TAMING BALKAN NATIONALISM This page intentionally left blank Taming Balkan Nationalism ROBIN OKEY 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Robin Okey 2007 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–921391–7 13579108642 Contents Preface vii Abbreviations xiii Maps xv 1. Background to a Mission: Pre-Austrian Bosnia and the Powers 1 2. Stuttering into Gear 26 3.TheNatureoftheKallay´ Regime 55 4. Kállay and the Serbs 74 5. Kallay´ and the Muslims 92 6. Kállay and the Croats 109 7. The Crisis of the Kállay Regime 123 8. Towards Constitutionalism, 1903–10: Divergent Visions 144 9. A Public Reckoning: Cultural Policy in the Bosnian Diet 176 10. An Unofficial Reckoning: The Student Movement 193 11. On the Eve of War: A Balance Sheet 217 Review and Epilogue 251 Notes 259 Bibliography 318 Index 339 This page intentionally left blank Preface Few historical episodes are as exclusively linked with a single act as the Austro- Hungarian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina.1 The assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne by the Serb student Gavrilo Princip in 1914 has irrevocably associated Bosnia and the occupation with the theme of nationalism, and given them a small niche in the consciousness of educated people. A generation ago one could say no more than this. Events since the fall of communism have lent a wider interest to themes which were never dull. With the decline of Marxism a shift of academic focus from issues of class to culture and ethnic identity makes multinational Bosnia a potentially rich field for booming nationalism studies. Related preoccupations with a ‘clash of civilizations’ find resonance in Austria-Hungary’s attempt to overhaul a backward Ottoman province, justified as it was by appeals to ‘modern’, western values and the aspiration to influence existing Bosnian mentalities in accordance with them. These themes of cultural politics intersected in Austrian-occupied Bosnia with the power politics of Balkan regional strategy which the occupation was intended to solve. This dual aspect also has a modern connotation. As long as Great Powers feel the need to intervene in troublesome areas of different cultural background to protect their perceived interests, the Bosnian record may merit attention. It is the politics of Austria- Hungary’s self-proclaimed ‘cultural mission’ in Bosnia and the native Bosnian responses evoked by it which are to be the main themes of this book. Cultural mission, the preferred Austrian term, or the French mission civil- isatrice, were concepts of the period in which the Bosnian occupation occurred which powerfully expressed the sense of a western superiority towards other cultures after a century or more of unprecedented advance. The progress of industry and communications, the explosion of knowledge and scholarly disci- plines, and the revolution in the concept and practice of government and society all understandably conspired to produce in the agents of this age of imperialism a sense of historic power and calling. While during the occupation European rule extended rapidly over almost the whole world, in 1878 it was mainly exercised over Oriental and Islamic-influenced countries, like British India, French Algeria and Russian Turkestan. Thus Bosnia, an Ottoman territory for four centuries, geographically in Europe but universally accounted an ‘Oriental’ province—in the lifestyle also of its Christian subjects—fitted all the more naturally into the contemporary frame as European mission land. ‘Europe’ in a civilizational sense was after all western Europe. Hence many of the attitudes on the part of governors and governed under the Austrian occupation can be best understood in the context of imperialism, and the debate engendered by Edward Said’s thesis on the ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes that he saw westerners imposing on the viii Preface eastern, particularly the Islamic world. Ideas of the discords resulting when a Europe governed by abstract, regimented norms came in contact with an ‘Other’ perceived as irrational have been prominent in recent studies of colonialism.2 To what extent did ‘Orientalism’ operate in Bosnia and how fraught was the encounter between different civilizational modes? Yet Bosnia was not just another colony of western power. Its physical contiguity with the metropole meant that occupation was always intended to become permanent. Bosnia had to be absorbed into the Monarchy to prevent the emergence of a large south Slav state on its border, which could destabilize the Monarchy’s fraught nationality relations. This rationale for the occupation bore the weighty implication that Austria-Hungary’s rulers had rivals in their claim to bring European progress to Bosnia. Serbs and Croats, as Christian Europeans, also asserted a European mission in Bosnia, which they interpreted, however, in national terms: the mobilizing power for betterment of the national spirit. The story of the occupation became that of a battle for the moral high ground. The vision of a family of peoples united in progress under the august sceptre of a benevolent emperor opposed that of nations awoken from the despond of poverty and alien rule to the fulfilment of their high destinies. The rival Serb and Croat claims to Bosnia, and the tensions between the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the Monarchy, added further fields for contestation. Whether in the Habsburg or Slav nationalist perspective, the task of European uplift was both economic and cultural. The development of modern commu- nications and economy are readily understood themes, whose outlines will be briefly sketched as background to the main story told here. But the work of cultural modernization requires initial explanation. At the root of the progress on which Europeans prided themselves were shifts in mentality. As a result of the Enlightenment the orbit of received authority, particularly previously pervasive religious authority, had contracted relative to notions of a civic society, whose progress was based on the free circulation of ideas and free association of individ- uals, endowed with equal rights before the law. Such a society necessarily placed great weight on general education, at least as an ideal, so that individuals could play their role as its members. The Habsburg cultural mission in Bosnia meant introducing the modern spirit to a province seen to be in hock to superstition and ignorant priests. Modern-minded religious hierarchies would be organized, and seminaries for an educated clergy, who could become mediators of Austrian reform ideas to the masses, while schools open to members of all Bosnia’s religious confessions could teach a common loyalty to the new state power. A cultural mission so conceived had the advantage for Austro-Hungarian administrators of identifying the legitimizing modernizing principle with the Habsburg state, while associating the people of Bosnia with the traditional, religious sector in the modernist paradigm. In many ways, the Monarchy continued the Ottoman millet system of treating Bosnians as religious rather than national groups, to be governed through reshaped religious hierarchies. This dovetailed conveniently Preface ix with the occupation’s political goal of restricting the growth of Serb and Croatian nationalism. Under the masterful Benjamin von Kallay,´ Bosnia’s longest-serving administrator, the confessionalizing strategy was extended to subsume Muslims, Orthodox and Catholics into a wider Bosnian entity, which was to operate as a further barrier to pan-Serbian or pan-Croat influences. It was here that the clash with Serb and Croat-minded Bosnians came. Sharing the modernist association of religion with the traditional sphere, they saw Orthodox and Catholics as members of Serb and Croat nations with distinguished pedigrees in medieval statehood, whose national consciousness was now in process of revival. The sense of a historic, secular identity was strong enough for many nationalists