I'm going to answer all these in turn, so bear with me
This may be a stupid/simplistic question, but if the countries in the Balkans are based on ethnicity, why don't/didn't the Croats in BiH join Croatia and the Serbs join Serbia?
So, because it wouldn't be a good thread without a good technical answer, let me try my best to explain.
The roots of independence in terms of legality lie with the frankly absurd 1974 Constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It was Tito's attempt to create a viable structure for post-Tito Yugoslavia, which established the concept of dual citizenship within Yugoslavia. People had citizenship of the SFRY, but they also had individual citizenship of their 'home' Republic. The home republic was defined by the parents and their individual republic citizenships. Generally speaking, it was a bureaucratic formality, so our hero from Livno would have held citizenship of the SR Bosnia because that's where his parents were from, regardless of the fact that he was an ethnic Croat and his parents were also Croats. At this moment in 1974, it was really nothing important - you could move freely between republics, it was just a way of giving some 'importance' to the individual republics in order to calm nationalist issues.
(to make matters more complicated, there were also nationalities within the SFRY, so you had Slovenes, Croats, Muslims (by nationality), Serbs, Yugoslavs, etc etc)
So, there was dual sovereignty involved. Each republic was considered to be sovereign within the SFRY, but also each constituent people were *also* sovereign. You couldn't change the status of the individual republics without the consent of the republic as a whole, but also with the explicit consent of the individual nationalities within a given republic. So, in the case of Bosnia, you had three nationalities there - Croats, Muslims (by nationality, now known as Bosniaks) and Serbs. You also couldn't change the borders of the SFRY without the consent of *all* the republics. So, even if you agree that Slovenia and Croatia had broken away, there was still no consent from Serbia and Montenegro for the independence of the 1992-era Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina.
And so we have the problem of independence. There are so many ways of looking at this problem, but sticking strictly to Bosnia, there is a strong argument to suggest that the independence referendum in 1992 was deeply flawed. There was no consent from the Serb population of the Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina (as it was known in 1992), the Constitution of the Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina guaranteed equality of the peoples (i.e. the three nationalities), and regardless of what Karadzic and other criminals were doing at that time, it's by no means certain that the Serbs in Bosnia would have voted for independence too in a free/fair referendum.
So, we move forward to the war and the position of the international community. The international community in Croatia had made it very clear that they did not support breaking up the individual republics into smaller fragments, nor did they support the secessionist movements within them. They regarded the individual republics as holding their own sovereignty, and this was confirmed by the Badinter Arbitration -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitration_Commission_of_the_Peace_Conference_on_Yugoslavia - which made it clear that the then-EEC would not support changing the borders of the former internal republics.
Without writing an essay on this topic - the general principle was that the EEC (and by extension, the US) would simply not support the Croat areas seceding and joining the Republic of Croatia, nor would they support the Serb areas from joining the Republic of Serbia. This was in accordance with the SFRY Constitution, yet the same commission regarded the SFRY as no longer existing (which is what justified the independence referenda). It takes some mental gymnastics to follow all this, but in general, it's very clear that war was going to happen in Bosnia once the Badinter Arbitartion made it clear that the SFRY no longer existed.
The 1990-2 Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina was in a no-win situation regardless - had the Croat and Bosniak representatives accepted that the country was to remain in the SFRY, then Serbia would have transformed the remaining three republics (Serbia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Montenegro) into a single Serbian-dominated state. Had they left, well, war was going to follow in order to prevent Bosnia from leaving Serbian clutches, just as it did in Serb-majority areas in Croatia.
Anyway, let's jump forward. Why did the international community not support the Serb/Croat areas from leaving Bosnia and joining their 'mother' countries? Well, the Badinter Arbitration was generally considered to be law, combined with the fact that the Bosniaks really didn't hold much territory by 1995. This map shows it perfectly -
https://www.loc.gov/resource/g6861f.ct003054/ - Serbia had huge parts of the country under their control. What remained was unviable as a seperate Bosniak state, although the Croat part could easily have joined Croatia.
I should also address the uncomfortable part of history that doesn't get talked about -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milošević–Tuđman_Karađorđevo_meeting - Milošević and Tuđman may well have talked about the possibility of sharing Bosnia between themselves at this point. It wouldn't have been that unrealistic, given how the Croats turned on their nominally Bosniak allies in 1993.
Do you know if this makes any noticeable difference to economic prosperity, or are there too many other variables?
From what I understand, it does make a difference, but it's balanced out by the fact that Sarajevo and Mostar are in the 'other' side. From my observations, both sides are more or less the same economically. The mystery to me is how they all have rather large houses and how they afford to heat them in winter...
Have you (@Cloud Strife) ever read 'Eastern Approaches' by Fitzroy MacLean? A significant part of it describes the author's wartime experieces in Yugoslavia as in effect the British Ambassador to the Partisans.
