We are going to a country that, in a way, we can say we are only just beginning to discover. Namely, a month ago, in mid-December 2022, the leaders of the European Union member states made a decision to invite Bosnia and Herzegovina to join our organization.
Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a population of less than four million, has thus become the eighth candidate country for the European Union. It should be said right away that Bosnia and Herzegovina has also been a NATO candidate since 2010, and Bosnia’s internal political challenges are to blame.
What is Bosnia and Herzegovina most associated with – probably Sarajevo, its capital. And the fact that in 1984 the Winter Olympic Games were held there. And they were the first such games in a socialist, Slavic-populated country, and only the second in the Balkans, after the first modern games in Athens in the 19th century.
The other association is a bit harsher – with the shooting of the Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince Ferdinand, which actually became the first shot fired in the First World War. But on a more positive note, Bosnia and Herzegovina is only one of six countries in the world that has such a double name.
The country consists of two regions – the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska. There is also the internationally monitored area of Brcko.
And this territorial division also resonates with ethnic division, which has long been a problem. Namely, half of the country’s population are Bosnians, whose language is Bosnian and whose religion is Muslim. Another 30 percent of the country’s population are ethnic Serbs who speak the Serbian language and are Orthodox. And finally, 15 percent of the population are Croats who speak the Croatian language and belong to the Roman Catholic Church.
The break-up of Yugoslavia and the struggle for independence of states and peoples led to one of the most terrible conflicts in modern history. The Bosnian War, which lasted from 1992 to 1995, has gone down in history not only with the establishment and international recognition of the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also with those later convicted of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, such as the Serbian politician Radovan Karadzic and Colonel General Radko Mladic. It has gone down in history with the systematic mass rape of women by Serbian soldiers. Rape was used as a means of waging war, resulting in up to 50,000 Bosnian women suffering.
Ethnic cleansing by the Serb army and more than 100 thousand killed are the consequences of the Bosnian war. The Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, in which more than eight thousand Bosnian men and boys were targeted, is one of the best-known examples of this ethnic cleansing.
Of course, the Bosnian and Croat warring parties were also accused and convicted of crimes against humanity. The Bosnian war caused almost 330 billion euros in losses to the country’s economy, calculated in today’s monetary units. Considering that the entire economy of today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina is only about 22 billion euros, this means that the war destroyed the economy fifteen times over.
And this terrible experience should also be taken into account when thinking about modern Ukraine and how much Russia is now purposefully destroying the future of Ukraine’s economy and how expensive it will be to restore it all. The economic challenges of Bosnia and Herzegovina provide the empirical material to see what is happening and will happen to Ukraine.
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s almost three-decade-long struggle with the consequences of war, as well as the transition from a socialist planned economy to a free market economy, are actually happening simultaneously. The economy depends on the export of metals, energy resources, as well as textiles. And of course, as has often been observed, including in Latvia, the money sent back to relatives by those working abroad is also a significant income.
As a result of the war, the political approach has been to give greater freedoms to the regions and decentralize the government. This has hindered the implementation of coordinated economic reforms and does not provide foreign investors with much-needed stability. The national currency mark is pegged to the euro, which promotes stability in the financial system, but also Italian and Austrian banks, which dominate the national market, do not feel secure enough to expand their activities more actively.
Unemployment is the biggest socio-economic problem and also a political problem, because unemployed people have a lot of free time and a high level of desperation to turn to populists and radicals. The unemployment rate in the country is estimated to be around 30 percent.
The example of Bosnia and Herzegovina shows how people, like Latvia in the 1990s, strive for hope and stability. Not only political, but primarily economic stability. But without political stability and predictability, economic stability is also impossible. The country lacks money and the country lacks order. That is why the citizens are also looking for foreign aid. Both financial and integration into organizations. Bosnia and Herzegovina has not yet joined either NATO or the European Union. It is not even a member of the World Trade Organization.
It is clear that Bosnia and Herzegovina sees membership in the European Union as a solution to many of its problems. It looks at the examples in the neighbors – such Western Balkan countries as Slovenia and most recently – Croatia joined the European Union, which also brought stability and growth. And now it is among the eight official candidate countries of the European Union. The process of accession negotiations has not officially started with all of them. Bosnia is in the same category as Moldova and Ukraine, with which these negotiations have not yet started.
In the context of enlargement, this time we ask professionals what the enlargement process means not for the candidate country, but for the European Union itself. Zane Petre, head of the European Commission’s representation in Latvia, explains.
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