Under Two Dinasties. An Inquiry into the Historical Roots of a Bosniak National Identity

Every nation is the strange mixture of different features: some stressed their cultural and idiomatic particularities, others their faith or their economic skills; certain nations pointed out their ethnic uniqueness, others had all these elements as the result of historical dynamics that, through diplomacy and the violence of wars, accompanied the birth of new nations. In the last few years, Europe has witnessed not only the European integration process and the sovranational construction of common institutions, but also the fragmentation of her old status quo, especially in the former Soviet Union and in the south-eastern and Balkan area, where the wars of the nineties accelerated the decline and collapse of Yugoslavia, on whose ruins new national identities rose side by side with the appearance of new countries. During these troubled years, Bosnia experienced the definitive consolidation of a national Bosniak identity. This process, which had already begun during the communist regime, was speeded up by the war and, after the Dayton agreement, by the formation of a new state with a new and fragile cultural perspective.