ONE LAST vestige remains of the post–World War I stipulation that put Southern Slavs of three major faiths—Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Islam—under a single flag. It is Bosnia and Herzegovina. Twenty years ago it was nearly destroyed by a three-way war between Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks that left some one hundred thousand dead and made refugees out of another two million. Its dissolution has been steadily wrought out since, through what some observers have termed a “war by other means.” Its weapons are those deployed by Balkan elites everywhere—corruption, electoral machinations, ethnic strong-arming—but only in Bosnia have they pushed the state to the brink of nonexistence. The virtual disappearance of the word “Bosnian” from public discourse in recent years—citizens of Bosnia identify themselves by religion more today than they did during the war—may indeed prove self-fulfilling: the future of Bosnian statehood has become the focus of the general election, set for October 2018. Its destruction would give the Croats in the southwest, the Serbs in the north and east, and the Bosniaks clustered around Sarajevo their own states. Proponents of federalization are not just political elites, for whom carving up the state would be a boon of power and resources, but citizens of a country whose very premise for existing is rejected by more than half the population.

Surviving a war only to be eviscerated by bureaucratic mismanagement: Bosnia’s is one of the more perplexing European crises of late, and among the least discussed. The vast expanse of journalism once fixated on Sarajevo has withered into a thin stable of academic journals and specialist roundtables. Walk around the capital today, and the flagging inertia of NGOs and diplomatic missions is everywhere palpable. Attention has shifted to Kosovo and Ukraine. “Bosnia is the place you send your interns,” Leila Bičakčić, the head of the Center for Investigative Reporting, told me. “You do not put your serious people here anymore.” Nowhere can the war be easily forgotten. Cities are still speckled with bullet holes. Sheikh-funded refugee towns remain pitched up all across the Dinaric valleys. But perhaps more revealing of what Bosnia means for the world today is the cheap commodification of the killing. In Sarajevo, you can have your hotel arrange a visit to the Tunnel of Hope that funneled the besieged to safety. Slogans from the war have been memorialized as refrigerator magnets. The Genocide Tour takes you out to the mass graves at Srebrenica in a caravan of minibuses.

THE “INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY” that once relished its self-satisfaction over having salvaged Bosnia has little idea what to do with it today. Any taxonomy of the debacle must begin with the 1995 Dayton Accords—an agreement about which everyday Bosnians were never consulted, and which was never intended to be permanent, but whose exhaust fumes now infiltrate almost every aspect of their lives. Dayton stopped the war by essentially freezing it in place. Two mistakes were apparent from the outset. One, the failure to effect a victor of any sort all but guaranteed the conflict’s continuation through the apparatuses of the emergent Bosnian state. This kept not just the war’s winner but even its very events subject to wild contestation. Walking in Sarajevo one morning, I met two Bosnian Serbs who were mapping out the old marketplace that was shelled in a pair of attacks that killed 111 in 1994 and 1995. They had been dispatched from Belgrade as part of an investigation attempting to demonstrate that the trajectory of the rockets showed they could only have been fired by Bosniak forces against their own civilians. Twenty years on, revisionism trumps reconciliation in Bosnia.

Dayton’s other mistake stemmed from a misunderstanding of why war had broken out in the first place. Any acute reading of Bosnia’s past would have shown that, historically, the problems tended to arise from outside forces that intervened to disturb its fragile ethnic balance. Despite no shortage of such external candidates, Western diplomats overwhelmingly favored the tribalism narrative: Balkan peoples had been fighting one another for a long time. It is only grimly ironic that many of the more obvious culprits behind Yugoslavia’s unraveling—the role of the IMF and World Bank in priming the country for social unrest by pitting it through a decade of austerity after Tito’s death, for example—are now once again at work in Bosnia.

But if the war did owe to ethnic divisions, it was necessary that they be emphatically bridged in its aftermath. The paradox of addressing religion was that Dayton shackled nearly everything to it. In Bosnia, the four centuries since Westphalia seemingly never happened. You are Catholic, Orthodox or Muslim before you are Bosnian. There are no minorities or dual identities. Almost everything, from school curricula to public-sector employment to health care, is determined from birth by religion. You can only vote for politicians of your own religious ethnicity. Well-known to observers within Bosnia, a matter of apparent indifference to the Eurocrats who blindly demand its continuation, the Dayton system punishes electoral moderation, erodes political accountability and all but rewards extremism—and it has been churning for a generation now.

