Bosniak and Serbian National NarrativeThree ethnic groups reside in today's Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs, which are defined in the Constitution of Bosnia as constitutive nations, and not as national majorities and minorities. Similar political architecture exists, for example, in Belgium and Switzerland, as opposed to one-nation one state countries, like the United States of America and France. Contemporary standard languages, among these three groups, rest on a common linguistic foundation, and, are mutually very close. In spite of their linguistic closeness, they are mutually differentiated by separate cultural and political identities, and, have different national narratives. You can find a sociolinguistic analysis of these languages in this video in English, and, about the historical development in this video.
Each one of those national narratives emphasizes the originality of one's own ethnic group on the territory of Bosnia, and projects it into the distant past, while the presence of the remaining two ethnic groups is more or less marginalized, and interpreted as an import from outside, in other words, as the product of centuries-old foreign influences in Bosnia.
Serbian narrativeThe first national narrative to arise was the Serbian. During the westward and northward expansion of Serbs and Serbianized Vlachs under the aegis of the Ottoman authorities in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the growth of confessionally defined Serbian proto-national consciousness began to crystallize among the patriarchs and higher echelons of the Orthodox clergy in their titles, as well among Serbian monks on their travels in Russia and other lands, resulting in sporadic proclamations of the entire South Slavic area as “Slaveno-Serbian", with the emerging narratives on Bosnian and Croatian historic lands, as supposedly “Serbian regions", relegating their non-Serbian population to an unenviable position of deficient “Serbs of the Roman rite" or Croatian-Bosnian Catholics and, as the other branch, “Islamicized Orthodox Christians." One should mention that this was a development of the late 18th century. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the enlighteners and national ideologists: Dositej Obradović and particularly Vuk Karadžić, The Serbs: All and Everywhere, provided this Pan-Serbian idea with a linguistic basis, proclaiming the majority of the South Slavic linguistic idioms, as the Serbian language, and, their speakers as Serbs. This ideology was not autochthonous, because, prior to the late 18th and early 19th century, Slavic studies of Dobrovsky, Šafarik and Kopitar, and its misconceptions, linguistically defined Serbdom was not an issue among the Orthodox in Bosnia and everywhere where Serbs had settled outside of Serbia proper. Actually, Serbs abhorred everything written in the 400 years Shtokavian vernacular, liturgical and secular literary tradition, as something Croatian or Dalmatian, Catholic and poisonous, utterly dangerous for Serbian national and cultural identity. After the establishment of the Principality of Serbia in 1830, Serbian politics, through its project of Greater Serbia, views the western Balkans as Serbian. The Greater Serbian project received its clearest expression in the work, named Outline, of Iylliya Garashanin in 1844, and in the brochure, The Annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Serbian Problem, published 1908 in Belgrade. The author of this brochure, Yovan TChveeitch, the leading name of Serbian science in that period, defined Bosnia as: “the core soil and heart of the Serbian people", in a similar manner as the “Moscow region is for Russia”. During the twentieth century, the Greater Serbian national narrative, according to which Bosnia is the central province of the Serbian people, experienced, for sure, “Yugoslavist accommodations", but Serbian Yugoslavism, in its core, retained a Greater Serbian character. This especially came to expression on the occasion of the collapse of Tito's Yugoslavia, in the late twentieth century. At that time, the Serbian side imposed upon particular parts of the Yugoslav federation, the option of war, and the bloody breakdown of the Yugoslav state, instead of a civilized separation.
The argumentation of the Serbian national narrative, rests on the great linguistic closeness, and, similar elements in folk culture of particular ethnic groups of the South Slavic world. This great linguistic similarity, has been transformed into the thesis of a uniform linguistic identity, so that the Serbian side worked on the Serbianization of linguistic culture in Croatia, and, in particular, in Bosnia, from the time of Karadžhić's work: The Serbs, All and Everywhere, to the breakdown of Yugoslavia. This project under the appellation of Serbocroatism also found a responsive chord in international linguistics, which even today, in considerable part, persists with its Serbo-Croatist attitudes, by which the BosnianBosniak, Croatian and Serbian standard languages, are being joined into one language. German linguist and Slavicist, Leopold Auburger, described the ideology of Serbo-Croatism thus: The perception of closeness, creates the illusion of sameness.
