Bad model, so limit the damage

Matthew Parish, continuing the conversation about Bosnia that started yesterday, writes (tune in tomorrow for Kurt’s response):

Kurt and I agree on many things, in particular the point at which international attention in Bosnia finally faded and what has happened since. But there is an important point on which I think we disagree, namely the value of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) and what commentators sometimes call “hard power” in state-building.

On one view, sometimes known as “post-liberalism”, post-conflict societies are not ready for immediate democracy. Their institutions are so weak that they cannot engender the political compromises necessary for a multi-ethnic society to function effectively. The solution proffered is to suspend democratic institutions, and/or provide supervision and oversight by an international organisation pending emergence of domestic institutions from a period of fragility. This is the model OHR followed in Bosnia, and it was the first time it was tried after the end of the Cold War.

This model suffers from three problems. First, it neglects the risk of the international supervisor going awry. OHR became a tyrant, disregarding the most basic standards of human rights and political dialogue. In fact the organisation adopted the pre-existing political habits of the former Yugoslavia, acting like a petty local communist party official. It is difficult to see how an organisation susceptible to such frailties can serve as a role model to guide domestic institutions in the right direction. It is at risk of acting as badly as the institutions it is trying to reform.

Second, reliance on an international overseer may inhibit rather than promote domestic political maturity. If politicians believe difficult decisions will be made by foreigners, the tough compromises necessary for the country to make progress may be forsaken because the international supervisors will make the hard decisions instead.

But most fundamentally, heavy-handed international intervention assumes a time scale of international interest which western democracies, working to short electoral cycles, are not prepared to commit to. Intervention was fashionable in Bosnia for a few years after the war, when there was still significant media coverage. But then memories began to fade, and there was ever less political capital in the intervening nations to continuing to engage with Bosnia. And in this lay the seeds of OHR’s collapse. Thus everything OHR built up was destined to dissolve once the west lost interest because it had been imposed without inter-ethnic consensus and the dissenting national groups elected to withdraw at the first available opportunity. I do not see how western interest can now be revived. Silajdzic’s strategy was to try to renew American interest, by creating crises and confrontations; but the international community shunned him for his efforts.

If international attention is doomed never to last long enough to make a difference, then query whether such a project should be ever started. OHR’s fate was to build up the unsustainable. Once international interest in Bosnia faded, Dodik tore down all that OHR had constructed. It is a cruel irony that Dodik was once OHR’s protégé in its struggle with SDS; when OHR fell, Dodik adopted the same agenda as that OHR had been fighting against.

OHR’s work made Bosnia’s fall far harder than it need have been, and on balance I suspect that Bosnia would be a better place now if the “Bonn powers” had never been created. But the OHR model has been copied widely elsewhere. The Bosnian model has been widely cited as a success; yet it was not really so. These are some of the themes I explore in my book “A Free City in the Balkans”.

Kurt thinks we are in big trouble if OHR is not rejuvenated. I think the organisation should never have started work, and now we are left picking up the pieces of a failed theory of international intervention. If Bosnia collapses completely, as I unfortunately think it will, the international community will be in large part to blame for foisting an unsustainable model of state-building upon the country. In light of the mess we are now in, the immediate policy goal should be damage limitation.