The Collapse of Liberal Internationalism in Europe's Last Protectorate
Thirty years after Dayton, peace endures, but sovereignty remains suspended. A state cannot mature while governed by an external hand.
Filip Gašpar is a political advisor and essayist of Croatian descent from Bosnia and Herzegovina. He specializes in strategic communication, international positioning, and conservative network-building across Europe. His work appears regularly in German and international outlets, as well as in media across the former Yugoslavia.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily align with those of The American Postliberal.
Bosnia has never possessed a single national identity in the modern sense. Founded in the settlement that stopped the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country remains anchored in a constitutional balance that reflects plurality rather than unity. It remains a shared political space of Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs, three historical communities whose memories, fears and aspirations diverge far more often than they converge.
Dayton did not invent this structure. It merely formalized it. Bosnia’s political order rests on the recognition of three constituent peoples whose identities shape the structure of the state.
The Bosniaks, mostly Muslim, form the demographic core of the country. The Croats, largely Catholic, look culturally toward the West. The Serbs, predominantly Orthodox, are historically and institutionally connected to Serbia. Dayton codified their constitutional status and built a political architecture around their coexistence.
International diplomacy often speaks of “Bosnians” as if they formed a unified political people, but Bosnia and Herzegovina has no such demos. Its constitution recognizes three constituent peoples as the foundational subjects of the state, each with its own mandate, its own loyalties and its own understanding of what sovereignty should mean.
The country functions not through national cohesion but through negotiated coexistence.
This starting point is essential. Without it, Bosnia appears chaotic, its institutions opaque, its conflicts irrational. With it, the logic becomes clear: Bosnia is not a nation-state, but a political arrangement designed to manage difference. A system built to prevent domination, yet one that struggles to produce genuine self-government.
Peace holds, but true sovereignty is lacking. Rooted in the settlement that stopped the bloodiest European conflict since 1945, Bosnia and Herzegovina continues to be a country that administers, elects and negotiates, yet does not exercise genuine self-government. It is the only place on the continent where stability is carefully engineered while political adulthood remains structurally impossible. A country suspended between peace and autonomy, governed by its institutions yet supervised by powers above them.
The weight of the Dayton anniversary cannot be understood without recalling the war that preceded it, not as a sequence of military operations but as the moral catastrophe that shattered the European belief that the post-Cold War order had rendered large-scale violence obsolete. It was a conflict that exposed the fragility of Europe’s moral self-image: a war unfolding on the continent at the very moment Europe imagined itself beyond such barbarism.
The siege of cities, the destruction of communities and the collapse of ordinary life revealed how quickly the promises of a new era could give way to the cruelties of the old.
When the Dayton Agreement was signed in Paris on December 14, 1995, the fighting stopped, but the political struggle over the form of the state had only begun.
The war that tore Bosnia apart between 1992 and 1995 was not a civil war in the conventional sense. It was the bloodiest European conflict since 1945, nearly one hundred thousand dead, more than half the population displaced, entire towns erased as if they had never existed.
Europe, intoxicated by the end of history, discovered that its soil could still drink blood in industrial quantities. Dayton stopped the killing, but it did not restore sovereignty. It froze the war into institutions and called the result peace.
Three decades on, Bosnia and Herzegovina remains the last Western protectorate on the continent. Real power does not reside in its parliaments, its three presidents or its fourteen assemblies. It resides in the hands of one unelected foreign official, the High Representative, who can legislate by decree, dismiss elected leaders, annul court rulings, and rewrite the criminal code at will.
This is not a transitional arrangement gone awry. This is managed sovereignty, a living relic of the liberal-imperial 1990s that somehow survived into an age that no longer believes in its premises.
The West watched this collapse with fascination, guilt and paralysis. European diplomacy was trapped between its moral rhetoric and its strategic caution. The United States hesitated to intervene decisively until the final year.
