Predatory collectivity : youth, ethnic identities and the ‘Bosnian Herzegovinians’

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is a young State, once a Republic member of the Jugoslavia. Twenty years ago, after almost four years of war, the three nationalist leaders who led the conflict signed the Agreement that would have changed permanently the future of BiH. The Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) stopped the war and provided BiH with a new Constitution. Serbs, Croats and Bošnjaks were recognized as Constituent Nations, (along with ‘Others’), and the Country was divided into two highly autonomous, and almost ethnically homogeneous, Entities: the Federation of Bosnia Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska. The new Bosnian State’s architecture was shaped along consociational democracy’s features (Lijphart, 1977), in which power-sharing and groups’ autonomies were seen as the best ways to overcome tensions and build a democratic State. Sadly, the DPA did not solved ethnic antagonisms, core of the war. Some, indeed, describe BiH as an ethnopolis (Mujkić, 2008), in which everything is declined in ethnic terms and the ethno-national collective identification is the one promoted while State identification is, instead, prevented and contested. ‘Bosnian Herzegovinian’ is not an available political category and those who identify as such are formally part of the ‘Others’, discriminated within the political system and without a protected and recognized identity. The intertwined consequences of the nationalist strategies of (nation)state-building, together with the contradictions on which the DPA is based, have provoked individuals’ depersonalization and collectivization of the identity spectrum, ultimately transforming ‘demos in ethnos’ (Abazović, Velikonja 2014:39). People are not understood for the subjects they are but for the collectivity they belong to, which is predetermined by the ethno-religious origins of the family. But the situation is more complex: this narrowed idea of belonging is impeding the existence of multiple identifications and memberships, hindering a common identification with the Bosnian State. Together with political antagonisms, this leads to State immobilism and, at individual level, ‘due’ ethnic identification caused by the ‘difficulty’ of being Bosnian Herzegovinians, therefore ratifying the ethno-nationalist matrix’s existence. The major claim of this paper is that the perpetuation of monolitical ethno-national identities is posing serious problems for BiH, which is trying to find its way toward a consolidated democracy and is willing to join the EU. Sadly, these goals cannot be achieved if the ethnic identification will remain the one encouraged and the State identification will remain challenged, ultimately more a problem than the norm. This paper analyzes how, and through which mechanisms, nationalists actors push for identifications based ethnic origins; it will take into consideration some attempts made by bosnian as well as international actors in promoting a non-ethnic identification and it will also try to describe individual mechanisms of ethnic affiliation. With a focus on the generation born during the conflict, and using interviews’ extracts I made in Sarajevo among them, I will discuss the identity spectrum’s shrinkage, looking at the ways in which youngsters identify themselves in ethnic and non-ethnic terms