In his essay “Between Concealed Hatred and Open Quarrelling,” Nenad Kecmanović, a Bosnian Serb political scientist and former member of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s wartime collective presidency, offers a seductively simple account of history. According to this narrative, the Serbs created Yugoslavia twice and were betrayed on both occasions. Within the common state, and especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina, they were supposedly compelled to forget their own victims. Now, finally freed from such illusions, they have no choice but to rally around the All-Serb Assembly, a political and symbolic gathering organised under the auspices of Aleksandar Vučić, the president of Serbia, and the leadership of Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina.
History is thus transformed into a closed evidentiary procedure: everything that has happened is treated as proof that coexistence was never possible, while every new attempt at cooperation is presented merely as preparation for the next betrayal. When neighbours are not quarrelling, this allegedly means that they are simply concealing their hatred. When they do quarrel, they are at last being honest. Hatred, in other words, emerges as the only sincere human emotion, particularly when dignified with the adjective “centuries-old.”
A National Strategy in High Resolution
The problem is that the results of Serbian national policy during the dissolution of Yugoslavia hardly recommend the very alternative that Kecmanović presents as the mature conclusion of historical experience. The policy of territorial unification, which was largely propagandistic and campaign-driven rather than genuinely operational or strategically coherent, did not ultimately produce a state uniting all Serbs. Instead, it ended in wars, international sanctions, demographic devastation, the disappearance of Serbian communities from large parts of Croatia, the permanently insecure position of Republika Srpska within Bosnia and Herzegovina’s post-Dayton system of international supervision, and Kosovo’s de facto removal from Serbia’s constitutional order.
This catastrophe was not, of course, produced by Serbs alone. Croatian, Slovenian, Albanian and Muslim, later Bosniak, nationalisms had their own programmes, institutions and responsibilities. At the same time, the international community’s decision to recognise the internal republican borders established within socialist Yugoslavia as the borders of the newly independent states decisively shaped the outcome of the country’s dissolution. These borders were commonly described as “AVNOJ borders,” after the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia, the wartime communist-led body that laid the constitutional foundations of post-1945 federal Yugoslavia.
But that is precisely why it is unreasonable to treat the failure of one national project by ceremonially relaunching it in digital form, only this time with even more flags and Orthodox bishops, and with artificial intelligence enlisted to transform a catastrophic historical defeat into a successful national strategy rendered in high resolution.
As evidence of the supposedly natural impossibility of a functioning Bosnian and Herzegovinian society, Kecmanović points to the 1990 elections, the country’s first multiparty elections after the collapse of communist one-party rule. Around eighty per cent of voters, he notes, supported the national parties representing Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Muslims, now generally known as Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats, parties which “soon became three armed national movements.”
The first part of this statement offers a roughly accurate description of the election results. The second retrospectively assigns those results a meaning they did not possess at the time. Voters were not handed ballots on which they could choose the destruction of cities, concentration camps, the expulsion of their neighbours or the ruin of the companies in which they had worked for decades. The national parties presented themselves as defenders of collective interests, but they also promised democracy, prosperity, equality and peaceful coexistence.
Their positions on the future of Yugoslavia were not identical, but none of them asked the electorate for a mandate to carry out what subsequently occurred. The national parties did turn ethnic affiliation into the principal basis of political organisation. That did not mean, however, that their voters were already three armies that had merely arrived at the polling stations without uniforms.
The parties became armed movements through subsequent political decisions, failed negotiations, media mobilisation, fear and reciprocal rearmament. This is the crucial distinction. If people voted for war because of some Cain-like genetic predisposition to fratricide, then no identifiable person or institution bears responsibility for the descent into barbarism. The blame can simply be assigned to the unprovable abstraction of “centuries-old hatred.”
But if political elites transformed mandates entrusted to them in peacetime into mandates for war, then responsibility can be established. And if responsibility exists, so too does the possibility that different political choices could have been made.
None of this, however, leads to the opposite myth: that Yugoslavia was a harmonious utopia until, one morning, Serbian nationalism crashed through the ceiling of the Federal Executive Council, the Yugoslav federal government, crushed the official ideal of “brotherhood and unity,” and then entered into the minutes that the country had collapsed because of some historical intolerance towards the Serbs.
