Many of my loyal readers know a few things about the Balkans. Relax. That probably does not make you bad people.

Here is a gripping analysis of the dreary political paralysis in Bosnia:

In theory, Bosnia’s constitution treats Croats as one of the country’s three constituent peoples, entitling them to representation equivalent to as much as a third of the positions in the country’s public institutions.

In reality Croats may represent only 10 per cent or less of the country’s current residents. Hence, quotas in theory reserved for Croat interests in practice may be expropriated by Bosniaks.

This happens when Bosniaks vote for Croat politicians sympathetic to the Bosniak position. Because there are far more Bosniaks than Croats, Bosniak votes carry the day over those of Croats and the officials occupying quotas reserved for Croats end up representing Bosniak, not Croat, points of view.

The country’s tripartite Presidency is the most glaring example of this outcome. Bosnia’s constitution provides for three presidents: a Bosniak, a Croat and a Serb. Since the country is ethnically partitioned into two entities, the Serb President is to be elected from Republika Srpska and the Bosniak and Croat presidents are to be elected from the Federation entity.

But 80 to 85 per cent of the population of the Federation is Bosniak. Thus, if a Bosniak political party fields a Croat candidate sympathetic to Bosniak goals, Bosniak votes may elect two members of the Presidency, Serb votes one and Croat votes none.

Huh? What’s all this about?

Basically:

  • the Dayton peace deal in 1995 set up a new BH constitution which unwisely rummaged around in the debris of Yugo-communist supposed constitutionality and factored in the idea of ‘constituent peoples’ (namely Bosniac/Muslims, Serbs, Croats and a rump category of Others) in a country comprising two ‘entities’
  • it further set up a joint three-person BH Presidency comprising a Serb elected from the territory of Republika Srpska (one entity), plus a Bosniac and Croat elected from the territory of the Federation (the other entity)

This scheme is trivially discriminatory (ie Croats living in RS or Serbs living in the Federation can not run for President – Others are nowhere). The  European Court of Human Rights a mere 15 years later said that these provisions were unacceptable.

Fine. Now what?

The problem (as the logical Afrikaners worked out) is that it is impossible to run apartheid-style classifications for eligibility to office without the supporting legislation defining the classifications and how people fit into them. In other words, unless you have laws defining who is (say) a Croat and who can vote for ‘Croats, anyone can claim to be a Croat and anyone can vote for him/her.

This opens the way to some Bosniacs voting for a ‘moderate’ Croat, thereby pushing out the candidate of the ‘true’ Croats supported by the majority of Bosnian Croats. As Matthew Parish explains above, this happens because the absolute number of Croats in the country is relatively small.

You might say that if the Croats have only something like a tenth of the BH population they should not complain too much about which Croat gets a senior position. You might be right.  

But because the whole Dayton deal is lop-sided (the Serbs get ‘their’ entity but the Bosniacs and Croats have to share an ‘entity’), the RS leadership can play upon these illogicalities in the Federation to create a mess. Note that the Bosniacs/Croats can not do similarly muddy the voting waters in RS – their absolute numbers in RS are insufficient to stop a candidate strongly favoured by a large bloc of Serbs prevailing. 

All of which points up a vivid drama at the heart of democracy. Which voting system gives a respectably representative and thereby legitimate and sustainable outcome?

Clearly some sort of proportional voting arrangement would have been better, but that cuts through ‘equality’ for all ethnic communities. Had the three ethnic communities not been guaranteed equal shares of the three-person Presidency and other arrangements linking group identities to political power, the Dayton deal would have been far harder to strike.

The other way of doing things was, of course, to have three entities* – one for each community – in some sort of confederative structure. This would have been sensible and principled: each community would get some sort of territorial reassurance in return for accepting the wider structure. See eg Switzerland.

This never got going. The largest group (Bosniacs) were totally opposed to what they saw as further fragmentation, plus the deal to set up the Federation (ie an alliance of Bosniacs and Croats against Serbs) had been a fleeting triumph of US/German foreign policy when the Bosnian conflict was raging. 

The above article mentions that D Holbrooke master-minded Dayton and was a great champion of RS politician Dodik. As we all were at the time (1997/98) – he was a huge improvement on Karadzic.

But the stalemate now in Bosnia also can be attributed to the flat refusal of Holbrooke before Dayton to listen to anything which might have qualified US planning, which basically was more about Clinton’s re-election timetable than anything else. 

Get some small but vital things wrong and watch how the consequences compound up and up years later. Did I mention the Eurozone?

* PS: by the way, if any Brit proposes a BH constitution that might actually work and be more or less fair, that person has no chance of being put forward by the FCO as a candidate for EU Ambassador in Sarajevo.

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