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| 7.5 - 8.0 million | ||||||||||||||||
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Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Serbo-Croatian |
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Bosnians (Bosnian: Bosanci) are people who reside in, or come from, Bosnia and Herzegovina. By the modern state definition a Bosnian can be anyone who holds citizenship of the state. This includes, but is not limited to, members of the constituent ethnic groups of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Bosniaks, Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats. Although those who reside in the Herzegovina part of Bosnia and Herzegovina prefer to call themselves Herzegovinians in the regional sense. Ethnic minorities such as: Jews, Roma, Albanians, Montenegrins, and others may consider Bosnian to be attached to their ethnicity (e.g. Bosnian Albanians).
In addition, there is a sizable population in Bosnia and Herzegovina who believe that Bosnians are a nation holding a distinct collective cultural identity. By this usage, a Bosnian would be an individual who belonged to this culture. They assert that this collective identity is capable of diminishing or overcoming existing political and ethnic divisions.
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The earliest cultural and linguistic roots of Bosnian history can be traced back to the Migration Period of the Early Middle Ages. It was then that the Slavs from southeastern Europe, invaded the Eastern Roman Empire and settled the Balkan peninsula. There, they mixed with the indigenous paleo-Balkan peoples known collectively as the Illyrians. From the chaos of the Dark Ages, from 800 AD, the Slavic tribes coalesced into early principalities. As these expanded, they came to include other Slavic tribes and territories, and later evolved into centralized Kingdoms. The Croats to the west swore allegiance to Rome, influenced by neighboring Catholic kingdoms, while the Serbs to the east fell under Byzantine influence and embraced Orthodoxy; cementing their separate identities. In contrast, there was no prominent tribe in Bosnia, and an independent Bosnian state did not arise until much later. Prior to this, the core Bosnian lands (between the Drina and Bosna rivers) was in a near-constant state of flux between Serb and Croat rule. In the twelfth century, a Bosnian banovina arose which was characterized by an independent religious structure. It rose to become a powerful kingdom in the fourteenth century, the designation Bošnjani was used to describe the kingdom's inhabitants. It was probably a regional name derived from the river Bosna which flows through the heart of the country. Before the collapse of the Roman Empire, the river was called the Bosona by the native Illyrians, and some scholars speculate that the name Bosnia itself derives from this term.
The Bosnian kingdom grew and expanded under the Kotromanić dynasty to include Croatian and Serbian territories. As a consequence, even more Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians dwelt within its borders, along with adherents of a native Bosnian Church whose origins and nature are a subject of continued debate among scholars. Those belonging to this sect simply called themselves Krstjani ("Christians"). Many scholars have argued that these Bosnian Krstjani were Manichaean dualists related to the Bogomils of Bulgaria, while others question this theory, citing lack of historical evidence. Both Catholic and Orthodox Church authorities considered the Bosnian Church heretical, and launched vigorous proselytizing campaigns to stem its influence. As a result of these divisions, no coherent religious identity developed in medieval Bosnia as it had in Croatia and Serbia.
As the centuries passed, the Bosnian kingdom slowly began to decline. It had become fractured by increased political and religious disunity. By then, the Ottoman Turks had already gained a foothold in the Balkans; first defeating the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo and expanding westward, the Turks eventually conquered all of Bosnia and portions of neighboring Croatia. Territory that partly belonged to the medieval Croatian Kingdom and partly to the Bosnian Kingdom had remained under Ottoman rule for so long that it had been referred to as Turkish Croatia (later as Bosanska Krajina). These developments would alter Bosnian history forever, introducing an Islamic component into the already confounded Bosnian ethno-religious identity. The Bosnian Church would forever disappear, although the circumstances under which it did are as hotly debated as its nature and origins. Some historians contend that the Bosnian Krstjani converted en masse to Islam, seeking refuge from Catholic and Orthodox persecution, while others argue that the Bosnian Church had already ceased to operate many decades before the Turkish conquest. Whatever the case, a distinct Slavic Muslim community developed under Ottoman rule in Bosnia, giving rise to the modern Bosniaks.
