The Rise of Authoritarian Nationalism is Coming for Everyone | Prof. Zlatko Hadžidedić

## Introduction A different theory of nationalism emerges from the Sarajevo conversation: nationalism is not an archaic sentiment that sleeps and occasionally wakes; it is a political technology revived and repurposed by the dynamics of late capitalism and geopolitical strategy. The exchange with Professor Zlatko Hadžidedić reframes the collapse of Yugoslavia and the violence that followed as a case study in how market reforms, international diplomacy, and deliberate institutional choices manufacture identities and then weaponize them. Far from being an inevitable reassertion of ancient loyalties, the proliferation of ethno-religious categories and the territorial partitioning that grew from them are best understood as engineered outcomes—responses to economic imperatives and geopolitical calculations that created incentives for particular elites and external actors to break multi‑confessional social fabrics apart. ## The Recent Origins of Ethno-Religious Identities One of the most provocative claims in the discussion is how recent—and how malleable—the identities we treat as primordial actually are. What modern observers often describe as age-old divisions (Orthodox equals Serb, Catholic equals Croat, Muslim equals Bosniak) crystallized through political and ecclesiastical campaigns in the 19th and 20th centuries. Religious denomination served as a scaffold; nationhood was constructed atop it. As Hadžidedić points out, campaigns by national churches and political elites remapped religious affiliation into national identity by deliberate administrative, clerical, and educational measures. The shift from “Muslim” as a religious marker to “Bosniak” as an ethno-religious category was itself a political decision, an act of rebranding that retrofitted a territorial-cultural identity onto populations who had previously been defined in more fluid terms. This reconfiguration was neither neutral nor accidental. The stepwise association of church and nation—priests sent from one polity to cultivate a sense of shared nationality, historical narratives repackaged to legitimize territorial claims—showed how identity formation can be orchestrated. The boundaries drawn in diplomatic halls and religious offices reverberated through daily life: who you married, where your children were educated, which language dominated public life. Crucially, the Lisbon Conference that preceded Bosnia’s war institutionalized a vision of segregated ethno-territorial units. That diplomatic blueprint made partition seem administratively possible, but only because activists and armies were willing to make it physically real. In mixed urban neighborhoods where households of different faiths had coexisted for generations, the overlay of ethnic cartography made separation look like policy and, ultimately, like destiny. ## Can Nationalism Play a Healthy Role in Society? The conversation resists the simplistic dichotomy that casts nationalism as either wholly emancipatory or inherently malignant. Nationalism, the discussants concede, can be a vehicle for social cohesion and collective mobilization; it has been the language of liberation for anti-colonial struggles and of economic modernization in some contexts. Yet the crucial variable is not nationalism per se but the political economy and institutional structure in which it arises. When nationalism is the primary route to social advancement, it ceases to be a neutral expression of identity and becomes an instrument for redistribution—who gets access to jobs, property, and state power. Under socialist Yugoslavia, the dominant pattern of social promotion hinged on party membership and the rhetoric of brotherhood and unity. That created incentives for people to adopt the Communist frame if they wanted to advance—often without deep ideological conversion. When the external pressure to transition to capitalism arrived, the pattern switched. Nationalist affiliation became the doorway to privatization proceeds and patronage. Those positioned closest to the emerging sources of power adapted first, converting administrative influence into wealth and using nationalist narratives to legitimize new ownership structures. Thus nationalism can be benign when it complements an inclusive institutional framework; it becomes corrosive when political openings and economic privatizations align with identity-based access to resources. The consequence is not merely social polarization but the creation of durable rent-seeking structures embedded in ethno-territorial forms. This insight reframes popular explanations that appeal to culture, ancient hatreds, or primordial animosities. People often align themselves along the axes that promise material security and recognition. Ideology follows incentive. Where the state, foreign actors, or economic elites make ethnic affiliation the clear path to resources, nationalism hardens quickly—translating competition into collective