Zlatko Hadžidedić No Nationalism without Capitalism, and Vice Versa
Is ethno-nationalism in Bosnia-Herzegovina “ever-existing” and “ineradicable”, and does it inevitably threaten the country’s very survival? In order to provide an adequate answer to these questions, we must put this popular, simplistic picture into a broader historical and geopolitical context.
First of all, let us pay attention to the fact that the rapid rise of nationalism in the post-socialist societies at the end of the 20th century, as was also the case in the post-feudal societies of the 18th and 19th centuries, coincided with the rise of capitalism.[i] In both historical and social contexts, the ideology of nationalism practically served as a cover to legitimize the appropriation of vast economic resources and the takeover of the complete state apparatus by a single social class, the growing class of capitalists. Within this ideological construct, with the help of a simple logical trick, the partial interests of this social class were a priori legitimized, having been presented as the universal interests of the entire society:
- “the nation” is conceived as a virtual sovereign, an avatar that simulates the being of the entire society, through which this being is realized in the form of sovereignty, and thus “the nation” becomes the ultimate source of social and political legitimacy;
- the class of capitalists assumes control of the state apparatus and ownership of economic resources, declaring this act an act of “the nation”, thereby constituting its ‘national state’;
- this unilateral expropriation/appropriation, labelled as “national revolution”, is thus presented as a self-legitimizing act by which the whole society realizes its being in the form of sovereignty, embodied as a “nation” by constituting its “national state’;
- the state and its economic resources thus function at a nominal level as the sovereign property of the avatar called “the nation”, while on a factual level they function as the sovereign property of the class that created it.
Karl Marx was among the few who was not deceived by this logical-ideological trick: he saw these social changes simply as the “bourgeois revolutions”, and their products as the “bourgeois states,” states created to serve the interests of the ruling class of capitalists (he also saw all other models of state as tailored to the interests of the ruling classes). However, many before and after Marx did not understand this trick, and in all parts of the world where capitalism has achieved dominance the ideology of nationalism has made them believe that the avatar called “the nation” represents the only legitimate form of social existence, that the state projected as the sovereign property of that avatar (which in practice functions as the sovereign property of the class that created it) constitutes the only legitimate form of political organization, and that the private interests of one class represent the public interests of the entire society. The class of capitalists thus established the ideology of nationalism as an unquestionable social religion, where “the nation” plays the role of unquestionable divinity and where the a priori legitimacy is granted to the power that propagates that religion and identifies itself as the clergy which serves that god. But, paradoxically, while it closed the targeted societies within the virtual boundaries of nations and within the territorial borders of states tailored around these nations, and thereby brought them into a status of mutual mental and physical isolation, the class of capitalists established its own structures which have been functioning beyond these boundaries and borders, as a trans¬national network, so as to create advantageous conditions for extra-exploitation of the populations isolated in their respective “nations”.[ii] For, by its very nature capital is not only a-national, but also trans-national: while on one hand capital tends to isolate the exploited classes within separate nations through the ideology of nationalism that imposes nations and national states as the only possible modus vivendi, on the other hand it builds its own corporations and monopolies as trans-national structures, independent of the physical, political and psychological boundaries that nationalism projects onto the rest of society.
The ideology of nationalism is, therefore, undoubtedly universalist in its aspirations and achievements. But nationalism in non-Western European countries – where, of course, Bosnia and other countries of the former Yugoslavia belong – still has some specific characteristics. Due to the prolonged presence of the feudal empires (Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov) on their territories, nationalism appeared in them relatively late in comparison to the countries of their origin, the 17th-century England and the 18th-century France. As such, nationalist discourse in non-Western countries has yet to establish itself in more stable, non-excess forms – just like capitalism, which there also largely remains in the excess forms that characterize the so-called “primitive accumulation of capital”. Given that most of these non-Western societies have long been exposed to the religious proselytism of the aforementioned empires (and religious proselytism is one of the basic constituent principles of all feudal and late feudal empires), it is logical that their newly created capitalist elites, acting in opposition to this proselytism, have largely emphasized their own confessional identities as the strongest and safest foundations for the development of their own national projects and identities. National identities constructed by this kind of confessional exclusivity (usually associated with ethnic exclusivity) have manifested themselves as extremely impermeable and inflexible, and the rivalry between their umbrella national projects as almost irreconcilable. This is why this model of nationalism maintained a strong position in the political processes within these societies even during the period when they were part of the Cold War bloc of communist countries, so that it has occupied the very center of political developments upon their return to the capitalist orbit.
The ideology of nationalism began its penetration into Bosnia-Herzegovina in the second half of the 19th century under the influence of the expansionist national project from the Kingdom of Serbia based on the ethno-confessional principle, associated with the emergence of initial elements of capitalism among the indigenous urban social structures in Bosnia. The anti-Ottoman Movement for the Autonomy of Bosnia and its uprising (1831-1832) contained certain proto-nationalist ideas; however, this authentic Bosnian national project was not based on ethno-confessional, but on less exclusive, historical-territorial principle of national identity, uncharacteristic for non-Western European countries. As such, it clearly manifested its weakness and inefficiency in relation to the rival national projects, primarily the one from Serbia, which used the exclusive ethno-confessional principle as a tool for the development of national identification. The practical-political superiority of the ethno-confessional concept of national identification in this part of the world is best demonstrated by the fact that even Serbian nationalism itself (at the time when it was influenced by the ideas of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, the main figure of the Serbian Enlightenment, who developed them on the basis of Herder’s ethno-linguistic concept of nationalism, present in the German-speaking countries) was not effective in the efforts to promote the Serbian national identity on the basis of multi-confessional, ethno-linguistic principle, so as to mobilise and homogenise into a newly-emerging Serb nation all those who spoke the language that was common in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia, in order to legitimize the expansion of the Kingdom of Serbia into the latter three countries, on the basis of the principle that all members of one nation should live in one national state. As in other non-Western European countries, in the case of Serbia the ethno-confessional concept of national identification eventually proved to be a considerably stronger foundation for the realization and expansion of the national project. After the aforementioned conceptual wanderings with Herderianism, Serbian national project eventually succeeded in its efforts to mobilize and homogenize the vast majority of members of the Orthodox confession in these three countries as members of the Serbian nation (the main promoter of this concept of national identification was Ilija Garašanin, Kingdom of Serbia’s Minister of Interior in the second half of the 19th century), so that they practically became part of the project conceived in accordance with the aforementioned principle of “one nation in one state”, with the aim to eventually cede to Serbia parts of the countries in which they lived.
Although the constituent principles of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, when it occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878, were intrinsically opposed to the principles of nationalism, this already worn-out empire had already made key concessions to the Hungarian national project, having transformed itself into a hybrid combination of a late feudal empire and a capitalist confederation, so that eventually both Czech and Croatian nationalism had also gained considerable strength within its borders.[iii] Also, this hybrid capitalist-feudal state brought elements of developed capitalism to the cities of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which solidified the socio-economic basis for further penetration of Serbian and Croatian nationalism among the urban Orthodox and Catholic population in Bosnia.
In addition to these nationalism built on ethno-confessional identities, the South Slavic ethno-linguistic national concept also occurred in Bosnia – as in Serbia and Croatia before – associated with the project of a single state of Southern Slavs and, possibly, their common Yugoslav nation. Although the dominant international powers supported the establishment of this state after World War I, as well as its survival after World War II, the ethno-linguistic concept of the Yugoslav nation never managed to overtake the ethno-confessional concept of national identification promoted by the Serbian and Croatian nationalism, whose mutual confrontation constantly undermined the chances for the majority of the population to identify with the concept of the Yugoslav nation. The socialist Yugoslavia, of course, did not promote national homogeneity but trans-national solidarity of the working class as its official constituent principle.
However, by accepting the federal system, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia made certain concessions to the already existing concepts of nations and nationalism – the ethno-confessional one in Serbia and Croatia and among the Orthodox and Catholic populations in Bosnia, the ethno-linguistic one in Slovenia and Macedonia, as well as the historical-territorial one in Montenegro, while Bosnia itself was conceived as an undifferentiated zone of influence of Serbian and Croatian nationalism.[iv] It is therefore logical that, with the gradual turning of the SFRY towards capitalist system, the position of the Serbian and Croatian ethno-confessional nationalism had been strengthened, so that the ultimate triumph of capitalism led to the dissolution of the SFRY into national states, followed by the armed conflict between the Serbian and Croatian expansionist projects over Bosnia, in its parts where the Orthodox and Catholic population made the statistical majority. After the collapse of the SFRY, an independent Bosnia-Herzegovina, constituted as a non-national state, has clearly been perceived as an anomaly within the international capitalist order based on national states. Therefore, from the independence day to the present, there have always been initiatives – not only by Serbian and Croatian nationalism, but also by influential international circles that promote the universal capitalist order – that this anomaly be eliminated by dividing Bosnia’s territory between the ethno-national projects of ‘Greater Serbia’ and ‘Greater Croatia’.