A third, related problem then emerged. Dayton issued Bosnia not so much democracy as “democratization.” How to preserve the centrality of the state while satisfying the territorial claims of the respective combatants? The answer was to tell the Bosniaks it was a republic and the Croats and Serbs that it was a federation—all the while giving no Bosnians a state equipped with any meaningful external sovereignty. Bosnia is Switzerland minus most of the functioning bits. Smaller than West Virginia, it is composed of fourteen different territorial units, two entities and twelve governments. At the top is a central government in Sarajevo that revolves the presidency between the three ethnicities. Beneath this, there is the autonomously run Brčko District, and then two entities. In the north is the Republika Srpska, a heavily centralized statelet in which 30 percent of Bosnians—mostly Serbs—control 49 percent of the landmass. In the south is the Federation, a heavily disparate collection of ten cantons, most messily divided between Croats and Muslims, many equipped with different legislative codes, hierarchies of alphabets, anthems and flags. That both entities essentially operate as their own states—they elect their own governments and run their own security forces—doesn’t so much quench the desire for autonomy as dangle it before them.

Attempting to congeal this morass together are some fifty state ministries, hundreds of public-sector institutions and seventy government agencies. They are staffed by that fourth and most robust of Bosnian subgroups: the civil servant. In a country where nearly one in three cannot find work, one in five of those who do work are employed by the state. “Don’t count on another war destroying Bosnia,” Siniša Pepić, a Bosnian Serb economist, told me in Banja Luka. “Public debt will wreck it first.”

Wrangling over control of the state is an encrusted class of politicians who, in relative terms, draw higher salaries than any other parliamentarians on the European continent. Most fall into one of six parties, two per ethnicity, an assemblage dubbed the “sextet” that conforms to no discernible left-right spectrum because the currency of political support in Bosnia has never evolved beyond issues of ethnicity. Most elites traffic in support from their records during the war, or those of their fathers. Among the Bosniaks there is Bakir Izetbegović, son of Alija Izetbegović, the former president. Among the Croats there is Dragan Čović, who has been indicted on corruption charges three additional times since being removed from the tripartite presidency by the European high representative in 2005 for abuse of power. Among the Serbs there is Milorad Dodik, the greatest threat to Bosnia’s continued existence. Many observers of Bosnia suspect that what unites the trio of elites is their own collusive self-enrichment: they despise one another but couldn’t exist without each other. Elections are preceded by stunts: a cross erected above Sarajevo whips Bosniak voters into fears of Serb nationalism, the demolition of a memorial honoring Muslims stokes talk of the rehabilitation of Milošević. In Bosnia, the rising tide of nationalism raises all three ethnic boats simultaneously. “What did Freud call it? The narcissism of minor differences?” Predrag Kojović, the leader of Naša Stranka, one of the only multiethnic parties in Bosnia, asked me. “All three ethnicities have gamed the system with identical reasoning: Why risk losing support over actual problems when you can reap enough votes from perceived problems?”

The result is a state supervised by the West, captured by three different sets of elites and ransacked by six political machines—all simultaneously. Bosnians call it štela, the “contactocracy.” The greatest barrier to its reformation is the lumbering convolutions of the state itself, a piñata of clientelism that gets crammed with more and more political appointees every time power turns over from one ethnicity or party to another. Any attempt to fix the system must start by agreeing on its problems. Few Bosnians can manage even this. For Serbs it is overly centralized and for Bosniaks it is too disparate, while for Croats it is nothing: they lack any entity of their own to mismanage.

THE DIVISION of Bosnian land is the most salient, and dangerous, example of ongoing elite collusion. “You can tag whatever technical name you want on it. Electoral restructuring, administration rezoning,” a researcher with the Democratization Policy Council told me in Sarajevo. “But it’s ethnic cleansing all the same.” What the armies could not thrash out twenty years ago—splintering Bosnia into three states composed of uniform ethnicity—is now being steadily carried out by bureaucratic machination. I was in Srebrenica in October when the town voted in an ethnic Serb as its mayor. There was international outrage that the Bosniaks had been pushed out of power in the very place where eight thousand of their own had been massacred in July 1995. But those of the town’s dwindling Muslim population I met directed their rage only at their own political elites, who, they believed, had deliberately ceded Srebrenica to the Serbs in order to consolidate their administrative control of the Federation further west. The Serbs would have their territory; the Bosniaks would have theirs; the ethnic cross-fertilization, the pluralism that sets Bosnia apart from its neighbors, would be stamped out.

Similar reversals are now happening all across Bosnia. Later I took a bus to Velika Kladuša on the Croatian border, where I witnessed a separate phenomenon. After Tito’s death, a farmer called Fikret Abdić introduced the town to command-and-control agriculture. Other farmers grew their produce on individual plots, but Abdić was the first to extend his control to everything from the land to the storefronts. His specialty was chickens. By the late 1980s, his company, Agrokomerc, was employing thousands of Yugoslavs, paving its own roads, piping water to distant communities, building schools and manning its own police force—a parastate in all but name. Abdić lasted the war by raising a private army and paying off a surrounding network of warlords, as president of the short-lived Autonomous Province of Western Bosnia. In 2002, he was sentenced to twenty years of jail in Croatia after being convicted of war crimes. He was released in 2012; last October he was elected mayor of Velika Kladuša.

