Introductory Remarks
The existence of three different and conflicting memories, linked to three different collective identities, and formed through history, in Bosnia-Herzegovina is extremely important in light of the fact that in the last decade of the twentieth century, Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) became a stage of struggle and experiment in world policy. More precisely, it became a battlefield between different cultural, political and religious concepts of society and the state. In these circumstances the history and destiny of BiH became much more important than they would have been in other situations.
BiH, a small Balkan country, became the focus of world policy between 1992 and 1995, during the war that ended with the Dayton Peace Agreement in November/December 1995. Although this Peace Agreement brought peace to BiH, it did not solve, as it could not, any of the deeply rooted historical and psychological problems that had existed before the war broke out. Thus, the ethno-national division of BiH, having been sealed by the Dayton Agreement, the historical and political scene of BiH was almost the same in 2014 as it was in 1991.
Actually, BiH is still in a deep political crisis, threatened by the danger of disintegration. The crisis is very closely related to the different regimes and policies of historical memory transmitted by the media and the educational system. The whole society, from top to bottom, is divided along ethno-national lines.
Historical experience has taught us that the breakdown of BiH would be reflected on a much broader space than the region of South Eastern Europe, i.e. the Balkans.
Historical Discontinuity and National Disunity of BiH
The history of Bosnia and Herzegovina, partially confirming wider European developments, but partially breaking with them as well, has been crucially determined by foreign and authoritarian political systems – a history without western-type democracy. That history has developed within seven disparate civilizational, political, and legal paradigms: in the Banovina/Kingdom of Bosnia (IX c. – 1463); the Ottoman Empire (1463–1878); the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (1878–1918); First Yugoslavia (1918–1941); the Independent State of Croatia (1941–1945); Second Yugoslavia (1945–1992); and in the internationally recognized State of Bosnia and Herzegovina since 1992. The history of Bosnia and Herzegovina has not run along a straight line, a logical dynamics of transition from one state into another, but rather has been impacted by external powers that have caused deep demographic, cultural, and political disintegration. After the period of medieval state independence, during the Ottoman period (1463–1878), the ground for a common political identity of the three religiously divided ethnic communities – today’s Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks – was destroyed. Each of these communities has remained emotionally tied to extra-Bosnian political and religious centres (Beograd, Zagreb, and Istanbul). Political life in BiH was dominated by pragmatism and dogmatism; thus, none of the political traditions related to all those more or less undemocratic systems were accepted, either emotionally or in memory, in the same way by all inhabitants of today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina.Reference Džaja 1
Such a ‘raw’ representation of history, which keeps generating and re-generating trauma, is what the intellectual, religious and political pseudo-elite of Bosnia and Herzegovina present to their fellow-citizens.
BiH has received attention in European and world history for the schism of the Bosnian church in the medieval period, and for the anti-fascist struggle going on between 1941 and 1945. In modern history the political destiny of BiH was determined by three treaties: Berlin (1878), Versailles (1919) and Dayton-Paris (1995).
The Turkish Complex – in the case of the Bosnjaks the complex of ‘lesser value’, in the case of the Serbs and Croats the complex of ‘greater value’ – is one of the recurring factors resulting from the long period of Ottoman rule. This Complex left three opposite imprints in the psychology of the three Bosnian-Herzegovinian ethno-national communities: ‘We are Turks’ (Bosnjak); ‘Antemurale christianitatis’ (Croatian); ‘The Return to Ancestral Faith’ (Serbian).Reference Žanić 2
Political Culture as a Reflection of the Friend–Enemy Scheme
The fundamental contradictory elements of political culture and political language in BiH rest on the stereotypical friend–enemy scheme. The deep opposition between Orthodox and Catholic Christians (or Serbs and Croats) dates from the Great Schism of 1054. Relations between Christians and Muslims are marked by the problem of conversion from Christianity to Islam under the Ottomans. In each case the underlying opposition reads: true believer – false believer. Religious stereotypes were ‘translated’ into political language and have outlived all political establishments so far. So, the nationalism of the ‘Doomsday’ is still on. This is discouraging but true: religious communities in Bosnia-Herzegovina cannot contribute to reconciliation because they produce conflicted political cultures in the same way that they are conflicted between themselves on the basis of their own dogmatic standpoints. On the contrary, they contribute to BiH increasingly becoming a religious state and, at the same time, to political representation based on confessional affiliation.Reference Komšić 3
Mutual enmities and resentment generated in the historical period of statelessness under the Ottomans, which each of the three communities experienced differently emotionally, lived on even after the withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire from BiH in 1878. They did so first in the guise of the ‘rustic’ parliamentary democracy of the First Yugoslavia, and then under the single-party system of the Second Yugoslavia. A traditional, idolized patriarchal order, rooted on the predominance of the rural over the urban, outlived all state forms.
