How to build the peace: the King of the Nation Builders reveals all

Paddy Ashdown spent more than three years trying to reconstruct Bosnia. He was asked by Donald Rumsfeld to do the same in Iraq. Here, he tells Matthew d’Ancona that such reconstruction must be at the heart of 21st-century geopolitics

You send an ex-Lib Dem leader to the Balkans for three and a half years, and he comes back the King of Nation Builders. Not that ‘nation-building’ is a term much liked by Paddy Ashdown, former High Representative of the International Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

‘That’s something you do to start a nation. This is reconstruction: how do you reconstruct? And let’s not talk about a “nation”, either. Foreigners are not given to creating nations. There are exceptions like Simón Bolîvar, but by and large interveners can only create the state. It’s only the people who can create the nation. So let’s call it reconstruction after conflict. And the story — post the second world war — of reconstruction of states after conflict is the story of hubris, nemesis and amnesia.