The Foreign Service Journal, December 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2020 53 are divvied up on an ethnic basis. Difficult- to-remove party bosses thrive and stash ill- gotten gains abroad, while citizens complain and hope to emigrate. The promise of even- tual European Union membership, a strong incentive for reform when it was first enunciated in the early 2000s, is now in doubt, as Europe is preoccupied with its own problems and unreason- ably delayed accession negotiations with qualified candidates like North Macedonia and Albania while refusing Kosovo visa- free travel. With the United Kingdom exiting, and ethnic nation- alists dominant in Poland and Hungary, the European Union is no longer the beacon of liberal democracy it once was. Nor is the United States, where the Trump administration has applauded Brexit and is trying to undermine the E.U. The sub- stantial successes of peace implementation in the first 10 years after Dayton resulted from the United States and Europe working in tandem for the same ends. That has become far more difficult. The current dissonance between Washington and Brussels echoes in the Balkans, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina. What is to be done? A Near-term Threat Nothing needs to be done in haste. B&H has been peaceful, if poorly governed, for most of the past 25 years. It can continue in that state a while longer, if only because those in power benefit from its dysfunctionality. But there is a risk that an ethnicity-based land swap between Kosovo and Serbia could destabilize the country. That proposal would exchange majority-Serbian territory in northern Kosovo for majority-Albanian territory in southern Serbia, with dire consequences for the future of Serbs living else- where in Kosovo and Albanians living elsewhere in Serbia. Milorad Dodik, the Serb representative in Bosnia and Herze- govina’s collective presidency, has said that such a land swap will trigger his promise of declaring Republika Srpska independent. He has already prepared the ground for this move by denying the validity of the constitutional court’s decisions in R.S. and arming Ethnic Map of Bosnia & Herzegovina, 1991 RELIEFWEB (HTTP://BIT.LY/RELIEFWEB-MAP),FROMTHEOFFICEOFTHEHIGHREPRESENTATIVEOFBOSNIA&HERZEGOVINA