rivalry and, eventually, into violence if political doors close and territorial claims are offered as solutions. ## The Future of Capitalism and Authoritarian Nationalism The conversation advances a disturbing forecast: authoritarian nationalism is not an aberration but a strategic adaptation of a hyper-capitalist order. Capitalism, as described here, contains an internal contradiction: it produces concentrated wealth and repeated cycles of dispossession that, if left unchecked, mobilize the dispossessed against the system. One way to preserve capital’s core structures is to create a social glue that obscures class cleavages and aligns diverse groups behind a national project. Authoritarian nationalism can fulfill that role by replacing redistributive politics with identity-based inclusion, promising belonging while deflecting demands for economic justice. In this scenario, state coercion and elite capture become routine governance tools. When combined with privatization and the consolidation of assets among a narrow class, authoritarian nationalism becomes an effective political technology: it delegitimizes demands for economic equality by framing grievances as threats to national unity or foreign plots, while simultaneously enabling rulers to centralize power and ensure favorable conditions for capital accumulation. The Sarajevo discussion suggests that we are not seeing a regional anomaly but a template that can be scaled and replicated. As global capital seeks stability amid crises—ecological, financial, demographic—authoritarian nationalism offers an organizing principle that stabilizes markets by stabilizing hierarchical social orders. Hadžidedić’s argument also highlights the international dimension: major powers and diplomatic actors can actively shape national trajectories by choosing which forms of identity to validate and which maps to endorse. The Lisbon Conference’s tacit endorsement of partition illustrates how international diplomacy can institutionalize fragmentation, often for geopolitical convenience. If such interventions become normalized, the result will be a geopolitical landscape of brittle, identity-defined polities whose internal governance is more easily aligned with external economic interests. Authoritarian nationalism, from this vantage, serves both domestic ruling classes and global capital by protecting property regimes and suppressing cross-cutting solidarities that could threaten accumulation. ## Outro The conversation from Sarajevo refuses comfortable narratives of ancient hatreds or inevitable ethnic conflict. Instead it offers a political‑economic account: identities can be engineered, public policies can prescriptively map social groups onto territory, and international actors can accelerate fragmentation when it serves strategic interests. Nationalism is a malleable instrument—capable of unifying in some contexts, and of fragmenting and excluding in others—depending on the incentives created by economic systems and diplomatic choices. For scho

The Rise of Authoritarian Nationalism is Coming for Everyone How does a society go from peaceful neighbors to bitter enemies? What if nationalism wasn't a sleeping giant but a tool deliberately awakened by capitalism? And what happens when global powers actively prevent a country from forming a unified identity? To explore these questions, today I’m talking to Professor Zlatko Hadžidedić, the Director at the Center for Nationalism Studies located in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We uncover the manufactured nature of ethno- religious identities, the geopolitical games that fragment nations, and a chilling prediction for the future: a global rise of "authoritarian nationalism" designed to serve a new hyper-capitalist order. This is a fundamental rethink of how nations are made and unmade. Links: Center for Nationalism Studies: https://nationalismstudies.org/ Nations and Capital (Book): https://www.routledge.com /Nations-and-Capital-The-Missing-Link-in-Global-Expansion/Hadzidedic/p/book/9781032159720 Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Goods Store: https://neutralitystudies- shop.fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:33 Nationalism, Capitalism, and the Dissolution of Yugoslavia 00:13:02 The Recent Origins of Ethno-Religious Identities 00:18:38 How Social Cohesion Collapsed 00:28:15 Can Nationalism Play a Healthy Role in Society? 