Bosnia-Herzegovina experienced a traumatic war that led to the death of over 100,000 citizens and the displacement of half the population. The Dayton Peace Accords have regulated post-war reconstruction and politics since 1995, resulting in a complex power-sharing system that relied heavily on extensive international intervention in the first post-war decade. Subsequent international disengagement and the persistence of nationalist and clientalist political parties has led to stagnation characterized by high levels of political polarization and limited progress in terms of economic development or Euro-Atlantic integration. The narratives of the war remain present and mutually exclusive.

After more than twenty-five years since the beginning of the transition from authoritarian single-party rule to multi-party politics, there is no doubt that the countries that have emerged from Yugoslavia are democracies. During the years 1989 to 1991, however, this eventual outcome was by no means certain. At that time, the future of democracy in Central and Southeastern Europe was unclear and the countries in the Southeastern tier lagged behind those in Central Europe. Bulgaria and Romania saw a change of leadership in November and December 1989, the former through a palace coup, the latter through a combination of a violent revolution and a coup. Yugoslavia and Albania did not experience any such changes during that year and seemed at first isolated from developments elsewhere. In the absence of Soviet dominance, the combination of the call for democracy and against Soviet influence was less salient and the homegrown legacy of communism appeared to set them apart. However, the communist parties in both countries soon had to agree to allow multi-party elections in 1990 and 1991. If the striking feature of 1989 was the remarkable speed and certainty with which democracy emerged as the sole acceptable political system in Central Europe, doubts lingered in Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania, as well as most Yugoslav republics. Either socialist incumbents, only partially reformed, displayed strong authoritarian traits or new parties often with nationalist ideologies took office with little interest in transforming the states into liberal polities. It would take another move toward democracy through a combination of the ballot box and popular protest movements to shift the countries more decisively toward democracy. However, as this chapter argues, enduring legacies of both communist and post-communist governments have restrained the countries’ consolidation as liberal democracies. While there is a distinct North–South pattern of democratic consolidation, with Slovenia moving quickly toward liberal democracy and Croatia struggling with authoritarianism for a decade before a decisive move toward democracy in 2000, the other post-Yugoslav republics have been struggling with moving toward liberal democracy for different reasons, such as contested statehood (“stateness”) in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo to state capture in Montenegro and authoritarian patterns in Serbia and Macedonia.

Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter, Bosnia) only reluctantly became an independent country as Yugoslavia dissolved in 1991–2. Bosnia emerged the most weakened of all states from the wars over Yugoslavia's dissolution. Not only was it physically destroyed, around 100,000 Bosnian citizens were dead and half of the population displaced, but also a third of the population which identified as Serbs and many Croats (less than a fifth of the population) had little commitment to the state and saw their future in neighboring Serbia and Croatia. Bosnia survived only as a weak state which gave predominance to ethnoterritorial units carved out during the war through ethnic cleansing and mass murder. In order to survive the immediate post-war period, Bosnia could only exist with limited sovereignty and a strong international presence. Thus the post-communist period in Bosnia was overshadowed by the aftermath of the war and debates were unlike those in most other countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Ethnicity often took precedence over democratization, fragmentation over economic reform, and international imposition over domestic state-building.

This chapter on the deeply divided Bosnian polity will first explore the aborted democratization process before the war and the impact of the war itself. It will then turn to the political system and the development of the country's party system. Subsequently, it will discuss the nature and impact of EU integration processes and economic liberalization.