A Contribution to the History of a Political Fiction
The Civic Bosnia and Herzegovina That Never Existed
Following public remarks by former US Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina Michael Murphy, a political storm erupted across both the Bosniak political scene and parties that define themselves as advocates of a civic, non-ethnic vision of the country. Murphy described Bakir Izetbegović, the leader of the Party of Democratic Action (SDA)—the country’s largest Bosniak nationalist party, founded by his father Alija Izetbegović—not merely as a politician who had, at key moments, obstructed important political processes and made decisions driven by narrow party interests, but also as someone who had proposed the creation of a Bosniak state “the size of Slovenia.” While some observers interpreted Murphy’s remarks as confirmation of long-standing concerns about the political conduct of the SDA, others dismissed them as an inappropriate intervention by a foreign diplomat in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s internal affairs.
The debate was further intensified by comments from Igor Stojanović of the Social Democratic Party (SDP BiH), a formally multi-ethnic centre-left party. Stojanović, who currently serves as the Serb vice-president of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina—the larger of the country’s two constituent entities—directed his criticism not only at the SDA but also at the Democratic Front (DF), a self-described civic and centre-left party led by Željko Komšić. He accused DF officials of defending Bakir Izetbegović even more enthusiastically than some members of the SDA itself.
Stojanović advanced two closely related arguments. First, he claimed that, under the banner of defending Bosnia and Herzegovina and promoting the ideal of a civic state, political practices fundamentally at odds with those civic principles had for years been ignored or downplayed. As examples, he referred to several controversial episodes from both the wartime and post-war periods, including the treatment of General Jovan Divjak and police commander Dragan Vikić—two prominent wartime defenders of Sarajevo who were often portrayed as symbols of Bosnia’s multi-ethnic resistance—as well as the assassination attempt that killed the wife of Sefer Halilović, the former commander of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to Stojanović, the Bosnian political public had for too long chosen to overlook the qusion of “who exactly sits within the SDA,” suggesting that some individuals associated with the party had at various times been willing to engage in discusons about the partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
His second argument concerned what he sees as the hypocrisy of some self-proclaimed advocates of a civic Bosnia and Herzegovina. In his view, it is difficult to credibly champion the idea of a civic, non-ethnic state while conducting political activity almost exclusively within a single ethnic and political constituency, without making any serious effort to engage communities beyond that base. To illustrate this point, he mentioned places such as Banja Luka, the largest city in the predominantly Serb entity of Republika Srpska, and the predominantly Croat municipalities of Široki Brijeg and Grude in western Herzegovina. In doing so, Stojanović qusioned the credibility of a significant segment of Bosnia’s self-described civic political scene, arguing that its universalist rhetoric often extends far beyond its actual political reach.
Yet, however politically understandable Stojanović's criticism of the SDA and the Democratic Front may be, it raises a qusion far more important than day-to-day party disputes. The real issue is whether the idea of a civic Bosnia and Herzegovina ever had a firm historical foundation on which it could be built, especially in 1992. Before asking who betrayed the civic state, one must first ask whether such a state was at all attainable in a society whose constituent peoples had, throughout most of their modern history, understood Bosnia and Herzegovina in fundamentally different ways.
The only period in which a serious attempt was made to overcome these differences was socialist Yugoslavia. That project was not the product of spontaneous historical development, but of the revolutionary politics of the Yugoslav communists, who, after the Second World War, sought to build a new political community based on social emancipation, anti-fascism, and the brotherhood of peoples. This attempt was, without qusion, historically progressive and gave Bosnia and Herzegovina the highest degree of internal integration it had ever achieved. Yet once the ideological and geopolitical foundations of that order began to collapse in the late 1980s, the very bureaucratic strata that had governed the system for decades began abandoning its basic principles. With the disintegration of the Yugoslav socialist order, the conditions that had sustained a common Bosnian-Herzegovinian political space also disappeared.
