In recent times in Bosnia and Herzegovina, there has emerged, at once somewhat timidly and somewhat aggressively, an initiative to promote the national designation “Bosanac” (“Bosnian”) and, in the name of a supposedly broader, civic or supranational identity, to push into the background or at least relativize the name “Bošnjak” (“Bosniak”). A number of intellectuals have rallied around this idea, claiming that “Bošnjak” is a putative project of Benjamin Kállay, the Austro-Hungarian governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the end of the 19th century; that the term has been compromised, that it is overly “ethnic” or “religious,” and that “Bosanac” would be the natural designation for all who live in Bosnia and Herzegovina, even as a replacement for the existing national name.

For those unfamiliar: today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina is a highly decentralized United Nations mandate territory, governed by a democratically unelected governor – the “High Representative of the International Community” – together with a monstrous domestic bureaucratic apparatus.  

The symbolic self-irony of this initiative is also reflected in the fact that its promoters – President Academician Prof. Dr Suad Kurtćehajić; Vice-Presidents Mirsad Čaušević and Prof. Dr Zlatko Hadžidedić; Academicians Ibrahim Žuđelović and Asim Kurjak; Dr Esad Bajtal; Ahmed Bosnić; Gradimir Gojer; then Prof. Dr Šeherzada Džafić; Dr Mevludin Tanović; Mr Milan Jovičić, graduate electrical engineer; Nedžad Hodžić, graduate electrical engineer and former member of the Croatian Parliament; and Secretary-General Nešad Alikadić – gathered precisely on 25 November in Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn Hotel, on ZAVNOBiH Day, to work diligently to ensure that the ethnic name “Bošnjak” is finally relativized in favour of the generic “Bosanac.”  ZAVNOBiH Day marks the first session of the State Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, held on 25 November 1943, when representatives of all peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina declared the country a political entity with equal Serbs, Croats and Muslims.

The paradox is all the more striking given that this is the very same hall in which, on 9 January 1992, the Republic of Srpska ( the present highly autonomous state entity with a Serb majority within the Dayton framework of Bosnia and Herzegovina ) was proclaimed, and on 27 September 1993 the Bosniak Assembly (Bošnjački sabor) was held, at which the ethnic name “Bošnjak” was reaffirmed for Bosnia’s Muslims.

The problem with this concept does not lie in the term “Bosanac” itself – which can certainly make sense as a regional designation that in the past was equivalent to the term “Bošnjak” in its local, homeland-based meaning – but rather in the underlying assumption that the name “Bošnjak” is historically artificial and redundant, and should therefore be replaced. Semantically, “Bošnjak” is a shortened and phonetically more economical variant of the more archaic term that previously took the form “Bošnjanin”: a person from Bosnia, regardless of their medieval or Ottoman premodern ethno-confessional affiliation. “Bosanac” is likewise derived from Bosna, but in a newer, simpler way: the stem Bosan- + the suffix -ac, and semantically it means – and has meant – the same as “Bošnjak” and “Bošnjanin” at the basic level: an inhabitant of Bosnia.

It is precisely here that the misunderstanding arises, because the entire historical stratification and continuity of the designation “Bošnjak” is ignored. And here is why the thesis of its alleged “inauthenticity” is historiographically untenable, and why the initiative to displace this name is, at the very least, completely superfluous.

The claim advanced by the participants in the aforementioned gathering that the designation “Bošnjak” is exclusively a “Kállay project” — in the sense that it did not exist prior to him — is historiographically untenable. Benjamin Kállay did indeed attempt to turn this designation into the foundation of a modern, civic identity in line with the needs of the Austro-Hungarian administration, but the word “Bošnjak” itself predates him by far, as part of a broader set of premodern Balkan self-designations. In the Ottoman period it functioned primarily as an eschatological-confessional identity within the upper stratum of Bosnian Muslim society — above all the beğ (bey) aristocracy — and denoted, in the narrower sense, a Muslim Ottoman from the Bosnian Eyalet. By contrast, the broader urban and rural Muslim population in everyday speech far more often identified with the term “Turčin” (“Turk”), which in the vernacular had a confessional meaning and simply signified “Muslim.”

In this context, the following should also be emphasized: every individual who, in the process of Islamisation, entered the Muslim community simultaneously entered the Ottoman cultural and administrative framework, which means that he became both a Bošnjak (in the narrower, eyalet-based sense) and a Turčin (in the broader, confessional sense in the vernacular). In other words, in Bosnia the process of Islamisation was almost always at the same time a process of Ottomanisation, whereby both identities – the institutional one (Bošnjak) and the popular-confessional one (Turčin) – overlapped and in practice functioned as two levels of the same belonging.

