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International community and state-building after the collapse of the former Yugoslavia:

between Dr Frankenstein and good governance

Boško Picula1

Nowhere in a smaller geographic area than the former Yugoslavia

after the end of the Cold War have emerged more new states. From

1991 up to 2008 no less than seven states became independent. Also,

their processes of becoming independent and state-building proceeded

in different circumstances, but with a key influence of a range of the

actors of international relations, from certain organisations and

integrations (UN, EU, OSCE) to particular states (USA). This

influence does not relate only to the resolution of the multi-stage

armed conflict which accompanied the collapse of the former

Yugoslavia, but also to the dynamics of the process in which

particular countries became independent and to the building of

particular institutions in them, even their whole political systems.

Twenty-five years after the beginning of this process, the crucial

question is whether the international community has succeeded in this

or failed. What were once parts of the same federation with a

recognizable foreign-policy profile, today the countries which

emerged after the collapse of the former Yugoslavia have very

different statuses in the international community.

Keywords: former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia,

Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, political system,

conflicts, conflict resolution, international community

Introduction: A state determined by wars

If we compare the political map of the European continent after the end of World War II with

the present one, we can notice fewer changes than it could be expected after almost a hundred

years of dramatic events. From 1918 to today, Europe and the world have gone through a

series of fundamental changes in terms of political circumstances within individual states and

in terms of their mutual relations. After the first global war, the world went through an even

harder conflict which affected almost the whole of humanity, while in the aftermath of World

War II it found itself in a new configuration of international relations, marked by bipolarity.

All these events primarily referred to the situation in Europe, which from the end of the First

1 PhD, Senior lecturer at the University College of International Relations and Diplomacy Dag Hammarskjöld in

Zagreb, Croatia; as a consultant, he collaborates with Croatian non-governmental organizations and international

organizations in Croatia and Europe.

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World War to the present day has gone through a number of stages with regard to relations

among its states and with regard to circumstances within individual states.

Nevertheless, the abovementioned comparison of political maps of Europe of ninety-seven

years ago and the present one reveals that, in the course of the last century, the continent

stabilized in terms of the number of states. The disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian

Empire, the Russian Empire and the German Empire as well as the changes within the British

Empire after the First World War determined the number of states in Europe over the long

term so that the subsequent changes occurred only after the end of the Cold War. In point of

fact, over the past one hundred years these were the only, although significant, changes

regarding the number of European states. Namely, between 1991 and 1993 more states gained

independence in Europe and in the Eurasian region after the three socialist federations had

fallen apart. As a consequence of the disintegration of the former Union of the Soviet

Socialist Republics fifteen new states were created, out of which ten in Europe: Russia,

Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The former Czechoslovakia was succeeded by the Czech Republic and Slovakia, while the

former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia broke up into five new states: Slovenia,

Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia which was

jointly established by the two remaining Yugoslav republics, Serbia and Montenegro. The

process of creating new states in Europe did not stop at this point as the Federal Republic of

Yugoslavia, which in the meantime had changed its name into Serbia and Montenegro,

dissolved exactly into Serbia and Montenegro. Two years later Kosovo, which used to be an

autonomous province within Serbia, became independent too.

While in the first years after the Cold War the dissolutions of Czechoslovakia and of the

Soviet Union passed off peacefully and with political agreements between the newly

established states, the former Yugoslavia fell apart in stages through a series of armed

conflicts that lasted for a whole decade: since the summer of 1991, when a brief war in

Slovenia and a years-long one in Croatia broke out, until the spring of 2001, when war

engulfed also Macedonia, which had not been affected by major conflicts at the very

beginning of the wars in former Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, in 1991 war had spread in a most

severe form to Bosnia and Herzegovina, whereas the United States of America and its NATO

allies intervened militarily against Serbia only in the spring of 1999 when Kosovo was at war.

Therefore, it was the territory of the former Yugoslavia, where there are seven independent

states today, to become the first part of the European continent after World War II affected by

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armed conflicts. According to estimates, in the abovementioned ten-year period (1991-2001)

more than 140 thousand people were killed in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, out of which

the majority, about one hundred thousand, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. For the sake of

comparison, in the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war, according to various estimates, between

120 and 150 thousand people were killed.

Being the most severe series of armed conflicts in Europe after the Second World War to date,

the wars in the former Yugoslavia can be viewed from multiple angles. One of them relates

surely to the analysis of conflicts themselves, of their causes and their development, of the

attempts to solve them and of their consequences. The second analysis refers to the

circumstances under which the former Yugoslavia fell apart amid armed conflicts, in which

process the prediction that the Yugoslav case would be a trigger for a similar turn of events in

the territory of the former Soviet Union, did not come true. At least not during the 1990s. The

third viewing angle refers to the role of the international community, which, by means of

different actors, mechanisms and outcomes influenced the resolution of conflicts in the former

Yugoslavia. In this process the concept of the international community was, as always,

heterogeneous due to the fact that different countries, organizations and associations

attempted to influence the termination of these hostilities, of course, with varying degrees of

success. Finally, it is possible to analyze what the outcome of the war brought to each new

state politically, both in terms of their individual domestic politics and institutionalized

political systems and in terms of their individual positions in international relations. In this

respect, the states that succeeded the former Yugoslavia represent “a continent within a

continent” as nowhere in Europe or even in the world, in such a short period of time so many

different states have ever been created, the states which, on the other hand, have got a lot in

common.

