CER | Bosnia: Make or Break

Countless books have appeared in the past decade on the conflicts that divided and shattered the once-prosperous republics that made up the Yugoslav federation. Too often, however, readers in the region remained unmoved. Too often, foreign observers proved unable--understandably so--to fully understand and interpret the maze of historic relations, ethnic, national and religious backgrounds, mistaken policies and fallen ideologies.

True, the outsider’s distance was important to achieve an unbiased assessment of the complex inter-relations on the Balkans. Many local authors could not find such a frame of reference. On the other hand, distance often became a disadvantage when a number of Western writers looked at the countries of the former Yugoslavia through the prism of their own geopolitical, historical, and ideological understandings and experiences, which in some cases were simply not applicable to the region.

Reconstructing Multiethnic Societies mostly overcomes this error by combining the views of eight foreign and four local experts in different fields of social studies. A compilation of studies originally presented at two seminars organized in 1998 and 1999 by the Institute for Strengthening Democracy in Konjic, the volume presents a combination of theoretical and practical discussions on different aspects of the past, present, and possible future of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Furthermore, the authors dare to wrestle with the never-ending, difficult discussion about the theoretical definitions and practical applications of democracy.

While providing a broad analysis of many aspects of postwar Bosnia with the aim of drawing lessons relevant to similar cases, the book might have benefited by looking more deeply into the historical background and different roles of the local communities and neighboring countries leading to the outbreak of war. The important role of the three main religious communities is skirted completely.

Although the authors’ views took shape amid the situation of three years ago, when the country was still fully in the grip of nationalist parties and the security of minority returnees was openly threatened, this can be seen, paradoxically, as a strength, as succeeding events revealed the tremendous progress that has been achieved throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina.

More than 10 years after the outbreak of war, local politicians and the public are looking for ways to improve the framework set up in the 1995 Dayton peace accord. One of the strong points of this book is a thorough analysis of Dayton from various aspects through several different chapters.

“The Dayton accords were an attempt to accommodate radically opposed visions of [Bosnia and Herzegovina] and the incompatible claims of the different ethnic groups,” states Daniel Kofman in “Self-determination in a Multiethnic State: Bosnians, Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs.” Kofman’s examination is taken further by Fionnuala Ni Aolain in a legal analysis of “the fractured soul” of Dayton, its implementation, and the role played in it by international organizations and agencies.

Aolain stresses that the real challenge lies in widening Dayton’s scope in order to “ensure a functional, not a deformed state.” In fact, this is exactly the path the international community has taken since 1999, gradually reinforcing Bosnia’s weak state administration to create a single framework for both the Muslim-Croat and Serb entities.

Aolain foresaw something like the present negotiations on constitutional changes to provide balanced protection for human rights and better representation of all ethnic groups in key institutions. What has changed since then is that now such changes can be voiced and even implemented without the risk of high tensions, blunt obstructionism, and even violence. One such change is the concessions by Republika Srpska that effectively mean the entity is no longer Serb-only. These moves triggered a new round of debate over whether the international community should act more forcefully to impose its own solutions, as at Dayton, or allow a slower, local democratic process to take root. Aolain’s well-chosen advice is that “it is insufficient for outsiders to create perfect paper rules,” and that the territory’s Western overseers must exercise their UN-granted administrative powers much more carefully.

Reconstructing Multiethnic Societies also could have alerted many both within and outside Bosnia of the need to target economic reconstruction rather than zoom in exclusively on political issues. Preoccupied by petty local political bickering and gamesmanship, the international community as well as the general public in Bosnia only recently came to see that a self-sustainable economy is the make-or-break issue. Even hardline politicians are now replacing their ancient nationalist rhetoric with economic policy statements.

“Democracy operates within economic constraints. To indict Bosnia for democratic failures without fully addressing its economic impoverishment, which prevents democratic development, is an injustice,” Thomas William Simon writes in the chapter “The Injustice of Procedural Democracy.”

Simon concludes with a phrase made famous by one of Dayton’s masterminds for his own domestic purposes.

“It’s the economy, stupid.”

Srecko Latal worked as a correspondent for the Associated Press and as an analyst and editor for the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting, and is now employed as a media expert by the World Bank.

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