Why We Shouldn’t Ignore Bosnia

Observers of international conflicts tend to think that once a peace strategy has been drawn up, the issue that was supposedly remedied no longer matters on the political stage. Bosnia, however, illuminates the consequences of this sort of hasty conclusion.

Unlike the other former Yugoslav republics, Bosnia didn’t have one ethnic group that could claim to be a majority. Rather, according to a 1991 census, Bosniaks had a relative majority with 44 percent, followed by Serbs with 31 percent and Croats with 17 percent. The break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s strained relationships among these three “constituent peoples.” Some 100,000 people were killed in the resulting land grab, and thousands more displaced.

International actors never intended for the Dayton Agreement to be a silver bullet for the ethnic tensions that fractured Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia in the ’90s. They created it in 1995 to extinguish a three-year war. Still, the agreement has since contributed to myriad regional issues. In addition, the Western Balkans is the one region in which the European Union has taken on full security leadership. The EU therefore ought to shoulder much of the responsibility for cleaning up the mess that it’s helped to make in Bosnia.

Dayton’s peace deal set up an enormously complex government structure, steered primarily by foreign actors, that’s poised Bosnia’s predatory political elites to carry on their high-handed corruption, and in a country in which unemployment hangs around 45 percent. A key feature of the agreement was Bosnia’s partition into two ethnic enclaves: the Bosnian Serb Republika Srpska, which covers 49 percent of the territory, and the Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which covers the remaining 51 percent.

Each political entity has its own president, parliament, and police force, but the divided nature of the two entities fosters an environment that looks more stable than it actually is. Even a long-overdue 2013 census, the first since the war, threatened to reopen Bosnia’s ethno-national wounds as Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs braced themselves for familiar elite-led propaganda campaigns and possible shifts in the balance of power.

And this is to say nothing of the mass protests in 2014, when hundreds of people across dozens of cities and towns attacked administrative buildings and squared off with police in acts that signaled that Bosnia’s citizens are fed up with the “stable but stagnant” status quo.

International powers faced substantial constraints in crafting a conflict-settlement strategy during the course of Bosnia’s ongoing war, which certainly complicated any efforts to foresee the long-term consequences of peace talks. But interest in Bosnia’s uncertain path forward has fallen by the wayside for much of the international community. Twenty years after the conclusion of a brutal civil war, Bosnia has seen little additional progress, and this reality ought to matter to world leaders for several reasons.

First, much of Bosnia’s current sociopolitical malaise is deeply rooted in the Dayton Agreement. The peace deal has essentially cemented the postwar state along its already heated ethnic lines. One clear example of this troubling situation is the Sejdić-Finci question, which goes back to a 2009 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that declared part of Bosnia’s Dayton-brokered constitution unlawful because it discriminates against people who don’t identify as Bosniak, Croat, or Serb. Specifically, minority groups such as Jews, Roma, and even people who simply reject ethnic labels are excluded from top state jobs. Despite the ECHR ruling, Bosnia’s political elites, who have no reason to relinquish their power, have refused to fix the issue, opting, instead, to entrench ethnic segregation in employment.

Second, regional security in Bosnia’s post-Soviet landscape remains uncertain. Though the West’s understanding of Eastern Europe is too often coated with Cold War stereotypes of Russia, it’s critical to confront the contemporary realities of Russia’s geopolitical power plays. Russia has mastered the art of leveraging its partnerships to suit its own interests. Last October, for instance, Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a visit to Belgrade, agreed not to recognize Kosovo’s independence, an important gesture toward Serbia, which lost the territory in the ’90s. Serbian President Tomislav Nikolić and his Republika Srpska counterpart Milorad Dodik, in turn, vowed to resist EU pressure to sanction Russia for its role in the Ukraine crisis. Dodik, in particular, is known to make calls for Bosnian Serb independence that smack of the same rhetoric around Russia’s incursions into Crimea. Or think of it like this: Russia’s regional trouble-making threatens to spill over into the Western Balkans, and it could shake up Bosnia’s fragile cultural and political climate.

And third, there are still lessons to be learned from Bosnia about how to conduct a peace process. For many scholars, Russia’s invasion last February of the mainly Russophone Crimea illuminated strong similarities between Bosnia and Ukraine. Balkans expert Jasmin Mujanović observes that the political tactic “being deployed by Russia bears remarkable likeness to what was done by the Milosevic government in Yugoslavia. It’s occupation in the name of ethnic solidarity or protection of peace: You occupy a territory and then engineer a referendum.” This isn’t to suggest that Ukraine is on the brink of erupting into a bloody war as Bosnia did in 1992, or that Russia is attempting to drum up ethnic violence. Yet domestic and international players would be wise not to neglect the Bosnian example, which shines a light not only on the dangers of unchecked ethno-territorial aggression—but also on the dangers of short-sighted solutions to it.

Facilitating constructive change in Bosnia won’t be easy. But there’s optimism, and a healthy dose of skepticism, to be found in recent developments. Earlier this year, EU leaders endorsed an association agreement with Bosnia that unblocked its bid to join the political bloc. Bosnia’s leaders, for their part, agreed to implement much-needed reforms, such as measures for ethnic reconciliation and against corruption. Though it will be a long time before Bosnia is in a position to join the EU, this agreement is still an auspicious potential beginning of that process.

Perhaps the prospect of membership, weighed against the backdrop of regional power plays, will make clear to the international community that there’s still too much to be done in and to be learned from Bosnia for the war-traumatized state to be ignored.