This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Agreement. The Constitution, an annex to the Agreement, establishes political rights on the ground of affiliation with one of the constituent peoples. Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state of three peoples is not a new, Dayton-era invention, but rather a reinterpretation of the National Anti-Fascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereinafter: ZAVNOBiH). Or perhaps a misinterpretation. In his book Sjećanje i poricanje: Od ZAVNOBIHA do naših dana (Memory and Denial: From ZAVNOBiH to the Present Day), Professor Nerzuk Ćurak of the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Sarajevo describes ZAVNOBiH as “one of the most important moments in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s legal and political history”, one that still possesses “transformative power”.
Q: While one of the key statements of ZAVNOBiH was: “BiH is neither Serb, no Croat, nor Muslim, but rather Serb and Croat and Muslim”, from 1992 onward – even before the war began – all proposals put forward by international actors envisioned some form of ethno-territorial division of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Did they understand Bosnia at all – its society, its state, its conflict – or did they misunderstand it?
War is always a form of misunderstanding, and I believe it had a strong impact on the policies of the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina – strongly negative, in fact – because certain prejudices about Bosnia and Herzegovina, from the perspective of international actors, were confirmed by the war. When I say that, I mean that the situation on the ground during the war was what predominantly shaped the production of policies toward Bosnia and Herzegovina. As I often put it, the Dayton Peace Agreement, by recognising the results of violence, stopped the violence. And that, in fact, is our problem. When there is a war, most people around the world want it to end as soon as possible, leaving political interpretations and problems to be dealt with later. The only thing that matters is that the war stops. Therefore, it is no surprise that the people of Sarajevo, when the peace agreement was signed in Dayton, said: “Sign it, Alija, even if all that remains is a small courtyard”, which in a way reflects how exhausted people were by the violence, and how the political consequences mattered far less to them.
Founding Bosnia and Herzegovina solely on an ethnic basis
Looking back on three decades of this negative peace, we can see that Bosnia really should have had more competent negotiators in Dayton. If we first consider the Serb territorial gains, which had covered two-thirds of the country, that became the main criterion for political representation. Bosniak political structures were dissatisfied with the 51–49 division, while Serb nationalist structures resented that the Republika Srpska failed to retain 70%.
Do these attempts by international mediators to constitute a new Bosnia and Herzegovina solely on an ethnic basis have anything to do with Bosnia’s historical legacy, or are they simply a product of the war? That is a question for debate. If the Bosnian Army had achieved an absolute territorial victory, I believe the idea of constituent peoples would have been abstracted in the same way it was in Croatia. Because when people claim that Bosnia and Herzegovina is historically destined for tri-ethnic representation, they forget that Croatia, too, was a state of Croat and Serb constituent peoples. In fact, the constituent status of Serbs was expressed more transparently and clearly in the Constitution of the Republic of Croatia than in the Constitution of Socialist Bosnia and Herzegovina – but after Croatia won the war, the constituent status of the Serb people suddenly disappeared and no longer appears as an issue at all. What I want to emphasise is that triumph in war changes a society’s consciousness, making it one of victory rather than one of justice. Due to the outcome of war, Serbs in Croatia lost their constitutional position, while in BiH they gained the strongest constitutional position. Why do I say this? To underline that decades-long ethnic essentialism is not an inevitability in either BiH or Croatia. Much depends on the pre-war context, on the war itself, and on the decision-makers. It is what it is now: a schizophrenic state that suffocates any utopian hope that Bosnia and Herzegovina, under Dayton as it currently stands, can be transformed into a civic political community without conflict. My experience and theoretical knowledge tell me that this will not work.
Q: That’s a somewhat depressing conclusion.
