The Foreign Service Journal, December 2020

54 DECEMBER 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL the R.S. police far beyond the level required to counter criminal- ity. He has also gotten Russian paramilitary training for them and boasted of wiretapping his opponents, many of whommight line up to support R.S. independence. Citizens who are loyal to Bosnia and Herzegovina will not let Republika Srpska go without a fight. If Dodik moves toward inde- pendence, a Bosniak-led force might try to seize the northeast- ern municipality of Brcko, the scene of horrific Serb atrocities and ferocious fighting during the 1992-1995 war. It links the two wings of Republika Srpska: one in the east and one in the north and west, where the R.S. capital of Banja Luka lies. The Repub- lika Srpska cannot survive without Brcko, so it will be the center of gravity of the next war, even though today the municipality is a model of reintegration as the result of successful American arbitration and supervision that made it constitutionally distinct from both the Federation and R.S. How can such a disaster be avoided? Most immediately, by avoiding any land swap between Serbia and Kosovo and moving all (European) troops still stationed in B&H to Brcko, where they would prevent both R.S. and the Federation from gaining exclu- sive control. In the longer term, what needs to be done is to end the division of the country into two ethnically defined entities derived from the warring parties of 1992-1995 and embedded in the current constitution. A Critical Reform As necessary as that division seemed at Dayton in 1995, it is a birth defect that prevents B&H from ever qualifying as a seri- ous candidate for E.U. accession. Belgium is constitutionally similar, but it is a charter member of the European Union, and Brus- sels is the Union’s executive capital. The E.U. will not be taking in any new members whose governance is as dysfunctional as Bel- gium’s, and B&H’s is far worse. Only with the best intentions, which do not exist, would it be possible for Dayton’s Bosnia and Herze- govina to qualify for E.U. accession. There is no reason other than its hard-to- amend Dayton constitution why B&H could not be governed without the entities of R.S. and the Federation (including its 10 can- tons). The central government in Sarajevo would need to be responsible for foreign affairs (including trade and customs), monetary and fiscal policy, and defense, as it is today, as well as have all the authority needed to negotiate and implement the acquis communautaire, the body of E.U. law and regulation that all new members are required to accept. The Sarajevo Parliament would need to be liberated from the various ethnic vetoes by which it is now constrained. But simply requiring a supermajority (60 percent or more) to form a govern- ing coalition would ensure that no single ethnicity could rule alone. The court system’s independence, professionalism and capacity to protect individual rights would need to be improved. The constitutional court would need to continue to have three foreign members, to break ethnic blockages. Without the entities and the cantons, the basic unit of subna- tional governance would then be the municipalities (aggregated in the larger population centers to form city governments), which have long had far more potential to get things done. Since they became popularly elected in 2003, B&H’s mayors have learned how to govern more effectively than their party masters in most of the cantons and Sarajevo. No matter their ethnicity, FOREIGNPOLICYRESEARCH INSTITUTE (HTTP://BIT.LY/FPRI-MAP)