Just as the Office of the High Representative slides into its deepest crisis in three decades, a second front has opened in the long argument over Bosnia and Herzegovina. This one runs through Zagreb.
On 10 July 2026, the caucus of the Homeland Movement (Domovinski pokret, DP), a national-conservative party positioned to the right of the governing Croatian Democratic Union and its junior partner in the coalition government since 2024, tabled a Resolution on Strengthening the Political Position of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Croatian Sabor. The text is careful, lawyerly, and studded with citations to Dayton, Washington, European Parliament resolutions, and Strasbourg case law.
Its political meaning is blunter than its footnotes. With its adoption, the Croatian Parliament has formally declared, as a matter of state policy, that Bosnia’s Croats have been denied the full political equality guaranteed by the Dayton Agreement and that Zagreb regards this as a legitimate object of its national interest. Coming weeks after Christian Schmidt announced his resignation as High Representative, the timing is not incidental. It confirms something the resignation had already suggested. The post-Dayton settlement is now being questioned from several directions, and actors who once confined their objections to the language of managed compromise are beginning to speak more plainly.
The resolution’s core complaint is a long-standing one. Because Croats and Bosniaks vote in the same federal constituency, the larger Bosniak electorate has repeatedly decided who fills the Croat seat in the tripartite presidency. A Croat member can be elected largely by non-Croat votes. To the architects of Dayton, this may look like inclusive multiethnic democracy. To most Croats it looks like the systematic nullification of a right the constitution promised them: the right of a constituent people to choose its own legitimate representatives.
More revealing is how the adopted resolution frames the issue. It states that, under existing constitutional and political conditions, the Croat people in Bosnia cannot fully exercise the constituent status guaranteed to them and cannot be regarded as fully equal with the other two peoples. That sentence, in a formal parliamentary act of a European Union member state, is a considerable escalation.
More striking still is the way the resolution constructs its case. Rather than appealing to history or emotion, it grounds its argument in the language of the very institutions that have shaped Bosnia for three decades. It invokes European Parliament resolutions calling for electoral rules that let all three constituent peoples freely elect their own representatives. It cites the Strasbourg court’s acceptance that an electoral system may legitimately tie voters to their representatives territorially. It points to the Venice Commission’s own reform efforts of 2021 and 2022. The message to Brussels is precise. These are the Union’s own principles, and Zagreb is asking only that they be applied. For most of the postwar period, Croatia’s official posture toward Bosnian Croats was one of rhetorical solidarity and practical caution. Zagreb funded schools, hospitals, churches, and cultural institutions, issued warm declarations, and avoided anything that might be read as interference in a neighbouring state.
‘The Croat people in Bosnia cannot fully exercise the constituent status guaranteed to them and cannot be regarded as fully equal’
This resolution keeps the caution in its wording while abandoning it in its ambition. It calls on the Croatian government to press for a full reform of Bosnia’s political system, to support electoral models proposed by the legitimate representatives of the Croat people, and explicitly to back the idea of a separate electoral unit for the election of the Croat member of the presidency. It asks Zagreb to deploy every available political, legal, and diplomatic instrument inside the European Union and international organizations on behalf of Bosnian Croats. And it urges Croats holding Bosnian citizenship to turn out in the general elections scheduled for 4 October 2026. That last point is the tell. This is not an abstract statement of principle. It is aimed at a specific ballot, three months away.
What the resolution does not say is as revealing as what it does. For a generation, the maximal Croat demand has been a third entity: a Croat-majority unit alongside the Federation and Republika Srpska, correcting what Croats regard as the original design flaw of Dayton, which gave the Serbs an entity of their own and left the Croats as a minority partner inside a Federation dominated by the more numerous Bosniaks.
The word entity appears nowhere in the Sabor text. Instead, it asks for a separate electoral unit to elect the Croat member of the presidency, and it takes pains to affirm Bosnia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and to disclaim any interest in the country’s internal arrangement. This is not a retreat from the old ambition. It is the same ambition, stripped of the term that makes it unspeakable in Sarajevo and Brussels. A separate electoral unit is a territorial guarantee of Croat self-representation by another name, the substance of a third entity without the toxic label. The drafters know that saying ‘entity’ would end the conversation before it began. So they have said everything except that, and dared their interlocutors to object to principles the European Union itself has endorsed.
