Ethno-Nationalism and Political Conflict in Bosnia (Europe) 34

Ethno-nationalism and Political Conflict in Bosnia (Europe) 34 Aleksandra Zdeb Contents Introduction ...................................................................................... 596 Ethnicized History of BiH ....................................................................... 597 Power-Sharing Institutions of BiH .............................................................. 601 Fragmented Political Elites of BiH ............................................................. 605 Conclusions ...................................................................................... 609 References ....................................................................................... 610 Abstract Already in the medieval period, Bosnia and Herzegovina took on a specific multicultural and multiethnic shape that has been formed and strengthened throughout the following centuries. The unique composition of the country that consists of three groups, Bošniaks, Croats, and Serbs, should not only be enu- merated among the elements that influenced the 1992–1995 war but also defined the post-conflict processes of state and peace building. This means that ethnicity and nationalism remain the main elements that define Bosnian politics, its political arena, and, inevitably, political conflict. This chapter aims at showing the ethnicized reality of the Bosnian state from three interconnected perspectives: historical, institutional, and, last but not least, cultural one oriented toward political parties. Consequently, the first one briefly introduces formation of the groups and relations between them; the subsequent two focus on the postwar politics and explain the specifics of power-sharing institutions and political parties. It shows that, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the ethnicity versus political conflict equation comprises another variable – power-sharing (or, in other words, classical consociationalism) which should be seen not only as a conflict manage- ment tool but also a building block of the post-conflict system. A. Zdeb (*) Centre for Southeast European Studies of the University of Graz, University of Graz, Graz, Austria e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 595 S. Ratuva (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2898-5_43 596 A. Zdeb Keywords Bosnia and Herzegovina · Consociationalism · Political parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina · Political system of Bosnia and Herzegovina · Situational definition of ethnicity Introduction Ethno-nationalism and conflict can be merged together in one specificterm– ethnic conflict. Leaving aside the question whether either ethnicity itself or special configu- rations of ethnic groups trigger ethnic conflicts, one can without a doubt define some conflicts as ethnic, and it should be emphasized that they are a very specific kind. It is enough to look at an extreme form of them – armed conflicts: wars concentrated on national liberation or ethnic autonomy constituted only one-fifth of the conflicts which took place between the Congress of Vienna and the Treaty of Versailles. In the twentieth century, their share increased to 45%, with a peak of 75% since the end of the Cold War (Wimmer et al. 2009: 316). However, as Ted Gurr observes (2000: 275–276), the eruption of ethnic problems in the early 1990s was in fact the culmi- nation of a long-term general trend of increasing communal-based protests and rebellion that began in the 1950s and simply peaked after the end of the Cold War. Yet, conflict does not have to be violent. The most reliable definition of an ethnic conflict was provided by Stefan Wolff (2013:11) who describes them as “a form of group conflict in which at least one of the parties involved interprets the conflict, its causes, and potential remedies along an actually existing or perceived discriminating ethno-national divide; it involves at least one party that is organized around the distinct ethno-national identity of its members.” In this spirit, Judith Nagata (1974) offers a situational definition of ethnicity: circumstances define the way in which a particular person would present themselves. Especially in multiethnic states, people may perceive their place of birth, lineage, aspects of their tradition, and culture as fundamental for their existence. Thus, they assign “primordial” meanings to these features – perceiving them as fundamental or even organic – similar in their nature to kinship ties. When cultural features are perceived in this way, they are “primordialized”–so the “primordialism” of ethnicity depends on the situation (relations) and is not rooted in its nature – what actors see as primordial, scholars should define as constructed (Fenton 2007: 104–106). This “situational ethnicity” model is based on actors’ perception of ethnic identity, which has its own meaning for social actions of the people concerned, but clearly is contained in the social situation in which the interaction is taking place (Mitchell 1974: 21). It is then obvious that ethnic identity, once mobilized, may become a powerful source of activity – for an individual human being, but also for the whole group, it is potentially a “total identity” which may be involved in all aspects of social life (Fenton 2007: 135) and be used as a convenient tool for political movement to press claims on government (Horowitz 2000: 81) and politicians to gain as well as preserve power. 34 Ethno-nationalism and Political Conflict in Bosnia (Europe) 597 Hence, once woken up, ethnicity is not easily forgotten, and it becomes an important part of everyday politics as a source of suspicion instead of trust, polar- ization instead of accommodation, and repressions instead of tolerance (Diamond and Plattner 1994: xix). Bosnia and Herzegovina (terms Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnia, and BiH will be used interchangeably), in a historical as well as contemporary perspective, exemplify all the main aspects in which situationally understood ethnicity could be seen throughout the history of social relations where ethnicity was rather a tool chosen to shape them, the institutional structure of the state created to settle the conflict, as well as its political arena and politics founded on the idea of ethno-nationalism. The chapter shows what does ethnicity and divisions mean for a society and its development when it becomes the dominant point of reference and is inextricably linked to politics. Ethnicized History of BiH Already in the medieval period, Bosnia took on a specific cultural and spiritual profile among the South Slavs as it was positioned between two blocks: the East and West Roman Empires. Lying on the periphery of each, neither had a sufficiently intense influence upon it to achieve its radical assimilation; thus, the whole spiritual and material culture of medieval Bosnia had a bifocal development – it was also at the basis of the multiform cultural parallelism that has characterized BiH throughout history – in the Middle Ages the cultures of Western and Eastern Christendom coexisted, enriched each other, and were themselves enriched by the relics of autochthonous tradition, Catholic, Orthodox and Bosnian Churches, Cyrilic, Greek, Latin, Glagolitic scripts, and Bosancica (Lovrenović 2001:45–6). With time, BiH became a classic example of a borderland, a space where cultures, traditions, and religions have merged, forcing its inhabitants to constantly define their identity and its boundaries in contact with the “important” others (Dąbrowska- Partyka 2004: 63). In consequence, medieval Bosnia triggered development of multiple confessions on its territory: the Catholic Church in the North, West and, since the 1340s, in central Bosnia as well as, the Orthodox Church in the South and East from the beginning of the fifteenth century. Yet, its mountainous character made it also a natural breeding ground for heretical religious practices like a schismatic Bosnian Church which gradually gained an important position in political life, while with the Ottoman conquest, the confessional map of BiH changed, and Islam began to gain a foothold (Hoare 2007: 41; Lovrenović 2001: 49; Donia and Fine 2011: 37). Nevertheless, it was only in the context of the Ottoman all-embracing confes- sionalism that complex cultural identities emerged: Muslim-Bošniak in which Turkish-Islamic culture dominated; Serbian-Orthodox linked to the Byzantine religious tradition; Catholic-Croatian shaped by Western Christian traditions, and later the Sephardic-Jewish of the communities exiled from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century (Lovrenović 2001: 108). Ethnically and religiously diverse population of BiH has not always been divided into three separate and rigid categories of Muslims 598 A. Zdeb (Bošniaks), Serbs, and Croats. Rather, successive generations have interpreted their identities according to their own geographic, political, social, and cultural circumstances, while BiH’s contemporary social structure is a product of its medieval statehood and the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Yugoslav periods of rule (Hoare 2007: 28, 33) during which particular communities had more privileged position than others. Moreover, the process of nation-state consolidation that took place throughout Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to some extent, bypassed BiH. Since the fourteenth century, the region passed from under the control of one multinational empire to another, retaining many social and economic traces of its Ottoman origins

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