Nicoline van Harskamp - DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and ...

formula “one nation - one state”, the ethnic tensions between the three constitutive nations
being themselves “constitutive” and thus not leaving any possibility for any other
political articulation, an articulation of any kind of “bastardry”. 12 In some perverse way,
this kind of situation also implies resistance to normalisation and opens up the possibility
that it is precisely Bosnia-Herzegovina that could be the space in which one can
think of an alternative to the allegedly obvious and natural model of the nation state, the
object of which is the unobstructed establishment of a free market, which cancels out all
antagonisms.
Consociationalism, which appeared as a possible “pragmatic solution” in the theoretical,
popular and political considerations of the political arrangement of Bosnia-Herzegovina
is in this light not at all a simple way out, for instead of the impossible formula of nation
state it implies a model of organisation in which all sides (or the political “elite of the
ethnicities”) would have to conduct a “politics of accommodation”. These Bosnia-Herzegovina
political “elites” that would have in such a model to practice “self-restricting
accommodation” carry out, in fact, the practice of “restricted aggressiveness” 13 and stay
in power precisely because they encourage instability. In this kind of state everyone is
a victim - and all fight for the position of the biggest victim -ultimately, what they all
share is the feeling that they are all together helpless victims of geopolitics. In such a
“common feeling” the very essence of the potentiality of all together and individual as
protagonists of a true politics of the future is lost. Like in every (ethno)nationalism-saturated
surrounds, the domination of selective oblivion is entrenched through collective
self-justification, which in fact selectively does away with the past. What is happening
in Bosnia-Herzegovina after the war is not simply a return to the state of before the war,
the pre-war peace (“community of equal peoples and ethnicities”) - the first reference
for peace here is again war itself, the analysis of which can only set off the imagination
of some “new peace”, perhaps one that will join the “Christian doctrine of mercy and the
Islamic concerning compassion”. 14
Is a radical change really impossible in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is currently, as state
construction, kept together by the collusion of a pointlessly expensive bureaucracy
headed by inefficient ethno-national leadership on the one hand and the new wartransition-economically-prosperous
class in its alliance with neo-liberal colonialism on
the other? These are then those “elites” that in an ideal consociationalist model should
speak and “negotiate” under the eye of the international community and its eurocentric
vapid phrases about “multiculturalism”.
In such an environment, the “civil” political identification and its possible emancipatory
political practice is pushed completely to the side, and the very term is subject to
manipulation and contamination. This “option” outside the ethno-nationalist paradigm
seems actually in these days to be experiencing its final defeat. As Jasmina Husanović 15
informs us, in a situation in which the “civilly common” and the “civilly individual” on
the one hand is marginalised in post-Dayton Bosnia as impractical, and through such an
implicit depolitisation constituted as impossible, an authentic political gesture is that
of “shaking up” what conventional politics puts before us as impossible or impossible
for - the imperative of authentic politics is not the art of the possible but the art of the
GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN