Changing Youth Values in Southeast Europe

Beyond Ethnicity

Tamara Trošt, Tamara P. Trošt, Danilo Mandić

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138086364
• eBook ISBN: 9781351617864
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What shapes the cultural, political and ideological values of young people living in Southeastern Europe? Which identities matter to them? How are their values changing, and how can they be changed? Who is changing them? Europe's periphery is the testing ground for the success of European values and identities. The future stability and political coherence of the Union will be determined in large measure by identity issues in this region.

This book examines the ways in which ethnic and national values and identities have been surpassed as the overriding focus in the lives of the region's youth. Employing bottom-up, ethnographic, and interview-based approaches, it explores when and where ethnic and national identification processes become salient. Using intra-national and international comparisons of youth populations of Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Vojvodina, contributors uncover the mechanisms by which ethnic identities are evoked, reproduced and challenged. In addition to exploring political, regional cultural generational and class identities, the contributors examine wider questions of European unity.

This volume offers a corrective to previous thinking about youth ethnic identities and will prove useful to scholars in political science and sociology studying issues of ethnic and national identities and nationalism, as well as youth cultures and identities.

Part I
New ethnic mosaics

Cleavages within ethnic groups

1
Negotiating identities in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina

Self, ethnicity, and nationhood in adolescents born of wartime rape

Tatjana Takševa

I perceive myself as a fighter for peace… I think that’s me, I think I need to be that… because as a child who has blood from two different groups, I am able to negotiate more, and act as a peace-keeper… between both nations in order to overcome divisions and conflicts. What we need is to eliminate this war situation.… We the young ones.… we should not allow ourselves to become collateral damage of the enemies, of the nationalists on all different sides. Regardless of ethnic belonging, we should sign a pact that will allow for cooperation in the future.… That is basically what I fight for.

(Erjavec and Volčič 2010b: 536)

This was spoken by Amda, an adolescent Bosniak girl, in response to her interviewers’ request to describe herself and her understanding of her identity as a child born of wartime rape to a Bosniak mother living in Sarajevo. Although Amda uses metaphors from the semantic field of warfare to define her sense of self, she does so in a way that reorganizes her ‘identification matrix’ (Volčič 2007: 69) in positive terms, casting herself as a peace-builder and a peace-keeper between ethnic groups still divided. She also perceives herself as someone who by default stands opposed to the enemy nationalists on all sides; in her statement, youth constitutes an ideological category that embodies the desire for peace, cooperation, and a shared identity beyond ethnic affiliations.

Emerging as the product of a recent violent conflict in which more than 20,000 Bosniak and Croat women were kept in rape camps and forcibly impregnated, mainly by Serbian but also Croat soldiers, and based on her ‘mixed blood,’ Amda negotiates her identity in terms of being a ‘third party’ who can bridge or overcome interpersonal and social tensions in an ethnically divided Bosnia and Herzegovina, thus representing an alternative to a form of national belonging based on ‘pure’ ethnicity that remains inscribed into the country’s constitution.¹

In her positive construction of her mixed ethnic identity, Amda represents an exception among the interviewed youth. She is one of two out of 19 girls who took part in two recent studies (Erjavec and Volčič 2010a; Erjavec and Volčič 2010b) who articulated a sense of self in relation to ethnicity in a constructive manner, reframing their perceived ‘outsider’ status as a potential source of strength and positive change. The remaining respondents use the same language of warfare but in ways that signal their sense of social and community exclusion and isolation. Their statements reveal their conception of their ‘mixed blood’ as an aberration, a state of being ‘unclean’ or ‘cancerous,’ having interiorized their community’s persistent attempts to assert an ethnically homogenous national identity by casting them as the tools of genocide, and as the ‘children of the enemy.’ While this perspective is tragic but perhaps unsurprising, what is surprising and important is the articulation of a positive identity alternative presented by narratives like Amda’s. Both sets of narratives come from the same population. However, while one set presents a version of identity based on pure ethnic identification, the other moves beyond this narrow affiliation.

The particular issues relating to the identity of children born of wartime rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina have been overlooked over the last two decades. But now they are of particular relevance as these children have entered (young) adulthood, and soon will be expected to contribute to the social and political life of the country according to its strictly defined ethno-national concepts of three ‘Constituent Peoples’ (Bosniaks, Serbs, Croats) and ‘Others.’ Analysing the small body of published narratives of adolescents born of wartime rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this chapter contributes to the academic corpus on ethnicity and nationhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina by focusing on the socio-economic, generational, and ideological factors contributing to the identity construction of this particular population, especially as they are evidenced in narratives like Amda’s, where identity is envisioned as hybrid and transcending ethno-national labels. Since the nation is not only a political project but also a cognitive, affective, and discursive category deployed in everyday practice (Bonikowski 2016), I argue that the constructively reimagined identification matrix in the personal narratives of children born of wartime rape serve not only as a direct way to explain the past and examine the present, but also as a potential discursive blueprint for a political and cultural future for Bosnia and Herzegovina where national identity can be articulated through an alternative set of values based on common civic interests, beyond ethnic affiliations.