Of course, in the case of a consistent application of the ethno-confessional concept of national states on the Bosnian soil, the existing ethno-confessional identity of the Muslim population would certainly remain a contentious issue. During the Austro-Hungarian occupation and the first and second Yugoslavia, the original ethno-confessional identity of the Muslim population in Bosnia, strictly speaking, was not transformed into a national one, since it was not based on the nationalist idea of creation of a national state, but rather on its distinctive cultural and traditional characteristics. The efforts to construct a national identity of the Muslim population began only in the 1990s, when its political elite as a covert goal adopted creation of an ethno-confessional “Muslim state” in that part of the Bosnian territory where the Muslim population represented a statistical majority. In this context, this elite renamed Muslims as “Bosniaks” (which is the ancient name for all people living in Bosnia, regardless of their confessional identity), in order to nominally legitimize its aspirations to these remaining parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, the question arises to what extent this identity was actually formed as a national one in the true sense of the word, because most of this population has not become aware of the fact that its political elite has introduced this manipulation as a part of the project to create a separate national state, which could only be realized through the partition of Bosnia between the Serbian, Croatian and Bosniak national projects. The vast majority of this confessional group does not accept such a partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina and continues to treat its identity as cultural/traditional, not as a national one. However, it should still be noted that this concept of an exclusive ethno-confessional nation was introduced precisely at the time of the introduction of the capitalist order in Bosnia-Herzegovina and that it continues to live within this socio-economic framework.[v]
The experience of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a non-national state has shown that international circles that promote the universal capitalist order (especially those located in Great Britain and Europe) are in principle inclined to accept the option of its final partition between the Serbian and Croatian national projects, with the creation of a miniature ethno-confessional national state for the Muslim population, since that partition establishes the national state as the norm with no exceptions. It is far from clear whether these circles, guided by the same motive, would also support the possibility of constituting a single multi-confessional Bosnian nation based on the civic i.e. historical-territorial principle, since this very option has never had adequate promotion by domestic political forces. Moreover, these domestic forces, even unconsciously, promote the first option on a daily basis, insisting that Bosnia-Herzegovina’s ethno-confessional communities must be called “nations”. For, despite the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of the term “nation”, in the entire world this term always implies one specific constructive principle, according to which every group called “the nation” aspires to possess sovereignty and create its own laws, that is, to possesses its own state. Therefore, when one speaks about “three nations” in Bosnia, it inevitably invites and by definition legitimizes projects aiming to complete three national states – in this case, to cede the current autonomous entity Republika Srpska to Serbia, to cede the Catholic-populated Western Herzegovina to Croatia, and to found the national state for Muslims/Bosniaks. Regardless of whether the majority of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina supports these projects and their implications or not, the daily public and official use of the term “three nations” axiomatically assigns legitimacy to these projects and grants them support of those international circles that treat the model of the national state as the universal norm.
Through the attempts to implement these three national projects, the domestic ethno-confessional elites have constituted themselves as three distinct political-economic oligarchies. By forming “their own”, distinct nation-state structures, they have sought to legalise the appropriation of the economic resources within the territories they have seized. Of course, the pursuit of three national projects within one limited territorial framework implies their permanent conflict over territorial and institutional demarcation, and this permanent systemic political conflict generates the permanent systemic economic paralysis, where the entire economy is reduced to the expropriation, distribution and exploitation of the available resources, with a total lack of investments, production, exports and development. A step out of this cycle of systemic paralysis would only be possible by strengthening one different – entrepreneurial, production- and export-oriented – capitalist elite, which would not identify its strength and interests with the maintenance of the three existing national projects and their mutual conflict. In this case, it would be logical for such an elite to identify its interests with the weakening of the foundations on which these national projects are based, which primarily implies a de-nationalisation of identities constructed within these projects, so as to return them to their original ethno-confessional frameworks.
The basic precondition for such a transformation is permanent abandonment of the practice of public labeling of these ethno-confessional identities as “nations”. For, such a public discourse automatically, on psychological and political levels, pushes these identities into the framework of the three national projects, and thereby draws them into a constant competition and conflict over the seizure of the three ‘national territories’. A different public discourse, in which these identities would be marked as confessional, ethnic or ethno-confessional, would lead to their de-nationalisation, that is, de-politicisation and de-territorialisation, promoting only their cultural/traditional distinctive characteristics. This would make room within the society as a whole to construct awareness of common interests arising from the logic of living in the existing common state, and therefore to construct a common political identity and a common, trans-ethnic and trans-confessional national project. Thus, instead of insisting on the three (supposedly cemented) national identities, which inevitably evokes creation of three national states within which these national identities must by definition be located (nation-to-state model), a single trans-ethnic and trans-confessional national identity (state-to-nation model) may well be constructed, based on the common interest identified with stable living in the already-existing common state. And then, a country whose population would have constructed a single national identity would not be an anomaly within the international order composed exclusively of national states.
National identities are shaped as part of national projects and national projects involve creation of national states. Therefore, so-called national conflicts do not represent uneradicated historical conflicts of certain population groups, but rather conflicts of political projects aiming to create their own national states. The basis for a conflict is an attempt to implement one national project at the expense of another, that is, to create one national state at the expense of another. If national projects do not touch and do not clash over creation of national states within one limited territory, there is no basis for conflict and so-called national conflicts do not occur.
Bosnia-Herzegovina is specific because the national projects based on the existing ethno-confessional identities did not have any territorial basis for their realization, that is, for the creation of national states: the confessional communities, whose distinctive characteristics have been used by the national projects from Serbia and Croatia in order to create separate national identities as the basis for their parallel greater-state expansions, had lived for centuries totally mixed in the single common territory of Bosnia, without any particular territories reserved for particular confessions. Therefore, there were no serious conflicts among these communities as long as their identities remained purely confessional (otherwise, of course, these communities could not live without physical separation for so many centuries), that is, as long as these primary identities have not been transformed into national identities within the aforementioned national projects, which have served as the foundation for the the expansion of the existing national states, Serbia and Croatia, at Bosnia’s expense.
That is exactly why these national projects had to apply the most brutal force to create ‘their own’ territories in the process of so-called ethnic cleansing: ethnic cleansing was not a result of any “irreconcilable historical antagonisms”, but the only possible tool for creation of separate national territories and realization of the aforementioned national projects in the given conditions. However, once having been in active struggle for territories, national projects, according to their inherent logic, can hardly give up the fight for creation of national territories and national states until they experience a total defeat. And they can be totally defeated only by other national projects, since such a mechanism represents the norm as long as the national states represent the norm within the global capitalist system. National projects always seek to create or expand their national states, and compromises do not characterize them – only a total victory in the form of the planned national state or a complete defeat by other national projects.
Thus, the presence of capitalism as the ruling model requires the presence of some form of nationalism – the question is only which model of construction of national identity some capitalist elite pragmatically chooses to build a national state, in order to effectively mobilise and homogenise the rest of society on its platform. The existing national projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina, based on the three ethno-confessional identities, despite their seemingly insoluble conflicts, inevitably lead to a final solution in the form of three national states, because nationalism is there to produce national states. But the process of Bosnia’s ultimate dissolution into three ethno-confessional nation-states can hardly take place without additional violence, without another war, and the question is whether such a development would be an acceptable option from the perspective of regional and European stability. Of course, the question is whether the eventual project of building a single common national identity within a single common state (state-to-nation model) would be an option that has sufficient political potential to substitute the three already present national projects. But, in any case, the option of their further conflict may continue to bring certain benefits only to the three existing oligarchies, and it cannot bring the most basic sense of perspective to the rest of the society, because there can be no perspective, other than the final dissolution, that it might contain.
[i] With the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the expansion of neoliberal capitalism in the countries of the former communist bloc, there was also the abandonment of the non-national principle of state organization and the expansion of the model of the national state in this part of the world. The socialist German Democratic Republic was left without the class principle on which it had been founded and thereby it lost its raison d’etre in relation to the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany, so that they inevitably merged into a single national state. For, by definition, there was no place within the capitalist order for two national states for the German nation, but only for one. Also, the states constituted as federations of ethnic communities (a federation of Czechs and Slovaks in the case of Czechoslovakia, a federation of Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Georgians, Kazakhs, etc. in the case of the Soviet Union, and a federation of Slovenians, Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, etc. in the case of Yugoslavia), based on the presumed trans-ethnic connections of their working classes, had no chances of survival: with the weakening of the concept of trans-ethnic class connections in the process of establishing the capitalist order, all of them were eventually constituted as sovereign nations with their independent national states.
[ii] It was precisely the trans-national structure of the class of capitalists that led Marx to assert that its dominance could only be countered with the help of a similar trans-national structure formed by the working class. Marx felt that the working class could not eliminate its exploitation isolated within the boundaries of “the nation.”
[iii] Croatian nationalists chose ethno-linguistic basis as a distinctive principle in relation to the rival Hungarian and Slovenian nationalisms, while having chosen ethno-confessional identity as a distinctive principle in relation to the Serbian nationalism.
[iv] The Montenegrin nation and its national state were constituted on a historical-territorial principle, although the Serbian nationalism, based on the ethno-confessional principle, has been present in Montenegro since the 19th century. This ideology promotes the idea that all inhabitants of Montenegro, due to their Orthodox confessional identity, must be nationally identified as Serbs. Montenegrin nationalism takes the Montenegrin ruler and poet from the 19th century, Petar Petrovic Njegoš, as the mythical creator of the Montenegrin nation. At the same time, paradoxically, those who promote Serbian national identity of the inhabitants of Montenegro also find their main foundation in his works, in which he advocates the ethno-confessional principle of national identification and in which Montenegro is identified as a part of the Serb nation.
[v] In the period when Bosnia-Herzegovina was included in Austria-Hungary, and then in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians, i.e. the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the so-called “agrarian reform” was not completed yet, so that certain elements of the Ottoman feudal order were still present on its territory. Therefore, capitalism in Bosnia-Herzegovina has been introduced for the first time only after the fall of the socialist system.
