Ivo Josipović

Ivo Josipović: The Head of State Who Kept Composing

In April 2023, eight years after leaving the presidency of Croatia, Ivo Josipović premiered an opera about John Lennon. It was not a retirement hobby. By then he had written some fifty works for chamber and orchestral forces, won the Grand Prix of the European Broadcasting Union, taken two Porin awards, run the Music Biennale Zagreb and served as secretary-general of the Croatian Composers' Society. He had also published more than eighty scholarly papers on criminal law and argued his country's case at The Hague. The presidency was, in a sense, the third career.

Two Diplomas

He was born in Zagreb on 28 August 1957, to a family from Baška Voda on the Dalmatian coast. In 1980 he graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Zagreb and passed the bar exam. Three years later, in 1983, he graduated in composition from the Zagreb Academy of Music, where he studied under Stanko Horvat.

Most people who attempt this sort of double life eventually choose. Josipović did not. He took a master's degree in criminal law in 1985 and a doctorate in 1994 on arrest and pre-trial detention in criminal procedure, and went on to lecture in criminal procedure, international criminal law and misdemeanour law at the law faculty — while simultaneously teaching harmony at the music academy. The two institutions are a short walk apart in central Zagreb, and for years he commuted between them.

The Jurist

His legal work was unglamorous and consequential. He drafted Croatian legislation during the years when a new state was assembling a legal system from scratch, and in 1994 co-founded the Croatian Law Center. He served as an associate expert for the Council of Europe, monitoring prison systems — the least visible and most morally revealing corner of any justice system.

Internationally, he took part in the United Nations preparatory work for the International Criminal Court and in the Rome diplomatic conference that created it. He represented Croatia before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and before the International Court of Justice. This is worth pausing on: a Croatian professor of criminal procedure spent the 1990s and 2000s inside the machinery built to prosecute the crimes of the wars that had just torn his region apart, arguing on behalf of a state that was both plaintiff and defendant in the region's moral accounting.

The Composer

The music was not a sideline either. He wrote roughly fifty works, and in 1985 his *Samba da Camera* won the European Broadcasting Union's Grand Prix. Two Porin awards, Croatia's principal record prize, followed at the turn of the millennium. From 1991 he directed the Music Biennale Zagreb, the contemporary music festival that has been the country's window onto the international avant-garde since the 1960s — a directorship that began, it is worth noting, in the year the war began.

Nova Pravednost

He had helped convert the old League of Communists into the Social Democratic Party, and sat in parliament from 2003. In the 2010 presidential election he ran on the slogan *Nova pravednost* — new justice — a message aimed squarely at a country exhausted by corruption, and he won.

He took office in February 2010 with a platform that read like a jurist's brief: active Croatian membership in NATO, the United Nations and the Council of Europe; accession to the European Union; the normalisation of relations across south-eastern Europe; the advancement of human rights and the prosecution of war crimes; democratisation, institutional modernisation and economic development geared to EU membership. In 2013, during his term, Croatia became a member of the European Union.

Apologies

The defining and most contested feature of his presidency was reconciliation. Josipović used the office to make public apologies — for Croatian involvement in the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and for historic atrocities committed against Jews. In a region where political capital is still earned by refusing to concede anything, this was a genuine act of will, and it was genuinely controversial at home. The Croatian presidency is a constitutionally limited office with substantial symbolic authority and little executive power; Josipović spent that symbolic authority on the one commodity his neighbours most needed and his own voters least wanted to sell.

Defeat and After

In 2015 he lost his bid for a second term, narrowly, to Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, becoming the first Croatian president to be denied re-election. He returned to teaching, to scholarship and to the score paper. *Lennon* opened in 2023.

Why Ivo Is Called a Genius

The case rests on genuine dual mastery, which is rarer than it sounds and easy to fake. Plenty of politicians play an instrument; very few have a Grand Prix from the European Broadcasting Union and a festival directorship on the résumé. Plenty of composers hold an academic post; very few hold a doctorate in criminal procedure and have argued before the International Court of Justice. His distinction is operating at professional level in two fields with almost no cognitive overlap — the formal, non-verbal work of composition and the intensely verbal, precedent-bound work of criminal law — then adding elected office on top.

There is a plausible link. Both disciplines are systems of rules applied under constraint, where the interest lies in what can be built inside a form; the same temperament shows in each.

The honest counter-case is that breadth is not depth. Josipović is a respected Croatian composer, not a figure who reshaped European music; his scholarly output is solid rather than field-defining. His presidency was largely ceremonial by constitutional design, his signature reconciliation policy produced goodwill rather than settlements, and he lost re-election to a candidate running a more nationally assertive campaign — evidence that his approach did not persuade his own electorate. No source examined here calls him a genius. What the record supports is something more defensible and still unusual: a first-class mind that refused to specialise, in a century that rewards nothing else.

Legacy

Josipović presided over Croatia's entry into the European Union, the formal end of the long post-Yugoslav journey back into Europe, and he used the office to say things about the wars that his country found uncomfortable and its neighbours found necessary. He remains an active composer and legal scholar, which means his output is not yet closed. His real significance may be as a proof of concept: that a serious artist can be a serious lawyer and a plausible head of state, and that the modern assumption of a single lane is a convention rather than a law.

Achievements

• Knight Grand Cross with Collar of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic — 2011
• Affiliated with University of Zagreb
• Educated at University of Mostar and Faculty of Law of the University of Zagreb
• Worked as composer, politician and university teacher