When peace finally came it arrived not through a consistent moral vision but through exhaustion and the recognition that failure to end the conflict would undermine the moral self-image the West had built after the Cold War. The war became a moral debt that had to be paid through the construction of an order that would prevent its repetition.
Dayton was not only a peace agreement. It was a gesture of expiation. It expressed the belief that stability could be engineered if the international community took responsibility for the political life of a country whose institutions had been destroyed.
This conviction shaped the peculiar character of the postwar settlement. The West did not simply want to end a war; it wanted to manage the moral consequences of having allowed Europe to descend into atrocity once again. Dayton therefore became more than a ceasefire. It became the foundation of a pedagogical project: Bosnia was not only to be stabilized, it was to be taught how to function.
What began as an emergency response to a moral crisis hardened into a governing philosophy, the belief that a wounded society could be healed only if its political adulthood was indefinitely postponed. That belief produced a singular political architecture composed of three constituent peoples (Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs), two near-sovereign entities, ten cantons, fourteen parliaments, a tripartite presidency and a labyrinth of veto rights were deliberately designed to freeze politics rather than enable it. The war ended, but politics was placed in cryostasis: peace through paralysis.
At the summit of this frozen structure stands an office never meant to survive this long. Conceived in 1995 as a temporary stabilizing presence, the High Representative was transformed in Bonn two years later into an unelected executive armed with powers unmatched in contemporary Europe. The so-called Bonn Powers allowed for acts that no Bosnian institution may review and no electorate may reverse.
The Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina has solemnly declared itself incompetent to judge the actions of its foreign overseer. Sovereignty, resides not in Sarajevo, Banja Luka, or Mostar, but in the hands of a European civil servant answerable to no one inside the country he governs.
What was designed as provisional authority became structurally indispensable. The more the High Representative intervened, the more domestic actors adapted to his presence.
Compromise became irrational when final arbitration always came from above; political responsibility atrophied because it was no longer required. A generation of leaders learned to govern with the expectation of external correction. The office that was meant to cultivate autonomy became its primary obstacle.
Thus a mechanism created to heal a traumatized society quietly evolved into an experiment in post-national governance, a laboratory for the Western conviction that administrative supervision could permanently replace political responsibility, that democratic forms could endure even when democratic agency was suspended, that a state could remain peaceful but not sovereign, functioning but not free.
Bosnia today is the living proof that stability engineered from above can be astonishingly durable and that the price of such durability is the indefinite deferral of self-government. The paradox deepened when the office itself drifted outside the international legal framework that once anchored it.
The current High Representative, Christian Schmidt, was never confirmed by the United Nations Security Council. Russia and China refused to validate his appointment. Western governments responded not by seeking renewed legitimacy but by declaring legitimacy unnecessary.
Schmidt, a former German Bundestag member and federal minister from the Christian Social Union, thus exercises an office whose authority now rests entirely on Western recognition rather than the universal mandate envisioned in 1995. Bosnia is therefore governed by a foreign official whose authority is internationally contested yet domestically enforceable.
Schmidt rules in the image of a colonial administrator who proclaims democracy while exercising absolutism. It is a situation in which the formal architecture of sovereignty is contradicted by the material exercise of power.
This model has no analogue anywhere else. Other protectorates operate, but none with this degree of constitutional entanglement. Occupations occur, but never with this veneer of democratic institutionalization. International trusteeships have been attempted, but never embedded inside what is nominally a functioning constitutional democracy.
Bosnia is neither a colony nor a democracy, neither a sovereign state nor an administered territory. It is governed through an arrangement that cannot be categorized because it was never designed to endure beyond its transitional moment. Its continued existence is not a sign of strategic design but of political exhaustion. It persists because Europe has become unable to imagine a Balkan state that governs itself without supervision. What appears as separation of powers is, in truth, a chain of command. The modern West manages obedience under the name of consensus.
