Bursać: Pathological fear of the urban elite of unitarism!

(Patria) - Once, that same liberal elite – including those from select academic, political, and media circles – was the first to unanimously endorse a state without ethnic fiefdoms, without entity trenches, without cantonal pashaliks. Therefore, a seal on a basically unitary BiH. Today? Today they run from that word and from such a state like former communists from the Internationale, writes columnist Dragan Bursać for Hayat.ba.

Recalling how three years ago, at a book promotion in Sarajevo, cadres from Naša stranka, SDP, independent intellectuals, and civic leftists approached him and agreed with his remark that he was fighting for a Bosnia and Herzegovina without entities and cantons, with Sarajevo as the capital.

“Now, what happened to them in the last three years is a question for them. Whether it was some kind of HDZ-itis virus or acute spinelessness – it’s up to them again. However, I see these days how many from that literary evening from three and a half years ago are renouncing both themselves and their desires for a unified state that they so ardently promoted. And they didn’t betray me, I can easily manage for myself and them, but they deceived the citizens to whom they sold the thing they lack under their kidneys, telling them in October of that same 2022 that they needed exactly such a unified state without entities and cantons, i.e., basically unitary, and then they opted, not for a two-entity, but potentially for a three-entity mud.

I tell you, it’s a wonder how people change both themselves and their compass. But well, to each his own. Without pathos, let’s move on.”

Bursać adds that the specter of unitarism is haunting Sarajevo:

“So, here we are today, in 2025, where the specter of unitarism has become something like a ghost from an old rock and roll album – everyone sang it, everyone loved it, and today they hide from it like former communists from the ‘Internationale’. As soon as someone says ‘unitary Bosnia and Herzegovina,’ panic lights go on in the bazaar, as if it were a political plague 2.0.

Once, I repeat, that same elite – including those from select academic, political, and media circles – was the first to unanimously endorse a state without ethnic fiefdoms, without entity trenches, without cantonal pashaliks. Therefore, a seal on a basically unitary state. Today? Today they run from that word as if it were radioactive”.

The Hayat columnist also detects why this is so: “Because in the meantime, a new fashion has appeared, a new empty intellectual pose: consociation. That word, that intellectual vampire that sucks all functionality out of the political system, has become an ideological prop of a special Sarajevo school of thought that tries with all its might to sound ‘more modern’ than Europe itself”.

“How consociation has become the new avant-garde. Paradoxically, people who swear by Europe, democracy, and liberalism today advocate a model that is used in Europe only by states that are in permanent crisis or under constant international tutelage.

Consociation is not a European ideal, but a European necessity. There are no ‘rigid’, ‘soft’, or ‘liberal’ versions. There is only one thing: the constant cementing of ethnic trenches.

And that school, in its desire to present itself as intellectually refined, actually ends up saying the same sentence that the leaders of a certain Herzegovinian political firm have been saying for decades: ‘The majority cannot decide. Never.’ Sounds familiar? Of course, it sounds.

It’s just said more quietly and ‘more liberally’ here, so it fits nicely in cafes around the Eternal Flame. Why has unitary Bosnia become a specter? Not because it is dangerous. Not because it is unjust.
Not because it is majoritarian. No. Unitarity is a specter because it destroys the economic and political architecture of this small elite that lives off complications and sitting on at least two chairs.

Because a unified state means:
- the end of entity calculations,
- the end of the cantonal bureaucratic jungle,
- the end of parallel governments, centers of power, and sinecure institutions,
- the end of privileges that come from ‘state fragmentation’.

Who loses first in that model?

HDZ.

Who loses second?

SNSD.

And who loses third, quite unexpectedly?

Precisely those Sarajevo ‘liberals’ who live off the status quo.

The elite – from applause in 2022 to silence in 2025. And here we come to the elite.

To the people who, on that April day in 2022, cried because someone publicly said what they were afraid to say, but what was on their hearts.

To those who approached me, hugged me, and repeated: ‘That is our Bosnia! One! Indivisible! Without entities, without cantons!’

Well, today, part of that same elite is scared.

Part is confused.

Part is frozen.

And part has fallen into the trap of intellectual conformism and is renouncing its own beliefs so as not to be ‘radical’.

Today, if you say you want a unified state, they look at you as if you are superficially offending taste, not the system.

I am completely convinced that at least 90% of all of them truly want that unified and indivisible state, but now it’s ‘not the time’ and ‘why now?’. And those are two things that Čović and Dodik have no problem with and do not suffer from. So, the future survival of BiH will depend on whether those who want it unified are stronger in their desires and projections than those who want it to cease to exist.

Think about it…

The specter is not unitarism. The problem is the lack of courage. Let it be clear: the specter today is not unitary Bosnia and Herzegovina. The specter is the realization that some politicians from Sarajevo no longer have the courage they had on that day in 2022. Because saying you want a unified state is not nationalism. It is not extremism. It is not radicalism. It is the most ordinary, elementary European standard. And we, it turns out, are behaving as if it were an atomic bomb that will explode in some hall,” writes Bursać!