Profil du Pays: Bosnie-Herzégovine

Its formal set-up was established by the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement. After more than three years of failed negotiations, over 100,000 deaths and the displacement of approximately 2 million people as refugees, this Agreement ended the nearly four-year war in BiH (1992­–95). The war took place between the country’s three main ethnic communities—Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs—representing three religious groups—Muslims, Christian Catholics and Orthodox Christians. The Agreement—brokered by the United States (US) and implemented by the international community—constituted the BiH state as a consociational (ethno-territorial power-sharing) democracy, and it solidified and legitimized a “shallow” state model.

The Dayton Peace Agreement was envisioned to accommodate socio–political diversity, while safeguarding the sovereignty of the BiH state. To achieve these goals, the Agreement divided BiH into two entities—the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH), with a 51 percent share of the territory and inhabited mostly by Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats, and the Republika Srpska (RS), with 49 percent of the territory and populated almost exclusively by Bosnian Serbs—and the self-governing administrative unit, the Brčko District. The entities were given characteristics of states—with developed institutions, decision-making power and clear borders—within a more complex state. This produced an intricate and multi-layered system of governance, including three (rotating) presidents, veto and co-decision mechanisms, grand coalition governments, autonomy of substate units and proportional representation of different communities at all levels of government.

As a result, deadlocks in decision-making are frequent, and ethnicity is the dominant socio–political cleavage.

The Agreement conceptualized BiH citizens as homogenous, rooted, antagonistic and bounded units which “caused” a local culture of violence. The problem with this ideology of “good enough plurality” is that it approaches ethnicity as an a priori organization of political discourse, and it makes a consociational power-sharing model and extensive international engagement logical and necessary. This vision of ethnic people rooted in ethnic territories goes against BiH’s ethno-politically intertwined history. Furthermore, it generates a dysfunctional state, frozen peace, economic devastation and the perpetual distancing of ethnically conceptualized people, stripped of their state-level citizen identification.

In addition to being politically dysfunctional, the BiH state, with its massive bureaucracy and convoluted, unsynchronized laws, is an ideal ground for ethno-nationalist elites to exercise overt corruption. These widespread practices propel some observers to claim that Bosnia is the most corrupt country in Europe and that it is a “captive state,” in which “all levels of government and state institutions are highly affected by corruption.” In (the former) Eastern Europe, such processes are often understood as side effects of “postsocialist transitions,” and they manifest most visibly in the hasty and illicit privatization of the state’s (formerly collectively owned) resources. This privatization leads to centralization of wealth and power in the hands of a few elites and to a dispossession of the public of their collective ownership of resources under socialism. As a result, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Index, BiH ranks 73^rd in the world and is one of the least developed countries in Europe. Furthermore, there are currently over 400,000 unemployed people in BiH. This points to an increasing gap between the rich and poor, and it highlights class as an important emerging identity cleavage in BiH.

As a result of the extensive war destruction, post-war “Dayton nationalism” and post-socialist economic disparities, the state is perpetually losing its citizens.

In 1991, right before the war began, there were 4.4 million people living in BiH. The results of the first post-war census, held in 2013 and 2014 show that 3.5 million people live in BiH. For most BiH citizens, the assemblage of a post-war dysfunctional state, extreme levels of corruption and perpetual unemployment create disillusionment and posit the future as a predicament. Consequently, many decide to leave the state and imagine their future elsewhere, especially those young and able, which adds to the already large BiH diaspora.

BiH has a diaspora of an estimated 7 million people, mostly residing in the US, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Australia and Austria. The diaspora is composed of historical emigrants who fled the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century; economic emigrants who left the socialist Yugoslavia in search of job opportunities; refugees who fled the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s; and most recently, the exodus of young people in search of better life elsewhere. Transnational links between the resident population and the diaspora are strong. Remittances account for between 10 and 17 percent of the country’s GDP since the early 2000s.

The diversity and pluralism issues in this ethnically divided state are further complicated by traditional cultural and structural norms, which often sideline women and LGBTQ+ communities from public life and positions of leadership. In addition, since 2015, BiH became the “hot spot” on the European Union (EU) migrant route. An estimated 75,000 migrants have transited the state’s territory creating new forms of exclusion, solidarity and economic ruination. This novel phenomenon is important to understand emerging articulations of diversity and pluralism in BiH. However, the data related to transnational migration are spotty, anecdotal and often inadequate, making this diversity type difficult to be treated by some indicators. In those instances where data is too inconclusive or limited, this indicator was left blank in the report.