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11 Changing the State of Knowledge Introduction The future of Bosnia and Herzegovina is being defined by the currents of European unification. It has no option but to take part in this process, whether through force majeure or its own free will. Fighting against the currents that are irresistibly linking Europe into a single economic, monetary, political, and cultural community will only increase the need for solutions to be imposed from outside, with a concomitent warping of people’s minds and behavior. This will merely prolong the unnatural condition caused first by ethno-national utopian totalitarianism and then by Communism, which so distorted politics, culture, and the economy that people were reduced almost entirely to the self-centered need to rationalize their grasping pursuit of material goods and their efforts to dominate others. This process reached its logical climax in the war against Bosnia and Herzegovina. If politics, economy, and culture are to evolve from their current status, moulded by totalitarian ideologies and the habits they generate, into a framework that would enable humankind to distinguish the common weal from sheer self-interest, the rights of the individual from naked greed, they need a blueprint to guide them; a blueprint moreover that would allow the inclusion of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the unstoppable currents of harmonization within Europe and the wider world to change from an externally imposed process into a movement based on free will, one in which the whole of human nature might find expression. This is not a simple change of direction, and it calls for capacities possessed by no recognizable force on Bosnia’s contemporary political stage. This is because the issue of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s future requires two crucial factors to be taken into consideration. The first is liberalism as a key determinant of the contemporary understanding of the world. The second is tradition , the nexus where individuals and the totality of their world find their 189 ultimate meaning. These two factors give rise to two languages, which tend to be mutually incomprehensible. In seeking an overall understanding of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s future, an appropriate way of finding out how the country reflects this duality would be to examine its social system in its entirety. But the very concept of “social system” is obfuscated or contested nowadays. So many prejudices and misinterpretations are bound up with the term that it is viewed by many with hostility , and avoided by others; it is, however, an issue that must be confronted head-on if we are to understand and work towards the future. The models currently prevalent embrace neither the individuality nor the universality of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian experience—an experience that remains largely misunderstood, even by its own people, when studied exclusively from one viewpoint, be it liberal or traditional. The Illusion of Multiculturalism As the Bosnian question is generally addressed by reducing it to its military, humanitarian, political, and economic aspects, it is worth looking to culture for a way out of the current impasse, which prevents us from moving towards a sustainable and harmonious social system. Bosnia is often cited as an example of “multiculturalism,” but no other approach to the Bosnian enigma arouses as many prejudiced and uninformed responses. It is the key to the ideological extremes that have robbed Bosnian society of both its reality and its potential. If culture may be defined as a set of meanings expressed through ideas and symbols, the central intellectual challenge in examining the blinkered assumptions underlying “Bosnian multiculturalism” is to disentangle the variety of meanings, ideas, and symbols implied by the “cultures” in the Bosnian space. From this understanding of “complexity” to a demand for the “territorialization ” of ethnic identities and their cultural correlates there is but one step: the inevitable construction of political identities, for which history, culture , and ethnicity are only masks, and violence against the Other the only way to impose their authority and win the loyalty of their subjects. The examination of this matrix is the central challenge and main task of any intellectual effort. This, though, is not yet being done in Bosnia itself,1 which hinders the possibility of systematic collaboration among those forces in the world order that have not been able to remain indifferent to the slaughter, destruction, and mistrust within Bosnia. Since every social system operates according to a wide variety of norms and values, any serious examination of these norms and values will be a long, slow process of validation and elimination, with...

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