The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions, we have not created a civil society.

Ashdown’s remark contrasts the formal architecture of governance—constitutions, ministries, courts, elections—with the informal but essential fabric that makes those structures work: civic trust, independent associations, a free press, habits of compromise, and citizens who organize beyond ethnic or patronage networks. The “greatest failure” implies that post-conflict or post-authoritarian reconstruction can succeed on paper while still failing in lived reality, because institutions without a participatory civic culture become hollow, captured, or ineffective. The line is often read as a warning that democracy-building is not merely technical state-building; it requires nurturing pluralism and social cooperation so that power is checked not only by law but by society itself.