The Importance of Being Bosniak

[Jacaylbaro]

Many Bosniak political and media opinion makers are discovering that their best option involves using a traditional and, in the context of current borders, transnational ethnic movement to improve their leverage with their neighbours and the EU.

 

Ongoing debates in the Bosniak community reflect in part the failure of efforts to force civic identities on the shards of former Yugoslavia. Ethnic entrepreneurs are considering how to neutralize Serb and Croat ability so far to block Bosniak efforts to translate larger numbers into greater influence inside Bosnia’s current borders. Some Bosniaks also are considering whether to expand their work to embrace co-nationals in Serbia and Montenegro, and, perhaps, natural allies farther south.

 

The origins and authenticity of the term “Bosniak” are less important than its development into a marker of a community co-equal to the ethnic labels of its adversaries. The meanings of “Bosniak” in late Ottoman times and during the very short period in which Western occupiers tried – and failed – to give the word a civic flavor (something like “American”) matter now only as historical artifacts. Bosniak political and media opinion makers are fashioning a classically ethnic communal identity that encompasses more than the idea that Muslim Slavs are the titular people of Bosnia. Bosniaks are doing something like what Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes did when Yugoslav dissolution evolved into competitive communal reconstruction.

 

Bosniaks have five problems. First, as a staatsvolk, they only are a plurality or a bare majority, and therefore lack the overwhelming demographic/ethnic dominance that still marks national construction in the more successful European states. (Devolution in Spain and the UK and persistence of ethnic issues in Romania indicate the “success” of these states still is in question – note the current inter-communal squabble over Bucharest’s effort to redraw the administrative line in Transylvania).

 

 

FULL STORY: http://www.transconflict.com/2011/09/the-importance-of-being-bosniak-149/#.TnoUNXWdkos.facebook