Senadin Lavić, Center for Nationalism Studies Bosnian nation-state, Bosnianhood and Bosnian political identity
The nation is a political community of citizens. European rationalism of the late 18th century and the first half of the 19th century terminated the perception that the state is an organization derived from God’s will. The state is secular and is inhabited by citizens! Secularism means separating the church from the state, developing a civil, secular, plural society and state institutions governed by law. In every contemporary narrative on modern nationalism in Europe, we always begin with the Firstborn Nation of England and the French Revolution as the starting point of the modern nation.[i] It is a topos from which European nations-states have evolved, in which the ethnic was pushed into the pre-modern and pre-political state, and the nation has been placed in the space of political or political struggle. The modern nation is emerging in the epoch of capitalism in Europe, and it is problematic to project it into the pre-modern times.
Living today in a European state such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, an individual citizen can say that he is not the subject of a monarch, as was his ancestor in the age of the Ottoman Empire. This shows the change, so he is not a servant of the Sultan or some other monarch, because he lives in a parliamentary political system where political parties compete in the elections for positions in the government. In a feudal, pre-modern system the subject is, in fact, a “servant” of a master who is powerful and even considered the representative of God on Earth or the one who possesses divine prerogatives in his reign. The subject has his ruler, monarch, king, emperor or someone similar – whom he surrenders all power and the right to rule. But after the bourgeois revolutions across Europe, from the 18th century to the present, things have changed drastically. Today in Europe there are monarchs and their families, but they no longer have a constitutional and legislative power in their hands.
In the modern epoch, the individual, a citizen of the state, has rights and obligations, freedoms and responsibilities in a pluralist political order. He chooses certain political options and gives them support. Political options, identified through different political organisations, work to win power and achieve political agendas. In the developed liberal democratic order, political parties do not represent ethno-religious groups (as in some areas of the Balkans), but certain political ideas for which citizens give their votes and support. A developed democratic order respects civic values and does not invade the privacy of citizens (i.e. ethnic, religious, cultural identity of an individual citizen). It keeps the distinction between the national (state) and the ethnic (folk culture, language, religion, customs, traditions…). This is a continuous distinction between the legal-political sphere and the cultural or historical-psychological sphere of people’s lives in the community. The nation’s legal understanding and sociological theories of the nation don’t always match and often seem to diverge in basic concepts.
The awareness that the individual is a citizen of one state means that he is free, equal, protected by the laws of the state, the public values of political life, that he has citizenship, that he has rights and obligations in the state system. This contains the essential characteristics of the individual’s life as a political being — the basis of the individual is freedom. That’s guaranteed by the state. The modern nation integrates individuals or all members of one state into a community of citizens that keeps us out of a particular class, ethnic circle, religious community, family community. It is important to emphasize that the nation is a unique modern form of social integration or a form of sociability. This form differs substantially from the one that we call ethnicism – celebrating and ideologizing the politics of “tribes” as supreme politics. The civic nation comprises the multilateral content of ethnicity and supersedes it in the political as an action around the general that is essential to all members of the state.
The modern nation starts from the free individual, the man who operates from his own freedom, morality and responsibility for the community. The individual (the citizen) is the greatest value of social-state life. This concept implies a political community of free individuals who make decisions and take positions on the main flows of the political community. The nation conceptualized like that does not start from a collectivity or a homogeneous group, therefore, it implies the free individual and thinks of his common good in the political community. This is the state that cares for all its citizens! It is necessary, however, to note that we often meet people who do not develop their own individuality and do not behave as free individuals in the state but hide in a crowd, group, “tribe”, and there compensate for the power they do not possess as individuals, or acquire psychological security. They are part of the political culture in which an individual is determined only through belonging to a homogeneous “group”, a collectivity that gives him identity, meaning and happiness. In this political culture, citizens are, unfortunately, constantly subjected to a perverse political orientation whose basis is reduction of the political community of citizens to an ethno-religious community governed by a single leader (ethnarch), the representative of an ethnic group, chief of a tribe, or some “chosen” leader. In this, the highest profit is reserved for priests and their organized religious forms, through their control of conservative politics. They become the richest and most powerful parts of such a society. In unfortunate times, priests arise as those who explain the meaning of man’s life and suppress the scientific forms of explanation of human life. In this blurred horror, it is necessary to advocate preservation of the distinction between the nation and the national against various kinds of ethnocentric exclusivity, tribalism and other inherited cultural loyalties. It is wrong to identify the nation with the glorification of an ethnic collective!
In Bosnia, however, at work is the ethno-political narrative on the “constituent nature of the peoples”, an attempt to make the ethnically determined ‘peoples’ a substantive form of the political, which brings us back to the pre-democratic and ethno-collectivist organization of political life. In this way, in fact, the neighboring states deliberately create the possibility for direct interference in the political affairs of Bosnia through separate homogenized ethnic groups. It is precisely in these attempts to subjugate all Bosnian to the external domination that all their cynical deception is shown. The neighboring states, with their hegemonic intentions, attempt to occupy and destroy the pieces of the Bosnian territory through projected cultural loyalty to the ethnic groups that also exist in these states. The hegemony of the Serbian and Croatian nationalism towards Bosnia rests on such a premise. In that, one can clearly recognize the point of setting up the ethno-religious definition of the nation as the primary political determination. All the “wisdom” of this ethno-politics is reflected in the reduction of the Bosnian identity to “the three (constituent?) peoples” – as if these “three nations” constitute Bosnia by inclusion of “their” territories!? In this, the Bosnian people are skilfully deceived that the political is only what is ethnic (and religious) and that all narratives about Bosnia must be translated into epic narratives about “the three separate peoples”! Skilful pseudo-scientific propaganda interpolates into the history an ideological mantra that since the beginning of time Bosnia has been based on “the three peoples”, while deliberately hiding the historical fact that the people of Bosnia have become divided only since the 19th century, in accordance with the propaganda projections of the external national programmes. Bosnian citizens have not yet been brought to awareness of the Bosnian identity as a political category that reflects the meaning of the common existence of all the people in Bosnia. The Bosnian identity does not exclude anyone in his peculiarity, because Bosnia’s existence has always been inclusive and ennobling, therefore, it implies plurality of human forms. This clearly shows the connection between the cultural sphere and the legal-political sphere of the existence of people in the community.
