Telling Stories

The EU and the western Balkans

History is in large part about the stories we choose to tell ourselves. In Britain, we remember the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo as the start of the unravelling of the twentieth century. That is one story.

In Sarajevo itself, they tell a different story. To many there, the assassination of the Archduke was a manifestation of militant Serb nationalism, the act of an extremist who the Serb government were either unable or unwilling to stop. The Austro-Hungarians’ reaction to the assassination may have been aggressive. Their basic analysis of the event was, however, correct. The Black Hand gang, to which Gavrilo Princip belonged, was in practice intertwined with the Serbian army and government establishment.

The First World War may have been catastrophic for Europe as a whole. Those who subscribed to the Black Hand gang’s ideology of Serbian irredentism will have seen it ultimately as a vindication of their strategy, for it resulted in the creation of Yugoslavia.

I found myself in Sarajevo two Tuesdays ago, trying to navigate my way by car to the apartment I was to stay in. My phone was playing up and refusing to sync with the GPS. Following Sarajevo’s southern ringroad (actually a very straight road), I was getting stressed out trying to work out where I should turn off to the right among a string of the humdrum dilapidated high-rises that you find on the outskirts of so many cities.

The next day, I found myself on the same road going the other way, on a guided tour to the tunnels at the airport through which the Bosnians had supplied themselves during the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1995. The tour guide, a man who I judge was slightly younger than I am (I’m 55) and who had been a police officer at that time, told us how this road had been the snipers’ alley during the siege. 1,000 Sarajevans had been killed on this road in that period.

How did we let ourselves be so surprised by the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and how have we let ourselves forget it? For if we had remembered it, we would have learned much that was of value for Ukraine.

Even now, it is easy to find those throughout the former Yugoslavia who are wistful for its demise. A great idea, they will tell you. An EU before the EU existed, they will tell you. Among those who were not Serbs, however, the wistfulness for the former Yugoslavia is for an idea that is long dead. When Serbs sought to take full control in the years after the death of Tito (a Croat-Slovene), the balance of the country was destroyed. By 1990, it was breaking up into its component parts.

Slovenia left Yugoslavia with minimal casualties (63 dead between the two sides). Serbs had no real interest in it: no Serbs to speak of lived in Slovenia. Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina, however, Serbia fought for very hard.

In early 1992, Bosnia held a referendum on whether to become independent. This referendum followed more than a year of manoeuvring during which time it was apparent that almost all of the Serbian minority were wholly unreconciled to the idea of Bosnian independence. Despite a boycott of the vote by Bosnian Serbs, over 63% of voters voted for independence. Bosnia & Herzegovina declared independence on 3 March 1992, days before I qualified as a solicitor. This was internationally recognised on 6 April 1992, and war immediately broke out.

As in Ukraine in 2014, the war was nominally started by local separatists. In reality it was sponsored by Serbia itself. In the next three years, 100,000 people were killed in the war. Ethnic cleansing was rife on the Serb side and to a lesser extent among Croat forces.

The war was brought to an end with a highly cumbersome political compromise. The Bosnian Serb territory are formally part of Bosnia & Herzegovina but in practice almost all decision-making is made within that territory. State level decisions are brokered through a complex power-sharing structure that has led to a multiplication of politicians.

This has endured for nearly 30 years now. The structure doesn’t work well in practice. It has brought peace but not reconciliation.

In the meantime, the different communities have gone in different directions. The Bosnian Serb enclaves are introverted. As you travel through them, you are treated to a mass of the flags of the separatist region in every little town, advertising their separate identity. Z graffiti is everywhere, suggesting that an emotional affiliation with Russia is also common.

Bosnians, however, have not shrivelled inwards. Their own foundation myth is of diversity, of a country created on multi-ethnic foundations. This is admirable, whether or not it is wholly true, and many residents seem keen to make it a lived reality. It reflects the story that they have told themselves about the former Yugoslavia and it reflects their desire to join the EU (in their terms, the Yugoslavia after the original Yugoslavia).

Uncomfortably, this is not a multi-ethnic state which many Bosnian Serbs wish to be part of. Can we really accept Bosnia’s foundation myth when one leg of the three-legged chair wants no part of it? Just as importantly, how can the country create a new working constitution that actually works beyond merely preserving the peace?