This can be best seen exactly this year which marks a quarter-century since the beginning of

democratization of the former Yugoslavia, viewed as a prelude to its disintegration and

twenty years since the end of the worst war stages in the former Yugoslavia, i.e. the war in

Bosnia and Herzegovina and the war in Croatia. Due to different and even conflicting

interpretations of the wars in question throughout individual successor states of the former

Yugoslavia, it is difficult to talk about a positive or even just peace which was brought about

at the end of these wars. As for reaching a just peace, there is a lack of political efforts by all

representatives of the former belligerents to bring initial contradictory objectives within the

scope for compromise. A full establishment of all social relations (political, economic,

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cultural) in the war-affected environments as a stage of reconciliation with the rule of law and

condemnations of crime is missing too. Positive peace remains only an objective as, in spite

of many advances made in the last twenty years, a long-term reconciliation has not come to

existence yet, nor the state of peace has irreversibly taken hold as part of collective

consciousness. If democratic transition is a process that can last six months in the institutional

sense (constitutional reforms), six years in the political sense, and six decades in the social

sense (development of civil society), as the German political scientist and theoretician of

transition Ralph Dahrendorf put it, then a similar time span can be set for the process of

establishing peace and its preservation. It takes several months to stop an armed conflict if the

actors capable of changing the asymmetry of the conflict get involved, as it happened in

Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo; whereas it can take several years for maintaining

peace on the basis of political legitimacy of new or old actors in elections within the new

political system, while for the process of a just, and especially positive, peace, more decades

and generations are required to pass for sure.

Today the territory of the former Yugoslavia is an area with seven new states which have

been determined by the outcomes of conflicts ever since the end of the First World War.

Similar conflict and post-conflict circumstances determined the reconstruction of Yugoslavia

in the aftermath World War II and ultimately Yugoslavia collapsed at war, simply confirming

that the coordinates of its creation, reconstruction and demise had been determined

systematically by wars and their consequences. In the political and social sense, are the new

states that emerged on the ruins of the former Yugoslavia nowadays stable political

communities whose stability is based exactly on overcoming the contradictions which used to

be Yugoslavia’s “inherent faults”? There is neither one single nor an unambiguous answer to

this question. There are as many answers as there are states generated after the disintegration

of the former Yugoslavia. Some of them became members of the European Union and NATO,

which speaks volumes about comprehensive political, legal and security stabilization

(Slovenia, Croatia); some of them are yet to become part of these integrations, whereby

internal contradictions, even tensions, as well as the issues of relations with neighbouring

countries represent aggravating circumstances (Montenegro, Macedonia); for some of the

states internal consensus on statehood and territorial integrity remains questionable (Bosnia-

Herzegovina, Kosovo), while Serbia is an example of maintaining both internal and external

political balance between reluctance to accepting the loss of territory on the one hand and

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various international alliances and completing priorities on the other (European Union,

Russia).

Today all these states are parliamentary democracies which have been holding multiparty

elections for well twenty five years now, even under armed conflict circumstances (Croatia)

or under immediate post-conflict circumstances (Bosnia-Herzegovina), having thus fully

legitimate power which all successive authorities in Yugoslavia lacked, since the state’s

creation in 1918 to its demise in 1991. The international community, particularly the UN, the

OESS and the European Union participated in the creation of certain political institutions and

mechanisms for making collective decisions, particularly in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in

Kosovo, and to a lesser extent in Montenegro and in Macedonia, especially within the process

of finding a political solution to the war conflict and in terms of the peacekeeping activities

after the war. While some of these interventions were successful, such as the construction of

the constitutional framework of Bosnia-Herzegovina and of Kosovo immediately after the end

of military operations or preparation and holding the Montenegrin referendum on

independence in 2006, in most cases it was about the absence of long-term solutions for

ending conflicts. These conflicts today, however, are neither armed nor manifest. Yet, being

latent and “frozen”, they are still dangerous.

Yugoslav politics and the political system prior to the disintegration of the state in 1991

While the choice of political system and exercising power by the authorities in the successor

states of the former Yugoslav socialist federation were greatly influenced by internal and

external political circumstances and partly by certain international community actors, on the

eve of its disintegration in 1991, Yugoslavia was in many respects a political system sui

generis. In addition, it was a state which in its second period of existence, since the end of the

Second World War in 1945 to its collapse, tried to promote both a specific domestic political

system and a specific foreign policy. Ultimately, the last Constitution of the Socialist Federal

Republic of Yugoslavia, as the state was officially called, was internationally confirmed as the

legal basis for national independence of the Yugoslav republics that had jointly constituted the

federation. As a state, Yugoslavia was created on 1 December 1918, three weeks after the

official end of the First World War. In its first period of existence it was a monarchy, a highly

centralized state in terms of national/subnational governance. It was created by the unification

of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, as a transitory state founded by the South Slavs

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who lived in Austria-Hungary (similar by its form to Czechoslovakia which was created at the

same time), the Kingdom of Serbia and the Kingdom of Montenegro.

