Nationalism vs Non-Nationalism in Bosnia

Identity vs Politics

Photo by Vong Vathanak on Unsplash

I recently posted a tweet that people in Bosnia are really divided into two groups: nationalists and ‘non-nationalists’ — I gave this name, there are probably better names but let’s leave that aside.

I’ve written about our huge government, based on Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. I’m not going to repeat how we have 14 governments, three presidents, 13 ministers for pretty much everything, which means we have zero accountability because they just shift the blame from one to another, so citizen pressure is almost impossible. Right now, I’ll talk more about how this system is based on divisions — Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats.

So: we have 3 presidents, one from each of these groups. One of the Croatian political parties HDZ, the one that is almost inseparable from HDZ in Croatia insists that the Croat president must be from their political party. They’re calling it ‘legitimate representation’. One, there is no legitimate representation, they do NOT represent only their specific group, they represent the whole country even though they are from a specific group. Two, HDZ does NOT get to say who is and who is NOT a legitimate Croat. Their main argument is that Bosniaks voted for a Croat (Zeljko Komsic) from DF political party, and therefore he’s not a legitimate representative of Croats. Zeljko Komsic does NOT…