Some constitutions are agreed, some are passed by parliaments, some are imposed. The constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina came delivered as part of a package. Specifically, the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement included a provisional draft constitution for Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was appended to the principal agreement as Annex 4. (1) The fifteen-page document (it runs from pages 59 to 74 of the integral DPA text) was clearly intended as a temporary arrangement to be superseded by a Constitution that would be agreed by elected political officials in the state and approved by public vote. But this has never happened.
As political actors in the country repeatedly demonstrated that they lacked the capacity and political will to agree on structures for new institutions, whether they were institutions of baseline legal importance like a Constitution or everyday structures of communal contact and sociability like schools and sporting leagues, the Annex 4 Constitution took on an unanticipated and unwanted permanence. The document offers a perverse testament to the intractability of political forces, both domestic and international, as its legal force has been upheld by courts while the document itself, which was written in English, lacks an official translation into the local language(s). (2)
As political institutions remain immobile and unsuited to the conduct of dialogue on even everyday issues – to say nothing of large-scale agreements on legal and institutional structures – there is every likelihood that DPA Annex 4 will continue to function as Bosnia and Herzegovina’s constitution well into the future. Both the limitations inherent in its design and the tendency of political actors to instrumentalise its status, stressing the elements that operate in their favour while ignoring the ones that do not, suggest the basic outlines of permanent political crisis that have marked the last two decades of political life in Bosnia and Herzegovina will continue to do so for some time.
This presentation explores causes and consequences of the longevity of the Dayton Annex 4 Constitution. On the one hand, the constitution has functioned in part largely consistently with the intentions of the Dayton Peace Agreement. The agreement was conceived as a means of ending armed conflict in the country by securing for the principal hostile parties the territorial gains and advantages they had acquired through violence. This is of course in line with a well-accepted principle of diplomacy, that agreements are possible when the warring parties agree that they have more to gain by affirming the situation on the ground than by continuing to fight to change it. (3)
As the name suggests, the agreement is an agreement for cessation of hostilities rather than an agreement on the institutionalization of state structures – indeed, one of the factors that may have made the agreement salable to domestic publics in states that had been opposed to the establishment of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was that it could be plausibly interpreted as not establishing a state, or at least as establishing a sufficient degree of substate layers of government that it made consolidation of a state improbable.
In favor of the Annex 4 Constitution, it could be argued that its continued operation in force has offered a degree of protection against the reopening of potentially explosive political conflicts likely to lead to the recommencement of violence, such as the status of entities and dissatisfaction with the positions of some groups within the entities. Consistent, however, with the insight that “politics is war by other means,” (4) the settlement of violent conflicts over the control of territory has not meant that fundamental disputes related to political identities, the structure of political control, and the status of citizens have been resolved.
In that regard, it is always necessary to approach the Dayton Peace Agreement with a measure of balance. On the one hand, the partial success of Dayton has to be recognized: in the twenty years since it came into force, large-scale violence has not reemerged. Considering the scale and the character of the violence that was experienced in the 1992-1995 conflict, this achievement is meaningful. However, on the other hand, the partial success of Dayton obscures some of its important failures, in particular the failure to overcome conditions deriving directly from violence, and the failure to establish institutions that make possible for the citizens of the state a life unencumbered by ethnifying (5) and parasitic structures that emerged from conflict.
The two principal elements of the Dayton Peace Agreement that are especially relevant for any assessment of its functioning are:
1) it created ethnic territories in the forms of entities and cantons, and while it provided that some of these would be “mixed,” it in effect mandated ethnicised monopolies of power in these territories, and
2) it attempted to guard against provocative actions by the people occupying the ethnolithic structures it created by subjecting them to international oversight through a number of means, but most prominently by means of the Office of the High Representative (OHR), which has (but lately rarely uses) the power to issue and veto legislation and to remove officials from their positions.
While the general role of OHR is most frequently described as oversight, it is clear that many of its functions, in particular the abilty to impose and annul decisions made by domestic institutions, were conceived specifically as a means of compensating for the danger posed by the creation of local ethnified power monopolies and the delivery of these monopolies to the successors of political actors who attempted to achieve ethnonational goals by the widespread use of violence against civilians.
