New rulers

Soon it will be five years since an international administration was established for Bosnia following the Dayton Agreement of November 1995, which in turn ended three years of horrific war. The international administration is supposed gradually to create conditions for Bosnia to re-establish its own democratic self-rule. Chandler's conclusion is that it is doing just the contrary.

As the administration continues, it becomes more heavy-handed, more overweening, and more convinced that the peoples of Bosnia are nowhere near ready for democracy. Its impatient contempt for the peoples of Bosnia becomes self-reinforcing, because it converts politics into a game of jockeying for position and favour with itself as arbiter. Its desire for stability and security translates into an unwillingness ever to be satisfied that it is time to slacken its grip.

Chandler documents the process in minute detail. Exactly what viewpoint he argues from, I don't quite know. He makes no claim that free rein for the drives for a Greater Serbia - or for a Greater Croatia - would be the desirable 'anti-imperialist' alternative. As far as I can understand, he would favour a 'reformist' easing of big-power control. But whatever his political preferences, his sober, low-key factual account compels attention.

Bosnia looks like being no exception to the process documented. Already in East Timor, UN district officials and Timorese leaders - unconcealedly anxious though they are to keep the favour of the big powers - are criticising the heavy-handedness of a UN high command which runs the desperately poor territory from a luxury hotel moored just offshore.

In Kosova there is no near prospect of big-power political control being eased.

In a famous book, Africa and the Victorians, Ronald Robinson and others showed how British imperial rule in Egypt, for example, in the late 19th century, was driven crucially by the logic of processes within Egypt. The British government wanted not to rule Egypt themselves, but only to have an Egyptian government which would secure good conditions for trade. As imperialist economic penetration released its acids into Egypt's body politic, the British government was drawn into intervening more and more to secure the sort of independent Egyptian government they wanted - until finally they had no independent Egyptian government at all, but semi-colonial British rule.

What may be happening in East Timor, Kosova and Bosnia is not exactly analogous. The old polities broke down not because of economic acids but because of local small imperialisms, Indonesian and Serbian. The 'temporary' administrations serve not one national state, but rather the nearest approximations that exist to 'imperialism-in-general' - the United Nations, NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. In fact, so Chandler argues, a large part of the motive in the Bosnian administration is not so much anything specific to Bosnia at all as a desire to cohere those international institutions.

Nevertheless, there are clear parallels. Chandler's book warns all of us, myself included, who saw Indonesian and Serbian imperialisms as the 'greatest evils' in East Timor, Bosnia and Kosova, of how short-sighted we would be to give any political endorsement to the 'lesser evils' of big-power intervention.

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Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton, by David Chandler