Edin Hajdarpasic. Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914

It seems the sad fate of the Balkans to be associated so strongly with nationalism. Ethnicity, nations, and nationalism have exercised an enduring gravitational pull upon the region’s historiography, giving its corpus a distorted profile. In this respect, Edin Hajdarpasic’s Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914 might go unremarked as yet another book in an overworked field. Rather than treating the nation as a fact (either stable or evolving) in Balkan history, however, Hajdarpasic provides a novel history of the idea of the nation, looking closely at the evolution of intellectuals’ romanticized image of the People, and the laborious transferal of the idea and image from the handful of activists to the masses. The result is a remarkably refreshing study that conveys clearly just how difficult it was for activists and governments not only to implant national consciousness in people largely indifferent to the idea, but, once they had done so, to guide its growth along lines that they could control.

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