The Great Politics of Small Politicians

For generations born after the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement, "Bosnia and Herzegovina" as they know it appears as an attempt to end the war at all costs and establish peace with minimum possibilities of renewed large-scale armed conflicts, ensuring the impossibility of national overvoting and the establishment of dominance of one over the other two and vice versa nations... while completely neglecting the specificities of Bosnia and Herzegovina that were recognized even by, one might say, less informed individuals, such as the delegates of both sessions of ZAVNOBiH, which laid the foundations and determined the borders of the SR BiH territory, whose tradition is continued by RBiH, and after it, "Bosnia and Herzegovina".

This was a counterproductive result of the "international community's" experiment, aimed at a characteristic multinational micro-space, with which similar problems in similar environments in other parts of the world were being resolved at the time (late 20th and early 21st centuries), especially in the Middle East, where, for the purpose of reforming old and establishing new global ratios and divisions, centuries-old, multinational, and multi-confessional communities had to be reorganized into unsustainable and mutually hostile ethnicities, in order to create constant focal points of conflict with the ultimate goal of opening a permanent and profitable market for the military industry's products, and simultaneously and concurrently depleting the resources of the geographical area/territory in question and protecting existing energy routes.

Thus, "Bosnia and Herzegovina" became a construct without precedent in political science theory to date, and especially in political practice, so much so that there isn't even an adequate terminological definition for it and its social order, a corresponding sufficiently descriptive name that would define what kind of social order it is, and it only exists by its complex name: Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

"Bosnia and Herzegovina" is considered a "country/state case," an artificial creation composed (?) of two entities, the Federation of BiH (FBiH) and Republika Srpska (RS), and the Brčko District, with an unsustainably complex internal organization and a dysfunctional social order in which no decision can be made without the consensus of the representatives of the three majority peoples/nations, previously in conflict and irreconcilably at war in the vortex of mutual opposition and support. 

"Bosnia and Herzegovina" – an unfinished state or a thousand-year tradition?

"Bosnia and Herzegovina" is exceptionally (poorly) administratively organized, a divided and stratified country (state), to such an extent that it seems destined never to function in any way. 

Basing the social order, sovereignty, and integrity of the state on a (tri)national principle, a political system, and a decision-making system based on the "agreement of the peoples," an unimaginably unsustainable and potentially very limited system open to all sorts of abuses, an atmosphere has been created in which it has been extremely easy to achieve a political, economic, social, and any other "status quo" that will become one of the fundamental determinants of the multi-decade situation. Moreover, in such a system, each nation has a whole range of administrative instruments at its disposal to prevent the implementation of any – every – meaningful, let alone positive and progress-oriented decision, that does not appeal to any interest group formed in the meantime to achieve its own, mostly material, interests. 

According to its constitutional order, "Bosnia and Herzegovina" is not ruled by its citizens, not even by people, consequently not by (ethno)nations, but by the "constituent peoples," Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats, through nationalist movements that have never outgrown the mere, simplest, and cheapest form of populism characteristic of the historical period between the two world wars, and (as a pathetic romantic attempt to revive the feeling of "brotherhood and unity") through parties with a social democratic label (in FBiH) which, paradoxically, in RS, are ideologically and manifestationally no different from extremely right-wing political subjects. In the meantime, there is a complete distortion or "aging" of the national label; thus, the constitutional provision for a "member of the BiH Presidency from the ranks of (for example, Bosniak) people" becomes a "(Bosniak) member of the Presidency" (the same applies to the other two national denominations).

It should be kept in mind that when speaking of the political-national plurality of Bosnia and Herzegovina, we are actually only talking about its part called the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, since the other entity, Republika Srpska, is ethnically almost "pure" and ideologically politically monolithic.

Therefore, the "protection of national rights" in the sense of (national) equality or, for that matter, insisting on "citizens' equality" remain mere platitudes and serve exclusively as means and instruments for achieving a common interest – the absolute and absolutist exploitation of all available resources, and in this regard, there are almost no differences between political subjects in BiH, except perhaps in rhetoric and narrative.

The citizen, as the sole real and full owner and holder of political sovereignty and social integrity, is pushed into the obscure category of "others" which, based on the prevailing (tri)national paradigm, is also understood in the (same) national context as "nationally undecided," so it is completely lost.
The political patronage over the "others" in "Bosnia and Herzegovina" has been taken over by so-called non-national parties (parties, fronts, alliances...) of a conditionally left-wing provenance. This "conditionality" stems from the fact that the parties in question – the Social Democratic Party (SDP), the Democratic Front (DF), Our Party (NS)... manifest and prove their left-wing orientation solely and exclusively through their multi-ethnic composition/membership and the claim that they are not national, but not through ideology or practical action, by offering a social, economic, and political alternative. On the contrary, in practice, they have shown – partly through coalition with national parties, and partly through independent action during a period (the time of the "rule" of the Alliance for Change) – that they are actually no different from national/nationalist parties in any significant way.

