At the recently held “TradFest” in Zagreb—where, in the long-established manner of Croatian nationalism, ideas are first declared necessary and only afterwards explained—the issue of the so-called third Croatian entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina assumed its most explicit form to date. Although the gathering had no institutional character and adopted no formal conclusions, the very framing of the panel—“Bosnia and Herzegovina: a failed state and the necessity of a third Croatian entity”—was enough to make its outcome all but predetermined.

The panel brought together a range of political and ideological actors, including representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, which over the past two years has played a significant role in mobilizing the Croatian right—a process that reached its apex in a half-million-strong concert in Zagreb by the neo-Nazi singer Marko Perković Thompson, held under episcopal blessing. The intervention of the retired Vrhbosna Cardinal Vinko Puljić, one of the senior members of the Roman Curia, lent particular weight to the event, effectively shifting it beyond the realm of marginal far-right gatherings.

According to reports from the conference—still not fully available to the public—Puljić stated: “I cannot accept injustice, but we must seek a solution for survival and equality,” adding that the constitutional arrangement of Bosnia and Herzegovina must be addressed at the political, not ecclesiastical level—as though his very presence at the event did not already signal the convergence of church and political positions.

Within such a framework, the idea of a third entity no longer appears as one option among many—the sort previously floated through various “non-papers,” trial balloons, pre-election calculations, or well-intentioned academic proposals. What is at stake here is something far more consequential: a clearly articulated form of institutional backing, coming from an institution that has historically been one of the principal bearers of the Croatian national project—the Church among Croats, more precisely its Vrhbosna Archdiocese.

In this enduringly paternalistic mode, the proposed constitutional transformation—envisioning a third entity encompassing the entirety of Herzegovina’s federal territories and nearly all of Central Bosnia—is presented as stabilization and the only viable path to coexistence, while the complex reality of the state is reduced to a problem demanding a simple solution. Yet, as experience repeatedly shows, it is precisely within such “simple solutions” that the most catastrophic consequences tend to reside.

Those consequences were avoided in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1971, at the height of the Croatian Spring (a reformist movement in socialist Croatia in the late 1960s and early 1970s that evolved into an increasingly pronounced and ultimately extreme nationalist current, seeking greater autonomy for the Socialist Republic of Croatia within Yugoslavia before being suppressed by the federal leadership)—but, tragically, not in 1991.

For a careful observer of the developmental phases and tactical patterns of Croatian nationalism, the position of Cardinal Vinko Puljić—the long-serving Archbishop of Vrhbosna (Sarajevo) and one of the senior figures within the Roman Catholic hierarchy—can hardly come as a surprise, except perhaps to those who once regarded him as a champion of an “independent Bosnia and Herzegovina” in 1991. In reality, his stance follows logically from the period of the so-called “Croatian silence” that succeeded the collapse of the political establishment which had led the Croatian Spring (MASPOK) in 1971. During that period, the Roman Catholic Church in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina assumed the role of a key custodian of national political continuity—preserving ideas and preparing the ground until conditions allowed their open political articulation after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

At the time, both the Socialist Republic of Croatia and the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina were federal units within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, sharing a common state framework in which republican borders did not function as international frontiers but as internal administrative lines. Crucially, the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was constitutionally defined as a republic of three equal constituent peoples—Serbs, Muslims (today Bosniaks), and Croats—an arrangement that formed the basis of its political legitimacy within the Yugoslav federation.

That continuity was also evident in attitudes toward Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Even during the MASPOK period, segments of the Croatian public were not only advancing claims of alleged inequality of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also promoting a more insidious thesis: that Bosnia and Herzegovina was not a self-standing republican entity, but rather the “mother country” exclusively of the Muslim (Bosniak) people, while the “Croatian part of the nation” should be tied to Croatia and the “Serbian part” to Serbia. However couched in the language of national equality, this formula effectively stripped Bosnia and Herzegovina of political subjectivity and reduced it—if not yet in explicit terms, then de facto—to the status of an “artificial creation,” an idea later associated with the thinking of Franjo Tuđman, the first president of independent Croatia.