The Constitutional Court occupies a similarly ambiguous position. It appears to embody the final authority of the rule of law, yet three of its judges are foreign nationals appointed not by the citizens but by international actors. Over the years the court has shifted from constitutional arbiter to supervisory instrument, interpreting key provisions in ways that align not with negotiated balances but with the administrative logic of the international presence.
In practice it has become an extension of international oversight, an institution whose jurisprudence reflects not the friction of domestic pluralism, but the priorities of an order sustained from above.
The consequences of this system became unmistakable in 2025, when Milorad Dodik, the elected president of Republika Srpska, was convicted under a criminal article that did not exist until High Representative Christian Schmidt created it himself. The episode exposed not an institutional malfunction but the logic of an order built on delegated authority rather than democratic mandate.
In any constitutional system legislation originates from parliament, is enforced by the executive and is reviewed by the judiciary. These three functions are separated not out of procedural fastidiousness but to prevent the very concentration of power that turns legality into an instrument of discipline.
In Bosnia the High Representative has gradually come to function as all three. He writes the law, he enforces the law and he stands beyond judicial scrutiny.
Absurdity revealed itself fully that year. When Dodik refused to publish a decree issued by Schmidt, the High Representative did not seek political negotiation or judicial clarification. Instead, he amended the criminal code ex post facto to criminalize non-compliance with his own orders.
The investigative organs then opened proceedings not under a statute debated and adopted by an elected legislature but under a provision that existed solely because the High Representative had drafted, enacted and promulgated it. Dodik was prosecuted, tried and sentenced under a legal instrument authored by the very official whose authority he had challenged, a procedure that would disgrace even a military tribunal in a banana republic.
At trial the court piously noted that it lacked jurisdiction to examine the legality of the High Representative’s acts. It treated the OHR’s decrees not as administrative measures subject to judicial review but as an external normative power beyond the reach of the constitution itself.
An elected president was thus removed by a foreign administrator using a statute the administrator had himself created, enforced through institutions he ultimately controls, and shielded from review by a judicial order that acknowledges its own subordination.
Nothing about this sequence represented an aberration. It reflected the constitutional structure of post-Dayton Bosnia with perfect clarity. This was not a failure of the rule of law. It was the rule of law functioning exactly as designed, under foreign occupation.
The decision reshaped the political landscape. The Central Election Commission annulled his mandate, and an interim officeholder assumed the presidency. New elections in the Republika Srpska were scheduled through a chain of decisions that depended not on internal constitutional processes but on an external authority whose law had initiated the sequence.
The vote became a referendum on the legitimacy of the entire supervisory structure. Even Dodik’s opponents understood that the trial had dissolved the boundary between domestic governance and international administration.
International reactions revealed deeper contradictions.
Western diplomats described the case as a triumph of the rule of law while relying on a legal provision created outside the country’s constitutional framework. European officials spoke of judicial independence while defending an institution that stands outside judicial review.
Washington maintained a cautious tone yet quietly reconsidered the effectiveness of coercive tools, eventually lifting sanctions in recognition of their diminishing strategic value.
In Sarajevo, political elites claimed that the ruling affirmed state authority, while in Banja Luka it was perceived as confirmation that the central institutions function only as long as an external guarantor enforces their decisions.
Its significance lies not in the fate of one politician but in the exposure of a system where power is distributed but authority converges in the hands of a foreign official. It revealed that political conflict in Bosnia does not unfold within a sovereign constitutional order, but within a layered hierarchy in which ultimate coercive force remains international. It showed that the mechanism created to secure peace now generates political estrangement and deepens mistrust among the groups whose cooperation is essential for any genuine democratic stability.
Washington has not abolished the Office of the High Representative, but it has moved from active endorsement to strategic constraint. It quietly blocks expansive interventions and signals that the architecture of supervision cannot outlive its geopolitical moment. American diplomacy now speaks of responsible transition, managed disengagement, and a controlled phase-out within the coming political cycle.
The shift in Washington’s posture toward Bosnia in 2025 marked a turning point not only for the country but for the entire postwar philosophy that had governed American engagement in the Balkans.
