Some notes about Bosnia and "peopleShood"

I am writing some notes about "peoplehood", a term I have started seeing and hearing more often since I joined our network. So, I want to start in the following way:

"My name is Vladan, and I am a hyper-radical-individualist who, among other things, thinks that regulated cocaine consumption should be legalized, humans should have a right to become cyborgs, and global free migration is possible. I grew up in a war and post-war social environment in Bosnia filled with ethnoreligious nationalism, sectarianism, Christianism, Islamism, and socially conservative values. Compared to most people born in my area, I was lucky enough to have parents who listened to Frank Zappa and Bob Marley and read Albert Camus and Grimm Brothers. I never really had any fascination for folklore, folk music, or traditional cultures, which I regarded as outdated, bearing, and primitive, except when reading anthropological books about Navajos or Maoris. I like voluntary communities and identifications as long as they are based on universalist ideas and reject collectivism. Because of my bad experiences in Bosnia, I used to ignore and reject my own history as during my teens instead of trying to understand it deeper". 

When it comes to Sweden, to make a long story short, for the last 30-40 years, peoplehood has been influenced by liberal, progressive, and social-democratic ideas, making Sweden one of the most individualistic societies worldwide. One reason for the increased support for the far-right is that more Swedes are seeing peoplehood in civic terms as through democratic values, laws, and institutions instead of food, music, or traditions. 

Regarding Bosnia, things are much more complicated, sensitive, and destructive. One of the reasons is that historically in Bosnia, there was never any peoplehood but "peopleshood" (plural)

We who are in and from Bosnia sometimes say that in Bosnia (and Herzegovina, the southern part of the country) - everything is divided by 3. This is because of the ethno-identity-political situation where the constitution of Bosnia is that the (semi)nation is a community of constitutive peoples and others. This constitutional arrangement is also known as "Dejton," which was called after the Dayton in Ohio, USA, where the peace agreement was signed in 1995, finishing the war in Bosnia. 

According to the Bosnian constitution, I am not counted as a constitutive because I am from a family with Yugoslav-Bosnian identification and thereby being sorted into "Others". But "Dejton" is nothing new in the history of Bosnia because : 
 
- During the Ottoman Empire, Bosnia was administratively divided into Christians, Muslims and Jews 

- During the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Bosnian counseling parliament in Sarajevo had Orotodox (later Serbs,) Catholic (later Croats), Muslim (later Bosniacs), and other representatives 

- During the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a similar policy existed 

- During socialist Yugoslavia, while Yugoslavia was organized as a federation of nationalities and national minorities, Bosnia was organized as a republic of Serbs, Croats, Muslims (in special cases where religion was equalized to nationality), and others. 

Based on my views, Bosnia has historically been a country of collectivism, religiosity, and herd mentality, while individualism, secularism, and universalism have been less popular and exist. 
However, when it comes to peoplehoods, there is another history. Ideas of Yugoslav nationalism in the 19th century were similar to, for example, ideas of British nationalism of uniting Englishmen, Scots, Welshmen, and others, and similar to Scandinavinism of uniting Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians into a single nation. While the idea of Scandivnaia as a nation failed for different reasons, Yugoslavia was more successful. Yugoslavia is often compared to the Soviet Union. Still, the Soviet Union was much more of a top-down creation while Yugoslavia was more bottom-up because the name of the country was "Southslavia" based on the idea that people could be Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, others, and Yugoslavs at the same time. 

Regarding Bosnia, one "landmark" in history was the ZAVNOBiH meeting in November 1943. ZAVNOBiH was the Country Anti-Fascist Council for the People's Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, organized by the Yugoslav Community Party and partisan movement which, among other things, proclaimed that Bosnia would be a socialist republic in Yugoslavia and a country for Serbs, Croats, Muslims, and others. 

Most of the participants at the conference were Serbs who believed in a common life with other ethnic communities, which is a big difference to how most of the Serbs behaved during the 1990s when they decided to "separate" from the others. In my own family history, Yugoslav Serbs were killed by "Big Serbs" because they favored ideas of co-existence and unity with others and rejected ideas of Serbs being superior or more important than others. The WWII in Bosnia was a war not between ethnic communities but between different members of ethnic communities who were divided through political ideas regarding unity with a group VS unity for integrating several groups. 

After reading more about Lene Rachel Andersen reasoning regarding "circles of belonging," as in her book Libertism, I started thinking about one of the writers I used to read when in the early 2010s. Ivan Lovrenovic is an intellectual, writer, and historian who has written much about Bosnia and Herzegovina as a cultural area. One of the things that blew my mind was his explanation regarding circles. He wrote about how relations and everyday life in Bosnia were shaped by merging and interconnected ethnic community circles. In some parts of the country, it was more about Serbs-Croats, in other parts Serbs-Muslims, in third parts Serbs-Muslims-Others. Another point is that the differences between people were individual, regarding how they were able or unable, willing or unwilling to live and relate to each other.
 
Loverenovic was born in Croatia and moved to Bosnia as a child, and much of his early work was about Bosnian Catholics and Croats. During the war, he mainly stayed in the besieged city of Sarajevo, supported the idea of Bosnia as a civic country and society for all inhabitants, and protested against both the governments of Serbia and Croatia for their military and political aggression against Bosnia. In several ways, Lovrenovic is an example of how a person who has a more individualistic, civic, and universalist approach to identification can have a plurality of identities and circles of belonging, thereby rejecting different nationalist, sectarian, and tribalist ideas and behaviors. 

Therefore, one of my conclusions regarding peoplehood is that, for different reasons, it is impossible to create a sense of peoplehood in Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, historically, it is possible to create at least a larger sense of peopleShood, where instead of seeing ethnic communities or nationalities as the most important unit, a reimagined and multi-circle community can be created. Since similar organizations were possible during imperialism and communism, achieving multi-circular belonging during Europeanism and wider cosmopolitanism is also possible. 

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