Discourses of trans-ethnic narod in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

The processes of peace-building and democratization in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) were instituted on 14 December 1995 by the Dayton Accords, which brought an end to the Bosnian War. While claiming their objectives to be reconciliation, democracy, and ethnic pluralism, the accords inscribed in law the ethnic partition between Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims by granting rights to “people” based on their identification as “ethnic collectivities.” This powerful tension at the heart of “democratization” efforts has been central to what has transpired over the past 16 years. My account uses ethnographic methods and anthropological analysis to document how the ethnic emphasis of the local nationalist projects and international integration policies is working in practice to flatten the multilayered discourses of nationhood in BiH. As a result of these processes, long-standing notions of trans-ethnic nationhood in BiH lost their political visibility and potency. In this article I explore how trans-ethnic narod or nation(hood) – as a space of popular politics, cultural interconnectedness, morality, political critique, and economic victimhood – still lingers in the memories and practices of ordinary Bosnians and Herzegovinians, thus powerfully informing their political subjectivities.

Keywords:

• narod
• trans-ethnic nationhood
• consociational democracy
• Mostar
• Bosnia and Herzegovina

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grants from the American Association of University Women, the American Council of Learned Societies, the New Europe College, Penfield, the Social Science Research Council, the Spencer Foundation, and the United States Institute of Peace. I am extremely grateful to Genevra Murray for her intellectual and editing contributions. I thankfully acknowledge the help of three anonymous reviewers, especially reviewer 2, in regard to various parts of this article.

Notes

There are two curricula used in the Hercegovačko-Neretvanski Canton where I conducted my fieldwork: the Federal curriculum and the Croat curriculum. The former was envisioned by the Federal Ministry of Education to be followed by all schools in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, it is used almost exclusively by the Bosniaks. The latter, which used to be identical to and still resembles the curriculum of the Republic of Croatia, is used in all Croat-dominated cantons in BiH.

The Mostar Gymnasium was my primary research site during my dissertation research. This famous school and national monument is the first among 54 “two schools under one roof” to be reunified in BiH since the war.

The names of all informants have been changed to protect their privacy.

The name of the country in local languages is Bosna i Hercegovina, thus the abbreviation BiH. When stylistically more appropriate, I use Bosnia instead of BiH.

Following Brubaker (1996, 7), I opt not to use “nation” but “nationhood,” where this is understood as a “category of practice, institutionalized form, and contingent event.”

I use “ordinary people” with much caution in this work. As Veena Das (2007) has pointed out, “everyday” is where much of deeply political work happens.

Here “ours” stands for “local,” domestic, regional, and former-Yugoslav political elites, and “foreign” denotes the international peace-makers and democracy-builders who have been shaping Bosnian political, social, and military realities since at least the end of the war in 1995.

Of course, when I asked people about specific politicians, they distinguished among different individuals and political parties – they emphasized that there were some good and honest politicians. However, skepticism about politika remained – some people said that with time, everyone who enters official politics would become zaražen (contaminated) by “dirty politics.”

In most instances, I use the full name “Bosnians and Herzegovinians” to refer to the inhabitants of the country. I use the shorter version “Bosnians” where stylistically more appropriate, however.

I am thankful to an anonymous reviewer for this comment.

I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this comment.

In my study I utilized three ethnographic methods: multi-sited participant observation, interviews, and text analysis. I employed the participant-observation method in four research sites: a school (the Mostar Gymnasium during, between, and after classes); international non-governmental organizations (INGOs); the students and teachers' homes; and leisure-time activities, such as hanging out at the local bars, hiking, and skiing. In addition, I conducted semi-structured interviews with selected students and their parents, and with other informants: teachers, principals, INGO workers, ministers of education, educational experts, and political leaders. The sample in Mostar included an approximately equal number of Croats (39) and Bosniaks (39), and males (43) and females (41). I also had numerous unstructured conversations with people at markets, cultural centers, graveyards, parks, shopping malls, and coffee shops.

At the congress of Muslim intellectuals in 1993, the terms Bosniak or Bosniac (Bošnjak) officially replaced the term Muslim when denoting nationhood. In everyday speech, however, Muslim and Bošnjak are often used synonymously.

The International Community in BiH is best described as a “loose coalition of international governmental institutions, national governments and non-governmental organizations that has bound itself to Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Dayton Accords and the period of reconstruction” (World Bank and Council of Europe 1999, 2). It refers equally to military and civilian international organizations working in BiH and their staff.

The consociational power-sharing model presumes cooperation of political elites across ethnic divides in order to manage conflicts. Fears of ethnic domination are reduced by extending self-rule and segmental autonomy as far as possible to each community (Palmer 2005). However, this model of power-sharing, initially developed by Arend Lijphart (1977), has been exposed to multiple criticisms. Its most vocal opponent, Donald L. Horowitz, argues that consociationalism is inherently unstable and can lead to the reification of ethnic divisions since “grand coalitions are unlikely, because of the dynamic of interethnic competition” (1985, 575).

