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With Europeans, not without them

Kati Marton, Dick Holbrooke’s wife, called yesterday for revivified American diplomacy aimed at preventing Bosnia from flying apart.  She is right to be worried.  But calls for engagement need something substantial to back them up.  That was her husband’s great virtue:  he was able to push all the levers of American power in the same direction at the same time, marrying power to engagement.

It is hard to know what that would mean today.  The military lever, as Ms Marton acknowledges, is simply not available.  American economic leverage in Bosnia is minimal.  Our aid is mis-directed, trade is negligible, and investment is nonexistent. Our oversized embassy–it has many times the staff it had during the war, when I was its most frequent visitor–sponsors biotechnology seminars, boasts a donation of $533,000 for of anti-smuggling equipment and is still featuring the last ambassador’s July 4 farewell its website.  Last year’s embassy effort to produce reform in the Bosnian Federation–the 51% of the country in which power is shared principally between Croats and Muslims–has come to nothing.

Nor is it clear why Bosnia should be an American responsibility.  The fact is the United States never had vital national security interests in Bosnia.  What it had was a dominant geopolitical position–the 90s were the unipolar moment–and very few challengers.  Washington could, if it felt like it, devote its military, diplomatic and economic weight to ending the genocidal realities of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.  It no longer has that luxury.  It faces similar atrocities in Syria but has chosen to focus its attention on chemical weapons that have killed relatively few but represent a serious threat to a valued international norm.  Other priorities–the Iranian nuclear program, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, China’s military challenge in the Pacific and America’s own economic ailments–take priority.

Kati Marton discounts Europe’s role in Bosnia, misidentifying the “High Representative” as its agent.  Though an Austrian who knows a great deal about Bosnia, he is the agent of both the Americans and the Europeans.  The European Union representative is someone else.  The EU has a lot of what America lacks:  aid, trade and investment as well as good reason to be concerned, since renewed instability in Bosnia would bring increased refugee flows and substantial financial burdens.

The only way for Washington to be effective in Bosnia today is with the Europeans, not without them.  But most of Europe is indifferent and unconcerned.  The most directly interested are Croatia, which shares a long border with Bosnia and is now the EU’s 28^th member, and Germany, which played an important role supporting US efforts in the 1990s and now wields the biggest stick in Europe.  Chancellor Angela Merkel showed what she could do with a bit of clarity and a few choice words in Kosovo, where she has compelled Serbia to accept the validity of Kosovo’s constitutional framework on its entire territory. 

Washington, Zagreb and Berlin are the winning formula.  If you want to get something done today in Bosnia, Zagreb is vital to delivering the Bosnian Croats.  Berlin has clout with both the Croats and the Bosnian Serbs (largely through Belgrade).  And the Americans, as in the past, need to deliver the Bosniaks (those are the people Western newspapers call Bosnian Muslims).  A concerted Croatian/German/American initiative would drag the entire EU in the right direction and prove irresistible to all the Bosnians.

But even that won’t work unless we find serious allies within Bosnia.  They have proved elusive.  Milorad Dodik, once the darling of the West, has embraced vigorous Serb nationalism and is now the most serious threat to Bosnia’s unity.  Zlatko Lagumdzija, who once aimed at creating a cross-ethnic coalition, has failed.  Croats who would prefer a more united Bosnia that could move quickly towards EU membership just don’t have enough votes.

This is where strategic patience comes in.  Washington, Zagreb and Berlin should make it clear what they want the Bosnians to do.  They should prepare a short list—three to five reasonable items focused mainly on constitutional reform would be my preference—and then be prepared to await the Bosnian response, cutting American and EU assistance regularly if there is none. The Americans should shrink their embassy in Sarajevo dramatically.  The Europeans should get rid of their bilateral embassies altogether, relying on the EU representative to speak with a single voice. 

What about the 26 other members of the EU?  A few of them like the UK and the Netherlands, will back a well-crafted tripartite initiative.  The rest really cannot be helpful in this situation.  They should stand aside, as all but Germany did at Dayton, and let the key players use their clout.  They will be rewarded by saving on embassies in Sarajevo and by enjoying the spectacle of others doing the heavy lifting.  Their finance ministries will be grateful.