Demonstrate the UK’s Enduring Value Added to European Security in Bosnia — Now

As voters throughout Great Britain and Northern Ireland contemplate how — or even whether — to vote in European Parliament elections in a month, one aspect of the UK’s relationship with the EU and rest of the continent has been both touted as sacrosanct and a bargaining chip: its contribution to defense and security.

On a global scale, the UK is a middleweight power, aside from its nuclear deterrent. But in the European context, only France rivals its power projection capability, as well as will to employ it. Whatever posture the EU’s 27 members have toward the UK after three years of Brexit drama and decades of lukewarm attachment to the post-Cold War EU, this is widely appreciated. Since Russia’s seizure of Crimea and induced war in eastern Ukraine, followed by America’s erratic, isolationist, and nationalist turn under President Donald Trump, this is even more the case. Nobody serious advocates severing security ties; they are more valuable than ever.

London’s posture in the Western Balkans reflects this contribution. Since 1997, when Prime Minister Tony Blair authorized active pursuit and capture of indicted war criminals, Britain has led European efforts to ensure peace, stability, and to prevent further conflict. In the past decade in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this has placed the UK very solidly in a dwindling camp of Western countries — and often alone in the EU — which has actively advocated maintenance of the executive mandates established to ensure the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which ended almost four years of war and led to nearly 100,000 dead. These were — and remain — the civilian international High Representative, tasked with overseeing the implementation of Dayton, and an EU force, EUFOR, which succeeded NATO in 2004 with the mission of “maintaining a safe and secure environment” in the country. Deterrence was written into the peace agreement, with no expiration date.

Alas, since 2006, when the late Paddy Ashdown (whom I advised) left Bosnia at the end of his tenure as High Representative, the trajectory has been ever downward. The prevailing wisdom when he left was that EU enlargement alone would resolve the country’s outstanding governance functionality issues by incentivizing political reform. The EU was particularly high on its “soft power” as well as its own transformative potential, in the wake of the 2004 big bang enlargement — and the ill-considered 2003 invasion of Iraq. Deterrence was seen as not only superfluous, but heretical, in a country with a “membership perspective.” So both EUFOR and the Office of the High Representative were allowed to wither through disuse and active efforts to dismantle them both. It is not coincidental that Russia supported such efforts. EUFOR is now fewer than 600 troops; it is in no position to deter violence or react forcefully to it.

Now, the lack of an effective deterrent has allowed Bosnia to approach the brink of renewed violent conflict. Since 2006, Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik has advocated — and assertively pursued — not only the dismantling of state institutions (particularly a judiciary which might hold him and other entrenched politicians accountable), but the dissolution of the state itself, arguing the country is doomed and that the Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority “entity” established in war and made a component of the state at Dayton, should secede, and perhaps join Serbia. He has also amplified his repression of domestic critics and built-up his paramilitary police capacity, in violation of Dayton. This has engendered a predictable Newtonian reaction from within the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina to also create its own “reserve police” capacity. Fear in Bosnia, growing steadily for over a decade, is now perhaps higher than it was in early 1992. People remember what happened then.

The potentially good news is that there is nothing inevitable about the country’s collapse into violence. It remains eminently preventable. Even better, there is ample reason to believe that popular discontent with not just Dodik, but the entire Bosnian political class, is pronounced to the point that progressive change would be enabled by re-establishing a credible deterrent and allowing space for citizens to engage for an accountable state free from endemic corruption and the deliberately stoked fear of renewed war. But hitherto, the will to confront this has been lacking. The EU’s — and West’s — policy remains on bureaucratic autopilot. The default setting remains to evade responsibility for imminent catastrophic failure, rather than preventing catastrophe.

Britain has slated a company on ready reserve to reinforce EUFOR as part of its “over the horizon” backup. NATO forces, including US forces based in Italy, are further back in the queue, but also available. The UK now needs to demonstrate its will to maintain peace in Bosnia, as well as its value to European security, by advocating immediate deployment of its own company to reinforce EUFOR where it would have the most potent effect: the city of Brcko. Brcko is the circuit breaker of the entire secession narrative, without which communication lines with eastern Bosnia and Serbia are severed for Republika Srpska. These are the control rods in the Bosnia’s overheating conflict reactor.

Such a deployment would, of course, be only the down-payment in a long overdue review of EU and Western policy toward Bosnia and the Balkans. But the UK’s contribution, and will, would be vital in making that possible before eruption of violence forces the issue. Brexit aside, the UK would be complicit in this failure — unless it takes the initiative now to prevent it.

Kurt Bassuener is co-founder of the Democratization Policy Council, a Berlin-based think-tank. He is completing his PhD at the University of St. Andrews’ Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence.