Politics & Power Quote by Paddy Ashdown

Ashdown’s line lands like a verdict on Bosnia’s postwar reality: peace was achieved, but at the price of a workable future. Calling Dayton “superb” for ending the war concedes the moral urgency of stopping bloodshed; labeling it “very bad” for making a state exposes the deal’s second-order damage. The sentence is engineered around that hard pivot, a politician’s way of saying: we did what we had to do, and now we’re stuck with it.

The subtext is institutional. Dayton froze a battlefield map into a constitutional order, rewarding armed facts on the ground with veto points, ethnic fiefdoms, and administrative sprawl. Ashdown is pointing to a familiar post-conflict trap: the agreement that ends violence often entrenches the very divisions that produced it. His “part company with Dayton” is not mere impatience; it’s an argument for legitimacy over mere stability. Peace as an absence of shooting is not the same thing as a state capable of equal citizenship, rule of law, and basic governance.

Context sharpens the stakes. As High Representative in the early 2000s, Ashdown wielded extraordinary powers to impose reforms and remove obstructionist officials. When he says he “tried to lay the foundations,” he’s simultaneously defending that controversial assertiveness and acknowledging its limits: external authority can jump-start institutions, but it can’t manufacture shared political commitment.

The intent, then, is twofold: justify a shift from wartime compromise to peacetime modernization, and challenge the international community’s temptation to treat “signed agreement” as “finished job.”