Different political identities resting on different perceptions of the Ottoman and Yugoslav epoch of the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina, three divergent traditions that are mutually exclusive, with evident differences in view of the political organization of the state, have made and still make political consensus impossible to realize. What has always been the unresolvable problem is the taming of political power through the state-controlled institutions and a productive confrontation with the deformed political culture inherited from the past without a true possibility for all ethnic communities to find proper political representation.
These were the circumstances under which the monologic and conflicting character of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian society was created, as a closed circle living on revenge, without compromise, except for the compromise gained by extortion. Such a state of mind and feeling calls for interventionism, and this is precisely what has been happening since 1992.
The Constitutional Tradition of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1910–2010)
The forces active in this historical seven-act ‘drama’ engendered such widely divergent views of life that the 100-year constitutional tradition of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1910–2010) did not succeed in generating any common starting position for the negotiations about the reform of the Dayton Constitution in which political, ethno-national elites participate now. The Constitution of 1910, the Vidovdan Constitution of 1919, three constitutions of Socialist Yugoslavia, of 1946, 1963 and 1974, and finally the Dayton Constitution of 1995, as Annex 4 of the Framework Peace Agreement for BiH, speak different languages and always need ‘interpreters’. The political implementation of Bosnia and Herzegovina into these constitutional provisions is of such a nature that it could not ensure a stable state and an efficient resolution of the social and economic problems. The Dayton Peace Agreement could do so even less, as its Annex 4 serving as Bosnia-Herzegovina’s ‘constitution’ introduced a legal provisional solution without formally annulling the 1974 BiH Constitution that guaranteed its sovereignty as a republic within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
A Cult of the Unfinished Past
In the wider picture, the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina appears as a history of caesuras. The Roman Empire was divided into an Eastern and a Western Empire along the linguistic border between Latin and Greek. It was on this same ‘seam of history’ that the Church schism of 1054 took place. It was here, where both the West and the East ended, met and mixed artistic forms, ethnicities and cultures to a point where it was difficult to recognize them separately. Yet it was also here that the frontier between the Ottoman Empire and the countries of central Europe was established and lasted for centuries. These divisions led to regions with mixed ethnicities and the territories with specific nationalities being colonized, which sowed the seeds of numberless problems. In this Balkan ‘Bermuda Triangle’ of history, identities were formed, made up of heterogeneous affiliations, composed harmoniously but also sharply polarized, split identities escaping full control, most clearly recognized at those moments – and there were too many of them – when they were denied on religious, national, ethnic or other grounds. That is why history could become a struggle for identity and that is what made it possible for people to turn overnight into killers.
Bosnia and Herzegovina fully share this historical fate with what has been called ‘Levantine’ man, ‘human dust which painfully passes between East and West, not belonging to either and beaten by both’, as Ivo Andrić put it. These agonizing historical circumstances provided a fertile soil for the appearance of uncanonical forms and dislocated paradigms in which the creation of a unique history was impossible as it was always – both from the in- and the outside – cut up, divided, opposed to and at odds with each and all. Bosnian man was and has remained a victim of history, and that is why his identity was unable to develop as a sum of independent affiliations, but rather ‘as a drawing on the stretched skin’. 4 Thus were created wounded communities nurturing their separate cults and myths, dreams and expectations, immeasurably far away from the rationality with which West Europeans look at the past.
