Ethnicism and Peoples in a Bind

By Senadin Lavić

Some human groups, through their actions, turn themselves into tragicomic socio-historical phenomena. And then they blame others for their unfortunate position. Then they curse fate and turn to mythical sources of existence because they have undermined all rational explanations for their own downfall. This is the moment when myth and mythical consciousness begin to dominate within a social group's historical environment and determine the dynamics of human existence. From this perverted consciousness, worlds of the irrational are set in motion, in which our human tragedies unfold.

Ethnopolitics has destroyed national groups in the Balkan region and turned them into impoverished communities seeking salvation through emigration or migration to developed countries in Western Europe. The tragicomic peoples who believe in ethnogeneses tailored for them by 19th-century ethnolinguists, church commissions, colonial conquerors and occupiers, party organizations, fathers of nations, novelists, one-dimensional historians, and military leaders who achieved notoriety as war criminals, are still stumbling
in the darkness of Balkan forests as objects of ridicule and proof of backwardness for the “Enlightened” landscapes of the world. In the myth, which is meant to console, they have been here since the “seventh century,” they arrived in some mythical great “migrations of peoples,” they were the first to occupy water sources, pastures, arable land, air, forests, ores, rivers, and tamed wild animals to serve them.

Thus, long before the primitive accumulation of capital, the fourth industrial revolution, and democracy! Some have clouded the vision of their compatriots and have been ruling the Balkan countries since the “tenth century” as if no one else existed there, in the spatial environment. They insist so primitively on “origin” and convince everyone else around them that they “originated” precisely from their tribe. And, what of it? Don't they all trace their “origin” back to the Serbs, that primordial source of all living things?

These small, tragicomic Balkan peoples still believe that they are important in world history and that they have determined the main currents of that history, of Christianity and Islam, of East and West, of Europe and Asia. Nothing happened around the Mediterranean basin without them and their will! Can anyone doubt these fierce achievements of being?! This is the supreme provincial hyperbole of a plundering horde that moves destructively through space and time. These tragicomic self-destructive groups are accustomed to living in timeless ghettos and “voting” for their compatriots, supposedly, uniform and identical in ethnic and religious affiliation. For an unfortunate consciousness, operating in some ahistorical
cul-de-sac, this is the fulfillment of the truth of political existence. And there is no question about this fascistoid self-degradation, nor justification for this imbecilic rush into a “bundle” of twigs.

The expectations from the fall of the Milošević regime have not been realized in Serbia, and this clearly shows that his political model has continued to operate in changed historical circumstances towards its set goal. These tragicomic “unhistorical peoples” have been turned into mincemeat by ethnopolitics and clerical hypocrisy, but they are still unable to perceive the bigotry, monolithic thinking, and deception of their leaders and their groups. They are accustomed to plundering and seizing what belongs to others, unearned, what they have not created and shaped with their own hands! Ceterum censeo, nations are a construct of a historical moment that is useful in developing awareness of belonging to a broader human social and cultural group. It is important for people to belong to broader communities and to feel at home in them in order to be freed from fear as a dominant factor of existence and to develop friendly relations with most other members. Of course, most members of a social community will never meet each other. Therefore, models and narratives about shared experience, history, origin, language, ancestors, literature, customs, beliefs, etc., are developed.

These tragicomic national forms are objects of bargaining for large world-historical state systems or contemporary empires and their rulers, for whom they serve as local and peripheral officials. These local peripheral “banovi” (“our leaders”) are invited for talks, and their “state institutions” are completely denied, reducing them to tribal chiefs, people without a state system, institutions, and without awareness of freedom. Local officials, “our tribal leaders,” who present themselves as presidents of small states and play the role of greatness in their own region, run after large transnational capitalist oligarchies and powerful players to get crumbs from the table for their “tribal”-national groups, whom they treat as “subjects.”

Thus, under rigged auspices, they conduct their affairs in the local sphere. These local leaders, among their “tribes,” play the role of augurs who successfully try to understand and interpret the will of the “powerful from Olympus” of the modern world. They read future events from the “flight of birds” in the sky above our landscape! These tragicomic Balkan peoples have not yet managed to emerge from the ethnic sphere into the political sphere, and they still derive their concepts of nation from religious affiliation. Where religion is the basis of the nation, culture will very quickly become petrified and extinguished! And, worst of all, there is no rule of law and economic sustainability. National cultural forms will very quickly become empty shells from which the spirit, a plurality of opinions, and life have already disappeared. 

They end up in debt bondage. Ethnicism, as shown among other things, is an ideology and practice of misusing a people and their religion for political purposes. Ethnicism is a shameful ethnopolitical deception, it is quite obvious, in which the misuse of a people or groups of people who have been shaped over time to believe they belong to a broader community is involved. Since the 1990s, ethnicism has enabled one, previously secondary social group, through ethnopolitical narratives, to become, during and after the war,
a dominant oligarchic political “elite” that behaves like a “higher class” which now wants to turn the state territory of BiH into Croatian, Bosniak, and Serb territory, i.e., into the private property of nationalist oligarchies or “tribal property.” Ethnopolitics is, in fact, an anti-Bosnian undertaking by which the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina is being dispossessed of its state property and that property is being transferred to the ownership of the entities and those forces that waged a war of conquest for
Bosnian territories.

The newly established ethno-religious social class maintains the status quo and does not want any changes in the social structure that would disrupt the “wailing of the mourners” and centuries of submissive consciousness. In this way, the state is captured, and citizens are subjected to the dubious will of the ethnopolitical narratives of national leaders who impose a slave consciousness on them as a political ideal. The basis of this is ignorance, fear, and poverty.

Finally, is Bosnian-Herzegovinian society what is defined by nationalists, internationalists, crypto-nationalists, false democrats, Nazis, fascists, representatives of great powers, great-power conquerors, and provincial dictators? If we were to agree to what the obscurantists determine for us, we would always live in slavery and a totalitarian order. It is in human nature not to submit or surrender to dangerous limitations arising from perverse ideology and conflictual politics. The production of knowledge about society and the world is a prerequisite for any progress towards the freedom of the individual and their community. However, the real problematic question at this moment is: does the university and the sciences within it still have any relevance for the social order? In this question arises the epochal fact of divergent processes between the humanistic heritage and Machiavellianism in politics. The essential Bosnian goal is the change of the political model and the achievement of equality and freedom for all people, citizens, and nationals in the territory of Bosnia!