Da li je narod "prirodna vrsta"? Bosna i Hercegovina između etničke i etičke jednakosti
Does the people represent a ‘natural kind’? Bosnia-Herzegovina between ethnic and moral equality

Summary/Abstract: Leaning on Brubaker’s analysis of the concepts of nation and nationality, the author offers a number of reasons why one should attempt at overcoming the existing logics of both the Dayton Constitution and the Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina. He argues that each social practice needs to be viewed through the norms that underlie such practice, but, in the case of the BiH, the current norms are unsustainable in both theoretical and practical terms. Furthermore he criticises the concept of constituent people as well as the concept of the right of a people to national self-determination. A strict division between constituent peoples embodies a social construction that does not reflect the existing relationships within the social reality. In terms of their language, their history, and their culture, the three peoples of Bosnia-Herzegovina have a lot in common and one cannot view them as isolated and self-contained wholes. As to the BiH Constitution, the concept of citizen, as an individual with universal and individual rights, has been suppressed in favour of the concept of constituent peoples as the bearers of rights. Hence the author claims that we should dismiss the consociationist model, on which the BiH Constitution is founded, and in its stead favour a liberal model based on fundamental human rights. Instead of ethnic, in the BiH we today need a moral equality, whilst instead of a popular right to self-determination, today in the BiH we need a citizen’s right to self-determination. The author further maintains that Taylor’s model of the politics of recognition cannot apply to Bosnia, because such a model could apply only to the situation when ethnic groups exhibit clear differences in culture. He also argues that a liberal-democratic re-composition of the BiH constitution, the replacement of paradigm, and a turn towards individualism would bring about a disempowerment of ethno-political matrix, and would also disarm the ethno-political narratives of collective good, transforming them into one of the many voices of which an overall ‘noise’ of the society is composed. Such a public space, thus democratized, would open a room to diverse forms of individual and collective self-understanding without a possibility of imposition. Given the objection that liberalism in the BiH has very weak roots, and no tradition, the author would respond by several historical analogies that all indicate that the ideas, including those with insufficient roots and without tradition in our public and political space, could nevertheless materialize; besides, the author argues that liberalism, based on the concept of fundamental human rights of a citizen as an individual, indeed is a least bad modus for mutual accommodation of pluralist social life in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

• Details
• Contents