Oct 11th 2010, 9:06 by T.J.
HILLARY CLINTON, the US secretary of state, begins her Balkan trip today in Sarajevo. Her tour will then take in Belgrade and Pristina, before winding up in Brussels, where she will discuss ways in which the EU and US can move the western Balkans forward.
On Kosovo, the agenda is relatively simple. She wants to help start talks between Serbia and Kosovo on practical matters of co-operation, with the aim of making life easier for ordinary people on both sides of the border.
Bosnia is harder. The Dayton agreement that ended the war 15 years ago, on the watch of Mrs Clinton's husband, left the Bosnians with a ferociously complex system of governance. The country was formally divided into two entities. On the one side is the Serb-dominated Republika Srpksa (RS), and on the other the Croat-Bosniak federation, which is in turn subdivided into ten cantons. Last week I wrote here about the results of Bosnia’s recent elections and also about a new report by the International Crisis Group on the specific problems of the federation.
For years Americans and Europeans have been trying to get Bosnians to agree to some measure of constitutional reform. A year ago an American-European initiative, the so-called Butmir process, ended in miserable failure. There have been some signs that the Americans want the Bosnians themselves to lead the process. Last week Philip Gordon, the US assistant secretary for European affairs, said to journalists: “We need to leave it to the Bosnians to design their own constitution. We can’t and don’t intend to try to impose it from the outside.” Yet Mrs Clinton's visit to the region suggests that the US does consider itself to have a stake in Bosnia.
The biggest problem will be Milorad Dodik, the president of the RS. Over the past four years he has moved to an ever-more extreme position, now arguing that Bosnia is not a workable state and should be dissolved into its constituent entities. As he does everything he can to disrupt the state's functioning it could be argued that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In his efforts to secure independence for RS, Mr Dodik drew comfort from a recent ruling by the International Court of Justice that Kosovo’s declaration of independence was not illegal. But there are major differences between Kosovo and the RS. First, a declaration of independence by the RS would almost certainly tip Bosnia back into some form of violent conflict. Second, the RS has very few no friends internationally.
There is a Belgrade angle to this too. Serbia's president, Boris Tadić, has worked assiduously to mend fences with the United States, but by going to the RS to support Mr Dodik during the recent elections he severely damaged his credibility in Washington and elsewhere. Last week, in a widely noted interview, Dan Serwer, a former US diplomat who was intimately involved with the Clinton administration’s Balkan policies, said that Mrs Clinton should ask Belgrade to give up its territorial ambitions in both Kosovo and Bosnia if it wants to secure its long-term ambitions of EU and NATO membership.
The point is that Mr Serwer does not believe Mr Tadić’s oft-expressed position that Serbia respects the territorial integrity of Bosnia. That is bad news for Mr Tadić. Yesterday thugs and rioters trashed the centre of Belgrade in show of hatred and intolerance against gays. Serbia has spent the last ten years climbing out of the hole of isolation. Let’s hope that it does not begin to slip back in.
the economist
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