Rather than viewing nationalism only as ‘the product of macro-structural forces’ such as politics, economics, and culture in a broad sense, recent research on nationalism examines the phenomenon as ‘the practical accomplishment of ordinary people engaging in routine activities.’ (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008: 537) Studies of nationalism are increasingly focused on the ways in which nationhood is negotiated, reproduced and, in some cases, undermined and subverted through the actual practices of ordinary people in everyday life (Hobsbawm 1991, Billig 1995, Herzfeld 1997, Edensor 2002). Malešević’s position (2006: 74–6) on the complex relationship between the two levels of ideology, the normative (or official) and the operative, can help lay the foundation for an analysis of how and why a particularly vulnerable segment of Bosnian society is motivated and persuaded to believe in the specific value system that is evidenced from their statements and personal narratives, and further, under what conditions one ideological construction is preferred over another. The normative levels of ideology in today’s Bosnian society are in flux and still look back to the events of the recent war, with the view of moving forward and developing more constructive forms of civic coexistence (according to domestic and international political rhetoric, at least). However, the operative level, the one ‘encountered in the features and patterns of everyday life’ (Malešević 2006: 78), is still for the most part grounded in the radical nationalistic constructs regarding enemy groups that emerged before and during the war. Fox and Miller-Idriss’ examination (2008: 537) of the ways in which the ‘nation as a discursive construct is constituted and legitimated… according to the contingencies of everyday life’ is especially useful as a theoretical framework through which to examine the constructions of national identity based on ethnicity in adolescents born of wartime rape in Bosnia. Their mixed ethnic identity, the recent war, and the political and social organization of the county provide a context for everyday articulations of national identity.

The articulations of identity found in the majority of narratives of adolescents born of wartime rape in large measure mirror the political and civic frameworks instituted by the Dayton Accord or Dayton Peace Agreement (signed on November 21, 1995) that ended the conflict and separated the formerly Yugoslav republic into three areas along ethnic lines: two entities (the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska) and the small, neutral, self-governing territory of the Brčko District, belonging to both entities. Their perspectives reveal that the current structure and operation of most political, cultural, and civic systems in the country have only solidified the divide, leaving little discursive space to the possibility of imagining a more unified Bosnia-Herzegovina. Current institutional structures provide few ‘entry points for reducing the political salience of ethnicity’ (Simonsen 2005: 306) and for boosting social and cultural factors that may play a role in creating a supra-national identity. The intention behind the Accord was to create a temporary structure for power-sharing for the major ethnic groups in Bosnia until a better mechanism is created. However, the ongoing difficulty in creating a mechanism that would be acceptable to all groups, even more than two decades after the conflict, has left Bosnia in a situation where ethnic divisions have been made axiomatic and practically intransigent based on institutional and government organization (cf. Guss and Siroky 2012: 310).

Rather than being a transitional phase in the move toward greater ethnic rein-tegration of Bosnian society, the political and civic frameworks instituted by the Dayton Peace Agreement seem to have cemented on a normative level a three-way ethnic cleavage of Bosnian life. This in turn seems to have conflated civic, ethnic, and larger national identities. The current constitution of Bosnia-Herzegovina does not effectively recognize the category of citizen, since the individual is constituted not as a political subject but as a member of an ethno-confessional group (Perišić). According to all official frameworks, ethnicity is the single most important marker of national identity in Bosnia, and those who, like the children born of wartime rape and children born in ‘mixed’ marriages, cannot declare theirs in straightforward and ‘pure’ ways remain the abject Other in all three ethnic communities. Media reports and governmental policies in Bosnia-Herzegovina reproduce this conceptualization while often manipulating it for their own political agendas (Weitsman 2007). The mothers’ community tends to construct the children’s identity as being determined by the ethnicity of the biological father and, as such, being marked by violent, ethnically inscribed hatred (Takševa 2015, Daniel-Wrabetz 2007). Politically, they remain neglected in the development of peace and reconciliation processes (McEvoy-Levy 2007). They are not able to claim a single ethnicity, have no real access to political power and often even lack civic rights. In social and personal terms, the political structure translates into matrices of systematic exclusion, intolerance, victimization, and discrimination for those branded Other.