Dejan Jović, a Croatian political scientist and one of the leading scholars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, interprets the collapse primarily as a crisis of the state itself. Under the ideological influence of Edvard Kardelj, Tito’s principal theorist of socialist self-management and federalism, the state was expected gradually to “wither away” in favour of a society governed through workers’ self-management and decentralised institutions.
The 1974 Yugoslav Constitution granted the six republics and the two autonomous provinces broad powers, including extensive opportunities to block decision-making at the federal level. The coherence of the system was maintained less by effective constitutional mechanisms than by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and the personal authority of Josip Broz Tito, the country’s president and dominant political figure from the end of the Second World War until his death in 1980.
Once Tito, the unified ruling party and any shared vision of the future had disappeared, what remained was a federation whose constituent parts were institutionally stronger than the whole, while its mechanisms for resolving political conflicts were almost unusable. Peter Radan, a legal scholar who has written extensively on the constitutional and territorial dimensions of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, has shown how the international recognition of the existing republican boundaries as the borders of the new states merely transferred the national question into several smaller and more ethnically homogeneous political frameworks.
Yugoslavia, therefore, was not destroyed by a single people or a single nationalism. Nor was it brought down by the mysterious forces of “centuries-old hatred.” It disintegrated through the convergence of an institutionally weakened state, a severe economic crisis, incompatible constitutional visions, nationalist elites largely drawn from the former communist bureaucracy, and the quasi-colonial ambitions of external powers.
Does Socialism’s Failure Imply “Centuries-Old Hatred”?
Socialism did, admittedly, fail disastrously in its attempt to create genuine “brotherhood and unity,” the official Yugoslav ideal of solidarity among the country’s nations and nationalities. Yet the claim that it merely concealed the “true,” hate-filled nature of Yugoslavia’s peoples is even more disastrously scandalous. If Kecmanović argues that a common state could not be built with the descendants of Croatian and Bosnian Muslim members of the Ustaša movement, he is effectively transferring guilt from the courtroom to the family tree. The Ustaša were a Croatian fascist and ultranationalist movement that ruled the so-called Independent State of Croatia, an Axis-sponsored puppet state established in 1941 and encompassing most of present-day Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its regime carried out systematic mass persecution and murder of Serbs, Jews and Roma, as well as of anti-fascist Croats, Muslims and other political opponents. Some Bosnian Muslims joined or served the Ustaša state, whose ideology formally portrayed them as part of the Croatian nation.
The post-war Yugoslav authorities dismantled the Ustaša regime, prosecuted many of its officials and military personnel, and severely punished numerous perpetrators of crimes against Serbs and other victims. To claim, nevertheless, that coexistence was impossible with their descendants is to replace individual criminal responsibility with inherited collective guilt, turning the crimes of particular people and institutions into a hereditary characteristic attributed to entire nations.
Applied consistently, such logic would make coexistence impossible with the descendants of every defeated military formation, collaborator or war criminal. In the Balkans, no one would then be capable of living with anyone else, while most people would probably be unable to live even with members of their own extended families.
At the same time, the Yugoslav system created a culture of shared life which, in many of its forms, has survived to the present day, despite the wars and the politics of nationalist incitement. Kecmanović’s claim that the 1990 elections merely revealed what decades of “compulsory brotherhood and unity” had concealed ignores the manner in which the system itself helped produce the eventual nationalist victors.
Draža Marković, a senior Serbian and Yugoslav communist official and an influential political memoirist, was quite explicit on this point. The League of Communists of Yugoslavia had already fragmented into almost independent republican organisations. Its republican leaderships themselves encouraged national homogenisation, calculating that they could preserve power in the emerging multiparty order by merging the defence of “socialism under threat” with the defence of “their own endangered nation.” That new political order was already becoming visible on the horizon as the Cold War drew to a close.
Nationalism did not, therefore, simply erupt “naturally,” after having been clumsily swept beneath the communist carpet, its face red with rage after fifty years of waiting. The republican elites organised it, equipped it institutionally and presented it as the fastest means of transferring the old ruling structures, or at least the old political and administrative machinery, into the new order.
