Prof. Dr. Asim Mujkić: The Pro-Bosnian Identity Is Seriously Endangered

Asim Mujkić is a prominent Bosnian sociologist and philosopher. He graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, Department of Philosophy and Sociology, in 1991, after which he enrolled in postgraduate studies at the same faculty. He earned his master's degree in 1998 on the topic Neopragmatism of Richard Rorty. At the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, in 2002, he defended his doctoral dissertation Anti-essentialist Character of the Philosophy of Pragmatism. He is a professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Sarajevo. 

Patria: How to interpret the recent vote by SNSD and HDZ that Serbs should not be constituent in cantons with a Croat majority? What is pragmatic about that?

Mujkić: The vote of the Serbian political elite that Serbs should not be constituent in Croat cantons, as well as, not so long ago, the vote of the Croat constitutional judge against the constituent status of Croats in the RS, i.e., in the entire territory of BiH, tells us that in ethnopolitics, which presents itself as a policy of protecting vital national interests, it is least about protecting vital national interests such as the constituent status of one's own people throughout BiH. This is about a political nation-building project of creating mini nation-states, with a clearly demarcated territory where one people will live on the territory of BiH, which, in the nationalist fantasies of Zagreb and Belgrade from the 1930s to the present day, is considered no man's land, an empty space that needs to be parcelled out and fenced off, in short, nationalised. 

The state-building project implies the establishment and maintenance of a clear ethnic majority in a certain imagined space, primarily by armed force and then by various discriminatory procedures, with as low a percentage of others, minorities, as possible. Because of this, the decision on the constituent status of all peoples throughout the territory of BiH is perceived as a supreme injustice because it undermines all those efforts and investments in national territorial consolidation within BiH. The entire war was fought so that the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina would not be constituent throughout BiH, but in the occupied territories that would be the nuclei of future mono-ethnic mini-states.

Patria: After the verdicts were pronounced at the Tribunal in The Hague, it seemed we could breathe a sigh of relief and start reconciliation processes in the Western Balkans. Immediately after the verdicts were delivered, they were denied from all sides. Today, not even two months later, no one mentions those verdicts. What is the ultimate goal of the Tribunal in The Hague?  

Mujkić: If I could express the work of the Hague Tribunal in one image, it would be that one from wartime Sarajevo when a French UNPROFOR soldier destroys evidence that a sniper bullet came from Serbian positions on Grbavica. What am I trying to say by that? Unfortunately, the primary goal of the Hague Tribunal was not to condemn the nationalist ideology behind the war operations in BiH, so after the war, that ideology only changed its spokespersons and operatives and continued to operate in BiH to this day. Only within such an approach, which remains blind to the ideological-political dimension of the final solution, primarily of the Serbian-Croatian question as the primary driver of the most horrific events in this part of the world, is it possible to have a 'municipal' genocide that happened 'out of nowhere', 'out of the blue', and for Serbia and Croatia to remain more or less spared the enormous responsibility they had in joint criminal enterprises, i.e., in the massacre and dismemberment of their neighbour.

This is, I would say, the ideology of 'containment', i.e., of keeping and observing events and everything that happens only within the borders of one state, without following the logic of things that would necessarily take us across borders to a regional context. Instead of starting its prosecutions from the top down, the Hague Tribunal started from the bottom up, from an anonymous person like Tadić, to finally, through painstaking work, reach Milošević, Karadžić, Mladić, the 'Croatian six', etc., which is why everything lasted so long and cost an enormous amount. Even so, by a roundabout way, staggering findings were reached, irrefutable facts were established, and notorious murderers and villains were convicted, which is of historical significance and for which I give The Hague a positive assessment.

Patria: For some time now, certain media in Serbia have been openly calling for war, and similar voices can be heard from some Croatian media. What is the purpose of media war-mongering against our neighbours? Is it to deliberately instil fear in neighbours? Or is fear used to justify the enormous purchase of weapons? Or..?        

Mujkić: On the one hand, European integration has seriously approached. Those disintegrative nationalist forces are getting nervous. They want to enter Europe with the best possible positions, with as much sovereignty and autonomy as possible, with as strong a position within BiH as possible, so as not to be swept away or, God forbid, find themselves behind bars. They see additional incentive for such action in the tide of right-wing politics sweeping the entire continent, which is extremely conservative with elements of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, and therefore it is important to project Bosniaks as much as possible as some Middle Eastern foreign element, in line with leading orientalist preconceptions, to reduce them to the projected Muslim dimension of their otherness. Bosniak nationalists also benefit from this victimising context, which is developing, which is ideal for internal homogenisation and delusions about the need for national unity, because nationalism in this region operates on the principle of communicating vessels.

