You would be hard-pressed to find a country where a random midsized city in the American Midwest is mentioned more often than New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago combined—unless you’re in Bosnia. Ever since November 1995, when the Clinton administration corralled Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian leaders at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, to negotiate an end to the war against Bosnia and the genocide of its Muslim population, “Dayton” has become etched into the nation’s collective memory. For Bosnians, Dayton is more than just a place—it’s an agreement that brought peace but also saddled Bosnia with a flawed and dysfunctional governing political system that continues to shape the country’s destiny.
This May, nearly 30 years after the original peace talks, former Dayton Mayor and current U.S. Rep. Mike Turner hosted the Dayton Dialogue conference during the NATO Parliamentary Assembly’s spring session. Billed as a forward-looking discussion on Bosnia, U.S. leadership, and the future of U.S.-Bosnia relations, the event quietly turned into a stage for Croatian nationalist talking points.
The conference came at a precarious moment: Milorad Dodik, a Kremlin-backed proxy supported by Serbia and the current president of Republika Srpska (RS), one of the two entities created by the Dayton Agreement, had just launched his most aggressive assault yet on the agreement itself. While international actors have long treated Dodik as a convenient target for condemnation, scoring easy diplomatic points without delivering real gains for Bosnia, they have largely ignored, and in some cases even enabled, a more coordinated and insidious threat from hard-line Croatian nationalists in Croatia and Bosnia. Their political agenda not only undermines decades of international effort and billions of dollars invested in Bosnia but also poses a serious and growing threat to regional peace.
Nowhere was this more evident than at the Dayton anniversary event. The gathering echoed Croatia’s wartime narratives from the 1990s. Among other rhetoric that raised serious concerns was the Croatian delegation’s open embrace of ethnic segregation in Bosnian schools, revisionist accounts of the civil war, and overt interference in Bosnia’s internal affairs, particularly concerning proposed changes to its election law.
The Dayton anniversary event was not an outlier. For nearly two decades, Croatian leadership has systematically undermined Bosnia’s sovereignty. The Dayton Agreement envisioned Bosnia and Herzegovina as a single state with two entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, principally comprising Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Croats, and RS, principally comprising Serb-majority areas. HDZ BiH, the Bosnia-based counterpart of Croatia’s ruling party and a wartime political actor, has long served as Zagreb’s primary tool of political influence and meddling in Bosnia.
Now, Croatia’s policy toward Bosnia continues to reflect its unfulfilled wartime ambitions, in which, according to Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman’s plan, Bosnia was to be carved up into ethnically pure territories between Croatia and Serbia through the systematic expulsion and mass killing of non-Croats and non-Serbs. While this plan was ultimately identified by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia as a joint criminal enterprise, its legacy persists—albeit in a different political form. Although the initial Tudjman-Milosevic plan failed, the establishment of RS granted Bosnian Serbs vast autonomy. Instead of strengthening the Bosnian state and supporting its Euro-Atlantic path, Dodik has exploited that autonomy to wage a relentless campaign of secessionist destabilization. Crucially, the level of self-rule granted to RS in Dayton was something never achieved by the Croats in Bosnia.
Today, Croatia’s ambitions have morphed into a new political strategy: a continuation of the Tudjman-Milosevic wartime project by political means. And as Western responses to Dodik have grown increasingly toothless, the policy of appeasement toward his actions has led Croat leaders in Bosnia to mimic Dodik’s tactics—pursuing the same destructive ends through political subversion rather than force.
Croatia’s growing stature on the international stage has only intensified its political focus on Bosnia. As European Union and NATO membership has expanded its foreign-policy influence, so too have the time and capital that Zagreb has invested in meddling in Bosnia’s internal affairs. Within EU institutions, Croatia has framed the alleged endangerment of Bosnian Croats as a central issue, turning it into a permanent item on the European agenda, including at the European Council.
Croatian MEPs routinely use the European Parliament as a platform to push for deeper ethnic gerrymandering in Bosnia, not less. Progress on Bosnia’s EU path is increasingly held hostage to electoral reforms designed to entrench Croatia’s political interests. Even NATO and EU summits have been co-opted to amplify these narratives, effectively subordinating Bosnia’s democratic future to a narrow, ethnonationalist agenda.
At the heart of Croat policy in Bosnia, driven by HDZ BiH and its leader Dragan Covic, is the notion of “legitimate representation.” Although never formally defined by Croat officials or grounded in political or legal theory, the concept boils down to a core tenet of ethnonationalist politics: HDZ BiH’s claim to the exclusive right to define who counts as a Croat and who gets to represent them. The clearest expression of this came in a recent amendment to the electoral law proposed by HDZ BiH in Bosnia’s Parliamentary Assembly. The proposal would effectively exclude Croats living in mixed cantons, allowing only those residing in Croat-majority “special territorial zones”—dominated by HDZ BiH—to vote for the Croat member of the presidency. It is a blatant attempt to engineer electoral outcomes through ethnic and geographic exclusion.
Beyond the fact that these proposed territorial zones trace their lineage to the wartime idea of Herzeg-Bosna—deemed a joint criminal enterprise by the International Criminal Tribunal—the proposal enshrines a dangerous principle: the territorialization of ethnonational exclusivity. In essence, it asserts that only certain ethnic groups should reside in or politically control specific parts of the country’s territory. This is not just a redrawing of electoral maps; it is a thinly veiled push for a “third entity,” a distinct Croat-majority political unit. Such a move doesn’t merely reshape Bosnia’s electoral geography; it entrenches ethnic segregation, emboldens separatist forces, and directly contravenes rulings by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that call for the dismantling of ethnic discrimination in Bosnia.