The Yugoslavia of the post-Tito decade—a patchwork of patronage networks, some hardened into fiefdoms, many outfitted with their own private security companies—is resorbing its most embattled orphan. Abdić’s story could be synecdoche for Bosnia writ large: a country that former war criminals, let out from their jail cells across Europe, have discovered seemingly primed for their arrival. It would take but one excessively unstable figure to upend the fragility of this ecosystem. Milorad Dodik, the president of Republika Srpska, is the strongest candidate for the part.

Fifty-seven years old, brash and broad-shouldered, Dodik is fond of breaking out into Serbian folk song after his frequent electoral victories. In September 2016, he sent the Bosnian Serbs to the polls in a referendum that many see as a dry run for a referendum on Republika Srpska’s independence from Bosnia. The question at hand was whether the Bosnian Serbs should be allowed to publicly commemorate the day their entity was founded—a clear provocation to Bosniaks who see the holiday as a veiled celebration of their genocide. Dodik still refuses to go to Sarajevo to face trial for what has become the most blatant violation of Dayton in Bosnia’s history. “Dodik now has a dry run for an independence referendum should he choose to hold one,” Srđan Puhalo, a Banja Luka–based journalist, told me. “He knows where to print the ballots, where to put the voting booths, how to harness the media.”

When Dodik entered politics, he was one of the few Bosnian Serbs who supported Dayton. His war had been spent ingratiating himself with Western diplomats desperate for whatever alternative could be found to the regime of Radovan Karadžić and the Serb Democratic Party (SDS), whose genocidal record Dodik went so far as to acknowledge. Madeleine Albright found him to be “a breath of fresh air.” Richard Holbrooke declared, “If more leaders like Dodik appeared, and survived, then the original Dayton design could work.” In postwar elections, Dodik vowed to tackle state corruption, facilitate the return of Muslim refugees, break the bond between church and state, and relocate Republika Srpska’s capital from Pale, the center of wartime operations, to Banja Luka, a quiet business hub in the north. More critically, he was open to giving both the Europeans and Americans an outsized role in Bosnian affairs. “The current crISIS in Republika Srpska cannot be in the interest of anybody in this region, Europe or the world,” he declared in his inaugural 1998 presidential address. “We live in a country that is watched closely by the international community and our economy will largely function on the principle of joined vessels.”

Dodik turned his back on the West only after first vaulting himself into power with at least $5 million in American capital and a string of European-imposed legislative reforms. By 2006, his pro-Western rhetoric had stopped, but the Western funding had not. Both NATO and the EU failed to grasp that Dodik was every bit as opportunistic as other parvenus on the eastern fringes—Viktor Orbán, Nikola Gruevski—who were using Western cash to dismantle their democracies at the very same time. When his prime-minister term limit expired in 2010, Dodik tacked to the presidency of Republika Srpska, which he has held since.

It says enough about Dodik’s formerly moderate stances on Serbdom that when the SDS paraded Radovan Karadžić’s daughter for the crowds during an anti-Dodik rally last May, Dodik responded by parading Ratko Mladić’s son. (Both fathers were in The Hague; it was parade’s end for them.) “Dodik learned that one doesn’t need to be an accountable politician in Bosnia,” Mladen Bosić, his chief political rival in the SDS, told me in Sarajevo. “The demand coming from the electorate—for jobs, electricity, whatever—isn’t there. Ethnicity works. Why bother to change?”

Dodik’s control of the media, judiciary and construction cartels is now so complete that Republika Srpska can now be convincingly labeled a single-party state as well as a parastate. He has sent his police to Russia for training, illegally equipped them with assault rifles and given them free range to detain citizens who take to social media with any objections. His private army—one of the major reasons Sarajevo is powerless to do anything about Dodik—trains at Farmaland, a collection of cow pastures forty-five kilometers north of Banja Luka.

Most of Dodik’s funding comes from the privatization of state telecommunications and oil refineries, pushed by the EU itself. He recycled most of the resulting $500 million into development banks that, through a murky hierarchy, Dodik ultimately controls. They are suspected to be his money-laundering machines. “This is where the game gets dangerous,” Puhalo told me. “Dodik is not enough of a Serb nationalist to risk becoming an international pariah for the idea. He is very much like Milošević in this sense. But if Sarajevo—or Brussels or Washington—begin to scrutinize his financial holdings too closely, don’t be surprised if the independence ballots start getting printed.”

