Abstract
By relying on the concepts of biopolitics and governmentality, this book attempts to ground Bosnian post-refugee transnationalism between racial states of Ireland and Bosnia in order to explain its enforced nature. The previous chapter grounded Bosnian refugee transnationalism in relation to the racial state of Ireland. This chapter grounds Bosnian post-refugee transnationalism in relation to the racial state of post-Dayton Bosnia. The chapter starts by presenting ethnic and religious complexity in Bosnia and argues that the racial state of post-conflict Bosnia is a product of the Dayton Agreement not a legacy of ancient ethnic hatreds, as the conflict is conventionally understood. It argues that the Bosnian biopolitical regime of governmentality reifies ethnicity and politicises nationalism. These factors combined enforce Bosnian post-refugee transnationalism.
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Notes
- 1.
Kurt Bassuener was a senior associate of the Democratisation Policy Council, a global initiative for accountability in democracy promotion.
- 2.
In a nutshell, his theory proposes that the times when the fundamental sources of conflict were primarily ideological or economic are over. In the future, the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. The clash of civilisations will dominate global politics.
- 3.
Huntington distinguishes between ‘fault line’ conflicts and ‘core line’ conflicts in his theory of inter-civilisational conflicts. Fault line conflicts are on the local level and occur between adjacent states belonging to different civilisations or within states that are home to populations belonging to different civilisations. Core line conflicts occur on the global level between the major states of different civilisations.
- 4.
Patrick Bishop has been the Daily Telegraph foreign correspondent covering numerous wars and conflicts since 1982.
- 5.
In his astute discussion of the withering away of Yugoslavia through the Socialist Party elites’ failure to reach ideological and political consensus between 1974 and 1990, Jovic (2009) provides a critical assessment of eight analytical approaches that have so far been used in explanations for the breakup of former Yugoslavia. These are (1) the economic argument; (2) the ancient ethnic hatred argument; (3) the nationalism argument; (4) the cultural argument; (5) the international politics argument; (6) the role of personality argument; (7) the fall of empires argument; and (8) the constitutional and institutional reasons argument. Having critically assessed the arguments, Jovic concludes that the elements of all, but not the ancient ethnic hatred one, can be found in the breakup of the Yugoslav state.
- 6.
Apart from his scholarly contribution, before his scholarly research, Andjelic was involved in a youth movement in Sarajevo during the period of Yugoslav disintegration. Subsequently, he became a popular member of the first generation of critical and satirical voices in the media as a provocative journalist.
- 7.
Bosnia was originally on the western side of the dividing line between the Western Roman and Eastern Roman Empire.
- 8.
For example, no words in Balkan languages can be shown to have derived from Gothic.
- 9.
Yet, interestingly, in November 1942, Bosnian Muslim autonomists who wanted their country to be given autonomy from the Croat fascist state of the time sent a memorandum to Hitler claiming their decadence from Goth tribes and, therefore, racial superiority over their Slav neighbours. In the memorandum they stated ‘We Bosnians came south to the Balkans in the third century as a Germanic tribe’ (Redzic 1987: 72). Even more interestingly, similar claims were made by the Croat fascist politician Ante Pavelic, in 1941 (Dedijer et al. 1974).
- 10.
It is clear, therefore, that Serbs and Croats were, from the earliest times, closely connected and migrated in tandem.
- 11.
There are many signs of pagan practices that were carried over into the Christianity and later into Islam in Bosnia. For example, the use of mountain tops as places of worship (Hadzijahic 1990).
- 12.
Thus a relationship was established between the two that would last until 1918.
- 13.
The word borrows from South Slavic ban meaning lord, master, ruler; further, borrowing from Turkish and the Avar word bajan, meaning ruler of the horde.
- 14.
Srebro means silver in Serbo-Croat.
- 15.
By 1422, Bosnia and Serbia together were mining more than a fifth of Europe’s entire production of silver (Malcolm 1994).
- 16.
As mentioned in the previous section, due to remote terrain, Hungary’s hold on Bosnian rulers was weak.
- 17.
This battle was used as a symbol of Serb patriotism during the breakup of Yugoslavia and was invoked in Slobodan Milosevic’s important Gazimestan speech (MacDonald 2002).
- 18.
For example, peasants who converted to Islam were promised more freedom and more secure forms of tenure (Tomasevic 1955).
- 19.
