Bosnia Deserves Better Than Permanent Probation

When the war in Bosnia ended in 1996, the Dayton Peace Agreement provided for a high representative, an international figure appointed by the 55 member Peace Implementation Council. The high representative has powers to impose or annul laws and to remove elected officials. The position was intended to be temporary and critics say that it has become an obstacle to the development of democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The fight over who should replace Bosnia and Herzegovina’s High Representative has exposed a deeper divide between Washington and Brussels: what to do with an international protectorate that was meant to have evaporated decades ago. The United States is right that Bosnia needs to move beyond open-ended foreign supervision. But if Washington wants a Bosnia that welcomes American investment and commercial engagement, simply weakening the machinery that has governed the country for three decades will not get it there.

The impasse proves the point. Europeans remain reluctant to dismantle the Office of the High Representative (OHR), empowered to impose laws and remove officials under its “Bonn Powers”; Washington has grown impatient with what it sees as an unaccountable brake on sovereignty. Europeans suspect an American bid to muscle into institutions that Brussels has spent years building; Americans suspect a European bid to preserve a protectorate past its purpose. Both suspicions contain some truth, and neither side gains from paralysis.

The immediate dispute

The immediate dispute concerns a person; the deeper problem is a system with no clear end in sight. Christian Schmidt resigned as high representative on July 1, charging the Peace Implementation Council (PIC) – the 55-odd states and organizations overseeing the 1995 Dayton settlement – with urgently finding a successor. His deputy, the American diplomat Louis Crishock, became acting high representative: for now, an American is running the apparatus his own government wants scaled back.

The July 14 deadline for a new high representative passed without agreement – not because of Bosnian obstruction, but because PIC ambassadors failed to reach a compromise. That should matter to Washington. If the objective is a Bosnia more sovereign and commercially open, the question is not whether the OHR should last forever – plainly it should not – but how to leave behind a state capable of standing without it.

A managed exit offers more leverage than passive disengagement; the alternative is a vacuum in which entrenched interests exploit ethnic divisions while outside powers less aligned with Bosnia’s sovereignty compete for influence. Washington’s instinct, articulated in its broader Western Balkans policy, is to empower local actors over open-ended supervision; European officials say much the same, even if distrust of American intentions has kept them from acting on it.

Thirty years ago, the Dayton Peace Accords stopped a war by dividing power among Bosniak, Serb and Croat blocs rather than building a fully functioning unified state – an achievement in itself, but a peace agreement drafted at speed to stop the killing, not a constitution designed to elaborate a functioning state. Bosnia remains suspended between that emergency architecture and the normal life of a sovereign nation.

It is tempting, particularly in Washington, to conclude that Bosnia’s institutions are themselves the obstacle and that the PIC and OHR are simply failed mechanisms best left to wither. But the deeper problem is horizonless oversight, which neither drives reform nor pushes politicians to take responsibility when they can hide behind an administrator’s extraordinary powers instead.

That drift has been compounded by neglect – as one senior European diplomat put it wearily, few in Brussels know much about Bosnia any more, and fewer really care – and by dysfunction: the PIC has not met at ministerial level for nearly 20 years, and the OHR has become entrenched to the point of paralysis.

Russia’s presence in the PIC, too, is a particular absurdity: a state waging war on one European neighbor sitting in judgment on the peace of another. Its 2021 bid to force the issue through the UN Security Council failed, and it has since largely boycotted the Council’s work on Bosnia.

None of this excuses Bosnia’s own political class, too many of whom remain trapped in the past and act provocatively precisely because the high representative’s powers shield them from consequences. But the protectorate has entrenched a culture in which responsibility is always someone else’s: Bosnia’s divisions have been curated, in part, by the very structures meant to heal them.

Office of the High Representative

The OHR was meant to close in 2007, then 2008. Instead that deadline morphed into the “5+2” agenda: five objectives and two conditions with no date attached, several still unmet two decades later. A benchmark with no timetable is not a transition plan but a permanent probation system, and the cost is economic and generational: investment that might come to Sarajevo goes instead to Zagreb or Belgrade, and young Bosnians leave for Vienna or Munich rather than build careers at home.

Tellingly, even Europeans who helped build the system now recognize this. In a recent Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung essay, former High Representatives Carl Bildt and Wolfgang Petritsch argued the OHR should be abolished without delay – proof that the case for ending supervision is no longer dismissed as a peculiarly American view. But their proposed route, tying closure closely to EU accession, has a problem of its own.

Whether Bosnia’s problems are better resolved inside the EU than left to accumulate outside it is for Brussels and its member states to determine – that is not Washington’s fight. But relying on accession – a moving target, and not Bosnia’s to move – makes for an unstable peg on which to hang the OHR’s closure. A better answer is to give the exit its own timetable, set ahead of that hard-to-predict point.

The answer is neither to walk away tomorrow nor to preserve the OHR indefinitely, but to use the machinery one final time to make itself obsolete: reconvene the PIC at ministerial level, narrow its purpose to a single task, and invest one individual of sufficient standing – palatable to both Washington and the Europeans – to negotiate the shape of a post-OHR Bosnia and direct the Bonn Powers toward that terminal purpose. That High Representative could then set a realistic timetable against the existing 5+2 benchmarks, publicize progress as each is met, and wind the office down accordingly, without prejudice to EU accession but not held up by it either.

There is a useful principle elsewhere in the Western Balkans. The Berlin Process, a decade-old initiative backed by Berlin and Brussels, has focused on regional economic integration rather than indefinite political oversight. Washington need not embrace the European project behind it to recognize the underlying logic: countries become more stable partners when they trade, invest and build institutions as sovereign actors, not when economic engagement entrenches the very powerbrokers whom reform should be displacing.

This is the basis of a genuine US-European bargain – Washington presses for less intrusive supervision and more commercial opening, Europe insists the transition leave behind functioning institutions rather than a vacuum, and the levers each side controls are aligned behind one timetable. The pay-off, if it holds, is striking: the day may usefully come when nationalist rhetoric in Bosnia is relegated to football chants and graffiti – the ordinary background noise of an imperfect European democracy, rather than an existential threat requiring a foreign administrator’s powers of censure. That day should arrive by design, through the PIC’s one final ministerial act – convening to invest a high representative with that terminal mandate – and a Bosnian settlement finally trusted, and required, to stand on its own.

Bosnia has spent 30 years suspended between international supervision and sovereign responsibility. The objective now should not be another 30 years managing that suspension but ending it – deliberately and credibly – in a way that serves Bosnia’s sovereignty and American and European interests alike. Bosnia could then do what it has long been ready to do: build, rather than merely endure, its own future.