Divided Nations and European Integration

7. European Integration and Postwar Political Relations between Croatia and the Bosnian Croats and Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs

CHAPTER 7 European Integration and Postwar Political Relations between Croatia and the Bosnian Croats and Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs Marsaili Fraser Introduction In Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia) sizable populations of Serbs and Croats maintain active ties with their neighboring titular nation-states. These relationships are markedly different from other examples of crossborder “kin” relations in Europe, where “external minorities” separated from “kin-states” are typically subject to the nationalizing policies of their “hoststates .” No single ethnic group forms a majority in Bosnia: Bosniaks (or Bosnian Muslims) are estimated to compose around 48 percent of the population , Serbs 37 percent, and Croats 14 percent. Bosnia declared independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992, marking the start of a devastating three-year war; by the time the war ended, largely homogeneous ethnic Serb and Croat territories had been ripped out of the country’s multiethnic patchwork, primarily as a result of ethnic cleansing. These war-time para-states enjoyed de facto independence from the Bosnian government and were intimately linked to neighboring states, the newly independent Republic of Croatia (hereafter Croatia) and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (hereafter FRY), a shrunken entity consisting of Serbia and Montenegro. Croats and Serbs 211 In 1994 and 1995 the US-sponsored Washington and Dayton Peace Agreements belatedly secured Bosnia’s external borders but also conferred high degrees of autonomy to the Serb and Croat territories established violently during the war. The state’s power-sharing structures, loosely configured through consociation and a quasi-confederation, formally recognized no titular nation but rather a governing triumvirate of three equal constituent peoples: Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. In practice, Bosnian Serb and Croat politicians used ethnic and territorial veto powers to disable power sharing after the war. Instead international civilian and military missions endowed with extraordinary executive powers guaranteed Bosnia’s borders against the separatist ambitions of the country’s Serb and Croat leaderships, as well as the irredentist inclinations of neighboring Serbia and Croatia. These ad hoc international organs also carved out a number of multiethnic federallevel institutions in Bosnia. However, despite this flurry of international activity , Bosnia’s central state has significantly fewer responsibilities, resources, and enforcement mechanisms than other federations in Europe and beyond (Venice Commission 2005). Stymied by internal disagreements, Bosnia has been incapable of reaching consensus on minimal tenets of statehood, let alone of enforcing a “nationalizing” policy over its citizens. Cross-border kin relations have had mixed effects on Bosnia’s postwar stability. The nationalist regimes in Croatia and Serbia were instrumental in creating and sustaining Bosnia’s Croat and Serb war-time para-states: ethnically cleansed swaths of Bosnia were to be incorporated into “Greater Croatia” and “Greater Serbia” when international circumstances permitted. When war was no longer in the interests of the Serbian and Croatian regimes, they forced their Bosnian progenies to accept a peace deal. But neither wartime nor postwar relations have been dominated consistently by the more powerful kin-states. Far from being puppets of neighboring Croatia and Serbia, the leaders of Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs are autonomous actors in control of strong substate governing structures. They have also influenced politics in Zagreb and Belgrade in a number of ways since the war. Nevertheless for much of the postwar period the Serb and Croat regimes in Bosnia remained more integrated with Yugoslavia/Serbia and Croatia respectively than with other parts of Bosnia. Opaque cross-border relations forged during the war persisted, maintaining links between political regimes, security networks, and organized crime. After the war a common cultural, economic, and security space opened between Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia’s Croat- and Serb-controlled areas, thereby undermining the few functional 212 Chapter 7 incentives that Bosnia’s Croat and Serb political elites may have had to participate in Bosnia’s feeble power-sharing institutions. After the nationalist regimes in Croatia and Serbia lost power in 2000, many of the murkier aspects of kin relations were reformed. Secure in its own borders (and making significant headway toward EU membership), Croatia highlighted its support for the territorial integrity of neighboring Bosnia, renouncing earlier irredentist claims and reforming relations with the Bosnian Croat leadership. This change of tack by Croatia encouraged Bosnian Croat leaders to participate more constructively in Bosnia’s central power-sharing structures. Serbia’s relationship with Republika Srpska (hereafter Srpska), the highly autonomous Bosnian Serb entity declared in 1992 (initially as the Republic...