Whose Bosnia?

Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914

Edin Hajdarpasic

• Editorial: Cornell University Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501701108
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Eastern European History

As Edin Hajdarpasic shows, formative contestations over Bosnia and the surrounding region began well the assassination that triggered World War I, emerging with the rise of new nineteenth-century forces—Serbian and Croatian nationalisms, and Ottoman, Habsburg, Muslim, and Yugoslav political movements—that claimed this province as their own. Whose Bosnia? reveals the political pressures and moral arguments that made Bosnia a prime target of escalating nationalist activity.

Hajdarpasic provides new insight into central themes of modern politics, illuminating core subjects like "the people, " state-building, and national suffering. Whose Bosnia? proposes a new figure in the history of nationalism: the (br)other, a character signifying the potential of being "brother" and "Other, " containing the fantasy of complete assimilation and insurmountable difference. By bringing this figure into focus, Whose Bosnia? shows nationalism to be a dynamic and open-ended force, one that eludes a clear sense of historical closure.

chapter one

The Land of the People

“The word narod has flooded our poetry, literature, sciences, not to mention our journalism,” wrote the Croatian politician Ivan Lorković in 1898 in a reflection on the significance of this term—generally meaning “the people”—for the rise of nationalism in the Balkans. “This is the word that has inspired all the movements in different parts of our people in this century; yet the concept of ‘the people’ itself proved to be different in content and in scope” for various constituencies. For some, it meant “liberation from the Turks,” for others, a folklorist celebration of vernacular “language and education,” for others still, it signaled political autonomy in the Habsburg Empire. “But none of these has encompassed this concept in its complete extent or in its full meaning,” Lorković concluded. “Every side viewed the people from another perspective, and none managed to fathom the secret depths of the national soul. It has remained unknown.”1

Getting to the heart of “the people” preoccupied countless writers of the nineteenth century. In the South Slavic context alone, thousands of pages were filled by debates over the implications of the term narod, which has been variously translated as the people, nation, folk, population, ethnic community, and so on; in turn, this pivotal term spawned further political references like narodnost (nationality or national belonging) or narodni (folk or popular, as adjectives). In Serbia, elementary school primers in the 1870s tried to teach the meanings of the term narod to schoolchildren by staging inspirational conversations between a father and his son.2 In Croatia, nineteenth-century scholars published lengthy accounts comparing different connotations of the term narod in different Slavic languages.3 Collections of folklore and writings of romantic poets invariably extolled the narod as the indisputable source of the national spirit.4 While the term nacija was also used, narod remained the sovereign term for matters relating to “the nation” in the South Slavic contexts. Indeed, when Serbian intellectuals engaged with Ernest Renan’s famous lecture “What Is the Nation?” in the 1880s, they translated the question as, “What Is the Narod?”5

For many, it seemed that any attempt at a definition of either “the nation” or “the people” would result in needless confusion. In 1879, one Serbian theorist spent almost one hundred pages reviewing the “latest scientific research” on “the principle of nationality” only to see countless European writers “come to the strange conclusion that ‘nationality’ is actually not a defined notion that has stable characteristics or signs, but that the constitutive elements of nationality are very confused, volatile, and in a constantly fluid and unconsolidated state…. This seems to be a notion that is truly undetermined, diffuse, without a defined or stable content!”6 Dizzy with definitional vertigo that usually followed the attempts to fill in this apparent void, most nineteenth-century nationalists resorted to tropes of naturalism that promised to restore self-evident truth to fundamental political categories. Thus the same Serbian scholar who decried the inadequacy of “certain international theories of the nation” concluded that narod and narodnost were “natural-historical facts” so obvious that they ultimately needed no explanation at all.7

If nationalists tended to mystify these concepts, later twentieth-century political scientists, sociologists, and other analysts often proposed critical classifications that distinguished different usages and meanings of terms like “the people,” “the nation,” or narod. Entries for these terms in The Dictionary of Untranslatables, an originally French- and later English-language compendium of major political concepts, indicate the key directions of such analyses. Demos and ethnos, for example, are widely seen as terms for very different political understandings of “the people,” while plebs, gens, populus, pueblo, Volk, race, and other concepts demarcate still more meanings and possible political platforms. Each of these terms can denote a distinct type of community and can help outline different visions of “the people.”8 For students of nationalism, one of the most familiar questions has been whether a particular conception of “the people” resembles something like demos (conceived of as a community of political membership that is relatively expansive and reflective of Enlightenment notions of democracy) or ethnos (understood as a limited community of birth or cultural belonging, a concept often traced to central European romanticism).9