Indices of ‘ethnic exclusionism’ or the possibility of interethnic friendship and tolerant cooperation based on survey data are (to say the least) varied in their findings. Some indicate an increase in ethnic intolerance between 1989 and 2003 (Guss and Siroky 2012: 305). According to a recent study on the social and demographic influences on interethnic friendships in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, just over half of Bosniak respondents (53%) reported meeting other ethnicities on a daily basis, while that figure was significantly lower for Bosnian Croats (only 18%) and Bosnian Serbs (29%) (O’Loughlin 2010:12). Correspondingly, over half of the residents of Bosnia-Herzegovina (54%) have all or most of their friends from their own ethnic group, while a 2015 poll conducted among Bosnian university students suggests that over half do not want to marry or date someone outside of their ethnic group due to the belief that children with ethnically mixed backgrounds have a ‘harder time in life because they are not accepted in Bosnian society’ (O’Loughlin 2010: 12; Brkanic 2015). At the same time, however, there are a handful of studies that aim to highlight the possibilities for reconciliation that exist within Bosnian society (O’Loughlin 2010, Simonsen 2005, Korac 2006, Guss and Siroky 2012). O’Loughlin’s study, for example, shows that almost half (47%) of Bosnian adults in 2010 wanted more friendships from different nationalities (24). What is also interesting is that the results of his study offer some insight into the economic, educational, age, gender, and religious background of his respondents. According to these statistics, those who belong to a higher socioeconomic bracket, who are older, male, less religious, who are better educated, and those to whom civic identity was more important than their ethnic one, ‘all tended to have more friends from mixed nationalities and wanted to have more’ (24).

With respect to methodology, the body of published narratives that serve as a basis for the present analysis comes from two 2010 scholarly studies by Karmen Erjavec and Zala Volčič. One of them (Erjavec and Volčič 2010a) is based on in-depth interviews with 11 adolescent Bosniak girls born of rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The goal of the study is to show how these adolescents represent themselves and their life situations. The other study (Erjavec and Volčič 2010b) is based on in-depth interviews with 19 Bosniak girls. The goal of this study was to ‘contribute to the research that deals with multiple identities after traumatic events, acknowledging that people can deal within and among these identities.’ (2010a: 360) The interviews were conducted over a period of six months in 2008–09 in different parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The two researchers report that finding participants willing to take part in their project was difficult. After having sent out invitations for participation to ‘more than 50 different women’s and children’s organizations, organizations for human rights, for adoption, orphanage and relief centres in BH’ (2010b: 527), the researchers report being contacted by about a quarter of those organizations with offers to help. The researchers further invited potential collaborators and requested help in sharing a call for participation, subsequent to which they received responses from the small group of respondents. The researchers report that there were also Serbian and Croatian children of war rape (male and female), but they draw their ‘empirical findings from interviews with Bosniak girls simply because there was a higher number of Bosniak girls who were members of organizations willing to participate in this study.’ (2010b: 527) All interviewees were between 14 and 16 years old at the time of the interview and all have pseudonyms. After Chaitin’s model (2003), all were invited to share their life stories with the researchers; the interviews lasted between two and four hours each and were conducted in spaces selected by the participants (2010a: 366). At the end of each interview, because the girls’ narratives were not always coherent with respect to their painful life situation, the researchers asked a total of four very open-ended questions connected to the study of self-presentation. The questions were: 1. How would you describe yourself? 2. Who are the most important and influential people in your life? How do you think they perceive you? 3. Which crucial events define your life, and in what ways these events affected you? and 4. How do you describe your situation? Both studies were conducted only after full informed consent was obtained from the participants and they were made aware of all the details on ‘how and why the data would be used and it was made clear who would have access to the interview material.’ (2010a: 364, 2010b: 527)

It is clear that both studies are based on a small self-selected sample, which is not surprising given the vulnerable nature of the population and the traumatic subject matter they were asked to speak on. Erjavec and Volčič comment on the limitations of their project based on the ‘small sample and its ethnic/national and gender homogeneity’ but correctly state that their ‘pool of respondents was limited by the painful and controversial nature of the topic’ (2010a: 364).² It is d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Editors
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: beyond ethnicity in research on youth in Southeast Europe
• PART I New ethnic mosaics: cleavages within ethnic groups
• PART II Political participation and youth identities
• PART III Transcending ethnic identities: comparative perspectives
• Conclusion
• Index