However commonplace this Croatian perspective may have become after the wars of the 1990s, the formula of “mother states,” both within and beyond Bosnia and Herzegovina, reveals itself as a classic Trojan gift—for both Serbs and Muslims: different in form, yet identical in its destructive consequences for the shared political space.

For Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the notion of Serbia as a “mother state” implied a dangerous relativization of their autochthonous status. Instead of being understood as a constituent people within Bosnia and Herzegovina—with full historical and political rights to that republic—they were reduced to a segment of a broader nation whose “true” center lay outside it. In this way, Bosnia and Herzegovina ceased to be their state to the same extent as Serbia and was relegated to a secondary space of national life. Within the Yugoslav framework—where Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina were parts of a single political entity—such a narrative did not expand rights; it introduced a logic of separation and a gradual abandonment of internal political subjectivity.

For Muslims (today Bosniaks), the appeal of the idea that Bosnia and Herzegovina was their “mother republic” concealed a trap of its own, precisely because it stood in contradiction to the ZAVNOBiH concept (the State Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the World War II-era political assembly that established Bosnia and Herzegovina as a republic of equal constituent peoples within Yugoslavia). If this “motherhood” was defined exclusively in relation to one nation, it simultaneously meant alienating Serbs from Bosnia and Herzegovina as their historical state, while also dividing Muslims themselves—those in Bosnia and Herzegovina from those in Serbia and Montenegro. Thus, instead of the integrative idea of a “small Yugoslavia,” what emerged was a model of fragmented and conflictual belonging, in which political relations were grounded in division rather than in a shared institutional framework.

This narrative was therefore doubly corrosive: for Serbs, it offered the illusion of a broader national anchor while effectively stripping them of full belonging within Bosnia and Herzegovina; for Muslims, it promised an exclusive “motherhood,” but at the cost of internal fracture and regional dislocation. What was presented as a solution to the national question in fact introduced a principle that undermined the very foundation laid by ZAVNOBiH—that Bosnia and Herzegovina was a shared, equal Yugoslav political community, not a collection of separate and fundamentally anti-Yugoslav national projects.

Fortunately, due to more favorable geopolitical circumstances in the 1970s, but above all owing to the sobriety of the Yugoslav leadership of the time—as well as that of the republican leaderships of the Socialist Republic of Serbia and the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina—this bait was not taken then.

The diary notes of Draža Marković—a prominent Serbian communist official and one of the key figures of the League of Communists of Serbia—offer telling evidence of this moment. They show that leading figures of the Yugoslav federation, including Stane Dolanc (a senior federal party leader) and Džemal Bijedić (then Prime Minister of Yugoslavia), firmly rejected the demands coming from Croatia, while at the same time supporting the strengthening of the Yugoslav state and openly ridiculing what they saw as an obsessive fixation on republican sovereignty. In such an atmosphere, a growing conviction took hold that Croatian nationalism had exceeded all limits and that a process of political sobering was underway. A similar account was left by Mirko Tepavac, the federal Minister of Foreign Affairs in Bijedić’s government, who recorded that participants in high-level discussions, upon returning from a visit to Timișoara, became increasingly outspoken in their criticism of the Croatian movement—developments that ultimately prompted Josip Broz Tito, the long-time leader of socialist Yugoslavia, to convene a session of the Presidency of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in Karađorđevo and remove the Croatian political leadership from power.

Unfortunately, such a political bloc no longer existed in the 1990s. In place of the earlier balance embodied by the Socialist Republics of Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, there emerged—at the twilight of the period known as the “Croatian silence”—what might be described as an “anti-Serbia,” led by the technocratic strongman Slobodan Milošević. His leadership, calculating and opportunistic, embraced the concept of a “mother state” for all Serbs, thereby implicitly accepting the logic of partitioning Bosnia and Herzegovina should such an outcome prove expedient in the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Parallel to this, a complementary “anti–Bosnia and Herzegovina” took shape in the form of the ostensibly pro-Bosnian regime of Alija Izetbegović in Sarajevo, which pursued the project of an “independent Bosnia and Herzegovina” in coalition with precisely those Croatian nationalist circles and church structures that had, already in the 1970s, envisaged its partial or total partition—ultimately reducing it to an “impossible state,” destined for dissolution. In this context, the policy of the right-wing Serbian leadership in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s can be understood as a peculiar form of self-imposed entrapment between two negative premises: the rejection of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a shared state, and the simultaneous impossibility of immediate political and state integration into Serbia. This double negation—both “anti-Bosnia” and the practical inability of a “full entry into anti-Serbia”—produced a model in which Republika Srpska (one of the two entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, created during the 1992–95 war and later formalized under the Dayton Peace Agreement) persisted as a perpetually provisional political framework, a kind of refuge meant to ensure collective security and bargaining power, while in fact generating precisely the opposite.

