Contribution to the Concept of the (Bosnian) Nation: It Is Important to Be Called Bosnian/Bosniak

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The idea of Bosnia and Bosnian identity is a constant companion of Bosnian history from the Middle Ages, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule, through Yugoslavia to the present day, but at the same time, its denial as a heretical idea is also present. In recent times, among the most prominent promoters of the idea of the Bosnian nation are Senadin Lavić and Slavo Kukić, who understand the concept of nation from different theoretical positions: one that sees the nation as a community of origin and the other that sees the nation as a community of citizens-citizens. Unlike these two approaches to the nation, which are mutually exclusive, Schnapper believes that there are no two approaches to the idea of the nation. The nation, she believes, represents a specific form of "political unity", and its ideal is the transcendence of particularity by integrating a diverse population into a community of free and equal citizens. Political unity is the ontological basis that holds the nation together as a specific social group. If the social connective tissue of a nation is political, which separates friend from foe, and if in the case of Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks the political (national) is derived from the confessional, the question arises whether it is possible to rise from the three confessional-national particularities to the the level of the universal and build a political community of friends, formally equal and free citizens, or is BiH as a modern democratic state possible? The Bosnian nation, as a political community, which the author advocates, is derived from the Bosnian myth (belief) in the common origin of all indigenous inhabitants medieval Bosnia, who were called Bosnians, Bosniaks, Bosnians, and which immanently transcends the confessional pluralization of Bosnians and establishes a historically substantial continuity of the unity and diversity of Bosnian identity. However, the question of the reality of the idea of the Bosnian nation remains.