PART THREE Doctrinal Ideological Positions of Croatian Federalism Nationalism in and Towards Bosnia and Herzegovina!

Continuation - third part

Read the first part HERE, and the second at THIS link

By: Enver Halilović

The creation of three federal sub-states in the country is the first step of its separatist-secessionist dissolution. The definition of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a trinational state is a means of promoting Croatian nationalist views of federalizing the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, justifying the reasonable existence of Republika Srpska, and the beginning of the end of the state of BiH.

For many contemporary theorists of nations and nationalism, Ernest Gellner*, Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson, and many others, a nation is a political community-state. A political community, a nation of citizens of a state, is territorially limited. As Max Weber says, it has a monopoly on physical violence as an institution. A state-nation, and vice versa, is a political community that exercises its sovereign power within the borders of its territory. A state-nation, and vice versa, sublimates two elements: ethnic or civic and political, institutional state. A nation, like a state, can be ethnic and civic. It is important that it exists as a state, that it has reached the stage of a state in its ethnogenesis. Nationalism can be The narrative of the trinationality of Bosnia and Herzegovina, like many other constructs in the hermeneutic circle about and in relation to it, is based on the ideological preconception*** of Bosnia as a Serbian land, Bosnia as a Croatian land, Bosnia as a Bosniak land, and not on Bosnian reality.

b) By inappropriately manipulating the general ideas and positions of some contemporary political philosophers, Will Kymlicka, Michael Wazer, Roger Brubaker, etc., to the Bosnian social and political reality, Ugo Vlaisavljević does not differentiate, equating the ethnic and civic understanding and conception of nation and nationalism in order to cloak Croatian federal-type separatism in the guise of scientific theory.

His identification of ethnic and civic determination of nation and nationalism is a skillful manipulation and abuse of Roger Brubaker's conception in interpreting the so-called inter-ethnic relations in Bosnia. Brubaker's theory of two forms of state and nation, civic and ethnic state, as well as ethnic and civic nation and nationalism in general, in discussions initiated by the formation of new states in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, is manipulatively applied to inter-ethnic as inter-national relations in Bosnia. One concept about a completely different geographical, historical, political, social space has been dogmatically, doctrinally transferred to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

3. Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a Yugoslavian dead end nor its federal relic

In Greater Croatian concepts, Bosnia and Herzegovina is figuratively called the "dead end" of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. "Dead end means that the division of the former state (SFRY, added E.H.) along national lines stopped at the borders of BiH****. The Bosnian stopping of the disintegration of Yugoslavia along national lines at the borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina is assessed as Yugoslavia's dead end. Protagonists and followers of the so-called national conception of Bosnia and Herzegovina consider Bosnia and Herzegovina a "mistake in the disintegration of Yugoslavia" because it did not disintegrate along their fictions of national lines in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Serb-Croatian colonial conceptualists cannot understand that there are no national lines in Bosnia that they speak of, and therefore it could not disintegrate along those lines.

The division of Bosnia along Serb-Croatian "national lines through Bosnia" was prevented by the glorious Army of BiH. It defended BiH from division along national lines into Croatian and Serbian parts, as Franjo Tuđman and Slobodan Milošević had planned and agreed. Followers of these concepts today have two options: to mourn with sadness and pain in their souls for the stopping of the "division of the former state" at the borders of Bosnia, and through the concept of its "national" territorial federalization, to politically revive the failed projects of its national division from the war. However, it is naive to expect that what was preserved in war will be lost in peace.