However, can we draw from the above the conclusion often encountered in the political rhetoric of superficial Bosniak nationalists and propagandists, namely that Serbian, and subsequently Croatian, identity was “imported” into Bosnia and Herzegovina only in the 19th century, and that this was the period in which “Serbization” and “Croatization” of an allegedly authentic Bosniak Christian population took place? For such claims, too, there is no confirmation in the relevant historical sources.

As far as the Orthodox population is concerned, the thesis of a supposed nineteenth-century “Serbization” advocated by the participants of the Holiday Inn gathering likewise does not hold. Numerous sources – both those produced within the Orthodox communities of Bosnia and the land of Hum (later Herzegovina) and those of foreign origin – consistently speak of the Orthodox inhabitants as Serbs. This includes local sources of parish and monastic provenance from within the Serbian Church; Roman Catholic missionary material; Habsburg sources on the population of Bosnia and its Orthodox émigré communities; travelogues; as well as Ottoman defters, in which, well into the 16th century, certain Herzegovinian defters are designated as “Serbian,” not to mention references to “Serbian settlements” and “Serbian land” in the same documents. Here we are dealing with a typical premodern identity arising out of a medieval eschatological category: medieval “nations” across Europe were first and foremost religious communities, a pattern that continued in the Ottoman period with the formation of the sırb milleti, that is, the Serbian community.

With regard to the Roman Catholic population, the situation is markedly different. Their designation “Bosnian / Bošnjak” was to the greatest extent regional, not strictly confessional or proto-national. In practice, they were divided into Šokci, Bunjevci, Latins, Magyars and Hrvaćani (Croats) – designations that referred to Catholic populations from Croatian territories which, in earlier periods, had been annexed to the Bosnian Eyalet as an integral part of an expanding Ottoman Empire. Here it should be added that the Franciscan order cultivated an indirect memory of the courtly Serb–Roman Catholic identity of the Kotromanić dynasty, and later a narrower concept of Bosnia as a Roman Catholic land, but did so by fully adopting external Dubrovnik, Dalmatian-Venetian and, ultimately, Croatian perceptions of that identity, which in time would become dominant. Such a population, in the worldview of the Ottoman Muslim elite, could not be “Bošnjak,” because for the Muslim aristocracy that term carried an exclusively confessional-identity meaning, one they were unwilling to share with members of other faiths.

For that reason, Bosnian Muslims themselves, after the Austro-Hungarian occupation, abandoned the term Bošnjak: in perceptual terms, “Bosnia” under the new circumstances ceased to be an Islamic frame of reference and became above all a Christian, especially Roman Catholic, space of the Habsburg Empire, so that an identity which had previously carried a strong Islamic component lost its meaning for them. It is precisely for this reason that Kállay’s attempt at a modernizing “Bosniakization” failed – not because the designation Bošnjak did not exist, but because its original meaning could not be transposed into a secularized, multi-confessional project without a loss of substance. It is therefore no surprise that the Bosniak identity survived the longest, up to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, in the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, which only in 1912, in the First Balkan War, ceased to be tied to the Ottoman Empire and to the Ottoman-Muslim concept of Bosniakness, becoming part of the modern Serbian national states of Serbia and, respectively, Montenegro.

Within this context one must also view the belated process of identity modernization in 1993, when the Bosnian muslim political leadership in Sarajevo reaffirmed the designation Bošnjak as the name of a constituent people of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This act was not the result of a long-term, organically evolving national development such as, in most European societies, unfolded over decades of cultural, educational and institutional consolidation, but rather of a war-conditioned and accelerated modernization. Instead of a peacetime process in which the term would have spread through schooling, culture and public institutions, the transformation of identity took place under extremely difficult and irregular conditions, deprived of stable mechanisms of cultural production. For that reason, the Bosniak identification of 1993 is at once a return to historical terminology and its profound modernization – a process which, compared to the European models of the 19th century, was markedly forced, accelerated and fragmentary.

Accordingly, the designation Bošnjak is fully grounded in history and does not represent some modern construct without prior foundations, nor an artificial intervention by an external administration, as is sometimes simplistically claimed. It appears in various semantic layers – from a premodern confessional-eschatological self-designation of the Muslim elite, through a regional toponymic identity in earlier epochs, to the modern national category affirmed in 1993 – but in all these forms it constitutes a continuity of historical usage. Precisely because of this continuity, which can be documented in Ottoman, Ragusan, missionary, travel and other sources, there is no need whatsoever for its alteration or replacement. On the contrary, it is a name that organically links different phases of collective existence and allows Bosniak identity to be understood as a historical process rather than as an ad hoc political invention.

