Because of their (geo)politically peripheral position in American foreign policy, there is little in the way of a permanent expert policy community concerned with the Western Balkans in Washington. Joseph E. Schmitz and Brian T. Kennedy’s recent article on Bosnia and Herzegovina, however, illustrates the dangers of leaving legal-political commentary on one of the most complex polities in the world to those lacking the requisite expertise. The product is not just a mangling of the major precepts of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s postwar constitutional and political regime, but, more dangerously, a profound misunderstanding of the United States’ own strategic interests in the region.
To wit, Schmitz and Kennedy ask what the American interest in Bosnia and Herzegovina is, and answer by telling us that it is a “sovereign, self-governing, and prosperous” Bosnia and Herzegovina. Most Bosnians, and most Americans (even those unfamiliar with the country’s complex politics), would readily agree with that prescript. The trouble is Schmitz and Kennedy’s entire case for a sovereign and self-governing Bosnia and Herzegovina is constructed through the political perspectives of a Chinese- and Russian-aligned secessionist political leader and his party. Namely, Milorad Dodik and his Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD), whose positions Schmitz and Kennedy buttress with occasional references to the views of the likewise ethnic separatist Croat(ian) Democratic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina (HDZ BiH) and their leader Dragan Čović, who has been in a coalition with the SNSD for the better part of twenty years.
Thus, from the outset, the entire frame of Schmitz and Kennedy’s article is a classic example of a poisoned well fallacy. Why should America’s interests in Bosnia and Herzegovina be distilled through the views of political leaders, one of whom by his own admission is seeking to break up that state? In fact, that aim is not just articulated to the Bosnian public by Dodik’s SNSD on a near daily basis, it is contained in the regime’s own contracts with its retinue of lobbyists in Washington, D.C. To pursue the question of Bosnian sovereignty through the perspective of the SNSD is thus akin to querying Jefferson Davis on his positions on American federalism and the equality of persons under the law.
But let us pursue their argument further.
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