While such analyses have captured certain strands of political thought, they have also tended to overlook another sense of the notion of “the people,” one that goes beyond given templates of ethnos or demos and instead points to “the people” as a site of praxis, a field of nationalist-populist activity where new political positions, subjectivities, and projects were developed throughout and well after the nineteenth century. Moving away from definitions of bounded social bases (communities of birth or membership) allows us to reinterpret the nineteenth-century preoccupations with “the people” as a crucial form of nationalist self-fashioning through particular practices and sensibilities. In a commentary on the works of Bronislaw Malinowski and Joseph Conrad, the anthropologist James Clifford has written of “ethnographic self-fashioning” as a creative historical project that brings into being both the ethnographer, the practitioner of a specific disciplinary code, and the ethnographer’s subject. Rather than assuming a prior difference between “self” and “other” (or between European writers and their non-European subjects in Clifford’s work), analytical questions about “self-fashioning” projects direct our attention to productive and transformative practices that can create and spread new cultural models, roles, and behaviors.10

My aim here is not to add yet another definition of the term narod as a given communal basis, but to outline how the nationalist discovery of “the people” constituted a new kind of political engagement—what I call “ethnographic populism”—that was accessible and extraordinarily adaptable, presenting a renewable set of political strategies that spurred on ever more patriotic missions and mutations. This approach allows us to rethink several crucial developments that marked the rise of national movements across Europe during the nineteenth century. In central and eastern Europe in particular, the production of folkloric and ethnographic studies has long been recognized as a quintessential “national science,” a branch of knowledge that emerging patriots fervently embraced in the wake of Herder and related romantic inspirations of the late eighteenth century.11 But the significance of such ethnographic activities has been often misunderstood. Scholars seeking to debunk harmful national myths have tended to see most nineteenth-century folkloric activities as examples of “the invention of traditions,” that is, as deliberate nationalist efforts to invent and impose certain narratives and customs on particular constituencies.12 The overwhelming focus on “fakelore,” however, has blinded us to the deeper and more transformative projects of national self-fashioning, projects that enabled the constitution of new kinds of patriotic subjectivities and drove the creation of “the people” as an endless and impossible subject of national-populist pursuits.13

Because of its centrality in South Slavic imaginings of nationhood, Bosnia-Herzegovina is an ideal site for such discussions. Over the course of the nineteenth century, leading South Slavic activists—from the famed folklorist Vuk Karadžić to local collectors like Ivan Franjo Jukić—discovered Bosnia-Herzegovina as “the land of the people” and in the process helped develop new practices of national self-fashioning on this central ethnographic terrain.

A Man from the People

At the outset of the nineteenth century, there was little apparent reason why Bosnia and Herzegovina in particular should have attracted any more attention in Serbia and Croatia than other neighboring regions. Prior to the 1830s, in fact, few South Slavic intellectuals and writers expressed any abiding interest in these Turkish provinces. To be sure, there were many mentions of this province, its medieval history, and its conquest by the Ottomans, but on the whole it is difficult to find sustained discussions of these regions, particularly about their relation to areas like Serbia or Croatia.14 The Serbian Enlightenment thinker Dositej Obradović, one of the first to take up the task of awakening “us Serbs,” certainly counted on “the inhabitants of Montenegro, Dalmatia, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia (excluding the kajkavian speakers), Slavonia, Srem, Bačka, and Banat, except for the Vlachs there,” to hear his pleas for Serbian unity; regarding Bosnia specifically, however, he had little to say. If anything, the conspicuous presence of “the Turks” in these areas gave Obradović an opportunity to expound an important point about his cross-confessional vision of the Serbian nation: “In speaking of the peoples in these kingdoms and provinces, I mean both the Greek and Latin Church followers, not excluding the Turks, Bosniacs, and Herzegovinians themselves, since confession and faith can be changed, but kin and language never (rod i jezik nikad).” These Turks, however, also had to be additionally explained as being the Bosnian Muslims, not “the real Turks [who] will go back to the state where they came from, while the Bosniacs will remain Bosniacs, and will be as their ancestors, that is, Serbs.”15 Despite providing a backdrop for these notable clarifications, Bosnia remained in Obradović’s accounts an otherwise unremarkable “sister land” of the rising and clearly more promising Serbia.16

