Once upon a time a certain corner of Europe was known as Yugoslavia. Then it became former Yugoslavia or, for pointy-heads, the Yugoslav successor states. Now, with Slovenia in the European Union, Brussels has packaged what’s left of the old Yugoslavia with Albania and relabelled it “the western Balkans” – but the problems remain as intractably Yugoslav as ever.
Take Bosnia-Herzegovina, where EU foreign ministers today named Valentin Inzko, a high-ranking Austrian diplomat, as the bloc’s new Special Representative. Inzko will wear two hats – he was named the world’s High Representative for Bosnia last week. But it will be something of a miracle if he makes any progress towards bringing the Bosnian state off the international life support machine on which it has depended since the end of the 1992-95 civil war.
Insofar as the EU has any idea what to do, it seems to believe that the mutual suspicions that poison relations between Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs (and, to some extent, both communities’ relations with Bosnian Croats) will gradually disappear under the lure of eventual EU membership for the country. But as an excellent new report by the International Crisis Group points out, Bosnia is quite unlike the other former communist states to which the EU has – often successfully – applied this soothing strategy.
The essential problem is that the 1995 Dayton peace agreement did enough to end the war and suppress the temptation to start another one, but not enough to convince the Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats that their only possible future lay in co-operating inside a single state. The Muslims were permitted to believe that one day they could assert themselves as Bosnia’s largest and strongest nationality, running a more centralised state. The Serbs were allowed to think that their sub-entity, Republika Srpska, might somehow be able to wriggle free of the rest of Bosnia and win independence.
Consequently, as Miroslav Lajcak of Slovakia, Inzko’s predecessor as High Representative, once told me, politicians representing Bosnia’s three nationalities do not regard putting Bosnia on a firm path to EU membership as a priority. Rather, all the squabbles that preoccupied them in the 1980s and early 1990s are being played out yet again.
“Hardliners on all sides recognise that advancing toward Europe means giving up their ideal solutions: the Serbs know that as Bosnia draws closer to Brussels, it will be harder for them to break away; the Bosniaks fear that reducing RS [Republika Srpska] autonomy will be impossible,” the ICG report says.
The tone of the nationalist rhetoric in Bosnia these days reveals a lot about the kind of dysfunctional place it has become. Although shrill, it stops short of direct incitement to mass violence – in contrast to, say, the language used in 1991 and early 1992. At the same time, it is loud enough to show that Bosnia’s politicians, living under international protection for almost 14 years, have got used to the idea that they can shout all they like and it won’t have any practical consequences for them.
They are, in that sense, like irresponsible adolescents – with the EU like a bumbling aunt, unsure whether to punish, reward, lecture, or just run upstairs with her hands over her ears.
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