It is a somewhat depressing conclusion – especially because, as we move further away from the war, the hope that people will become better, that they will grow to love their country more, that they will become true citizens of that country, that constitution-makers will respect their constitution – but things are getting worse and worse. At this moment, I believe that the HDZ of Bosnia and Herzegovina genuinely wants the country divided into three entities, and that this narrative is being developed – under a cloak of secrecy – as a strategic framework, to the extent that it can no longer be concealed, even through the HDZ’s institutional political behaviour. The HDZ’s politics is certainly one of the main reasons for my sense of dismay—that debosnianisation which seeks to undermine the foundations of our shared homeland. And then there is the fact that we already had all those plans: Cutileiro, Vance–Owen, Owen–Stoltenberg… we had countless proposals, and here we are, at Dayton. Nationalists who are incapable of thinking outside of their frameworks now want a new transformation of Bosnia that would, in practice, resemble the agreements that previously failed. What is it they want—another war? If you want three entities, that leads to war. If you want to carve off a part of the country, that leads to war. And how, then, is one supposed not to feel dismayed.
Bosnia is stronger than the nationalists
What still gives me a measure of optimism is this – Bosnia and Herzegovina is simply stronger than anything its nationalists wish upon it. It is far more than the sum of its ethnonationalist politics. That’s simply the way things are. And the way things are is difficult to measure. The way things are, simply, exists. You can feel it when you speak with people across different parts of the country. What is frustrating, however, is that despite very clear signs, we cannot move from Dayton back to international agreements that were rejected – and yet the political elites keep pulling precisely toward that regression. They are certainly not pulling toward the building of a republic. And all of this, of course, unfolds against the backdrop of the global rise of the radical, post-fascist, and neo-fascist right-wing. We can plainly see that Čović and Dodik strongly build on that trend. They are trying through insidious and covert Islamophobia – or entirely transparent Islamophobia – to construct a new, dark political identity for Bosniaks. I freeze when I hear the Republika Srpska’s lobbyists in the United States, like Rod Blagojević, say: “We must protect the Christians in Bosnia”. Just imagine the language, the prejudiced theologisation. A completely irrational depiction, yet one that becomes more important than reality. And that is a serious problem, because in today’s rigid right-wing world, that language seems to resonate with decision-makers. Still, I do not believe they will succeed. Bosnia’s strength lies precisely in the very thing these miserable actors are trying to use as an argument for dividing the country. I mentioned this at the start of the interview – the idea of the constituent peoples.
The positive dimensions of constituent peoples – as a shared idea
Unlike the Dayton version of constituent status, which effectively subordinates Bosnia and Herzegovina to its ethnic constituents, the concept of constituent peoples in BiH has its historical roots forged in the fires of the anti-fascist and people’s liberation war. It is our historical product which, unfortunately, can have both positive and negative dimensions. Over the past thirty years it has had mostly negative ones, because constituent peoples has been interpreted solely through a constituent, partial, nationalist, and entirely anti-Bosnian lens – through the affirmation of a self-proclaimed right of Belgrade and Zagreb to arbitrate in Bosnia. On the other hand, there is also an authentic Bosnian and Herzegovinian understanding of constituent peoples, in which the peoples of this country – affirmed through the people’s liberation struggle and the decisions of ZAVNOBiH – build their shared future together in their shared homeland Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the intention of creating a civic society, as was emphasised in the Declaration of ZAVNOBiH’s Second Session in 1944.
The difference between togetherness and division is huge. Yet in the thirty years since Dayton, we still do not have politics understanding constituent peoples in this way. Serb and Croat nationalist politics have not made the slightest move toward affirming constituent peoples as a shared idea. Instead, both politics interpret constituent peoples as a demand for separate ethnic units that create partial political identities. It is completely schizophrenic. It is complete madness. It is, in fact, an aggressive Serb and Croat nationalism now operating in a radical phase. And it frustrates me, because it is precisely this that prevents progressive Bosnian and Herzegovinian forces from overturning and defeating reactive Bosniak nationalism and from building a shared country.
Q: The first plan drafted by international mediators – the Carrington-Cutileiro plan, proposed even before the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina began – viewed Bosnia purely through an ethno-nationalist lens, dividing it according to an ethno-territorial principle. There was no proposal along the lines of: “Let’s preserve Bosnia and Herzegovina as a unified state of all its citizens”, without ethno-territorial divisions.
