No, Serbs and Bosniaks are Not Ancient Enemies
Challenging Nationalist Myths in Bosnia
There are people who live from their own work. There are people who live from the work of others. And then there are political agitators who survive almost entirely by manufacturing historical enemies. Milorad Dodik, the longtime leader of Republika Srpska—the Serb -majority entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina—has long since become a leading figure in that particular industry. In his political vocabulary, phrases such as “age-old enemies,” “true enemies,” and “our enemies” have become something between a verbal tic and a greeting.
“Good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon.”
“Who are the age-old enemies today?”
At a recent “highly important” public discussion in East Sarajevo, we were given a straightforward answer: Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks).
Thank you. Goodbye. See you again tomorrow.
Yet this kind of historical reductionism is hardly Dodik’s monopoly. For decades, it has also permeated a significant segment of the Bosniak nationalist media landscape, from Hayat TV and Stav magazine to Dnevni Avaz, one of the country’s largest newspapers. Within that narrative, much of premodern and modern Serbian history is frequently reduced to a single grand anti-Muslim conspiracy stretching across centuries—from Saint Sava, the founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the thirteenth century, right up to the present day. One might think that after eight hundred years such a conspiracy would eventually grow tired, but apparently not.
This simplification is sustained not only by political propaganda but also by the writings of figures such as Rasim Muminović, a philosopher and prominent intellectual associated with the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), the main Bosniak nationalist party founded by Alija Izetbegović. Muminović described Serbs as “the most bloodthirsty animals,” genetic “monsters that are neither human nor dog,” and “human gorillas,” effectively offering an entire nation a collective psychiatric diagnosis and a quasi-biological classification in place of historical analysis.
It is therefore hardly surprising that similar ideas later found an echo in the work of the late Abdulah Sidran, one of Bosnia’s most celebrated writers and public intellectuals, whose influence on Bosniak cultural and political discourse remains considerable even after his death. Sidran claimed that Serbs had spent the last two centuries working toward the disappearance of his people. Like Dodik’s rhetoric about “age-old enemies,” this is a thesis that could be dismantled by an average fourteen-year-old pupil in the final year of elementary school who has mastered the basic chronology of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Balkan history.
Between Sidran’s narrative and Dodik’s rhetoric of “centuries-old enemies,” the difference is largely one of flags and party symbols. The mechanism itself remains unchanged: complex historical processes are compressed into tribal morality tales, while entire communities are transformed into permanent villains whose guilt is presumed to transcend generations.
The problem is that the phrase “age-old enemy” is not the sort of expression one should casually toss around like a barroom remark or a party slogan. It is among the most serious historical labels imaginable. If a people truly has an age-old enemy, we are talking about a sustained, continuous, and fundamental antagonism spanning entire historical epochs. We are talking about something comparable to the relationship between Rome and Carthage, England and France during the Hundred Years' War, or the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy. It is not a term that should be deployed whenever a politician needs to fill the space between two press conferences.
Of course, the history of the Balkans should not be romanticized. Bosnian Serbs—and Serbs more broadly—and Bosnia’s Muslims, today known as Bosniaks, have not spent the last five centuries living in a picturesque postcard of brotherhood, love, and communal rakija-making by the river. The Ottoman period left deep scars and produced profoundly different historical experiences. Bosnia’s Muslims were largely integrated into the Ottoman imperial order, often serving as local administrators, military officers, and political intermediaries. The Serb population, meanwhile, found itself caught between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. During the long series of Ottoman-Habsburg wars, many Serbs aligned themselves with Vienna in the hope of obtaining some form of autonomy or liberation from Ottoman rule.
Later, as the Ottoman Empire weakened during the nineteenth century and the modern Serbian state emerged, significant segments of the Bosnian Muslim political elite often sought protection from external powers in order to preserve their position and security. Depending on the historical moment, these patrons included Vienna, Berlin, and, during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Washington and Brussels. These are historical realities that deserve serious analysis rather than sentimental embellishment.
But any serious analysis must begin with a basic understanding that historical processes cannot be reduced to selecting the darkest episodes from the past and retroactively inserting them into a theory of predetermined criminal continuity. If we were to read the history of any nation exclusively through its wars, massacres, persecutions, atrocities, and propaganda-driven hatreds, then the entirety of human history would appear as nothing more than an endless chronicle of collective madness and chainsaw massacres.
History is more complicated than that. Nations are not defined solely by the worst things their members have done, just as they are not defined solely by their finest achievements. The task of historical scholarship is to explain how societies change over time, not to construct myths of eternal innocence or eternal guilt. And that is precisely what rhetoric about “age-old enemies” tends to do: it transforms history from a field of inquiry into a reservoir of political ammunition.
This is precisely why it is dangerous to use political vocabulary inherited from the nineteenth century—or, even worse, from much earlier eras—to describe the realities of the twenty-first. Contemporary relations between Serbs and Bosniaks are not unfolding within the framework of some ancient geopolitical struggle. They take place in a world in which Belgrade, Banja Luka, and Sarajevo are all, each in their own way, deeply embedded in the same structures of external political, security, and economic dependence.
The average person in Banja Luka, East Sarajevo, Tuzla, or Zenica does not wake up each morning burdened by the threat of some medieval adversary. He lives under pressure from the same international lending institutions, the same financial obligations, the same development agencies, the same geopolitical agendas, and the same local political castes that derive their power and prosperity from those arrangements.
The greatest tragicomedy of the entire story is that the political elites of Sarajevo, Banja Luka, and Belgrade have spent decades presenting themselves as mortal enemies while simultaneously existing within the same system of dependency. All three centers rely on the same international financial arrangements, the same European integration frameworks, the same security architectures, and the same diplomatic power centers that effectively define the boundaries of acceptable political behavior.
