Even for the Balkans, a region with more than its fair share of crazy national borders, it’s an oddity—a five-and-a-half-mile stretch of Bosnia on the coast of Croatia.
Cobbled together at the 1995 Dayton Accords after four years of inter-ethnic conflict, Bosnia and Herzegovina is hardly a maritime nation. It has no navy or merchant fleet. There’s just one town, Neum (population 3,000), on its coast. Most of the boats in its small harbor look as if they’re kitted out for sports fishing or island-hopping parties, not international commerce.
Traveling south on the coast road to the ancient walled city of Dubrovnik, the top tourist destination on Croatia’s Adriatic coast, you need to show your passport twice—on entering Bosnia and (depending on the traffic) 15 or 20 minutes later on re-entering Croatia. Usually it’s a cursory check to make sure the people in the vehicle match their passport pictures. However, in 2023 when Croatia joins the European Schengen Area for border-free travel, the border police will need to scan passports. That will hold up traffic on this busy route.
How did Bosnia end up with a short stretch of Adriatic coastline? Why is the Dubrovnik region cut off from the rest of Croatia?
As with most territorial issues in the Balkans, it’s a quirk of history. For centuries, the Ottoman Empire was the dominant power in the Balkans. The Ottomans hoped to conquer Central Europe, but the Habsburg armies defeated them at the Battle of Kahlenberg near Vienna in 1683. At the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, the Ottomans gave up Hungary, Transylvania and Slavonia to the Habsburgs and their Polish allies. On the Adriatic coast, they ceded territory to the Habsburgs’ ally, the Venetian empire.
Venice’s main trading rival was the Republic of Dubrovnik (Ragusa). Since the 15th century, the city state had become a major trading port and maritime power with the third largest navy in the Mediterranean. Dubrovnik’s ruling elite maintained independence by making deals with the dominant powers. They recognized Ottoman authority in return for protection and trading privileges in the empire. After the Ottoman defeat in 1683, they also accepted the sovereignty of the Habsburg kings. As long as both empires left Dubrovnik alone to keep trading and making money, everyone was happy with the arrangement.
But not its arch trading rival, Venice, which captured part of Dubrovnik’s inland territory. The city feared the Venetians would surround it and cut off its inland trade. After recapturing the territory, Dubrovnik’s leaders cleverly decided to create a buffer zone, handing over a chunk of coastline to the Ottoman province of Bosnia. The Venetians had no qualms about attacking Dubrovnik, but would not run the risk of invading Ottoman territory. Even as other Balkan borders shifted over the next three centuries, Bosnia retained possession of the short coastal strip.
The business community of Neum has taken full advantage of its location. Prices for hotel rooms, restaurant meals and groceries are cheaper than on the other side of the border, so the town is a popular rest stop for travellers and tourist buses, whose drivers receive what we’ll politely call commissions for taking a lunch or dinner break at a particular restaurant, next door to the store where “their cousin” will offer passengers a “special price.”
Neum’s strategic advantage ended in July 2022 when Croatia completed construction of the 1.5-mile Pelješac Bridge. It spans the channel from the mainland to the Pelješac peninsula, where new access roads and tunnels connect with the Dubrovnik road. It adds a few miles to the trip, but travellers avoid border controls.
The project has been mired in controversy since it was first mooted in the late 1990s. Some Bosnian politicians claimed the bridge would cut off its access to international waters, with one group of MPs calling on Croatia to “stop attacking the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a maritime state.”
Leaving aside the question of whether five miles of coastline makes a country a “maritime state,” Croatia pointed out that Neum’s small harbor cannot accommodate large ships, and that its fishing and pleasure boats can pass easily under the 180-foot-high bridge.
While the political wrangling went on, construction costs climbed to an estimated $400 million, most of it funded by the European Union. There was controversy over the award of the building contract with the winner, the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CBRC), bidding far less than its European rivals. An Austrian company filed a complaint, claiming that CRBC was “price-dumping” and receiving Chinese state aid.
Croatia pulled out all the ceremonial stops for the formal opening at the end of July. Runners raced across the bridge while small boats with Croatian flags sailed under it. The first vehicle to cross was a Croatian-made electric car. “Tonight, we are uniting Croatia,” declared Croatia’s prime minister, Andrej Plenkovic. And, of course, the evening ended with a spectacular fireworks display.