For nearly three decades the United States treated Bosnia as the moral residue of a conflict it had been slow to stop and therefore obligated to manage. Bosnia was the place where the West rehearsed the idea that post conflict societies could be stabilized through a combination of international oversight, constitutional engineering and external discipline.
That belief, however, depended on a unipolar world, on a geopolitical environment in which American power could be extended almost indefinitely without strategic cost.
By 2025 that world had dissolved. Washington’s attention had shifted decisively to Eastern Europe and the Indo-Pacific. The war in Ukraine, the rise of China and the erosion of American military overmatch left little room for a Balkan protectorate conceived in the moral language of the 1990s.
The quiet decision to lift sanctions on Dodik reflected this transformation. It was not an endorsement of any local political actor. It was an acknowledgment that punitive tools had ceased to produce outcomes and that the architecture of coercion built after Dayton no longer aligned with American strategic priorities. Washington’s move signaled that the United States no longer intended to enforce the day-to-day mechanics of a constitutional system that Europe insisted on preserving.
It was a break with the assumption that Bosnia required perpetual guardianship. Instead of moral conditionality Washington embraced pragmatic stability. Instead of managing Bosnia’s political class it began preparing to step back and let the political forces within the country confront one another on their own terms.
Europe was unprepared for this shift because the European Union had grown accustomed to treating American presence as the backbone of its Balkan strategy. European policy toward Bosnia was never fully autonomous. It was calibrated to the confidence that Washington would ultimately guarantee stability if European management faltered.
When the United States began to withdraw from this role it exposed the EU’s inability to assume strategic responsibility.
Brussels had built its influence on procedure, not power. It knew how to coordinate dialogues, design roadmaps, and issue communiqués, but it lacked the political unity and geopolitical weight to replace American authority.
Germany’s insistence on preserving the High Representative did not reflect strategic clarity but strategic dependence. It masked the absence of a European alternative with the extension of a mechanism created when Europe was incapable of acting without American initiative.
For European policymakers, particularly in Berlin, this dependence created a deeper attachment to the moral vocabulary of the 1990s. It treats the High Representative not as a provisional mechanism but as a guardian of stability. What was designed to stop a war has become, in European imagination, the precondition of political order itself. It is a worldview frozen in time: moralism without sovereignty, supervision without end.
The year 2025 marked a deeper rupture because it became clear that Bosnia was no longer a central theater of Western moral identity. In the 1990s American intervention in the Balkans had been framed as a moral test of the post Cold War order. Bosnia was where the West believed it could demonstrate that atrocity would not return to Europe.
The the shifting winds of the strategic world of 2025 no longer allow such experiments. The United States is facing simultaneous crises and rising powers. It no longer has the luxury of maintaining elaborate supervisory structures in regions where its fundamental interests were limited.
Bosnia, once symbolically central to the Western narrative, now belonged to the category of inherited commitments that no longer justified attention or resources.
This recalibration was not a retreat, but a redistribution of strategic focus. It reflected the logic of a multipolar world in which even great powers must prioritize. Washington made clear through its actions that Bosnia’s stability would now depend primarily on local responsibility and regional diplomacy, not on American enforcement.
The message was that the era of externally maintained balance had expired. If Bosnia was to function as a state it would have to experience the consequences of its own political decisions, both constructive and destructive. The United States no longer sought to shape outcomes but to avoid entanglement.
Europe, however, interpreted the American shift not as a structural adjustment but as a vacuum. Its instinct was to double down on administrative control, to insist that the High Representative remain the axis around which the entire system turns, to treat Bosnia as a fragile ward that cannot be left unsupervised.
This divergence between American realism and European guardianship revealed the philosophical fracture at the heart of the Western alliance.
Washington sees sovereignty as something that must eventually be exercised. Europe sees sovereignty as something too dangerous to permit. Washington moves toward a world defined by power, competition, and hard choices.
Europe clings to the belief that conflicts can be managed through endless supervision.