It is evident that citizens are deceived by the primitive policies of exclusion and hatred that destroy Bosnia’s European future. The point is that the institutions of the state are captured by suspicious political-conservative groups that turn the state into the property of a “tribal” community and demolish the rights of the people as free citizens of the state. Thus it may happen that one form of government, for example, the judicial authority of the state, can be abused and controlled by political groups engaged in illegal business. It is a signal to citizens to fight to preserve the state and its institutions. If they don’t, they will be subjected to a dictatorship. Historical experience reminds us that the institution of a leader constantly re-emerges in the Balkans, the leader who decides everything and without whose consent nothing can happen in the human community. The people are almost accustomed to surrendering all their power to either God or the all-powerful Ruler. These are the societies and political systems in which citizens do not participate in a democratic way in politics but serve as objects of manipulation. So, there is no participatory democracy or political culture of citizens’ participation in this system of government.
It happens that the ethnic suddenly wants to “jump” from the sphere of the cultural and historical and psychological-emotional into the sphere of politics and impose itself as the decisive and only for all political “struggles”. This practice clearly states that there is a crisis of understanding and defining the nation and the national in the face of ethno-nationalism and ethnocentrism. But, also, it points to the fact that the public sphere, the public space, the “things” of the community, as far as every man in one state is concerned, unfortunately, are in the hands of the alienated centers of control and governance that successfully manipulate the state system as an area of “their own” power. Thus some tribal leader and his priest subjugate the political to their own will! Then one must think about identity on another level. The problem of identity of individuals and groups is to be resolved in the sphere of culture or cultural activity of human communities, and the problem of freedom through the rule of law in the state.
In democracy’s life, it is impossible to understand anything without the idea of demos through which all people in the community (polis, city, state), all citizens, think. In democracy, they all have influence on power – not only chosen elites or powerful individuals. It happens, however, that certain groups determine demos differently in political action and very irresponsibly attach to it ethnic determination or ethnic semantic framework. But, again and again, one should emphasize that demos is not ethnos! When demos is reduced to ethnos, at work is the historical “backsliding of democracy.” (C. Taylor) It is, in fact, a deeper cultural, epochal, existential backsliding of humans! Somewhere residents from the Rust Belt (U.S., France, etc.) are mobilizing, in which the devastating de-industrialization and pauperization of their life occurs, somewhere pure dispersal of populism drives the mass, and hatred of foreigners, fascist hysteria of fundamentalist ethno-identity and “pure race” or attempts to divide society into crazy ghettos through the evolving fear of migrants and so on. Mass mobilization never ends well or beyond the dead end. The decaying landscapes of the world are an ideological ground for ethnic ideologies.
The inability to spot and preserve the fine distinction between the national and the ethnic warns that a social order has not yet reached a level of awareness of democratic politics. So, one can talk about the relationship between undemocratic politics and dominance of the ethnic, that is, about the correlation that testifies to the inability to draw the distinction between the national and the ethnic. Conservative groups of politicians and priests constantly deceive social groups and their historical-social life that their ethnic and religious determination is all that matters, and then they postulate it into the sphere of politics and the political. In this way, we have a confusion and deception of the people of one state, because those categories relating to private life are presented as key political categories. This has been happening in Bosnia since the beginning of the 20th century. It also shows that democracy is a suitable form of government that can be used for many manipulations of political oligarchies. Through it, a soft fascism can be established, so as to make citizens unaware of its rise. The mass media, in doing so, serve as a means for deceiving people by false interpretations of social phenomena and processes. If civil society itself is subjugated and suppressed by the totalitarian demand of ethnic domination to be above all as a supreme value, then it is quite certain that fascist tendencies are at work. Behind this process is an established “elite of power” or ethno-religious political oligarchy, which politically and technically conducts the subjugation of civil society to a conservative interest group. Thus a narrative about ethnic partition of the state territories was introduced in Bosnia in the early 1990s, and has been imposed for three decades as the only possible “political” narrative. It’s the biggest nonsense!
Bosnian-hood is a political category and implies individual or group relationship to the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnian-hood is being pushed back by those “policies” and governing groups that deceive us with claims that the political community must be governed by ethno-religious criteria and rigid identities, according to the disputable assumption that the only thing that matters in political life of people in a country is to which ethnic or religious group they belong. To explain that religious belief is a personal thing of every individual means to develop awareness that the political is the general that a large number of people have in common and implies a public-legal relationship with the state and its other citizens. The political (Greek politikos) is a set of duties that are tied to the state or to what is common in one community of people. It is, in fact, national or state policy, and in its conduct the nation functions as a political community of citizens.
[i] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Zagreb: Political Culture, 1998, p. 60. In addition to all this, the period of transition to industrialism had to, according to our model, be the age of nationalism, a period of tumultuous transformations in which either political or cultural boundaries were changed or both, to satisfy the new nationalist imperative that began to be felt for the first time.
