The path of etno-nationalistist divisions

In November 2025, the Dayton Peace Agreements marks its 30^th anniversary. This agreement, which includes the Constitution for Bosnia and Hercegovina as one of its annexes, defined BiH as state of its three constituent peoples and intertwined political participation with ethnic affiliation, thereby discriminating against “citizens” and others. How did we arrive at this point – living in an ethno-political reality of three peoples instead of citizens, of three sides instead of one state? How can we examine the role and responsibilities of international actors from the outbreak of the wars to the present day?

These are among the questions discussed with Tahir Herenda, Senior Research and Teaching Assistant at Faculty of Law, University of Sarajevo. For his PhD, Herenda extensively researched the negotiations surrounding the Dayton Peace Accords, speaking with participants from that period and developing expertise in the field. He is also the author of the documentary theatre play Don’t Dream Dreams, which premieres in Sarajevo on 22 November 2025 in Sarajevo.

Q: You have read an extensive number of documents, books, secondary literature on the peace agreement negotiations – what has struck you the most?

A: Oh, this is a tough question. When I first started reading, what struck me the most is how little importance the Constitution held in the negotiations, especially in Dayton.

It was 21 days of negotiations. The topic number one was territory, where will Sarajevo be, where Goražde or Brčko, how do you come up with 51-49 percent, that was the main topic. Then you have various implementation issues that seem to be making precedence over the Constitutional negotiations, like who is going to do the military aspect, the civilian aspect, how is the police assistance going to go, all these little, tiny details that are important, of course, but they took precedence over the Constitution.

I’m going to try to quote or paraphrase Carl Bildt, he said, important Constitutional details were handed with nonchalance. I think that’s an exact quote. Also, he said at one point they made a mistake, like they didn’t use Roman numerals, they used Arabic numbers, so that had a totally different implication in the Constitution.

So you just see this was sort of pushed out in the last couple of days of the negotiation. And then you look at how complicated this Constitution is and you think, OK, if you want to create such a complicated structure, negotiating about it as a sort of tertiary problem in a very high-stakes, high-pressure environment is probably not going to come out with the best Constitution. That’s what I would say is the most important, the biggest shock I’ve had.

The second biggest one might be that this all actually happened because Clinton was in a sort of a tight bind domestically. The Republicans lost the election in 1994, the Senate was against him, the Congress was pro-Bosnian, they pressured him. So I think resolving Bosnia was the only big thing he could do, since all the domestic policy would have been blocked by the Congress and then the international field was the only significant field for him.

I have to say depressing to know that the war sort of depended on Clinton having a personal stake in the election.

The banality of ideas

The one that is widely known but it still somehow strikes me is how Dayton isn’t really significantly different from all other peace plans I’ve heard before. The basic principles of Dayton are the basic principles from Lisbon (Ed. note: the Lisbon peace plan, drafted by Lord Carrington and José Cutileiro in early 1992, proposing administrative ethnically divided territories within BiH). There is a path dependency after Lisbon where all of the international lawyers move within this space created by Cutileiro and his team, where the ethno-federalism, rigid power sharing, all of this was sort of created during those negotiations and then everyone else followed along that path. The banality of the ideas that were there would be another important surprise to me.

One more would be how little the Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs mattered during the negotiations. In those last days, Milošević is treating the Bosnian Serbs as a nuisance. He doesn’t share documents with them. There are accounts of Nikola Koljević doing nothing but drinking in Dayton because he had nothing else to do. He complained to Carl Bildt that Milošević doesn’t allow him to use the phone, to use the fax machine. I mean, the constitution and the whole agreement was to a certain degree imposed on everyone. But Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats participated much less than the Bosniaks in these negotiations. The Bosnian Croats were also sidelined. Tuđman was sort of the big boss of the Croat delegation. At one point even Krešimir Zubak didn’t want to sign the agreement. Then Tuđman said, OK, you don’t have to sign it. So it was very much under the control of Belgrade and Zagreb. 

I come from a Muslim family, you always hear these stories, it’s just Belgrade and Zagreb, they controlled everything. Then you grow up thinking it cannot be that simple. You don’t want to believe them because it seems simplistic and nationalistic. It has to be much more complex. But then it comes out, it really was so. That would be, off the top of my head, surprises or important conclusions that I drew from my research.

The fetishism about nation-states was still alive

Q: In his book The Unfinest Hour. Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, the historian Brendan Simms qualifies the Dayton Peace Agreement as the end or the outcome of a cynical Western approach towards Bosnia and Herzegovina and he particularly blames Britain and Western international actors in general, but specifically Great Britain, of putting too much focus on ethno-politics in order to justify their own appeasement approach.

A: Yes, I’m a big fan of Brendan Simms. I think there’s also, especially with Britain, there’s a historical reflex to look at these types of conflicts through the ethnic lens.

If you read how people, both British and French, talked about [the war in Bosnia], I would say, the Balkan conflict of the 90s was seen almost through the lenses of 19th century nationalism, some sort of unfinished state-building project where you have to have clear ethnic division between these different groups. The empires of the world still aren’t done decaying, so you have to have these clear delimitations between these different ethnic groups. This fetishism about the nation-state that emerged in the 19th century was still very much alive in the 1990s.

