Bosnia, the Balkans, Europe – and America: Timeo Europeos et dona ferentes
Bosnia, the Balkans, Europe – and America: Timeo Europeos et dona ferentes

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the Europe’s continuing failures to ensure sustainability of the State of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The author puts it into a wider and historical context. He investigates the intrinsically different relations of the USA and of Europe towards the integrity of the Balkan states in the course of 20th century, at times confronting roles in the recent Yugoslav wars, and ambiguous endeavours even in current transition towards democracy in Bosnia. This is demonstrated in his countering of the controversial the Venice Commission attitudes towards the political arrangement of Bosnia as both civic political creation and, simultaneously, a political creation based on national divisions. The article basically asks whether democracy is possible in a country/society that has recently been violated by genocide and ethnic cleansing. The author hopes that his starting hypothesis can be verified: the events in the Balkans, the wars in particular, over the course of the last two centuries, have not their causes only in the Balkans, but are basically the outcomes of the clash between two European political concepts, the Western one, on the one hand, and the Central-South-Eastern one, on the other.

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