December 12 marked the 30th anniversary of the signing of the treaty of Paris, far better known as the Dayton Peace Accords.
Dayton was the last of three US-mediated agreements that ended the wars in Croatia and Bosnia: the 1994 Washington Agreement that ended the Muslim-Croat War, the Erdut Agreement signed on November 12, 1995 that ended the Croatia War and, of course, the Dayton Peace Accords that ended the Bosnia War. I was the only US diplomat to participate in all three negotiations and was the principal negotiator of the Erdut Agreement.
In this anniversary year, I have been repeatedly asked about the lessons to be learnt from US diplomacy in the Balkans, particularly as they might be relevant to Ukraine. Generally, I dislike applying lessons from one conflict to another. The circumstances are always so different that it is far better to focus on the conflict at hand.
In this regard, I often think of what constitutional scholar Noah Feldman wrote about his flight to Kuwait as he prepared to join the Coalition Provisional Administration in Iraq. He noted his fellow passengers were busy reading books on the US occupations of Germany and Japan and offered the thought that they might have done better reading about Sunnis and Shiites.
However, one lesson from our Croatia/Bosnia negotiations is highly relevant to the current US peace effort for Ukraine. Throughout the entirety of our multi-year peace efforts in Croatia and Bosnia, we resisted all efforts to change the internationally recognised borders of either country.
It was not always easy. David Owen, the former British foreign secretary and EU mediator, had a number of schemes to change borders. At one point, he had the idea of Croatia ceding all – or part – of Eastern Slavonia to Serbia in exchange for an end to the Serb-held Krajina. In essence, he was trying to get Croatia to trade Croatian territory for Croatian territory – not so different from what US President Donald Trump is proposing for Ukraine today.
In another proposal, Mr Owen wanted Croatia to cede territory north of Brcko to create a land corridor between the two parts of the Bosnian Serb entity. Yet another scheme – which attracted some interest in the US State Department – would have had Bosnia cede Neum to Croatia in exchange for Croatia granting both the Bosniac and Serb-controlled parts of the country access to the Adriatic south of Molunat. This scheme even interested Croatia’s then-president, Franjo Tudjman.
As the Croatia peace negotiator, I opposed even discussing changes in the internationally recognised borders of Croatia or Bosnia. I believed that if we permitted even one change, Serbia would see that territorial changes were possible and we would never get to a lasting peace agreement. And it was not just Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic that I worried about. There were plenty of people in Croatia who had territorial ambitions in Bosnia and even – more fancifully – parts of the Serbian Vojvodina.
Ironically, my strongest ally in opposing any deal involving territorial exchanges was the Russian ambassador to Croatia – a partner in the peace process – who flew to Moscow to lobby against Mr Owen’s schemes.
Notwithstanding some internal discussion about the Neum deal, the administration of then-US president Bill Clinton took a firm line against any changes in borders. If we had not done so, there would have been no Dayton and possibly no end to the fighting in Bosnia and Croatia. Even today, there are irredentists in Serbia and the Bosnian Serb entity that would like to annex the Republika Srpska to Serbia. So far, they know that door is firmly shut but, even the discussion of a US plan to force Ukraine to give up territory provides irredentists an opening and not just in Bosnia.
Ukraine and the Europeans have rejected the territorial components of the Trump plan. While Russia occupies much of the territory that it says it wants to annex, Ukraine and the West can still deny Russia one thing it desperately needs: de jure recognition of its conquests. It is well to recall that the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic Republics for fifty years but never secured de jure recognition of its 1940 conquest. In the end, it was Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia that led the break-up the Soviet Union itself.
Russian President Vladimir Putin did not invade Ukraine just to seize the Donbas. Clearly his ambitions were more expansive and were thwarted only by the unexpectedly fierce – and heroic – resistance of the Ukrainians.
If Russia is rewarded with de jure recognition of its conquests – as Mr Trump has proposed – then we can reasonably expect a renewed campaign of conquest against the rest of Ukraine. And, if Russia gets away with territorial conquest, authoritarian leaders elsewhere will see that it is possible to attack a neighbour and annex its territory. This will make for a far more dangerous world.
