BOSNIA'S NATIONALIST GOVERNMENTS: Paddy Ashdown and the Paradoxes of State Building (ICG Balkans Report N°146)
BOSNIA'S NATIONALIST GOVERNMENTS: Paddy Ashdown and the Paradoxes of State Building (ICG Balkans Report N°146)

Author(s): Author Not Specified
Subject(s): Governance, Government/Political systems, Inter-Ethnic Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies
Published by: ICG International Crisis Group
Summary/Abstract: Nearly eight years after Dayton, this state of affairs worries many. It certainly worries Lord Ashdown. He hoped to be the last High Representative. The dilemma over when and how to disengage is real. The longer the people and politicians of BiH rely on foreigners to make their tough decisions and to pay their bills, the more difficult will be the reckoning. But it is too soon either for despair or for neo-colonial guilt. In the first case, the consistency with which Ashdown has pushed and preached reform is beginning to dissipate popular gloom in BiH if not abroad. As for the second, the international community needs still to expiate a different sort of guilt: for a war that need not have happened or lasted so long, a peace that established only the possibility of creating a viable state, and for several years that followed when it was not even feasible to try.

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