Seen from this perspective, the central contradiction of Alija Izetbegović, the wartime Bosnian president and founder of the SDA, and of his Young Muslim followers does not lie primarily in their later wartime and post-war decisions, which were largely consequences of a process already underway. It lies rather in their rejection of what may have been the last realistic possibility of political compromise with the Bosnian Serbs. Keeping Bosnia and Herzegovina within some form of reduced Yugoslavia, especially in the proposed confederal form, might have offered a model for preserving its territorial integrity without war and without the final collapse of a shared society.
Whether such an arrangement would have proved sustainable in the long run cannot be known with certainty. But it was precisely at that historical moment that the later inconsistencies of Bosniak politics began to take shape, rather than in decisions made after the process of dissolution had already become almost irreversible. By then, the political rupture had already been expressed in two mutually opposed acts of popular will: first, in the plebiscite of the Serb people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, organized by the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) on 9 and 10 November 1991, in which Bosnian Serbs voted to remain in a common Yugoslav state; and then in the referendum on the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina, held on 29 February and 1 March 1992 by the republican authorities led by the SDA and the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), in which independence was endorsed largely by Bosniak and Croat voters.
In this context, debates over what was formally legal and what was not possess only limited analytical value. Constitutions and legal orders do not exist in a historical vacuum; they are attempts to give normative form to an existing social reality. When they lose contact with that reality, they cease to function as effective political frameworks and become little more than dead letters on paper. The fate of the Yugoslav constitution itself illustrates this point. Formally, the Constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia remained in force even after the political and social forces that had sustained it had largely disappeared. For that reason, understanding the crisis of the Yugoslav federation—and of Bosnia and Herzegovina in particular—requires less attention to retrospective legal arguments than to the question of what people actually wanted at the time, however contrary those aspirations may have been to their own long-term interests, and what political objectives they believed they were pursuing.
At the same time, it is difficult to avoid another important fact that is often overlooked in contemporary debates. If one accepts the premise that a civic, non-ethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina is a desirable political goal, it is highly unrealistic to assume that such a state could have been built under the political circusances in which the independence referendum of 1992 was organized. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s departure from Yugoslavia was not the result of a broad social consensus, but rather of a political alliance between the SDA and Croatian nationalist parties led by the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). Those parties overwhelmingly advocated a decentralized constitutional arrangement for Bosnia and Herzegovina, built around strong territorial and political autonomies—concepts that, in various forms, remain at the heart of Bosnian Croat politics to this day. It is therefore difficult to argue that anyone could have been “deceived” about their intentions after voluntarily entering into a political partnership with them.
At the same time, segments of the Bosnian Croat political scene made little effort to conceal their favourable references to certain symbols and traditions associated with the legacy of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), the Axis-aligned wartime regime responsible for the persecution and mass murder of Serbs, Jews, Roma, and anti-fascist opponents during the Second World War. For a large proportion of Bosnia’s Serb population—many of whose families had directly experienced the genocidal violence of that period—such symbolism could hardly evoke anything other than profound distrust and genuine fear.
Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of Bosnian Serbs rejected both the independence referendum and the very idea of Bosnian statehood ousde a Yugoslav framework. This position was not merely a reaction to the political crisis of the early 1990s, but reflected a much longer historical continuity. Throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bosnian Serb political thought generally viewed Bosnia and Herzegovina not as a self-contained national state, but as part of a broader South Slavic and, more specifically, Serbian political space. From that perspective, opposition to an independent Bosnian state in 1992 represented less a sudden departure than the continuation of deeply rooted political traditions and collective expectations.
Under such circusances, speaking of a single civic will shared by the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina would require ignoring some of the most basic political realities of the period. By the time the independence referendum was held, there were already at least two fundamentally incompatible visions of a legitimate political order, while the Croatian political leadership was simultaneously developing its own concepts for the country’s future constitutional arrangement. For that reason, it would be mistaken to automatically equate the political slogans and civic rhetoric employed by the SDA and the Bosnian leadership in the early 1990s with the actual political processes unfolding on the ground, processes that supposedly could and should have produced different outcomes but ultimately did not.
