ABSTRACT
Any serious treatment of the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) must come to terms with the question of self-determination. It is indeed arguable that of the many shortcomings of the Dayton Peace Agreement (serving a quasi-constitutional role in BiH since its signing in 1995), a general defect underlying many others has been the failure to address the issue of selfdetermination directly. The reasons for this failure are not hard to guess. The Dayton Accords were an attempt to accommodate radically opposed visions of BiH and the incompatible claims of the different ethnic groups. The most charitable interpretation is that it engineered the best compromise available at the time, based on two overlapping lowest common denominators: one between Bosniaks and Croats, another between all three of the constituent ethnic groups (and the international community). A less kindly reading is that Dayton was the logical consequence of four years of international appeasement of ethnic aggression, genocide, and conquest primarily by Serbian and Bosnian Serb illegal forces, and on a somewhat more limited scale, by Herzegovinian Croats and their backers in Zagreb; an appeasement culminating in an accord the beleaguered Bosnian government had no realistic possibility of not signing, which granted the Bosnian Serbs quasi-independence on roughly half of BiH territory.