Image source: sarajevo-siege-tour-viewpoint-trebevic-sarajevo-funky-tours-traveller-photos.jpg
The nation is a political community of citizens. European rationalism of the late 18th century and the first half of the 19th century terminated the perception that the state is an organization derived from God’s will. The state is secular and is inhabited by citizens! Secularism means separating the church from the state, developing a civil, secular, plural society and state institutions governed by law. In every contemporary narrative on modern nationalism in Europe, we always begin with the Firstborn Nation of England and the French Revolution as the starting point of the modern nation.[i] It is a topos from which European nations-states have evolved, in which the ethnic was pushed into the pre-modern and pre-political state, and the nation has been placed in the space of political or political struggle. The modern nation is emerging in the epoch of capitalism in Europe, and it is problematic to project it into the pre-modern times.
Living today in a European state such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, an individual citizen can say that he is not the subject of a monarch, as was his ancestor in the age of the Ottoman Empire. This shows the change, so he is not a servant of the Sultan or some other monarch, because he lives in a parliamentary political system where political parties compete in the elections for positions in the government. In a feudal, pre-modern system the subject is, in fact, a “servant” of a master who is powerful and even considered the representative of God on Earth or the one who possesses divine prerogatives in his reign. The subject has his ruler, monarch, king, emperor or someone similar – whom he surrenders all power and the right to rule. But after the bourgeois revolutions across Europe, from the 18th century to the present, things have changed drastically. Today in Europe there are monarchs and their families, but they no longer have a constitutional and legislative power in their hands.
In the modern epoch, the individual, a citizen of the state, has rights and obligations, freedoms and responsibilities in a pluralist political order. He chooses certain political options and gives them support. Political options, identified through different political organisations, work to win power and achieve political agendas. In the developed liberal democratic order, political parties do not represent ethno-religious groups (as in some areas of the Balkans), but certain political ideas for which citizens give their votes and support. A developed democratic order respects civic values and does not invade the privacy of citizens (i.e. ethnic, religious, cultural identity of an individual citizen). It keeps the distinction between the national (state) and the ethnic (folk culture, language, religion, customs, traditions…). This is a continuous distinction between the legal-political sphere and the cultural or historical-psychological sphere of people’s lives in the community. The nation’s legal understanding and sociological theories of the nation don’t always match and often seem to diverge in basic concepts.
The awareness that the individual is a citizen of one state means that he is free, equal, protected by the laws of the state, the public values of political life, that he has citizenship, that he has rights and obligations in the state system. This contains the essential characteristics of the individual’s life as a political being — the basis of the individual is freedom. That’s guaranteed by the state. The modern nation integrates individuals or all members of one state into a community of citizens that keeps us out of a particular class, ethnic circle, religious community, family community. It is important to emphasize that the nation is a unique modern form of social integration or a form of sociability. This form differs substantially from the one that we call ethnicism – celebrating and ideologizing the politics of “tribes” as supreme politics. The civic nation comprises the multilateral content of ethnicity and supersedes it in the political as an action around the general that is essential to all members of the state.
The modern nation starts from the free individual, the man who operates from his own freedom, morality and responsibility for the community. The individual (the citizen) is the greatest value of social-state life. This concept implies a political community of free individuals who make decisions and take positions on the main flows of the political community. The nation conceptualized like that does not start from a collectivity or a homogeneous group, therefore, it implies the free individual and thinks of his common good in the political community. This is the state that cares for all its citizens! It is necessary, however, to note that we often meet people who do not develop their own individuality and do not behave as free individuals in the state but hide in a crowd, group, “tribe”, and there compensate for the power they do not possess as individuals, or acquire psychological security. They are part of the political culture in which an individual is determined only through belonging to a homogeneous “group”, a collectivity that gives him identity, meaning and happiness. In this political culture, citizens are, unfortunately, constantly subjected to a perverse political orientation whose basis is reduction of the political community of citizens to an ethno-religious community governed by a single leader (ethnarch), the representative of an ethnic group, chief of a tribe, or some “chosen” leader. In this, the highest profit is reserved for priests and their organized religious forms, through their control of conservative politics. They become the richest and most powerful parts of such a society. In unfortunate times, priests arise as those who explain the meaning of man’s life and suppress the scientific forms of explanation of human life. In this blurred horror, it is necessary to advocate preservation of the distinction between the nation and the national against various kinds of ethnocentric exclusivity, tribalism and other inherited cultural loyalties. It is wrong to identify the nation with the glorification of an ethnic collective!
In Bosnia, however, at work is the ethno-political narrative on the “constituent nature of the peoples”, an attempt to make the ethnically determined ‘peoples’ a substantive form of the political, which brings us back to the pre-democratic and ethno-collectivist organization of political life. In this way, in fact, the neighboring states deliberately create the possibility for direct interference in the political affairs of Bosnia through separate homogenized ethnic groups. It is precisely in these attempts to subjugate all Bosnian to the external domination that all their cynical deception is shown. The neighboring states, with their hegemonic intentions, attempt to occupy and destroy the pieces of the Bosnian territory through projected cultural loyalty to the ethnic groups that also exist in these states. The hegemony of the Serbian and Croatian nationalism towards Bosnia rests on such a premise. In that, one can clearly recognize the point of setting up the ethno-religious definition of the nation as the primary political determination. All the “wisdom” of this ethno-politics is reflected in the reduction of the Bosnian identity to “the three (constituent?) peoples” – as if these “three nations” constitute Bosnia by inclusion of “their” territories!? In this, the Bosnian people are skilfully deceived that the political is only what is ethnic (and religious) and that all narratives about Bosnia must be translated into epic narratives about “the three separate peoples”! Skilful pseudo-scientific propaganda interpolates into the history an ideological mantra that since the beginning of time Bosnia has been based on “the three peoples”, while deliberately hiding the historical fact that the people of Bosnia have become divided only since the 19th century, in accordance with the propaganda projections of the external national programmes. Bosnian citizens have not yet been brought to awareness of the Bosnian identity as a political category that reflects the meaning of the common existence of all the people in Bosnia. The Bosnian identity does not exclude anyone in his peculiarity, because Bosnia’s existence has always been inclusive and ennobling, therefore, it implies plurality of human forms. This clearly shows the connection between the cultural sphere and the legal-political sphere of the existence of people in the community.