Is ethno-nationalism in Bosnia-Herzegovina “ever-existing” and “ineradicable”, and does it inevitably threaten the country’s very survival? In order to provide an adequate answer to these questions, we must put this popular, simplistic picture into a broader historical and geopolitical context.
First of all, let us pay attention to the fact that the rapid rise of nationalism in the post-socialist societies at the end of the 20th century, as was also the case in the post-feudal societies of the 18th and 19th centuries, coincided with the rise of capitalism.[i] In both historical and social contexts, the ideology of nationalism practically served as a cover to legitimize the appropriation of vast economic resources and the takeover of the complete state apparatus by a single social class, the growing class of capitalists. Within this ideological construct, with the help of a simple logical trick, the partial interests of this social class were a priori legitimized, having been presented as the universal interests of the entire society:
- “the nation” is conceived as a virtual sovereign, an avatar that simulates the being of the entire society, through which this being is realized in the form of sovereignty, and thus “the nation” becomes the ultimate source of social and political legitimacy;
- the class of capitalists assumes control of the state apparatus and ownership of economic resources, declaring this act an act of “the nation”, thereby constituting its ‘national state’;
- this unilateral expropriation/appropriation, labelled as “national revolution”, is thus presented as a self-legitimizing act by which the whole society realizes its being in the form of sovereignty, embodied as a “nation” by constituting its “national state’;
- the state and its economic resources thus function at a nominal level as the sovereign property of the avatar called “the nation”, while on a factual level they function as the sovereign property of the class that created it.
Karl Marx was among the few who was not deceived by this logical-ideological trick: he saw these social changes simply as the “bourgeois revolutions”, and their products as the “bourgeois states,” states created to serve the interests of the ruling class of capitalists (he also saw all other models of state as tailored to the interests of the ruling classes). However, many before and after Marx did not understand this trick, and in all parts of the world where capitalism has achieved dominance the ideology of nationalism has made them believe that the avatar called “the nation” represents the only legitimate form of social existence, that the state projected as the sovereign property of that avatar (which in practice functions as the sovereign property of the class that created it) constitutes the only legitimate form of political organization, and that the private interests of one class represent the public interests of the entire society. The class of capitalists thus established the ideology of nationalism as an unquestionable social religion, where “the nation” plays the role of unquestionable divinity and where the a priori legitimacy is granted to the power that propagates that religion and identifies itself as the clergy which serves that god. But, paradoxically, while it closed the targeted societies within the virtual boundaries of nations and within the territorial borders of states tailored around these nations, and thereby brought them into a status of mutual mental and physical isolation, the class of capitalists established its own structures which have been functioning beyond these boundaries and borders, as a trans¬national network, so as to create advantageous conditions for extra-exploitation of the populations isolated in their respective “nations”.[ii] For, by its very nature capital is not only a-national, but also trans-national: while on one hand capital tends to isolate the exploited classes within separate nations through the ideology of nationalism that imposes nations and national states as the only possible modus vivendi, on the other hand it builds its own corporations and monopolies as trans-national structures, independent of the physical, political and psychological boundaries that nationalism projects onto the rest of society.
The ideology of nationalism is, therefore, undoubtedly universalist in its aspirations and achievements. But nationalism in non-Western European countries – where, of course, Bosnia and other countries of the former Yugoslavia belong – still has some specific characteristics. Due to the prolonged presence of the feudal empires (Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov) on their territories, nationalism appeared in them relatively late in comparison to the countries of their origin, the 17th-century England and the 18th-century France. As such, nationalist discourse in non-Western countries has yet to establish itself in more stable, non-excess forms – just like capitalism, which there also largely remains in the excess forms that characterize the so-called “primitive accumulation of capital”. Given that most of these non-Western societies have long been exposed to the religious proselytism of the aforementioned empires (and religious proselytism is one of the basic constituent principles of all feudal and late feudal empires), it is logical that their newly created capitalist elites, acting in opposition to this proselytism, have largely emphasized their own confessional identities as the strongest and safest foundations for the development of their own national projects and identities. National identities constructed by this kind of confessional exclusivity (usually associated with ethnic exclusivity) have manifested themselves as extremely impermeable and inflexible, and the rivalry between their umbrella national projects as almost irreconcilable. This is why this model of nationalism maintained a strong position in the political processes within these societies even during the period when they were part of the Cold War bloc of communist countries, so that it has occupied the very center of political developments upon their return to the capitalist orbit.
The ideology of nationalism began its penetration into Bosnia-Herzegovina in the second half of the 19th century under the influence of the expansionist national project from the Kingdom of Serbia based on the ethno-confessional principle, associated with the emergence of initial elements of capitalism among the indigenous urban social structures in Bosnia. The anti-Ottoman Movement for the Autonomy of Bosnia and its uprising (1831-1832) contained certain proto-nationalist ideas; however, this authentic Bosnian national project was not based on ethno-confessional, but on less exclusive, historical-territorial principle of national identity, uncharacteristic for non-Western European countries. As such, it clearly manifested its weakness and inefficiency in relation to the rival national projects, primarily the one from Serbia, which used the exclusive ethno-confessional principle as a tool for the development of national identification. The practical-political superiority of the ethno-confessional concept of national identification in this part of the world is best demonstrated by the fact that even Serbian nationalism itself (at the time when it was influenced by the ideas of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, the main figure of the Serbian Enlightenment, who developed them on the basis of Herder’s ethno-linguistic concept of nationalism, present in the German-speaking countries) was not effective in the efforts to promote the Serbian national identity on the basis of multi-confessional, ethno-linguistic principle, so as to mobilise and homogenise into a newly-emerging Serb nation all those who spoke the language that was common in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia, in order to legitimize the expansion of the Kingdom of Serbia into the latter three countries, on the basis of the principle that all members of one nation should live in one national state. As in other non-Western European countries, in the case of Serbia the ethno-confessional concept of national identification eventually proved to be a considerably stronger foundation for the realization and expansion of the national project. After the aforementioned conceptual wanderings with Herderianism, Serbian national project eventually succeeded in its efforts to mobilize and homogenize the vast majority of members of the Orthodox confession in these three countries as members of the Serbian nation (the main promoter of this concept of national identification was Ilija Garašanin, Kingdom of Serbia’s Minister of Interior in the second half of the 19th century), so that they practically became part of the project conceived in accordance with the aforementioned principle of “one nation in one state”, with the aim to eventually cede to Serbia parts of the countries in which they lived.
Although the constituent principles of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, when it occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878, were intrinsically opposed to the principles of nationalism, this already worn-out empire had already made key concessions to the Hungarian national project, having transformed itself into a hybrid combination of a late feudal empire and a capitalist confederation, so that eventually both Czech and Croatian nationalism had also gained considerable strength within its borders.[iii] Also, this hybrid capitalist-feudal state brought elements of developed capitalism to the cities of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which solidified the socio-economic basis for further penetration of Serbian and Croatian nationalism among the urban Orthodox and Catholic population in Bosnia.
In addition to these nationalism built on ethno-confessional identities, the South Slavic ethno-linguistic national concept also occurred in Bosnia – as in Serbia and Croatia before – associated with the project of a single state of Southern Slavs and, possibly, their common Yugoslav nation. Although the dominant international powers supported the establishment of this state after World War I, as well as its survival after World War II, the ethno-linguistic concept of the Yugoslav nation never managed to overtake the ethno-confessional concept of national identification promoted by the Serbian and Croatian nationalism, whose mutual confrontation constantly undermined the chances for the majority of the population to identify with the concept of the Yugoslav nation. The socialist Yugoslavia, of course, did not promote national homogeneity but trans-national solidarity of the working class as its official constituent principle.
However, by accepting the federal system, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia made certain concessions to the already existing concepts of nations and nationalism – the ethno-confessional one in Serbia and Croatia and among the Orthodox and Catholic populations in Bosnia, the ethno-linguistic one in Slovenia and Macedonia, as well as the historical-territorial one in Montenegro, while Bosnia itself was conceived as an undifferentiated zone of influence of Serbian and Croatian nationalism.[iv] It is therefore logical that, with the gradual turning of the SFRY towards capitalist system, the position of the Serbian and Croatian ethno-confessional nationalism had been strengthened, so that the ultimate triumph of capitalism led to the dissolution of the SFRY into national states, followed by the armed conflict between the Serbian and Croatian expansionist projects over Bosnia, in its parts where the Orthodox and Catholic population made the statistical majority. After the collapse of the SFRY, an independent Bosnia-Herzegovina, constituted as a non-national state, has clearly been perceived as an anomaly within the international capitalist order based on national states. Therefore, from the independence day to the present, there have always been initiatives – not only by Serbian and Croatian nationalism, but also by influential international circles that promote the universal capitalist order – that this anomaly be eliminated by dividing Bosnia’s territory between the ethno-national projects of ‘Greater Serbia’ and ‘Greater Croatia’.