There is an uncomfortable symmetry here that Western capitals will be slow to acknowledge. The Serb critique of the Dayton order and the Croat critique now increasingly rhyme. Both argue that the settlement, as administered, has hollowed out the equality it promised. Both regard decisions taken by international officials as having eroded, rather than protected, the position of a constituent people. The resolution says as much, pointing to decisions by former high representatives that it claims disturbed the equality of Croats in departure from Washington and Dayton.
The differences are ones of strategy. Republika Srpska’s leadership has consistently argued that its objective is to preserve the constitutional balance established by the Dayton Peace Agreement. From its perspective, the gradual transfer of competences to the state level and the extensive use of the High Representative’s powers have altered the original settlement. While this interpretation remains disputed, it reflects a long-standing constitutional argument rather than a recent political tactic. The Sabor text takes a different route to a related grievance. It reaffirms Bosnia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, insists it does not touch the country’s internal arrangement, recalls that Croatia was among the first states to recognize Bosnian independence in 1992 and the first to open an embassy in besieged Sarajevo, and frames the whole exercise as support for Bosnia’s European path. Two actors, two methods, but a shared underlying claim: that the settlement as administered has failed to deliver the equality it promised their people.
But the convergence, however partial, is politically potent. When two of the three constituent peoples both conclude that the current model denies them genuine equality, the claim that the model is a neutral guarantor of multiethnic democracy becomes very hard to sustain. It begins to look like what its critics have always said it was: a settlement that preserves peace while institutionalizing grievance.
Germany has made itself the principal European defender of a supervisory arrangement that Washington is quietly abandoning, and the Sabor resolution tightens that vice.
Berlin’s Bosnia policy rests on a familiar premise. The high representative and the broader international framework are indispensable guarantors of stability, and the alternative is chaos. That premise was already strained by Schmidt’s resignation and by American signals that his successor would wield a narrower mandate. It is strained further when an EU member state formally declares that one of Bosnia’s three peoples is not politically equal, and asks the Union to do something about it.
Croatia brings a particular standing to the argument. It is a member of the European Union and NATO, a Dayton and Washington signatory, and a government invoking the EU’s own stated principles. That makes its intervention harder for Brussels and Berlin to set aside, because it cannot be filed away under the familiar headings used to discount dissent from within Bosnia itself. The question it presses is a concrete one, and one the defenders of the status quo have long struggled to answer: why a Croat member of the presidency can be elected by voters who are not Croats.
The Croatian parliament has now adopted the resolution. Although introduced by the Homeland Movement, its final text reflected negotiations within the governing coalition and secured broad parliamentary support. Its opponents inside Bosnia have predictably portrayed it as a Croatian intervention in a neighbour’s internal affairs, while some Bosniak representatives continue to regard any move toward a separate Croat electoral unit as a step toward the ethnic partition of the Federation. The resolution itself notes, more hopefully, that some Bosniak politicians have signalled openness to restoring full Croat equality.
‘The question it presses is a concrete one: why a Croat member of the presidency can be elected by voters who are not Croats’
Its practical consequences remain uncertain. Its broader significance does not. For three decades, the Dayton settlement survived in part because its beneficiaries and its critics largely expressed their objections within the system’s own vocabulary of managed compromise. That silence is breaking. Washington is recalibrating. Schmidt is leaving. Republika Srpska has consistently argued that it seeks not to overturn Dayton but to preserve its original constitutional architecture. From this perspective, the gradual transfer of competences to the state level and the broad use of the High Representative’s powers represent departures from the settlement negotiated in 1995.
Although this interpretation remains contested, it reflects a long-standing constitutional argument rather than a recent political tactic. None of this dissolves the Office of the High Representative or rewrites Bosnia’s electoral law. But it points to a broader shift. A settlement defended for three decades as the guarantor of stability and equality is now being questioned not only within Bosnia itself, but increasingly from within the European mainstream. Croatia’s intervention matters not because it immediately changes Bosnia’s constitutional balance, but because it brings arguments long associated with Bosnia’s internal disputes into the political and legal vocabulary of an EU member state.
It also invites a broader question. If these concerns were sufficiently serious to secure the support of a majority in the Croatian Parliament, why did successive Croatian governments not pursue them with comparable determination during earlier years, when they held far greater influence over Bosnia policy in both Brussels and the wider international community? What was once regarded as a domestic constitutional dispute has become part of a wider European debate over whether the Dayton settlement, as it has evolved, still delivers the equality it originally promised.
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