No amount of exhortations that the international community ‘be more robust’ in and with Bosnia can get round the horrible fact that the key problem is profound disagreement on what Bosnia and Herzegovina is (are?).

The Bosniac/Serb/Croat communities and their leaders just do not and will not agree on what they want their country to be and represent.

Which, by the way, is why Titoist Yugoslavia broke up.

The highly decentralised demands championed by Croatia and Slovenia in particular after Tito died in 1980 (some of us in the Embassy archly called them the Crovenes) were not compatible with the insistence of Serbia/Belgrade that the country needed policies and institutions capable of imposing a more unitary approach.

Or to be precise, there might well have been clever ways to strike a deal and invent something which had enough centralisation to be workable and enough decentralisation to be legitimate and widely supported. But the greedy communist leaders in the different regional capitals struck positions which made that impossible, plus the EU offered some non-trivial bribes only much too late. Nor were mere voters consulted until the divisions were too profound and nationalist fervour officially whipped up

So now in Bosnia the bonkers formula adopted at Dayton in 1995 – One Country, Three Peoples, Two Entities – did stop the war but is not enough to create a national peacetime consensus on either workability or legitimacy. Republika Srpska inches towards holding referenda on different aspects of the Dayton process and international attempts to implement them.

And we see the unedifying spectacle of EU/US diplomats insisting on democracy in Bosnia, but not when it involves asking voters what they really want.

Hence the phenomenon of a wobbly state, propped up by the absence of any workable or legitimate alternatives, and EU money.

Elsewhere we have the opposite phenomenon, wobbly territories wanting to become full states but unable to do so. Welcome to Limbo World:

These quasi-states — which range from decades-old international flashpoints like Palestine, Northern Cyprus, and Taiwan to more obscure enclaves like Transnistria, Western Sahara, Puntland, Iraqi Kurdistan, and South Ossetia — control their own territory and operate at least semifunctional governments, yet lack meaningful recognition. Call them Limbo World. They start by acting like real countries, and then hope to become them.

In years past, such breakaway quasi-states tended to achieve independence fast or be reassimilated within a few years (usually after a gory civil war, as with Biafra in Nigeria). But today’s Limbo World countries stay in political purgatory for longer — the ones in this article have wandered in legal wilderness for an average of 15 years — representing a dangerous new international phenomenon: the permanent second-class state.

This trend is a mess waiting to happen. The first worry is that these quasi-states’ continued existence, and occasional luck, emboldens other secessionists. Imagine a world where every independence movement with a crate of Kalashnikovs thinks it can become the new Kurdistan, if only it hires the right lobbyists in Washington and opens a realistic-looking Ministry of Foreign Affairs in its makeshift capital.

The second concern is that these aspirant nations have none of the rights and obligations of full countries, just ambiguous status and guns without laws. The United Nations is, in the end, binary: You are in or you are out, and if you are out, your mass-produced miniature desk flag has no place in Turtle Bay.

In the middle somewhere is Kosovo, recognised by 64 out of 192 UN members. Not bad, indeed excellent by Limbo World standards, but still not good enough.

Answers?

None in principle or practice.

Since it all boils down to which is better: Peace, Justice or Stability?

And for whom?

And, above all: Who Decides?