1943-2018: Seventy-five Years of ZAVNOBiH (The Anti- Fascist People’s Liberation Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Unlearned Lessons
1943-2018: Seventy-five Years of ZAVNOBiH (The Anti- Fascist People’s Liberation Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Unlearned Lessons

Summary/Abstract: This text intends to offer a rather brief review of the sources of modern Bosnian statehood that is celebrated, at least in one third of this country as Statehood Day – November 25. This Day refers actually to the First session of ZAVNOBiH (Session of Anti-Fascist People’s Liberation Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina) that was held in Mrkonjic Grad on free territory on November 25, 1943. This Session is perceived as the founding revolutionary event of modern Bosnian polity, and at the same time it was, as I will argue, the final phase in realization of Leftist concept of a plural, multiethnic Republic contrary to a common pattern of monoethnically homogenized one-nation-state. Furthermore, this concept is genuine and significantly different from typical communist but also from liberal federalist solutions. In fact, Communist federalist solutions for the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia failed with the collapse of communism, exactly because they strictly followed the structural model of one-nation-one-state. The Yugoslav, the Soviet and the Czechoslovak republics of their respective federations were indeed molded on one-ethnic-nation state model. Had Bosnia been internally federalized in 1940s, had Bosnia been reconstituted as some kind of union of its one-ethnic-nation-regions or entities, it would have had collapsed overnight just as communist federations did, as the framework changed from socialism to capitalism. The same would have happened had Bosnia, as a whole, been constituted as one-nation-state.

• Details
• Contents