The foundation of the state was determined by the political and military circumstances in the

wake of the First World War, in which the political élite of the State of Slovenes, Croats and

Serbs sought to preserve the territorial integrity (Italy started conquering parts of the new state

on the basis of the Treaty of London under the terms of which it had joined the Triple Entente

in the First World War) by means of the unification with Serbia and Montenegro and, in doing

so, put into effect the decades-old idea of uniting all the South Slavs (except Bulgarians).

From another standpoint, in the unification with the western part of the South Slavic area

where a significant part of Serbs lived, Serbia saw the expansion of its political influence and

power, as well as the outcome that would confirm its participation and ultimately the victory

at the and of World War I on the side of the Entente. Therefore, the first, royal Yugoslavia

was created as a combination of necessity, compromise and concealment of actual political

goals. Instead of a federal state which was advocated mostly by the politicians in Slovenia and

in Croatia, the first Yugoslavia, which was officially called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and

Slovenes from 1918 to 1929, was founded as a unitary state headed by the Serbian

Karađorđević dynasty. In this connection, only Serbs, Croats and Slovenes had the status of

state-building nations. The Serbian political élite considered the Montenegrins and the

Macedonians to be part of the Serbian ethnic corpus, while the Muslim Slavic population in

Bosnia and Herzegovina and in other parts of the country was not awarded the status of a

separate nation, but only of a specific confession, ethnically either of Serbian or of Croatian

descent. Albanians in Kosovo did not have any minority rights, and out of a great number of

other minorities we should note the Hungarians and the Germans who lived in Vojvodina, in

the north of Serbia.

A fragile and defective democracy held together over the 1920s within an ethnically,

politically and economically extremely heterogeneous state, whereas after the political

violence in 1928 when the representatives of the most important opposition in the country, i.e.

the representatives of the Croatian Peasant Party were killed in the Yugoslav Parliament in

Belgrade, King Alexander introduced a dictatorship, renamed the state into the Kingdom of

Yugoslavia and carried out further centralization. After his assassination in France in 1934,

the repressive regime started weakening gradually, the elections were held and in 1939 the

federalization of the state was initiated by establishing a special Croatian unit within it.

However, the Second World War led to the disintegration of the state and some of its parts

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were occupied by Germany, Italy and other members of the Tripartite Pact, while in the

territory of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina a puppet state as an ally of Berlin and Rome was

established. The combat against the fascist occupiers was conducted by the Yugoslav

communists spearheaded by a Croatian, Josip Broz Tito. Upon winning the war they restored

the state, expanded its territory to the west and on the Adriatic coast and abolished the

monarchy.

By virtue of the 1946 Constitution, Yugoslavia became a federation consisting of six equal

republics, which was also guaranteed by the constitutional amendments (1953, 1963, 1974)

which equalized the rights of the country’s six nations: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians,

Montenegrins and Muslims. The latter were also awarded the status of separate South Slavs.

Moreover, the rights were guaranteed to a great number of national minorities, the most

numerous of whom were the Albanians in Kosovo which became an autonomous province

within Serbia, along with Vojvodina. However, from the very beginning, the second

Yugoslavia was a communist dictatorship where multi-party elections were never held, not

even after the end of the Cold War, as the democratic elections were conducted only at the

level of individual republics, not at the federal level. Having usurped power immediately after

the end of the Second World War, the communists carried out a comprehensive ideologization

of society, retribution of their political opponents and they established a repressive regime

which controlled all segments of the state and of society. Josip Broz Tito became president for

life both of the state and of the Communist party, which was the only party in the country, so

the Yugoslav form of autocracy at that time can be regarded as a blend of ideological and

personal dictatorship. In spite of being the Soviet Union’s most loyal ally over the first several

years, Tito’s Yugoslavia came into conflict with Stalin as early as in 1948 and from that time

on it started building its own version of socialist society and state as well as of foreign policy

orientation.

