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Twenty-five years ago, the United States brought
forth on the European continent a new state dedicated to the
proposition that citizens are not equal as individuals but rather
endowed with group rights. Those three groups (Bosniaks, Serbs and
Croats), denominated as “constituent peoples,” are entitled to block
numerical majority decisions. We have tested whether that
state—Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H)—or any state so conceived and so
dedicated, can long endure.
The answer is now clear: It can endure, but it
cannot function effectively to enable its citizens to prosper and
enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. B&H is trapped in
a scheme of governance that permanently empowers those who appeal to
group ethnic identity and disempowers those who try to appeal across
ethnic lines to people as individuals or groups that include more
than one ethnicity. There is no real possibility of alternation in
power or representation of civic interests, only reformulation of
elite bargains among ethnically defined and centrally commanded
political parties.
Political Paralysis
This ethnically based scheme is not a total
failure. It ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, attracted
massive international reconstruction assistance and permitted some
people to return to their homes and restart their lives. B&H today
has a per capita gross domestic product close to double that of the
former Yugoslavia before the 1990s wars. People of all ethnicities
can travel safely in the entire country, even if living and working
in areas where they are in the minority can still be difficult.
Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim Bosnians worship freely, many of them
in restored churches and mosques.
But politics at all levels remains frozen in a
constant struggle of conflicting ethnic group rights. The elaborate
architecture of the state—division into two “entities,”
majority-Serbian Republika Srpska (R.S.) and the (Croat-Bosniak)
Federation; division of the Federation into cantons; and,
ultimately, division of both entities into municipalities—ensures
ethnic vetoes over all important decisions and many unimportant
ones. Government jobs, state-owned companies and other public
resources are divvied up on an ethnic basis. Difficult-to-remove
party bosses thrive and stash ill-gotten gains abroad, while
citizens complain and hope to emigrate.
The promise of eventual European Union membership,
a strong incentive for reform when it was first enunciated in the
early 2000s, is now in doubt, as Europe is preoccupied with its own
problems and unreasonably delayed accession negotiations with
qualified candidates like North Macedonia and Albania while refusing
Kosovo visa-free travel. With the United Kingdom exiting, and ethnic
nationalists dominant in Poland and Hungary, the European Union is
no longer the beacon of liberal democracy it once was.
Nor is the United States, where the Trump
administration has applauded Brexit and is trying to undermine the
E.U. The substantial successes of peace implementation in the first
10 years after Dayton resulted from the United States and Europe
working in tandem for the same ends. That has become far more
difficult. The current dissonance between Washington and Brussels
echoes in the Balkans, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
What is to be done?
A Near-term Threat
Nothing needs to be done in haste. B&H has been
peaceful, if poorly governed, for most of the past 25 years. It can
continue in that state a while longer, if only because those in
power benefit from its dysfunctionality. But there is a risk that an
ethnicity-based land swap between Kosovo and Serbia could
destabilize the country. That proposal would exchange
majority-Serbian territory in northern Kosovo for majority-Albanian
territory in southern Serbia, with dire consequences for the future
of Serbs living elsewhere in Kosovo and Albanians living elsewhere
in Serbia.
Milorad Dodik, the Serb representative in Bosnia
and Herzegovina’s collective presidency, has said that such a land
swap will trigger his promise of declaring Republika Srpska
independent. He has already prepared the ground for this move by
denying the validity of the constitutional court’s decisions in R.S.
and arming the R.S. police far beyond the level required to counter
criminality. He has also gotten Russian paramilitary training for
them and boasted of wiretapping his opponents, many of whom might
line up to support R.S. independence.
Citizens who are loyal to Bosnia and Herzegovina
will not let Republika Srpska go without a fight. If Dodik moves
toward independence, a Bosniak-led force might try to seize the
northeastern municipality of Brcko, the scene of horrific Serb
atrocities and ferocious fighting during the 1992-1995 war. It links
the two wings of Republika Srpska: one in the east and one in the
north and west, where the R.S. capital of Banja Luka lies. The
Republika Srpska cannot survive without Brcko, so it will be the
center of gravity of the next war, even though today the
municipality is a model of reintegration as the result of successful
American arbitration and supervision that made it constitutionally
distinct from both the Federation and R.S.
How can such a disaster be avoided? Most
immediately, by avoiding any land swap between Serbia and Kosovo and
moving all (European) troops still stationed in B&H to Brcko, where
they would prevent both R.S. and the Federation from gaining
exclusive control. In the longer term, what needs to be done is to
end the division of the country into two ethnically defined entities
derived from the warring parties of 1992-1995 and embedded in the
current constitution.
A Critical Reform
As necessary as that division seemed at Dayton in
1995, it is a birth defect that prevents B&H from ever qualifying as
a serious candidate for E.U. accession. Belgium is constitutionally
similar, but it is a charter member of the European Union, and
Brussels is the Union’s executive capital. The E.U. will not be
taking in any new members whose governance is as dysfunctional as
Belgium’s, and B&H’s is far worse. Only with the best intentions,
which do not exist, would it be possible for Dayton’s Bosnia and
Herzegovina to qualify for E.U. accession.