Then, to all this, we add the destructive role of Russia, whose priority is to undermine the European project through support for far-right movements, then the blissful disinterest of the USA and typical European indecisiveness stemming from its ideological limitation to neoliberal minimalism, which boils down to security and a favourable environment for foreign investors. All in all, this is more than a good opportunity for that ideology which was not condemned to further mobilise and to achieve, to the greatest possible extent, the internal state-isation of ethnic units in BiH. As for armaments, I think the Dayton Agreement specified the scope of armaments that countries in the region can have. Whether this has been violated or not, I don't know, but presumably someone in Sarajevo should be dealing with that.

Patria:  The last thing heard from the European Union is that the year of admission for the Balkan states has not been set, that Europe will encourage admission and even hold meetings with regional leaders once a year. That looks optimistic, and states can work on their prosperity.   

Mujkić: I am of the opinion that the European approach to this part of the world was wrong from the start, focusing on individual states. That is the logic of 'containment'. The countries of the former Serbo-Croatian speaking area, which were actors and scenes of horrific nationalist excesses at the beginning of the nineties, which knew no borders, had to have a different, collective treatment, if for no other reason than because of Vukovar and Srebrenica, which were not some internal state incidents but involved significant cross-state infrastructure. Separate admission, say, of Croatia into the EU, only gave wings to its nationalist forces to now, with European legitimacy and from a privileged position, strengthen their colonial attitude towards others, especially towards BiH, and in this way, now legitimately as Europeans, directly interfere and exert pressure in BiH. I dare not imagine what will happen tomorrow, when Serbia also becomes a member, and BiH remains an isolated island.

All Serbian frustrations related to the loss of Kosovo will be poured onto Bosnia, and the intensity of that negative transfer will increase as Kosovo becomes more distant from Serbia. We already have the announcement of the Declaration on the Cultural and Educational Reunification of the RS and Serbia. Admission to the European Union, the lack of determination to punish promoters of nationalist ideologies, which have evident results in destabilisation and destruction, only legitimises such forces and encourages them to be even more radical in their approach. As for prosperity, we must know that the ruling political classes in these countries are mostly parasitic. There is no creativity, production, only decomposition, fragmentation, and financially lucrative circulation, resale of something that someone long before them produced. So they solve the unemployment problem by getting rid of their working-age population, which goes to the West. With this, we have entered the final phase of ethnic cleansing, the cleansing of our own peoples. This is the ultimate reach of this multi-decade nationalist adventure we find ourselves in.

Patria:  How is this Balkan paradox possible: Nationalisms, patriotisms, and numerous collectivisms are raging, yet there has never been more corruption, crime, systemic plunder of the state and state money. Theft is regularly defended by alleged national interests. Is it even possible to fight corruption in these circumstances?   

Mujkić: There is nothing contradictory there. Corruption is a constitutive element of government in the post-Yugoslav republics. The so-called Velvet Revolution from Macedonia to Estonia, which overthrew communism, took place on two tracks: the track of nationalism, i.e., the re-taking of one's national state, and the track of capitalist transformation, which was supposed to secure for the national state a ruling class that was taking over its national states. The rebellious citizens who initially demanded socialism with a human face, and then capitalism with a human face, actually overthrew the inhuman socialist regime only to end up in an inhuman capitalist regime, embodied by comprador bourgeoisies, i.e., a revolutionary class of people brought forth by the whirlwind of revolution, who thus found themselves in a position to dominate the apparatus of power, which gave them access to public resources and their disposal according to their will and needs.

Corruption goes hand in hand with the rehabilitation or creation of the nation-state, and the national interest is, in fact, when we analyse it, the interest of the ruling group. The product of nationalist velvet revolutions was a sharp class stratification present in all Eastern European countries, especially in our region, into a class of possessors of political, cultural, and economic power, which shares identical interests regardless of ethnic sign, and a class from which, by decrees of war governments, ownership of the means of production was first taken away, while they were dying holding the lines, and when they returned from the lines, at the entrance gates of their plants, which in the meantime had been privatised and dismantled, they found a notice that they were no longer needed, that they were on hold. Instead of the economic equality that once concerned their literal share in ownership, they were offered political equality, namely that from now on they are all equal in their Serbness, Bosniakness, and Croatness. According to this political equality, the richest and most powerful member of his people is equal to him, the poorest, and ownership, now cleansed of communist fantasies, became exclusively a private matter, and the entire burden of his unfavourable material existential situation was transferred to the shoulders of the individual who, as Bakir Izetbegović once said, 'didn't find his way' in this transition. That hapless wretch will find spiritual consolation for the material difficulties of his private life with his clergy. And so the circle of nationalist hegemony closes.

Creating a favourable environment for capitalist initiative here went hand in hand with ethnic cleansing, looting of plants, war profiteering. Theft, seizure, corruption, fraud come naturally in this first phase of capitalist accumulation. When class rule stabilises one day, when the hegemonic class feels secure in its position and stolen material possessions within the borders of its national state, the rule of law will also stabilise. Then that famous Monday with the rule of law, promised to us in 1990, will arrive.

Patria: Changes to the electoral legislation are being sought. Common sense and democracy say that Others must have all the rights as the three other nations. Europe talks about completely different solutions. They would create a system here that they would never allow in their own country. Can Europe in BiH destroy its own principles of freedom and democracy? 

