Lord Paddy Ashdown, the United Nations' High Representative of Bosnia Herzegovina, is effectively the international community's tsar in the Balkans. Recently, however, his almost limitless powers have come under attack.
| The European Stability Initiative (ESI) think tank has launched a broadside against the international protectorate in Bosnia (1). The ESI's Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin wrote an article for the Journal of Democracy entitled 'Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina: travails of the European Raj', and have kickstarted a debate on 'liberal imperialism' on their website (2).
| Julian Braithwaite, spokesperson for the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia, wrote a tetchy response to the UK Guardian's letters page on 7 July, accusing the ESI of self-promotion and inaccurate reporting - though he failed to mention any specific instances (3). The High Representative himself then entered the fray on 11 July, writing a piece for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Ashdown deftly avoided any reference to his own role, but acknowledged the critics who 'compare the international community's powers in Bosnia to those of a dictator or colonial governor' (4).
| Ashdown's defensiveness is surprising, given that he has previously conceded much of what the ESI report claims. Less than a year ago, Ashdown told the Guardian: 'What we have [in Bosnia] is near-imperialism.' He said that his job incorporates 'a Gilbert and Sullivan title and powers that should make a liberal blush' - though as the Guardian's Julian Glover wryly noted, Ashdown wasn't blushing (5).
| So extensive are Ashdown's powers that the ESI report cannot help but draw upon Britain's colonial history in India to illuminate the 'extraordinary political reality' in present-day Bosnia Herzegovina: 'In Sarajevo in the early twenty-first century, as in Calcutta in the nineteenth, foreigners play the part of "benevolent despots".' (6) The report presents a cogent summary of this 'unlimited authority of an international mission to overrule all of the democratic institutions of a sovereign member state of the United Nations' (7).
| According to the ESI report, the OHR has so much power that it has tied itself in knots trying to exercise it. In 1999, the third High Representative, Wolfgang Petritsch, dismissed elected Serbian mayor Mile Marceta without even citing a specific violation of the Dayton Peace Agreement (usually the justification given for the OHR's summary dismissals).
| Marceta was an eminent non-nationalist leader of a displaced persons' movement, whose public championing of multiethnic return irked 'international field officers, who resented [his] visibility and his impatience with their mission's lack of progress toward securing the right of return'. These field officers made common cause with local Croat nationalists to secure Marceta's dismissal - thus producing a situation where the 'OHR had dismissed an elected official not for blocking or ignoring the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement, but for trying too hard to implement it' (8).
| Ironically, as evidenced by the ESI report, the High Representative has even fewer legal constraints on his formal powers than that other tinpot Balkan dictator, Slobodan Miloševic. Ashdown can 'dismiss presidents, prime ministers, judges, mayors, without having to submit [the OHR's] decisions for review by any independent appeals body. [The OHR] can veto candidates for ministerial positions without needing publicly to present any evidence for its stance. It can impose legislation and create new institutions without having to estimate the cost to Bosnian taxpayers. In fact, the OHR is not accountable to any elected institution at all.' (9)
| In his article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Ashdown dismisses the need for votes, arguing that the OHR can claim its legitimacy from opinion polls, which indicate that the 'people of Bosnia…support [the OHR's] powers and think they are used not too much, but if anything too little' (10). The votes tell a different story: voter turnout has progressively diminished as the OHR has entrenched its powers; in the October 2002 elections, Bosnia's fragmented ethnic constituencies expressly countermanded the High Representative's 'advice', by casting more votes for nationalists than for Ashdown's favourites.
| Contrary to Julian Braithwaite's assertion, the ESI's report is up to date - but it does cover ground that has been covered before, notably by David Chandler in his book Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton, an indictment of the Bosnian nation-building experiment (11). Chandler has tracked Ashdown's record as 'colonial governor' since Ashdown took up the post of High Representative on 27 May 2002. So more interesting than the ESI report's detail, is its analysis of the dynamics underlying 'mission creep' in the Bosnian protectorate, and the historical analogy it draws upon.
| The report notes that, when the OHR was established, it had no formal powers at all. But after having purged the entire management board of the Bosnian Serb television broadcaster and sending troops to occupy the broadcaster's transmitters in May 1997, the OHR began to scale 'the commanding heights of what amounts to a system of "indirect rule"' (12). After this intervention, the OHR's overseer, the Peace Implementation Council (a biennial gathering of 50 foreign ministries chaired by the OHR), granted the OHR sweeping new powers.
| These so-called 'Bonn powers' became the OHR's weapons of choice. From 1997 to 1999, High Representative Carlos Westerndorp despatched an average of four 'impositions' a month. Under Ashdown, the figure has more than tripled to 'about 14 decisions each month' (13) - though Braithwaite claims it is 'only' 11 (14).
| The problem identified in the ESI report is the 'illusory' belief that well-intentioned international state-building missions are exempt from the 'universal laws of power'. Although the ESI claims there is a need for authoritarian rule in exceptional circumstances - such as Bosnia's 'postcommunist', post-civil war polity - its report emphasises the necessity of formal checks: 'Missing from the outset, however were substantive or procedural checks on the use of the new [Bonn] powers' (15). This explanation amounts to little more than the old adage that 'Absolute power corrupts absolutely' - ultimately an unsatisfactory explanation of gritty political realities.
