by VUK BACANOVIC
At the recently held “TradFest” in Zagreb—where, in the long-established manner of Croatian nationalism, ideas are first declared necessary and only afterwards explained—the issue of the so-called third Croatian entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina assumed its most explicit form to date. Although the gathering had no institutional character and adopted no formal conclusions, the very framing of the panel—“Bosnia and Herzegovina: a failed state and the necessity of a third Croatian entity”—was enough to make its outcome all but predetermined.
The panel brought together a range of political and ideological actors, including representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, which over the past two years has played a significant role in mobilizing the Croatian right—a process that reached its apex in a half-million-strong concert in Zagreb by the neo-Nazi singer Marko Perkovic Thompson, held under episcopal blessing. The intervention of the retired Vrhbosna Cardinal Vinko Puljic, one of the senior members of the Roman Curia, lent particular weight to the event, effectively shifting it beyond the realm of marginal far-right gatherings.
According to reports from the conference—still not fully available to the public—Puljic stated: “I cannot accept injustice, but we must seek a solution for survival and equality,” adding that the constitutional arrangement of Bosnia and Herzegovina must be addressed at the political, not ecclesiastical level—as though his very presence at the event did not already signal the convergence of church and political positions.
Within such a framework, the idea of a third entity no longer appears as one option among many—the sort previously floated through various “non-papers,” trial balloons, pre-election calculations, or well-intentioned academic proposals. What is at stake here is something far more consequential: a clearly articulated form of institutional backing, coming from an institution that has historically been one of the principal bearers of the Croatian national project—the Church among Croats, more precisely its Vrhbosna Archdiocese.
In this enduringly paternalistic mode, the proposed constitutional transformation—envisioning a third entity encompassing the entirety of Herzegovina’s federal territories and nearly all of Central Bosnia—is presented as stabilization and the only viable path to coexistence, while the complex reality of the state is reduced to a problem demanding a simple solution. Yet, as experience repeatedly shows, it is precisely within such “simple solutions” that the most catastrophic consequences tend to reside.
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