The national federalists of Bosnia advocate a very intriguing position: the disintegration of Yugoslavia is not over, it has entered a dead end at the borders of Bosnia, and until it disintegrates, the process of Yugoslavia's disintegration is not complete. Bosnia, at its borders, stopped the disintegration of the "former state," Yugoslavia, leading it into a "dead end." "along national lines" by the legitimate defense of its territorial integrity and national-state sovereignty. It is inappropriate to call Bosnia's struggle for state-national sovereignty and territorial integrity, which prevented its disintegration along so-called national lines, a dead end, and to turn a heroic defense into a "Yugoslav case" because it did not disintegrate like Yugoslavia, even though it was, as they say, a "multinational community" like the SFRY. Bosnia and Herzegovina was never a multinational state; only Greater Serbian and Greater Croatian communists declared it so, whom the Bosnian communists did not have the strength to oppose. Bosnia did not disintegrate along the national lines along which Yugoslavia disintegrated, both due to its chivalrous self-defense and because it was never, not only formally but also essentially, a federation of peoples or nations, and therefore could not disintegrate on those grounds. It is a notorious untruth that Bosnia today is a "preserved federal relic" of the so-called national division of federal Yugoslavia.

The claim that federal Yugoslavia disintegrated along national lines is a forgery and a factual revision of the history of its disintegration along republican lines. To say, as Ugo Vlaisavljević claims, that Yugoslavia disintegrated along national, not republican, lines is a historical forgery.

Anti-Bosnian ideological-political conceptualists believe that Bosnia's struggle and defense of its sovereignty and territorial integrity, the rejection of Serb-Croatian national demarcation through Bosnia, is a "dead end," that such a nationally undivided Bosnia is a "preserved relic" of Yugoslavia. The understanding and interpretation of a nationally undivided Bosnia as a Yugoslavian dead end and a Yugoslav preserved relic is an ideological-political construction whose goal is to justify the national division of Bosnia. It does not take into account the following facts. First, Yugoslavia disintegrated along republican lines, which were essentially also national lines in the sense of the statehood of the Yugoslav republics, as elaborated in the pages of this text. Second, in explaining the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation along national lines, the fact that neither Croatia nor Bosnia***** were constitutionally mono-national republics within the Yugoslav federation is neglected.

This means that the so-called national lines did not exist only in Bosnia during the Yugoslav era; they also existed in Croatia. The disintegration of Yugoslavia along national lines did not happen only in Bosnia, nor in Croatia, but the survival of Croatia as a unified, nationally undivided country is not called either a dead end of Yugoslavia or its preserved relic. This is how only the survival of nationally undivided Bosnia is understood and interpreted, which very clearly speaks of the bias and different standards of measurement and evaluation of the survival of nationally undivided Bosnia and nationally undivided Croatia.

The claim that the Yugoslav federation disintegrated along national lines and that by the non-disintegration of Bosnia, as a trinational republic, the national principle of the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation was overturned, and that such a Bosnia is a federal relic of Yugoslavia, is untrue.

Third, all Yugoslav republics and the province of Kosovo, the newly formed states, remained "nationally" undivided and within the borders they had within the Yugoslav federation. None were divided along internal "national lines" nor did they violate external borders they had within Yugoslavia as inter-republic borders. Serbia and Croatia, by attacking Bosnia and Herzegovina, wanted to change their borders, to expand them with the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but they did not succeed. Therefore, Bosnia is neither a dead end of Yugoslavia's disintegration nor a relic of the Yugoslav federation. The historical truth is that the Yugoslav socialist federation disintegrated along republican, not national, lines.

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* Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Minerva Zagreb, 1998; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the Short Twentieth Century, Dereta, Belgrade, 2004; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Školska knjiga, Zagreb, 1990.

** Friedrich Schleiermacher developed the hermeneutic circle of understanding the relationship between the whole and its constituent parts; Hermeneutics and Criticism. With application to the New Testament, two books, Demetra, Zagreb, 2002.

*** Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Naprijed, Zagreb, 1988.

**** UV, Ibid, "The dead-end means that the partition zhe former state along national lines was stopped et the border of B&H" ...p.34; "Rhere are good reasons to consider it an undissolved residue of the disintegrated federation, i.e. preserved federal relic", p.1

***** In the Yugoslav federation, Croatia was a republic of two peoples, not just the Croatian people, but also the Serbian people, just as Bosnia was a republic of three peoples, Muslims/Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats. Croatia became a mono-national state after war crimes, persecution, and ethnic cleansing of Croatian Serbs. Only after this "achievement" can Croatia be included in the "national" disintegration of the Yugoslav federation.