One question would be, why don't they want to live together? It seems to me that as long as you have political safeguards in line, there should be no absolute right of self-determination especially in a country without any clear boundaries (i.e. mixed villages). At most, the West should ensure that there are democratic safeguards in those countries in countries with mixed populations. In the case of Kosovo, that was not one of our priorities at all. The West was much more concerned with its own interests.

As well, I don't believe Bosnia should have been split up as envisioned by Izebetgovic/Tudjman/Milosevic early on. The Vance Owen plan seemed to present a perfectly functional framework for gov't, one that worked elswehere, and without 100,000 deaths that ensued, the people would have been much more capable of getting along in a power-sharing gov't. In both these cases we see that the principle of self-determination was not used to further the cause of Democracy, or to prevent violence, but it actually caused violence precisely because the right of self-determination was given to select groups of people, while it was refused for others, and not only that, the West acquiesced as discriminatory laws were passed by the very people they had given the right of self-determination to.

There have to be real standards that have an ethical logic to them, or otherwise powerful actors will always have the option of mucking things up.