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The author reports that, while Bosnia continues to face serious economic and political challenges, the country is beginning to emerge from the devastation caused by war. The people of Bosnia must be among the gloomiest in Europe. Polls show that two-thirds of the young want to emigrate; three-quarters think that the economy is going downhill; politicians are widely considered to be corrupt; and political apathy is at an all-time high. The official unemployment rate is running at almost 40%. And yet for all the surface gloom, the underlying picture is surprisingly good. Walk around Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital, or Banja Luka, capital of the Serb republic, and the streets are bustling. One reason, according to Dirk Reinermann, the World Bank's representative in Sarajevo, is that, by the Bank's reckoning, only 16% of Bosnians have no work at all. Mr Reinermann adds that he knows of no other post-war country where GDP has recovered to 80% of what it was before the war within eight years. Most infrastructure has been rebuilt. Naturally there is much left to do--not least the capture of such suspected war criminals as Radovan Karadzic, still believed to be at large in the Serb republic. But in November the European Commission accepted that the country had made significant progress towards European Union accession. In response to voters' gloom, politicians have come to realise that jobs and money matter more than flags. On this basis, the sooner they streamline the country's government, the faster they can move towards the EU and other western clubs that they want to join, such as NATO.