These measures were designed to simultaneously satisfy and constrain political actors who had achieved their position through violence, under the assumption that under a certain set of limits precisely these people would be able to direct the country’s peaceful political development. But they have had the perverse of effect of cementing into position the conditions created by violence, albeit with the benefit that violence itself has remained for the most part absent. Figures occupying political office remain, regardless of shifting election results, more or less immovable, while economic opportunity in almost every field remains closely linked to the ability of citizens to cultivate ties to these figures and their parties. Access to public economic goods, participation in lucrative privatization processes in which public investments are transferred to private ownership and, in many cases, even simple employment run through the complex layers of local government, where action is strongly conditioned by party interests and the omnipresent temptation of corruption. (6)
At the same time, occupying a position in the state structure functions as a remarkably efficient path to personal enrichment. Parliamentary deputies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example, are the most highly paid in the region and benefit from the largest difference between average wages and parliamentary salaries in Europe, (7) but in addition to this have the opportunity to multiply their pay by occupying several public offices at the same time, and to continue to receive their pay after leaving these offices. (8) Adding to this the set of opportunities afforded by corruption in the privatization of public enterprises and the awarding of public contracts, it becomes apparent that a spoils system is in operation which reproduces the structure of the profiteering system that operated during the war (Andreas, 2008). To the degree that the basic strategy of negotiation in Dayton was to encourage politicians to consent to signing the agreement by providing benefits for politicians, this has been an enormous success – which has come at enormous cost to the public.
What are some of the elements of this cost?
The combination of monopoly and oversight has led to the development of perverse structures of interest. One of the major ongoing sources of difficulty has been the structural subordination of all types of politics to the category of nationality. Consider for a moment the following passage from Article IV of the Annex 4 Constitution, describing the composition of legislative assembles:
The Parliamentary Assembly shall have two chambers: the House of Peoples and the House of Representatives.
1. House of Peoples. The House of Peoples shall comprise 15 Delegates, two- thirds from the Federation (including five Croats and five Bosniacs) and one- third from the Republika Srpska (five Serbs).
- The designated Croat and Bosniac Delegates from the Federation shall be selected, respectively, by the Croat and Bosniac Delegates to the House of Peoples of the Federation. Delegates from the Republika Srpska shall be selected by the National Assembly of the Republika Srpska.
- Nine members of the House of Peoples shall comprise a quorum, provided that at least three Bosniac, three Croat, and three Serb Delegates are present. (9)
Similarly, each chamber is instructed to “members one Serb, one Bosniac, and one Croat to serve as its Chair and Deputy Chairs.”
In the same vein, “A proposed decision of the Parliamentary Assembly may be declared to be destructive of a vital interest of the Bosniac, Croat, or Serb people by a majority of, as appropriate, the Bosniac, Croat, or Serb Delegates.” The activity of the parliamentary assemblies is overseen by a Presidency, which is designed to contain “one Bosniac and one Croat […] and one Serb.” In all instances access to representation and the articulation of interests are tied directly to attributions of ethnonational identity, and are exclusive in character.
No deep analysis is required to see that the Annex 4 Constitution envisions a country within which:
1) political representation is conceived as the representation of three ethnonational groups, with the ascription of membership of all citizens in one of them functioning as a foundational background assumption of the entire political structure,
2) there exist no paths to political representation outside of the framework of these three ethnonational groups,
3) political representatives themselves are constructed in advance as representing ethnonational interests and no other interests,
4) citizens who are not “Bosniac, Croat, or Serb,” or whose identities encompass more than one of these categories, are effectively excluded from political life.
The ethnonational categories imposed in the Annex 4 Constitution accurately reflect the claims to representation that were put forward by the armed parties to the Dayton Agreement in 1995. It is possible, however, to question the degree to which they represent the identities that are felt and expressed within the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
While most official attempts (the highly contested national census, for example)(10) to quantify national belonging rely on postulating groups and requiring that respondents either one of three named groups or one labelled „Other,“ more serious investigations by social scientists call the premise of one-dimensional ethnic belonging into question. Majstorović and Turjačanin (2013) find a lower level of attachment, in general, to nationality than to religion, and levels of commitment to universalistic values that rival those of commitment to ethnonational groups.