As for the model of political and economic system, Yugoslavia started promoting the

principles of self-management socialism as opposed to the Soviet-type state socialism. Its

fundamental feature was workers’ management of factories and institutions, but still under

full control of the ruling political party, namely the League of Communists. As far as foreign

policy is concerned, Yugoslavia, along with India and Egypt, spearheaded the Non-Aligned

Movement as a bloc of states that did not belong to either one of the two military-political

blocs led by the USA and the USSR. This special position of Yugoslavia during the Cold

War made it possible for Tito’s regime to enjoy a certain privileged status in international

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relations, while the original political differences between some parts of Yugoslavia, especially

between Slovenia and Croatia on one side, and Serbia on the other, were quashed by the

dominance of the ruling communists and by the power of the repressive apparatus. In doing

so, it used to be emphasized that Yugoslavia had resolved the turbulent national issue which

had troubled the first, monarchist Yugoslavia by establishing a federation with increasingly

greater power of the individual republics and autonomous provinces. Nevertheless, it was

only an illusion whose real situation and unresolved problems would erupt amid the country’s

political crisis at the end of the 1980s, the subsequent disintegration of the state and the

beginning of the war.

In the last two decades of existence in its original form, Yugoslavia functioned de facto as a

federation with elements of confederation due to the fact that the last 1974 Yugoslav

Constitution provided all the republics with entitlements of real states which had freely united

in a federation. The Constitution equalized the rights of all nations and national minorities and

entitled all the nations who had achieved their statehood through individual republics to self-

determination up to secession. This constitutional guarantee would become the basis of all the

referendums in the 1990s in which the individual former Yugoslav republics declared

themselves on their own state independence. The 1974 Constitution is, politically speaking, a

consequence of solving the crisis Yugoslavia had gone through in the late 1960s and in the

early 1970s. The culmination of the crisis was reached by the demands by the leadership of

the Socialist Republic of Croatia for further decentralization of the state. Although Tito

quashed the Croatian movement for greater autonomy in 1971, he actually accepted its

essential requirements by means of the 1974 Constitution, believing that his leader’s authority

as well as the key levers of the regime – the League of Communists and the Yugoslav

People’s Army – would be sufficient guarantees for preventing the disintegration of the

country.

The new constitutional arrangements confirmed the parliamentary political system of

Yugoslavia in which the parliament as a legislative body was not only the most important

institution as in a parliamentary system, but its central point in terms of political power and

authority. In this way Yugoslavia became a socialist version of the Swiss political system,

with the key differences being the one-party system and socialist economy. The Assembly of

the SFRY consisted of the Federal Chamber as the lower house of the parliament (the

republics were represented by thirty delegates each, while each autonomous province by

eight) and of the Chamber of Republics and Provinces as the upper house (the republics had

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twelve delegates each, while each province eight). Josip Broz Tito’s position of President of

the Republic for life was confirmed, but there existed also the institution of Presidency of the

SFRY as a collective head of state which started functioning after Tito’s death in 1980. Nine-

member Presidency was made of the representatives of all the republics and provinces and of

the president of the League of Communists by virtue of official position. A parliamentary

nature of the political system of Yugoslavia was confirmed by the relationship between the

parliament and the government, as the government was constitutionally named Federal

Executive Council and was merely the executive body of the parliament, fully accountable for

its work to the Assembly. The Constitution stipulated that the Federal Executive Council was

made of the president and the members (actually ministers) who were appointed in

accordance with the principle of equal representation of the republics and appropriate

representation of the autonomous provinces. Insofar as after Tito’s death representatives of

individual republics and provinces rotated in the office of President of the Presidency, the

President of the Federal Executive Council (actually the Prime Minister) was not appointed

according to a ‘national key’ and therefore the Yugoslav government from 1982 to 1991 was

headed by two representatives of Croatia and one of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The same assembly model was applied to the level of Republics and Provinces, the only

difference being the fact that each republic and province assembly had three chambers instead

of two: the Social and Political Council, the Council of Municipalities and the Council of

Associated Labour as a special chamber in which workers were represented. In the same

manner as the federation, the republics and the provinces had their presidencies as collective

heads of executive power and most of other powers of sovereign states including foreign

affairs and defence. However, according to the Constitution, the key authority of the

federation was ensuring independence and territorial integrity of the country and protecting its

sovereignty in international relations, i.e. deciding on war and peace. Nevertheless, as soon as

democratization started, legalization of the multi-party system was carried out and free

elections were conducted in all republics, the connective tissue of the federation started falling

apart. The irreconcilable goals of Serbia, which advocated stronger federation and a change of

the 1974 Constitution, and of Croatia and Slovenia, which were in favour of confederation,

led to the peak of the crisis and to the armed conflicts. Essentially, in the wars that followed,

on one side there were members of the Serbian communities in Croatia and in Bosnia-

Herzegovina endorsed by Serbia, and on the other the republics that had declared

independence.