00:31:39 Why a Unified Bosnian Identity is Suppressed 00:41:41 The Future of Capitalism and Authoritarian Nationalism 00:50:22 Geopolitics: Why Some Nationalisms Unify and Others Divide 00:56:11 Outro #Pascal Hello, everybody. This is Pascal Lottaz from Neutrality Studies, and today I'm talking to Professor Zlatko Hadžidedić, the director of the Center for Nationalism Studies, located in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Professor Hadžidedić, welcome. #Zlatko Hadžidedić Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. #Pascal Well, thank you very much for saying yes, because you were pointed out as one of the specialists from, well, Bosnia, to discuss the role of nationalism in the dissolution of Yugoslavia and also in today's politics. Could you maybe start with an overview of how you approach the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and how you define nationalism and the different nationalisms that you think are crucial to understanding that process? #Zlatko Hadžidedić -- 1 of 15 -- Well, I have my own approach, and I published it in my book *Nations and Capital: The Missing Link in Global Expansion*, published by Routledge in 2022. I truly think, as far as I could observe, that the rise of nationalism coincided with the influx of capitalism in the former Yugoslavia. People say that nationalisms were “sleeping,” so to speak, and then suddenly woke up—that’s the usual narrative. But what I can testify, as someone who was living in the former Yugoslavia, is that nationalisms were totally irrelevant as a narrative. That was something totally irrelevant in a socialist country because it was mainly about belonging to the working people—telling others that you were part of the working class or the Communist Party, and things like that. Those were the leading narratives. It was never about nationalism, not something we ever talked about. So I have to say that, literally, with the influx of capitalism at the end of the ’80s, the rise of nationalism took place. I wrote a book that explains the link between capitalism and nationalism. It’s a general theory of nationalism—it’s not about the former Yugoslavia, not even about Europe. It's just a very, very general theory of nationalism, which says that capitalism needed nationalism in order to survive—that capitalism has a built-in error, which is about creating a gap between the rich and the poor to such an extent that it inevitably creates conditions for rebellious masses to come on stage and eventually change the system. And in order to survive, to actually keep capitalism intact, capitalism needed a kind of social glue that would bridge the gap—or at least ostensibly bridge the gap—between the rich and the poor. And that was the ideology of nationalism, which preaches that we are all equal, we all have equal rights, we belong to the same nation, we have common interests, and so on, regardless of the fact that the top one, or the top ten, whatever percent of the population, take ninety percent of the income. Nevertheless, we belong to the same nation. Also, nationalism played a very specific geopolitical role in the expansion of the British Empire, which was the leading capitalist power. Practically, Britain was exporting this ideology under the guise of liberalism, and it never had to fight wars with competing empires such as the Spanish or Portuguese empires, or the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, the Dutch Empire, and so on. Eventually, they were all defeated through national revolutions led by the so-called liberals. They never thought of themselves as nationalists. If you take a look at Mazzini, at Simón Bolívar, at Kemal Pasha Atatürk—they were all self-confessed liberals. They never claimed to be nationalists; they were preaching liberal ideology against absolutism, for equality, and so on. But at the bottom, they were actually organizing national revolutions that introduced the ideology of nationalism and eventually turned their own countries into nation-states. A similar thing happened with the former socialist or communist bloc. All the complex states, including the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia—although Yugoslavia was a socialist country and did not belong to the bloc—had this complex federative -- 2 of 15 -- structure. Eventually, they all dissolved in a very similar manner, with the introduction of capitalism as an economic system into their political space. They dissolved into nation-states with the rise of nationalism in each of the constituent republics. So it was a very similar process, and we saw it here. Some people don’t remember it. They picked up the narrative about “sleeping nationalisms” and so on. But I had more theoretical knowledge, so to speak, to try to analyze things from a different perspective. In my view, that was the primary trigger and the main reason for the introduction of nationalism as a narrative—the dominant narrative—in all the Yugoslav republics. Unfortunately, Bosnia-Herzegovina… well, for some people fortunately—for Greater Serbian nationalists or Greater Croatian nationalists—but for Bosnians, unfortunately, Bosnia was not officially constituted as a nation-state. Even in the former socialist Yugoslavia, Bosnia was a different place. It was constituted as a republic consisting of three ethnic groups—or, more accurately, ethno-religious groups. In the 19th century, they all transformed from religious to ethno-religious communities. The Orthodox Christians became Serbs, the Catholics—under the influence of Croatian nationalism from Croatia—became Croats, and so