Of course, in the case of a consistent application of the ethno-confessional concept of national states on the Bosnian soil, the existing ethno-confessional identity of the Muslim population would certainly remain a contentious issue. During the Austro-Hungarian occupation and the first and second Yugoslavia, the original ethno-confessional identity of the Muslim population in Bosnia, strictly speaking, was not transformed into a national one, since it was not based on the nationalist idea of creation of a national state, but rather on its distinctive cultural and traditional characteristics. The efforts to construct a national identity of the Muslim population began only in the 1990s, when its political elite as a covert goal adopted creation of an ethno-confessional “Muslim state” in that part of the Bosnian territory where the Muslim population represented a statistical majority. In this context, this elite renamed Muslims as “Bosniaks” (which is the ancient name for all people living in Bosnia, regardless of their confessional identity), in order to nominally legitimize its aspirations to these remaining parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, the question arises to what extent this identity was actually formed as a national one in the true sense of the word, because most of this population has not become aware of the fact that its political elite has introduced this manipulation as a part of the project to create a separate national state, which could only be realized through the partition of Bosnia between the Serbian, Croatian and Bosniak national projects. The vast majority of this confessional group does not accept such a partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina and continues to treat its identity as cultural/traditional, not as a national one. However, it should still be noted that this concept of an exclusive ethno-confessional nation was introduced precisely at the time of the introduction of the capitalist order in Bosnia-Herzegovina and that it continues to live within this socio-economic framework.[v]
The experience of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a non-national state has shown that international circles that promote the universal capitalist order (especially those located in Great Britain and Europe) are in principle inclined to accept the option of its final partition between the Serbian and Croatian national projects, with the creation of a miniature ethno-confessional national state for the Muslim population, since that partition establishes the national state as the norm with no exceptions. It is far from clear whether these circles, guided by the same motive, would also support the possibility of constituting a single multi-confessional Bosnian nation based on the civic i.e. historical-territorial principle, since this very option has never had adequate promotion by domestic political forces. Moreover, these domestic forces, even unconsciously, promote the first option on a daily basis, insisting that Bosnia-Herzegovina’s ethno-confessional communities must be called “nations”. For, despite the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of the term “nation”, in the entire world this term always implies one specific constructive principle, according to which every group called “the nation” aspires to possess sovereignty and create its own laws, that is, to possesses its own state. Therefore, when one speaks about “three nations” in Bosnia, it inevitably invites and by definition legitimizes projects aiming to complete three national states – in this case, to cede the current autonomous entity Republika Srpska to Serbia, to cede the Catholic-populated Western Herzegovina to Croatia, and to found the national state for Muslims/Bosniaks. Regardless of whether the majority of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina supports these projects and their implications or not, the daily public and official use of the term “three nations” axiomatically assigns legitimacy to these projects and grants them support of those international circles that treat the model of the national state as the universal norm.
Through the attempts to implement these three national projects, the domestic ethno-confessional elites have constituted themselves as three distinct political-economic oligarchies. By forming “their own”, distinct nation-state structures, they have sought to legalise the appropriation of the economic resources within the territories they have seized. Of course, the pursuit of three national projects within one limited territorial framework implies their permanent conflict over territorial and institutional demarcation, and this permanent systemic political conflict generates the permanent systemic economic paralysis, where the entire economy is reduced to the expropriation, distribution and exploitation of the available resources, with a total lack of investments, production, exports and development. A step out of this cycle of systemic paralysis would only be possible by strengthening one different – entrepreneurial, production- and export-oriented – capitalist elite, which would not identify its strength and interests with the maintenance of the three existing national projects and their mutual conflict. In this case, it would be logical for such an elite to identify its interests with the weakening of the foundations on which these national projects are based, which primarily implies a de-nationalisation of identities constructed within these projects, so as to return them to their original ethno-confessional frameworks.
The basic precondition for such a transformation is permanent abandonment of the practice of public labeling of these ethno-confessional identities as “nations”. For, such a public discourse automatically, on psychological and political levels, pushes these identities into the framework of the three national projects, and thereby draws them into a constant competition and conflict over the seizure of the three ‘national territories’. A different public discourse, in which these identities would be marked as confessional, ethnic or ethno-confessional, would lead to their de-nationalisation, that is, de-politicisation and de-territorialisation, promoting only their cultural/traditional distinctive characteristics. This would make room within the society as a whole to construct awareness of common interests arising from the logic of living in the existing common state, and therefore to construct a common political identity and a common, trans-ethnic and trans-confessional national project. Thus, instead of insisting on the three (supposedly cemented) national identities, which inevitably evokes creation of three national states within which these national identities must by definition be located (nation-to-state model), a single trans-ethnic and trans-confessional national identity (state-to-nation model) may well be constructed, based on the common interest identified with stable living in the already-existing common state. And then, a country whose population would have constructed a single national identity would not be an anomaly within the international order composed exclusively of national states.
National identities are shaped as part of national projects and national projects involve creation of national states. Therefore, so-called national conflicts do not represent uneradicated historical conflicts of certain population groups, but rather conflicts of political projects aiming to create their own national states. The basis for a conflict is an attempt to implement one national project at the expense of another, that is, to create one national state at the expense of another. If national projects do not touch and do not clash over creation of national states within one limited territory, there is no basis for conflict and so-called national conflicts do not occur.
Bosnia-Herzegovina is specific because the national projects based on the existing ethno-confessional identities did not have any territorial basis for their realization, that is, for the creation of national states: the confessional communities, whose distinctive characteristics have been used by the national projects from Serbia and Croatia in order to create separate national identities as the basis for their parallel greater-state expansions, had lived for centuries totally mixed in the single common territory of Bosnia, without any particular territories reserved for particular confessions. Therefore, there were no serious conflicts among these communities as long as their identities remained purely confessional (otherwise, of course, these communities could not live without physical separation for so many centuries), that is, as long as these primary identities have not been transformed into national identities within the aforementioned national projects, which have served as the foundation for the the expansion of the existing national states, Serbia and Croatia, at Bosnia’s expense.
That is exactly why these national projects had to apply the most brutal force to create ‘their own’ territories in the process of so-called ethnic cleansing: ethnic cleansing was not a result of any “irreconcilable historical antagonisms”, but the only possible tool for creation of separate national territories and realization of the aforementioned national projects in the given conditions. However, once having been in active struggle for territories, national projects, according to their inherent logic, can hardly give up the fight for creation of national territories and national states until they experience a total defeat. And they can be totally defeated only by other national projects, since such a mechanism represents the norm as long as the national states represent the norm within the global capitalist system. National projects always seek to create or expand their national states, and compromises do not characterize them – only a total victory in the form of the planned national state or a complete defeat by other national projects.
Thus, the presence of capitalism as the ruling model requires the presence of some form of nationalism – the question is only which model of construction of national identity some capitalist elite pragmatically chooses to build a national state, in order to effectively mobilise and homogenise the rest of society on its platform. The existing national projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina, based on the three ethno-confessional identities, despite their seemingly insoluble conflicts, inevitably lead to a final solution in the form of three national states, because nationalism is there to produce national states. But the process of Bosnia’s ultimate dissolution into three ethno-confessional nation-states can hardly take place without additional violence, without another war, and the question is whether such a development would be an acceptable option from the perspective of regional and European stability. Of course, the question is whether the eventual project of building a single common national identity within a single common state (state-to-nation model) would be an option that has sufficient political potential to substitute the three already present national projects. But, in any case, the option of their further conflict may continue to bring certain benefits only to the three existing oligarchies, and it cannot bring the most basic sense of perspective to the rest of the society, because there can be no perspective, other than the final dissolution, that it might contain.
[i] With the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the expansion of neoliberal capitalism in the countries of the former communist bloc, there was also the abandonment of the non-national principle of state organization and the expansion of the model of the national state in this part of the world. The socialist German Democratic Republic was left without the class principle on which it had been founded and thereby it lost its raison d’etre in relation to the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany, so that they inevitably merged into a single national state. For, by definition, there was no place within the capitalist order for two national states for the German nation, but only for one. Also, the states constituted as federations of ethnic communities (a federation of Czechs and Slovaks in the case of Czechoslovakia, a federation of Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Georgians, Kazakhs, etc. in the case of the Soviet Union, and a federation of Slovenians, Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, etc. in the case of Yugoslavia), based on the presumed trans-ethnic connections of their working classes, had no chances of survival: with the weakening of the concept of trans-ethnic class connections in the process of establishing the capitalist order, all of them were eventually constituted as sovereign nations with their independent national states.
[ii] It was precisely the trans-national structure of the class of capitalists that led Marx to assert that its dominance could only be countered with the help of a similar trans-national structure formed by the working class. Marx felt that the working class could not eliminate its exploitation isolated within the boundaries of “the nation.”
[iii] Croatian nationalists chose ethno-linguistic basis as a distinctive principle in relation to the rival Hungarian and Slovenian nationalisms, while having chosen ethno-confessional identity as a distinctive principle in relation to the Serbian nationalism.
[iv] The Montenegrin nation and its national state were constituted on a historical-territorial principle, although the Serbian nationalism, based on the ethno-confessional principle, has been present in Montenegro since the 19th century. This ideology promotes the idea that all inhabitants of Montenegro, due to their Orthodox confessional identity, must be nationally identified as Serbs. Montenegrin nationalism takes the Montenegrin ruler and poet from the 19th century, Petar Petrovic Njegoš, as the mythical creator of the Montenegrin nation. At the same time, paradoxically, those who promote Serbian national identity of the inhabitants of Montenegro also find their main foundation in his works, in which he advocates the ethno-confessional principle of national identification and in which Montenegro is identified as a part of the Serb nation.
[v] In the period when Bosnia-Herzegovina was included in Austria-Hungary, and then in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians, i.e. the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the so-called “agrarian reform” was not completed yet, so that certain elements of the Ottoman feudal order were still present on its territory. Therefore, capitalism in Bosnia-Herzegovina has been introduced for the first time only after the fall of the socialist system.