Mujkić: As I said at the beginning of the interview, voting against the constituent status of one's own people is entirely in line with the project of ethnic territorialisation of one's group, and ethnic territorialisation of the group means nothing more than what I just mentioned, namely ensuring the status and material possessions of the ruling elite of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, which is called state-building, patriotic, authentic popular. The electoral law should, in their opinion, follow these trends. Marx wrote about how the secret of the rule of nationalist hegemony is to successfully present the particular interest of the ruling group as a general one. So, it is entirely consistent for the majority of Croats living in Bosnia to transfer constituent status to their Herzegovinian minority or to be uninterested in the position of Serbs where, according to Serbian leaders, they shouldn't even be.

As for Europe in all this, it certainly cannot abandon the fundamental values on which it rests, but achieving these values in BiH is possible in several ways. If BiH were transformed into three ethnic entities with a clear dominance of one of the three peoples, if we had mini nation-states within BiH, it is very easy to imagine the introduction of liberal-democratic principles with all possible guarantees of minority rights. The mechanical sum of these three cleansed national mini-states as liberal democracies, such as Croatia, Slovakia, Poland, etc., would give a mechanical liberal-democratic BiH compatible with the European value framework, and this way of thinking can be recognised in the initiatives of HDZ and SNSD.

The architectonics of BiH now looks like this. The more we go from the base, from the municipal level towards higher instances of government, the fewer liberal-democratic, European elements there are, and the more ethnopolitical elements there are. As someone genuinely interested in collective rights as well, my approach is the opposite. The more we go downwards, towards the local community, the more protective mechanisms of collective rights there should be, therefore where people truly live and where the protection of their rights concerns them most, the implementation of which would be supervised by, say, the state House of Peoples. If we had such an approach, i.e., if we were truly interested in the position and rights of our people, it would never have happened that we vote against measures that provide for its constituent status and representation, and this way, the so-called protection of vital national interests at the state level is presented as an abstraction, better and more simply put - a bluff.  

Patria: Can the multi-ethnic tolerance and unity of diversity we once had in BiH be restored?  

Mujkić: The war against BiH was precisely a war against multi-ethnic tolerance and unity of diversity. The goal of the war against BiH was to transmit the intolerant, all-hating, exclusive, and, as Đipalo Junuz would say, the shoddy nationalist virus onto the people of BiH. Let us remember the time before the start of the war, nationalist feelings in BiH were systematically produced. Work was done diligently to create conditions in which the manifestation of nationalism would be the only desirable public pattern of behaviour. If we want to know today who won that nationalist war, let us look around us.

If we have truly become with the people around us what the aggressor wanted us to be, then the victory is on their side. Unfortunately, there are many people in this country, even those who consider themselves Bosnian patriots, who think that the only way to fight the nationalism of others is to become bigoted nationalists themselves. By doing so, they condemn themselves to their future small entity, their mini-state. Bosnia is not a nation-state; rather, it builds its identity in a subtle interrelationship of its differences. Its identity is dynamic and dialectical and, if I can illustrate it, I would say that the essence of Bosnia and Herzegovina is neither in Bosnia nor in Herzegovina but in that 'and', in that 'between', in that which connects the different, in that open space. In my judgment, the true political task is to preserve that 'between' and that openness. Any other policy is anti-Bosnian, even if it calls itself pro-Bosnian a hundred times over. Of course, that identity is seriously endangered today. The struggle to save this country is precisely a struggle for such an identity, and the battlefield for saving that identity is not just the state framework and its institutions, as we are convinced by Bosniak ethno-national leaders who have their mouths full of the state, but society.

Let us ask ourselves whether such a thing as a Bosnian-Herzegovinian society exists. Bosnia and Herzegovina will exist as much as there is a Bosnian-Herzegovinian society. What has been done so far by advocates of Bosnian-Herzegovinian statehood to rehabilitate Bosnian-Herzegovinian society, to build trust, to persistently open doors and space for differences, to reaffirm and spread multi-ethnicity? Where is the politics based on what is common to us, what we share, what emphasises our interdependence? Our so-called left, for which this should be a natural environment of struggle, has failed on this front. Is it not clear to us that after three decades of rule by the politics of difference, we will get nowhere with that politics except to our own small ethnic 'Swaziland'. If anyone, then we in the Balkans must become crystal clear: nationalism is, like its younger brother fascism, an essentially criminal ideology; there is no good nationalism. It shows its ugly face even in the orderly liberal democracies of today's Europe in relation to immigrants and minorities.

In the last hundred years, since the process of creating nation-states began here, nationalism has caused two world wars, the Balkan wars at the beginning and end of the century, and in its name, the most horrific and massive crimes have been committed here. The future of both BiH and the EU depends on a successful reckoning with it. I dream of the day when we will look at it with disgust and disbelief, just as we today look at the burning of witches.