The Foreign Service Journal, December 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2020 55 mayors need to fill potholes, attract investors, keep the schools running, and maintain law and order. It is hard to reduce gover- nance at the municipal level to ethnicity. Ethnicity would not, however, evaporate as a political fac- tor. Devolving additional authority to B&H’s 143 municipalities would empower local ethnic majorities. Most (if not all) of the 64 municipalities in Republika Srpska are majority Serb. Most of the 79 municipalities in the Federation are majority Bosniak, but a sig- nificant number are majority Croat. Eliminating the entities and cantons would still leave ample opportunity for ethnic nationalists to prove their point at the ballot box, but there would also be elec- toral competition within plurality or majority ethnicities, raising the political value of local minorities. This is not a new idea, but it contradicts the current constitution andwouldweaken B&H’s ethnic warlords, who for more than 25 years have commanded the resources required tomuffle dissent. Themoment tomove forwardwith such a reformmay have arrived. Tight fiscal conditions in the aftermath of the COVID-19 epidemic will provide a powerful incentive to simplify the constitutional architecture. Croatia and Serbia, alsoweakened financially, will want to reduce subsidies to their co-nationals in B&H. Straitened finances could incentivizemassive popular mobilization. Bosnians would need to insist on reform, as they began to do in the aftermath of disastrous floods in 2014 and continued to do inmultiethnic dem- onstrations against police abuses of power in 2018 and early 2019. International Support Needed Bosnian mobilization will need international support to effectuate change. The United States and the European Union are the prime candidates for foreign partners. Bosnia and Her- zegovina is smaller in population than more than half of U.S. states, whose counties and other local subsidiary governments are roughly analogous to B&H’s “municipalities.” B&H is also smaller than 20 of the European Union’s 27 members. There is no need for either entities or cantons to govern a country of this size, and the E.U.’s principle of subsidiarity (doing things at the lowest level of governance possible) favors empowering the municipalities. Strengthened municipal governance in both Macedonia and Kosovo since their 1999 and 2001 wars has been successful and has empowered numerical minorities. Some may worry about a ripple effect in the region, especially in the municipalities of Serbia’s Bosniak-inhabited Sandzak or Vojvodina and Montenegro’s Serb-inhabited municipalities in both the north and south. But those areas have a mutually deterrent relationship: Anything Serbia asks for municipalities inside Montenegro it should be willing to concede to municipali- ties inside Serbia. Reciprocity is one of the most fundamental of diplomatic principles. Twenty-five years after Dayton, this is the constitutional reform Bosnia and Herzegovina needs: simplification of its state archi- tecture, with devolution of powers to the municipalities while the central government (B&H citizens call it the “state” government) focuses on preparing the country for E.U. and NATOmembership. The Brcko District, in all but name a municipality that has had a special, autonomous status for more than two decades, points in the right direction. It has prospered while managing its ethnic ten- sions better than most of the rest of the country. There is no sign that the powers that be in Bosnia and Herze- govina will seize the opportunity without tandem pressure from Washington and Brussels, which has been vital to all substantial progress since the war. In the aftermath of COVID-19, they, too, will lack the means to subsidize B&H as they have for 25 years. The United States and the European Union would need to convince Turkey and Croatia to use their considerable leverage in B&H with the Bosniak and Croat communities, respectively. Belgrade and Moscow would likewise need to use their influence in Banja Luka. Belgrade knows that strengthening municipal governance has benefited Serbs in Kosovo, and Moscow understands it could be part of the solution in Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk, as well. The United States and the European Union have good rea- son to be proud of what they did for Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995 and thereafter. But the process has stalled short of completion. Enabling the country to enter NATO and the E.U. as a fully functioning state of all its citizens would be eloquent testimony to renewed American and European commitment to democracy worldwide. Municipalization, combined with refo- cusing the “state” government on NATO and E.U. membership, would hasten that day. n 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.