It seems that the years preceding the 1990s, all these ideas in the post-World War II world about human rights, individual rights, all this was sort of put aside and this pragmatism of 19th century took over. Brendan Simms is definitely correct there in putting the blame on this British pragmatism of looking at the situation through these simplistic lenses that emphasize ethnic affiliation. But the same can be said, I think, to a certain extent about Mitterrand. I think, what Mitterrand specifically said at one point in 1991, he said, I’m paraphrasing him, it’s like 1914 again. It’s like World War I. So it’s the Serbs and the English and the French on one side, it’s the Germans and the Croats on the other. There are also these World War I and World War II alliances that blurred their vision in seeing what happened and added to the selective blindness, especially in Bosnia, because looking at Bosnia in 1992, it’s probably the worst year of the war, and that’s the year of the war where you still have this forced equality between the sides, this moral equivalence of the sides.

Q: When the war started, Bosnia and Herzegovina had been recognized by the European Community as an independent state and accepted as UN member a few weeks later in May 1992. Had there been also some kind of other discourse among international actors, in the sense of – there are not actually three sides, there are maybe only two sides, where we have to protect the one multi-ethnic state of Bosnia which is under attack?

A: I didn’t do an in-depth study of what everyone said in 1992, but in 1992 the Europeans seemed to be along these ethno-nationalist lines, of we need to accommodate the different people that live there. Before the Badinter commission made its decision, Mitterrand and Douglas Hurd, who was the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the UK, were sort of flirting with the idea, maybe we should redraw the borders, these borders are not sacred, etc., etc. I haven’t seen anything coming from Europeans like civic, secular values should be protected. Who was a protector of these civic, secular values was the Americans. The American position in general was against this ethno-territorialism and this fetishism in terms of national belonging. Warren Zimmermann, the then US-Ambassador to Yugoslavia, was advising Izetbegović not to sign the Cutileiro plan, precisely because the Americans didn’t like this precedent of ethno-territorialism, of basically dismembering this new state along the ethnic lines. They thought that it sets a bad precedent. So, the Americans were maybe not overtly pro-secular and pro-civic but were definitely against the prevailing ethnic division of Bosnia. But then again, if you look at 1994-1995, they accept that as the rule of the game.

The ‘international community’ messed up

Q: You mentioned that somehow, Cutileiro came up first with ethno-territorial principles and then all other peace plans followed along those lines, it is a kind of path-dependency. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Cutileiro – or someone else – had had a different understanding of Bosnia, the nature of the conflict. 

A: Oh yes - what would have happened then? That’s a million-dollar question. Radovan Karadžić actually said in one of the meetings of the so-called National Assembly of Serbian People in Bosnia, I forgot the full name of it in English, the international community has really messed up. ‘They have accepted us as negotiators. If they just said, these are some rebels going against their own government, we would have been done and dusted. This is going to be the first time that the international community accepts the dissolution of a recognized state.’ This is me paraphrasing a couple of his different speeches. Appeasement is the key word here. The Europeans don’t want to get their fingers inside this whole mess.

There’s also the saying of Otto von Bismarck, the Balkans isn’t worth the bones of a good Pomeranian grenadier, or something like that. You know, you don’t want to go there and risk lives of your people in order to resolve some opaque Balkan conflict that’s just going to reemerge again in 10-15 years. So there’s this racism, for lack of a better term, that I think is somewhere in the minds of the people.

And also it’s, again, pragmatism because if you want to stop the war, you see which sides want what. What the guys with the guns want. And you’re not burdening yourself with thinking, will this work, how will this work, is this in line with our principles. You know that you don’t want to go there, you don’t want to spend, risk the lives of your people, you don’t want to risk being involved in a volatile situation, so the easiest way out is to figure out what do these people want and try to give it to them. And if it goes against some of your principles, well, tough luck, I mean.

I didn’t see any of them coming up with this idea, let’s try and keep the civic and secular values of these three communities living together as one. I don’t see it popping off in Europe anyway. The Americans were, at the time, the Bush administration, of the opinion of not having a dog in this race.

As someone living here, of course I get emotional about this history on a certain level, and very sad about it, as everyone does. The nastiest thing about Dayton is - if after bombing Dubrovnik and Vukovar there had been an aggressive response by sending Tomahawk missiles or whatever, you could have sat down and found a solution back then. And maybe the solution would not have been so ethno-fetishist as this one is. So, treating the Balkans as a backwater is also a problem there. Something is happening and it’s sort of a second-grade problem, ‘we don’t have to go all in there, let’s try to do the least possible thing to make them stop’, so that’s also an important thing to have in mind.

Q: Are you personally disappointed? 