It is evident that citizens are deceived by the primitive policies of exclusion and hatred that destroy Bosnia’s European future. The point is that the institutions of the state are captured by suspicious political-conservative groups that turn the state into the property of a “tribal” community and demolish the rights of the people as free citizens of the state. Thus it may happen that one form of government, for example, the judicial authority of the state, can be abused and controlled by political groups engaged in illegal business. It is a signal to citizens to fight to preserve the state and its institutions. If they don’t, they will be subjected to a dictatorship. Historical experience reminds us that the institution of a leader constantly re-emerges in the Balkans, the leader who decides everything and without whose consent nothing can happen in the human community. The people are almost accustomed to surrendering all their power to either God or the all-powerful Ruler. These are the societies and political systems in which citizens do not participate in a democratic way in politics but serve as objects of manipulation. So, there is no participatory democracy or political culture of citizens’ participation in this system of government.
It happens that the ethnic suddenly wants to “jump” from the sphere of the cultural and historical and psychological-emotional into the sphere of politics and impose itself as the decisive and only for all political “struggles”. This practice clearly states that there is a crisis of understanding and defining the nation and the national in the face of ethno-nationalism and ethnocentrism. But, also, it points to the fact that the public sphere, the public space, the “things” of the community, as far as every man in one state is concerned, unfortunately, are in the hands of the alienated centers of control and governance that successfully manipulate the state system as an area of “their own” power. Thus some tribal leader and his priest subjugate the political to their own will! Then one must think about identity on another level. The problem of identity of individuals and groups is to be resolved in the sphere of culture or cultural activity of human communities, and the problem of freedom through the rule of law in the state.
In democracy’s life, it is impossible to understand anything without the idea of demos through which all people in the community (polis, city, state), all citizens, think. In democracy, they all have influence on power – not only chosen elites or powerful individuals. It happens, however, that certain groups determine demos differently in political action and very irresponsibly attach to it ethnic determination or ethnic semantic framework. But, again and again, one should emphasize that demos is not ethnos! When demos is reduced to ethnos, at work is the historical “backsliding of democracy.” (C. Taylor) It is, in fact, a deeper cultural, epochal, existential backsliding of humans! Somewhere residents from the Rust Belt (U.S., France, etc.) are mobilizing, in which the devastating de-industrialization and pauperization of their life occurs, somewhere pure dispersal of populism drives the mass, and hatred of foreigners, fascist hysteria of fundamentalist ethno-identity and “pure race” or attempts to divide society into crazy ghettos through the evolving fear of migrants and so on. Mass mobilization never ends well or beyond the dead end. The decaying landscapes of the world are an ideological ground for ethnic ideologies.
The inability to spot and preserve the fine distinction between the national and the ethnic warns that a social order has not yet reached a level of awareness of democratic politics. So, one can talk about the relationship between undemocratic politics and dominance of the ethnic, that is, about the correlation that testifies to the inability to draw the distinction between the national and the ethnic. Conservative groups of politicians and priests constantly deceive social groups and their historical-social life that their ethnic and religious determination is all that matters, and then they postulate it into the sphere of politics and the political. In this way, we have a confusion and deception of the people of one state, because those categories relating to private life are presented as key political categories. This has been happening in Bosnia since the beginning of the 20th century. It also shows that democracy is a suitable form of government that can be used for many manipulations of political oligarchies. Through it, a soft fascism can be established, so as to make citizens unaware of its rise. The mass media, in doing so, serve as a means for deceiving people by false interpretations of social phenomena and processes. If civil society itself is subjugated and suppressed by the totalitarian demand of ethnic domination to be above all as a supreme value, then it is quite certain that fascist tendencies are at work. Behind this process is an established “elite of power” or ethno-religious political oligarchy, which politically and technically conducts the subjugation of civil society to a conservative interest group. Thus a narrative about ethnic partition of the state territories was introduced in Bosnia in the early 1990s, and has been imposed for three decades as the only possible “political” narrative. It’s the biggest nonsense!
Bosnian-hood is a political category and implies individual or group relationship to the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnian-hood is being pushed back by those “policies” and governing groups that deceive us with claims that the political community must be governed by ethno-religious criteria and rigid identities, according to the disputable assumption that the only thing that matters in political life of people in a country is to which ethnic or religious group they belong. To explain that religious belief is a personal thing of every individual means to develop awareness that the political is the general that a large number of people have in common and implies a public-legal relationship with the state and its other citizens. The political (Greek politikos) is a set of duties that are tied to the state or to what is common in one community of people. It is, in fact, national or state policy, and in its conduct the nation functions as a political community of citizens.
[i] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Zagreb: Political Culture, 1998, p. 60. In addition to all this, the period of transition to industrialism had to, according to our model, be the age of nationalism, a period of tumultuous transformations in which either political or cultural boundaries were changed or both, to satisfy the new nationalist imperative that began to be felt for the first time.