The 10 cantons in FBiH fall into 3 groups: 5 in which Bosniaks are the majority population, 3 Croatian-majority cantons, and 2 “mixed” cantons.

Here I expand on Sally Engle Merry's (2001) notion of spatial governmentality, which she understands as gendered mechanisms of spatial segregation, discipline, and punishment found in postmodern cities.

For an analysis of “tolerance” as a discourse and practice of de-politicization of inequality in the contemporary US, see Wendy Brown's Regulating Aversion (2008).

Here I distinguish between multiculturalism as the ideology, political philosophy, and regime of peace-building that has been used by the international and local elites to establish the postwar state in BiH (see Gagnon n.d.), and multiculturality as the lived, constantly negotiated differences, interconnectedness, and heterogeneity that have been constitutive of Bosnia and Herzegovinian society. The former position approaches and envisions heterogeneity in a mechanical way – as a mosaic of three different, coexistent ethno-religions (see Hajdarpašić 2008) – and views diversity as the mathematical antithesis of monoculturalism and homogeneity. This rigid approach overlooks contingency, malleability, and polyvocality of identities and identifications, whose “content lies in permanent cultural interaction …” (Lovrenović 2001, 227).

In her explanation of nationalism as constraining and overwhelming, Drakulić (1993, 50–52) writes: [B]eing Croat has become my destiny […] I am defined by my nationality, and by it alone [?]. Along with millions of other Croats, I was pinned to the wall of nationhood – not only by outside pressure from Serbia and the Federal Army but by national homogenization within Croatia itself. That is what the war is doing to us, reducing us to one dimension: the Nation. The trouble with this nationhood, however, is that whereas before, I was defined by my education, my job, my ideas, my character – and, yes, my nationality too, now I feel stripped of all that. I am nobody, because I am not a person anymore, I am one of 4.5 million Croats […]. But I am not in a position to choose any longer. Nor, I think, is anyone else. {…} What has happened is that something people cherished as part of their cultural identity – an alternative to the all-embracing communism, a means to survive has become their political identity and turned into something like an ill-fitting shirt. You may feel the sleeves are too short, the collar too tight. You might not like the color, and the cloth might itch. But there is no escape; there is nothing else to wear.

During Yugoslav times, Serbo-Croatian was the official language spoken in Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, and BiH. The language had many local variants, and it used two alphabets, Latin and Cyrillic. The Latin alphabet was more frequently used in Slovenia, Croatia, and most of BiH; Cyrillic was dominant in Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and eastern parts of BiH. Regardless of these regional differences, people whose first language was Serbo-Croatian understand each other easily. At the same time, they could immediately recognize which region of the country a person is from based on the way he or she speaks. Since the start of the wars in the region, however, political leaders and many laypeople on all sides have insisted they speak three different languages, a claim constitutionally acknowledged in Dayton, when the partition of Serbo-Croatian into Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian was legitimized and institutionalized (Farrell 2001, 5). Many local and foreign linguists, however, still argue that the three new languages are variants of one language, Serbo-Croatian, since they share a common set of grammar rules. Regardless of the massive production of new vocabulary in all three languages, which was an attempt to further distance the “new” languages and people who spoke them, the language communities in the region still understand each others' languages without much difficulty.

This attitude is problematic for several reasons – just like (ethno)nationalism, it romanticizes, compartmentalizes, reduces, and essentializes its object, in this case the common “Bosnian mentality.”

I am thankful to an anonymous reviewer for this comment.

The complicated and powerful gendering and de-gendering of politics in postwar BiH is beyond the scope of this article. See, however, Helms (2010) for an insightful discussion of these processes.

This political maneuvering around nationalism that the elites perform in order to remain in power causes much frustration among those individuals who say that they do not understand why people, who might even understand these “dirty political schemas,” continue to vote for nationalists. An answer was provided to me by a US-born, Bosnian-language-fluent and Mostar-based field officer working for the Organization for Co-operation and Security in Europe (OSCE), who commented: “When I first came here [to Mostar], I thought it would be all about nationalism. That is how it seemed at first, and that is what I learned about during my graduate-school training in the United States. But now I understand … it is not about nationalism, it is about nepotism.” Later, over lunch, he added: “People vote for those who promise to give them jobs, and right now, the nationalists have that power.” This analysis demonstrates a more complicated political behavior than studies of nationalism and ethnic politics can alone provide – instead of blindly following nationalists, many ordinary people calculate their best choices, creating complicated overlaps and compromises between morality, ethics, ethnic belonging, security, and everyday survival.

Stolac is a small town in southwest Bosnia and Herzegovina, not far from Mostar.