Change course, overhaul Dayton, fix Bosnia

Bruce Hitchner of Tufts and the Dayton Peace Accords Project writes:

If there is one lesson that ethnic nationalists on all sides in Bosnia learned from the 1992-5 conflict it is that their goals could not be achieved by war. They learned this lesson when the United States, finally accepting that one of its vital national interests—peace in Europe—was at stake, intervened to stop the war.

But the ethnic nationalists also absorbed another lesson, some to their relief, others to their dismay: that a Bosnia not at war did not have any special claim on the vital national interests of the United States. The Dayton Agreement, brokered by the United States, was first and foremost a peace treaty, and by any measure Washington has stood by its responsibility to enforce the peace.

The annexes are another story; they laid out the mechanisms and procedures for rebuilding Bosnia, but rather than root out firmly and finally the institutions and structures that had caused the war, the annexes glossed over many of them. And while there were many technical and legal solutions to political, constitutional, and economic problems articulated in the Annexes, supported by an international mission, the OHR, created to help implement them, their fulfillment ultimately depended on many of the same people and structures that had instigated the war.

All of this was not lost on the ethnic nationalists. They determined, each in their own way, that their respective goals could be achieved by exploiting the legal ambiguities and often complex institutional mechanisms embedded in the Annexes. It might take longer, but what could not be achieved by war, they determined, could be attained by peaceful political attrition.

If what I suggest here is true, the answer to the problems of Bosnia does not lie in further measures to enforce the peace treaty per se or in the re-empowerment of international authority to enforce the annexes, but in the recognition that securing the peace and creating a stable democratic society in Bosnia cannot be achieved under the existing Dayton post-war settlement. It is time, I suggest, that the United States, as well as the European Union, acknowledge that the Dayton Annexes have failed to achieve their ultimate purpose; and that the only acceptable way forward is a complete overhaul of the country’s constitutional, political, and electoral order.

This may appear a radical and not especially welcome proposal, but after 16 years of falling short of fully implementing the annexes and other necessary reforms, and no prospect of a change in this pattern driven by this generation of politicians, a fundamental policy shift of this magnitude is perhaps the only way out of an increasingly stalemated political environment in Bosnia. Otherwise, the very thing that the Dayton peace treaty clearly established–peace–will be at risk.

This does not mean calling for a Dayton II or yet another international conference. What is required instead is the will and imagination to put forward a new vision of post-Dayton Bosnia that is matched by renewed international efforts at building fundamental trust and reconciliation. While there may always be a segment of the population of Bosnia who will desire separation over national unity, there are many among even among the ethnic nationalists who know implicitly that there are solutions to protecting group rights and interests in a unified, democratic, and functional Bosnia that hold far more hope for their future than a fateful and quixotic attempt at extreme autonomy or independence.

Indeed, there are many, I suspect, who will welcome it even among those who are thought to be against such things, but only so long as it is backed by a genuine commitment to building trust, confidence and political security across ethnic lines, and thereby ending the incentives to zero-sum politics that Dayton inherently encourages and sustains.

In the end, it comes down to facing up to a failure, and changing course. I think the United States and European Union have the capacity to do that in the case of Bosnia. More importantly, I believe the majority of Bosnians across the spectrum would welcome it. The question is whether Washington and Brussels are prepared to change course before things get worse, rather than when events compel them to do so.