Voters, therefore, were not choosing between a common state and war. They were making their choices within a political arena that had already been divided along republican and national lines. At the same time, Yugoslavia’s economic, family and cultural ties were real. Their subsequent destruction does not prove that they had never existed, just as blowing up a bridge does not prove that the river had never possessed another bank. It proves only that those laying the explosives had taken control of both approaches in time.
The Načertanije, the SANU Memorandum…
None of this, however, makes the opposite, Sarajevo-centred approach acceptable: the attempt to construct the unity of Bosnia and Herzegovina through majoritarian outvoting and by treating distinct Serbian or Croatian national identities as concealed attacks upon the state.
As early as the 1970s, Rodoljub Čolaković, a Bosnian Serb communist revolutionary, prominent Yugoslav Partisan and senior post-war official in Bosnia and Herzegovina, warned against the emergence of what he called “neo-Kállayism.” The term referred to Benjamin Kállay, the Austro-Hungarian administrator of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1882 to 1903, who attempted to promote a distinct, overarching Bosnian political identity as a means of weakening Serbian and Croatian national movements in the occupied province. By “neo-Kállayism,” Čolaković meant the renewed effort to construct a separate Bosnian and Herzegovinian culture by suppressing or marginalising the Serbian and Croatian national heritage within the country.
He explicitly rejected the notion that the cultural work of Serbs and Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina did not also belong to Serbian and Croatian culture respectively. He likewise opposed attempts to portray their cultural and intellectual connections with Belgrade and Zagreb as evidence of suspicious external loyalties. A shared society, he argued, required mutual respect for each community’s cultural inheritance, not the administrative melting of those inheritances into an officially manufactured “Bosnian culture.”
Kecmanović is right to criticise the surviving traces of this conception. At the same time, however, he performs its most important task on its behalf. He presents Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks as fully formed and almost naturally irreconcilable political communities, reducing any shared Bosnian and Herzegovinian identity to a temporary delusion imposed by “compulsory brotherhood and unity.”
The average Bosniak neo-Kállayist claims that a Serb can belong to Bosnia and Herzegovina only by negating what he is. Kecmanović replies that a Serb who does not suppress what he is cannot genuinely belong to Bosnia and Herzegovina at all. The two sworn opponents thus arrive at precisely the same conclusion.
In a similar manner, the regime of Milo Đukanović, Montenegro’s dominant political leader for three decades, attempted to construct modern Montenegrin identity through an escalating conflict with Serbian national identity, the Serbian language, the Serbian Orthodox Church and a substantial part of Montenegro’s own population. Yet the failures of such policies do not demonstrate that Bosnia and Herzegovina or Montenegro are inherently meaningless states.
The only conclusion that follows is that a shared society can rest neither on demanding that people renounce who they are nor on persuading them that their very identity makes coexistence with others permanently impossible.
At the same time, Kecmanović contributes to the opposing nationalist myth when he claims that Aleksandar Vučić, Milorad Dodik and Patriarch Porfirije, respectively the political leaders of Serbia and Republika Srpska and the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, used the Declaration of the All-Serb Assembly to “establish continuity with Ilija Garašanin and Dobrica Ćosić,” and thus with the Načertanije and the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, commonly known as the SANU Memorandum.
These three documents are not complementary parts of a single political programme. The Načertanije was a foreign-policy blueprint drafted in 1844 for the autonomous Principality of Serbia, at a time when the Balkans were still dominated by the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. It is associated with Ilija Garašanin, one of the leading Serbian statesmen of the nineteenth century. The SANU Memorandum, leaked to the press in 1986, was an unfinished academic draft written by a group of members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Although it became notorious as an alleged ideological blueprint for later Serbian nationalism, its authors explicitly presented their arguments within the constitutional framework inherited from AVNOJ, the communist-led wartime council that laid the foundations of federal Yugoslavia. Dobrica Ćosić, an influential Serbian novelist, political thinker and later the first president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, is frequently linked in public debate with the broader intellectual climate surrounding the document, although he was not its author.
The Declaration of the All-Serb Assembly, by contrast, is a contemporary political statement adopted by the present authorities of Serbia and Republika Srpska within the framework of the modern international order. The three texts share neither a single author nor a common institution, genre, legal status or political objective.