Efforts were made to neutralize the remaining cultural and political differences, by stressing the importance of folk culture, and, proclaiming as foreign, all cultural and political traditions which were not able to fit into the Greater Serbian project. This project failed, because Croatian and Serbian literatures, both liturgical and secular, differ in the past 800 to 1000 years, and, while Croatian literature and standard language, have roots in the 500 years old urban Western Shtokavian writing, combined with Chaakavian and Kaaykaavian features, and, modeled upon European Humanist and Renaissance traditions, Serbian literature, based mostly on rural Eastern Shtokavian speeches, with Russian Slavonic imports, possesses a different physiognomy embedded in its 200 years old tradition. Nevertheless, especially during the Communist Yugoslavia period, from 1945 to 1991, official language in Bosnia was strongly Serbianized through the media and school system, imposing characteristically Serbian traits in: vocabulary, technical terminology, syntax and stylistics, with Bosnian Muslims indifferently following the dominant Serbian cultural hegemony, which collapsed only during the Yugoslav wars after 1991.
The remaining two Bosnian constitutive peoples, the Bosnian Croats, and, Bosnian Muslims or Bosniaks, opposed the Serbian reading of the cultural and political identity of Bosnia, with their own national narratives, as antipodal projects.
Croatian narrativeThe Croatian national narrative, on Bosnia, as an exclusively Croatian land, developed on the heels of the Greater Serbian narrative, and, received its final formulation at the turn of the twentieth century. The Croatian narrative, which has rather complex and contradictory proto-national roots in the 16th century, in Humanist reading of the older historical sources, which mixed: Illyrian, Croatian, mythized Gothic and Slavic ideological narratives in the work of Vinko Pribojević, did not build its argumentation upon the thesis of the sameness of the language and folk culture, but, rather on historic right, and dominant early historical sources, according to which medieval Bosnia, and its population, belonged, not to the Serbian, but to the Croatian demographic, cultural and political sphere. Owing to the Ottoman conquests, a large portion of the medieval Bosnians were Islamicized, while a numerous Serbian-Orthodox population, settled in Bosnia at the same time. While, according to the Croatian narrative, the Islamicized Bosnians, or Ottoman Bosnians, preserved the consciousness of their own supposedly Croatian affiliation, the immigrant Serbs, as members of the Serbian Orthodox Church, retained their non-Bosnian Serbian political and cultural traditions. After the retreat of the Ottoman Empire, the four hundred year old Ottoman rule in Bosnia left in its wake Catholic Croats, Muslim Croats and the settled Serbs. In 1992, the Croatian side renounced the, Croats of the Islamic faith in Bosnia, proclaimed the Croatian constitutive people in Bosnia, as the diaspora of the Republic of Croatia, and toyed with the idea of political division of Bosnia, as did the other two sides.
Since the middle of the 17th century, the Vatican has considered the Catholic population, of today's Republic of Croatia, and today's Bosnia and Herzegovina, to be members of the same nation. So, the Vatican did not include Slovenes, who are also Slavs and Catholics, and didn't even consider Serbs, as members of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Culturally and historically, Croats were the sole inheritors of Saint Jerome's legend, as the founder of Glagolitic script, and, the patriarch of Slavic language in the Roman province of Dalmatia. It could be said, that this provision applies only to Catholics from the mentioned area, Slovenes and Serbs were excluded, for obvious cultural and ecclesiastical reasons, and, the name for this nation was specified to be Illyrian, which is equivalent to the modern perception of the Croatian nation, if we substitute the Illyrian name with Croatian.
Privitak:
Sveti Jeronim i sveta Rota.png [ 310.2 KiB | Pogledano 2255 put/a. ]
Namely, the Supreme Ecclesiastical Court in Rome, Saint Rota, in the judgment of April 24 1656, ruled as follows: we say, we declare, we judge, we determine and declare, that as a true and real province of the Illyrian people, it was, and is, and, that is meant to be Dalmatia or Illyricum, which are parts of Croatia, Bosnia and Slavonia, and, that only those who come from the said four regions: Dalmatia, Croatia, Bosnia and Slavonia, can be admitted to canonical places and, ecclesiastical benefices of the same congregational church, as well as to the hospitality and brotherhood of the same Saint Jerome.
