INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION OF BOSNIAN SOVEREIGNTY
The Bosnian frontier emerged in full form on April 6 and 7, 1991, when first the U.S. and then the European Community recognized its sovereignty.[2] Until late 1991, Bosnia's largely Muslim leadership was reluctant to demand independence, realizing the move would provoke war. Prior secessionist successes by Slovenia and Croatia made it difficult for Bosnia to stay put, however. These two northern Yugoslav republics had begun their own escape soon after Yugoslavia's first multiparty elections in 1990–91, with first Slovenia and then Croatia declaring the intention to secede. Yugoslav federal troops intervened first in Slovenia during summer 1991, but Western European diplomats quickly intervened, convincing Yugoslav generals to withdraw. Soon after, tensions erupted into fighting in Croatia, with some federal troops lending a helping hand to local Serb militias. European mediators intervened yet again, and in December 1991, a European arbitration commission accepted requests by the Slovenian and Croatian republican governments for international recognition of their territorial sovereignty. UN peacekeepers were deployed to monitor a second Yugoslav federal withdrawal.
Bosnia's Muslim leadership sought European recognition on December 23, 1991, over the objections of Bosnian Serb leaders hoping to remain in the slimmed-down Yugoslavia. Bosnian Serbs could not understand why, if Yugoslavia's territory was being divided up, they couldn't take part of Bosnia with them. The international insistence on dividing up Yugoslavia according to its old republican boundaries seemed to them irrational and unjust, privileging republican rights over those of nations, and placing ethnic Serbs in Bosnia at a distinct disadvantage.
Why were Slovenia and Croatia so eager to secede? Above all, the broader Yugoslav drift toward nationalism, centered largely on the country's republican entities, was affecting all political units in the federation, but Slovenia and Croatia also had strong economic incentives to secede. Slovenia, as the richest and most likely to gain European Community membership, was particularly eager to rid itself of the other, less successful, Yugoslav republics, and the Slovenian communist party was the most explicitly pro-sovereignty in the mid-1980s. The Croatian party branch was also intrigued by the notion, but its commitment to secession developed later, largely due to the legacy of 1967–71, when the
Slovenian and Croatian secessionism was also part of a broader Eastern European phenomenon. The end of the Cold War had made it seem possible for some formerly communist states to join the European Community, generating massive pressures throughout the region. Within Yugoslavia, this resulted in inter-republican competition, with each portraying itself as more "European" than the others.[3] Discourse in Slovenia and Croatia reflected this phenomenon as Catholic politicians portrayed themselves as more civilized than the Orthodox Serbs, whom they characterized as an unsophisticated and violent people "corrupted" by their long subjection to Ottoman rule.
In 1990, Yugoslavia's first multiparty elections gave secessionists enormous energy. As a plethora of new parties jostled for popular support, each republic's political agenda was swept toward nationalism and secessionism, leading to a spiraling security dilemma. Ethno-nationalist sentiments on all sides fed off each other, and as activists within each group prepared to confront the others, levels of mutual threat and suspicion increased.[4]