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The new states after the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the international community

Two days after Slovenia and Croatia adopted the declarations of national independence in

their parliaments on 25 June 1991, the intra-Yugoslav conflict grew from the stage of political

crisis and latent conflict into the stage of overt armed conflict. On 23 December 1990

Slovenia, as the first of the six Yugoslav republics, held a referendum in which the Slovene

voters declared themselves about the possibility that Slovenia would become a sovereign and

independent state. 94.8% of Slovene citizens voted in favour of this option in the event that

the negotiations on the future of Yugoslavia would not result in a solution acceptable to

everybody. The next one to hold a state independence referendum was Croatia. In the

Croatian referendum held on 19 May 1991, 93.2% of voters opted for sovereignty. As in the

meantime the months-long negotiations on the future of the Yugoslav state conducted by the

leaderships of all six Yugoslav republics had broken down, Slovenia and Croatia declared

independence in accordance with the referendum results. However, the Yugoslav People’s

Army (org. JNA) intervened, first by trying to prevent Slovenia from accomplishing its

independence, and then by occupying the areas inhabited by the Serbian national minority in

Croatia. While the war in Slovenia lasted about ten days (27 June – 7 July 1995), the war in

Croatia continued until August 1995 when the Croatian Army liberated the areas which had

hitherto been under military and political control of local Serbs. This kind of beginning of a

series of wars in the former Yugoslavia could have been expected as, from the very start,

Slovenia had been out of the plans of Serbia’s government led by President Slobodan

Milošević.

Milošević’s regime was counting on a new state that would be made of Serbia and

Montenegro together with large parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia where the majority

of population was Serbian. At the very beginning of the war in Yugoslavia, which by its

intensity and escalation mostly stunned European politicians, it was perfectly clear that the

international community would be of key importance for bringing it to a halt or at least under

control. It started occurring only ten days after the beginning of the war in Slovenia, when the

Brioni agreement was signed on 7 July 1991, on the Brioni Islands in Croatia. This is the first

in a series of compromise-seeking and, essentially, ineffective solutions sponsored by the

international community with the purpose of trying to bring under control the situation in the

former Yugoslavia. The agreement was signed by the representatives of Slovenia, Croatia and

the remnants of the central Yugoslav authorities under the political sponsorship of the

European Community and it was supposed to provide for the complete withdrawal of the

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Yugoslav People’s Army from Slovenia, which actually happened, for the arrival of European

observers in the crisis areas and for a three-month moratorium on the Slovenian and Croatian

declarations of independence in order to achieve a joint solution. However, the war flared up

exactly in the areas from which the Yugoslav National Army had withdrawn and by the

beginning of October 1991 the conflict between rebel Serbs and Croatia came to a climax.

Without having achieved any kind of political solution and with thousands of deaths, the

three-month moratorium expired and Croatia and Slovenia embarked upon achieving an

international confirmation of their state independence. Meanwhile, on 8 September 1991,

Macedonia held a referendum in which voters voted for independence, as it would do Bosnia-

Herzegovina too on 29 February and 1 March 1992, thereby becoming the fourth Yugoslav

republic to declare independence in spite of the boycott by the majority of Serbs who lived

there. The escalation of war in Croatia and an attempt to avert a similar turn of events in

Bosnia-Herzegovina led to the establishment of the Arbitration Commission of the Peace

Conference on Yugoslavia in the summer of 1991. On 27 August 1991, the Commission

established the Council of Ministers of the European Community, colloquially called Badinter

Commission after its president Robert Badinter, President of the Constitutional Council of

France.

On the basis of international law, the five-member Commission was supposed to propose a

resolution of all contentious legal issues that arose as a consequence of the disintegration of

Yugoslavia and thereby make it easier for a peaceful solution to the conflict to be found. From

November 1991 to January 1991 the Commission passed fifteen legal opinions, out of which

the most important ones are the following: the issue of State succession should be resolved

according to the principles of international law and justice in compliance with the

fundamental human rights and the fundamental rights concerning nations and national

minorities; the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had disintegrated and did not exist as

a state anymore; none of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia could inherit

Yugoslavia’s status in international organizations; the borders between the former Yugoslav

republics became the borders of the new states and could not be changed by force, but only by

agreement; the day of succession for Slovenia and Croatia was 8 October 1991, for

Macedonia 17 November 1991, for Bosnia-Herzegovina 6 March 1992 and for the Federal

Republic of Yugoslavia, in which Serbia and Montenegro had joined, 27 April 1992. Badinter

Commission’s activities and opinions became the legal basis for international recognition of

independence of individual states which inherited the former SFRY, but also legal principles

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that would be incorporated in certain institutional arrangements of the new states. It was

exactly through this Commission’s activities that the international community gave the most

important contribution to resolving the legal issues regarding the circumstances of the

disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, while the political proposals, by means of which

different international actors tried to stop the conflict, first in Croatia, subsequently in Bosnia-

Herzegovina, turned out to be much less successful. Therefore, the first effective ceasefire in

the case of the war in Croatia was achieved through the implementation of the Sarajevo

agreement, signed in January 1992 under the auspices of the United Nations.