A possible conclusion may be that however strong they may appear to be, ethnic boundaries are widely conceived in the local culture(s) as permeable and far from absolute. In an analagous discussion, Pickering uses ethnographic methods to explore complexities of lived nationality against the backdrop of narrow census categories and concludes that „the official categories will always be a rearguard effort to impose a severely simplified frame on a complex reality“ (2007: 66). In this regard it can be argued that the reduction of the population to three mutually exclusive constituent groups fails to meet the needs of statistical accuracy or to reflect the multiple orientations of citizens. However, it suits beautifully the needs of politicians who legitimate their continued occupation of the state apparatus by promotion of the fear of the other and the perception that the categories on which their power relies as inevitable – at the same time presenting the consequences of violence as though they were the causes.
But even if not all “Serbs,” “Bosniaks” and “Croats” sense that the categories that are offered describe them adequately, there are two types of citizens for whom the categories on offer provide no paths to representation at all: people belonging to a group that is not one of the three “constituent” ones, and people who regard themselves as individual citizens. Two citizens belonging to the former category sued Bosnia and Herzegovina before the European Court of Human Rights: the heads of the country’s principal Roma and Jewish organizations respectively, Dervo Sejdić and Jakob Finci, obtained a judgement in 2009 confirming that their exclusion from the right to contest a political office amounted to racial discrimination, and instructing the country to amend the constitution to provide for political rights for all citizens, ruling that “no difference in treatment which is based exclusively or to a decisive extent on a person’s ethnic origin is capable of being objectively justified in a contemporary democratic society built on the principles of pluralism and respect for different cultures.” (11) No action has been taken, and European policymakers have been sorely divided over whether the issue of the Annex 4 Constitution’s insistence on systematic discrimination should be abandoned (European Stability Initiative 2013; Keil 2013) as a concession to politicians in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The exclusion of minorities from political representation is a serious enough shortcoming of the Annex 4 Constitution. Equally serious is the exclusion of citizens seeking non-ethnic paths to representation. When Azra Zornić appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, drawing on the reasoning offered by the court in the Sejdić-Finci ruling, and arguing that her exclusion from standing for public office because of her refusal to declare affiliation with any of the three “constituent peoples” amounted to discrimination, the court did find in her favor (again, with no effect).
But she was compelled to contend against a government that argued both “that Bosnia and Herzegovina could not be held responsible for the contested constitutional provisions because the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina was part of an international treaty” and that “the present applicant did not belong to any ‘minority’, but chose of her own will not to declare affiliation with any of the ‘constituent people’. She could change her mind at any time should she wish to participate in the political life of Bosnia and Herzegovina.” The arguments offered by the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina reflect an official perception that citizens are positively required to choose an ethnic affiliation (from a menu of three items). Beyond this, ethnic representation is perceived as having narrow boundaries: when the Social Democrat (12) Željko Komšić was elected in 2006 as the Croat member of the state presidency, his legitimacy was contested by Croat nationalists overtly on the ground that non-Croats had voted for him, and implicitly on the ground that the Croat seat “belongs to” a nationalist party (Touquet 2011).
The official discouragement of citizens to act politically as individuals has consequences for the behaviour of political parties and for the political structure more broadly. As constitutionally mandated representatives of ethnonational groups rather than citizens, political representatives are compelled to participate in institutional life by means of contestation with other ethnonational groups. A consequence of this is that political parties competing for ethnonational support face a strong encouragement to stress ethnic interests and to leave the sort of ideological contestation that is a characteristic of electoral democracy behind.
At the same time that political parties are motivated to minimise political contestation so that the degree of political diversity within ethnonational groups is reduced or eliminated, they are also strongly motivated to maximise disagreement between groups. The “Serb” representative is elected to oppose the “Bosniak” and “Croat” representatives, and so on in permutation. Parties are pushed to compete on the ground of which one makes the most exclusive claims founded on ethnonational demands.
