Damage limitation won’t work, so fix it

Here is the final installment of a several day exchange on Bosnia issues, in which Kurt Bassuener responds again to Matthew Parish (to get the full exchange on peacefare.net, just click on the “Balkans” category over on the right:

Most of Matthew Parish’s response questions the very idea of enforceable peace implementation and then goes to posit the myriad flaws he sees with its execution over the past 15 years.  The underlying argument that the European Stability Initiative has long been making, now with the International Crisis Group in tow: if the international actors – particularly the OHR – got out of the way, Bosnian politicians would find their own equilibrium, and Bosnia would self-propel into the Euro-Atlantic mainstream.

This is no longer a theoretical exercise, since it’s effectively been tested since 2006. It has failed.  Nobody can credibly claim that a tyrannical OHR has stomped like Godzilla over domestic political actors crippling their ability to be responsible since then.  If that ever were the case – and this is myth, in my view – it certainly isn’t now.

What’s since become clear is the incentives in the Dayton system make the default setting, absent external guardrails, a drift toward partition.  On that Mr. Parish and I agree.   I am just far more convinced than he that this will lead to major violence if left unchecked.

Yet I posit that the international community’s failing wasn’t that it went too far. Rather, it’s that it didn’t go far enough toward changing the incentive structure.  This is a constitutional and structural problem.  The problem isn’t that political actors are “immature” – they operate rationally within a system designed to cater to their needs as warlords and signatories to a peace agreement, not designed to promote democratic accountability.  So they inhabit a happy hunting ground of unaccountability unrivalled in Europe; no “carrots” are more appealing than the perquisites of power they already have.

The prevailing idea of the two High Representatives who actively engaged in state-building (albeit with different styles), Wolfgang Petritsch and Paddy Ashdown, can be summed up as “if you build it, they will come.”  The country’s politicians were encouraged, and in some cases compelled, to create the institutions and mechanisms to enable the country to move toward the EU and NATO. It was assumed that “the pull of Brussels” would be strong enough for the political leaders who resisted or unenthusiastically accepted these to ultimately embrace them for the greater good.

If they actually cared for the popular good, that would be the case.  But they have little incentive to, able to turn to the political comfort food of patronage and fear to get them through repeated election cycles despite popular frustration at their protracted lack of delivery.  While there is undeniably a background level of nationalism in Bosnia – there is in every country  – it is impossible to get a baseline reading, since the system acts as an amplifier.

I’m actually quite confident that a modus vivendi could be found among BiH’s citizens, if the country’s politicians were disarmed by taking their ability to leverage fear away.   But the international community always hamstrung itself on this, the biggest value added it could have, by constantly telegraphing its lack of staying power.

But so much for our respective opinions on how we got here.  As I wrote in my original reply to Matthew Parish’s article in Balkan Insight (which launched this exchange), his proposal is for international management of state dissolution, which is what I assume he means by “damage limitation.”

Practically speaking, that’s just not feasible, for the reasons I wrote about in my article.  The split would not – and cannot – be consensual between the entities. It would engender violent resistance. The correlation of forces that prevailed in the war does not hold now – the RS is in a much weaker position.  Any attempt to create a third entity in the Federation would also be fraught.  The idea that an international community that doesn’t have the stamina to keep the EUFOR mission of 2000 troops fully staffed (it’s at about 1500 now) would summon the fortitude to contend with the inherent dangers of managing partition – which would mean overseeing ethnic re-cleansing of numerous locales – beggars belief.

What is so dangerous about what Mr. Parish counsels is that the likely impact that promoting the idea of inevitability of state failure will find willing ears in the EU and beyond, since it is the bureaucratic path of least resistance.  That is clearly the intent.  There is already pronounced desire on the part of most continental European PIC members (Germany, France, Italy and the EU institutions), plus Russia to dispense with the executive mandates of the High Representative, a Chapter 7-mandated EUFOR, and a Brcko Supervisor.  For Russia, the incentive is clear.  For the EU, it seems simply driven by bureaucratic inertia, wishful thinking, and actuarial policymaking.  This is myopia bordering on blindness, since it would be left to deal with the results without any ability to respond – at least not with “soft power” or with the imprimatur of the UN Security Council.  With these mandates, there is a legal platform to at least react, given the  bathetic lack of will to deter (which would be far more effective).  The prevailing policy direction in the EU is to irreversibly limit its own options.

Those who have counted on the international community to preserve the state’s integrity will draw the logical conclusion that they will have to do this themselves.  Some already have made this deduction.  I don’t think this is the kind of “ownership” the EU has in mind…