Nevertheless, on the basis of this agreement the UN troops arrived on the dividing line

between Croatia and the rebel Serbs, which led to freezing the conflict and to a de facto

division of Croatia, analogous to the case of Cyprus. The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which

lasted from April 1992 to December 1995, i.e. until the signing of the Dayton-Paris

Agreement, also proceeded with a series of unsuccessful attempts by the international

community, including the United Nations and the European Union, to solve it. The war that

began as a conflict between the Muslim and Croatian side who were for independence of

Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Serbian side, which with the help of Serbia opposed the

independence, soon turned into a war of “all against all” like the Lebanese Civil War. First,

the Croatian-Muslim conflict was stopped through the Washington Agreement in 1994 and

with the USA’s support, and then the war itself too, through a political and military

intervention by the USA and NATO forces which attacked the military targets of Bosnian-

Herzegovinian Serbs. NATO’s forces also intervened against Serbia during the war in Kosovo

in 1999, thus enabling the independence of Kosovo in 2008, and the USA and NATO played

a major role in ending a months-long armed conflict between the Macedonian authorities and

ethnic Albanian rebels in Macedonia in 2001.

Simultaneously with the armed conflicts or immediately after them, in most states that

succeeded Yugoslavia, sweeping reforms of political systems were undertaken. The

international community played an important role in them too, but with partial effectiveness

again. On the one hand, this engagement brought about the legal framework for respecting

broad human rights and the rights of minorities, e.g. in Croatia, Macedonia and Kosovo, but

on the other, paradoxically, to their neglect and almost Frankestein’s system of government,

as in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Furthermore, only one part of the states that emerged as a

consequence of the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia became entirely sovereign

(Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro), one part is still under the supervision of the international

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community (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo), one part does not control one part of its earlier

territory (Serbia), and another one is not even able to confirm its constitutional and legal

framework through its own state’s official name (Macedonia).

Viable or nonviable states?

Apart from having participated in conflict resolution in all the wars in the former Yugoslavia

from 1991 to 2001 both in a diplomatic and military way, through various organizations and

through individual states, the international community was an active actor in deciding on

political system in one part of these states after the end of the conflict. This primarily

concerns Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo and to some extent Macedonia, although all

successor states of the former Yugoslavia varyingly integrated the recommendations produced

by the international community into their own political decisions. The state that suffered most

casualties of war and took the greatest death toll was Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is also the state

in which the international community intervened most in the matters of post-conflict state

organization and political system. After three and a half years of serious armed conflicts, the

war in Bosnia-Herzegovina ended by the Dayton Peace Agreement (official name: General

Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina) initialled on 21 November 1995

at the US Air Force Base Wright Patterson, and officially signed in Paris on 14 December

1995. The Agreement was signed by the representatives of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Federal

Republic of Yugoslavia and Croatia with international support of the USA, France, the United

Kingdom, Germany, Russia and the European Union. The most important elements of the

Agreement were the termination of the armed conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina and

preservation of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a unitary state. In order to implement what was agreed

upon, the Peace Implementation Council was established. It was composed of representatives

of 55 states and international organizations and it de facto assumed sovereignty over the state

and over the work of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a sort of

international administrator with the task of overseeing the process of establishing civil peace

in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

At the same time as the Peace Agreement started being implemented, Bosnia-Herzegovina

underwent a complete transformation of its political system. The text of the Constitution of

Bosnia-Herzegovina is actually Annex 4 of the adopted peace agreement, and thereby Bosnia-

14

Herzegovina was transformed into a complex and decentralized state consisting of the

following two entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Serb Republic

(Republika Srpska). While before the war as a Yugoslav republic, Bosnia-Herzegovina had a

unitary arrangement with municipalities as units of local government, after the war it became

a federation encompassing yet another federation and a republic within. Such a solution upon

which the representatives of the international community agreed with the Bosnian-

Herzegovinian sides (although they actually imposed it) was a necessary compromise that

would allow all the conflicting parties to stay in the same state. In this matter, the Federation

of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a somewhat bigger entity within the common state, got control

of 51% of the territory and today it consists of ten cantons in which the majority are Bosniaks

(formerly Muslims) and Croats. Another entity, called Serb Republic (Republika Srpska) was

assigned 49% of the territory and therefore the Serbian part of the new state today has control

of a higher percentage of the territory when compared to the territory inhabited by the Serb

majority before the war. Consequently, the latter fact has been evaluated as recognition of war

conquests in a number of analyses. On the other hand, almost two thirds of a whole of

population of Bosnia-Herzegovina live in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Agreement also specifies the creation of a special part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, called

Brčko District which did not belong to either of the two entities and is situated in a key

position in the north of the country, thus connecting certain parts of both entities. As for

legislature, Bosnia-Herzegovina has got a bicameral system. Its Parliamentary Assembly

consists of two chambers: the House of Peoples, that has 15 members out of which two thirds

are made of representatives from the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and one third

from the Serb Republic and the House of Representatives, that has 42 members from the

Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and one third from the Serb Republic. The executive

branch of government is headed by the three-member Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina

and by the Council of Ministers, i.e. the Cabinet. The Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina

is composed of three members: one representative per each of the three constituent peoples,

i.e. Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. In the meantime, this solution has been challenged by the

European Court of Human Rights as a violation of the European Convention on Human

Rights (along with the composition of the House of Peoples where only Bosniaks, Croats and

Serbs can be elected) on the grounds that any citizen of Bosnia-Herzegovina cannot be elected

to that political office unless he or she is a member of one of the three constituent peoples. If

Bosnia-Herzegovina wants to become a member of the European Union, among other things,

15

it will have to change this very constitutional provision. Basically, this kind of national parity

and the parity between the two entities determine to a large degree the composition and work

of a number of Bosnian-Herzegovinian institutions which are stuck in a situation of blocking

one another and in a position of internationally supervised sovereignty twenty years after the

war.

