Feeling the Nation: The Master Frame of SDS BiH

Abstract

This chapter offers a synchronic discourse analysis that deals with large-scale performative structures of SDS’s discourse. Based on a study of thousands of speeches, statements, and commentaries by SDS officials, it identifies common modes of understandings that unified the various actors into a single Serb nationalist coalition. It outlines SDS’s master vision of ethnic nations as living, thinking, and acting corporeal beings. It also identifies SDS’s large-scale description of the political moment in Bosnia as a clash of an upright and virtuous Serb national being against the menacing ethnic others for which Serbs needed to awaken after the decades of naivety and misapprehensions. The chapter evaluates the powers of such portrayals to mobilize sensibilities conductive for ethnic mobilization.