The American pivot therefore transformed Bosnia into a geopolitical symbol once again, not of humanitarian intervention but of Western disunity. The country now stands between two fading visions of order. The American vision that once lifted Bosnia into the realm of moral experimentation is giving way to strategic restraint. The European vision that once relied on American power is struggling to maintain its instruments without the partner that made them viable.
The year 2025 did not simply mark a change in policy. It marked the end of an era in which Bosnia served as the stage on which the West enacted its moral drama. What remains is a geopolitical reality in which the country must face the responsibilities of sovereignty because the world that once denied it those responsibilities has no further interest in carrying them.
Each of the three constitutive peoples interprets the postwar order not through abstract constitutional theory but through the wounds and fears that shaped their experience of the conflict.
Dayton did not create a neutral structure that all could inhabit equally. It created a framework that each group reads through the memory of its own survival. The Bosniaks, who suffered the greatest demographic losses and saw the territorial fragmentation of the country as a direct threat to their physical existence, view Dayton primarily as a guarantee against partition. For them the agreement is a shield that prevents the disintegration of a state whose collapse once seemed imminent.
The complexity of the institutional system, the vetoes, and the cumbersome procedures are considered acceptable costs because they preserve the territorial continuity of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the Bosniak narrative Dayton is imperfect but necessary, a compromise that stopped the war yet must be defended against any attempt to weaken the central institutions.
Behind this view lies a deep fear that decentralization is simply the slow path to dissolution, a fear reinforced by the memory of a conflict in which geography determined life or death.
The Croatian perspective emerges from the opposite experience. Croats constitute the smallest of the three peoples and are concentrated in regions where their electoral weight is overshadowed by Bosniak majorities. In theory Dayton placed them on equal constitutional footing with the other groups. In practice it gave them equality without weight.
The repeated election of a Croatian member of the state presidency by Bosniak voters, against the preference of Croatian constituencies, confirmed their sense that the system recognizes them symbolically but not substantively. Their municipalities are often governed by coalitions that do not reflect their demographic reality, and the structure of the Federation leaves them with limited political leverage.
For many Croats Dayton is not a protective arrangement, but an unfulfilled promise. It offers recognition but not influence, status without security. What the Croats seek through electoral reform is not a revision of the peace but a restoration of its original equilibrium. They see themselves as the least numerous but most exposed community, a bridge between the Western Balkans and Central Europe, yet treated as a disposable component of a system designed to avoid upsetting the larger actors.
This experience of structural marginalization is reinforced by a recurring electoral phenomenon that has become the clearest symbol of Croatian political impotence. The presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina is built on the premise that each constitutive people elects its own representative. The logic is simple and foundational.
In the Bosnian constitution, constituent peoples are not cultural categories but constitutional subjects with collective political rights.
The Bosniak member represents the Bosniaks, the Serb member represents the Serbs, and the Croatian member represents the Croats.
This arrangement was meant to guarantee balance, recognition, and equality among groups that entered the peace exhausted and deeply skeptical of one another. It was one of Dayton’s essential safeguards, a mechanism designed to prevent domination by the majority and ensure that sovereignty would always be shared.
In practice this principle has been systematically undermined. Željko Komšić, who holds the Croatian seat in the presidency, has been elected multiple times almost entirely by Bosniak voters. His electoral victories are numerically legitimate but politically devastating because they render the constitutional logic meaningless.
Croatian constituencies overwhelmingly reject him, yet he repeatedly takes office through the support of a demographic majority that Dayton was explicitly designed to restrain. What was intended as a mechanism of equality has become an instrument of majoritarian leverage.
Each election of Komšić confirms for Croats that their formal rights do not translate into substantive representation and that their status as a constitutive people is protected in language but not in practice. The effects of this dynamic have eroded Croatian confidence in the state more deeply than any legislative dispute or institutional conflict.
