POLITICAL COMPETITION AND REJECTION OF RADICAL NATIONALISM IN WARTIME YUGOSLAVIA: THE CASE OF TUZLA (1990-1996)

Thesis addresses the puzzle of why and how the third largest Bosnian municipality, city of Tuzla, managed to be the only municipality who elected non-ethnic party leadership during first multiparty elections in former Yugoslavia and subsequently reject radical Muslim, Serbian and Croatian nationalism and survive politically to protect its moderate political option and maintain ethnic peace and coexistence. The central question of the thesis is why and how city of Tuzla managed to reject virulent Serbo-Croatian-Muslim radical nationalism. In wartime Yugoslavia, new radical ethno-political elements, cultural and historical heritage, existing socialist institutions, economic and natural resources and enterprising policymaking were used to both induce conflict on multi-ethnic Yugoslav communities, as well as to defuse the conflict to maintain the peace. Thesis identifies causal mechanism which addresses why part of the research as identity formation and how part of the research question as strategies and policies during wartime. This was done in two phases. First phase, formation of the Tuzla’s identity, a set of three processes during three time periods corresponding approximately hundred years, processes of: bonding of ethnicities and nationalities in Tuzla’s large mining sector, forging of working class through labor movements, union organization and anti-fascist movement and cementing of a working class in socialist Yugoslavia through economic, cultural and educational expansion. The identity formed in Tuzla was prelude to the wartime process conflict management. Indeed, second phase of the causal mechanism constructed as strategies and policies of wartime elites and civil society as a process of conflict management. Additionally, thesis expands the range of instrumentalist explanation for the Yugoslav conflict, while arguing against the primordialist approach. Primordialism posits that ethnic identity is ascriptive or inherent, i.e. primordial. The general assumption therefore is that ethnic group membership is fixed and passes down intact across generations, ethno is a primordial attribute in humans that is ascriptive, and all our differences and hence hate stem from it. Alternatively, instrumentalism sees ethnicity as an ‘instrument’ used by political entrepreneurial elites to politicize the ethno, strategically and purposefully inducing conflict onto homogeneous communities with the ultimate aim to maintain the status quo and acquire economic and political gains. Case of Tuzla shows that Yugoslav ‘ethnic’ wars as proclaimed in the West are largely a myth, and while instrumentalism does explain the conflict, it fails in its overreaching assumptions professing elites unchecked capacity to manipulate whomever, whenever, while inadvertently not giving proper credit to the anatomy of the civil society. Tuzla is the case where elites acted in opposite of instrumentalist assumptions while civil society mobilized to help the elites in its moderate politics. Moreover, literature relying instrumentalism widely missed the complexities of ‘micro’ vs. ‘macro’ war(s) in Bosnia, where elites collaborated with each other for economic and political benefits. Hence, instrumentalism while being constructive theory on ethnic conflict, it can benefit from being refined with less overreaching assumption regarding elites while inadvertently giving credit to the anatomy of the civil societies.