Remember the Bonn Powers for Bosnia and Herzegovina – the supposed authority bestowed on the High Representative by the ‘international community’ to allow him/her to remove recalcitrant Bosnians from office or otherwise ‘move forward’ the ‘peace process’?

The impressive thing was that as far as I could see the Bonn Powers had no real legal basis at all. They amounted to an international political power-play bluff which successive High Representatives wrapped up in legal language to make the whole thing look imposing and inevitable.

And they worked, for many years. Senior BH politicians and officials were indeed sacked. Yet the perverse if unsurprising result of sacking people whose elections we had proclaimed to be free and fair was only a diminished sense of local responsibility for real-life outcomes, rather than enhanced effort. Inat?

Thus familiarity bred contempt. Sooner or later a direct legal challenge to these ‘powers’ was going to be mounted somewhere.

The whole idea of these ‘powers’ (not granted under the Dayton Peace Treaty) was at best ambiguous. The more they were used, the more likely they were to become counter-productive: they amounted to an arbitrary use of power with no serious legal checks and balances.

Matthew Parish is a lawyer who knows the BH situation from first hand. Here is a trenchant essay decribing how the current HiRep Valentin Inzko is quietly demolishing all the powers, many of which were abused in a grotesque way:

Mass dismissals became common shows of force. High Representative Wolfgang Petritsch dismissed 12 people (and imposed 24 laws and amended the constitutions of both Entities) in his last two days in office. Ashdown dismissed some 58 officials on one day in June 2004.

The so-called “Bonn powers”, named after the international conference that created them, became used with increasing frequency and capriciousness.

Some of the most repellent exercises of this unrestrained authority took place quite late. In July 2007 High Representative Miroslav Lajcak accused a hitherto obscure official Dragomir Andan, then Deputy Head of Police Education in Republika Srpska, of supporting Radovan Karadzic, fired him from office, confiscated his identity documents (and those of 90 other people) and ordered the police to investigate him.

In September of the same year his Deputy, Raffi Gregorian, fined a Brcko District parliamentarian two months’ salary for making an obscene gesture on television.

Bosnia’s Constitutional Court, despairing of the gross failures of due process and right to a fair trial inherent in OHR’s methods, declared that the Bosnian courts should review OHR’s decisions. OHR annulled its judgment and threatened any judge with the same sanctions should (s)he seek to implement the Constitutional Court’s ruling.

What was intended to be a deft tool for removing crude senior trouble-makers after all else had failed became a clumsy and quite illegitimate bludgeon.

The issue now becomes stark(er): can Bosnia and Herzegovina survive in its current form if this threat, clumsy as it was, is removed, allowing Bosnia’s Serbs and Croats to express their objections to the Dayton peace deal all the more assertively?

It’s easy to be pessimistic:

In lifting OHR’s remaining bans, Inzko has quietly conceded that OHR no longer has the moral authority to dismiss people from public office or to punish them by international decree. An educated and civilised advocate of European values, he considers the use of these powers out of place in a modern democracy.

In taking this decent stance he deserves to be praised in the highest degree, because his embrace of principle is likely to subject him to significant attacks. Abdication of the Bonn powers confirms there is now no domestic tool to prevent Bosnia’s Serbs and Croats from pursuing their secessionist goals.

Bosnia and Herzegovina may collapse over the coming months, and the international community will shortly find it convenient to blame Inzko. We will hear expressions of despair about his weak leadership and lack of resolve in letting Dodik push the country to the brink of failure.

The period of proconsulship is now over, and the international community will need a scapegoat for the fact that its labours over the last 15 years have proven to be for naught. The Americans in particular will inveigh over European weakness, refusing to countenance that their heavy-handed model of state-building, pioneered by Richard Holbrooke in reconstructing Bosnia and Kosovo, has proven unsuccessful.

Instead we are getting a turbo-boosted EU ‘Embassy’, armed with lots of long-term carrots and no sticks. Soft power!

This soft power strategy carries its own dangers. It risks underestimating the depth of inter-ethnic animosity, which may impede meaningful political cooperation whatever the external incentives. It also assumes a maturity to Bosnian democracy – in which the electorate can be expected to vote for the outcome most economically beneficial to them – which so far has proven absent.

The most desirable solution for the future of Bosnia may be as a radically decentralised state which maintains formal unitary sovereignty only in name. The Scottish, Swiss and Northern Irish models all may provide insights in this regard. But such an approach would entail dismantling many of the institutions of central government that OHR previously created.

If the EU tries to resist this course, then it may perpetuate political crisis in much the same way as OHR has done and its soft power will prove uninfluential.

We are on the brink of a profound change in the international community’s attitudes towards Bosnia. Bosniaks will not like it, because they perceive the authority of OHR to have been exercised mostly in their interests. Croats and Serbs will welcome it because they will be able to advance their agendas …

International officials cannot credibly exhort domestic politicians to observe the bedrock standards of European governance set out in the European Convention on Human Rights, if they do not see fit to submit to those standards themselves.

That last point must be right.

More generally, the BH model gives all sorts of insights into what works and what does not in internationally-sponsored ‘nation-building’. In particular, it points to what I call front-loading for success, taking radical action in the early days of any intervention to remove senior extremists from positions of influence so ass to empower (and be seen to empower) more moderate and constructive local forces. The absurdly extended hunts for Karadzic/Mladic show how idiotic and off-balance things get if this is not done.  

But will anyone bother to learn those lessons and apply them next time round? Of course not.

As always, these things boil down to some simple propositions. In this case, how to make work a new European state when something like half the population would, on the whole, rather not be in it?