Lučić , Iva Im Namen der Nation. Der politische Aufwertungsprozess der Muslime im sozialistischen Jugoslawien (1956–1971) (review)

Abstract

SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 384 Lučić, Iva. Im Namen der Nation. Der politische Aufwertungsprozess der Muslime im sozialistischen Jugoslawien (1956–1971). Studia Historica Upsaliensia, 256. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala Universitet, Uppsala, 2016. 335 pp. Notes. Index. SEK 293.00. Iva Lučić’s multiple award-winning book is based on her doctoral dissertation at the University of Uppsala, which explores the political process of recognition of Muslims as a nation in Socialist Yugoslavia. With recent studies coming out of the former Yugoslavia being extremely insular and biased, and international scholarship dominated by English-language popular topics with often reductionist tropes, this is the third key work on Bosnia and one of its nations in a span of three years, all of them appearing from less expected parts of the world. Walking in the footsteps of German historian Wolfgang Höpken, who only hinted at the dynamic of the Communist party in the Yugoslav federation as the key arena of Muslim nation-building, Lučić combines a stringent theoretical framework and painstaking but eventually rewarding archival research to bring fresh force to historical discipline and a milestone expansion in general knowledge. Lučić posits Muslim nation-building as neither teleological nor the only possible option and instead demonstrates a process of political mobilization at the centre of which was the Communist party’s nationality policy. In fact, in the 1990s Bosnian Muslims for the most part rejected their appellation and embraced the name Bošnjaks (Bosnyaks), which is by now widely accepted by outsiders too. Furthermore, the party’s leader and Yugoslav president Tito was against the process but eventually had to accept its, by no means, preconceived outcome. Finally, the Communist party members in Bosnia who initially overwhelmingly declared as ethnic Serbs came out of the debate convinced of the need to adopt the newly agreed ethnic/national denomination as Muslims. They were driven, as Lučić shows, by the need to affirm Bosnian statehood in the wake of the decentralization of the Yugoslav federation and the political devaluation of Yugoslav identity. Bosnian statehood in turn was constructed around the Yugoslav republic’s unique tripartite national structure — made up of Serbs, Croats and, for the lack of a better name at the time, Muslims — and their peaceful co-existence, in order to combat the image of previous inter-ethnic hostility and the republic’s backwardness, as characterized by Yugoslavia’s highest illiteracy rate. Lučić’s other major contribution is to illuminate the context of Socialist Yugoslavia. The country’s nationality policy, as this book demonstrates, founded its federal project and gave it a new lease of life that lasted for almost half a century, although now it is mostly remembered for its miserable collapse. Moreover, this is a case study of nation-building under socialism, which relied REVIEWS 385 on dismissing and delegating nationalism to bourgeois capitalism, only to reverse its cause, as demonstrated by Lučić’s examination of the role of the partyleadershipanditsmembers,intellectualsandordinarycitizens.Reactions from other parts of the country and verification through a federal system was as important if not more so, than local dynamics. Lučić’s contextualization shows once again how methodologically and factually limited, if not utterly wrong, recently acclaimed studies in ‘Croatian tourism during Socialism’ or ‘ethnic relations in Socialist Macedonia’ have been, all of which tried to avoid the overarching Yugoslav framework. While not entirely necessary to enhance her argument, Iva Lučić’s reliance on the theoretical framework of social movements in terms of mobilization, structures, resources and conceptual framing by political actors, turns out to be very useful in organizing and formulating her arguments. While her archival investigation is limited to the most important but relatively narrow timeframe of 1956–71, when the question was deemed resolved, Iva Lučić’s meticulous study goes further, offering a detailed and systematic, theoretically- and methodologically-layered analysis of Muslim nation-building in all aspects of Socialist Yugoslavia. With recent studies by Armina Omerika and Xavier Bougarel, the history of Bošnjaks as a nation in the twentieth century is finally emerging, based on solid factual and theoretical foundations, able to resist political manipulation and myth making. Finally, Iva...