HDZ BiH and other major Croat political parties in Bosnia have consistently refused to propose election law reforms or amendments grounded in the ECHR rulings, despite the fact that such rulings are, by Bosnia’s own constitution, superior to the constitution itself. Both HDZ BiH and its sister party in Croatia have openly opposed these rulings, calling them “politically motivated and fabricated”—most notably Kovacevic v. Bosnia and Herzegovina—because they challenge the very foundations of ethnically divided electoral zones and instead affirm the primacy of individual civic identity over ethnic affiliation. Unsurprisingly, the Kovacevic ruling found Bosnia’s political and electoral system, rooted in the Dayton Agreement, structurally discriminatory. The court concluded that Bosnia’s framework rests on outdated principles that tie political rights not only to ethnic identity but to place of residence. It called explicitly for comprehensive constitutional reform.
The ruling struck at the heart of the HDZ’s political platform, threatening its core identity and hold on power. In response, the Croatian government, working in close coordination with Bosnian Croats, mounted an aggressive campaign to overturn the decision, with the unprecedented support of the Office of the High Representative through an amicus brief. Although the ECHR’s Grand Chamber eventually annulled the ruling on procedural grounds, the substance of its conclusions was never contested.
The consequences are clear: This decision will deepen the divide between two competing visions for Bosnia’s future. On one side are the ethnonationalist actors, determined to preserve a dysfunctional status quo that blocks democratic progress. On the other are civic reformers, pushing for a modernized constitution aligned with European human rights standards. Without such reform, Bosnia cannot move forward on the path to EU and NATO membership.
It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when key Croatian leaders actively promoted a constructive, cooperative relationship with Bosnia. Former Croatian Presidents Stjepan Mesic and Ivo Josipovic, along with former Foreign Minister Vesna Pusic, championed the idea that Bosnian Croats should view Sarajevo, not Zagreb, as their political center. Their vision for the region’s European future was rooted in mutual respect, state sovereignty, and genuine partnership. Crucially, they advanced this vision without preconditions or nationalist calculations, placing the stability of both countries, and the broader region, above narrow party interests centered in ethnonationalism.
Today, however, those voices have been relegated to the margins. Political figures who once championed civic cooperation are now largely absent from Croatia’s public discourse. Even within left-leaning parties, once the natural home for such principles, the rhetoric has shifted dramatically. Many on the Croatian left have and adopting increasingly antagonistic attitudes toward Bosnia and its institutions.
A striking example of this political regression is Croatia’s current president and former prime minister, Zoran Milanovic. Two decades ago, Milanovic publicly supported and even campaigned for Zeljko Komsic, a progressive Bosnian Croat politician who opposed HDZ’s ethnic exclusivism and instead championed civic rights and individual liberties. Today, Milanovic has reversed course entirely. He not only vilifies Komsic with demeaning slurs but regularly employs inflammatory, ethnonationalist rhetoric, often veering into openly racist and fascist overtones, particularly when referring to Bosniaks. Among his most notorious comments is the “first soap, then perfume” remark, implying that long before Bosniaks could even ask for civic rights and individual liberties, they first needed to “clean themselves.” Milanovic’s transformation is not merely a personal betrayal of former principles—it reflects a broader collapse in Croatia’s political discourse on Bosnia, one that threatens to unravel decades of fragile peace and regional cooperation.
In short, the days of Josipovic, Mesic, and Pusic are over. While Bosnians remain grateful that the Dayton Agreement ended the war, it also set a troubling precedent: It legitimized a politics of aggression without accountability. That legacy lives on, in both the spirit and the letter of the Dayton constitution.
Today, in what amounts to the most serious assault on Bosnia’s constitutional order since the end of the war, the current Croat leaders in Sarajevo and Zagreb are actively escalating tensions by aligning themselves with Dodik and RS’s secessionist agenda. They have used the most recent crisis to push their long-standing nationalist goal of dividing the Bosnian state. With Dodik remaining in power and the international community unwilling to work on meaningful reforms, HDZ BiH and Croatian policymakers have grown increasingly bold in their efforts to undermine Bosnia’s political stability, all without facing real consequences.
More troubling still, this reveals a deeper, more sinister truth: Bosnia’s sovereignty is tolerated by the international community only so long as it functions as a condominium between Croatia and Serbia, its independence perpetually contested, partitioned, and held hostage by its neighbors. The result is chronic instability by design.
If the international community continues to treat Bosnia as a secondary concern—or worse, as a permanent buffer zone between competing nationalist projects—it will have effectively surrendered its postwar commitments to peace, democracy, and human rights. What is unfolding in Bosnia is not just a crisis of governance but a managed disintegration—a slow erosion of statehood, masked by procedural diplomacy and hollow affirmations of European integration.
Croatia’s increasingly aggressive posture, couched as concern for Bosnian Croats, is in reality a strategic campaign that advances ethnic partition under the cover of legitimacy. This campaign, increasingly aligned with Russian interests, threatens not only Bosnia’s sovereignty but also regional stability and the credibility of Western alliances. Far from being a stabilizing force, Croatia is becoming an unreliable partner, one whose actions undermine both Bosnia’s future and the strategic interests of Europe and the United States.
Bosnia does not need new lines drawn on old maps or “special territorial zones” born of wartime ambitions. It needs a full reckoning with the discriminatory underpinnings of the Dayton system and a decisive shift toward a civic, inclusive democracy, where citizenship, not ethnicity, determines political rights. That transformation is not only possible; it is essential if Europe and the United States are to remain faithful to the very values they claim to defend.