During the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1878 to 1918, Benjamin Kallay, Joint Imperial Minister of Finance and Vienna-based administrator of Bosnia, promoted Bošnjaštvo, a policy that aimed to inspire in Bosnia's people 'a feeling that they belong to a great and powerful nation'.[5] The policy advocated the ideal of a pluralist and multi-confessional Bosnian nation and viewed Bosnians as "speaking the Bosnian language and divided into three religions with equal rights."[6][7] The policy attempted to isolate Bosnia and Herzegovina from its irredentist neighbors (the Orthodox in Serbia, Catholics in Croatia, and the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire) and to negate the concept of Croat and Serb nationhood that had already spread to Bosnia and Herzegovina's Catholic and Orthodox communities from neighboring Croatia and Serbia in the mid 19th century.[7] Croats and Serbs who opposed the policy, ignored Bosnian nationhood and instead sought to claim Bosnian Muslims as their own, a move that was rejected by most Bosnian Muslims.[8][9] Following the death of Kallay, the policy was abandoned and by the latter half of the 1910s nationalism was an integral factor of Bosnian politics, with national political parties corresponding to the three groups dominating elections.[7]
During the time when Bosnia and Herzegovina were part of Yugoslavia and heavily influenced by Croat and Serb politics neither of the two terms Bosnian or Bosniak were recognized as a nation. Thus, Bosnian Muslims and anyone who confessed themselves to Bosnian ethnicity were listed under the category "regional affiliation" by the Yugoslav statistics. This also applied to the last census in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1991. However, because of this, census format in former Yugoslavia was often subject of political manipulation. As a matter of fact, Muslim Bosnians requested the option Bosnian in the constitutional amendments of 1947 and 1973, but instead they had to declare themselves either as Serbs or Croats until 1963, "undecided" or "Muslim in a national sense" (with lower case m) until 1973, and Muslims (with capital M) until 1993.
In 1990 the name Bosniaks was re-introduced to replace the term Muslim but it was too late for that term to be realistically accepted by non-Muslim ethnic groups in Bosnia.
This resulted in Bosniak, or even Muslim, as terms being (re)coined recently as a political compromise. Peculiarly enough, in the present day Bosnia it is practically impossible for a citizen to declare her/himself as Bosnian. Due to widespread practices in the Ottoman empire, the distinction (for taxation purposes, military service etc.) was made based mainly on religion and this heritage only contributed to the ethnic chaos in the Balkans that followed in the wake of its retreat from Europe.
Bosnians are as multi-religious a society as they are multi-ethnic, but this is not to say that its component religions and ethnicities are homogeneous and independent from each other.
According to Tone Bringa, an author and anthropologist, in respect to Bosnia and Bosnians she states that "Neither Bosniak, nor Croat, nor Serb identities can be fully understood with reference only to Islam or Christianity respectively but have to be considered in a specific Bosnian context that has resulted in a shared history and locality among Bosnians of Islamic as well as Christian backgrounds."[10] According to Bringa, in Bosnia there is a singular, "trans-ethnic culture" that encompassed each ethnicity and makes different faiths, including Christianity and Islam, "synergistically interdependent".[10]
Still, large numbers of Bosnians are secular which is a trend that has more profoundly found root in last 60 years in Bosnia and Herzegovina as they were part of the Communist system that rejected traditional organized religion.
In a 2007 survey conducted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 57% of the surveyors identified an ethnic designation as the primary one, while 43% opted for "being a citizen of Bosnia-Herzegovina". However, 75% of the surveyors answered positively to the question "As well as thinking of yourself as a [Bosniak, Croat, Serb], do you also think of yourself as being a citizen of the whole of Bosnia-Herzegovina?". In the same survey, 43% said that they identify as a citizen of Bosnia-Herzegovina as the primary identity, 14% identified themselves solely with their specific ethnic or religious group, while 41% expressed the dual identity.[11][12]