One of the principal sites for the posing of ethnonational demands, and consequently one of the most important reasons that constitutional reform has not advanced since 1995, is the structure of the state itself. Any effort to produce an agreed constitution would require providing answers to questions that the Dayton agreement left open: what is the relation of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s two “entities” to the central state, what is the position of Croats in the Federation where they comprise a formally equal but numerically overwhelmed group, what rights to representation can be realised by members of “constituent nations” in places where they are not part of a majority (e.g., Serbs in the Federation and Bosniaks and Croats in the RS), and what structures could create space for a citizen-based rather than an ethnicity-based politics? Addressing these questions requires that current political actors demonstrate flexibility, an ability to compromise, and the political will to create structures that, while they may make the creation of a democratic political community possible, would undermine three lucrative existing political monopolies.
However, the maximal positions occupied by political actors leave no space for compromise. At bottom, the creation of space for open democratic contestation would both undermine the legitimacy of consolidated clientelism and disrupt the operation of a lucrative set of political-economic arrangements. This threat is commonly met by escalation of ethnonational rhetoric. For parties representing Republika Srpska, any proposals that involve strengthening of the power of the central state are met with invocation of the spectre of of ethnic domination. For parties representing the Federation, any affirmation of the territorial autonomy of Republic Srpska (13) resembles a legitimation of the consequences of genocide. Strategic and symbolic calculations come together in a manner that preserves and deepens the immobility of political structures.
In this process the Dayton agreement plays a double role – all political actors regularly affirm their commitment to the agreement, but do so opportunistically and selectively. On the one hand, Dayton is deployed as the instrument that created the entities, legitimated their ongoing competition with the state, and guarantees that their institutions be protected against weakening or absorption into the overall state structure. When Republika Srpska president Milorad Dodik invokes Dayton and calls for adherence to it, as he does frequently, the reference is meant to remind listeners that the agreement established autonomous entities (reference to the fact that it created a state with institutions that are designed to function over the whole of its territory are converniently excluded).
Similarly, when the election of Željko Komšić discussed above is attacked as a violation of the spirit of Dayton, this is meant to call forward an understanding that ethnically-based powersharing implies that power is shared among groups whose dominance was cemented in the course of violent conflict – in this case, the perception that HDZ was promised a continuous monopoly over the political life of Croats in the Federation. (14) In this respect, as both Bose (2002) and Bieber (2006) have noted, Dayton and the Annex 4 Constitution serve as ongoing legitimation for the political projects of ethnifying elites, particularly those directed against against the consolidation of the Bosnian state.
On the other hand, Dayton came accompanied by institutions designed to curb just the sorts of excesses in which ethnocratic parties indulge. The OHR, under the “Bonn powers” granted in 1997, (15) is able to veto and impose legislation and to remove officials from office for obstructing the Dayton agreement. Although OHR has been hesitant to invoke these powers recently, between 1997 and 2010 the “Bonn powers” were used 900 times (Szewczyk 2010).
While the extensive powers granted to agencies exercising international oversight were adopted with an eye to reducing the danger of renewed conflict and on the basis of an assessment that established their necessity, it is possible to argue that they have had as much of an effect in encouraging provocation as in preventing it. The initiation of provocative legislative initiatives, or the failure to pass constructive ones, comes at little political cost as elected officials can rely on OHR to veto scandalous measures and to impose ones on which they fail to reach agreement. This means that politicians are relatively free to engage in pandering to the most extreme sectors of public opinion while being able to use a mechanism that relieves them of the consequences of this. Provoking a severe reaction from OHR can often enhance a party’s popularity, as international oversight is popularly dismissed as ineffective or resented as an expression of international interference.
