Success Quote by Paddy Ashdown

It lands like an indictment of post-conflict technocracy: you can draft constitutions, raise flags, train police, even hold elections, and still end up with a country that feels brittle. Ashdown is drawing a hard line between the visible architecture of governance and the invisible culture that makes it legitimate. Institutions are the stage set; civil society is the audience that refuses to leave when the lights flicker.

The phrasing matters. "We have created" carries the telltale stamp of international administration and elite brokerage - people with mandates, budgets, and deadlines. It also smuggles in complicity: this is not a problem belonging to "them" but to the managers and reformers who believed procedure could substitute for trust. "Civil society" is deployed less as NGO-speak than as a moral ecosystem: independent media that can embarrass officials, unions and churches and neighborhood groups that can argue without reaching for weapons, everyday habits of participation that make politics feel like something citizens do, not something done to them.

Ashdown's context is inseparable from Bosnia, where he served as High Representative, empowered to impose laws and sack officials. His remark reads like a late-career reckoning with that paradox: the more outsiders enforce functionality from above, the more they risk stunting the messy, bottom-up legitimacy that a democracy needs. The subtext is a warning to state-builders everywhere - if your success metrics are laws passed and agencies launched, you may be winning on paper while the public sphere quietly empties out.