The week of the UN General Assembly confirmed what Republika Srpska had argued even when doing so came at a significant cost: an international order based on selective moral standards and external arbitration has exhausted itself, while the world is irreversibly moving toward a new balance, the Republika Srpska Office for International Cooperation said.
In an analysis titled “The end of an order: What the UN General Assembly week means for Republika Srpska,” the Office argued that Republika Srpska is entering this emerging order from what it considers its most favorable international position in the past three decades.
“The task is not to declare this a victory, but to use it patiently and responsibly, so that Republika Srpska’s place in the new world order becomes an indisputable fact rather than a matter of someone else’s will,” the analysis said.
The full position of the Republika Srpska Office for International Cooperation follows:
The end of an order: What the UN General Assembly week means for Republika Srpska
The UN General Assembly session showed that many of today’s most important decisions are negotiated outside the assembly hall, that what Republika Srpska sees as double standards toward it are not an exception but a recurring practice, and that Republika Srpska must speak with its own voice in the emerging international order.
The general debate of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly, being held this week in New York, did not produce a common direction. The theme of the session itself — “Renewing trust, managing transformation: United Nations delivering for all” — can be read as a self-diagnosis by an organization acknowledging that trust has been damaged and that transformation is underway. An organization that has symbolized the international order for eight decades functioned this week more as a stage on which individual powers addressed their own audiences than as a common forum.
Leading global powers openly questioned the roles of the Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court from the UN podium, including calls for states to withdraw from the latter. Proposals for reforming the Security Council remain mutually incompatible, while any amendment to the UN Charter requires the consent of the five permanent members whose privileged position is itself being challenged.
According to the Office, this deadlock contributes to an environment in which even middle powers believe they can act without consequences. At the same time, those same middle powers have defended multilateralism because it is a system in which their voices carry weight. Under such circumstances, the Office argues, it is difficult to dispute the assessment that the transition toward a multipolar world has become irreversible.
Actual diplomacy, however, increasingly took place outside the General Assembly hall: through bilateral talks among major powers, high-level meetings and agreements concluded on the sidelines of the session.
The pattern, according to the analysis, is increasingly clear: decisions are negotiated bilaterally and transactionally, while the UN often serves as the venue where those decisions are subsequently presented. Messages heard from the podium also reflected a position long advocated by Republika Srpska — that the existing system is being weakened because rules are not applied equally to everyone.
The Office pointed to several examples that it considers evidence of inconsistent application of the same principles.
The right of peoples to self-determination, it argued, is treated in some cases as a legitimate democratic issue, citing Greenland and constitutional debates involving Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. By contrast, when Republika Srpska defends competencies it says are guaranteed under the Dayton Agreement, the Office argued that the same principle is often interpreted as secessionism and a threat to peace.
Similarly, the analysis claimed that support for strengthening the military capabilities of one side in the region can pass without significant international reaction, while constitutionally grounded actions by Republika Srpska institutions are frequently portrayed as destabilizing.
It also cited a recent first-instance judgment involving former members of the KLA as raising questions about what the Office considers inconsistencies in international justice when it comes to Serb victims.
Despite these pressures, the Office argued that Republika Srpska’s recent international contacts contradict portrayals of it as an isolated source of instability, pointing to high-level meetings involving its officials. In its assessment, the image of Republika Srpska as a source of unrest increasingly survives as a domestic political narrative rather than as a reflection of its current international engagement.
According to the analysis, what is weakening is not only the authority of the United Nations, but also an entire era in which supranational actors — including the UN, the Office of the High Representative, ad hoc tribunals and the broadly defined “international community” — exercised extensive authority in determining what was considered legitimate.
The Office argued that Washington has also signaled a move away from externally imposed “nation-building,” with greater responsibility for political solutions shifting toward domestic actors.
It further argued that growing divisions among international actors and the guarantors of the Dayton framework demonstrate that its international dimension has been exhausted. From that perspective, the answer should not be a revision of Dayton, but a return to the original text of the agreement and political compromise among domestic actors.
Republika Srpska, the analysis stressed, does not challenge either the letter of the Dayton Agreement or the UN system.
The United Nations remains, according to the Office, the greatest achievement of global diplomacy over the past 80 years, even as it faces what the analysis describes as its most serious crisis since its establishment.
For that reason, the position of Republika Srpska is that international rules should be applied equally to everyone. The problem, it argued, is not the existence of rules but their inconsistent application and arbitrary interpretation.
Republika Srpska does not advocate weakening the UN, the analysis said, but rather restoring what it sees as the organization’s original role as a forum of equals, in which decisions concerning BiH should be made by its constituent peoples rather than external arbiters or any single part of the country.
Republika Srpska’s diplomacy, the Office said, recognizes that it operates within the UN system and believes it has the right, together with friends and partners, to contribute to improving that system.
The analysis argued that Republika Srpska should never again allow itself to become a silent observer or the subject of decisions made in an arena where it was neither present nor consulted. For that reason, it said, the United Nations remains important, while the upcoming United Nations Day on October 24 carries particular significance this year.
The Office pointed to Republika Srpska’s recent international activities — access to high-level officials, deeper cooperation with partners and efforts to present the suffering of Serb victims to international audiences, including through an exhibition at the U.S. Congress — as evidence of continuity in its diplomatic strategy.
It argued that recent progress, which it described as a shift from sanctions to high-level meetings within a relatively short period, should not lead to complacency but to continued patient and sustained diplomatic work.
Nothing in international relations, the analysis stressed, is achieved without mutual interests.
According to the Office, the latest UN General Assembly week therefore confirmed that Republika Srpska should continue building and articulating its own voice within the international community.
The Office concluded that the week had reinforced what Republika Srpska had maintained even when that position came at considerable cost: that an international order based on selective moral standards and external arbitration has exhausted itself and that the world is irreversibly moving toward a new balance.
“In this new order, Republika Srpska enters from its most favorable position in the past thirty years. The task is not to declare this a victory, but to use it patiently and responsibly — so that Republika Srpska’s place in the new world order becomes an indisputable fact rather than a matter of someone else’s will,” the analysis concluded.
Source: RTRS