Is ethno-nationalism in Bosnia-Herzegovina “ever-existing” and “ineradicable”, and does it inevitably threaten the country’s very survival? In order to provide an adequate answer to these questions, we must put this popular, simplistic picture into a broader historical and geopolitical context.
First of all, let us pay attention to the fact that the rapid rise of nationalism in the post-socialist societies at the end of the 20th century, as was also the case in the post-feudal societies of the 18th and 19th centuries, coincided with the rise of capitalism.[i] In both historical and social contexts, the ideology of nationalism practically served as a cover to legitimize the appropriation of vast economic resources and the takeover of the complete state apparatus by a single social class, the growing class of capitalists. Within this ideological construct, with the help of a simple logical trick, the partial interests of this social class were a priori legitimized, having been presented as the universal interests of the entire society:
- “the nation” is conceived as a virtual sovereign, an avatar that simulates the being of the entire society, through which this being is realized in the form of sovereignty, and thus “the nation” becomes the ultimate source of social and political legitimacy;
- the class of capitalists assumes control of the state apparatus and ownership of economic resources, declaring this act an act of “the nation”, thereby constituting its ‘national state’;
- this unilateral expropriation/appropriation, labelled as “national revolution”, is thus presented as a self-legitimizing act by which the whole society realizes its being in the form of sovereignty, embodied as a “nation” by constituting its “national state’;
- the state and its economic resources thus function at a nominal level as the sovereign property of the avatar called “the nation”, while on a factual level they function as the sovereign property of the class that created it.
Karl Marx was among the few who was not deceived by this logical-ideological trick: he saw these social changes simply as the “bourgeois revolutions”, and their products as the “bourgeois states,” states created to serve the interests of the ruling class of capitalists (he also saw all other models of state as tailored to the interests of the ruling classes). However, many before and after Marx did not understand this trick, and in all parts of the world where capitalism has achieved dominance the ideology of nationalism has made them believe that the avatar called “the nation” represents the only legitimate form of social existence, that the state projected as the sovereign property of that avatar (which in practice functions as the sovereign property of the class that created it) constitutes the only legitimate form of political organization, and that the private interests of one class represent the public interests of the entire society. The class of capitalists thus established the ideology of nationalism as an unquestionable social religion, where “the nation” plays the role of unquestionable divinity and where the a priori legitimacy is granted to the power that propagates that religion and identifies itself as the clergy which serves that god. But, paradoxically, while it closed the targeted societies within the virtual boundaries of nations and within the territorial borders of states tailored around these nations, and thereby brought them into a status of mutual mental and physical isolation, the class of capitalists established its own structures which have been functioning beyond these boundaries and borders, as a trans¬national network, so as to create advantageous conditions for extra-exploitation of the populations isolated in their respective “nations”.[ii] For, by its very nature capital is not only a-national, but also trans-national: while on one hand capital tends to isolate the exploited classes within separate nations through the ideology of nationalism that imposes nations and national states as the only possible modus vivendi, on the other hand it builds its own corporations and monopolies as trans-national structures, independent of the physical, political and psychological boundaries that nationalism projects onto the rest of society.
The ideology of nationalism is, therefore, undoubtedly universalist in its aspirations and achievements. But nationalism in non-Western European countries – where, of course, Bosnia and other countries of the former Yugoslavia belong – still has some specific characteristics. Due to the prolonged presence of the feudal empires (Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov) on their territories, nationalism appeared in them relatively late in comparison to the countries of their origin, the 17th-century England and the 18th-century France. As such, nationalist discourse in non-Western countries has yet to establish itself in more stable, non-excess forms – just like capitalism, which there also largely remains in the excess forms that characterize the so-called “primitive accumulation of capital”. Given that most of these non-Western societies have long been exposed to the religious proselytism of the aforementioned empires (and religious proselytism is one of the basic constituent principles of all feudal and late feudal empires), it is logical that their newly created capitalist elites, acting in opposition to this proselytism, have largely emphasized their own confessional identities as the strongest and safest foundations for the development of their own national projects and identities. National identities constructed by this kind of confessional exclusivity (usually associated with ethnic exclusivity) have manifested themselves as extremely impermeable and inflexible, and the rivalry between their umbrella national projects as almost irreconcilable. This is why this model of nationalism maintained a strong position in the political processes within these societies even during the period when they were part of the Cold War bloc of communist countries, so that it has occupied the very center of political developments upon their return to the capitalist orbit.
The ideology of nationalism began its penetration into Bosnia-Herzegovina in the second half of the 19th century under the influence of the expansionist national project from the Kingdom of Serbia based on the ethno-confessional principle, associated with the emergence of initial elements of capitalism among the indigenous urban social structures in Bosnia. The anti-Ottoman Movement for the Autonomy of Bosnia and its uprising (1831-1832) contained certain proto-nationalist ideas; however, this authentic Bosnian national project was not based on ethno-confessional, but on less exclusive, historical-territorial principle of national identity, uncharacteristic for non-Western European countries. As such, it clearly manifested its weakness and inefficiency in relation to the rival national projects, primarily the one from Serbia, which used the exclusive ethno-confessional principle as a tool for the development of national identification. The practical-political superiority of the ethno-confessional concept of national identification in this part of the world is best demonstrated by the fact that even Serbian nationalism itself (at the time when it was influenced by the ideas of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, the main figure of the Serbian Enlightenment, who developed them on the basis of Herder’s ethno-linguistic concept of nationalism, present in the German-speaking countries) was not effective in the efforts to promote the Serbian national identity on the basis of multi-confessional, ethno-linguistic principle, so as to mobilise and homogenise into a newly-emerging Serb nation all those who spoke the language that was common in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia, in order to legitimize the expansion of the Kingdom of Serbia into the latter three countries, on the basis of the principle that all members of one nation should live in one national state. As in other non-Western European countries, in the case of Serbia the ethno-confessional concept of national identification eventually proved to be a considerably stronger foundation for the realization and expansion of the national project. After the aforementioned conceptual wanderings with Herderianism, Serbian national project eventually succeeded in its efforts to mobilize and homogenize the vast majority of members of the Orthodox confession in these three countries as members of the Serbian nation (the main promoter of this concept of national identification was Ilija Garašanin, Kingdom of Serbia’s Minister of Interior in the second half of the 19th century), so that they practically became part of the project conceived in accordance with the aforementioned principle of “one nation in one state”, with the aim to eventually cede to Serbia parts of the countries in which they lived.
Although the constituent principles of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, when it occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878, were intrinsically opposed to the principles of nationalism, this already worn-out empire had already made key concessions to the Hungarian national project, having transformed itself into a hybrid combination of a late feudal empire and a capitalist confederation, so that eventually both Czech and Croatian nationalism had also gained considerable strength within its borders.[iii] Also, this hybrid capitalist-feudal state brought elements of developed capitalism to the cities of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which solidified the socio-economic basis for further penetration of Serbian and Croatian nationalism among the urban Orthodox and Catholic population in Bosnia.
In addition to these nationalism built on ethno-confessional identities, the South Slavic ethno-linguistic national concept also occurred in Bosnia – as in Serbia and Croatia before – associated with the project of a single state of Southern Slavs and, possibly, their common Yugoslav nation. Although the dominant international powers supported the establishment of this state after World War I, as well as its survival after World War II, the ethno-linguistic concept of the Yugoslav nation never managed to overtake the ethno-confessional concept of national identification promoted by the Serbian and Croatian nationalism, whose mutual confrontation constantly undermined the chances for the majority of the population to identify with the concept of the Yugoslav nation. The socialist Yugoslavia, of course, did not promote national homogeneity but trans-national solidarity of the working class as its official constituent principle.
However, by accepting the federal system, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia made certain concessions to the already existing concepts of nations and nationalism – the ethno-confessional one in Serbia and Croatia and among the Orthodox and Catholic populations in Bosnia, the ethno-linguistic one in Slovenia and Macedonia, as well as the historical-territorial one in Montenegro, while Bosnia itself was conceived as an undifferentiated zone of influence of Serbian and Croatian nationalism.[iv] It is therefore logical that, with the gradual turning of the SFRY towards capitalist system, the position of the Serbian and Croatian ethno-confessional nationalism had been strengthened, so that the ultimate triumph of capitalism led to the dissolution of the SFRY into national states, followed by the armed conflict between the Serbian and Croatian expansionist projects over Bosnia, in its parts where the Orthodox and Catholic population made the statistical majority. After the collapse of the SFRY, an independent Bosnia-Herzegovina, constituted as a non-national state, has clearly been perceived as an anomaly within the international capitalist order based on national states. Therefore, from the independence day to the present, there have always been initiatives – not only by Serbian and Croatian nationalism, but also by influential international circles that promote the universal capitalist order – that this anomaly be eliminated by dividing Bosnia’s territory between the ethno-national projects of ‘Greater Serbia’ and ‘Greater Croatia’.
