From Dayton to Europe

Many commentators suggest that the transition to Bosnian ownership has been held back by the Dayton framework, which created a weak central state and a country divided into two separate entities, the Republika Srpska (RS) and the Muslim-Croat Bosnian Federation (FBiH), with ten cantonal governments, as well as an autonomous region, Brčko. Ten years on, the idea that the post-war transition has been frustrated by a surfeit of Bosnian governing institutions, protected by their Dayton status, could not be further from the truth. Rather, the international powers of administration, under the Office of the High Representative, have been vastly increased, reducing the Bosnian institutions established by Dayton to administrative shells. There has been a transition away from Dayton, but this has been from the ad hoc regulatory controls of the self-selected ‘coalition of the willing’, the Peace Implementation Council, towards an expanded framework of European Union regulation, covering all aspects of the post-Dayton process. Dayton has proved highly flexible, with external institutions rewriting their mandates and powers. However, despite the transformation in post-Dayton mechanisms, it is still too early to talk of any indications of a shift towards Bosnian ‘ownership’.