Over the past five years, Bosnia has made astonishingly little economic progress. The High Representatives have blamed this situation on corruption and nationalism. Both are certainly plentiful in Bosnia. Laws are changed every Tuesday, voted, vetoed or imposed at will. Economic activity is controlled in a feudal fashion, with local officials usually maintaining a stranglehold on all activities on behalf of their political party.
Most parties are simply vessels for their leaders.
Corruption is a natural consequence of personal politics. However, these two issues however present and important are not the key to understanding or solving the Bosnian situation. The war that broke out in 1992 was not a case of external aggression against a peaceful Bosnian nation. Such a nation is a figment of imperial imagination first Turkish, then Austrian, and finally American. The underlying cause of the war, as Misha Glenny pointed out in Fall of Yugoslavia , were irreconcilable political differences between ethnic communities.