Ethno-national Auto-subjectivizations

The entire dysfunctional and latently corrupt system has been made even worse by the reduction of national/ethnic interests to three respective auto-subjectivizations, political parties, communities, and even them to three institutionalized personas or personalized institutions in the form of party leaders and their close circle of collaborators, rather followers who, with minor personal and nominal changes, will retain power in the country using all available means. Thus, the Bosnian-Herzegovinian socio-political paradigm is based on the common interest of all political subjects (parties, alliances), with ethno-national parties leading the way, which have reduced the state to a party, the party to an "interest group," and the interest group to an individual.

It is significant to mention another unscientific characteristic, a kind of "parallelism in perceiving reality," in which political auto-subjectivizations engaged in "political life," i.e., power, regardless of the level, live and act in a completely deconcentrated, displaced, and eccentric dimension of reality, an almost virtual reality that exists for itself and by itself; they deal with matters and problems that have no connection or reflection in real life – the life of everyday living; each ethno-national political (auto)subjectivization is convinced and claims that it acts and is exclusively the constitutional (constituent) representative of the (constituent) national whole, and in that self-defined virtual context, it speaks in the name of the people! One could say, even without great expertise, that this is a kind of collective political and sociological autism.

In addition to all this, the fact is that the limited and restrictive conceptual and ideological vocabulary from the previous system, which is often called a regime, has been adopted with almost no substantive interventions, only with the necessary replacement of ideological with clerical-national lexicon and transferred into new social and historical circumstances. Thus, ideologically, national parties and blocs are perceived as "right-wing," and parties of social democratic provenance, all created by appropriating the legacy of the League of Communists of SR Bosnia and Herzegovina and the successive outflow of cadres from the original Social Democratic Party, are considered "left-wing" oriented political currents and subjects. The complicating factor is the fact that in Bosnia and Herzegovina, there are actually no real ideological differences between the "right and left," except in terms of strength and influence.

Agreement of the Peoples and/or Peaceful Separation

The policies of the respective nationalist movements in the meantime, some of which have grown into political communities, parties, and also national clans, are easily linked to this: secession of part of the territory and the formation of "Greater Serbia," Croatia within the borders of the Banovina from 1939, and the achievement of cultural and religious autonomy for Bosnian Muslims, and a pale and uninventive neo-romantic vision of "Yugoslavia in miniature."

This seemingly simple, nostalgic, and romantic, almost literary metaphor actually hides two dangerous traps: the first, which could be called positive, lies in the fact that it implicitly indicates that Bosnia and Herzegovina, like Yugoslavia, is not possible as a mono-national state, and equally directly indicates that it belongs equally to all its citizens. This thesis, in a spun version, is used by some political subjects from the Serb and Croat national corpus in the sense of promoting the thesis that Bosnia and Herzegovina, like Yugoslavia, is not sustainable as a community of peoples, and directly or indirectly advocating secession, separation, or some kind of "peaceful separation."

It is clear that "peaceful separation" in Bosnia and Herzegovina is never an option, neither as separation nor especially as peaceful, and therefore this critical point represents a constant source of friction. In this sense, each national corpus has developed a separate agent that, using the instrument of "protection of national interest," uses it exclusively to protect its own and the achievements of a privileged group. In this complex social, sociological, political, and every conceivable environment, the system proves to be the biggest obstacle to the establishment of the state and the establishment of its functional institutions.

Along these lines and on this basis, nationalist partocracies build their two-decade rule but also, incomparably worse than that, a monopoly on every idea, from political to economic, that opposes theirs in any way; this monopoly is most evident in claiming ownership of nationality: if a person is not a member of a certain party – they are not and cannot be a sufficiently or at all good Bosniak, Serb, Croat, on patriotism, in the form of national patriotism: only what comes from the party is a patriotic thought, proposal, act... everything else is something else, even on good intentions: only what comes from the bosom of a certain party can be and is well-intentioned; everything else is not and cannot be... All of this is slowly turning political subjects into quasi-religious sects, and the current historical period is being staged in the form of, at best gray, and actually the blackest Middle Ages. In other words, the fundamental tri-national division of power in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the ethno-national policy that rules national territories according to the principle of principalities, banates, and beyliks, which, with the close connection of national leaders and religious community leaders, i.e., politics and religion, indicates another feudal characteristic (the need for divine legitimacy of power), are actually elements of a feudal social order that does not know or allow for the possibility of stepping outside the mental relationship of sovereign – subject.

Since the described paradigm of political life functions flawlessly, even, thanks to an equally perverse educational system, especially at the primary school level (separate schools for children of different nationalities), the system produces new generations of educated nationalists, it could be considered the main cause of lack of ideas and a serious lack of any initial "spiritus movens" in the form of the need to find a new or at least different social, political, or any other organized action in terms of any alternative.

