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Daniel Dăianu writes an analysis of Romania's perspectives of integration in the European Union and NATO. He suggests that Romania has to make some realistic efforts for becoming a member in the both of these institutions, trying to avoid as many as possible of the internal conflicts and problems. The analyst quotes Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Kagan, Robert Kaplan and Francis Fukuyama.
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Zoe Petre writes an article about the Romania and NATO vs. European Integration Process. The author suggests that there is no incompatibility between the two targets. Romania needs NATO for military security, but Romania also needs European Union for economic safety and prosperity. There is no need to panic that Romania wants both of them.
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Rodica Culcer makes some comments about Unites States of America and European Union from the Romanian point of view. She tries to see if the stronger collaboration with USA can bring more advantages on a short term for Romania. The negotiations with EU are just at the beginning and there are many problems to be solved, while NATO is not any more just a dream.
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Magdalena Boiangiu takes an interview with Mircea Geoană, Romanian Minister for Foreign Affairs. The main subjects discussed on this occasion are European Union, NATO and the effort that Romania made in the last years for integration. Mircea Geoană speaks about the plans and actions for the next four years.
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Elena Ştefoi realizes a synthesis of the political actions in the last decade concerning European and NATO integration of Romania. She suggests that Romania has many interesting perspectives, ether continental or regional, but it is very important that the diplomacy actions to be followed by an economic development and growth.
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Magdalena Boiangiu writes an essay about Balkans region, starting from a study published by Ivan Krastev in Journal of Democracy. She is interested in a political point of view on this open to democracy region. Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Yugoslavia have to solve new demands and to cooperate for social, political and military stability.
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Cristian Ghinea suggests that Romania has all needed qualities to become a NATO member. Romania improved its military equipment, sent troups in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan and, a very important detail, the population wants a NATO integration. The only problem is that Romanian economy is not strong enough yet so the EU integration remains just an aspiration.
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"Mak Dizdar is generally recognised to be the leading poet of 20th-century Bosnia and Herzegovina. Like his contemporary Vasko Popa, Dizdar was a poet of major European stature, who mined the depths of his country’s culture and past, seeking not what was narrowly ethnic, but what was universally human. Yet Dizdar’s vibrant and original poetic voice is virtually unknown to the wider European reading public. Nor - unlike Popa, or his Central European contemporaries such as Holub or Milosz - has he had a fertilising effect on other poets in the English-reading world." (...)
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The Bosnian paradigm represents a challenge for academic research and requires a multidisciplinary approach, with relevant perspectives chosen according to the particular subject-matter or theme. However, my own research interest in Bosnia is focused on the complex context of the Bosnian paradigm, on the totality of Bosnia. There are of course a number of pitfalls in the methods used in such academic research; however, a multidisciplinary approach to learning the "truth" on a social subject has long been my own fundamental research orientation. This article complements my political study of 1997 and an earlier historical overview (The Bosnian paradigm represents a challenge for academic research and requires a multidisciplinary approach, with relevant perspectives chosen according to the particular subject-matter or theme. However, my own research interest in Bosnia is focused on the complex context of the Bosnian paradigm, on the totality of Bosnia. There are of course a number of pitfalls in the methods used in such academic research; however, a multidisciplinary approach to learning the "truth" on a social subject has long been my own fundamental research orientation. This article complements my political study of 1997 and an earlier historical overview (Kržišnik-Bukić, 1996/1997). (...)
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Brad K. Blitz examines whether the Dayton Peace Agreement provisions might form a possible basis for de facto reunification of BiH. When writing (1998), Blitz felt that political and economic unification would be most likely following a political implosion of Republika Srpska; but that redistributive policies towards the regions, investment in education and economic R&D, and reduction in military expenditure would be key enabling factors. "The Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) which ended the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina established a new federal arrangement through which two entities, the Muslim-Croat Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska (RS), would evolve towards economic integration. While institutionalizing internal political divisions, the DPA also leaves open the possibility that the entities may elect closer cooperation and even unification through greater inter-entity coordination and amendments to the federal constitution which appears as an appendix". (...)