| 'Vague and general criteria [as in the Bonn powers] lead inexorably toward the open-endedness of the Utilitarians' civilising imperialism, which is ultimately incompatible with the objective of democratisation', argues the ESI report (16). The ESI proposes that an independent commission be established to review the OHR's legislative impositions and summary dismissals, composed 'ideally by elected Bosnian legislators who might be joined by members from…the European parliament or the US Congress' (17).
| But the overarching problem to be contained here is not 'vague and general criteria'. Constructing transnational checks and balances on the OHR's arbitrary powers may help to shield the Bosnian electorate from the worst effects of Ashdown's authoritarianism. But all the checks in the world will not suppress the impulse underlying the OHR's boundless appetite for power: namely, the assumption that it has not merely the right, but the duty, to direct Bosnians' lives.
| The ESI report claims that originally the 'High Representative was to fill the role of a senior…diplomat with enough moral weight to help settle disputes' (18). This is a disingenuous claim. What imbued the OHR with 'moral weight' was precisely the assumption that the 'international community' has the political right and moral authority to shape the lives of lesser, wayward peoples. Institutions shape politics; they do not create it. Having abrogated the fundamental starting point of democratic politics - the right to self-determination - the OHR proceeded to construct the legal framework it needed to fulfil its authoritarian guiding principles.
| The weakness of the ESI's conclusion exposes the ambivalence in its notion of 'liberal imperialism'. The prefix 'liberal' seems designed to cushion the readers' delicate sensibilities from the ugliness of the word 'imperialism' when it stands alone. 'Liberal imperialism' is meant to evoke irrepressible benevolence, as incarnated by those misguided Utilitarians. Without the benefit of prefixes however, 'imperialism' alone is associated with Nazism, racism, plunder and rapine.
| The only possible response to those who wax lyrical about the benevolent varieties of imperialism is to ask: is there any other kind? When has imperialism not been irrepressibly benevolent and well-intentioned? Even in its most barbarous moments, imperialism has justified itself in the language of harsh necessity and 'unavoidable' costs.
| Ironically, the difficult history of imperialism that the prefix 'liberal' tries to hide is exemplified by Ashdown's own career. Never having been elected to an official position in Britain, Ashdown remains a minor political personality. Nonetheless, his remarkable life and career capture the forward strides and dramatic retreats of twentieth-century politics - on the international stage that is, not the domestic.
| Before his entry into British politics, Ashdown's military career was devoted to buttressing the retreat of the British imperium. He served as an officer in the Royal Marines from 1959 to 1972, having the distinction of seeing active service in two of the twentieth century's most successful 'counter-insurgency' campaigns, in Borneo and the Arabian Gulf - campaigns that amounted to little more than terrorising the locals (19). After returning to England in 1970, he was given command of a Commando Company in Belfast, before entering parliament in the 1983 general election (20).
| Ashdown's latest job represents the logical conclusion to a career devoted to imperial policing around the world - from South East Asia via the Middle East to Northern Ireland, finally to the Balkans. Born in New Delhi in 1941, when the Raj had less than a decade left in existence, Ashdown has not let the twilight of the British Empire impede him from becoming governor-general of his own satrapy.
| Read on:
The not-so-new imperialism, by David Chandler
(1) See Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Travails of the European Raj (.pdf), Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, Journal of Democracy, July 2003, Volume 14, Number 3; and Ashdown "running Bosnia like a Raj", Ian Traynor, Guardian, 5 July 2003
(2) See the European Stability Initiative's website
(3) See A new liberal imperialism?, Letters, by Julian Braithwaite, Guardian, 7 July 2003
(4) Available from We want to achieve legislation stamped 'Made in Bosnia', Paddy Ashdown, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 July 2003
(5) King Paddy, Julian Glover, Guardian, 11 October 2002
(6) Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Travails of the European Raj (.pdf), Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, Journal of Democracy, July 2003, Volume 14, Number 3, p62
(7) Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Travails of the European Raj (.pdf), Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, Journal of Democracy, July 2003, Volume 14, Number 3, p60
(8) Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Travails of the European Raj (.pdf), Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, Journal of Democracy, July 2003, Volume 14, Number 3, p66
(9) Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Travails of the European Raj (.pdf), Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, Journal of Democracy, July 2003, Volume 14, Number 3, p61
(10) We want to achieve legislation stamped 'Made in Bosnia', Paddy Ashdown, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 July 2003
(11) Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton, David Chandler, Pluto Press, 2000 (buy this book from Amazon UK)
(12) Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Travails of the European Raj (.pdf), Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, Journal of Democracy, July 2003, Volume 14, Number 3, p62
(13) Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Travails of the European Raj (.pdf), Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, Journal of Democracy, July 2003, Volume 14, Number 3, p68
(14) Ashdown "running Bosnia like a Raj, Ian Traynor, Guardian 5 July 2003
(15) Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Travails of the European Raj (.pdf), Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, Journal of Democracy, July 2003, Volume 14, Number 3, p64
(16) Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Travails of the European Raj (.pdf), Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, Journal of Democracy, July 2003, Volume 14, Number 3, p71
(17) Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Travails of the European Raj (.pdf), Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, Journal of Democracy, July 2003, Volume 14, Number 3, p72
(18) Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Travails of the European Raj (.pdf), Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, Journal of Democracy, July 2003, Volume 14, Number 3, p73
(19) For an account of the British-led counter-insurgency campaign in Oman, see Fred Halliday's Arabia Without Sultans, Saqi Books, 2001 (buy this book from Amazon UK)
(20) See the OHR's website for Lord Ashdown's Curriculum Vitae
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