Each individual mention separately, and all of them together with countless particular manifestations at the daily political level, create a unique picture, a paradigm of a country without any, let alone a bright future. It is clear that in that contextual and quasi-ideological framework, there is neither mental nor any other space for thinking about the state in any of the sociological, political, and philosophical concepts and contexts of these terms, nor about the emergence, separation, or formation of a unique political project in the form of political subjectivization, a formal/informal group (association) of citizens, or any form of organized political action in terms of reaffirming, first and foremost, statehood, and then a society established on the foundations of civilization, decency, public discourse, democracy, free articulation of ideas, and public dialogue.

Therefore, it is understandable that currently, in the political arena of Bosnia and Herzegovina, there is no political and/or ideological force that functions on different premises and principles than those mentioned. This indicates an ideological, conceptual, and even intellectual vacuum, or it is the opposite case that it is precisely this (conceptual, ideological, and intellectual) vacuum that has caused the stagnation beneath the constant and hilarious ripples on the surface of the political quagmire. On the other hand, the possibility of an opportunistic and conformist, and even consumerist, attitude of engaged and disengaged intellectuals is not excluded, and is even very likely, from whom, as a rule, an alternative is expected as thinking elites.

Totalitarian Underpinnings of Ethno-national Parties 

History teaches that all power becomes stricter and more totalitarian over time. The peculiarity of Bosnia and Herzegovina lies in the fact that power is structured as tri-national, which has, in the meantime, mostly transformed into tri-party. This tri-party oligarchy does not function on the level of ideology (unless managing and disposing of public resources is considered as such, although in BiH this has reached the level of ideology) but on the contrary; all the largest, most numerous, and most influential parties/organizations emerged in the nineties of the last century on the eve of the very collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as reactionary, nationalist, and populist movements that justified their existence by opposing the one-party social structure of the previous regime. Of course, each of the leading political auto-subjectivizations of the respective peoples in Bosnia and Herzegovina has its specificities, as do parties with a declarative social democratic program and a civic political orientation. For example, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) originated as the namesake "outpost" of the HDZ formed in Croatia, and the then most numerous Serb party in BiH, the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), was named after the party of the same name also formed in Croatia, but in parts of the territory with a Serb national majority. The fact that the largest and most numerous Bosniak party was founded by former political prisoners, convicts, and prisoners further complicates the paradigmatic definition of the Party of Democratic Action (SDA). 

In a short, but concise and educational article under the subtitle "Implications of the Model of Social Revolution Structure," Renato Stanković writes: "From the aforementioned argumentation, we can conclude that the paradigmatic nature of the social system can be reduced to two characteristics: structure and circularity. The implications of this are extremely significant. Namely, the characteristic of structure allows us to predict the process of social upheaval, and the characteristic of circularity allows us to be sure that social upheavals will occur in the future. In addition to the predictability of the revolution process itself and the results that come with it, in this way it is possible to predict the behavior of the system that controls the image of the world through a certain social paradigm. Namely, when it comes to scientific revolution, the system can deny or ignore the appearance of the first anomalies. When the number of anomalies increases, the system becomes weak and must negotiate, but ultimately a reversal occurs. If we wanted to apply this to social revolution, the process is identical" (Stanković 2010: 16).

Precisely the existence of so many negativities, unfilled gaps, ideological idleness, a large number of prohibitions and restrictions, inconsistencies in the political, administrative, economic, and every other form of state action indicates an open and free space that can be actively and effectively used to initiate a change in the political, social, economic... statehood paradigm of Bosnia and Herzegovina according to the model of a republic's political organization, with a modern administrative-regional organization, decent institutions that do not offend the common sense or intelligence of any inhabitant of the country regardless of national or non-national affiliation, and the beginning of rebuilding a society in which, first and foremost, the citizens of this country will have trust, and then present themselves as a reliable partner to international organizations and institutions, serious investors and their investments, the flow of people, ideas, and money, and with the aim of reforming Bosnian-Herzegovinian society into an open, civil, civilized, cultural, and decent society based on generally accepted civilizational norms that are considered European values.

The idea of "Europe" offers countless possibilities for a different way of thinking about Bosnia and Herzegovina not only in the foreseeable future but also in the present, not only based on the values it cherishes: awareness of the individual as the basic cell of society and the free spirit of the individual, pluralism of perspectives, democracy and tolerance, expanding the circle of inclusion (the circle of people with whom the common "we" is shared – and multiplied –), a culture of human rights based on the teachings of natural law, and historical consciousness and ethical values of art and culture, but also, perhaps more importantly and significantly for our conditions, a new vocabulary, because the existing one is simply unable to express new ideas. 

Only by redefining the inherited and defining a completely new vocabulary based on the values insisted upon by the progressive civic intellectual elite – above all on education and culture as the fundamental determinants of a new positive collective identification – would it be possible to expect the emergence of new ideas that can neither objectively nor subjectively be born within the existing imposed and self-imposed frameworks.