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The author notes how, during the 1990s, US commentators constructed a false opposition between the European and Islamic worlds and totemised it with the label "clash of civilizations". Allcock points out how such a Manichean approach implies that a complex,multi-layered identity for the Bosniaks and Bosnia´s other citizens (European and Balkan, Christian and Islamic, etc.) is a historical anomaly, and that Bosnia´s fate is "sooner or later [to] be eliminated as the "fault-lines" [between civilizations] move". "Why Huntington? In the summer of 1993, in the journal Foreign Affairs, the American Historian Samuel P. Huntington published an article, "The clash of civilizations?", which has had a substantial impact upon discussion of the shape of international relations following the collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. The vigour of the debate which this piece stimulated is suggested by the publication shortly afterwards of a volume of critical responses to it (Huntington, 1996). Subsequently Huntington revised and elaborated his original thesis in a best-selling book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1997). Huntington´s book is of interest and importance for at least two reasons." (...)
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The author agrees that the problem for all three religious communities in BiH is the use of religious persuasion as a shibboleth of identity, and thus as a means of justifying political separateness. He argues that the solution is to uncouple the religious from the mundane: "for the contemporary state to be as secular as possible,and [...] religion to be as spiritual as possible". "There has been a kind of renaissance of religion in former Yugoslavia as regards its involvement in public life. There is an interconnection and even a direct link between the religious (predominantly moral) and the political (predominantly impregnated with social power). When clashes within society arise, religions - some to a greater, some to a lesser extent - do not hesitate to manifest their power by legalizing the use of violence in the areas dominated by politics. It is hard to refute the argument that every developed religion has at least three constituents: ideological, interpretative, and normative-directional". (...)
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In his article the author equates Bosnian identity with loyalty to the Bosnian state, which he sees as the most effective guarantor of all three sub-identities (Bosnian Croat, Bosnian Serb and Bosniak). As for Bosniak identity, he sees it as having three components: one geographic (the European element), one religious (the Muslim element), and one historical (the fact that the Bosniak heritage reaches back through all phases of Bosnia´s history, not merely to its Ottoman/Muslim phase). "The Bosnian and European identities are not the Bosniaks´ only characteristics, but they, along with our Bosniak and Muslim identities, are among the most important. The Bosniaks, of course, are not the only ones in Bosnia who have both Bosnian and European identities, although during the recent turbulent years this has been the subject of heated debate. But one should be wary of conclusions arising from heated debates. In those difficult years, as a result of the harrying of Bosnia by Serb and Croat nationalists, many Bosniaks both within and outside Bosnia may have doubted that the Bosnian Croats, and especially the Bosnian Serbs, might also have a Bosnian identity." (...)
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The article focuses on the relationship between literature and identity in BiH. The author examines the status of "Bosnian-Herzegovinan literature". Agić asks whether it is merely as an assemblage of three independent literary traditions (Bosniak, Croat and Serb), or - the model which he implicitly favours - whether there is a superstructure which both unifies the three Bosnian sub-traditions and sets literature written by Croats and Serbs apart from literature written in Croatia and Serbia proper.
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The author looks not at the ethics of tolerance but at the ethics of intervention. In a casestudy of U.S. reporting of the Bosnian war, Keith Doubt explores the implications of two contrasting stances. Holding to the "ethic of ultimate ends" means seeking long-term good, even if one´s actions cause short-term bad; whereas holding to the "ethic of responsibility" means seeing any long-term ethical aim as irrational and unfeasible, and looking only to what is doable in the short term. The least bad stance, Doubt implies, is one of ultimate ends tempered by responsibility, i.e. a quest for justice tempered by an attempt to reduce the bad consequences that this may bring about.