Of course, this is a rough sketch that should be enunciated in much more detailed terms. An historical excursus into Croatian integrative ideologies from the 19th century on, should suffice. There have been two national ideologies, pure Croatian, essentially secular liberal nationalism, indifferent to religious identity and religiosity as such; another was Yugoslav Croatian ideology. Frequently, those two integrative ideologies oscillated and individuals have been, as time and events had been passing, tossed between these two camps, or, trying to synthesize both world-views or ideologies, Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža, for instance. Roughly, pure Croat ideologues were soft on Muslims, while Yugoslav Croatian intellectuals were soft on Serbs, and others vacillated between these two positions. Interestingly enough, Franciscan friars and historians Krunoslav Draganović and Dominik Mandić belonged to pure pan-Croatian ideology, trying to nationally assimilate Bosnian Muslims into Croatdom, and, simultaneously refusing to work on religious conversion of Muslims, a strange phenomenon, considering they were Catholic priests and monks. It seems, that for them, nationality was more important than religion, a walking contradiction.
Bosniak narrativeThe national narrative of the Bosnia Muslims, officially declared as Bosniaks in 1993, was born in the shadow of the Serbian and Croatian narratives. The Bosniak side resisted the tendencies of Serbianization and Croaticization, by building against these stereotypes its own historical picture, in which a continuity was postulated between the medieval Bosnians, called Boshnyani, and Ottoman Bosniaks, called Boshnyaatci, between the so-called Bosnian Bogomils, as the members of the medieval Bosnian Church were known in the nineteenth century, and the Islamic community in Bosnia and, finally, between the medieval Bosnian Kingdom and the Ottoman Bosnian eyalet founded in 1580. One of the Bosniak ideologists Enver Imamović, in 1992 in the Bosniak parliament stated, that it would be a hard task to convince Muslim population in Bosnia that their ancestors were called by the names of pre Ottoman Christian rulers of Bosnia, for example Katarina and Stjepan. And also, during the breakup of Yugoslavia, only Bosnian Croats named their military forces after pre Ottoman Bosnian rulers: dukes, bans and kings. In the search for deeper roots, the Bosniak side did not stop at the early Middle Ages, as did the Serbian and Croatian national narratives, but projected the existence of its ethnos into the Roman and Illyrian period, and by doing so, equated the antiquity of the Bosniaks with that of the ancient Greeks. The presence of Croats and Serbs in Bosnia, was interpreted as a marginal phenomenon of Bosnian history; namely, the Serbs and Croats appear in the Bosniak narrative, according to Alitchitch: “as small groups that dropped into Bosnia who knows under what conditions, and with what aims”.
Privitak:
Spomenik okupatoru.png [ 439.52 KiB | Pogledano 2255 put/a. ]
Then, from the beginning of their national individuation at the end of the 19th century, Bosnian Muslims, the majority of them, did not feel they belonged to either Croats or Serbs, simply because true nations cannot participate in two or more religious cultural civilizations. True, many Muslim intellectuals, from 1879 to 1945, identified either as Croats or Serbs, but they did not constitute more than 1-3% of Muslim population. The vast majority of Bosnian Muslims knew, in their heart of hearts, that they were not Croats or Serbs. A more serious Bosnian Muslim national individualization, began during Communist Yugoslavia, when they were finally recognized by Communist authorities as a separate nation, not just a shapeless ethnic group. The majority of Bosnian Muslims were rather secularized, but the identitarian core of that people was Ottoman-Islamic, and not secular Turkish along reforms of Kemal Paša Ataturk, nor Bosnian in their cultural-historical identifications, because the Ottoman conquest had destroyed historical memory of the old Bosnian kingdom, which remained, to a certain extent, only among Bosnian Catholic people who are, from this vantage point, the only true Bosnians who had fused historical identity and collective memory, particularly among Franciscans, while among the Orthodox people in Bosnia, there was no emotional connection with anything historically pre-Ottoman Bosnian, due to the Catholic character of most of the old Bosnian polity.