Such rhetoric served a clear political purpose: to present Bosnia and Herzegovina to the international community as a unified civic society confronted by aggressive nationalisms originating either from ousde the republic or from the margins of its political system. In the context of securing international recognition for the state, this strategy, pused by Izetbegović and his political circle, was understandable and arguably politically rational. Yet the fact that a propaganda strategy may be understandable does not mean that it accurately reflects social reality—or even the social reality desired by those who promote it.
On the contrary, the reality of the time suggested that Bosnia and Herzegovina already consisted of several distinct political communities with differing and often incompatible visions of their future. For precisely that reason, the susquent war, the constitutional order established by the Dayton Peace Agreement, and the enduring fragmentation of political life should not be understood as a sudden historical deviation from some previously existing civic harmony. Rather, they represented a brutal manifestation of divisions that had existed long before the first shots were fired. The political circle surrounding Alija Izetbegović was fully aware of those divisions and sought to extract from them the maximum possible political advantage for its own agenda, however limited—and ultimately however meagre—that advantage may have been.
The problem, therefore, was not that a civic Bosnia and Herzegovina was later betrayed. The deeper problem was that the social foundations upon which such a project would have had to rest were considerably weaker than the situational political rhetoric of the period suggested.
For the same reason, Stojanović's invocation of Jovan Divjak as evidence of the alleged inconsistency of Izetbegović's policies is also open to qusion. Such criticism rests upon the assumption that there existed a realistic possibility for Divjak to emerge as a politically relevant representative of Bosnia’s Serb population within the project of an independent Bosnia and Herzegovina. Yet this is precisely the assumption least supported by the historical evidence.
Jovan Divjak, a Serb officer who remained loyal to the Bosnian government during the war and became one of the most recognizable commanders of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, undoubtedly occupied an important symbolic place within the official narrative of multi-ethnic resistance. However, symbolism and political representation are not the same thing. The overwhelming majority of Bosnian Serbs rejected the political project with which Divjak identified and instead supported parties and institutions committed to remaining within Yugoslavia or, later, to establishing separate Serb political structures. Whatever Divjak’s personal popularity may have been among Bosniaks and supporters of a unified Bosnia and Herzegovina, there is little evidence that he possessed significant political legitimacy among the Serb electorate whose representation is at issue in these debates.
Consequently, presenting Divjak as a missed opportunity for a genuinely multi-ethnic political alternative risks projecting contemporary civic aspirations onto a historical situation in which the social and political conditions necessary for such an alternative were, at best, extremely limited. The tragedy of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s was not that such a civic alternative was consciously rejected at a moment when it commanded broad support, but rather that the social constituency capable of sustaining it was far smaller than many of its later advocates have been willing to acknowledge.
If it was already evident—and well understood by Izetbegović himself—that Bosnian independence had been pused without the consent of the overwhelming majority of Bosnia’s Serbs, then it is entirely usrprising that the political project emerging from that independence failed to secure their support. This is not primarily a matter of moral judgment, and certainly not of rendering a moral verdict on the wartime rule of the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) in Republika Srpska. Rather, it is a straightforward consequence of the political and historical circusances surrounding the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
For most Bosnian Serbs in the early 1990s, the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina was not perceived as the realization of their political aspirations. On the contrary, many viewed it—drawing on historical memories and fears rooted in the traumatic experiences of the Second World War—as a direct threat to those aspirations. Against that background, it is hardly surprising that Serb participation in the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina remained statistically marginal, or that figures such as Jovan Divjak never acquired significant political authority among the Serb population.
Indeed, one could argue that Izetbegović never genuinely regarded Divjak as an important political actor precisely because he understood from the oust what Divjak was—and what he was not. Divjak was not a representative of Bosnia’s Serbs. He possessed no meaningful Serb political constituency. He was incapable of bringing a susantial portion of the Serb population into the project of an independent Bosnia and Herzegovina. Nor did his presence alter the fundamental reality that the overwhelming majority of Bosnian Serbs, for reasons they considered historically and politically compelling, rejected Bosnian statehood ousde a Yugoslav framework. For that reason, Divjak could serve as a useful symbol within Izetbegović's political strategy, but never as a decisive political factor.