No, never, but I'll start reading it tonight! The whole issue of the Partisans is incredibly fascinating - what Tito did should never be underestimated. It's true that they were run ragged on occasion, but it was a remarkable feat to put together an ethnically diverse group that was then strong enough to essentially tell Stalin to get lost after the war.
Interestingly he's never given much clue as to which community he or his family were from -- I suspect he may be of mixed ancestry, which might be all the more reason to live in Oxford rather than Sarajevo.
It's very possible. Mixed marriages were incredibly common in Bosnia before the war, to the point where people were using Yugoslav as their nationality. Certainly these days, one of the huge problems in Bosnia is that there's far less mixing of people. In Mostar for instance, people are staying on 'their' side of the river, or in Sarajevo, the Serbs don't wander that much into the city centre unless it's for a specific reason. Of course, there's also plenty of stupidity in that respect - my favourite example is how the trolleybus towards the East Sarajevo bus station (but actually in the west of Sarajevo!) ends a couple of hundred metres before the East Sarajevo bus station.
Someone told me that due to COVID, apparently if you want to drive to Neum from Croatia, you must go a long way round as non-Bosnian citizens who enter BiH along the coastal route have to be out of the country via the other crossing within an hour.
It's not that silly, although it wouldn't surprise me given the Balkans. No, if you want to enter BiH at that point, you just have to comply with the entry restrictions, whatever they might be. The 'one hour' rule is only if you intend to transit through Neum. If you intend to stay in Neum, you just declare that to the border police and they'll clear you into BiH properly. However, that border is also very silly, because it's quite common for the BiH police to simply not control anyone on entry and exit. I've crossed there a few times, and I think I've only been checked by the BiH police once on entry. It was the same before Croatia joined the EU as well.
Thanks for all the information posted above at least it means I didn't understand because it was all (and still is) very complex.
It is terribly, terribly complex, and I don't think I understand even 10% of it all. There is, for instance, one example of typical Balkan stubbornness -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_10
To explain: the Federation of Bosnia-Hercegovina is divided into 10 cantons as part of the Dayton settlement. 5 are majority Bosniak, 3 are majority Croat, and 2 are ethnically mixed with no majority. As the FBiH is quite decentralised and the cantons have quite a lot of power (for instance, education and culture is at the canton level), it means that there's quite a lot of political importance attached to them. Each canton has a name, and they're normally geographically based, such as the Sarajevo Canton or the Una-Sana Canton. Canton 10 is...different.
Why? Canton 10 is 77% Croat, 13% Serb and 9% Bosniak. As a result, the Canton is dominated by Croats, and they decided in their wisdom that it would be a good idea to name their Canton after the wartime Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia (Hercegbosanska županija - Herzeg-Bosnia County). The name was ruled illegal by the Constitutional Court, as it isn't part of historical Hercegovina, nor is the name županija used officially in the Federation of Bosnia-Hercegovina. The name is used in Croatia proper, but officially, the FBiH Constitution talks about Cantons. Of course, Bosnia being Bosnia, it wouldn't be complete without stubbornness. The end result is that the Canton is known as Hercegbosanska županija by the local Cantonal government and in the Croatian language, while Bosniaks and Serbs refer to Canton 10. Canton 10 is the official and legal name until the Cantonal authorities amend the Constitution, but they won't change it. They could use - for instance - Livno Canton, but no, they want their original name and that's that.
Now imagine the same stubbornness throughout the country at every single level.
(one other thing that's worth addressing - in terms of political outlook, the Serbs and Croats want maximum devolution for their areas with a very weak central government, the Bosniaks want a strong central government and fewer devolved powers. This reflects back to the wartime situation - President Izetbegovic refused to compromise on Bosnia's territorial boundaries, whereas the Serbs and Croats both wanted to break chunks of Bosnia away and to join the mother countries). The Bosniaks, of course, would prefer majority centralised rule, because the 2013 census gave them a slight majority (50.1%) in the country and 70% in the Federation of BiH. The interesting and curious thing is that the war actually gave the Bosniaks a majority - before the war, they only had around 43% of the total population, although I suspect most of the self-declared Yugoslavs were Bosniaks, as it was common pre-1974 for them to refer to themselves as Yugoslavs as there was no separate Bosniak (or Muslim) nationality.)
181 said:
Have you ever come across the theory, based on his accent, that Tito wasn't really Josip Broz from Croatia, or even Yugoslavian at all:
https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/docu...ocuments/cryptologic-spectrum/is_yugoslav.pdf?
Wikipedia takes the view that the true explanation is more likely to be that his native dialect was a form of Kajkavian.
Yes, it was quite a common theory. The argument goes that he was replaced at some point by some Russian based on his use of Serbo-Croat, but given that he was from a very rural area where Kajkavian dominated, it's most likely that the CIA were simply unfamiliar with the fact that he didn't speak Shtokavian natively. His mother (if I remember rightly...) was Slovene too, so it's quite understandable that his speech in what would be his third language was not the same as a real native speaker.