Bosnian identitiesThus, historically, from the 15th to the 19th centuries, two Bosnian identities have remained, having virtually nothing to do with each other, one among Catholics, who saw themselves as true heirs of old Bosnia, and wanted to get rid of Islam and Turks and have been trying to unify Bosnia with Catholic or Christian Europe, and in this instance with their co-ethnics in Croatia; another Bosnian identity was that of Bosnian Muslims, who differentiated between themselves, as Bosnian Turks possessing regional Bosnian identity, and, real Turks from other parts of the Ottoman Empire. Needless to say, these two Bosnian identities did not interweave, and had nothing in common regards cultural-historical memory and political-economic goals. Serbs in Bosnia have been formed in the mold of Serbian Orthodoxy; they did not possess any recognizable Bosnian identity, their culture being primarily Serbian and Orthodox Christian, with Bosnian historical associations serving, sometimes, only as a regional catalyst for modern Serbian Orthodox national integration. As far as Bosnian Croats go, their pride as self-conscious inheritors of the glory of the old Bosnian polity, sometimes, decelerated, slowed and hindered their final crystallization, and, integration in the modern Croatian nation.
Privitak:
Narativi.png [ 355.27 KiB | Pogledano 2255 put/a. ]
ConclusionOne can see from the preceding paragraphs, that all three Bosnian national narratives have been established on postulations regarding the antiquity, and continuous settlement on Bosnian soil of one’s own ethnic group. Arguments for such historical constructs were sought after by the Serbian side, as already mentioned, above all in a common linguistic basis, and, similarities in the area of folk culture, by the Croatian side in the postulated political and cultural connection of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian area, with Croatian regions during the Middle Ages and later. The alleged consciousness of this community amongst the Bosnian Muslims survived the four hundred year Ottoman period, because its rule was foreign. Their integration into the modern Croatian nation was expected, as a logical consequence, because the Bosnian Muslims, according to this myopic idea, through their conversion to Islam, only changed their religious affiliation, but, not their alleged Croatian cultural and political identity, or, in Serbian narrative, Serbian cultural and political identity. The Bosnian Muslims opposed this Croatian and Serbian reading of the history of Bosnia, through postulations about the continuity between medieval Bosnian and Ottoman political and religious institutions, between the Bosnian Kingdom and the Ottoman Bosnian eyalet, and, between the Bosnian Church and the Islamic community. With regard to the medieval Bosnian Church, the Bosniak side has speculated and speculates, about its allegedly greater theological similarities with Islam, than with the established Christian churches, in order to further separate that institution from its Christian text and context, and, so establish a direct continuity between medieval Bosnians, Bošnjani, and Ottoman Bosniaks, Bošnjaci. These ahistorical projections completely fail, because, Bosnian Church teachings had nothing in common with Islam, which actually destroyed the culture of that religious sect; also, Islamization, wars, and succeeding population transfers sucked, in what is now Bosnia, most Islamized Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, Albanians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Vlachs, so, there is neither demographic, nor cultural uninterrupted continuity, between contemporary Bosniaks, and medieval Bosnians.
Alongside the postulation of the continuity with the distant past, it is noticeable, that all three narratives, have pushed to the margins the profound demographic changes, above all, the numerous migrations and evictions from Bosnia during the Ottoman wars, while the complex process of Islamization, has been reduced to a question of conversions from Bogomilism, a misattributed appellation for Bosnian Church, to Islam.
All in all, Bosnian national narratives, are a classic example of Benedict Anderson's thesis on nations as “imagined communities", and, Eric Hobsbawm's thesis on “invented tradition“, and they emerged as an ideological product of political projects, that were tested in Bosnia at the time of its entry into modern history. Historiography stands before the task of deconstructing these constructs, to make clear their imaginary character, in other words to show, through an argumentative reconstruction of history, real historical hypotheses which must be taken into consideration, before creating a common political and cultural life amongst the heterogeneous communities of Bosnia.
