given that Dodik does not want MAP, meaning he does not want NATO but wants cooperation with NATO, and for his partners from the SDA, joining NATO is the issue of all issues, and due to these strained relations, state government in Bosnia and Herzegovina has not been established for eight months, Dodik has offered a kind of modified IPAP as a compromise for MAP and the key to the final formation of government in the country.

Proponents of BiH's membership in NATO fear that the SDA might present IPAP to its voters as equally a step closer to NATO as MAP is, just worded differently, while Dodik would present this program to his electorate as "nothing serious," as Serbia signed it with NATO long ago anyway.

The truth, however, is much crueler, and it states that IPAP is no compromise for MAP, but rather Bosnia and Herzegovina's abandonment of NATO membership, Milorad Dodik's salvation, and the defeat of Bosnia and Herzegovina's European future.

From a legal standpoint, things are also a bit more complicated. If "Bosnia and Herzegovina, through previous laws and a decision of the Presidency of BiH, committed itself to wanting to become a member of the NATO alliance, which is why it received guidance from the world's largest military bloc on the conditions to be met before joining NATO," and if Bosnia and Herzegovina now wishes to change its military-political orientation, it would have to pass new laws in the State Parliament. Merely accepting a modified IPAP and abandoning MAP without amending laws, for example, the Law on the Armed Forces of BiH, would be illegal.

It would be very interesting to see how Dragan Čović – the president of HDZ and a strong coalition partner of Milorad Dodik – would behave if, by chance, the proposal to abandon NATO really came before the state parliamentarians.