On: Bosnians vote as pro-Russian politician looms large and ethnic tensions simmer

4 October 2026

I read this morning that the Bosnians go to the polls, and that the man who dominates the campaign is the very man forbidden to stand in it. There is a lesson here that no constitution teaches: a prohibition that leaves a man’s voice intact while stripping his name achieves nothing but to prove his point for him. The ban becomes his credential. He need not say the institutions are foreign; the institutions have said it for him, in their own hand.

What strikes me more deeply is the arrangement of the country itself. Bosnia was assembled, after its terrible war, by powers who drew its provinces along the lines of its hatreds and then wondered why the hatreds did not dissolve. One cannot build a township on the principle that each man must live among those who resemble him, and then expect him to learn citizenship, which is precisely the art of living among those who do not. The federation is a machine designed to produce the very separateness it was erected to prevent. Every election renews the design.

And there is a further mechanism, subtler still. When a people’s political life is administered from outside - by international guardians, high representatives, protectorates of one kind or another - the citizen learns that his vote is a ceremony and his assembly a stage. He does not become free by being protected; he becomes a ward. The tutelary hand does not seize his will; it simply makes the exercise of will seem unnecessary, and then impossible, and then forgotten. A nation kept in perpetual minority will eventually seek a father, and it matters little whether the father is in Brussels or in Moscow - only that he be firm, and distant, and flattering.

I do not despair of them. The energy of small peoples is astonishing, and they have endured worse than this arrangement. But I observe that a country cannot be taught self-government the way one teaches arithmetic - by lecture. It must be practised, clumsily, locally, in the township and the parish, or it remains a word in a treaty.