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Afterword
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Afterword Bosnia’s survival in the twentieth century vacillated between what appeared to be transient defeats and periods of consolidation. Its nature is determined by these extremes. Apparent defeats are accompanied by the repetition of killing and destruction, and reconsolidation by the rise and manifestation of the elements that humankind projects as its desired image. Thus, Bosnia becomes an issue of unity in diversity, a unity that has persisted through more than one thousand years of its history, articulated in one and the same language, and of denial to which the most appalling forms of violence bear witness. It has thus grown to be the paradigm of modern discourse about tradition and, as a result , a warning to the whole world. Though examination of this issue directly or indirectly presupposes a knowledge of its essence, the nature of the decisions derived from this knowledge, the impediments to them and the failure to act upon them, bear witness to its inadequacy. The dominant approaches and interpretations of the Bosnian conundrum do not provide a satisfactory answer. The principal concern of individuals within Bosnia itself and abroad, and of their institutional and organizational discourse embodying their views on the tensions in Bosnia, is the possibility of creating among the participants of the country’s diversity a level of tolerance sufficient to achieve the necessary political unity of a complex society. But despite its ideological clarity, this enterprise seems barely if at all feasible: as the feeling and knowledge of the distinctiveness of existing political identities grows stronger, tolerance grows weaker. The selfhood of individuals and ethnic identities are increasingly barricading themselves within their distinctiveness and separation from the Other. The creation of tolerance on the basis of indifference or political realism becomes a Sisyphean task. The same applies to the belief that tolerance would be possible on the basis of the liberal idea of the autonomous self. Principled possibilities of a “transcendent” unity of religions remain outside the arena provided by the liberal image of the world. 231 The prevailing modes of addressing and interpreting Bosnia that have been disseminated throughout the world comprise a body of what is perceived as knowledge of the country, but which is in fact close to being ignorance, of a kind that is incapable of recognizing itself for what it is through a reappraisal of its own premises. The logical conclusion of the interpretation proffered both to the world at large and to the people of Bosnia is that the prevalent view of identity in the nation-state, as embodied in the ideologies of the neighboring countries, should be applied to Bosnia as well: in this view, the tensions in Bosnia result from the failure to achieve the only valid matrix for “settling accounts between differences” and sharing the same space and time. This call presupposes proximity to the European sphere, because the ruling national ideologies of Serbdom and Croathood at the turn of the millennium, are inseparable in their skeletal aspects from Western thought. In the process, there are frequent attempts to portray the Bosnian unity of different planes of identity as a non-European deformity. The accepted view of Bosnia, ensconced in habits of mind dominated by the categories of European identities linked to the enlightenment, rationalism , industrialism and revolutions fails, however, to take into account an important aspect of the relationship between the modern and traditional definition of the self. In the towns and villages of Bosnia, Orthodox Christians , Catholics, and Muslims were able to live together for centuries without feeling or imagining that they were threatened by the fact that their differences coexisted in one and the same territory. The basic features of the self, both individual and collective (origin, ethno-genesis, history, etc.), of each of those different identities had its “foothold” in the total, one and the same otherness that transcends both inherited and adopted differences. The transcendent unity of religions was confirmed through intuitive intellectuality, that direct feeling for which discursive thought had neither appreciation nor a sufficient compass. When this identity, raised to the point where it outweighed transcendent otherness, became an ideology articulated in mainly rational terms, it veered towards paganism, in which origin, ideology, and so forth, became idols that can survive only through violence. The modern experience of the West, in which the original Christian concept of the self as the crucial arena of salvation, beyond “prophets and laws,” is transformed into the drama of individual freedom in which every I is the discriminating and...