If you are looking for a good example of why the Bosnia situation is so problematic, take national symbols.

The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is one of the two Entities formally established under the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995. The other is Republika Srpska.

In principle any citizen of BH has equal rights to live and work and so on in both Entities. But in practice Republika Srpska is seen as the Serbian Entity, while the Federation is seen as the Bosniac/Croat Entity. See this BBC account:

The 1995 Dayton peace accord, which ended the Bosnian war, set up two separate entities; a Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina, and the Bosnian Serb Republic, or Republika Srpska, each with its own president, government, parliament, police and other bodies.

So, question. What should the official Entity flags and emblems look like? Should each Entity have symbols which in one way or another nod equally in the direction of the three main communities?

The BH Constitutional Court in 2006 said Yes. Not to do so would be discriminatory.

Result?

No agreement two years later on what the new symbols should look like.

This passage opened my letter to the Independent but was slightly edited in the paper for space reasons:

The core problem? To mobilise people national identity has to be real, not synthetic.

Bosnia has no national identity. We (and they) talk about the ‘Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats’, not the Serb or Croat Bosnians: the emphasis is on their unBosnian-ness.

Indeed, my own characterisation of the issues has been quickly disputed! Thus:

I am a Serb, and I live in Bosnia & Herzegovina – my homeland, and the homeland of my ancestors. They call me Bosnian only when there is a need to accentuate my geographical origin, just as they call my friends from the south of my country Herzegovinians (!hardly found in English dictionaries).

I hope that with time more and more people outside Bosnia & Herzegovina will start to understand why we were very bitter in 1992 when muslim population here introduced the exclusive term Bosniaks for themselves, the term used for Christians in Bosnia & Herzegovina during the Ottoman rule.

If people can not or will not agree on things as simple yet subtle as the local nomenclature and symbols showing how they are bound together (since these issues go to profound issues of personal self-identification – see Belgium, Scotland, Quebec, Chechnya, Kurdistan and all the other examples), what is going to happen to all that EU and other investment aimed at creating a self-sustaining successful polity?

Not much.

It can all drag on, but on a deep level all concerned know that without whole-hearted agreement on the very basics the effort is doomed to fail, even if that happens far down the road.

Which conclusion, alas, does nothing to tell us what should happen instead in the Balkans.