Image source: sarajevo-siege-tour-viewpoint-trebevic-sarajevo-funky-tours-traveller-photos.jpg
The nation is a political community of citizens. European rationalism of the late 18th century and the first half of the 19th century terminated the perception that the state is an organization derived from God’s will. The state is secular and is inhabited by citizens! Secularism means separating the church from the state, developing a civil, secular, plural society and state institutions governed by law. In every contemporary narrative on modern nationalism in Europe, we always begin with the Firstborn Nation of England and the French Revolution as the starting point of the modern nation.[i] It is a topos from which European nations-states have evolved, in which the ethnic was pushed into the pre-modern and pre-political state, and the nation has been placed in the space of political or political struggle. The modern nation is emerging in the epoch of capitalism in Europe, and it is problematic to project it into the pre-modern times.
Living today in a European state such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, an individual citizen can say that he is not the subject of a monarch, as was his ancestor in the age of the Ottoman Empire. This shows the change, so he is not a servant of the Sultan or some other monarch, because he lives in a parliamentary political system where political parties compete in the elections for positions in the government. In a feudal, pre-modern system the subject is, in fact, a “servant” of a master who is powerful and even considered the representative of God on Earth or the one who possesses divine prerogatives in his reign. The subject has his ruler, monarch, king, emperor or someone similar – whom he surrenders all power and the right to rule. But after the bourgeois revolutions across Europe, from the 18th century to the present, things have changed drastically. Today in Europe there are monarchs and their families, but they no longer have a constitutional and legislative power in their hands.
In the modern epoch, the individual, a citizen of the state, has rights and obligations, freedoms and responsibilities in a pluralist political order. He chooses certain political options and gives them support. Political options, identified through different political organisations, work to win power and achieve political agendas. In the developed liberal democratic order, political parties do not represent ethno-religious groups (as in some areas of the Balkans), but certain political ideas for which citizens give their votes and support. A developed democratic order respects civic values and does not invade the privacy of citizens (i.e. ethnic, religious, cultural identity of an individual citizen). It keeps the distinction between the national (state) and the ethnic (folk culture, language, religion, customs, traditions…). This is a continuous distinction between the legal-political sphere and the cultural or historical-psychological sphere of people’s lives in the community. The nation’s legal understanding and sociological theories of the nation don’t always match and often seem to diverge in basic concepts.
The awareness that the individual is a citizen of one state means that he is free, equal, protected by the laws of the state, the public values of political life, that he has citizenship, that he has rights and obligations in the state system. This contains the essential characteristics of the individual’s life as a political being — the basis of the individual is freedom. That’s guaranteed by the state. The modern nation integrates individuals or all members of one state into a community of citizens that keeps us out of a particular class, ethnic circle, religious community, family community. It is important to emphasize that the nation is a unique modern form of social integration or a form of sociability. This form differs substantially from the one that we call ethnicism – celebrating and ideologizing the politics of “tribes” as supreme politics. The civic nation comprises the multilateral content of ethnicity and supersedes it in the political as an action around the general that is essential to all members of the state.
The modern nation starts from the free individual, the man who operates from his own freedom, morality and responsibility for the community. The individual (the citizen) is the greatest value of social-state life. This concept implies a political community of free individuals who make decisions and take positions on the main flows of the political community. The nation conceptualized like that does not start from a collectivity or a homogeneous group, therefore, it implies the free individual and thinks of his common good in the political community. This is the state that cares for all its citizens! It is necessary, however, to note that we often meet people who do not develop their own individuality and do not behave as free individuals in the state but hide in a crowd, group, “tribe”, and there compensate for the power they do not possess as individuals, or acquire psychological security. They are part of the political culture in which an individual is determined only through belonging to a homogeneous “group”, a collectivity that gives him identity, meaning and happiness. In this political culture, citizens are, unfortunately, constantly subjected to a perverse political orientation whose basis is reduction of the political community of citizens to an ethno-religious community governed by a single leader (ethnarch), the representative of an ethnic group, chief of a tribe, or some “chosen” leader. In this, the highest profit is reserved for priests and their organized religious forms, through their control of conservative politics. They become the richest and most powerful parts of such a society. In unfortunate times, priests arise as those who explain the meaning of man’s life and suppress the scientific forms of explanation of human life. In this blurred horror, it is necessary to advocate preservation of the distinction between the nation and the national against various kinds of ethnocentric exclusivity, tribalism and other inherited cultural loyalties. It is wrong to identify the nation with the glorification of an ethnic collective!
In Bosnia, however, at work is the ethno-political narrative on the “constituent nature of the peoples”, an attempt to make the ethnically determined ‘peoples’ a substantive form of the political, which brings us back to the pre-democratic and ethno-collectivist organization of political life. In this way, in fact, the neighboring states deliberately create the possibility for direct interference in the political affairs of Bosnia through separate homogenized ethnic groups. It is precisely in these attempts to subjugate all Bosnian to the external domination that all their cynical deception is shown. The neighboring states, with their hegemonic intentions, attempt to occupy and destroy the pieces of the Bosnian territory through projected cultural loyalty to the ethnic groups that also exist in these states. The hegemony of the Serbian and Croatian nationalism towards Bosnia rests on such a premise. In that, one can clearly recognize the point of setting up the ethno-religious definition of the nation as the primary political determination. All the “wisdom” of this ethno-politics is reflected in the reduction of the Bosnian identity to “the three (constituent?) peoples” – as if these “three nations” constitute Bosnia by inclusion of “their” territories!? In this, the Bosnian people are skilfully deceived that the political is only what is ethnic (and religious) and that all narratives about Bosnia must be translated into epic narratives about “the three separate peoples”! Skilful pseudo-scientific propaganda interpolates into the history an ideological mantra that since the beginning of time Bosnia has been based on “the three peoples”, while deliberately hiding the historical fact that the people of Bosnia have become divided only since the 19th century, in accordance with the propaganda projections of the external national programmes. Bosnian citizens have not yet been brought to awareness of the Bosnian identity as a political category that reflects the meaning of the common existence of all the people in Bosnia. The Bosnian identity does not exclude anyone in his peculiarity, because Bosnia’s existence has always been inclusive and ennobling, therefore, it implies plurality of human forms. This clearly shows the connection between the cultural sphere and the legal-political sphere of the existence of people in the community.
