Ending ethnic wars requires outside core-state sponsorship, not local effort

Evidence

An agreement to halt a fault line war will be successful, even if only temporarily, to the extent that it reflects the local balance of power among the primary parties and the interests of the tertiary and secondary parties. The 51 percent-49 percent division of Bosnia was not viable in 1994 when the Serbs controlled 70 percent of the country; it became viable when the Croatian and Muslim offensives reduced Serbian control to almost half. The peace process was also helped by the ethnic cleansing which occurred, with Serbs reduced to less than 3 percent of the population of Croatia and members of all three groups being separated violently or voluntarily in Bosnia. In addition, secondary and tertiary parties, the latter often the core states of civilizations, need to have real security or communal interests in a war to sponsor a viable solution. Alone, primary participants cannot halt fault line wars. Halting them and preventing their escalation into global wars depend primarily on the interests and actions of the core states of the world’s major civilizations. Fault line wars bubble up from below, fault line peaces trickle down from above. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 825

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ethnic cleansing helped make the Bosnian peace viable — and that local parties alone cannot end their own wars — resists easy summary and overturns moralized accounts of peacebuilding.
• SEED: Article angle: the forgotten role of ethnic cleansing in making negotiated settlements actually hold — the uncomfortable honesty of Dayton.
• XREF: Connects to arguments about NATO and outside intervention being decisive in Balkan settlement, and to broader literature on third-party enforcement of civil-war settlements.