Not only that. Do you think anyone from Bosnia and Herzegovina ever presented to various international representatives the idea of constituent peoples that I’ve just described to you? No. And that’s where, within the international community, the idea of ethnic representation, three separate notions, three separate political units that supposedly constitute Bosnia and Herzegovina comes from. That has nothing to do with the historical logic of how constituent peoples developed in this country.
Anyone honest will recall that the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was – this is the irony – a civic political community, but one in which the constituent peoples formed an internal content of that civic idea. There were established customs, norms, about how politics was formed: there had to be one Serb, one Croat, one Bosniak. The difference is that, in that period, competence and meritocracy accompanied that division. Today – nothing. Ignorance and stupidity. So, that rigid ethnic framing was never loosened in the minds of international representatives dealing with Bosnia and Herzegovina. That is one factor. The second is that Bosniaks emerged as a late nation, while Serb and Croat nationalisms had already built extensive personal, diplomatic, state, and international networks. They were able, in a way, to neutralise or obscure their own aggressive roles – and thus shape a notion of Bosnia that worked entirely in favour of the nationalists.
Indestructible neighbourhood and syncretism
Despite the approach taken by the international community and the support that approach received from domestic nationalist actors, including Alija Izetbegović’s SDA, we were placed in a position where everything else that truly constitutes Bosnia and Herzegovina – a distinctly Bosnian and Herzegovinian way of life, an ethnically patterned leopard skin that cannot be destroyed either by horrific crimes or by the Dayton political system, a sense of neighbourhood, a cultural syncretism – all of that was cast out. Salvation lies in what has been cast out. Despite the institutional design of the Dayton state, which affirms nationalists, even in such an environment, Bosnia’s non-imposed syncretism has not been destroyed. What I named the way things are – has not been destroyed.
A few years ago, a progressive member of the European Parliament visited Bosnia. He understood everything immediately; he affirmed BiH as a plural state and a unified civic space. And that made me wonder, rhetorically, why the overwhelming majority of High Representatives in BiH have been conservatives. Why couldn’t a High Representative come from the Greens, the left liberals, genuine social democrats, progressives in general? That is the question. In all these years, not a single High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina has been left-wing. Not one has come from a left-liberal political spectrum. Mostly the right-wing. Why? Well, of course, because they have far greater sympathy for the collectivist notions of Balkan nationalists. It’s an interesting question: why never? Why has no one from the Greens ever been appointed High Representative? Given their political background, they – even if they wanted to – could not so easily shed their principles and turn into ethno-nationalists. Perhaps that is precisely why they were never chosen.
As I often say, from the standpoint of international engagement, there are two things we have never tried: we have never tried having the key people come from the left side of the political spectrum, and second, we have never even attempted to constitute a civic political community. We have tried everything else – and nothing has produced results. At this moment, I can state axiomatically that Croatia – meaning Zagreb and the HDZ in Bosnia and Hercegovina – will never agree to that. And they will continue, as they already are, to turn the Croats of Bosnia and Hercegovina – an authentic people of this country – into a Croatian national minority, a national minority of the Republic of Croatia. Which is outrageous on at least two counts. It is outrageous, first, because it reduces an authentic people to the status of a national minority – something that will, in time, prove a major historical sin on Zagreb’s part. That is one. And second: if they are doing this, then they should at least admit it. Instead, they are producing a national minority for which they then demand rights equal to those of an authentic political people of this country. As an authentic political people of this country, they should not be advocating the ideas they are now advocating – namely, the idea of “Herzegovinisation” of Bosnian Croats: reducing the entire logos of Bosnian Croats to Herzegovina, to the people of the HDZ of Herzegovina, to the concept of Herceg-Bosna; to a model of political representation that is, in essence, ethno-minority representation. Because when you demand that members of the state Presidency be elected only and exclusively by Croats, that is the status of a national minority. And of course they know this. Yet they are asking for more than they need, instead of all of us building this country together.
