It was in 2012 that I first became interested in ethnonationality and collective identities, and it did not take me too long to pack my stuff, leave Italy, and move to Bosnia Herzegovina. Back in 2013 I was conducting a study on the generation born during the siege of Sarajevo, and I was surprised at how many young adults managed to build or retain inter-ethnic friendships, not becoming poisoned by ethnonationalism after all they had gone through. I also was very impressed at how many people in their fifties and sixties were still remembering Yugoslavia and âthe Marshalâ almost with tears in their eyes. I could not then explain to myself why Bosnia was such a divided country. Why were ethnonational parties so strong? Why was being a Serb, a BoĆĄnjak, or a Croat, at the end of the day, so important? And why did being a Bosnian Herzegovinian mean nothing? Was it the politiciansâ faultâas everybody was thinking? Or was it the result of the Dayton Agreement? The more I listened and entered the youngstersâ lives, trying to understand their ideas, concerns, and perceptions, the more I wondered about their role, what they were doing and what they were not? And where were their ideas, behaviours, and perceptions coming from? The next logical step was thus to look at their families. I began to wonder about their parents, that Yugoslav generation which contributed to both building and destroying Yugoslavia. How and which experiences shaped them and their understanding of belonging? And what has been transmitted from one generation to the next?
Aware that Bosnia, and Sarajevo in particular, was probably a âtoo peculiarâ reality, I decided to explore another multiethnic former Yugoslav republic, and I thus moved to Macedonia, Skopje. There I found a slightly similar reality that was nonetheless more clearly divided along ethnic lines. Yet in both regions I saw ethnonational divisions reflected in ethnonational parties schools, media, neighbourhoods, friendships. Ethnonationality was everywhere. So how did Yugoslavia manage to maintain unity for decades? How did it succeed in counterbalancing ethnonational with supra-ethnic feelings of belonging? I even got to the point of wondering if Yugoslavia really existed.
Many other people are puzzled by these same questions, and their brilliant works have largely succeeded in giving these issues an answer (see Calic 2019; Lampe 2000; Pearson 2015). This book cannot hope to do the same; yet moved by very similar guiding questions, it focuses on ethnonationalityâthe issue par excellence in the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav space. However, it is not (only) about ethnonational identities . Rather, it explores the complexities and shaping forces behind them. Ethnonationality is, in fact, not only a matter of self-identification (Brubaker and Cooper 2000) or something subjectively felt (Wimmer 2008b), and it is not only connected to or inferred by the stateâs citizenship policies and institutional assets. During Titoâs Yugoslavia, nacionalnostâwhich means ethnonational belongingâacquired different meanings and functions according to the circumstances. Ethnonational forms of identification were always allowed but were coupled with a sense of shared belonging to the whole SFRY (Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) , and the Yugoslav citizenship was the tool used to foster cooperation among and between peoples and republics. In the 1990s, however, ethnonationality acquired a new importance, while Yugoslav citizenship lost its unification power. Yet ethnonationality had begun to âmatter moreâ back in the 1970s, as a consequence of economic malaise and then institutional and constitutional changes. Nowadays, particularly in those multiethnic realities which failed to become ethnic nation-states during the transitionâalthough they tried toâethnonationality is, for many reasons, much more important than citizenship. After its blatant entering into the public (and political) sphere, ethnonationalityâs collective dimension has acquired an exaggerated importance, becoming the favourite toy of politicians and state buildersâor state destroyers, depending on the circumstances. It has been, and is, mobilized, instrumentalized, politicized, institutionalized. According to political and ideological circumstances it has been nurtured and emphasized, neglected, discouraged, or coupled with other forms of identification and belonging. It has been used to include and exclude, to enjoy rights and benefits, to serve collective purposes and achieve individual goals, to rule and destroy, to kill and to survive. Ethnonationality nowadays seems to be about status, power, resources. But it also conditions friendships and love relationships. It oftentimes determines where to live and the school to which you send your kids. Ethnonationality is about who you vote for and who claims to represent you. It is about the state, institutions, mechanisms, procedures, quotas, seats. But it is also about ideologies, peace, and war.