It is evident that citizens are deceived by the primitive policies of exclusion and hatred that destroy Bosnia’s European future. The point is that the institutions of the state are captured by suspicious political-conservative groups that turn the state into the property of a “tribal” community and demolish the rights of the people as free citizens of the state. Thus it may happen that one form of government, for example, the judicial authority of the state, can be abused and controlled by political groups engaged in illegal business. It is a signal to citizens to fight to preserve the state and its institutions. If they don’t, they will be subjected to a dictatorship. Historical experience reminds us that the institution of a leader constantly re-emerges in the Balkans, the leader who decides everything and without whose consent nothing can happen in the human community. The people are almost accustomed to surrendering all their power to either God or the all-powerful Ruler. These are the societies and political systems in which citizens do not participate in a democratic way in politics but serve as objects of manipulation. So, there is no participatory democracy or political culture of citizens’ participation in this system of government.
It happens that the ethnic suddenly wants to “jump” from the sphere of the cultural and historical and psychological-emotional into the sphere of politics and impose itself as the decisive and only for all political “struggles”. This practice clearly states that there is a crisis of understanding and defining the nation and the national in the face of ethno-nationalism and ethnocentrism. But, also, it points to the fact that the public sphere, the public space, the “things” of the community, as far as every man in one state is concerned, unfortunately, are in the hands of the alienated centers of control and governance that successfully manipulate the state system as an area of “their own” power. Thus some tribal leader and his priest subjugate the political to their own will! Then one must think about identity on another level. The problem of identity of individuals and groups is to be resolved in the sphere of culture or cultural activity of human communities, and the problem of freedom through the rule of law in the state.
In democracy’s life, it is impossible to understand anything without the idea of demos through which all people in the community (polis, city, state), all citizens, think. In democracy, they all have influence on power – not only chosen elites or powerful individuals. It happens, however, that certain groups determine demos differently in political action and very irresponsibly attach to it ethnic determination or ethnic semantic framework. But, again and again, one should emphasize that demos is not ethnos! When demos is reduced to ethnos, at work is the historical “backsliding of democracy.” (C. Taylor) It is, in fact, a deeper cultural, epochal, existential backsliding of humans! Somewhere residents from the Rust Belt (U.S., France, etc.) are mobilizing, in which the devastating de-industrialization and pauperization of their life occurs, somewhere pure dispersal of populism drives the mass, and hatred of foreigners, fascist hysteria of fundamentalist ethno-identity and “pure race” or attempts to divide society into crazy ghettos through the evolving fear of migrants and so on. Mass mobilization never ends well or beyond the dead end. The decaying landscapes of the world are an ideological ground for ethnic ideologies.
The inability to spot and preserve the fine distinction between the national and the ethnic warns that a social order has not yet reached a level of awareness of democratic politics. So, one can talk about the relationship between undemocratic politics and dominance of the ethnic, that is, about the correlation that testifies to the inability to draw the distinction between the national and the ethnic. Conservative groups of politicians and priests constantly deceive social groups and their historical-social life that their ethnic and religious determination is all that matters, and then they postulate it into the sphere of politics and the political. In this way, we have a confusion and deception of the people of one state, because those categories relating to private life are presented as key political categories. This has been happening in Bosnia since the beginning of the 20th century. It also shows that democracy is a suitable form of government that can be used for many manipulations of political oligarchies. Through it, a soft fascism can be established, so as to make citizens unaware of its rise. The mass media, in doing so, serve as a means for deceiving people by false interpretations of social phenomena and processes. If civil society itself is subjugated and suppressed by the totalitarian demand of ethnic domination to be above all as a supreme value, then it is quite certain that fascist tendencies are at work. Behind this process is an established “elite of power” or ethno-religious political oligarchy, which politically and technically conducts the subjugation of civil society to a conservative interest group. Thus a narrative about ethnic partition of the state territories was introduced in Bosnia in the early 1990s, and has been imposed for three decades as the only possible “political” narrative. It’s the biggest nonsense!
Bosnian-hood is a political category and implies individual or group relationship to the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnian-hood is being pushed back by those “policies” and governing groups that deceive us with claims that the political community must be governed by ethno-religious criteria and rigid identities, according to the disputable assumption that the only thing that matters in political life of people in a country is to which ethnic or religious group they belong. To explain that religious belief is a personal thing of every individual means to develop awareness that the political is the general that a large number of people have in common and implies a public-legal relationship with the state and its other citizens. The political (Greek politikos) is a set of duties that are tied to the state or to what is common in one community of people. It is, in fact, national or state policy, and in its conduct the nation functions as a political community of citizens.
[i] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Zagreb: Political Culture, 1998, p. 60. In addition to all this, the period of transition to industrialism had to, according to our model, be the age of nationalism, a period of tumultuous transformations in which either political or cultural boundaries were changed or both, to satisfy the new nationalist imperative that began to be felt for the first time.
