Anyone reading this blog regularly will know my views on the Bosnia story and the underlying struggles it epitomizes.

But as there is never enough of a good thing, here is a new longer piece from me over at TransConflict:

Basically, Yugoslavia was a set of sui generis contradictory and dishonest nationalist-socialist structures that for 45 years played down ‘national’ ethnicity for some purposes, while cementing it in to political life in others.

Approaching Dayton, the Americans were dimly aware of some of this, but it did not much matter to them. They were not interested in changing local mindsets or being reluctant imperialists.

The Americans defined the Dayton process not to fit Bosnia, but to fit Dick Holbrooke’s ambition and Bill Clinton’s timetable. They felt that they had made a huge new dangerous commitment to agree to US troops being on the ground in Bosnia – now the overwhelming priority was to get them home as soon as possible, preferably immediately after the 1996 BiH elections.

There was no prospect of the Americans or anyone else taking on a long-term responsibility to run Bosnia as a protectorate and sternly transform it into a modern democracy. On the contrary, the Dayton deal was designed to give Bosnians themselves and not the international community the leading role in running their country after its first ever free and fair elections. The so-called Bonn Powers of the High Representative (that I helped invent) were imposed later (arguably illegitimately) to try to make up for lost time…

Thus Dayton was a grimy US-driven deal cut with the territory’s “violent chauvinist elites” to stop the Bosnian war and create some chances for sensible pluralist political evolution. To make that happen the Americans incorporated their own unhappy creation of the ‘Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina’ and this meant ceding to the Serbs ‘their’ Entity.

Yes, ‘Others’ as a distinct category were marginalised at Dayton and so thereafter. But their numbers, like the numbers of ‘Yugoslavs’ in SFRY, were small enough to be ignorable – and ignored. And that will remain the case far into the future.

Mr. Mujanovic here has a strong if overstated point:

Dayton has created, instead, an exclusionary and particularistic linkage between particular “ethnic groups” (whose homogeneity is falsely assumed, as I have previously argued) and particular territories whose present demographic structures are the direct result of ethnic cleansing and genocide. In the process, such a constitutional order has effectively disenfranchised persons of other ethnicities, minorities, persons from mixed-marriages and, most of all, civically-inclined individuals who do not identify either as Bosniak, Serb or Croat.

All I am saying is that Dayton drew heavily (and necessarily) on legal forms and precedents taken from the Yugoslav coercive socialist self-management ideological toolkit, which in turn drew on wider European/Soviet precedents.

And I say that this was not illogical or malevolent or even unwise. Because Dayton was set-up in this way, it gave the three dominant different ethno-religious communities as such strong political internationally supported guarantees. This ended the war, allowing generous international assistance to flood in.

Have the Bosnian elites used this investment well? No. The excuse that their wretched failings and corruption over 17 years are caused by the evils of the Dayton constitution does not convince me. Within that flawed framework, a transformative amount more could have been done – and still can be done – to improve living standards and bring in good democratic civic processes.

The whole point is not the one advanced by Mr Mujanovic, our young left-anarchist of Bosnian roots in faraway Canada.

It is that Diplomacy has Limits. Some things can be done, and of the things that can be done most of them involve unpleasant compromises. There is an eternal struggle between Is and Ought – between pragmatically accepting unhappy outcomes and striving (maybe vainly) for supposedly happier outcomes that meet a higher standard of decency and freedom. Both pragmatism and idealism have their merits.

If Mr Mujanovic can persuade the mass of Bosnians to adopt social networked media tools and campaign to bring down the inept ethnic leaderships now running the place in favour of his anarchistic anti-capitalist plans, good for him. I suspect he won’t.

That said, I have often wondered how Dayton might have been done differently a few years later as Internet web-based technologies took off (back in 1995 remember that even email was a novelty for most people). That technology gives us quite different options for empowering citizens and bringing in far higher transparency in the public and private sectors alike. Peace deals can now be stacked in that direction. If anyone is interested.

The ultimate limit of diplomacy is that it is run by diplomats, not anarchists. Holbrooke was not a moral philosopher. He was a ruthless fixer, determined to drive through a Dayton peace deal for Bosnia, partly to help Bosnia as he saw it, and partly to impress President Clinton and help his own rise towards becoming US Secretary of State.

This meant that he was not interested in subtle questions going (say) to the way the first BH elections in 1996 were run. Different voting mechanisms and ways to arrange parliamentary seats might have led to very different and more reconciliatory outcomes. All that sort of thinking was pointy-headed European namby-pamby limpness.

Ah yes, they hoot, but all this is irrelevant and pernicious. Don’t you see that it was all down to a Milosevic/Serbian genocidal master-plan?

Perhaps it was. But even if it was, what would have happened if Alija Izetbegovic had not pushed for the fatal referendum to force Bosnia to break from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the teeth of furious Serb opposition, but instead had called in international experts to help Yugoslavs and Bosnians design a new set of substantively democratic constitutional arrangements?

Things would have been appallingly messy and unpleasant for a long time. But might not many tens of thousands of people who died in the war still be alive today, and Bosnia a far happier and more prosperous place now?

If you let things get so bad that you need to outsource your new constitution to the Americans, don’t be too surprised if you dislike the outcome?