Of course, in the case of a consistent application of the ethno-confessional concept of national states on the Bosnian soil, the existing ethno-confessional identity of the Muslim population would certainly remain a contentious issue. During the Austro-Hungarian occupation and the first and second Yugoslavia, the original ethno-confessional identity of the Muslim population in Bosnia, strictly speaking, was not transformed into a national one, since it was not based on the nationalist idea of creation of a national state, but rather on its distinctive cultural and traditional characteristics. The efforts to construct a national identity of the Muslim population began only in the 1990s, when its political elite as a covert goal adopted creation of an ethno-confessional “Muslim state” in that part of the Bosnian territory where the Muslim population represented a statistical majority. In this context, this elite renamed Muslims as “Bosniaks” (which is the ancient name for all people living in Bosnia, regardless of their confessional identity), in order to nominally legitimize its aspirations to these remaining parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, the question arises to what extent this identity was actually formed as a national one in the true sense of the word, because most of this population has not become aware of the fact that its political elite has introduced this manipulation as a part of the project to create a separate national state, which could only be realized through the partition of Bosnia between the Serbian, Croatian and Bosniak national projects. The vast majority of this confessional group does not accept such a partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina and continues to treat its identity as cultural/traditional, not as a national one. However, it should still be noted that this concept of an exclusive ethno-confessional nation was introduced precisely at the time of the introduction of the capitalist order in Bosnia-Herzegovina and that it continues to live within this socio-economic framework.[v]
The experience of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a non-national state has shown that international circles that promote the universal capitalist order (especially those located in Great Britain and Europe) are in principle inclined to accept the option of its final partition between the Serbian and Croatian national projects, with the creation of a miniature ethno-confessional national state for the Muslim population, since that partition establishes the national state as the norm with no exceptions. It is far from clear whether these circles, guided by the same motive, would also support the possibility of constituting a single multi-confessional Bosnian nation based on the civic i.e. historical-territorial principle, since this very option has never had adequate promotion by domestic political forces. Moreover, these domestic forces, even unconsciously, promote the first option on a daily basis, insisting that Bosnia-Herzegovina’s ethno-confessional communities must be called “nations”. For, despite the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of the term “nation”, in the entire world this term always implies one specific constructive principle, according to which every group called “the nation” aspires to possess sovereignty and create its own laws, that is, to possesses its own state. Therefore, when one speaks about “three nations” in Bosnia, it inevitably invites and by definition legitimizes projects aiming to complete three national states – in this case, to cede the current autonomous entity Republika Srpska to Serbia, to cede the Catholic-populated Western Herzegovina to Croatia, and to found the national state for Muslims/Bosniaks. Regardless of whether the majority of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina supports these projects and their implications or not, the daily public and official use of the term “three nations” axiomatically assigns legitimacy to these projects and grants them support of those international circles that treat the model of the national state as the universal norm.
Through the attempts to implement these three national projects, the domestic ethno-confessional elites have constituted themselves as three distinct political-economic oligarchies. By forming “their own”, distinct nation-state structures, they have sought to legalise the appropriation of the economic resources within the territories they have seized. Of course, the pursuit of three national projects within one limited territorial framework implies their permanent conflict over territorial and institutional demarcation, and this permanent systemic political conflict generates the permanent systemic economic paralysis, where the entire economy is reduced to the expropriation, distribution and exploitation of the available resources, with a total lack of investments, production, exports and development. A step out of this cycle of systemic paralysis would only be possible by strengthening one different – entrepreneurial, production- and export-oriented – capitalist elite, which would not identify its strength and interests with the maintenance of the three existing national projects and their mutual conflict. In this case, it would be logical for such an elite to identify its interests with the weakening of the foundations on which these national projects are based, which primarily implies a de-nationalisation of identities constructed within these projects, so as to return them to their original ethno-confessional frameworks.
The basic precondition for such a transformation is permanent abandonment of the practice of public labeling of these ethno-confessional identities as “nations”. For, such a public discourse automatically, on psychological and political levels, pushes these identities into the framework of the three national projects, and thereby draws them into a constant competition and conflict over the seizure of the three ‘national territories’. A different public discourse, in which these identities would be marked as confessional, ethnic or ethno-confessional, would lead to their de-nationalisation, that is, de-politicisation and de-territorialisation, promoting only their cultural/traditional distinctive characteristics. This would make room within the society as a whole to construct awareness of common interests arising from the logic of living in the existing common state, and therefore to construct a common political identity and a common, trans-ethnic and trans-confessional national project. Thus, instead of insisting on the three (supposedly cemented) national identities, which inevitably evokes creation of three national states within which these national identities must by definition be located (nation-to-state model), a single trans-ethnic and trans-confessional national identity (state-to-nation model) may well be constructed, based on the common interest identified with stable living in the already-existing common state. And then, a country whose population would have constructed a single national identity would not be an anomaly within the international order composed exclusively of national states.
National identities are shaped as part of national projects and national projects involve creation of national states. Therefore, so-called national conflicts do not represent uneradicated historical conflicts of certain population groups, but rather conflicts of political projects aiming to create their own national states. The basis for a conflict is an attempt to implement one national project at the expense of another, that is, to create one national state at the expense of another. If national projects do not touch and do not clash over creation of national states within one limited territory, there is no basis for conflict and so-called national conflicts do not occur.
Bosnia-Herzegovina is specific because the national projects based on the existing ethno-confessional identities did not have any territorial basis for their realization, that is, for the creation of national states: the confessional communities, whose distinctive characteristics have been used by the national projects from Serbia and Croatia in order to create separate national identities as the basis for their parallel greater-state expansions, had lived for centuries totally mixed in the single common territory of Bosnia, without any particular territories reserved for particular confessions. Therefore, there were no serious conflicts among these communities as long as their identities remained purely confessional (otherwise, of course, these communities could not live without physical separation for so many centuries), that is, as long as these primary identities have not been transformed into national identities within the aforementioned national projects, which have served as the foundation for the the expansion of the existing national states, Serbia and Croatia, at Bosnia’s expense.
That is exactly why these national projects had to apply the most brutal force to create ‘their own’ territories in the process of so-called ethnic cleansing: ethnic cleansing was not a result of any “irreconcilable historical antagonisms”, but the only possible tool for creation of separate national territories and realization of the aforementioned national projects in the given conditions. However, once having been in active struggle for territories, national projects, according to their inherent logic, can hardly give up the fight for creation of national territories and national states until they experience a total defeat. And they can be totally defeated only by other national projects, since such a mechanism represents the norm as long as the national states represent the norm within the global capitalist system. National projects always seek to create or expand their national states, and compromises do not characterize them – only a total victory in the form of the planned national state or a complete defeat by other national projects.
Thus, the presence of capitalism as the ruling model requires the presence of some form of nationalism – the question is only which model of construction of national identity some capitalist elite pragmatically chooses to build a national state, in order to effectively mobilise and homogenise the rest of society on its platform. The existing national projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina, based on the three ethno-confessional identities, despite their seemingly insoluble conflicts, inevitably lead to a final solution in the form of three national states, because nationalism is there to produce national states. But the process of Bosnia’s ultimate dissolution into three ethno-confessional nation-states can hardly take place without additional violence, without another war, and the question is whether such a development would be an acceptable option from the perspective of regional and European stability. Of course, the question is whether the eventual project of building a single common national identity within a single common state (state-to-nation model) would be an option that has sufficient political potential to substitute the three already present national projects. But, in any case, the option of their further conflict may continue to bring certain benefits only to the three existing oligarchies, and it cannot bring the most basic sense of perspective to the rest of the society, because there can be no perspective, other than the final dissolution, that it might contain.
[i] With the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the expansion of neoliberal capitalism in the countries of the former communist bloc, there was also the abandonment of the non-national principle of state organization and the expansion of the model of the national state in this part of the world. The socialist German Democratic Republic was left without the class principle on which it had been founded and thereby it lost its raison d’etre in relation to the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany, so that they inevitably merged into a single national state. For, by definition, there was no place within the capitalist order for two national states for the German nation, but only for one. Also, the states constituted as federations of ethnic communities (a federation of Czechs and Slovaks in the case of Czechoslovakia, a federation of Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Georgians, Kazakhs, etc. in the case of the Soviet Union, and a federation of Slovenians, Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, etc. in the case of Yugoslavia), based on the presumed trans-ethnic connections of their working classes, had no chances of survival: with the weakening of the concept of trans-ethnic class connections in the process of establishing the capitalist order, all of them were eventually constituted as sovereign nations with their independent national states.
[ii] It was precisely the trans-national structure of the class of capitalists that led Marx to assert that its dominance could only be countered with the help of a similar trans-national structure formed by the working class. Marx felt that the working class could not eliminate its exploitation isolated within the boundaries of “the nation.”
[iii] Croatian nationalists chose ethno-linguistic basis as a distinctive principle in relation to the rival Hungarian and Slovenian nationalisms, while having chosen ethno-confessional identity as a distinctive principle in relation to the Serbian nationalism.
[iv] The Montenegrin nation and its national state were constituted on a historical-territorial principle, although the Serbian nationalism, based on the ethno-confessional principle, has been present in Montenegro since the 19th century. This ideology promotes the idea that all inhabitants of Montenegro, due to their Orthodox confessional identity, must be nationally identified as Serbs. Montenegrin nationalism takes the Montenegrin ruler and poet from the 19th century, Petar Petrovic Njegoš, as the mythical creator of the Montenegrin nation. At the same time, paradoxically, those who promote Serbian national identity of the inhabitants of Montenegro also find their main foundation in his works, in which he advocates the ethno-confessional principle of national identification and in which Montenegro is identified as a part of the Serb nation.
[v] In the period when Bosnia-Herzegovina was included in Austria-Hungary, and then in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians, i.e. the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the so-called “agrarian reform” was not completed yet, so that certain elements of the Ottoman feudal order were still present on its territory. Therefore, capitalism in Bosnia-Herzegovina has been introduced for the first time only after the fall of the socialist system.