To most Croatian, Slavonian, or Dalmatian intellectuals as well, Bosnia seemed no more outstanding than other provinces in the South Slavic tableau at the turn of the nineteenth century. When Ljudevit Gaj, the leading figure of the Illyrian movement, issued his announcement of the first issue of Novine horvatzke (The Croatian newspaper) in 1835, he appealed to readers who may be “Croatian, Slavonian, Dalmatian, Dubrovnikan, Serbian, Carniolan, Styrian, Istrian, Carinthian, Bosnian, and other Slavs,” noting the Ottoman provinces but expressing no particularly strong claim regarding the areas across the Croatian border.17 Yet by the 1840s, Gaj was not only seeking to publish materials from Bosnia in particular but was also introducing himself to potential diplomatic allies as “the head…of the society regarding Bosnia and Herzegovina,” where he was working for Slavic “liberation from the Muhammedan yoke.”18 In fact, prompted by political agitations of Illyrian activists in these areas, the Ottoman governor Vecihi-pasha lodged a protest to the Habsburg authorities alleging that “a Catholic by the name of Gaj” was sending spies and revolutionaries from Croatia into Bosnia.19

To understand the rise of intense Serbian and Croatian interest in Bosnia-Herzegovina, it is first necessary to revisit a crucial intervention in the realm of national culture and language, an intervention that redefined not only linguistic debates but also broader understandings of how and where the key attributes of the nation could be discovered and publicized. In fact, what gave “Herzegovina” in particular a distinct populist ring during the nineteenth century was the work of Vuk Karadžić, whose career and stature afford insight into the process of the Serbian-Croatian discovery of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787–1864)—in Yugoslav history simply called Vuk—remains best known as the linguistic reformer and philologist who standardized the Serbian language and thus helped lay the groundwork for the emergence of the shared South Slavic dialects, today called the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian languages. As the ethnologist Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin described, “Karadžić’s linguistic canon, and with it, the pattern of Serbian popular culture and folklore, enjoyed currency as the sole norm for the entire Croatian and Serbian language region, and for Serbian and Croatian popular culture” since the mid-nineteenth century.20

It is easy to see why Vuk was held up by both Serbian and Croatian intellectuals as the decisive figure in the history of South Slavic nationalities. As most accounts emphasize, Vuk was born to a peasant family in Tršić, a small village in Serbia near the Bosnian border, and was among the few local children to receive some education before the First Serbian Uprising swept through this region. This personal background—sketched in terms of village life, cattle herders, peasant customs, and folk songs—played a pivotal part in his scholarly work, which he embarked on shortly after leaving Serbia in the wake of the defeated uprising and arriving in Vienna in 1813. Settling in the Austrian capital, Vuk quickly formed deeply productive relationships with many Slavic and German intellectuals of his time, particularly with the Slovene scholar Jernej Kopitar, who gave Vuk crucial advice and support in the imperial capital.21 Once established as an author, Vuk continued to publish, travel, assemble, and disseminate numerous works—collections of Serbian folk poetry, stories, riddles, proverbs, and customs—which were extraordinarily well received; writers like Goethe, Ranke, Pushkin, and the Grimm brothers wrote euphoric prefaces and promoted Vuk’s work across Europe into German, English, French, Swedish, Italian, Russian, and so on.22

Perhaps the crowning and certainly the most cited of Vuk’s achievements was the reform of the modern Serbian language, codified principally in his dictionary and demonstrated in his later writings. There was, as always, fierce opposition to the creation of the new national linguistic standard; particularly vehement obje...