Image source: sarajevo-siege-tour-viewpoint-trebevic-sarajevo-funky-tours-traveller-photos.jpg
The nation is a political community of citizens. European rationalism of the late 18th century and the first half of the 19th century terminated the perception that the state is an organization derived from God’s will. The state is secular and is inhabited by citizens! Secularism means separating the church from the state, developing a civil, secular, plural society and state institutions governed by law. In every contemporary narrative on modern nationalism in Europe, we always begin with the Firstborn Nation of England and the French Revolution as the starting point of the modern nation.[i] It is a topos from which European nations-states have evolved, in which the ethnic was pushed into the pre-modern and pre-political state, and the nation has been placed in the space of political or political struggle. The modern nation is emerging in the epoch of capitalism in Europe, and it is problematic to project it into the pre-modern times.
Living today in a European state such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, an individual citizen can say that he is not the subject of a monarch, as was his ancestor in the age of the Ottoman Empire. This shows the change, so he is not a servant of the Sultan or some other monarch, because he lives in a parliamentary political system where political parties compete in the elections for positions in the government. In a feudal, pre-modern system the subject is, in fact, a “servant” of a master who is powerful and even considered the representative of God on Earth or the one who possesses divine prerogatives in his reign. The subject has his ruler, monarch, king, emperor or someone similar – whom he surrenders all power and the right to rule. But after the bourgeois revolutions across Europe, from the 18th century to the present, things have changed drastically. Today in Europe there are monarchs and their families, but they no longer have a constitutional and legislative power in their hands.
In the modern epoch, the individual, a citizen of the state, has rights and obligations, freedoms and responsibilities in a pluralist political order. He chooses certain political options and gives them support. Political options, identified through different political organisations, work to win power and achieve political agendas. In the developed liberal democratic order, political parties do not represent ethno-religious groups (as in some areas of the Balkans), but certain political ideas for which citizens give their votes and support. A developed democratic order respects civic values and does not invade the privacy of citizens (i.e. ethnic, religious, cultural identity of an individual citizen). It keeps the distinction between the national (state) and the ethnic (folk culture, language, religion, customs, traditions…). This is a continuous distinction between the legal-political sphere and the cultural or historical-psychological sphere of people’s lives in the community. The nation’s legal understanding and sociological theories of the nation don’t always match and often seem to diverge in basic concepts.
The awareness that the individual is a citizen of one state means that he is free, equal, protected by the laws of the state, the public values of political life, that he has citizenship, that he has rights and obligations in the state system. This contains the essential characteristics of the individual’s life as a political being — the basis of the individual is freedom. That’s guaranteed by the state. The modern nation integrates individuals or all members of one state into a community of citizens that keeps us out of a particular class, ethnic circle, religious community, family community. It is important to emphasize that the nation is a unique modern form of social integration or a form of sociability. This form differs substantially from the one that we call ethnicism – celebrating and ideologizing the politics of “tribes” as supreme politics. The civic nation comprises the multilateral content of ethnicity and supersedes it in the political as an action around the general that is essential to all members of the state.
The modern nation starts from the free individual, the man who operates from his own freedom, morality and responsibility for the community. The individual (the citizen) is the greatest value of social-state life. This concept implies a political community of free individuals who make decisions and take positions on the main flows of the political community. The nation conceptualized like that does not start from a collectivity or a homogeneous group, therefore, it implies the free individual and thinks of his common good in the political community. This is the state that cares for all its citizens! It is necessary, however, to note that we often meet people who do not develop their own individuality and do not behave as free individuals in the state but hide in a crowd, group, “tribe”, and there compensate for the power they do not possess as individuals, or acquire psychological security. They are part of the political culture in which an individual is determined only through belonging to a homogeneous “group”, a collectivity that gives him identity, meaning and happiness. In this political culture, citizens are, unfortunately, constantly subjected to a perverse political orientation whose basis is reduction of the political community of citizens to an ethno-religious community governed by a single leader (ethnarch), the representative of an ethnic group, chief of a tribe, or some “chosen” leader. In this, the highest profit is reserved for priests and their organized religious forms, through their control of conservative politics. They become the richest and most powerful parts of such a society. In unfortunate times, priests arise as those who explain the meaning of man’s life and suppress the scientific forms of explanation of human life. In this blurred horror, it is necessary to advocate preservation of the distinction between the nation and the national against various kinds of ethnocentric exclusivity, tribalism and other inherited cultural loyalties. It is wrong to identify the nation with the glorification of an ethnic collective!
In Bosnia, however, at work is the ethno-political narrative on the “constituent nature of the peoples”, an attempt to make the ethnically determined ‘peoples’ a substantive form of the political, which brings us back to the pre-democratic and ethno-collectivist organization of political life. In this way, in fact, the neighboring states deliberately create the possibility for direct interference in the political affairs of Bosnia through separate homogenized ethnic groups. It is precisely in these attempts to subjugate all Bosnian to the external domination that all their cynical deception is shown. The neighboring states, with their hegemonic intentions, attempt to occupy and destroy the pieces of the Bosnian territory through projected cultural loyalty to the ethnic groups that also exist in these states. The hegemony of the Serbian and Croatian nationalism towards Bosnia rests on such a premise. In that, one can clearly recognize the point of setting up the ethno-religious definition of the nation as the primary political determination. All the “wisdom” of this ethno-politics is reflected in the reduction of the Bosnian identity to “the three (constituent?) peoples” – as if these “three nations” constitute Bosnia by inclusion of “their” territories!? In this, the Bosnian people are skilfully deceived that the political is only what is ethnic (and religious) and that all narratives about Bosnia must be translated into epic narratives about “the three separate peoples”! Skilful pseudo-scientific propaganda interpolates into the history an ideological mantra that since the beginning of time Bosnia has been based on “the three peoples”, while deliberately hiding the historical fact that the people of Bosnia have become divided only since the 19th century, in accordance with the propaganda projections of the external national programmes. Bosnian citizens have not yet been brought to awareness of the Bosnian identity as a political category that reflects the meaning of the common existence of all the people in Bosnia. The Bosnian identity does not exclude anyone in his peculiarity, because Bosnia’s existence has always been inclusive and ennobling, therefore, it implies plurality of human forms. This clearly shows the connection between the cultural sphere and the legal-political sphere of the existence of people in the community.