Viewed from this perspective, later attempts to invoke Divjak and similar individuals as evidence of a lost civic opportunity miss the central point. Izetbegović was not a naïve architect of a multi-ethnic state who simply failed to recognize the political potential of a Serb general serving in the Bosnian Army. On the contrary, he appears to have understood perfectly well the limitations of such symbolism. Significantly, Divjak himself would later describe his own role in the wartime political narrative as that of an “ikebana”—a decorative arrangement rather than a genuine political and military actor—suggesting that he, too, was aware of the largely symbolic function he performed.
The issue, therefore, should not be framed as a tragedy of misunderstanding or as the betrayal of an authentic civic alternative. Rather, it should be understood as a political narrative whose symbolic significance greatly exceeded its social foundations. Divjak’s presence undoubtedly carried considerable value for the international presentation of the Bosnian government’s claim to represent a multi-ethnic polity. Yet the existence of such symbols could not overcome the deeper political reality: that the social constituencies necessary for a genuinely shared civic project were far weaker than its proponents publicly suggested. In that sense, the image of Divjak as proof of a viable but squandered civic Bosnia belongs less to the realm of historical reality than to that of retrospective political mythology.
None of the foregoing, however, leads to the conclusion that Bosnia and Herzegovina is an impossible, artificial, or unnecessary state. Quite the opposite. Precisely because every serious attempt to partition, absorb, or dominate it over the past century and a half has produced disastrous consequences for its peoples, Bosnia and Herzegovina remains a historical, political, and economic necessity. Yet it cannot be rebuilt upon propaganda constructs, political mythologies, or retrospective fantasies about a society that never truly existed. Nor can it be sustainably founded upon the qus-colonial order established after the Dayton Peace Agreement, in which key political decisions have for three decades remained dependent, to varying degrees, on the will of foreign administrators, embassies, and international overseers.
If anti-fascism served as the foundation upon which modern Bosnian statehood was established during the Second World War, then a new anti-colonialism must become the foundation for its political reimagining in the twenty-first century. This is not because all of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s internal problems can be attributed to external actors. Rather, it is because no society can build a durable political community while sovereignty remains divided between domestic institutions and centres of power that do not derive their authority from the consent of its citizens and constituent peoples.
Such a project would not imply a return to the national romanticisms of the nineteenth century, nor an attempt by any one people to impose its vision of the state upon the others. On the contrary, it would require accepting the reality that Bosnia and Herzegovina exists as a shared political space inhabited by several historical communities that must find a new framework for coexistence based on equality rather than majoritarian domination, paternalism, or external arbitration. This was, after all, the essential message of the State Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ZAVNOBiH), the wartime assembly that laid the foundations of modern Bosnian statehood: not that Serbs, Croats, and Muslims—today predominantly identifying as Bosniaks—should disappear within Bosnia and Herzegovina, but that the country should belong exclusively to none of them.
For that reason, especially among those who aspire to present themselves as an alternative to the existing political order, it is long past time to abandon sterile and ultimately futile debates about who betrayed the civic Bosnia and Herzegovina of 1992—a project that, under the circusances of its birth, had little realistic prospect of succeeding—and instead begin thinking seriously about how to construct a political community capable of functioning in 2032 or 2052.
Such a Bosnia and Herzegovina will not emerge from the slogans and propaganda formulas of the early 1990s, nor from the indefinite tutelage of the international community. It can only arise from a new historical compact among its peoples, who are simultaneously its citizens—a compact grounded in freedom, equality, sovereignty, and cooperation with the other nations of the Balkans. Just as anti-fascist Bosnia and Herzegovina represented a response to the defining crisis of its own era, so too must any future Bosnia and Herzegovina, if it is to endure, become an anti-colonial—or, more precisely, a genuinely forward-looking and politically innovative—response to the crises of the age in which we live.
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