Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Proximate Colony in the Twilight of Empire

Abstract

Under Austro-Hungarian administration (1878–1918), Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) became the locus of the Habsburg  Monarchy’s colonial and geostrategic ambitions in the Balkans. But what kind of a colony was this, one which adjoined
its parent colonizer along two-thirds of its boundaries? In this essay, I argue that Bosnia-Herzegovina during its Habsburg era may best be understood as a proximate colony, in which the proximity of colony and colonizer compounded what Georges Balandier called, in his landmark 1951 essay, its “colonial situation”. Following the American historian of Africa, Frederick Cooper, I argue that colonialism in BiH, more than just a legal characterization or the repressive hegemony of one society over another, often produced unforeseen changes in the societies of both the colony and the colonizing power (here called the metropole, following conventions in the literature). Characterizing BiH as a “proximate colony” draws upon the historical
reinterpretation known as the Imperial Turn, which questions the long-accepted differentiation between nation-states (which are viewed as modern and progressive) and empires (which are seen as archaic and dysfunctional). One scholar
of the British Empire defines the imperial turn as “accelerated attention … [to] metropolitansocieties” [that is, the imperializing homelands] in histories of imperialism. I will apply the rein-metroterpretations of the Imperial Turn to Bosnia and Herzegovina in three areas: economic relations, nationality issues, culture.