Looking back, the 2006 package of proposed constitutional reforms was a missed chance to improve on Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dysfunctional post-war system – and one that may not reoccur.
Hamza Karcic
This month marks the 20th anniversary of the last major US-led effort to reform Bosnia’s constitution. It was in April 2006, during the George W. Bush administration, that the US pushed for amendments to the 1995 constitution forged by the Dayton peace agreement that ended the war.
The initial post-war years were spent on ensuring security and state-building, with significant progress during Paddy Ashdown’s term as High Representative, the country’s international overseer, from 2002 to 2006. The Thessaloniki summit of 2003 also promised a European perspective to the Western Balkans.
Once serious state-building was set in motion and progress was visible, the myriad shortcomings of the institutional architecture established under the Dayton agreement as a blueprint for the country’s political set-up became apparent. There was a sense that a US-led diplomatic effort to upgrade Dayton could succeed and that Bosnia would transition from the Dayton era to the Brussels phase, heading onwards towards EU membership.
The diplomatic push came a decade after the signing of the peace agreement in 1995; it was clear by then that Dayton had in-built obstructions to Bosnia’s proper functioning as a state. Also, by 2006, the Serb Democratic Party, SDS, the nationalist party founded by Radovan Karadzic, was no longer as powerful as it had been back in the 1990s. So this seemed like a window of opportunity to upgrade Dayton rather than rework it.
