Nationalism as a structural obstacle to democratization of Bosnia and Herzegovina society

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the intensity and dispersion of nationalism among young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina at two time points - in the period of late socialism (1989) and in the period of consolidated post-socialist transformation (2012). In addition, our intention is to investigate the determinants of nationalism in the socialist and post-socialist period and compare them to determine whether there are different mechanisms of generating nationalism in two different systems of social reproduction, or they are in fact active long-term factors lasting longer than various social systems. The starting premise is that nationalism was not widespread in the period of socialism, and that its expansion and deep rooting started in the Post-Daytonian Bosnia and Herzegovina society. This creates a structural obstacle to the transition from formal to higher form of democracy (the so-called effective democracy). In the empirical part of the research, we rely on instruments for measuring nationalism that have been used on several occasions in empirical research in Serbia and Croatia. The data we use was collected in the survey called ?Social Structure and Quality of Life?, conducted in 1989 in all the republics of Yugoslavia, and the ?Value Orientation and Attitude Towards Social Changes?, conducted in 2012 in the Doboj region of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Data in these two surveys is completely comparable.