Politics and philosophy of death production in the Balkans

“What sort of philosophy one chooses, depends  therefore on what sort of man one is; for, a philosophical system is not a dead piece of furniture, to be rejected or accepted at will; rather, it is a thing enlivened by the soul of the one who holds it”,
Johann Gottlieb Fichte[1]

After the World War Two, Hannah Arendt optimistically predicted that evil would become a fundamental issue in the postwar intellectual life of Europe. After the wars of the 1990s in the area of the former Yugoslavia, that same moral-intellectual optimism was again proven to be unrealistic. After all the horrendous events, evil is still present in local political games and calculations, its victims still just an item in the current “political dealings”: how much would be lost with foreign donators if it was gained with local public; creation of a psychological profile of the donor; following of the (non)diplomatic facial expressions of world leaders after refusal to try war crimes. A government that leaves the victims of war only to the private sphere of family rituals for remembrance, without institutionalization of their fates through procedures of law, “legitimizes” a kind of “mythical justice” according to which, individual death is just collateral damage in the struggle for the idea of a Holy Territory. Post festum, through false statistics, the victims are victimized again.

If avoiding justice means breeding new evil, which will continue to affirm its unpunishability, then this is the greatest moral downfall of the societies of the former Yugoslavia, which are today still areas of spiritual, territorial, institutional and cultural nationalism.

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When the desire for territory turns into a paroxysm, civic values become just a phrase, a slogan necessary because of the fact that today, there is no alimony for those who deliberately sever their ties to the international community. The fact that citizens of the world are legitimized under the auspices of the idea of the United Nations, is ridiculed by advocates of state nationalism,[2]  with their idea of United nationalisms: for them the UN is just a naive prelude to the future (historical continuity) of united nationalisms.[3] In an atmosphere of an increasingly broad departure from Kant’s idea of a world civil order, nationalist aspirations grow. Even though the United Nations are, above all, an idea (a universal civil order still exists only on a virtual map), as an organization today they are a real (logo)therapy for confronting facts of real-politics.

In Cartesian dualism, it could be stated that in nationalism the relation between res extense and res cogitans, the weight is superiorly on the side of the former. All the causes for nations to go into conflicts stem from their reduction to res extense (spread out matter). The will for res extense creates a “territorial ideology”. This was shown once again through the example of the former Yugoslavia.[4] Intellectual producers, executors and managers of death, along with regime’s show performers, with made-to-order, revised mythology and false lighting effects of the Great History of the Nation, manipulated fates of millions and created a new cult(ure) of tradition. The result, an area soaked with as many deaths as needed by its fictional history, ordered by and from contemporaries. The nation framed itself into a historically false and carnaged Area.

By choosing consequences useful to the reconstruction of history and for deconstruction of the future, the Nations achieved a high degree of consensus between “regime intellectuals” and voluntary, mental victims of their conspiracy. For the official policy on either side, the most important thing was to exclude the suffering by the only true and innocent victims, those caught in the cross-fire of two or more nationalisms.

When, for the benefit of the local audience, intellectual elites determine and promote “the most accurate history”, and when that version of the history becomes the most popular one with the general public, this adaptation of the past foreshadows future conflicts, regardless of the fact that these same elites modestly proclaim to be “just contemplating” the (inter)national reality in the privacy of their own studies. With the alibi of blessed nonculpability for the intellectual elite, and proclaiming their formal “absence” from the actual place (of suffering), the national ideologists reduce, or even deny, post festum, the magnitude of their misdeed. But it is by following their dictate, in a national act sanctified in advance, that the “field operatives” have marked and carved out  the res extense, the area to be conquered. If you are one of “the remnants of the slaughtered people” (a morbid vision of the most popular Serbian poet, which, when repeated often enough, harms the sense of moral orientation of the populace), the fact that you are “accidentally alive” gives you the right to, as a mortal remnant of a national tragedy, bring the life of the Other into question. With this “right”, nationalism has become a causa efficiens (efficient cause) of the disintegration of the region that, at one time, was rich in diversity, an obituary to the lives it had ended, coming to a finish with the hypocritical analysis of foreign, international culpability.