Is ethno-nationalism in Bosnia-Herzegovina “ever-existing” and “ineradicable”, and does it inevitably threaten the country’s very survival? In order to provide an adequate answer to these questions, we must put this popular, simplistic picture into a broader historical and geopolitical context.
First of all, let us pay attention to the fact that the rapid rise of nationalism in the post-socialist societies at the end of the 20th century, as was also the case in the post-feudal societies of the 18th and 19th centuries, coincided with the rise of capitalism.[i] In both historical and social contexts, the ideology of nationalism practically served as a cover to legitimize the appropriation of vast economic resources and the takeover of the complete state apparatus by a single social class, the growing class of capitalists. Within this ideological construct, with the help of a simple logical trick, the partial interests of this social class were a priori legitimized, having been presented as the universal interests of the entire society:
- “the nation” is conceived as a virtual sovereign, an avatar that simulates the being of the entire society, through which this being is realized in the form of sovereignty, and thus “the nation” becomes the ultimate source of social and political legitimacy;
- the class of capitalists assumes control of the state apparatus and ownership of economic resources, declaring this act an act of “the nation”, thereby constituting its ‘national state’;
- this unilateral expropriation/appropriation, labelled as “national revolution”, is thus presented as a self-legitimizing act by which the whole society realizes its being in the form of sovereignty, embodied as a “nation” by constituting its “national state’;
- the state and its economic resources thus function at a nominal level as the sovereign property of the avatar called “the nation”, while on a factual level they function as the sovereign property of the class that created it.
Karl Marx was among the few who was not deceived by this logical-ideological trick: he saw these social changes simply as the “bourgeois revolutions”, and their products as the “bourgeois states,” states created to serve the interests of the ruling class of capitalists (he also saw all other models of state as tailored to the interests of the ruling classes). However, many before and after Marx did not understand this trick, and in all parts of the world where capitalism has achieved dominance the ideology of nationalism has made them believe that the avatar called “the nation” represents the only legitimate form of social existence, that the state projected as the sovereign property of that avatar (which in practice functions as the sovereign property of the class that created it) constitutes the only legitimate form of political organization, and that the private interests of one class represent the public interests of the entire society. The class of capitalists thus established the ideology of nationalism as an unquestionable social religion, where “the nation” plays the role of unquestionable divinity and where the a priori legitimacy is granted to the power that propagates that religion and identifies itself as the clergy which serves that god. But, paradoxically, while it closed the targeted societies within the virtual boundaries of nations and within the territorial borders of states tailored around these nations, and thereby brought them into a status of mutual mental and physical isolation, the class of capitalists established its own structures which have been functioning beyond these boundaries and borders, as a trans¬national network, so as to create advantageous conditions for extra-exploitation of the populations isolated in their respective “nations”.[ii] For, by its very nature capital is not only a-national, but also trans-national: while on one hand capital tends to isolate the exploited classes within separate nations through the ideology of nationalism that imposes nations and national states as the only possible modus vivendi, on the other hand it builds its own corporations and monopolies as trans-national structures, independent of the physical, political and psychological boundaries that nationalism projects onto the rest of society.
The ideology of nationalism is, therefore, undoubtedly universalist in its aspirations and achievements. But nationalism in non-Western European countries – where, of course, Bosnia and other countries of the former Yugoslavia belong – still has some specific characteristics. Due to the prolonged presence of the feudal empires (Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov) on their territories, nationalism appeared in them relatively late in comparison to the countries of their origin, the 17th-century England and the 18th-century France. As such, nationalist discourse in non-Western countries has yet to establish itself in more stable, non-excess forms – just like capitalism, which there also largely remains in the excess forms that characterize the so-called “primitive accumulation of capital”. Given that most of these non-Western societies have long been exposed to the religious proselytism of the aforementioned empires (and religious proselytism is one of the basic constituent principles of all feudal and late feudal empires), it is logical that their newly created capitalist elites, acting in opposition to this proselytism, have largely emphasized their own confessional identities as the strongest and safest foundations for the development of their own national projects and identities. National identities constructed by this kind of confessional exclusivity (usually associated with ethnic exclusivity) have manifested themselves as extremely impermeable and inflexible, and the rivalry between their umbrella national projects as almost irreconcilable. This is why this model of nationalism maintained a strong position in the political processes within these societies even during the period when they were part of the Cold War bloc of communist countries, so that it has occupied the very center of political developments upon their return to the capitalist orbit.
The ideology of nationalism began its penetration into Bosnia-Herzegovina in the second half of the 19th century under the influence of the expansionist national project from the Kingdom of Serbia based on the ethno-confessional principle, associated with the emergence of initial elements of capitalism among the indigenous urban social structures in Bosnia. The anti-Ottoman Movement for the Autonomy of Bosnia and its uprising (1831-1832) contained certain proto-nationalist ideas; however, this authentic Bosnian national project was not based on ethno-confessional, but on less exclusive, historical-territorial principle of national identity, uncharacteristic for non-Western European countries. As such, it clearly manifested its weakness and inefficiency in relation to the rival national projects, primarily the one from Serbia, which used the exclusive ethno-confessional principle as a tool for the development of national identification. The practical-political superiority of the ethno-confessional concept of national identification in this part of the world is best demonstrated by the fact that even Serbian nationalism itself (at the time when it was influenced by the ideas of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, the main figure of the Serbian Enlightenment, who developed them on the basis of Herder’s ethno-linguistic concept of nationalism, present in the German-speaking countries) was not effective in the efforts to promote the Serbian national identity on the basis of multi-confessional, ethno-linguistic principle, so as to mobilise and homogenise into a newly-emerging Serb nation all those who spoke the language that was common in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia, in order to legitimize the expansion of the Kingdom of Serbia into the latter three countries, on the basis of the principle that all members of one nation should live in one national state. As in other non-Western European countries, in the case of Serbia the ethno-confessional concept of national identification eventually proved to be a considerably stronger foundation for the realization and expansion of the national project. After the aforementioned conceptual wanderings with Herderianism, Serbian national project eventually succeeded in its efforts to mobilize and homogenize the vast majority of members of the Orthodox confession in these three countries as members of the Serbian nation (the main promoter of this concept of national identification was Ilija Garašanin, Kingdom of Serbia’s Minister of Interior in the second half of the 19th century), so that they practically became part of the project conceived in accordance with the aforementioned principle of “one nation in one state”, with the aim to eventually cede to Serbia parts of the countries in which they lived.
Although the constituent principles of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, when it occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878, were intrinsically opposed to the principles of nationalism, this already worn-out empire had already made key concessions to the Hungarian national project, having transformed itself into a hybrid combination of a late feudal empire and a capitalist confederation, so that eventually both Czech and Croatian nationalism had also gained considerable strength within its borders.[iii] Also, this hybrid capitalist-feudal state brought elements of developed capitalism to the cities of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which solidified the socio-economic basis for further penetration of Serbian and Croatian nationalism among the urban Orthodox and Catholic population in Bosnia.
In addition to these nationalism built on ethno-confessional identities, the South Slavic ethno-linguistic national concept also occurred in Bosnia – as in Serbia and Croatia before – associated with the project of a single state of Southern Slavs and, possibly, their common Yugoslav nation. Although the dominant international powers supported the establishment of this state after World War I, as well as its survival after World War II, the ethno-linguistic concept of the Yugoslav nation never managed to overtake the ethno-confessional concept of national identification promoted by the Serbian and Croatian nationalism, whose mutual confrontation constantly undermined the chances for the majority of the population to identify with the concept of the Yugoslav nation. The socialist Yugoslavia, of course, did not promote national homogeneity but trans-national solidarity of the working class as its official constituent principle.
However, by accepting the federal system, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia made certain concessions to the already existing concepts of nations and nationalism – the ethno-confessional one in Serbia and Croatia and among the Orthodox and Catholic populations in Bosnia, the ethno-linguistic one in Slovenia and Macedonia, as well as the historical-territorial one in Montenegro, while Bosnia itself was conceived as an undifferentiated zone of influence of Serbian and Croatian nationalism.[iv] It is therefore logical that, with the gradual turning of the SFRY towards capitalist system, the position of the Serbian and Croatian ethno-confessional nationalism had been strengthened, so that the ultimate triumph of capitalism led to the dissolution of the SFRY into national states, followed by the armed conflict between the Serbian and Croatian expansionist projects over Bosnia, in its parts where the Orthodox and Catholic population made the statistical majority. After the collapse of the SFRY, an independent Bosnia-Herzegovina, constituted as a non-national state, has clearly been perceived as an anomaly within the international capitalist order based on national states. Therefore, from the independence day to the present, there have always been initiatives – not only by Serbian and Croatian nationalism, but also by influential international circles that promote the universal capitalist order – that this anomaly be eliminated by dividing Bosnia’s territory between the ethno-national projects of ‘Greater Serbia’ and ‘Greater Croatia’.
