Contemplating Failure and Creating Alternatives in the Balkans: Bosnia\u27s Peoples, Democracy and the Shape of Self-Determination

A decade after Dayton, Bosnia is a fictive, failed state held together by outsiders\u27 weapons and outsiders\u27 will. All parties recognize that Bosnia\u27s current constitutional dispensation is dysfunctional and are calling for change, but how should the international community respond? In deciding, we should recognize that we may owe Bosnians much, but we owe Bosnia nothing. This Article argues that traditional self-determination doctrine is unable to justify either further claims for secession from Bosnia or Bosnia\u27s own original secession. It examines the processes used by the international community to frame the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the recognition process for Bosnia, and the likely legal outcomes if these same arguments were applied to the post-Dayton situation, suggesting that most of the legal and moral objections conventionally arrayed against any further fragmentation of the country cannot be differentiated from the circumstances prevailing at the original secession. The Article concludes that the war and the peace have made ethnic groups\u27 claims more possible and more compelling today. Our and Bosnians\u27 desire for stability and justice might be better served by Bosnia\u27s division, and our commitment to democracy makes it essential that, whatever our moral sense, we let Bosnians decide. The claim is narrow and case-dependent, but it will inevitably have implications for re-conceptualizing claims about state formation elsewhere