What Are We Going to Talk About, Then?
Ethnonationality has therefore become much more than an identity component. And it does much more than remind individuals of their origins.
This book aims to explore the âevolutionâ of ethnonationality, and how it has changed over time, across regimes andâas the reader has perhaps guessedâgenerations. It does so for the two post-Yugoslav, multiethnic, and post-conflict, republics of Bosnia Herzegovina and Macedoniaâhere studied as two cases of a number of multinational/ethnic countries whose ethnic collective identities have been at various times built, neglected, emphasized, or instrumentalized and politicized. In order to deal with the complexity surrounding and featuring the concept and its declinations, the exploration of this evolutionary process is performed from a temporal perspective encompassing both the macro and micro dimensions, and surveys both the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav structural systems and respective generations. The second part of the book attempts to portray this evolutionary process not simply from the peopleâs perspective, but from the eyes and through the words of two different generations: a âYugoslav generationâ that grew up and socialized in the âgolden eraâ of Yugoslavia, and a âpost-Yugoslavâ generation which grew up and socialized in the ânew worldâ. The generational perspective represents the most innovative feature of the book; a fresh and new point of view that considers, alongside other major socializing agents, the paramount role the family environment has in shaping attitudes and behaviours. In order to satisfy my initial curiosity, I thus decided to look at two generations living together in the same family unit. In this way, while investigating how macro changes influenced, and have been influenced by, different generationsâ ideas and patterns of behaviour connected to ethnonationality; how and why individuals belonging to different generations signify and use their ethnonational backgrounds; and how their ideas and behaviours concurred to shape ethnonationalityâs semantic and pragmatic character; I would also discover what has been transmitted, or not, from one generation to the next. This work seeks to be the first attempt to shed light on possible inter-generational dis-similarities and dis-continuities in the modalities of framing and using ethnonationality, unveiling the rationale and motivations behind individualsâ and collectivitiesâ maintenance or subversion of the current status quoâbuilt upon ethnonationality itself.
Ends and Means
The book starts with the idea that without a temporal perspective any account on the topic would be incomplete. It does not consider the fall of Yugoslavia as a âyear zeroâ but, rather, as the outcome of pre-existing mechanisms and conditions. Ethnonationalityâs importance, in fact, did not emerge all of a sudden in the âinfamous 1990sâ: on the contrary, since Socialist Yugoslaviaâs birth in the 1940s equality among the nations was reflected in both the Federationâs institutional asset (Pearson 2015) and its socio-political organization, representing a key pillar of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia itself.
The book is also grounded on the awareness that any socio-political dynamic is the outcome of interactions and negotiations involving both the state and the masses; hence, while exploring the evolution of the meanings and functions of ethnonationality, both its politico-institutional and social-subjective dimensions are considered, performing a multidimensional and inter-generational analysis. Structural elements such as the institutionsâ shapes and the ideological umbrella under which interactions take place do matter, and are crucial in shaping and even constraining actorsâ behaviours. It is in these spaces, changing over time as a consequence of complex dynamics, that actors and factors relate together, influencing each other. Additionally, as Koneska argued in her comparative work (2014: 8), in these spaces of socialization and mutual influence the actors âare exposed to sets of norms about appropriate behavior in different situationsâ. In fact, although on the one hand structural factors influence, shape, and at times even constrain actorsâ behaviour, on the other hand the actors interact, socialize, and compete moved by their own ideas and interests, concurring to tailor the reality they live in. Their behaviours could go in a direction which sustains and hence reproduces structural aspects or, on the contrary, could go in the direction of non-alignment, hence attempting to resist, or change, the structure itself.
The adoption of a relational approach is further justified by a certain lack in the available literature: on the one side there is already an abundance of works on ethnonationalism, politicization of ethnic identities , redefinition of groupsâ boundaries, and more generally on the changes that occurred in the region with the fall of Yugoslavia. Yet the available studies are macro-centred (Gordy 2014) and there is a lack of publications also taking into account the roles people exerted and still exert, and the kind of interactions and intersections existing between the state and the masses. We also k...