Croats increasingly view Bosnia and Herzegovina as a framework in which their political voice can be overridden at will. Their demand for electoral reform is therefore not a nationalist project but a plea for the restoration of the parity Dayton promised. They insist that no community can be considered equal if it does not have the capacity to choose the person who speaks in its name.
The Croatian narrative of frustration is not rooted in secessionist intention but in the experience of being represented by someone elected against their overwhelming will. It is the clearest example of how a system that was designed to protect all groups has gradually drifted toward privileging one at the expense of another.
The Komšić phenomenon is therefore more than an electoral anomaly. It is the most visible sign that the equilibrium envisioned at Dayton has tilted, that one group has acquired the ability to shape the representation of another and that the international custodians of the system are unwilling to correct the imbalance because doing so would expose the fragility of the order they are trying to preserve.
Western diplomats periodically voice understanding for this grievance, yet no High Representative has ever dared to impose a solution, and no EU negotiation chapter has ever been conditioned on its resolution. The imbalance is treated as a regrettable but immutable fact of demographic life – too explosive to touch, too blatent to ignore.
The Serb interpretation of Dayton is rooted in a distinct historical memory. For Serbs the peace agreement is not an abstract constitutional text but a contract that guaranteed the political autonomy of the Republika Srpska and defined the limits of state authority. They view the postwar decades not as natural institutional evolution but as a steady erosion of that contract.
Competences once belonging to the entities were transferred upward through decisions imposed by the High Representative rather than achieved through domestic consensus. Laws were rewritten without parliamentary authority, officials dismissed without judicial review, and state-level institutions expanded through mechanisms never contained in the original agreement.
What was conceived as a balance of powers became, in their eyes, a gradual centralization executed by an external authority. Defending the autonomy of the entity is therefore interpreted not as secessionism but as constitutional fidelity, a refusal to allow a negotiated settlement to be transformed into a flexible instrument interpreted at will by international actors.
These three interpretations do not coexist peacefully. They collide in every institutional debate and every reform proposal. The Bosniak fear of fragmentation collides with the Croatian fear of political erasure. The Croatian demand for genuine equality collides with the Bosniak insistence on pluralistic representation. The Serb insistence on the original terms of Dayton collides with the Western belief that the agreement must be adapted to create a functional state.
Bosnia therefore operates not on the basis of shared constitutional principles, but on three incompatible historical memories. Each group defends not only its interests but its own version of what the country is supposed to be.
The architecture of the state is inseparable from the emotional geography of the war. Dayton froze the frontlines, but it did not harmonize the narratives that emerged from them. Bosnia’s political system is not simply complex. It is a system in which three different interpretations of sovereignty coexist under one legal roof, each convinced that it is defending the only version of the peace that can guarantee its survival.
Bosnia stands today at the fracture line between two opposing conceptions of how political order is built and sustained. One maintains that sovereignty can be engineered and supervised indefinitely. The other recognizes that sovereignty must be exercised even imperfectly if a state is ever to mature into a political subject rather than remain an object of international management.
The United States is cautiously shifting toward the latter.
Europe remains committed to the former.
No democracy would accept an unelected foreign official empowered to dismiss governors, rewrite legislation, overrule constitutional courts, and sanction elected leaders without judicial review. However this remains the normal constitutional condition of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The anniversary of the Dayton Agreement is not a celebration of peace but a reminder of the limits of managed sovereignty, the illusions of external control, and the political adolescence that results when responsibility is denied for too long.
Bosnia is stable, but the stability rings hollow without the substance of sovereignty. Stability without freedom cannot endure. It is postponement. It is a carefully managed intermission in which sovereignty remains theoretical, waiting for the moment when the custodians step back and the country must finally decide what kind of state it intends to become.
Bosnia and Herzegovina does not require deeper supervision. It requires the return of political responsibility to those who must live with the consequences of their choices.
Thirty years after Dayton, peace endures, but sovereignty remains suspended. A state cannot mature while governed by an external hand. Sovereignty, like faith, survives only where it is lived.
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