The positive elements of Dayton turned into disintegration
This is what I sense as the real problem. The citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina want to live in an orderly, functional country, yet they see the HDZ moving ever deeper into a position of obstructing Bosnia and Herzegovina. The idea that the Croat member of the Presidency should be elected only by Croats is, in fact, a cover – not for building the state, but for its non-building. Many people might initially support what the HDZ is demanding, but then they are overcome by the fear that this would be the beginning of the end of Bosnia and Herzegovina, not its building. And what leads us to that conclusion? The fact that for thirty years, the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina has not functioned as an instrument of the state. Members of the Presidency see themselves as representatives of the Serb, Croat, and Bosniak peoples – which is unconstitutional. Under the Constitution, they are a joint collective body, the Presidency of the state, not representatives of an ethnic partiality. Yet none of them sees themselves that way. In other words, they are denying the Constitution. Which means they should have been held accountable in some form. But this view has become so deeply embedded – in language, in people, in the media, among politicians, scholars, cultural workers – that the unconstitutional behaviour of the members of the Presidency has come to be accepted as constitutional. Therefore, our political actors have managed to transform even the positive elements of Dayton from integration into disintegration.
Q: There is a common criticism that Western actors have no real strategy or vision for Bosnia and Herzegovina, that what prevails instead is pure appeasement, balancing, keeping things merely calm. Unlike ZAVNOBiH, which had a vision for Bosnia and Herzegovina and for a shared future. From the Cutileiro plan through Dayton and onward, we have had a “stabilitocracy” without vision, with everything else pushed aside. Where does this difference come from?
You can find in this book (ed. note. Sjećanje i poricanje) what, for example, Rodoljub Čolaković, a Serb from Bosnia, says about Muslims. Today, it would be unthinkable. Compare Dodik – who dehumanises Bosnian Muslims on a daily basis, because this is the assigned agenda of contemporary global Islamophobia – with Rodoljub Čolaković, who declared in 1945, at the Third Session of ZAVNOBiH in Sarajevo: that we would never again allow the Serbian and Croatian bourgeoisie to partition Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that our Muslim brothers are here now who would never allow it either. Imagine that! In other words, eighty years ago we had people in Bosnia who were more modern than today’s chauvinists, for whom politics is the art of preventing any form of progress. Whenever a conflict arises, whenever something happens that requires political intervention, they act in ways that resolve nothing – beyond merely stopping a potential clash. International politicians are similar. I recoil at the word ‘stability’. For them, stability is all that matters. And when ‘stability’ becomes the central term of diplomatic language, there is no development, no better life. Imagine: thirty years after the war – ‘stability’; the important thing is that EUFOR is here, that everything is stable. Whether there will be any nation-building is considered entirely irrelevant. This language needs to change – this discourse on stability as the final expression of power of the Balkans. The European Union is facing a serious problem. It is no longer the idea of peace, hope, tolerance, and empathy. Walls are being raised. Militarism is growing – just the other day, the German Chancellor Merz announced how many billions of euros will be invested in the military industry in the coming years for Germany to become the strongest land force in Europe. These are strange things.
Q: A moment ago, you mentioned that ‘the other side’, that sense of neighbourhood, that cultural syncretism, is still present. How strong is it, and how long can it survive?
That is the intangible driving force of Bosnian history. It is something that cannot be measured – yet it is the way things are. However, we have never truly managed to present it to the world as the most important cultural and, consequently, political feature. Only with the war against Bosnia and Herzegovina at the end of the twentieth century did BiH become highly visible, especially within global academic circles. Over the past thirty years, a considerable number of scholars interested in Bosnia have produced serious academic work that has relativised the previously dominant Serbian and Croatian paradigms of BiH – something that is by no means insignificant. It is important, all these scholars, artists, and civic activists from around the world do sense and understand what we are talking about. The problem lies in the political realm, where none of this can find expression. It cannot because the design of the state genuinely favours nationalists. As for the international community, the only thing that matters is that there is no shooting. That is as far as the world’s understanding goes. Any attempt to affirm a Bosnian and Herzegovinian raison d’état or a unified, plural society is immediately labelled as a potential pathway to violence, and this is precisely why we have continuous appeasement of the nationalists – to prevent any rupture. It is dreadful, but this is how political actors behave: nothing should change. This is the strategy both in Sarajevo and in Brussels.
Q: Is there any reflection among international actors – a moment of saying, “yes, we made mistakes,” or “we could do better”?