The economies of both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia occupy a largely peripheral position within the broader European division of labor. They depend heavily on low-cost labor, remittances from emigrants, foreign investment, and borrowing rather than on genuine technological and industrial self-sufficiency. Even when political leaders publicly swear allegiance to supposedly irreconcilable national visions, the governing classes in Sarajevo, Banja Luka, and Belgrade often function in practice as local managers of the same wider political and economic order.
That is why the rhetoric of “age-old enemies” appears so bizarre today. Historically, age-old enemies struggle over sovereignty, territory, strategic resources, and competing systems of power. Yet neither Sarajevo, nor Banja Luka, nor Belgrade exercises full independent control over the most important economic questions, the most important security questions, or, by extension, many of the most important political questions facing their societies. They increasingly resemble tenants arguing endlessly over the pattern of the wallpaper in a rented apartment—while someone else owns the building.
One side manufactures a pathological form of Serbophobia in which Serbs supposedly spent their entire history doing little other than plotting genocide. The other produces an equally pathological Islamophobia in which Bosniaks are imagined as having spent centuries thinking of nothing except how to impale as many infidels—specifically Serbs—as possible.
One camp wakes its people every morning with stories about the so-called Neo-Ottoman “Green Transversal,” a supposedly existential Islamic geopolitical project stretching across the Balkans. Yet upon closer inspection, this terrifying dragon turns out to consist largely of the Bosniak-majority portion of Bosnia and Herzegovina—a territory comprising roughly 23 percent of the country under the Dayton constitutional framework- burdened by catastrophic demographic decline and a population emigrating faster than it can reproduce itself.
The other camp lulls its followers to sleep with tales of an impending Greater Serbian hegemon that is allegedly always on the verge of reappearing. Yet the object of this fear is a state whose political class has spent decades carefully listening to the views of foreign embassies—above all the American embassy—on virtually every major strategic issue, to the point that critics have often accused it of informally accepting realities that previous generations of Serbian politicians would have regarded as unthinkable, including the effective accommodation of Kosovo’s separation from Serbia.
The disaster is always announced in installments, like an endless television soap opera written for a politically immature audience that never quite grasps what is happening. The next catastrophe is always just around the corner. The next betrayal. The next conspiracy. The next historical reckoning. There is always another episode. There is never a conclusion.
Which is why, before invoking the phrase “age-old enemies” once again, it might be worth asking a simple question: if Bosniaks and Serbs truly are each other’s greatest historical adversaries, how is it that both now find themselves subordinate to many of the same centers of power, dependent on many of the same external arbiters, and trapped within the same political circus?
One does not normally describe two passengers sitting in the same carriage as mortal enemies simply because they are arguing over which window offers the better view.
Perhaps the real problem is that the owners of the circus tent disappeared from view long ago, and the audience never even noticed. Their attention has remained fixed on the clowns, who for more than thirty years have been throwing the same rotten tomatoes at one another while presenting each performance as a unique and earth-shattering historical event.
After all, let us consider the future offered by the merchants of “age-old enemies.” Serbs are expected to believe that behind every Bosniak political initiative lurks a conspiracy aimed at their disappearance. Bosniaks are expected to believe that every Serbian political demand conceals yet another blueprint for their destruction. The result is a society in which people read fewer books but become increasingly convinced that they can read one another’s minds; a society in which fewer and fewer citizens understand how economics, state institutions, or international politics actually function, while more and more are certain that they have deciphered the secret centuries-old plans of their neighbors.
It is a perfect world for demagogues, party-controlled media outlets, and political entrepreneurs who profit from fear.
That is why the first prerequisite for any serious Serbian-Bosniak politics of reconciliation is the rejection of idiotic interpretations of history. Not merely because they are offensive, but because they are intellectually impoverished. The history of a people is not a criminal case file in which a permanent culprit is identified once and for all. Nor is it a catalogue of national character defects. It is a complex historical process shaped by competing interests, empires, economic forces, religious traditions, ideological movements, collective fears, and the simple struggle for survival.
Anyone—and this includes a substantial portion of the political elites on all sides—who offers you a simple explanation for five hundred years of Balkan history is almost certainly trying to make a fool of you.
And the Balkans already have more than enough people who earn a living from other people’s gullibility. There is little reason to keep providing them with customers voluntarily.
For if Serbs and Bosniaks collectively were truly what their respective demagogues claim them to be, there would long ago be neither Serbs nor Bosniaks left. They have had more than enough opportunities throughout history to destroy one another—and yet they did not. The reason is simple: dark historical regimes, episodes of violence, and periods of hatred are not permanent features of any people’s history. They are moments within history, not its entirety.
The real historical process has always been far more complex than the propaganda caricatures drawn by political entrepreneurs of fear. Which is precisely why it is time for the politics of both peoples to move beyond the vicious circle of mutual accusations and the endless competition over collective victimhood.
The history of the small nations of the Balkans contains one striking constant. For most of their existence, they have been objects of other powers' geopolitical projects far more often than they have been autonomous subjects of their own history. Empires, great powers, international alliances, and competing ideological blocs have repeatedly shaped the region’s destiny to a far greater extent than the ambitions of the local populations themselves.
For that reason, the fundamental political question of the twenty-first century is not how to prove that the other side is an age-old enemy. The real question is how to develop enough political maturity to resist, together, the mechanisms of dependency, division, and manipulation that have kept both peoples—albeit in different ways—confined for so long to supporting roles in other people’s dramas.
History offers little evidence that Serbs and Bosniaks are eternal enemies. It offers abundant evidence that they have repeatedly been persuaded to see one another that way by those who benefited from the arrangement. The challenge of the present century is whether they can finally learn to recognize the difference.
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