Bosnia Herzegovina is an example of failed democratization. The Bosnian republic was an ethnically divided society. Muslims, Serbs, and Croats constituted three distinct ethnocultural communities whose relations over the centuries were characterized by both intergroup conflict and accommodation. Conflict had, at times, taken the form of warfare between the groups including, during World War II, genocidal war. Accommodation had taken the form of power-sharing among the respective ethnic leaderships, largely as the result of sponsorship by more powerful outside actors. It also took the form of an emerging, multiethnic, or “civil” identity, expressed in the 1970s and 1980s as “Yugoslavism.” The failure of democratization between 1990 and the outbreak of war in 1992 represented the triumph of one tradition over the other.

In an effort to maintain legitimacy, the Yugoslav communist regime had permitted a substantial degree of liberalization to take place. But the local communist leadership of Bosnia Herzegovina did not permit this process to proceed as far in its own republic as in some others. In neither Yugoslavia as a whole nor any of its regions did actual democratization take place under the old regime. With the breakdown of communist authoritarianism, liberalization accelerated in Bosnia Herzegovina, the political rules of the game were altered, and a significant pluralization of politics took place. More than forty new political groups of varying size and character came into existence in the republic in 1990.