2
implication, the Bosnian voters and their representatives, in this reading, bear the
responsibility for the weakness and lack of legitimacy of central state institutions and
the failure of the state-building aspirations of Bosnia’s international benefactors.
This article seeks to establish that this consensus is based on a myth and that the
Dayton agreement has, in fact, been a moveable feast. The framework created at
Dayton was an extremely flexible one, which has enabled international actors,
unaccountable to the people of Bosnia, to shape and reshape the agenda of post-war
transition in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Dayton’s flexibility has been the key
factor enabling external powers to permanently postpone any transition to Bosnian
‘ownership’. The only transition which has taken place has been from the ad hoc
policy-ownership of self-selected members of the Peace Implementation Council
(PIC) to direct regulatory control under the aegis of the European Union. This
transition has taken place through informal and unaccountable mechanisms of
external regulation, and has been imposed ‘from above’ without any debate or
genuine involvement of the people or elected representatives of BiH. In sum, the
flexibility of external mechanisms of regulation has been a central factor in ‘sucking-
out’ the capacity of Bosnia’s political institutions and undermining the legitimacy of
the BiH state.
4
The following section briefly considers the disputed origins of the Dayton agreement,
after which the post-Dayton developments are briefly analysed in two stages. The first
period is from 1995 to 1999, during which time the powers of the PIC High
Representative were extended, but with little clear policy direction or end point for the
ad hoc international administration. The second period, from 2000 to 2005, saw a
gradual transformation of external regulative mechanisms under the leadership of the
European Union, which laid a comprehensive framework for European ‘ownership’ of
the post-Dayton process. Throughout both these periods, BiH input or ownership of
the policy-making process has been little more than rhetorical. Dayton has provided
the framework in which the external process of managing the post-Dayton peace has
been transformed beyond recognition, while the population of BiH and their elected
representatives have been marginalized from the political process and the elected
bodies bypassed by the creation of new ad hoc mechanisms of direct and indirect EU
interference.
Convention