In these respects the institution of international oversight through OHR, and especially the “Bonn powers,” while established to prevent the development of excessive ethnic contestation in domestic politics, may have had the unintended consequence of encouraging it. Reaction to international oversight has assisted the development of a political class that affirms its position through repeated invocation (and occasionally through populist rejection) of Dayton, while the Annex 4 Constitution’s transfer of elements of sovereignty to international oversight has deepened some elements of political stalemate, encouraging prominent political actors to cultivate popular support through maximally ethnifying political stances, with a degree of confidence that international overseers will step in to control the damage.
Another unanticipated consequence of this mutually reinforcing relationship is that the requirement of international oversight, initially conceived as a temporary measure, tends to extend indefinitely into the future as provocative behavior by politicians is interpreted as evidence of the continued necessity for oversight.
The hope at the time that that Dayton was signed, of course, was that its arrangements would function temporarily. Annex II of Annex 4 makes two specific references to the constitution being “superseded by applicable agreement or law” or “otherwise determined by a competent governmental body.” Within a reasonable period of time, politicians were to have agreed on the basic structural rules and framework for a common state, international overseers were to determine that their role was no longer necessary, and public deliberation of concrete political issues was to take the place of ethnifying gamesmanship. To a certain extent it could be argued that the country was traveling in this direction before the present stalemate achieved metastasis in 2006, where it has remained since. Making this argument depends on a contention that the fundamental problem with the Dayton agreement was not the structures it established, but the people who came to occupy those structures. In this view, Bosnian politicians did not universally share the goals behind the peace agreement, while they saw considerable opportunity for themselves in maintaining its dysfunctional shell.
The longer it remains in force, the more it tends to reinforce a political system that is parasitic, unrepresentative, and unresponsive. In this context scholars like Hromadžić (2015) have described Bosnia as “an empty nation,” a condition that Jansen (2015) diagnoses as “Daytonitis.” The systematic constriction of political life has meant that basic issues remain unresolved.
A refusal of RS and Federation ministries to agree in 2013 meant that students from Bosnia and Herzegovina were ineligible to participate in the European Union’s “Erasmus Mundus” mobility program, which provides opportunities for study visits to universities throughout Europe.(16) While an online petition appeared to lead toward a resolution of this particular stalemate, a lack of motion could easily be observed on other issues. As late as June 2015, state and local budgets were severely threatened by a failure to negotiate financing with the International Monetary Fund, again because of unresolved disputes between representatives of the Federation and the RS. (17) In the latter half of 2015, disputes between the state government and RS led to recurrent threats of a referendum designed to undermine the authority of judicial and law enforcement institutions, and eventually in December to the declaration of a boycott of law enforcement institutions by RS.
Yet the most dramatic illustration of the self-imposed paralysis of state institutions damaging the lives of its citizens came to prominence in June 2013. A deadlocked parliament had for a long time failed to reach agreement on a law for the regulation of personal identity numbers (Jedinstveni matični broj građana, or JMBG), preventing the issuance of identity documents and passports for new citizens. The problem expanded in scope from inconvenience to popular scandal when three month old Belmin Ibrišević, who was required to travel to neighbouring Serbia for urgent medical treatment that was not available domestically, could not receive a passport that would permit her to cross the border. Eventually the infant girl died without receiving the necessary medical treatment.
Citizens in Sarajevo responded by forming a human chain around the state parliament, symbolically enclosing the deputies in the building and pledging not to let them out until they passed the disputed law on identity documents and took other measures to make medical care available to citizens and transfer some political privileges to public benefit. (18) Significantly, the Bebolucija (“baby revolution”) attracted participation and support across entity boundaries, suggesting a broad consensus on the primacy of human needs over ethnonational categories imposed by, and providing benefit only to, politicians. Eventually RS did pass a law on the issuance of identity documents, while the Federation continued its immobility (Amakolas and Maksimović 2013).
Although the Bebolucija eventually quieted down, the gulf that it indicated dividing citizens from political elites remained. In February 2014, large-scale citizen protests in Tuzla decrying the illegal privatization of enterprises to owners who stripped assets, failed to engage in production and fired workers met a violent police response, which both intensified the protests in Tuzla and provided a catalyst for them to spread to cities across the Federation. (19) Although some instances of rioting and arson in Sarajevo and Mostar attracted broad media attention, a creative initiative by citizens lasted longer and had more profound short-term effect: in all of the major cities of the Federation citizens’ plenums were formed to debate concerns of the protest and to formulate demands to the local governments. (20) At a minimum, the plenum movement provided a concrete illustration of the depth of needs experienced by participants and their lack of faith in the Dayton-endorsed political authorities to address them.
