Art Institutions and National Identity in a Post - Conflict Society
Post-conflict societies inhabit a prolonged identity crisis. This crisis defines the scenario in present day Bosnia and Herzegovina, where ethno-centric narratives embody the consciousness of the Bosniak, Croat, and Serb populations, inhibiting the prevalence of an overarching national identity. In this thesis, I contend that realizing a national identity, as defined by Benedict Anderson, is crucial to the reconciliation of a post-conflict country such as Bosnia. In light of the limitations of parliamentary structures (such as those defined by Bosnia’s Dayton Agreement) within a society affected by mass atrocity, I argue that art institutions are capable of negotiating the question of a national identity. Focusing on Bosnia, I have examined the nation’s representation in the Venice Biennale, the phenomenological significance of the Sarajevo Film Festival, and finally, the function of museums and public art within the nation. This has revealed how art institutions can address the past in order to memorialize and revisit significant events to realize a collective history, act as a soft body power, create new traditions and narratives, and act as a means for society to realize the distinctness of the nation. My research concludes that art institutions can certainly fulfill long-term and symbolic functions that governmental or legal bodies fail to effectively address, despite their limitations in regards to outreach, access, and the dubious assumption about the effects that they can have on a post-conflict society. This ultimately reiterates the importance of art to the political imagination, not just in Bosnia, but also in other post-conflict societies.
Museums, national, postnational and transcultural identities
The emergence of the nation-state, the public, and the public museum in the late eighteenth century, were intimately bound together. The French Revolution of 1789, regarded as a key moment in the dawn of the nation-state era in Western Europe, was a revolution of ‘the people’ which saw the replacement of an aristocratic order with a new more horizontal and democratic conception of a collectivity of equals. As such, the opening up of the formerly princely collections was an eloquent symbolic assertion of the new ideals of ‘egalite, fraternite et liberte’. That which was private and aristocratic was made public and ‘of the people’; the special, exclusive sphere of the elite was breached and opened up to the scrutiny of those who had previously
Bulgaria's Turks in the 1980s: a minority endangered1
Looking back at the recent past of the region of southeast Europe one could not agree more with Junal Ljutfi (MP from the Movement of Rights and Freedoms in Bulgaria), who at the September 1997 session of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly stated that “safeguarding and protecting minority rights is directly related to the stability and peace on the European continent” (see Ljutfi, 1997). Five years later, in 2002 within the roundtable discussing the Bulgarian ethnic experience, President-elect Parvanov claimed it was “one of the most competitive export products of Bulgarian transition” (see Iliev, 2002, p 5). Undoubtedly, the permanent presence of the Movement of Rights and Freedoms (MRF) in the political life of the country since 1990 was essential for achieving such a result. It managed to avoid the possibly negative consequences for the existence of the constitutional provision that “there shall be no political parties on ethnic, racial, or religious lines” (Art. 11.4). It is currently in the governing coalition in Bulgaria. In the words of MRF founders, viable ethnic peace in the country depends on the respect of the identity of all minority groups and the encouragement of their integration into all aspects of social and political life (Iliev, 2002, p 11, emphasis added). It could be reasonably claimed that the ethnic Turkish minority in Bulgaria are now safe in having those two principles upheld. A substantial guarantee for their sustainability is inter alia Bulgaria’s stated desire to become part of a European order based on respect for fundamental rights and freedoms. This has not always been the case, however. The recent history of communist rule in Bulgaria offers numerous examples of how these two principles have been utterly distorted and applied in an ideologically motivated fashion that brought the worst kind of nationalism to the fore—militant assimilationist, one based on ethnic intolerance and directed against the Bulgarian Turks and other minority groups. Although Bulgaria now is praised for the peaceful coexistence of its ethnic groups, especially in a regional comparative perspective, during the years of communism it was the only state to execute a number of renaming campaigns and to instigate the biggest exodus of a minority population leaving a socialist East European country to enter a non-socialist one. The following article