Today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina 

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Ethnic conflicts

As the communism collapsed former Yugoslavia and its inhabitants had the possibility of establishing a liberal democracy and legislate new civil states. However, aspects such as re-ligion, ethnicity and national identity became the new political guides. Instead of focusing on creating a democratic state people created new groups and statehoods depending on ethnicity. This separation formed a conflicf between the violence of appeals and power to ethnicity as a foundation of state development on one hand, and the international stan-dards of state sovereignity and territorial integrity on the other. The international commu-nity failed to reconcile the conflict between these mutually exclusive principles of state formation.
As the republic Bosnia descended into war and the natonalistic parties and leaderships or-ganized their communities, three major issues were contested in Bosnia. The first major contest involved the definition of the nature of rights in Bosnia, furtherlly on whether the rights were seen as residing in individuals, or in the ethnic communities as cooperative enti-ties. However, no answers could be found to this question by looking at the outlying Bos-nian past nor the immediate communist-era past. The second contest touches the problem unleashed with the disintegration of Yugoslavia, namely the “national question”. This term applies to all features of interethnic relations. The most important aspect of the national question however, concerns the defining of the right to declare titular, or state-constituting status and defining the rights that accrues to “others”, namely the minority ethnic groups. To attain state-constituting position grants superior political and cultural rights on a group, including control over the state itselfs. The national question and the struggle over rights were significant for Bosnia, a multiethnic state in which none of the groups could claim ti-tular status alone, and all three majority groups competed for the status of a state-constituting nation.
Since Bosnia and Herzegovina was bordered by two more authoritative national states of two of the groups challenging the specific issues, the Serbs and the Croats, the national question and the contests over rights within Bosnia could no be determined without Crota-tia and Serbia participating. As Yugoslavia fell apart and the appearance of new nationalist states, Serbia and Croatia, the conflicts in Bosnia took on international dimensions, and a new third contentious issue arised; how should the international community respond to the collapse of a multiethnical state and the conflicts beginning among its peoples.6
All of the parties involved in the conflict approached the contested issue differently. Each raised fun-damental issues for the international community as it made an effort to mediate the con-flict. The rival claims of the Muslims, Serbs and Croats as state-constituting countries and the contests in Bosnia over individual versus collective rights were at first evident as a political conflict over the definition of executive institutions and principles. This escalated to a competition over a legitimate definition of the state itself and, in time, to a war regarding the existence of the state. When looking at the academic approach to these issues, two main formulas are used; the pluralist ( integrationist approach) and the power-sharing approach.
The latter can be con-densed to a couple of simple ideas: Firstly, culturally originated values may be seen as the ground to ethnic conflicts, since the contact between groups may be unable to coexist. The power-sharing approach involves isolation of groups from one another by dividing net-works of political and social institutions. Secondly, all of the cultural communities and sections establish a higher degree of autono-my over their own affairs in the obvious confidence that culturally distinct groups cannot reach compromise. Thirdly, the power-sharing model advocates for proportional systems of representation with respect to decisionmaking on issues of common interests to all groups.
This is to ensure the participation of legislative bodies of all such groups in the de-cisions that affect them. And fourth, all of the groups represented in authoritaritive deci-sionmaking processes are contracted to have veto power when the decision involves “vital interests” of the groups. Due to the fact that intergroup contact is limited to the leaders, the group vetoes on issues concerning “vital interests” and decisionmaking on issues of common interests, are to be implemented by the elites of each group.
The leaders of each group have a monopoly even over the definition of how common interests should be represented, and what constitutes the different “vital interests” of each of the groups. The power-sharing approach lends it-self to socialist definitions of rights and group claims to state-constituting status however. The apparent weakness of such a systemto intransigent the leaders behavior is circum-vented by goodness between governmental elites of the ethnic sections, a condition that is vital for success.
The pluralist approach on the other hand is established from a fundamentally different view on intergroup contact and the effects from the intergroup contact. According to the pluralist view intergroup contact generates mutual cooperation and consideration under significantly important circumstances of open communications and equality, and not con-flicts. Institutions are viewed as means to transform relations between groups in the plural-ist approact, meanwhile the power-sharing approach see institutions above all as mechan-isms of ethnic segmentation.
The contact in public institutions is not seen as an instrument of cultural assimilation necessarily. However, contact that is sustained under the conditions of open communications and equality is seen as contributing factor to the appearance of a common culture of cooperation and communication, or as called in West “civic culture”. Thus, the pluralist approach is assumed on a dedication to individual rights.

1 Introduction .
1.1 Problem .
1.2 Purpose and questions
1.3 Method and design
1.4 Sources and data .
1.5 Disposition
2 History
2.1 Political history
2.2 Ethnic conflicts
3 The political parties 
4 The entities 
4.1 The Federation
4.2 Republika Srpska
4.3 The Dayton Agreement
4.4 The constitution
5 Today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina 
5.1 Afterwar years
5.2 Nato
5.3 The European Union
5.4 The United Nations
6 European Union Vs. Russia 
7 Summary 
8 Conclusion 
References

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Bosnia and Herzegovina A multinational state