Unconscious nationalism : youth in post-war Bosnia Herzegovina

Bosnia Herzegovina (BiH) is a young Country, once a Republic member of the Yugoslavia. After the 1992 - 1995 war, the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) was signed to stop the conflict and drive BiH toward a democratic society. The new Constitution recognized three Constituent Peoples - Serbs, Croats and Bošnjaks (along with Others) - and opted for a spatial separation breaking BiH into two, almost ethnically homogeneous, Entities. Overall, the DPA did not solved the ethnic question and gave a new ‘democratic’ legitimization to the nationalist actors’ political existence, protagonists of the war. Consequently, everything was declined in ethnic terms, from State’s institutions to school-system, and ethno-national belonging became the primary source of representation. Ethnopolitics and nationalism caused individuals’ depersonalization and collectivization of the identity spectrum, according to which people’s collective identity is inferred by ethno-religious origins of the family. Needless to say how the identity issue is important for the nationalist actors, who are still contributing to divide people, deepening societal cleavages. After twenty years since the war ended, nationalism is still a dominant political idiom and getting out from the ethnic matrix is highly difficult. This contribution will be based on interviews I made in Sarajevo, in 2013, among the generation born during the war: these youngsters are growing in a Society in which their parents’ stories about the past violently clash with the surrounding social reality, and for this reasons their words are particularly interesting. Considering the vicious circle created by the nationalist actors, I will describe the strategies used in building their nations; while, through the interviews, I will show the social pervasiveness of the nationalist idiom, reflecting on its social consequences and demonstrating the often unconscious, routinized, reproduction of the nationalist rhetoric