Imagining Bosnia: Constructions of Bosnian and Bosniak Identity after the War

Abstract

This is a contribution to the discussion forum "Conceptualizing Society after the Modern Territorial State and Nation." Riccardo Nicolosi's essay about the Balkan literature of the 1990s has remained unpublished for many years, yet it surprisingly resonates with the current debates in the field formerly known as Russian studies. Nicolosi focuses on Bosnian writers who belong to different generations – Muhamed Filipović, Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, and Dževad Karahasan. In the wake of the devastating Balkan wars, they reflect on the discourse of the Bosnian nation. Responding to Serbian nationalism as the main existential threat, Bosnian intellectuals insisted on the principally different nature of their national community. They characterized the Bosnian nation as multicultural and predicated more on religion than on any other factor. Bosnian specificity was explained by the Ottoman historical legacy and illustrated by somewhat idealized examples of early modern Ottomanism. This cultural repertoire allowed Bosnian intellectuals to criticize exclusive nationalism, embrace cultural tolerance, and advance a more humane version of nationalism. At the same time, this vision was wrought by the fundamental tension between religion and ethnicity as well as between Islamic universalism and Bosnian national separateness. It was also unclear how early modern political forms could be used at the turn of the twenty-first century. Thus, the Ottoman historical repertoire could be used to critique modern exclusive nationalism, but a whole new conceptual language needed to be elaborated to implement an alternative social order.