THE SEPTEMBER referendum demonstrated that Dodik can dismantle Dayton in dramatic fashion, at will, without reprisal. Europe’s bluff on Bosnia—that it possessed the political will to support the state—has been exposed. “Several years ago, the decision was made not to use the executive powers of the high representative, but to rely on ‘local ownership’ of issues and ideas,” Valentin Inzko, the European high representative, told me. “Bosnia’s leaders and institutions must take responsibility for their own country.”

And yet those leaders and institutions have proven chronically incapable of doing just that. Succoring financial support out of the West is more profitable than attempting to be a Western-style state. Dodik himself has masterfully outsourced his disputes with the West to their own foreign-policy complexes: Republika Srpska runs diplomatic offices in Brussels, Belgrade, Vienna, Moscow, Stuttgart and Jerusalem. Until 2009, Dodik spent more money on DC lobbyists than any other “country” in the world apart from the Cayman Islands and the United Arab Emirates. Most of it was done through a DC firm called Quinn Gillespie and Associates, headed by, among others, Jack Quinn, whose career trajectory—from Bill Clinton’s White House counsel during the bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs to American adviser for the champion of Bosnian Serb independence—proves that one need not even be Bosnian to wring profit out of the country through ideological contortion.

While labeling U.S. chargé d’affaires Nicholas Hill a “pathological liar and proven troublemaker” and refusing to meet a single American official for three years, Dodik publishes Beltway op-eds claiming that Republika Srpska is the only solution to Bosnia’s radicalization problem and an embodiment par excellence of the Founding Fathers’ federal model. This arrangement would be less troubling if Dodik didn’t appear to get exactly what he wanted out of it. In 2009, the United States inexplicably reversed its stance that international prosecutors could lead investigations into Bosnian organized crime. All pending cases were relegated not even to Bosnia’s central judiciary, but to local judges—the very Banja Luka courts, in other words, that Dodik himself controls.

Does Dodik want his own state? The status quo allows him to siphon largesse out of sources—Sarajevo, Brussels and Washington—that he can simultaneously deride for political gain. It is equally unthinkable that Serbia wants unification with Republika Srpska. The cost of integration alone is a deterrent. But with the loss of Krajina, Montenegro and Kosovo, it’s also true that Republika Srpska has been Belgrade’s only successful foreign-policy adventure since the collapse of Yugoslavia. Dodik is a useful lout for Belgrade, as well as a convenient renegade for Russia: Putin flew Dodik to Moscow shortly before September’s referendum. An independent Republika Srpska would undermine any plans to integrate Bosnia into the EU or NATO, though Vladimir Putin hardly needs Milorad Dodik to prevent that.

Still, Dodik is a symptom of the Bosnian debacle rather than its cause. By turning Bosnia into a virtual protectorate of the Euro-Atlantic, ridding its politicians of their mandates to administer their own state in any demonstrable capacity, Dayton pitted the one-time combatants increasingly inward—against one another, in the ever-expanding arenas of an over-architected state. Too slow to stop this a decade ago, the EU now almost certainly cannot: years of foreign meddling in Sarajevo have been an education for Bosnian political elites. They understand how Europe works, that the specter that they might begin killing one another again is itself enough to leverage funds and watered-down standards for progress, that the flimsiest displays of sensible governance and the most ceremonious adaptations of reform are received with gushing praise by EU diplomats who, at any rate, lavish their jurisdictions on pushing privatization instead of, say, enforcing the writ of law. Not that much of this is to be found in the annual EU reports on Bosnia: it would be an embarrassment indeed if their diplomatic carnival—the troupes of foreign-policy experts and teams of international researchers with advanced degrees in state building—were shown to be crippling Bosnia, not fixing it.

SHOULD BOSNIA be dismembered, either at the hands of Dodik or through the trickling rot of mismanagement, two questions emerge. First, what was the purpose of the war if the same result was to come of the peace? One suspects that reconciliation in Bosnia would have greater prospects if two decades of coexistence had the semblances of a functioning state system to show for itself.

Instead, the lesson of 1995 has become something more troubling: that if one is to insist on ethnic cleansing, one ought to at least do it thoroughly. In Croatia, where the Bosniaks and Serbs were evicted or killed off nearly to a man, EU accession came with minimal obstruction. It says something about Europe today that many of its most pluralistic states—Macedonia, Moldova, Ukraine—remain the least qualified candidates for integration.

The second question: if the “international community” cannot figure out Bosnia, the state that Tito deemed Yugoslavia in miniature, where there is at least a single language and shared cultural heritage, how can it possibly be expected to figure out Lebanon? Iraq? To allow Dayton to continue as it does is to wittingly perpetuate a broken system. Any talk of rewriting it—that is, wiping Bosnia clean and starting fresh with a grand new vision for the state—is fantasy masquerading as solution. Who would even do it?

Alexander Clapp is a journalist based in Istanbul. He is working on a book about Romania.

Image: Reuters