Yet it is in this very provisionality that its paradox resides: conceived as a transitional form toward a “mother state,” it was at the same time compelled to function within the very space it sought to leave behind. What emerged was a condition of permanent temporariness—a political construct that leads nowhere, yet cannot be abandoned: the lingering nightmare of the Croatian Spring, from which there seems to be no awakening.

And how, then, does one awaken from it?

If we take a comparative view, setting aside wartime traumas and post-war propaganda, a clear pattern emerges: Bosniaks and Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina—and more broadly in Serbia and Montenegro—fared best, throughout the Yugoslav experience, when their politically progressive leaderships were able to find common ground within a unified political space. It was precisely such cooperation, grounded in equality, institutional interdependence, and an awareness of shared destiny, that made it possible to articulate and defend national interests without mutual negation, without dangerous illusions of exclusive “mother states,” and without undermining the very foundations of political life.

By contrast, every attempt to “simplify” matters—by drawing lines, dividing territories, and discovering supposedly salvific “motherlands”—has led to outcomes already seen too many times. From the ill-fated and destructive Cvetković–Maček Agreement (a 1939 political deal within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia that created the Banovina of Croatia by carving up Bosnian territory along ethnic lines), through the humiliating accommodation of a large segment of the Muslim political and religious elite to the project of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH—a fascist puppet state established in 1941 under Nazi and Italian patronage, responsible for mass atrocities), to the later grand bargains between Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman, or the tactical alliances of Alija Izetbegović with Croatian nationalists and black-shirted radicals—all such “cleverly” conceived realpolitik ended the same way: not only in deep crises and political collapse, but in historical debacles and moral downfall that discredited both sides alike, leaving behind a shattered political landscape, devastated lives, and a long-term erosion of mutual trust—to the ruin of all involved.

It can therefore be said plainly—however uncomfortable it may sound to some—that both Serbs and Bosniaks have suffered the most precisely when they believed they could be saved by imported doctrines of “mother states” and by narratives portraying their mutual relations as artificial. These ideas, which invariably present themselves as some grand revelation about “thousand-year-old borders” and final territorial settlements, in fact trace their lineage to those rather unsavory figures in black uniforms and their ideological architects. In moments of crisis, they have repeatedly appeared persuasive enough to be embraced as “reality,” only to reveal themselves, time and again, as catastrophically misguided—at an ever greater cost.

For that very reason, if one wishes to break free from this nightmarish centrifuge, one must return to facts that are neither new nor hidden, but persistently ignored and swept aside: Serbs and Bosniaks—especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina—inherit, in different ways, the entirety of that country’s history, from its first mention in the 10th century to the present day. Their names appear in the sources in shifting forms and meanings, alternating and intertwining—not as evidence of rupture, but as different manifestations of a single state tradition, a shared space, and—yes—a shared historical destiny, however far it may be from any imagined harmony, and however harsh it has often been for both.

From this follows a simple—though evidently very difficult—task: to foster political and intellectual elites capable of persistently pointing to these facts, of recalling shared achievements precisely when they are deliberately erased from memory, and of placing them alongside moments of collapse as the clearest warning of what happens when a common political space becomes hostage to illusions of exclusive “motherhoods” and territorial fragmentation—with particular emphasis on a serious and honest study of their shared socialist past, as well as of the antifascist and anticolonial traditions that once gave that common space its deepest legitimacy and coherence.

For if our difficult and often painful history teaches anything at all, it is this: those who simplify it—or reduce it to nothing but animosities, wars, massacres, and hatreds—ultimately become orphans of a past they themselves have crudely fabricated, left without a heritage worth defending and without a future that could ever be built upon it.Email