ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the responses of the inhabitants of Bosnia-Herzegovina to questions about their ethnic and state (civic) belonging in terms of the groups and institutions with which they identify. It is based on the results of the 2011 survey of 1,518 respondents in Bosnia-Herzegovina, conducted by the IPSOS Strategic Marketing agency and funded by the Norwegian Research Council. The main question was: Can we speak about Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) as a state with equal representation for all its citizens – or do they identify primarily on an ethnic basis, seeing Bosnia-Herzegovina as a state that serves and represents some ethnicities more than others? These issues are particularly relevant since, nearly two decades after the signing of the Dayton Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and divided the country into two ‘entities’ (the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the Serb Republic), the political and social opportunities and hierarchies in the country remain determined by ethnic markers. Nationalist parties still command the largest following, and there is a lack of institutions that can transcend ethnic divides. According to many commentators (see Chandler 1999; Bieber 2006a, 2006b; Pickering 2007), the Dayton Accords have served to cement the ethnonationalist divisions drawn through the war violence: post-1995 BiH is not a society organized according to the wishes of its population, since vast numbers were forced to leave their homes and resettle in territories that were ethnically ‘cleansed’ and homogenized during and after the war. Other commentators (Oberschall 2000; Lieberman 2006) stress that the agendas of Bosnian warring elites and the Dayton Accords obfuscated the striking discrepancy between the trans-ethnic culture that had permeated everyday life in socialist-era Bosnia-Herzegovina and the brutality of ethnic ‘cleansing’ and post-war ethnic homogenization. These views are further substantiated by numerous surveys conducted in Yugoslavia between the late 1960s and 1991, which showed that members of Bosnian ethnicities had the lowest indicators of ethnic distancing in Yugoslavia and the fastest-growing (apart from the province of Vojvodina) population of ethnic Yugoslavs (Pantić 1967; Rot and Havelka 1973; Bačević 1990; Bačević et al. 1991).
