Nebojša Jovanović: Anti-Fascism between Two Deaths: Bosnian Intellectual Elite and its Civic-Liberal Revisionism

From the perspective of the majority of benevolent Western observers, the main antagonism that characterizes post-socialist Bosnia and Herzegovina is that between the antidemocratic ethno-nationalists and their democratic civic critics. The arena of historical science and its institutions is one of the most picturesque domains wherein this antagonism can easily be detected: ethno-nationalist historians, prone to misuse the past events in order to recreate the history of their individual ethnic groups (within a wider nationalist project of the reinvention of ethnic tradition), are confronted by the "civic" historians who insist that history must not be ideologically "contaminated", but should be seen as an unibased sphere of objective knowledge.

However, I would like to question this apparent confrontation in order to offer a different perspective from which this opposition is revealed as false, and those "civic" intellectuals are shown to be no less problematic than their proverbial ethno-nationalist villains. On a closer look, with their insistence on the meta-ideological position of (historical, theoretical, critical...) knowledge, they position themselves to appear as if they would hold absolute truths on Bosnian society and its history. Their main strategy comprises of the levelling of all ideological positions (as "the barbarism of our Left and Right", to quote one of them), which boils down to an equation whereby Yugoslav socialism equals post-Yugoslav nationalism or, in an even starker intepretation, the former is perceived as the essential cause of the latter. One of the effects of this strategy is the erasing of the political and the fetishizing of culture, resulting in a type of social amnesia. This replaces historical perspectives of the leftist tradition of the international solidarity and antifascist struggle with a myriad of isolated imaginaries belonging to different and incommensurable cultural (i.e. ethnic and religious) groups. In this paper, I will offer an analysis of several examples of this strategy carried out by the Bosnian (self-proclaimed) "intellectual elite", which points to the node of the prohibition of leftist politics, antifascist revisionism and civic-liberal conformism.

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