Bosnia's protectors are frustrated by the fact that after eight years of foreign tutelage, politics there is still dominated by parties which assert the interests of one ethnic group Muslim, Serb or Croat rather than the whole country.
Given the chief justice's expressed interest in tightening up the rules for standing, along with general confusion in the courts about whether sponsors of a referendum can assert the interests of a state unwilling to defend it, it's possible that the standing issue is what drove this case from the beginning.
In most regions where different religions and ethnicities live, there are memories not only of bloodshed but also of mutually beneficial co-existence, often made possible by an authoritarian regime (be it Tsarist, Ottoman, Leninist, Titoist or Ba'athist) which keeps the peace by repressing any move to assert the interests of one group at the expense of others.
The real test is whether they will channel that momentum in ways that assert the interest of the public above the interests of the banks.
The World Trade Organization, too, Professor Stiglitz asserts, promotes the interests of the developed world.
Those who speak for that apparatus, preeminently the president, assert that the interests of the state and the interests of the country are indistinguishable.
"But in focusing on these teachers who make up a fraction of the workforce, he strips the hundreds of thousands of teachers who are doing a good job of any right to a voice". During a two-month trial in the case, Vergara vs. California, both sides asserted that the interests of students were at stake.
Katie Townsend, an attorney for the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, which joined our case last month in an effort to "assert the broader interests of the press and the public," told VICE News it's difficult for the media to report on certain aspects of the government's use of electronic surveillance because of the intense secrecy surrounding the issue.
So they forced the would-be monarch to govern within rules that had been asserted previously in the interests of the citizenry and to agree that he would govern according to the will of the people.
So this could be a sign that we have, at last, reached a stage of the game where Mr Clegg is going to assert the self-interest of his party more trenchantly.
