Understanding Federal Bargaining on Bosnian Soil: No Mean Feat, or How Bosnia Refuted Riker
Understanding Federal Bargaining on Bosnian Soil: No Mean Feat, or How Bosnia Refuted Riker

Summary/Abstract: Roughly 40% of today’s world population live in decentralised state constructs. Whilst a long list of federal organisms have endorsed federalism via foregoing natural historical developments, it was decentralisation in its nature as a tool for conflict resolution, qua federalism, to mark an end to the bloodiest war in Europe after World War II, giving at the same time birth to a new federation on European soil. Modern civil conflicts do not end up in a classical military victory to one of the warring parties, but, instead, into brokered peace for and among them. Up to its federal (re-)birth, Bosnia had never been organised along ethnic lines, nor had it any experience as an independent state in modern era; it did have, however, experience with consociational power-sharing by virtue of its long history as a country of multiple peoples. Nonetheless, ‘federalism’s federation’ was not meant and is not bound to initiate a rigid institutional status quo to last for centuries: federalism is polymorphic, it is dynamic and flexible in its nature, and this not least through its bargain element. This is also what the proposed contribution shall introduce us to: although differently faceted, bargaining for power between centre and subunits is inherent to each federal organism. Is it though able to work out in illustrating the Bosnian ‘federal case’?

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