A: Of course, yes. I mean, it goes without saying. I don’t know how much the perspective of us people born in the war or after the war who don’t know any other type of Bosnia than this is being appreciated right now. When I listen to my parents or whatever, the generation that came before me, they always talk about, ‘you didn’t know what was the nationality or religion of which person, we all did everything together’, la-la-la, la-la-la, and then you come and grow up in a war-torn country that has this very, very complicated constitution, you have to think, man, it could have been done differently, this is not the only way. Of course, personally, not even going into the number of deaths and number of traumatized people, the fact that we live these three ethnic realities that seem to be mutually exclusive on such a small space with so many common issues and our inability to see these common issues – it’s very hard not to be cynical, sarcastic and ironic about everything we talk about here, because I think cynicism is the only rational response to what’s happening, because if you aren’t cynical, then you’re just straight out disappointed or you’re tuned off.

Q: Did you find someone from the international actors who is also disappointed or critical of what they actually did, critical of the ethno-territorial and appeasement approach?

A: The majority of the international actors that I talked with are like, this was the best we could do under these circumstances. But if you read Schwarz-Schilling's book, The Failed Peace in Bosnia, there’s a lot of criticism there. I read Paddy Ashdown’s book, I read Carl Bildt’s book, spoke with Wolfgang Petritsch, there seems to be, maybe not said out loud, but there seems to be this realization that things could have been done better, especially on the part of the international actors, there seems to be a lot of discord between the US and the EU and what is a good way forward.

I think there’s criticism, maybe not open criticism, but there seems to be an acceptance that there were a lot of mistakes made in the post-war period, that there were a lot of chances in the post-war period that are maybe lost now forever. Returning of returnees - in 1996 and 1997 was the only time this could happen. Restoring this multi-ethnicity of Bosnia, of having several multi-ethnic cities, you could do it in 1996 and 1997, you cannot do it in 2002, people are already creating lives. So that has been sort of shyly mentioned as a missed opportunity. So there is some criticism that’s sort of very specific, but any overarching criticism or self-reflection of accepting ‘we may have been simplifying this through these ethno-national lenses, there is more to this society than these three simplistic, mutually exclusive boxes’, I don’t think I saw that. Professor Gro Nystuen, legal advisor to Carl Bildt in Dayton, she spoke about the silver bullet in Dayton, so the provision in Dayton that says that the ECHR, the European Convention, is above other law, sort of, for her I think this was the very important thing to say to me, is that, you know, this was a state of necessity, we accepted these ethnic vetoes and this ethnification of the constitution, but we have put the silver bullet here to allow for the situation to unravel itself. 30 years after, we see that the bullet has been fired, but it hasn’t hit the target.

There is no West – there is a continuity of individuals

Q: Talking about pragmatism, appeasement - are those still the principles of engagement with Bosnia and Herzegovina or have international, Western actors changed their approach, learned something?

A: There is no West or international actors. There’s a continuity of different individuals coming here and trying to build a career, trying to do something that they send to their Ministry of Foreign Affairs or to whomever that looks like a success. What has been lacking from 1992 to 2025 is a strategic approach, having a clear-cut end goal and having a path of reaching that end goal. That has been lacking. The West has been mostly reactive to what is happening in Bosnia. Any sort of long-term vision and consensus on the two sides of the Atlantic on what to do and how to do it has been lacking, and I don’t think it’s going to come about anytime soon. I mean, the current US approach, you know everything. I don’t know what needs to be said there. But also the Europeans - the pathetic hour of Europe hasn’t ended yet. They still seem to be in discord on what to do and how to do it. I mean, the US at least had the sanctions against the biggest spoilers of the Dayton Agreement. They aren’t capable of producing even that. So the West hasn’t learned anything. It’s liberating to say it because people here in Bosnia, we have this lower-value complex towards Westerners. You assume that they are unmistakable, that they understand the situation. But if you look at, for example, the way they approached Dodik in the late 90s, early 2000s, it’s obvious these people don’t have a clue. They cannot predict the developments half as well as they think they do.

And most importantly, they aren’t so different from us. What you constantly hear is this criticism like ‘these people can’t agree on anything’. But if you look at the April Pact, they also can’t agree on everything. The Americans, the British, the rest of the Europeans, the HR, they all seem to have some sort of very weird power-sharing agreement between them, and they all seem to be chasing their own tails, I guess.

Q: You mentioned the lack of strategy from the outside – is there a vision for Bosnia and Herzegovina from the inside? 

A: From the inside, unfortunately also, there isn’t any... We have three different ethnic echo chambers that generate the content that is wanted by their voting bodies. I think the truth of the matter is any change would have to be a very expensive compromise for all three of the parties. And compromise is a dirty word. You have to betray your voting body and risk closing the next election in order for compromise to go through. So, from the inside, you have these three different narratives that are, of course, to an extent, mutually exclusive. It’s very hard to be optimistic about it coming from the inside. What I think should be the way forward is looking at different divided societies and trying to learn from their mistakes or their good experiences of how to move forward. Unfortunately, this compromise reached in Dayton is so far from everyone’s original goals, it’s hard to move on any different ground without it seeming as a betrayal of any of the sides. The biggest loss, I think, is the fact that we lost this public sphere that’s ethnically mixed. We lost this marketplace of ideas that happens across ethnic lines. There is no honest and sincere dialogue.

The interview was conducted by Judith Brand, former director of the Heinrich-Böll Foundation’s regional office in Sarajevo.