No, there is only the post festum, when High Representatives finish their mandates. Only then do they speak. The main criticism directed at any High Representative by Serb and Croat nationalists is that he is working for Sarajevo and for the Bosniaks. And here is the paradox: this simply is not true. The High Representative is merely fulfilling his mandate. And his mandate is not to dismantle Bosnia, but to build Bosnia through Dayton. Yet Bosniak nationalists have also fallen into this Serb-Croat trap, developing a narrative against the current High Representative – an act of serious self-destruction from ambush. These are the people who believe that after Friday, after the Jummah prayer, Bosnia and Herzegovina should also be a civic state. This is entirely ahistorical. These are people detached from reality. They call me a utopian, yet they themselves are completely disconnected from reality – and in doing so, they reject Bosnia. These nationalists do not contribute to building Bosnia when they start claiming that Serbs and Croats are not Serbs and Croats, that they are Orthodox and Catholics. You cannot tell other people who they are. That is something Bosniaks, given their own centuries-long experience of being denied recognition, should never do. It is utter madness. And it produces an anti-Bosnian narrative, because then people say: “You see? This idea of a civic Bosnia is just a desire for Bosniak domination. They won’t allow me to be a Serb or a Croat”. Even though such statements are marginal, the media in Serbia and Croatia elevate them to the highest level, and these marginal utterances are presented as mainstream – as if ninety-nine percent of the population stood behind them, rather than them being a statistical error.
Q: How can we revive the spirit of ZAVNOBiH and treat it as a modern example for the future? Is that possible?
You can see how strongly Serbian and Croatian nationalism reject the idea of civic democracy. They reject it radically because they cannot see it – because they see it only as an expression of Bosniak nationalism. On one hand, that is a shameful interpretation, because – as my colleague Dejan Jović once put it in a conversation with Ivo Lučić, the former head of SIS [ed. note: the Intelligence and Security Service] in the Croatian Army during the war and a sort of historian: What exactly do you want? You want Croats to be sovereign in Croatia and in one third of Bosnia; Serbs to be sovereign in Serbia and in one third of Bosnia; and Bosniaks to have sovereignty in their own country only over one third of that country. In fact, that is precisely the idea of Croat and Serb nationalists, because they absolutely do not recognise Bosniaks as a political people – they do not say this publicly, but that is what it comes down to. This is something deep, a kind of cultural violence, linking Bosniaks with the Turks, betrayal of the faith, madness, absolute madness. Yet it continues to smoulder among them as a driving force of evil. This is why I believe our path forward is a modernised ZAVNOBiH – so that the representatives of the peoples begin to build Bosnia and Herzegovina together, because for thirty years the representatives of the peoples have been dismantling Bosnia and Herzegovina. We need people who have a vision of Bosnia and Herzegovina as our shared homeland. And if we were to work on that for ten, twenty, thirty years, then the very logic of life would create conditions for raising the level of political representation to a higher stage – to a level of genuine political integration in which it no longer matters so much which nation you belong to, and so on. But what we lack is that internal agreement – an authentic internal recognition. So that through such internal recognition we say to one another: I recognise you in the fullness of your being – ethno-national, religious, and otherwise – and let’s build our country together.
In 1992, by every criterion of warfare, Bosnia should have ceased to exist. Such a force was directed against you. People went out to defend themselves in sports shoes. There are things simply inexplicable. Western scholarship believes only in quantitative indicators. That is one-sided. Not everything can be measured. If everything could be measured, Vietnam would have disappeared from the face of the earth, because it fought against the strongest power in the world and won. Therefore, I believe in Bosnia. I truly do. And this is not the product of some senseless hope. I have travelled across the entire country; I have led various peace workshops from Krajina to Nevesinje. People in Bosnia are frightened; people in today’s Bosnia will not, on their own, initiate any serious uprising against those in power. They will not. Because we are an inward-looking country, a country oriented toward itself. You can see this so clearly in our hospitality, solidarity, kindness, humour, and belief in the small things that others consider insignificant. Perhaps the world will one day return to small things. I do not think we should give that up, because these are traits of long duration. Among other things, they are part of the reason Bosnia continues to exist.