Eurasia Press & News
Such social and civic engagement is not new in Bosnia, historically. Throughout the modern history of Bosnia, there is a common thread of engagement on socioeconomic and institutional problems. Even before World War I, there was a history of Socialist political networks and movements.
The 1990s war in Bosnia and Herzegovina prompted political and media narratives about the war as a result of centuries of years of hatred and conflict between ethnic communities. US author Robert Kaplan’s highly influential book Balkan Ghosts propagated this idea, which was then repeated by Western politicians such as John Major, Britain’s Prime Minister during the Bosnian war years. The right-wing academic, Samuel Huntington, used Bosnia as an example for his controversial thesis about an inevitable “clash of civilisations” between Christians and Muslims.
However, Bosnia also has a history of universalist ideologies, such as Socialism, class-based politics and organising inter-ethnic solidarity and community based on everyday life experiences. At the beginning of the 20th century, under Austro-Hungarian rule, Bosnia saw the emergence of a Social Democratic Party. Founded in Sarajevo in 1909, it organised railway workers, miners and urban craftsmen. The party programme emphasised universal suffrage, labour protections and secular public institutions and framed its politics around class rather than religious or national identity.
During the same period, the city of Tuzla, later known as “the red city of Bosnia”, was becoming a hub for left-wing political networks and activists. The impact of the Social Democratic Party was small since Bosnia was mainly an agricultural and peasant-based society. But its existence challenges the typical narrative that Bosnia has always been politically defined only by ethnic division.
In other areas, such as Zenica, miners and industrial workers organised strikes demanding better conditions. In Sarajevo, workers’ clubs and associations linked Bosnia to broader European socialist networks. Civic and social movements, such as the Proleter (Proleterian) Workers’ Cultural and Educational Society did not focus in the first place on religion and ethnicity but on left-wing ideas based on Marxism, Socialism and Communism.
Later, during Socialist Yugoslavia, Bosnia became heavily industrialised.
Cities like Zenica and Tuzla developed strong working-class identities tied to steel, mining and chemical industries, where social rights, public housing and universal education were central to the political model. That system was authoritarian but it institutionalized the idea that politics could be organised around shared social interests rather than communal divisions.
Bosnia’s post-Dayton political order, on the other hand, has prioritized ethnic balance over functional governance. Patronage networks flourished and public companies became political spoils. In this environment, corruption became not an exception but a structure. Many public transport companies, energy providers, municipal administrations have been repeatedly accused of mismanagement and party-based appointments.
Corruption in Bosnia is not only accepted by many citizens, who for many reasons are apolitical or uninterested in civic engagement, but is also “nationalised”. Corrupt actions and deeds are often legitimised and accepted, as long as the corrupted individual has “the right” ethnicity. In everyday life, one often hears phrases such as, “At least he/she is one of ours, not theirs”.
To make things even more ironic, the system of party-political control over enterprises is a legacy from Socialist Yugoslavia. The difference is that the current corruption and mismanagement take place in a multi-party system. Still, many people in Bosnia see political parties mainly as a source of income, positions and privileges, or even as criminal networks, not as ideologically driven class organisations or interest groups.