A similar sentiment came to the fore in May of 2014, when the entire region was hit by major floods. In Bosnia and Herzgovina, citizens suspicious of the ability of state institutions to direct aid money where it was needed and to use it appropriately, established charities designed to, as one of them put it, “circumvent the bureaucracy and thus avoid various difficulties many NGOs have been struggling with. Hundreds of tons of aid which has been donated through international channels is still waiting to be distributed across the region, instead of immediately going to the victims of the Balkan floods. Despite hard work and best intentions, red tape, bureaucracy, and corruption have made this process more difficult to manage than it should be for many well-intentioned organizations.” (21) A later analysis of flood response confirmed suspicions – official responses were held back by competitive relations between parallel institutions, lack of clarity as to legal responsibility, and the misdirection of funds intended for relief and prevention. (22)
Although the protest movement did not sustain momentum over the long term and elections in 2014 produced little observable change, the dynamics suggested by mass refusal of institutions and a wide gulf between generously rewarded ethnifying elites and deprived citizens continued to be displayed in other ways.
One of the most interesting recent developments has taken place in Tuzla, where the February 2014 protests began. The depressed city had formerly been a centre of the chemicals industry in Yugoslavia – the local SODASO factory, for example, used to produce 80% of the table salt consumed in Yugoslavia, 208,000 tonnes of it in 1991. By 1999 it was producing 21,000 tonnes (Nurković 2010). Privatized in 2002, by 2013 the company employed only 422 people, down from 2500 in 1998. (23) The SODASO headquarters, unused by the new private owners, had been rented out as offices to the local government and were the target of protest and an arson attack in February 2014 – the graffiti-decorated shell now stands as a kind of monument to the Tuzla protests. (24)
Another privatized and non- performing industrial concern in Tuzla is the DITA detergents factory, which had not produced detergent since 2012 and whose work force of 360 has been reduced to 27. (25) Lacking investment, pay and management, in June 2015 the workers began producing detergent again and distributing them to markets in the region. In the same month similar independent efforts were made by Tuzla workers at the Aida shoe factory and the TTU transport equipment factory. (26) Although operating on a small scale and in need both of investment to carry over a longer term and of access to marketing and distribution networks to bring products to potential buyers, these initiatives have been generally celebrated as small popular victories against unresponsive and predatory political and financial operators who had kept people out of work for years.
For Bosnian citizens, the issues of immobile state institutions, imposed ethnonational divisions, and an economy unresponsive to human needs are related, and all are regarded as consequences of the conditions created by Dayton’s Annex 4 Constitution, which over its unexpectedly long life has cemented parasitic structures in power while systematically excluding citizens from public life. These consequences bode poorly for the stated goals of international intervention (also surely the goals of most citizens), which include the construction and consolidation of a peaceful and democratic state where public life is marked by reconciliation.
While in 1995 it may have arguably been the case that a semi-legal and semi-representative system offered the only viable alternative to continued violence, Dayton long ago reached the ground of diminishing returns. Its present contribution to public life is in large measure negative. Creating structures that can overcome the barriers that the Annex 4 Constitution has put in place, however, will require doing things that no domestic or international administration in Bosnia and Herzegovina has dared to do so far: responding to citizens’ genuine identities and needs, permitting participation in public life unmediated by war- generated categories, and opening public space to democratic dialogue.
1. The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina was signed on 14 December 1995.
2. As a part of the official stance dividing all elements of social life into three exclusive ethnonational categories, Bosnia and Herzegovina has three official languages: Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. The differences between these three languages are largely either imperceptible or comparable to distinctions of accent and dialect existing within most languages. See Kordić (2010).