There is no reason other than its hard-to-amend
Dayton constitution why B&H could not be governed without the
entities of R.S. and the Federation (including its 10 cantons). The
central government in Sarajevo would need to be responsible for
foreign affairs (including trade and customs), monetary and fiscal
policy, and defense, as it is today, as well as have all the
authority needed to negotiate and implement the acquis
communautaire, the body of E.U. law and regulation that all new
members are required to accept.
The Sarajevo Parliament would need to be liberated
from the various ethnic vetoes by which it is now constrained. But
simply requiring a supermajority (60 percent or more) to form a
governing coalition would ensure that no single ethnicity could rule
alone. The court system’s independence, professionalism and capacity
to protect individual rights would need to be improved. The
constitutional court would need to continue to have three foreign
members, to break ethnic blockages.
Without the entities and the cantons, the basic
unit of subnational governance would then be the municipalities
(aggregated in the larger population centers to form city
governments), which have long had far more potential to get things
done. Since they became popularly elected in 2003, B&H’s mayors have
learned how to govern more effectively than their party masters in
most of the cantons and Sarajevo. No matter their ethnicity, mayors
need to fill potholes, attract investors, keep the schools running,
and maintain law and order. It is hard to reduce governance at the
municipal level to ethnicity.
Ethnicity would not, however, evaporate as a
political factor. Devolving additional authority to B&H’s 143
municipalities would empower local ethnic majorities. Most (if not
all) of the 64 municipalities in Republika Srpska are majority Serb.
Most of the 79 municipalities in the Federation are majority
Bosniak, but a significant number are majority Croat. Eliminating
the entities and cantons would still leave ample opportunity for
ethnic nationalists to prove their point at the ballot box, but
there would also be electoral competition within plurality or
majority ethnicities, raising the political value of local
minorities.
This is not a new idea, but it contradicts the
current constitution and would weaken B&H’s ethnic warlords, who for
more than 25 years have commanded the resources required to muffle
dissent. The moment to move forward with such a reform may have
arrived. Tight fiscal conditions in the aftermath of the COVID-19
epidemic will provide a powerful incentive to simplify the
constitutional architecture. Croatia and Serbia, also weakened
financially, will want to reduce subsidies to their co-nationals in
B&H. Straitened finances could incentivize massive popular
mobilization. Bosnians would need to insist on reform, as they began
to do in the aftermath of disastrous floods in 2014 and continued to
do in multiethnic demonstrations against police abuses of power in
2018 and early 2019.
International Support Needed
Bosnian mobilization will need international
support to effectuate change. The United States and the European
Union are the prime candidates for foreign partners. Bosnia and
Herzegovina is smaller in population than more than half of U.S.
states, whose counties and other local subsidiary governments are
roughly analogous to B&H’s “municipalities.” B&H is also smaller
than 20 of the European Union’s 27 members. There is no need for
either entities or cantons to govern a country of this size, and the
E.U.’s principle of subsidiarity (doing things at the lowest level
of governance possible) favors empowering the municipalities.
Strengthened municipal governance in both Macedonia and Kosovo since
their 1999 and 2001 wars has been successful and has empowered
numerical minorities.
Some may worry about a ripple effect in the
region, especially in the municipalities of Serbia’s
Bosniak-inhabited Sandzak or Vojvodina and Montenegro’s
Serb-inhabited municipalities in both the north and south. But those
areas have a mutually deterrent relationship: Anything Serbia asks
for municipalities inside Montenegro it should be willing to concede
to municipalities inside Serbia. Reciprocity is one of the most
fundamental of diplomatic principles.
Twenty-five years after Dayton, this is the
constitutional reform Bosnia and Herzegovina needs: simplification
of its state architecture, with devolution of powers to the
municipalities while the central government (B&H citizens call it
the “state” government) focuses on preparing the country for E.U.
and NATO membership. The Brcko District, in all but name a
municipality that has had a special, autonomous status for more than
two decades, points in the right direction. It has prospered while
managing its ethnic tensions better than most of the rest of the
country.
There is no sign that the powers that be in Bosnia
and Herzegovina will seize the opportunity without tandem pressure
from Washington and Brussels, which has been vital to all
substantial progress since the war. In the aftermath of COVID-19,
they, too, will lack the means to subsidize B&H as they have for 25
years. The United States and the European Union would need to
convince Turkey and Croatia to use their considerable leverage in
B&H with the Bosniak and Croat communities, respectively. Belgrade
and Moscow would likewise need to use their influence in Banja Luka.
Belgrade knows that strengthening municipal governance has benefited
Serbs in Kosovo, and Moscow understands it could be part of the
solution in Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk, as well.
The United States and the European Union have good
reason to be proud of what they did for Bosnia and Herzegovina in
1995 and thereafter. But the process has stalled short of
completion. Enabling the country to enter NATO and the E.U. as a
fully functioning state of all its citizens would be eloquent
testimony to renewed American and European commitment to democracy
worldwide. Municipalization, combined with refocusing the “state”
government on NATO and E.U. membership, would hasten that day.
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