In the Balkans in general – and therefore in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well – there arose a cult of the unfinished past, awaiting redeemers and healers, and with the clear frontier between past, present, and future erased. Psychoanalysts have established that the feelings of groups affected by traumatic experiences are conveyed from one generation to another and that the ‘chosen trauma’ appears through the collective memory of an event or chain of events: ‘In short, members of a massively traumatized group cannot successfully complete certain psychological tasks and they, then, transmit such tasks to the children of the next generation(s) along with the conscious and unconscious shared wish that the next generation(s) will resolve them’.Reference Volkan 5 Thus, the cycle of negative generalizations and stereotypes is prolonged and constantly regenerated, especially in patriarchal societies, such as the Southern Slavic ones have been for centuries.Reference Дворниковић 6 That is why all attempts of modernization have failed to ‘modernize’ archaic patriarchal patterns. BiH finds itself at the threshold of the cycle that in modern societies has resulted in a transition from class-hierarchical structures to functional structures; that is, to pluralistic democracies where one’s religion is part of the society, not part of the state.
Different Types of Memory – Different Relations to the State: Eternal Crisis and Doomsday Nationalism
What arose in the Balkans then, centred above all on Bosnia and Herzegovina, was a political culture of a postcolonial type, which never succeeded in emancipating itself. In general, the modernization of the Balkan countries began with the creation of national states in the nineteenth century, not as a result of long-term continuing processes but rather as a sudden attempt to overcome or even delete the old. Thus, politics as a basic factor acquired a dominant role over society. This made it possible for nationalism to emerge much earlier than the spread of mass literacy.Reference Stojanović 7 Such an order of values left an indelible trace in the field of opposing historical narratives, political culture, and political language.
The memory of the Second World War and the memory of the wars between the Serbs, Croats and Bosnjaks in the 1990s are connected to each other, although structured differently. After the victory of the anti-fascist coalition in 1945, which the military National Liberation Movement headed by Josip Broz Tito was part of, and which was made up of members of all nationalities, a victorious mentality emerged and, later on, the state, through its leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement, was recognized and respected worldwide. Such a model for memory was built into the foundation of the political order of the Second Yugoslavia. Tito’s Yugoslavia, especially since 1966, developed an efficient federal model of national representation and equality from the level of the constituent republics to that of the federal institutions, in which Bosnia-Herzegovina reached its historical maximum of developed statehood. This period, especially in retrospect, is referred to as a ‘golden age’.Reference Bilandžić 8
The war (1992–1995) between the Serbs, Croats and Bosnjaks left a different type of memory. However, it would be wrong to consider this conflict as a religious, civic or ethnic war, or as the result of ancient hatreds or a specific Balkan mentality, or even as an internal Bosnian-Herzegovinian conflict.Reference Velikonja 9 This conflict drew on other premises and resulted from the varying views of the political elite about the political make-up of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state after the break-up of Yugoslavia. These different concepts, still present in the political life of the country today, have resulted in three different memories that are exclusive of each other and that cancel one another. The historical and socio-psychological foundations and alternative narratives of the recent past stay alive because of fictitious enemies created for the benefit of ethno-nationalism, allowing an ethno-nationalistic ideology to be established as a public hate system. These forms of memory building are based first of all on the ideology of ‘sacrifice’, namely ‘sacrificing’ for ‘our affair’ – religion, politics, state and people. Such memory building from the very start is exclusive, making for a fractious political life with no room for consensus.