Specifically, the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina is still the most powerful

political office in the state, with broad executive and legislative powers including the power to

dismiss individual elected officials. On the other hand, the High Representative is the most

important barrier against a potential new disintegration of the country, since Bosnia-

Herzegovina is actually a state without internal consensus, likely to move towards new

conflicts unless internationally supervised. In such a situation, only apparently do the three

constituent peoples (according to estimates, 48% of Bosniaks, 34% of Serbs and 14% of

Croats) have the same positions within the state, whereas in reality, these positions differ.

While the Serbs have got their own entity, the Bosniaks and the Croats share a single one.

Furthermore, no decision at the federal level can be made without the consent of the

representatives of all three peoples, which has so far led to a number of deadlocks, the biggest

one being the 2006 failure to reach an agreement about new and more effective constitutional

arrangements. For that matter, the multi-party democratic elections do not solve anything as

they often assume the character of censuses, thus merely extending the unwillingness to make

a move towards unblocking.

A similar situation prevails in Kosovo too, with the difference that the international

community began to act there through the UN after the end of NATO’s military intervention.

The intervention in question took place in June 1999 and it allowed this former autonomous

province within Serbia first to become a UN protectorate and, after years of negotiations, an

independent state called Republic of Kosovo as declared by the Parliament on 17 February

2008. Serbia never acknowledged this decision, which resulted in the present situation where

Kosovo is not recognized by a large number of states in the world (out of 193 UN members,

108 have recognized Kosovo’s sovereignty, while 85 have not, including China and Russia as

permanent members of the UN Security Council; 28 EU members have recognized Kosovo,

while five of them have not). The international community fully participated in the creation of

Kosovo’s political system. Nevertheless, Kosovo’s system of decentralized parliamentary

16

republic with multi-party democratic elections does not represent a problem, unlike the

situation of the country’s division.

Something like Cyprus, Kosovo is nowadays divided into the Serbian north-west and the rest

of the country predominantly populated by Albanians (in the whole of Kosovo’s territory

there are 92% of Albanians, 4% of Serbs, while the rest of the population is made of

Bosniaks, Gorani, Turks and Roma). In point of fact, the central government communicates

only partially with the rogue north-west, specifically, through the international community, in

the same manner it conducts negotiations with official Serbia on normalization of relations,

which is one of the preconditions in the process of Serbia’s joining the European Union.

Thus, while the UN activities in Kosovo, especially in terms of the work of the UN Special

Envoy Martti Ahtissari who proposed the internationally supervised sovereignty of Kosovo as

a solution, can be assessed as successful at averting a new armed conflict, the real question is

how the relations between Kosovo and Serbia will be resolved. With the current view of the

situation that prevails in the country, it is not possible for Serbia to recognize Kosovo as an

independent state as it considers it still to be part of its territory in spite of the fact that the

majority of Kosovo’s population voted for independence and that Serbia lost the war for

control over Kosovo. It is possible that an appropriate diplomatic solution capable of

acknowledging the real situation, including both Kosovo’s independence and a special status

of the Serbian ethnic community, will be achieved through the negotiations on Serbia’s

membership of the European Union.

Moreover, the war in Kosovo influenced significantly the growth of political tension in

neighbouring Macedonia as during the war a great number of Albanian refugees had arrived

in Macedonia, specifically to the territory of west Macedonia majorly populated by the

country’s Albanian minority (according to various estimates, between one fifth and one third

of Macedonia’s total population is ethnically Albanian). Although it seemed that Macedonia

would eventually be the only former Yugoslav state to have been spared of war, the armed

conflict between representatives of the Albanian minority and the central government broke

out in January 2001 and ended in August 2001 by the Ohrid Agreement. The reason for the

conflict was a discontent of the Albanians in Macedonia with their position within the state

and with the constitutional arrangements regulating it, but it was actually about redistribution

of political power in the country situated in a particularly sensitive position in the centre of

the Balkans, surrounded by Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece, the latter not even

17

recognizing the state by the name of Macedonia and arguing that this is exclusively a Greek

historical and geographical denomination (Macedonia was therefore admitted to a number of

international organizations with a truly Frankenstein-style name: Former Yugoslav Republic

of Macedonia). The war in Macedonia was stopped by NATO’s political and military

intervention and the result was the expansion of the rights of the Albanian minority in

Macedonia and actually the prevention of the country’s disintegration into the Albanian north-

western part and the rest of the country. The case of Macedonia as well as the cases of

Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo is the most vivid examples of the international community’s

direct involvement in the process of institutional arrangement in the states that have been

affected by war. Besides, we are talking about a continuum of compromise solutions of

questionable durability and viability where a point between the poles – the one of “good

governance” and of Frankenstein solutions - is to be accounted for both by the international

community and by domestic actors in the states under discussion.