101 said:
While the Bosnian war was going on, the impression one got from the news was that, although things were complicated, the siege of Sarajevo was largley a case of Serbs outside the city besieging non-Serbs inside it. However, I read more recently that a large number of Serbs remained there throughout the war and then left afterwards. One might think that either they and their non-Serb neighbours would have seen each other as the enemy and they would have left or been driven out much sooner, or that they would have developed some fellow-feeling with their neighbours through suffering the siege together and have wanted to stay. Can you shed any light on this? (I'm sure it's more complicated than outsiders might think).
I'll make a separate post on this issue, because it's an interesting one. The main point is that yes, some Serbs did stay behind and fight for the Bosnian Army. The most famous is General Divjak -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jovan_Divjak - who absolutely embraced the defence of Sarajevo and the operations of the Bosnian Army. They completely wasted his talent, because they were too busy looking at his ethnicity rather than the fact that he was one of the very few professionally-trained commanders within the army.
181 said:
Do you know how well the different communities get on in the Brčko district?
Rather well, although it's said that the real reason is because Brčko is a hotbed of smuggling activities (the infamous Arizona Market is there), and the international community tolerates it so that they can show the District as a success story. It is well governed, and there are few tensions there to the best of my knowledge.
Following up from this post yesterday:
181 said:
While the Bosnian war was going on, the impression one got from the news was that, although things were complicated, the siege of Sarajevo was largley a case of Serbs outside the city besieging non-Serbs inside it. However, I read more recently that a large number of Serbs remained there throughout the war and then left afterwards. One might think that either they and their non-Serb neighbours would have seen each other as the enemy and they would have left or been driven out much sooner, or that they would have developed some fellow-feeling with their neighbours through suffering the siege together and have wanted to stay. Can you shed any light on this? (I'm sure it's more complicated than outsiders might think).
This is where it gets very, very complicated. There were many mixed marriages in Sarajevo, and the Sarajevo identity (the 'Sarajliji' if I have my grammar right...) was incredibly strong. They identified more with the city than their nationality, and there are many reports how people would go to mosques and churches for each other's festivities. Anyway, when it was clear that war was going to happen, there were certainly cases of Serbs leaving in the middle of the night. There are plenty of reports that the message was being received by Serbs in the city that it would be best to go now, especially once the Croatian War of Independence started for real, and Serbs were often simply leaving for Serbia.
When the siege started - it was predictably horrible. General Divjak represents the typical fate of a Serb within the Bosniak-held sectors of the city. They were treated with suspicion, and they weren't particularly welcome in the Bosnian Army. There were certainly cases of violence aimed towards them, and there was one notorious criminal in Sarajevo (I've forgotten his name) who definitely went after Serbs in some way. However, most of them were simply left alone and treated as any other Sarajevan.
The ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Sarajevo actually happened after the war. The areas of Sarajevo under control of the Republika Srpska (such as Grbavica, where many of the snipers operated from during the war) suffered from ethnic cleansing carried out by the RS forces between Dayton and the date of the handover to the Federation (1st March 1996) - RS forces went from door to door, effectively forcing people out of their homes and setting fire to buildings.
There's a good article here about it -
https://apnews.com/article/7e012f8aa4a3b590cabfe415eb072f7f - they clearly wanted to empty Sarajevo of Serbs before the handover. The new districts built after the war in East Sarajevo (such as in Lukavica) are a consequence of this. I cannot make sense of why they were forcing Serbs out of their homes, and some of the pictures you see from the war are actually from Grbavica in 1996.
Of course, there were other issues - some apartments were occupied by people who had taken them after their Bosniak/Croat occupiers had been forced out. What makes it even worse is that the Bosniak/Croat political leaders had made it clear that they were welcome to stay in Sarajevo, and that there was clearly no intention on their part to harass Serb residents of the city once the city came fully under control of the Federation of Bosnia-Hercegovina. It was purely political propaganda on the part of the RS leadership, who wanted to simultaneously increase the (Serb) population of the RS while being able to point at the FBiH as "Bosniak-Croat". Having 50,000 (or more!) Serbs in Sarajevo wouldn't have helped with that particular piece of propaganda.
One other point: men of military age simply couldn't leave Sarajevo as well. It wasn't just the case that they were in grave danger by entering Serb-held territory, but also because the Bosnian Army wouldn't let them leave.
The more I write about this stuff, the more it seems incredible that it was happening in the mid 1990's.
".
! I had long fondly been imagining that (save for Slovenia / Slovenian -- long acknowledged as being "a rather different animal" from the rest of what was Yugoslavia) in that one-time country, everyone spoke essentially the same, mutually understandable, language; with a few differing words here and there, favoured by the different peoples. "That's all I knew !"