The invention of such continuity, however, is useful to everyone involved. The governments of Vučić and Dodik acquire a historical genealogy, false gilding perhaps, but gilding nonetheless. Meanwhile, Sarajevo’s more banal neo-Kállayists acquire a Serbian witness for their claim that there has existed a continuous, two-century-long Serbian programme of conquest. The term “neo-Kállayist” refers here to those who, following the logic associated with the Austro-Hungarian administrator Benjamin Kállay, attempt to construct a unified Bosnian identity by treating distinct Serbian and Croatian national traditions as politically suspect or inherently hostile to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Kecmanović first tells such people that they know nothing about the Načertanije, and then solemnly signs his name beneath precisely the conclusion they had reached in complete ignorance. In practice, he endorses the amateurish and inflammatory claim made by Abdulah Sidran, the celebrated Bosnian poet and screenwriter, about “a single hegemonic power in the Balkans, headquartered in Belgrade, which has been working since 1804 to ensure that I cease to exist.”
Why a professor would attribute to Serbian politics precisely the invented two-hundred-year continuity assigned to it by its most fervent opponents is a question only he can answer. What is certain is that he does not dismantle the neo-Kállayist construction. Instead, he ceremonially presents it with the very evidence it has never been able to find for itself, for the simple reason that it does not exist.
It is as though, in some theatre of the absurd, a man first declared that he was not an elephant at all, only to glue a trunk to his face and demand that everyone recognise him as one.
Every Serb in His Own State
The genuine alternative to this invented two-hundred-year continuity is therefore not “all Serbs in a single state,” but rather: every Serb in his own state. If the politics of the All-Serb Assembly continually suggests to Serbia’s neighbours that Serbs, wherever they may live, belong to a single political entity headquartered in Belgrade, it merely feeds the suspicion that their citizenship is provisional and that their loyalty to the states in which they live is purely tactical.
A Serb in Bosnia and Herzegovina must instead be a full and equal political co-owner of Bosnia and Herzegovina, not a temporary resident awaiting the next set of instructions from Belgrade. A Serb in Montenegro must be an equal co-owner of Montenegro, not a guest whose national identity is tolerated only until the next change of government. This does not exclude cultural, spiritual or economic ties with Serbia. On the contrary, it liberates those ties from the burden of serving as a substitute for statehood and from the atmosphere of permanent national emergency.
Such a transformation would, of course, also require changes from the other sides. Bosniak politics must cease treating the constitutional status of Serbs as one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s three constituent peoples as a temporary concession that can gradually be emptied of any real meaning. The authorities in Podgorica, Montenegro’s capital and the customary shorthand for its central government, must more consistently free themselves from the legacy of Milo Đukanović’s long rule, during which Montenegrin identity was increasingly constructed in opposition to Serbian identity, language and the Serbian Orthodox Church. At the same time, the Montenegrin opposition must stop treating Serbian identity as an imported disorder and as evidence of disloyalty to Montenegro.
Yet Serbs themselves cannot demand recognition as constituent co-owners of these states while, following the instructions of the organisers of the All-Serb Assembly, simultaneously describing those same countries as historically meaningless, incurably hostile and fit only to be abandoned. One cannot demand half of a house while insisting that the house does not exist, especially when the so-called All-Serb Assembly is merely a paper tiger that roars ceremonially before television cameras but possesses neither historical foundations nor political power nor any credible prospect of achieving the objectives it announces so thunderously.
In this sense, Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a paradigmatic “remnant of the remnants of Yugoslavia,” is not so much inherently impossible as it is continually rendered impossible by self-fulfilling prophecies about its impossibility. This is even more clearly true of Montenegro.
If, however, the small nations of the region continue competing to see which of them can inspire greater fear among its neighbours, the outcome will be neither the “Serbian World,” the political slogan for a transborder community centred on Serbia, nor a unitary Bosnia, nor an eternal Montenegro purged of Serbs, nor any other form of nationalist fiction. It will be a landscape of empty schools, abandoned villages and depopulated towns, accompanied by ever more solemn national assemblies representing peoples whose numbers diminish between one gathering and the next.
What Serbs need, therefore, is not less national consciousness, but a politics capable of transforming that consciousness into freedom, security and equality in the places where they actually live. Everything else amounts to the accumulation of symbols while people continue to be subtracted, until both “ours” and “theirs” have disappeared altogether.