3. The most succinct statement of the principle comes from the French colonel David Galula (1963 [2006]), “At any time during the process, the insurgent may make peace offers, provided there is more to gain by negotiating than by fighting.
4. This reversal of the famous dictum by Clausewitz was proposed by Michel Foucault in “Two Lectures,” in Foucault (C. Gordon ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977 (NY: Pantheon 1980:90).
5. I adopt with appreciation the term used by Paula Pickering (2007) to refer to the leaders of political structures entrenched by Dayton: „ethnifying elites.“
6. There have been a number of studies of the functioning of corruption in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, among the most useful of which are Divjak and Pugh (2008), Donais (2010), and several of the essays collected in Arsenijević (2014), including those by Ibrišimović, Kurtović and Mujanović.
7. In 2010 the Center for Investigative Reporting in Sarajevo enumerated the level and sources of income for political officials in the country. A summary is available as Center for Investigative Reporting, „Cushy Political Job: 100,000 KM Salary, Extras and No Votes Needed.“ . A 2013 study by the GEA Centre for Research and Studies found that Bosnian MPs, with salaries at 600% of the national average, were the best-paid officials in Europe in relation to the general population.
8. The right to continued enjoyment of multiple salaries is known informally as „bijeli hljeb“ („white bread“), and was an object of sustained contention in the anti-elite protests in 2014.
9. The composition of the House of Peoples itself is a response to a decision of the Constitutional Court on the status of “constituent nations,” on which political parties subsequently conducted negotiations, with a resolution imposed by OHR in 2002. See OHR Legal Department, “Agreement on the implementation of the constituent peoples’ decision of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” 27 March 2002.
10. A census was conducted in 2013, but the results of the census have not been published.
11. The quotation appearing above occurs in paragraph 44 of the decision.
12. Željko Komšić left the Social Democratic Party in 2012, when he was still a member of the presidency.
13. Occasionally parties from Republika Srpska will make use of the resentment originating from some ethnocratic Croat parties in the Federation, who argue that if one ethnonational formation received an autonomous territory, another formation should receive one too.
14 The relationship is further complicated by the fact that Dayton approved the holding of dual citizenship by ethnic Serb and Croat citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that the election law in Croatia provides both voting rights and designated parliamentary representation to the “diaspora” (formally, by means of the XI electoral district). Diaspora voters, largely in Bosnia and Herzegovina but also from some other countries with large ethnic Croat populations (Australia, Germany…) regularly vote for HDZ and other parties of the nationally-oriented political right in large majorities, a tendency which sometimes has the effect of distorting election results in Croatia.
15. Office of the High Representative, “12/10/1997: PIC Bonn Conclusions.
16. Documentation published by Buka magazine ties the failure to agree to blockage by RS authorities. Unsigned, “Dokumenti: Vlada RS, mladi SNSD i Erasmus program,”
17. Unsigned, “Bosnia’s New Deal With IMF in Jeopardy,” World Bulletin.
18. The demands of the movement in detail, as well as a selection of news and essays related to the JMBG protests.
19. Aside from a small number of solidarity marches, there was little participation in protests in the Republika Srpska, a point that was used for propaganda purposes by RS authorities (as it was officially interpreted to indicate that workers in RS must be more satisfied).
20. The plenums are discussed in depth by myself and others in the essays collected in Arsenijević (ed.) (2014). Many of the documents produced by protests and plenums are collected in translation online.
21. The mission statement of Balkan Flood Relief Direct.
22 Lejla Deronja Suljić, Muris Bulić, Denis Telić and Asmir Ćilimković. 2014. Poplave u BiH: Elementarne i/ili institucionalnaneefikasnost. Tuzla: Centri civilnih inicijativa.
23. I last visited the site in June 2015.
24. Al Jazeera, “Radnici Dite pokrenuli proizvodne pogone,” 4 June 2015.
25. Maja Nikolić, “Kako su radnici iz Tuzle ponovo pokrenuli svoje fabrike,” Radio Slobodna Europa, 12 June 2015.
Article published with the permission by the author.
Also published in Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, Volume 15, Issue 4.
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