It is evident that citizens are deceived by the primitive policies of exclusion and hatred that destroy Bosnia’s European future. The point is that the institutions of the state are captured by suspicious political-conservative groups that turn the state into the property of a “tribal” community and demolish the rights of the people as free citizens of the state. Thus it may happen that one form of government, for example, the judicial authority of the state, can be abused and controlled by political groups engaged in illegal business. It is a signal to citizens to fight to preserve the state and its institutions. If they don’t, they will be subjected to a dictatorship. Historical experience reminds us that the institution of a leader constantly re-emerges in the Balkans, the leader who decides everything and without whose consent nothing can happen in the human community. The people are almost accustomed to surrendering all their power to either God or the all-powerful Ruler. These are the societies and political systems in which citizens do not participate in a democratic way in politics but serve as objects of manipulation. So, there is no participatory democracy or political culture of citizens’ participation in this system of government.
It happens that the ethnic suddenly wants to “jump” from the sphere of the cultural and historical and psychological-emotional into the sphere of politics and impose itself as the decisive and only for all political “struggles”. This practice clearly states that there is a crisis of understanding and defining the nation and the national in the face of ethno-nationalism and ethnocentrism. But, also, it points to the fact that the public sphere, the public space, the “things” of the community, as far as every man in one state is concerned, unfortunately, are in the hands of the alienated centers of control and governance that successfully manipulate the state system as an area of “their own” power. Thus some tribal leader and his priest subjugate the political to their own will! Then one must think about identity on another level. The problem of identity of individuals and groups is to be resolved in the sphere of culture or cultural activity of human communities, and the problem of freedom through the rule of law in the state.
In democracy’s life, it is impossible to understand anything without the idea of demos through which all people in the community (polis, city, state), all citizens, think. In democracy, they all have influence on power – not only chosen elites or powerful individuals. It happens, however, that certain groups determine demos differently in political action and very irresponsibly attach to it ethnic determination or ethnic semantic framework. But, again and again, one should emphasize that demos is not ethnos! When demos is reduced to ethnos, at work is the historical “backsliding of democracy.” (C. Taylor) It is, in fact, a deeper cultural, epochal, existential backsliding of humans! Somewhere residents from the Rust Belt (U.S., France, etc.) are mobilizing, in which the devastating de-industrialization and pauperization of their life occurs, somewhere pure dispersal of populism drives the mass, and hatred of foreigners, fascist hysteria of fundamentalist ethno-identity and “pure race” or attempts to divide society into crazy ghettos through the evolving fear of migrants and so on. Mass mobilization never ends well or beyond the dead end. The decaying landscapes of the world are an ideological ground for ethnic ideologies.
The inability to spot and preserve the fine distinction between the national and the ethnic warns that a social order has not yet reached a level of awareness of democratic politics. So, one can talk about the relationship between undemocratic politics and dominance of the ethnic, that is, about the correlation that testifies to the inability to draw the distinction between the national and the ethnic. Conservative groups of politicians and priests constantly deceive social groups and their historical-social life that their ethnic and religious determination is all that matters, and then they postulate it into the sphere of politics and the political. In this way, we have a confusion and deception of the people of one state, because those categories relating to private life are presented as key political categories. This has been happening in Bosnia since the beginning of the 20th century. It also shows that democracy is a suitable form of government that can be used for many manipulations of political oligarchies. Through it, a soft fascism can be established, so as to make citizens unaware of its rise. The mass media, in doing so, serve as a means for deceiving people by false interpretations of social phenomena and processes. If civil society itself is subjugated and suppressed by the totalitarian demand of ethnic domination to be above all as a supreme value, then it is quite certain that fascist tendencies are at work. Behind this process is an established “elite of power” or ethno-religious political oligarchy, which politically and technically conducts the subjugation of civil society to a conservative interest group. Thus a narrative about ethnic partition of the state territories was introduced in Bosnia in the early 1990s, and has been imposed for three decades as the only possible “political” narrative. It’s the biggest nonsense!
Bosnian-hood is a political category and implies individual or group relationship to the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnian-hood is being pushed back by those “policies” and governing groups that deceive us with claims that the political community must be governed by ethno-religious criteria and rigid identities, according to the disputable assumption that the only thing that matters in political life of people in a country is to which ethnic or religious group they belong. To explain that religious belief is a personal thing of every individual means to develop awareness that the political is the general that a large number of people have in common and implies a public-legal relationship with the state and its other citizens. The political (Greek politikos) is a set of duties that are tied to the state or to what is common in one community of people. It is, in fact, national or state policy, and in its conduct the nation functions as a political community of citizens.
[i] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Zagreb: Political Culture, 1998, p. 60. In addition to all this, the period of transition to industrialism had to, according to our model, be the age of nationalism, a period of tumultuous transformations in which either political or cultural boundaries were changed or both, to satisfy the new nationalist imperative that began to be felt for the first time.
Image source: sarajevo-siege-tour-viewpoint-trebevic-sarajevo-funky-tours-traveller-photos.jpg