Of course, in the case of a consistent application of the ethno-confessional concept of national states on the Bosnian soil, the existing ethno-confessional identity of the Muslim population would certainly remain a contentious issue. During the Austro-Hungarian occupation and the first and second Yugoslavia, the original ethno-confessional identity of the Muslim population in Bosnia, strictly speaking, was not transformed into a national one, since it was not based on the nationalist idea of creation of a national state, but rather on its distinctive cultural and traditional characteristics. The efforts to construct a national identity of the Muslim population began only in the 1990s, when its political elite as a covert goal adopted creation of an ethno-confessional “Muslim state” in that part of the Bosnian territory where the Muslim population represented a statistical majority. In this context, this elite renamed Muslims as “Bosniaks” (which is the ancient name for all people living in Bosnia, regardless of their confessional identity), in order to nominally legitimize its aspirations to these remaining parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, the question arises to what extent this identity was actually formed as a national one in the true sense of the word, because most of this population has not become aware of the fact that its political elite has introduced this manipulation as a part of the project to create a separate national state, which could only be realized through the partition of Bosnia between the Serbian, Croatian and Bosniak national projects. The vast majority of this confessional group does not accept such a partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina and continues to treat its identity as cultural/traditional, not as a national one. However, it should still be noted that this concept of an exclusive ethno-confessional nation was introduced precisely at the time of the introduction of the capitalist order in Bosnia-Herzegovina and that it continues to live within this socio-economic framework.[v]
The experience of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a non-national state has shown that international circles that promote the universal capitalist order (especially those located in Great Britain and Europe) are in principle inclined to accept the option of its final partition between the Serbian and Croatian national projects, with the creation of a miniature ethno-confessional national state for the Muslim population, since that partition establishes the national state as the norm with no exceptions. It is far from clear whether these circles, guided by the same motive, would also support the possibility of constituting a single multi-confessional Bosnian nation based on the civic i.e. historical-territorial principle, since this very option has never had adequate promotion by domestic political forces. Moreover, these domestic forces, even unconsciously, promote the first option on a daily basis, insisting that Bosnia-Herzegovina’s ethno-confessional communities must be called “nations”. For, despite the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of the term “nation”, in the entire world this term always implies one specific constructive principle, according to which every group called “the nation” aspires to possess sovereignty and create its own laws, that is, to possesses its own state. Therefore, when one speaks about “three nations” in Bosnia, it inevitably invites and by definition legitimizes projects aiming to complete three national states – in this case, to cede the current autonomous entity Republika Srpska to Serbia, to cede the Catholic-populated Western Herzegovina to Croatia, and to found the national state for Muslims/Bosniaks. Regardless of whether the majority of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina supports these projects and their implications or not, the daily public and official use of the term “three nations” axiomatically assigns legitimacy to these projects and grants them support of those international circles that treat the model of the national state as the universal norm.
Through the attempts to implement these three national projects, the domestic ethno-confessional elites have constituted themselves as three distinct political-economic oligarchies. By forming “their own”, distinct nation-state structures, they have sought to legalise the appropriation of the economic resources within the territories they have seized. Of course, the pursuit of three national projects within one limited territorial framework implies their permanent conflict over territorial and institutional demarcation, and this permanent systemic political conflict generates the permanent systemic economic paralysis, where the entire economy is reduced to the expropriation, distribution and exploitation of the available resources, with a total lack of investments, production, exports and development. A step out of this cycle of systemic paralysis would only be possible by strengthening one different – entrepreneurial, production- and export-oriented – capitalist elite, which would not identify its strength and interests with the maintenance of the three existing national projects and their mutual conflict. In this case, it would be logical for such an elite to identify its interests with the weakening of the foundations on which these national projects are based, which primarily implies a de-nationalisation of identities constructed within these projects, so as to return them to their original ethno-confessional frameworks.
The basic precondition for such a transformation is permanent abandonment of the practice of public labeling of these ethno-confessional identities as “nations”. For, such a public discourse automatically, on psychological and political levels, pushes these identities into the framework of the three national projects, and thereby draws them into a constant competition and conflict over the seizure of the three ‘national territories’. A different public discourse, in which these identities would be marked as confessional, ethnic or ethno-confessional, would lead to their de-nationalisation, that is, de-politicisation and de-territorialisation, promoting only their cultural/traditional distinctive characteristics. This would make room within the society as a whole to construct awareness of common interests arising from the logic of living in the existing common state, and therefore to construct a common political identity and a common, trans-ethnic and trans-confessional national project. Thus, instead of insisting on the three (supposedly cemented) national identities, which inevitably evokes creation of three national states within which these national identities must by definition be located (nation-to-state model), a single trans-ethnic and trans-confessional national identity (state-to-nation model) may well be constructed, based on the common interest identified with stable living in the already-existing common state. And then, a country whose population would have constructed a single national identity would not be an anomaly within the international order composed exclusively of national states.
National identities are shaped as part of national projects and national projects involve creation of national states. Therefore, so-called national conflicts do not represent uneradicated historical conflicts of certain population groups, but rather conflicts of political projects aiming to create their own national states. The basis for a conflict is an attempt to implement one national project at the expense of another, that is, to create one national state at the expense of another. If national projects do not touch and do not clash over creation of national states within one limited territory, there is no basis for conflict and so-called national conflicts do not occur.
Bosnia-Herzegovina is specific because the national projects based on the existing ethno-confessional identities did not have any territorial basis for their realization, that is, for the creation of national states: the confessional communities, whose distinctive characteristics have been used by the national projects from Serbia and Croatia in order to create separate national identities as the basis for their parallel greater-state expansions, had lived for centuries totally mixed in the single common territory of Bosnia, without any particular territories reserved for particular confessions. Therefore, there were no serious conflicts among these communities as long as their identities remained purely confessional (otherwise, of course, these communities could not live without physical separation for so many centuries), that is, as long as these primary identities have not been transformed into national identities within the aforementioned national projects, which have served as the foundation for the the expansion of the existing national states, Serbia and Croatia, at Bosnia’s expense.
That is exactly why these national projects had to apply the most brutal force to create ‘their own’ territories in the process of so-called ethnic cleansing: ethnic cleansing was not a result of any “irreconcilable historical antagonisms”, but the only possible tool for creation of separate national territories and realization of the aforementioned national projects in the given conditions. However, once having been in active struggle for territories, national projects, according to their inherent logic, can hardly give up the fight for creation of national territories and national states until they experience a total defeat. And they can be totally defeated only by other national projects, since such a mechanism represents the norm as long as the national states represent the norm within the global capitalist system. National projects always seek to create or expand their national states, and compromises do not characterize them – only a total victory in the form of the planned national state or a complete defeat by other national projects.
Thus, the presence of capitalism as the ruling model requires the presence of some form of nationalism – the question is only which model of construction of national identity some capitalist elite pragmatically chooses to build a national state, in order to effectively mobilise and homogenise the rest of society on its platform. The existing national projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina, based on the three ethno-confessional identities, despite their seemingly insoluble conflicts, inevitably lead to a final solution in the form of three national states, because nationalism is there to produce national states. But the process of Bosnia’s ultimate dissolution into three ethno-confessional nation-states can hardly take place without additional violence, without another war, and the question is whether such a development would be an acceptable option from the perspective of regional and European stability. Of course, the question is whether the eventual project of building a single common national identity within a single common state (state-to-nation model) would be an option that has sufficient political potential to substitute the three already present national projects. But, in any case, the option of their further conflict may continue to bring certain benefits only to the three existing oligarchies, and it cannot bring the most basic sense of perspective to the rest of the society, because there can be no perspective, other than the final dissolution, that it might contain.
[i] With the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the expansion of neoliberal capitalism in the countries of the former communist bloc, there was also the abandonment of the non-national principle of state organization and the expansion of the model of the national state in this part of the world. The socialist German Democratic Republic was left without the class principle on which it had been founded and thereby it lost its raison d’etre in relation to the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany, so that they inevitably merged into a single national state. For, by definition, there was no place within the capitalist order for two national states for the German nation, but only for one. Also, the states constituted as federations of ethnic communities (a federation of Czechs and Slovaks in the case of Czechoslovakia, a federation of Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Georgians, Kazakhs, etc. in the case of the Soviet Union, and a federation of Slovenians, Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, etc. in the case of Yugoslavia), based on the presumed trans-ethnic connections of their working classes, had no chances of survival: with the weakening of the concept of trans-ethnic class connections in the process of establishing the capitalist order, all of them were eventually constituted as sovereign nations with their independent national states.
[ii] It was precisely the trans-national structure of the class of capitalists that led Marx to assert that its dominance could only be countered with the help of a similar trans-national structure formed by the working class. Marx felt that the working class could not eliminate its exploitation isolated within the boundaries of “the nation.”
[iii] Croatian nationalists chose ethno-linguistic basis as a distinctive principle in relation to the rival Hungarian and Slovenian nationalisms, while having chosen ethno-confessional identity as a distinctive principle in relation to the Serbian nationalism.
[iv] The Montenegrin nation and its national state were constituted on a historical-territorial principle, although the Serbian nationalism, based on the ethno-confessional principle, has been present in Montenegro since the 19th century. This ideology promotes the idea that all inhabitants of Montenegro, due to their Orthodox confessional identity, must be nationally identified as Serbs. Montenegrin nationalism takes the Montenegrin ruler and poet from the 19th century, Petar Petrovic Njegoš, as the mythical creator of the Montenegrin nation. At the same time, paradoxically, those who promote Serbian national identity of the inhabitants of Montenegro also find their main foundation in his works, in which he advocates the ethno-confessional principle of national identification and in which Montenegro is identified as a part of the Serb nation.
[v] In the period when Bosnia-Herzegovina was included in Austria-Hungary, and then in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians, i.e. the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the so-called “agrarian reform” was not completed yet, so that certain elements of the Ottoman feudal order were still present on its territory. Therefore, capitalism in Bosnia-Herzegovina has been introduced for the first time only after the fall of the socialist system.