Jasmin Mujanović writes:

In the months leading up to the resumption of open Russian aggression in Ukraine, another European country consistently made international headlines concerning renewed threats of conflict: Bosnia and Herzegovina. Beginning last summer, Serb nationalist authorities in the country’s Republika Srpska entity (RS) — one of the two administrative regions within Bosnia created after the conclusion of the Bosnian War (1992-95) — launched a renewed secessionist bid following the imposition of an anti-genocide denial law. By January, the regime of Milorad Dodik and his SNSD party in RS had begun the legislative process of creating breakaway institutions — and suffered another round of U.S. sanctions as a result.

Yet even though Dodik has firmly entrenched himself as a pariah among Western officials, attempts at engagement with him and his associates continue, even by the U.S. Moreover, the expansive support structures that have kept Dodik in power — from the regime in Belgrade to his curiously warm relations with the president of Croatia — have remained almost wholly unsullied from the stain of his radicalism.

The reasons for this are partly rooted in Bosnia’s quixotic postwar status — especially its sectarian, U.S.-designed constitution — but more broadly they stem from a pernicious brand of Western diplomacy pursued on the “margins” of Europe that has focused on accommodation rather than transformation. Entrenched autocrats, illiberal strongmen and ethnic chieftains have been the preferred interlocutors of European and U.S. officials in the Western Balkans for much of the past three decades.

While officially advocating for the Western Balkans’ integration into the EU and NATO, critics have referred to the dominant thrust of Western policy in the region as “stabilocracy”: the pursuit of political stability at the expense of democratization, and thus the normalization and even expansion of political, economic and security ties by the West with illiberal and authoritarian regimes who are able to “deliver” on that stability.

In Ukraine, we see such a policy taken to its extreme, bloody conclusion. Decades of diplomatic double-dealing and rapprochement with the Kremlin by the West resulted in President Vladimir Putin’s decimation of Chechnya, his occupation of large chunks of Georgia, indiscriminate bombardments of Syrian civilians and now, of course, the horror in Ukraine — eight years in the making since Moscow’s initial occupations of Crimea and parts of the Donbas. [Continue reading…]