For all these reasons, contemporary initiatives to sideline the national name Bošnjak in favour of the supposedly more “neutral” Bosanac prove to be at once wrongly founded and entirely superfluous, since they rest on the mistaken assumption that the former name is historically suspect, while the latter is allegedly natural and inherently conciliatory. As is evident from the historical record, Bošnjak possesses a deep, well-documented continuity, whereas its near-synonym Bosanac has become primarily a geographical and regional designation.

For that reason, the initiative to push aside the name Bošnjak under the guise of a “civic” identity is not only historically unfounded, but also politically counterproductive. Nations do not come into being through the decisions of commissions, conferences and round tables, nor can they be produced by mere decree or by changing official terminology. Every time in modern history that an attempt has been made to “invent” an identity or to redirect it from above, by force and without an organic grounding in the historical experience and self-perception of the community, the result has been either complete failure or deep social disintegration and conflict. These are already present within the Bosniak corpus due to the extremely difficult wartime and post-war circumstances and the condition of colonial subordination in the Dayton protectorate, which prevents genuine national emancipation.

It is precisely this tendency that we see in today’s efforts to erase or relativize the name Bošnjak with a single political-administrative stroke and replace it with the generic designation Bosanac: instead of genuine citizenship, what is produced is additional confusion and mistrust, and the sense of historical continuity is undermined. Rather than constant renamings and laboratory-style experiments in national engineering, it is far healthier to fill the existing name with the content of a democratic, plural society and an anti-colonial sentiment. In this way – and not by abandoning it – the name Bošnjak can remain both the historical and contemporary designation of a people whose fate is organically bound up with Bosnia and with all those territories where a population lives that feels naturally at home in a Bosniak “skin.”

In conclusion, contemporary attempts to displace the national name Bošnjak in favour of a supposedly more “neutral” Bosanac cannot be understood merely as an internal debate about terminology. They are structurally embedded in a post‐Dayton order in which Bosnia and Herzegovina is produced and governed as a semi-sovereign, “problematic” periphery of Europe. In that context, projects of identity re-engineering function as a familiar colonial technology: they seek to render the local population more legible, governable and symbolically harmless by dissolving its historically grounded forms of collective self-definition into administratively convenient, ostensibly civic labels. The gesture of erasing or relativizing Bošnjak in the name of an abstract, dehistoricised “Bosnian” identity thus reproduces the classic asymmetry of colonial discourse: what arises from local historical experience is marked as particular, dangerous or “ethnic,” while what is projected from above is presented as universal, rational and peace-bringing.

From a postcolonial perspective, such initiatives amount to a form of internalised coloniality. They do not simply react to external pressures; they translate and perform them in the local idiom. The call to abandon Bošnjak in favour of Bosanac implicitly accepts the hierarchy of value according to which only identities that have been stripped of their inconvenient historical depth – especially of memories of resistance, dispossession and survival – are deemed compatible with “European standards.” In this sense, the symbolic disarmament of Bosniak historical continuity mirrors the wider depoliticisation of Bosnia and Herzegovina under the Dayton protectorate: a political community reduced to an object of “management,” whose past may be selectively remembered but not claimed as a source of autonomous agency.

These identity projects are therefore deeply connected to Bosnia’s colonial subordination in at least three ways. First, they reinforce the idea that legitimate identities are those that have been certified by external arbiters – international administrators, donor networks, or metropolitan academic fashions – rather than those consolidated through the community’s own historical struggles. Second, they fragment and weaken the capacity of Bosniaks to articulate themselves as a historical subject, by recasting their name as an obstacle to civic normalisation rather than as a vehicle for democratic, plural and anti-colonial self-assertion. Third, they shift responsibility for structural domination onto the dominated themselves: instead of interrogating the unequal, tutelary framework in which Bosnia and Herzegovina is kept, the focus is displaced onto the alleged “toxicity” of local identities and the need to cosmetically rename them.

Seen in this light, defending the historical legitimacy of the name Bošnjak is not a matter of romantic essentialism, but of resisting a particular mode of symbolic disempowerment. To insist on Bošnjak as a name that carries a long, multilayered and documentable continuity is to insist that Bosniaks are not a tabula rasa onto which each new regime – from imperial administrators to contemporary “international community” – may inscribe its preferred category. It is also to assert that a genuinely civic and democratic order in Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot be built by erasing or neutralising the historical experiences of its constituent communities, but only by acknowledging them and opening them towards a shared, anti-colonial horizon. In that sense, the task is not to abandon the name Bošnjak in order to become “more European,” but to fill it with the emancipatory content of a people that refuses to be endlessly managed, renamed and explained by others.

---