Brčko Democratic Forum publishes Schmitt's book "The Theory of the Constitution"

It is certainly a curiosity that one of the most significant works of one of the most famous and controversial legal theorists of the 20th century, Carl Schmitt, still relevant today, has been published by the Brčko Democratic Forum of Brčko District of BiH, reports the Patria News Agency.

Although neighboring countries, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia, have long translated some of his most important works, and their academic communities have debated many of Schmitt's theoretical positions, incorporating many of them into their own intellectual heritage, the Bosnian academic and political public has remained consistently autistic towards Carl Schmitt and his theoretical insights, which is certainly not accidental.

Then, in a small, intellectually unrecognizable Bosnian environment, from an unknown publisher and an unknown translator, appears a translation of one of Schmitt's most significant works, "Verfassungslehre" ("The Theory of the Constitution"), which has not been translated in any part of former Yugoslavia, which is certainly a curiosity that has a specific symbolic-semantic content.

The book was translated from German by Kašmir Ribić, born in Brčko, educated in Brčko and Belgrade in the field of legal sciences, and has been living in Berlin for a long time. So far, he has published parts of some of Schmitt's more significant works in domestic journals. "A child of libraries," as Kašmir Ribić was and remains, he combined the cruelty of his own upbringing and the cruelty of Bosnian historical reality with the cruelty of Carl Schmitt's theoretical positions, which resulted in a passionate engagement with and translation of Schmitt's works.

The main motive for translating and publishing this book is its textbook structure for elaborating the theory of the constitutional democratic state, which is so deficient in Bosnian academic educational practice, but also the relevance of its basic categories for analyzing the space of former Yugoslavia, and especially the Bosnian reality. The categories of constitution, sovereignty, the people as the modern bearer of sovereignty, legality and legitimacy, the political that arises from the distinction between friend and enemy, would be well analytically applied to the Bosnian reality.

This book, its translation, and its publication are certainly a multi-layered intellectual and cultural event in BiH that, by established Bosnian practice, few will recognize. However, this will certainly not significantly diminish its importance.