The conflicts of 1941–1945 and 1992–1995 created different historical memories in Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats, primarily in their relation to the state. While the idea of a common state – Yugoslavia – was nourished from the Second World War, in the other case the common state of Bosnia-Herzegovina was born as the result of the different political aims of the inhabitants of BiH peoples but also of interventionism by the international community headed by the leading world powers. This renders Bosnia-Herzegovina an unstable state without internal or external consensus and divided along ethnic lines.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the wars and conflicts of the twentieth century – the First and Second World Wars and the only relatively recently ended armed conflicts – appear as a big epic cycle of violence primarily targeting civilians. Genocide, deportations, concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, forced conversion, discriminatory laws, verdicts without trials for those holding different political views took thousands of human lives, and uprooted even more, sending them into emigration. While the number of the most recent victims is still debated, we see comparisons being made to the number of victims of the Second World War, whose number rises astronomically to 1,700,000.
The Role of Religious Communities
The nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina are in essence religious nations. The break-up of Yugoslavia favoured the return of religious communities upon the political scene and the revival of religious-nationalistic mythic structures embodied in the collective memory of nations, especially the myth of the ‘chosen’ nation (Ref. Reference Velikonja9, p. 259). That is why culture, as a criterion of national identity, can hardly be separated from religion, since perceptions of legitimacy have historically been rooted in religious learning rather than in civil law. Such a state of mind is conducive to turning an administrative state into a sentimental nation based on feelings of affiliation and attachment. It allows for the continual mythologization of political space or the political mythologization of the space on which the post-war culturological paradigm – the one that produces a conflicting mindset – is built. The most difficult consequence of such a state is the creation of a strong feeling associated with a cult of suffering, according to which the culprit for one’s own endangered condition is identified as one’s closest neighbours. The notions of ‘enemy’ and ‘Other’ thus become synonyms, which is a common trait of the South Slavic nationalisms in their inter-dependence.
In BiH, then, it is not civil religions, limited to certain societies and serving to separate them from others, that hold centre stage, but political religions in the service of the friend–enemy scheme. All political religions create animosity and raise barriers against others by legitimizing their own domination and through the symbolic integration of their own peoples. In modern, messianic political religions, such enmity is raised to the level of an apocalyptic drama. Modern political messianism teaches fear and hatred of the national or class enemy. The myth of the enemy turns into a political myth of a community against which an unsparing struggle is the only reasonable way forward. The enemy thus becomes the foundation of our political existence. This situation finds its final expression in the culture of remembrance – in conflicting narratives and politically motivated violence and the eradication of memories, based on the example of Mostar.Reference Markovina 10
The Responsibility of the International Community (1992–2014)
This finally brings us to the other side of the coin: if the Ottoman heritage presented an obstacle to forming a common political identity, these dichotomies could not be solved by West European-style nationalism in combination with accelerated modernization.Reference Todorova 11 A nation established on the basis of language has often produced fatal disagreements and tragedies. After the experiences of the 1991–1995 war and the post-war period, it is clear that BiH needs totally different, atypical solutions. It is not just that the international community cannot bring a solution, it also does not want to do it. After all, it was said loudly and clearly that change can come only from the inside.
In spite of its international recognition in 1992, the statehood and political subject-hood of Bosnia-Herzegovina have remained questionable and subject to the pressure of interventionism of the international community and the different viewpoints of the latter’s leading members. This brings up the responsibility of the leading European and world powers for such a state, and evokes the thought voiced by Christian Schwartz Schilling in 1992, upon his resignation as Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany. He was ‘ashamed’ to be part of such a government, while his reason for joining the government had been to ensure that Nazi bestialities ‘would happen never again’. 12 Schilling also said that ‘The Balkans catastrophe with its consequences to Europe and the world will represent the most severe damage to Europe, caused by our fault and will be a burden in the 21st century’.Reference Tibi 13
As its solution to the 1992 political crisis, political Europe only offered maps of ethnic divisions, turning the political into a humanitarian problem, a multi-ethnic society and country into a single-ethnic society, and leaving BiH in permanent crisis. The combination of neoliberal and ethno-nationalistic recipes has proven fatal in Bosnia-Herzegovina. This is why we still have three parallel and conflicted historical memories.
What is the Task of Historiography and of Historians?
