It took at least a decade after the end of the Bosnian War for scholars and researchers to begin to look at the situation of diaspora Bosnians in the United States. While such communities in St. Louis, Chicago, and New York City, among others, had already existed before the war, the great influx of refugees escaping the fighting and the postwar disorder greatly increased the populations there and, therefore, the push to study the challenges and tribulations of Bosnians living in the US. Several books about this topic have appeared within the last five years, mostly focusing on the Bosnian Muslims living in the US. One of the most recent books is the title reviewed here.
Mirsad Kriještorac explores the hypothesis that a group of people that has experienced a significant alteration in its societal conditions may emerge from that experience with a strikingly new self-identification. However, that identity, he asserts, will emerge only after the group, primarily through the group's elites, succeeds in articulating a nationalist perspective, not the other way around. In setting up this chicken or egg problem, the author's position is expressed by his book's title, First Nationalism Then Identity.
In order to clarify the relationship between nationalism and identity, the author focuses on the attitudes of members of the Bosnian Muslim diaspora in three large American cities and several smaller enclaves, each of which houses a significant, or at least noticeable, number of Bosnian Muslim expatriates: New York City; St. Louis; Chicago; Atlanta; Detroit; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Erie, Pennsylvania; Elmwood, New Jersey; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Waterloo, Iowa. These sites were chosen because the Bosnian Muslim populations there maintained their own visible and active religious, cultural, and social centers in various manifestations, although almost three-fourths of the data for the study came from the first-mentioned three most populous cities.
The polling questions used for the study were meant to tease out whether nationalism could be considered the driving instrument for the acquisition of a new self-identity, what the author refers to throughout the study as a “new salient identity.” Furthermore, did the trauma of the Bosnian War and the large-scale movement of Bosnian Muslims from their homeland animate, or perhaps simply accelerate, a process of national feeling among the Bosnian Muslim elites. And, did the elites influence their co-nationals, which then could (or did) produce a new self-identification among this population? The study also addressed other questions, such as the components of this national identification and whether such variables as age, gender, education, economic interaction with Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), and other factors might affect the type or strength of nationalist feeling and thus create a new self-identification.
Kriještorac seeks to illuminate the content of nationalism as developed outside of the nation-state that is the referent for the diaspora group. His choice of the Bosnian Muslims as his case study is quite interesting in that, while BiH had a brief medieval independent existence, until the late twentieth century it had been forced to be part of a variety of larger entities. While Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats could, conceivably, have had loyalties to Serbia and Croatia, respectively, in their various historical forms, the Bosnian Muslims had no other ethnoreligious/state modality to entice their loyalty, except secular, communist Yugoslavia. Therefore, the author was dealing with a group of people whose identification with BiH was not permitted to blossom fully until the collapse of Yugoslavia and the final guns of the Bosnian War were silenced. Most Bosnian Muslims remaining within BiH probably have a very strong attachment to the state that they fought for or returned to after the war, a question outside the purview of this inquiry. But what about those who have created a life outside of that country? For example, does the name Bosniak, adopted by many Bosnian Muslims to identify their national status, resonate with the diaspora? This study has sought to answer the question of the strength and salience of the diaspora population's attachment to BiH and whether a new identity based on a national feeling is emerging. This investigation is worth examining for those who question the future of a stable BiH, based on a loyal citizenry and supportive diaspora. Of course, next, it would be worthwhile (even imperative) to ferret out the strength of attachment to BiH of its other constituent peoples (and “Others”?), both at home and in the diaspora, even though their identification with BiH might be of a different type or strength than that of the Bosnian Muslims due to historical and socio-religious factors.
