Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, America.gov, as part of its feature “The Evolving Work of Democracy,” is asking academics and journalists from the United States and elsewhere to comment on the challenges to democracy that still lay ahead for countries of the former Eastern Bloc. What follows are their responses – and yours are welcomed as well.

What is the greatest challenge facing democracy in Bosnia-Herzegovina?

The greatest challenge facing democracy in Bosnia-Herzegovina is that the ideology of ethnic nationalism will ultimately derail the normative development of shared democratic values and principles among its citizens, and promote movement toward a completely unwarranted and short-sighted breakup of the country.

The origins of this problem go back to the 1992–95 war that divided the country into Muslim (Bosniak), Serb and Croat enclaves. These divisions were enshrined in the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, in particular in Annex 4 of the Agreement, the so-called Dayton Constitution, which provided the three “Constituent Peoples” with legal protection and representation at all levels of government, including an ethnic territorial division of the country into two entities (the Serb Republic and the Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina), each with considerable autonomy under a weak central government. This extraordinary concession to “constituent people” over purely citizen rights was carried out in the interest of peace and stability.

However, the long-term consequence of this arrangement has been a governmental structure that is deeply dysfunctional, expensive, pervasively venal, and thus incapable of providing services to its citizens or fully meeting its international obligations. In the absence of functioning, effective government, [responsibility for] sovereignty, the rule of law, stability and security of Bosnia-Herzegovina has had to remain reluctantly in the hands of the international community mission established by the Dayton Agreement under the authority of the Office of the High Representative. In 2005 the European Commission for Democracy through Law (the Venice Commission) determined that the strong ethnically based constitutional arrangement lacked “full democratic legitimacy.”

Despite repeated international and local initiatives to address this democratic deficit in the Dayton Constitution, some political parties in Bosnia-Herzegovina insist on the continuation of the existing democratically challenged constitutional order. Underpinning this perspective is a view that a sovereign, democratic Bosnia-Herzegovina in which citizen rights are paramount represents a profound threat to the security, rights, and aspirations of the Constituent Peoples.

Democracy in Bosnia-Herzegovina thus remains beholden to a supremacist view of ethnicity.

Until there is a broad recognition that democracy has the capacity to protect and enhance equally the individual and collective identities of all citizens, Bosnia-Herzegovina will be an incomplete democracy defined — far more than it need be — by ethnic rather than civic identity.

R. Bruce Hitchner is the chairman of the Dayton Peace Accords Project (the Dayton Project), a nongovernmental organization based at Tufts University, and a professor of classics and international relations there. Hitchner was a member of the original negotiating team that assisted the political parties of Bosnia-Herzegovina in negotiating the 2006 April Package of Constitutional Reforms. Since that time he has remained actively involved in advancing constitutional reform in Bosnia through continued consultation with Bosnian leaders and the international community in Bosnia.