ETHNONATIONALITY AND INTER-GENERATIONAL DIS-CONTINUITIES. POLITICAL REGIMES, IDEOLOGIES AND MASSES IN BOSNIA HERZEGOVINA AND FORMER YUGOSLAV REPUBLICS OF MACEDONIA, FROM THEIR YUGOSLAV PAST UNTIL NOWADAYS.

This dissertation is centred upon the concept of ‘ethnonationality’ and aims at investigating how its meanings and functions have possibly changed across generations, political regimes and time periods. The analysis is conducted in the ethnically plural contexts of Bosnia Herzegovina and FYRO Macedonia, and the research covers a time period that goes from the Yugoslav era until nowadays. Members of two differently socialized generations, one of ‘Yugoslav parents’ and one of ‘post-Yugoslav children’, and living together in the same family, have been chosen as unit of analysis of this work in order to better grasp possible inter-generational dis-continuities and dis-similarities entailing meanings and usages of ethnonationality. Starting from the idea that without a temporal perspective any research on the topic would be incomplete, this work doesn’t consider the fall of Yugoslavia as a ‘year zero’ but, rather, as the outcome of pre-existing mechanisms and conditions that paved the way for the current reality. The time perspective, coupled with an empirical analysis involving two generations, does help to better understand how and why the current post-Yugoslav societies of BiH and Macedonia have come to be the way they are. This work adopts a relational approach, hence it starts from the belief that without a macro exploration any micro explanation would be superficial; and, conversely, without a micro analysis any macro change won’t be properly understood. Performing a multi-dimensional and temporal exploration, thus, allows to understand how macro and micro - hence individuals and structures - interact together, and how their conjoined roles make the system functioning possibly shaping meanings and usages of ethnonationality itself. The aims of this work are, thus, to understand in what extent past and present ‘macro-environments’ and connected personal experiences have penetrated and shaped the micro-world influencing ideas and behaviours of two generations; and how these two generations’ ideas and behaviours influence, meet or clash with each other. In a broader perspective, the analysis performed in this research may tell us something new and interesting about the role played by multinational states and their institutions, political elites, dominant ideologies, families and masses themselves in avoiding/causing conflicts, building democracy or maintaining ethnocracies.