Bosnians chafe at the cumbersome compromise they live with and they want to establish a new relationship with Serbia. They also want a meant apology from Serbia for the atrocities inflicted on them, an apology that the Serbs are not yet ready to give. Nor do they want to cede territory to Serbia that is now largely ethnically Serbian, given that would be rewarding ethnic cleansing. It’s very difficult to fault them for these views but unless Serbia and Serbs change their hearts and minds Bosnia & Herzegovina risks being stuck for decades more to come.

For any new settlement that has a chance of enduring will need to offer the Republika Srpska, the Serb part of Bosnia & Herzegovina that covers almost half of the land, a considerable degree of self-determination. It’s a bitter truth that ethnic cleansing can work highly effectively.

Bosnia is remote and by European standards poor. It hopes to join the EU and transform itself from an economy largely dependent on remittances from abroad to a modern European economy. It has a long way to go. Corruption is mundane. You pay in cash in most places, largely it seems so that the proprietors can avoid paying tax on much of their earnings to a government they don’t trust or respect. Driving into Bosnia from Croatia, as I did, you immediately notice a deterioration in the quality of the roads (there are only 145 miles of dual carriageway motorways in the whole country). On the Croatian coastline, Dubrovnik and Split are now connected by a zippy modern road featuring a succession of feats of engineering. Bosnian roads meander slowly and feebly.

Bosnia is also quite utterly beautiful. The road between Sarajevo and Mostar treats you to gorgeous lake views as you thread between majestic hills. Sarajevo itself is enfolded within the hills that protected it during the siege and that gave its enemies the heights to rain down on it. Sarajevo is like Istanbul in miniature, a wonderful chaotic fusion of bazaar and European city, not troubling itself whether it faces east or west but being its own combination of both. It is one of the most charming cities that I have ever visited.

Mostar is much more securely eastern. There is the bridge, of course, lovingly rebuilt so well that it is hard to imagine that it was ever not there (be warned, it is steep and smooth and only the unwary attempt to cross it in flipflops or sandals). Each end of the bridge falls away into a bazaar that immerses you fully, and the air is of the Near East rather than Europe.

This is part of the EU’s next frontier. Bosnia & Herzegovina was accepted in December 2022, along with Moldova and Ukraine, as a candidate country for membership of the EU. Albania, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia are all currently ahead of them, with accession negotiations already underway.

The EU needs to learn from its own past. It admitted Cyprus without forcing a resolution of its dispute with Turkish Cyprus. Since its admission, the prospects of a settlement have declined further. Everyone agrees the status quo is damaging and yet two decades on the unsustainable continues to be sustained.

The EU has the opportunity now to help the applicant countries in the Balkans move forward. They have already had success brokering agreements between Serbia and Kosovo, most recently over car number plates. The EU can press for a more overarching approach, seeking a change of mindset between neighbouring countries before admitting them to membership. To do so would be a matter of self-interest. The EU should not wish to import such difficult problems and relationships before first establishing mechanisms for managing them, and ensuring new members retain an interest in continuing to work in earnest towards resolving them.

In particular, the EU needs to move Serbia from a mindset of compliance to a mindset of engagement. If the EU follows a tick-box approach to such matters without fully tackling the undercurrent of Serbian irredentism that continues to endure, it will find itself once again stuck with another disruptive member with few means of limiting that disruption. Just as in 1914, the Serbian government is at risk of being dragged along by groups that permeate the circles from which it is drawn. There would be no excuse for western European countries being surprised a third time by the same political idea.

I was in Split on Saturday for Victory Day, the day on which Croatia marks its victory over Serbia. The weather was unseasonably wet but the city was draped in countless flags to mark the occasion. A war that ended less than 30 years ago is fresh in the minds of the public. Like Bosnians, Croats are anxious that visitors should be aware of the suffering they experienced in the war (they have not yet made a reckoning with the less glorious parts of their own past – that is not a story they choose to tell themselves).

Croatia, however, has been able to put that war behind it in a way that Bosnia & Herzegovina has not: it is not only an EU member, it is now in the Schengen zone and the Eurozone. Young Croats have taken full advantage of the opportunities that gave them. Everywhere you meet dynamic young men and women who have lived and worked elsewhere. Croatia may be Europe’s playground but Europe is Croatia’s playground too. As a result, Croatia has prospered.

This is the prize that Bosnia & Herzegovina – and Serbia, and Montenegro, and Albania, and North Macedonia, and Kosovo – seeks. Croatia has shown them what is possible. The EU needs to help them tell new stories.