Time & Perspective Quote by Alija Izetbegovic

There is a grim kind of candor in Izetbegovic calling Bosnia-Hercegovina's sovereignty something that can be rationed: limited sovereignty for a limited time. It reads less like a proud declaration than a receipt for survival, the language of a leader forced to translate national self-determination into a negotiated product. The phrasing is deliberately contractual, almost bloodless, and that is the point. In the post-Dayton landscape, moral claims alone could not stop tanks or compel compliance; enforceable terms and international buy-in could.

The intent is twofold. Outwardly, he is reassuring external guarantors that Bosnia will play by the rules of the Dayton Agreement: power-sharing, international oversight, and the recognition that the state emerging from war would be partially administered, partially constrained. Inwardly, he is managing disappointment at home. "Limited" becomes a political sedative, a way to tell citizens and rivals alike: this is not capitulation, it's a temporary arrangement, a bridge to something fuller.

The subtext is that sovereignty is being used as both shield and bargaining chip. By stressing that the limitation is time-bound, he frames Dayton not as the final word on Bosnia's autonomy but as an emergency architecture meant to prevent renewed violence. It also signals an uncomfortable truth: the country was sovereign on paper while deeply dependent on international actors to police borders, institutions, and even the terms of peace.

Context matters. Dayton ended a devastating war by freezing competing claims into an uneasy constitutional structure. Izetbegovic's sentence accepts that the price of stopping the killing was a state whose independence would be real, but conditional.