Interestingly, the term raya persisted into modern-day Bosnia and it has transformed its meaning to mean authentic urban population.
- 20.
While Ottomans did settle some Turkish people in the other parts of the Balkans, the tax registers show that this policy was not applied to Bosnia (Malcolm 1994).
- 21.
However, to a much lesser degree towards the Orthodox Church. This was mainly due to the Ottoman’s preference of the Orthodox Church, but also because of its much smaller presence in Bosnia.
- 22.
Yet again, the Ottoman tax registers of the time show evidence of this process. Due to the Slav patronymic system, there were many entries such as ‘Ferhad, son of Ivan’, where Ferhad would be a Muslim name and Ivan a Croat one indicating conversion.
- 23.
If anything, the grievances sometimes happened within the religious denomination itself. For example, Islam in Ottoman Bosnia was mostly orthodox and mainstream. The only seriously heterodox movement was that of the Hamzevites, who followed sheikh Hamza Bali Bosnjak. Little remains of his teachings, but according to the records, it went too far in admitting the elements of Christian theology. The sheikh was executed for heresy in 1573, but his followers continued to exist as a shadowy opposition movement to mainstream Islam throughout the seventeenth century (Hukic 1977).
- 24.
The word itself was coined by Hegel to denote the separate spiritual essences of diverse nations that characterise the present stage of human history.
- 25.
- 26.
For example, an Orthodox cathedral was built in Sarajevo and an emissary from Bosnia travelled through Russia with a holy relic to collect donations for the cathedral. Also, a group of Catholic monks from the Rhineland was allowed to build a convent near Banja Luka, and an English Christian organisation funded the opening of a girls’ school in Sarajevo (Malcolm 1994).
- 27.
The San Stefano Peace Agreement created a large Bulgarian state under the influence of Russia and, under the agreement, Bosnia remained part of the Ottoman territory. The aim of the Berlin congress was to redraw the map in order to counterbalance Russian’s influence in Europe.
- 28.
The exact number of émigrés is debatable. The Austro-Hungarian authorities’ figures state that, between 1883 and 1918, 56,625 Muslims left the country. However, these figures refer only to those with official permit to leave. They do not include those who left illegally or those who left in the first four years of occupation, between 1879 and 1883. Some historians claim that up to 300,000 Muslims left Habsburg Bosnia (Malcolm 1994).
- 29.
This was helped by the new Bosnian Governor Baron Burián, who ruled Bosnia from 1903 until 1912.
- 30.
Hence, it can be argued that the Dayton system was not an entirely American invention, as it borrowed heavily from the Habsburg rule of Bosnia.
- 31.
Historically, two Yugoslav states existed in the Balkan lands. The first, Yugoslavia, called the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, existed between 1918 and 1941 and was the union of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. The second Yugoslavia was the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It included Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Macedonians and Montenegrins and existed from 1945 until 1992.
- 32.
South translates as jug in Serbo-Croat.
- 33.
This is not to suggest that those two fields are separate and that the ideology is not interconnected with the national movements in a complex way. Indeed, the fact that both Djordjevic (1974) and Gross (1979) juxtapose the two is problematic in itself.
- 34.
- 35.
There is also a small district of Brcko, which remains an independent municipality.
- 36.
The last Census of 1991 notes 126,067 people living in Mostar, 1/3 of that were Serbs (Oslobodjenje 2007a). This means that, during the conflict, the number of Serbs in Mostar was reduced from around 42,000 to between 5000 and 9000.
- 37.
For more information on segregated education in Bosnia see GATED project at www.gated.ie.
- 38.
HDZ (Croat Democratic Union) was a representative part for the Croat population in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
- 39.
Stolac is a southern Bosnian town where the ‘two schools under one roof’ policy was first introduced.
- 40.
For more details about NDC in Mostar, go to https://www.nansen-dialogue.net/ndcmostar/index.php/en/.
- 41.
This is particularly relevant with regard to Bosnia and Herzegovina, as it was the most mixed republic of the six republics of the former Yugoslavia. The last census before the conflict shows that 44 per cent of the population identified themselves as Muslims, 31 per cent as Serbs, 17 per cent as Croats and 8 per cent as Yugoslavs (Filipovic 1997).
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Halilovic-Pastuovic, M. (2020). Bosnian Post-Refuge Transnationalism and Bosnia. In: Bosnian Post-Refugee Transnationalism. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39564-3_4
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