Table 1. Conflicts, political systems and politics of the successor states of the former

Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia)

Bosnia and

Herzegovina

Croatia Slovenia

Status within the

former Yugoslavia

Republic Republic Republic

Referendum on

independence

Yes, 1992

(boycotted by Serbs)

Yes, 1991 Yes, 1990

Year of independence

1992 1991 1991

Being affected by war

after the disintegration

of Yugoslavia

Yes, after the

declaration of

independence

Yes, after the

declaration of

independence

Yes, after the

declaration of

independence

Type of conflict Armed resistance of a

minority against

proclamation of

independence of the

state with a subsequent

foreign military

intervention

Armed resistance of a

minority against

proclamation of

independence of the

state with military

counter-measures taken

by the central

authorities

Military intervention

by Yugoslavia’s central

authorities against

proclamation of

independence

18

Duration and intensity

of conflicts

1992-1995,

high intensity

1991-1995,

medium to high

intensity

1991,

low intensity

Political and military

intervention by the

international

community

Both political and

military

Both political and

military

Political

Year of adoption of the

new constitution

1995 1990 1991

Engagement of the

international

community in shaping

the new political

system

Yes Only partially

(minority rights)

No

Political system and

system of government

Parliamentary republic;

Compound state /

federation consisting of

two entities one of

which is also a

federation of cantons

Parliamentary unitary

republic

Parliamentary unitary

republic

Legislative power Bicameral parliament

Unicameral parliament Bicameral parliament

Executive power Three member

presidency and

Government

President of the

Republic and

Government

President of the

Republic and

Government

Sovereignty two years

after the end of

conflicts

Partial Full Full

UN, EU and NATO

membership

UN UN, EU, NATO UN, EU, NATO

Table 2. Conflicts, political systems and politics of the successor states of the former

Yugoslavia (Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia)

Kosovo

Macedonia Montenegro Serbia

Status within the

former

Yugoslavia

Autonomous

province within

Serbia

Republic Republic Republic

Referendum on

independence

Only unofficial,

boycotted by

Serbs, 1991

Yes, 1991 Yes, 2006 No

19

Year of

independence

2008 1991 2006

(1992-2006

republic within

the Federal

Republic of

Yugoslavia; and

of Serbia and

Montenegro)

2006

(1992-2006

republic within

the Federal

Republic of

Yugoslavia; and

of Serbia and

Montenegro)

Being affected by

war after the

disintegration of

Yugoslavia

Yes,

subsequently, in a

conflict with

Serbia over the

state status

Yes,

subsequently,

with the status of

independent state

Yes, indirectly,

via military and

political support

to the actors of the

conflicts in

Croatia and

Bosnia-

Herzegovina

Yes, indirectly,

via military and

political support

to the actors of the

conflicts in

Croatia and

Bosnia-

Herzegovina;

Through NATO’s

intervention in the

Kosovo War

Type of conflict Foreign military

intervention

following a

violent attempt by

the central

authorities to

break the

minority’s

resistance

Armed resistance

of the minority

against the central

authorities about

the issues of the

status within the

state

Military

participation out

of its borders as

part of the

Yugoslav army

until 1992

Military

participation out

of its borders as

part of the

Yugoslav army

until 1992;

NATO’s

intervention

because of the

Kosovo War

Duration and

intensity of

conflicts

1998-1999,

medium intensity

2001,

medium intensity

1991,

low intensity

1991,

low to medium

intensity;

1998-1999,

medium intensity

Political and

military

intervention by

the international

community

Both political and

military

Both political and

military

Political Both political and

military

Year of adoption

of the new

constitution

2008 1991 2007 2006

Engagement of

the international

community in

shaping the new

political system

Yes Yes, after the

conflict in 2001

(minority rights)

Only partially

(referendum on

independence)

No

20

Political system

and system of

government

Parliamentary

unitary republic

Parliamentary

unitary republic

with a wide

cultural autonomy

of the Albanian

minority

Parliamentary

unitary republic

Parliamentary

unitary republic

with provincial

autonomy

Legislative power Unicameral

parliament

Unicameral

parliament

Unicameral

parliament

Unicameral

parliament

Executive power President of the

Republic and

Government

President of the

Republic and

Government

President of the

Republic and

Government

President of the

Republic and

Government

Sovereignty two

years after the

end of conflicts

Supervised Conditional (the

state’s

internationally

recognized name)

Full Full, but does not

recognize the loss

of territory /

sovereignty

UN, EU and

NATO

membership

/ UN,

Candidate for EU

membership

UN,

Candidate for EU

membership

UN,

Candidate for EU

membership

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