on. Eventually, Muslims adopted the name Bosniaks, which actually belongs to all the people who live in Bosnia; it’s not specifically reserved for Bosnians. So these religious communities turned into ethno-religious communities. But there was something else. I would say a mistake—but some people still don’t correct this mistake. They still call them “nationalities” or “nations,” which actually gave them the right to claim sovereignty and to try to secede from Bosnia. So Bosnia entered the process of the dissolution of Yugoslavia with these three groups—two of which were claiming secession and aiming to become part of Greater Serbia or Greater Croatia. One of them was claiming to defend an integral Bosnia, but in fact, the leadership was also looking at the possibility of creating its own small, private state that would belong exclusively to Muslims. And for Bosnia, what was particularly tragic—and what was particularly dangerous at the time, and turned out to be tragic, actually—was the so-called Lisbon Conference, organized by the then European Community in 1992, prior to the war. So, before the war, the European Community held this conference, officially presided over by the Portuguese diplomat José Cutileiro, but effectively led by Lord Carrington, who was also presiding over the conference on the former Yugoslavia. They introduced the idea that these three ethno-religious communities, who had lived mixed together for centuries, should be separated. People were living door to door, you know, without any separate territories. Then they came up with the idea that these three groups should organize themselves into three separate territories. If you ask me, that was the crucial thing. Some of them accepted it with enthusiasm, some with less, but eventually they all accepted the idea. And if you ask me, that was the trigger for everything that -- 3 of 15 -- happened in Bosnia, because you can’t create three separate, isolated territories out of a mixed population without a war. You need a war for that. And the war was actually fought along the lines that were pre-negotiated at the Lisbon Conference. All the militaries were taking territories that had already been assigned to their so-called ethno- religious groups at the Lisbon Conference. So the European Community was, to the greatest extent, to blame for everything that happened. Of course, these ideas were coming from British diplomacy— I should emphasize that. But the European Community, at the time and to this very day, has never abandoned the idea that the ethnic partition of Bosnia is somehow the best solution. For Bosnians, it was never the best solution. Of course, there were some ethno-nationalist elites who saw their chance in creating separate territories, taking over resources in those territories, and so on. But for most of the population, that was certainly not the best solution. It was by far the worst one, because it pushed people into counting who was dominant in terms of numbers in this or that part of the territory. And eventually, you get tensions—you get three narratives about three separate statelets that need to be created. And eventually, you get a war that separates these three groups, with great help from neighboring Serbia and Croatia and the aggression of their armies in Bosnia and Herzegovina. #Pascal I mean, what you're explaining here, I think, is really important to dig deeper into. But you said something five minutes ago that intrigued me quite a bit. You said that these nationalities—the way people see themselves as belonging to one or the other box—weren’t how people conceptualized themselves in the 19th century or earlier. Because to me, it was always clear: Serbs are Orthodox Christians, Croats are Catholics, and Bosniaks are the Muslim population. And that they, in different periods—you know—different people had power over that, over the construct within which they lived. Because before Yugoslavia—well, before the socialist Yugoslavia— there was the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Before that, it was part of the Habsburg Empire, basically, and it changed hands. The Ottomans played a role as well, right? But you're saying that the idea of these three groups itself is a relatively recent phenomenon—about 100, 150 years at most. #Zlatko Hadžidedić Yes, yes, that's true. You can check it if you just take a look at the Greater Serbia program, the so- called *Načertanije* by Ilija Garašanin. There he refers to all Bosniaks as Bosniaks of the Orthodox faith, the Latin faith, and the Mohammedan faith. And he’s trying to consider which group would be easier to convert to Serbian nationhood, to a Serbian national identity. He says, well, it won’t be difficult with our brethren who are Orthodox Christians—we’ll simply send priests from Serbia there to tell them they are Serbs, they’ll adopt it—and they actually did. Because Bosnia was under the mandate of the central Patriarchate in Constantinople prior to that, but the Serbian Orthodox Church -- 4 of 15 -- b