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Nermin Moranjak-Bamburac deconstructs the "metaphors we live by", which not only describe our self-perceptions but also determine them (cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). In a discussion which gave the title for the present issue, Moranjak-Bamburac points out the complex ramifications of the metaphor "Bosnia is a crossroads". Though the metaphor has now become institutionalized as a "fashionable act of magical legitimisation" that underpins popular, literary and political discourse, it can have negative as well as positive connotations; and its dominance conceals other possible metaphors for the Bosnian-Herzegovinan experience. "Although it might seem that any discussion of Bosnia leads inevitably to communication conflicts, there is at least one consensus as to what Bosnia, its history and culture has (at least until now) comprised. Bosnia is almost universally seen as a "crossroads" of historic interests, cultures and identities. Moreover, in modern times the paradigm of the crossroads has often been used to transform the specific case of Bosnia into a framework for posing general questions relating to world, subject and identity. With a view to understanding the nature of identity in the Bosnian space and stopping this endless process of semiosis, a series of metaphoric operations have been undertaken - which, by a process of association, have shaped a quasi-identity into a schema of "Bosnian identity". The crossroads paradigm suggests a richness of different possibilities gathered into one spot, into one here and now, where the world resides in all its diversities, virtualities and, most importantly, values." (...)
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The author sees the bases of intolerance as lying within Bosnia, in the pre-modern division of society into ethno-religious communities during the Ottoman period. Lovrenović implies that tolerance lies in a rapprochement between religion and modernity. This, Lovrenović argues, began to take place during the later Communist years; but when a multi-party system permitted political identification along religious lines, Bosnian-Herzegovinan society reverted to a set of mutually intolerant, pre-modern ethnoreligious communities. The solution, Lovrenović cautiously proposes, lies in a truly democratic system, which will allow "the spiritual and individual dimensions of religion [to] prevail over ethno-cultural and group identification".
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Amila Buturović describes an archetypical Bosnian-Herzegovinan literary form - macaronic verse, i.e. verse which switches to and fro between languages (in this case, Bosnian and Turkish). Crucially, Buturović argues, this is a poetry of "multiplicity" rather than "national purity". At the moment, as even the Serbo-Croat language has split into the particularities of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, there seems to be little room for linguistic multiplicity. "One Saturday morning as the cottage country north of Toronto awoke to a temporary ice age, my three-year old daughter broke its frigid stillness outdoors by resorting to a polyglot description: "Mommy," she said, "çok je zima outside." Put in plain English it meant, "Mommy, it is very cold outside". Enchanted by her linguistic economy and multivocality, I found myself face to face with a set of questions raised by her spontaneous leap through three languages - English, Turkish, and Bosnian - which captured with such candor her impressions. It struck me that the difference between the two statements." (...)
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A key sub-theme of this issue is that of identity and intergroup relations within BiH. The scene is set by Ivan Lovrenović in his "Prolegomena to Forum Bosnae", which opened the journal´s very first issue. Looking at cultural identity within the Bosnian-Herzegovinan space, Lovrenović argues that it should be seen as composite and complex. This avoids the complementary perversions of subsuming it into ethno-religious allegiance (which condemns those who espouse it to a blinkered, bigoted provincialism) or seeing it as multi-culturalism (which merely puts a positive, liberal gloss on the apartheid of the nationalists). The first step to restoring a composite, non-noxious notion of identity, according to Lovrenović, is dialogue - not only between so-called ethnic groups, but also within them.
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Kurzman tackles the unspoken premise of the clash-of-civilizations theorists: that of the demonisation of Islam by the West. Kurzman echoes Mahmutćehajić in arguing that in "liberal" Islam (i.e. one that takes account of both modernity and tradition, to use Mahmutćehajić´s terms) there are strong philosophical grounds for tolerance of other religions and for social models based on co-existence rather than conflict. "Many non-Muslims have a picture of Islam as uniformly intolerant and fanatic, a picture that is rooted in centuries of hostilities and misimpressions. I argue that this picture is erroneous, and that there is a growing number of Muslims who share common concerns with Western liberalism. One of these concerns is peaceful multi-religious co-existence. I believe there are three primary Islamic approaches to the subject of peaceful multi-religious co-existence: The first approach I call the "liberal shari´a". In this approach Islamic scholars base." (...)
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