Historiography as a scientific discipline, essentially subject to politicization, contributed and continues to contribute to the present state of affairs. This has become especially evident since 1992, when the Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks, for the first time in their history, found themselves under the roof of the internationally recognized State of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mentally displaced from BiH, tied like snails to their ‘shells’ in the form of extra-Bosnian cultural, political and religious centres, each of these peoples, represented by their elites, have remained tied emotionally to a political and cultural paradigm from history: the Serbs – to First and Second Yugoslavia; the Croats – to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the Independent State of Croatia; the Bosniaks – to the Ottoman Empire. Each ethno-confessional group preserved as the referential point in its collective memory the historical era marked by its own supremacy. This mythical concept of historical memories has been kept alive by the media and an educational system controlled by politically criminalized elites.
Today, as the political crisis in the country is rising to a paroxysm, the question poses itself: how to live, with such a mental legacy, in one state (BiH)? And is that state sustainable at all?
The consolidation/reconciliation patterns of a religiously and ethnically complex society such as that of Bosnia and Herzegovina – formed within different political frameworks during ‘statelessness’ and where each new framework negated the previous one – include, above all, the establishment of a secular state, rule of law, institutions of authority, modernizing political life, revealing the truth about the recent war, and the media’s full responsibility in all this.
To firmly follow the path to its own historical subject-hood, for historiography and historians in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the following themes impose themselves: Slavism, anti-fascism, identity and secularism. The time ‘when we were the best, when we made the best for us out of ourselves’ should serve as a landmark.Reference Bajrektarević 14
Conclusion
Even after we were promised the end of ideologies and divisions, religiously and nationally coloured societies/states are still our harsh reality. Bosnia and Herzegovina is among them, searching for a way out of this degrading and non-promising situation after the conflicts of 1992–1995. Current ethnic division, generated from the near and distant history of this country, is being kept alive by domestic political pseudo-elites as well as by an international community with different political and economic interests. The present state of pseudo-democracy perfectly suits the preservation of three parallel and confrontational historical memories of Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks. Centuries of statelessness, historical and national discontinuity, and disagreement between the cultural and state identities of the three constitutive nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina, have led the country to the brink of disaster. Frozen military conflicts, as well as a combination of neoliberal capitalism and ethno-nationalism, have proven fatal for Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this situation, in which the state does not have political, economic, educational and media sovereignty, reconciliation is not possible, and thus instead of an ‘eternal now’ it is an ‘eternal past’ that is present nowadays.
New, atypical solutions are essential for opening a true perspective. The ‘global ethos’ interpreted by Hans Küng is required. Bosnia and Herzegovina as a global problem – Bosnia and Herzegovina as the global solution. Otherwise, we will witness the ‘end of history’ with all of its unforeseeable consequences.
Dubravko Lovrenović (1956) is a professor in the Department of History at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Sarajevo. A specialist in south-eastern medieval Europe, Lovrenović has authored books, reviews and journal articles on Bosnian medieval history. A significant number of his publications since 1996 have been dedicated to deconstruction of historiographic myths of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His doctoral dissertation Na klizištu povijesti. Sveta kruna ugarska i sveta kruna bosanska 1387-1463 (On the Slide of History: the Holy Hungarian Crown and the Holy Bosnian Crown 1387–1463) was published in Sarajevo-Zagreb in 2006. In 2008 he published a book on Bosnian myths, Povijest Est Magistra Vitae (History is the Master of Life). Stećci – Bosnian and Herzegovinian Medieval Tombstones was published in Sarajevo in 2009 (with a second edition in 2010 and a third in 2013) and has recently been published in English translation. Bosanska kvadratura kruga (Bosnian Squaring of the Circle) was published in Sarajevo-Zagreb 2012. Lovrenović was a visiting professor at Yale University in 2002; he spent the summer semester of the academic year 2004/2005 as a Scholar at CEU in Budapest and the academic year 2007/2008 as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Chicago. Since December 2012 Lovrenović has been a member of the Academy of Science and Arts of BiH.