Irresponsibility of Thought

When “intellectual elites” returned to the “traditional idea” of universal mutual historical fraud, they initiated death. The autopsy of reality of the 1990s shows that triviality of death in this area is a direct consequence of popularization of this very thesis. In fact, the war had been fought between citizens of Yugoslavia which was disintegrating and the nationalists of the newly formed states. Only the former were able to combine ethical and ethnic patriotism, but they no longer had a country.

True patriotism, such as, for example, Jaspers’ love  for Germany, is brutally just and unbiased: “Now that Germany is destroyed – in a certain sense and to a certain degree, and with a finality that anyone here can hardly comprehend – for the first time I feel comfortable as a German.”[5] This patriotism is such that, through conscience, is the protection of the Other from raging nationalism. Jaspers’ love was dramatic but certain existentialist protection for his wife (a Jew), the Other to whom Germany of that time had “developed” most brutal of methods. “During the Nazi rule, I would occasionally tell my wife ‘I am Germany’, to help us both keep a common ground. Such a claim makes sense only in its context. Taken out of context, or transferred to another, it becomes unbearably arrogant. (…) Politically, it is pointless. My wife and I were in agreement, even when she rejected this claim. I am not a German in any way which is different from her.”[6] “A common German ground” which the two inappropriate, persecuted Germans of such a Germany had clung to, in order to survive the horrific transformation of “patriotism”, was neither the state territory extended through planned mass murder, nor the racial “purity” strived for, or anything else contained in the imperialist plan of the Reich. For Jaspers and his Jewish wife in the anti-Semitic Germany “common ground” was the humanity by which they, simply, “were Germans in the same way”, human, pacifist, represented in the same way German culture, language, conscience.

After the most horrific statistics of deaths and crimes, ethical reactions of most of the perpetrators rarely follow. Belief that reality will confront evil, unfortunately, usually remains on the level of Socrates’ intellectualist delusion that virtue can be learnt and the moral optimism of Hannah Arendt that the conscience of the majority will confront the very absolute of human misdeeds. If today, after Auschwitz (but also Srebrenica), delusion and hope make more sense, it seems that evil is more resilient as well. Not just the act of evil, but also the rational justification of evil. There is no local, just a universal experience of evil: “Anyone who wishes to declare that Auschwitz is a German specialty, a product of a hypothetical German soul, takes away any significance from this discovery.”[7] But the optical illusion performed by “intellectuals” placed in the service of the nation, is often more detrimental than the crudeness of the politicians.

Nationalism is an anti-urban philosophy as, historically, the city, was the starting point of the civil state: “The simplest (definition, a remark by the author) is that the city is a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet.”[8] A cosmopolitan City, as a community of people of urban spirit, is, at present, the only idea of our civilization which in its definition includes the Other. “‘The city’ and ‘civilization’ etymologically have the same root. A civilized behavior implies treating others as foreigners and creating social ties at this social distance. The city is the human settlement in which it is easy to meet foreigners. The public geography of the city is institutionalized civility.”[9] When the City becomes a place from where strangers are expelled and the Other is marked as historically, nationally, and otherwise deficient in involuntary ways, it is practically shown that neither Nazism is a German specialty nor is our hypothetical “soul” in any way immune to it.

Philosophy and the Nation

With the “intellectualization” of the policy of nationalism and wars, the area of FY has once again balkanized itself in the generally accepted, derogatory sense.[10] By returning to the old national borders, the so-called “good (moderate) right” should have created a new, “more beautiful and older”[11] history and a different truth. The Area of the Nation became a territory, and not a living space. Along the seams of the intellectualized nationalist thinking, today one can see where the biggest battles were fought, how thoroughly life was destroyed and how one’s own death became exalted, while the deaths of others became easy. The awakened territorial pessimism reflected as discontent with the limits of one’s own habitat. And when the pre-reflexive cogito was fixed territorially, then started the work to awaken the territorial optimism of the masses, i.e. offer cause for a new war.

Using the example of late 18th century France, Denis de Rugemont states: “The distance between those in Power and human and natural reality, this spirit of abstraction, disdain for the feelings of civic duty, creates open room for state geometers.”[12] The entire adventurism of greedy cartographers ends up with the will for that which is beyond the borders, as the only thing-of-this-world which remains for the empowered and territorially blinkered “intellectual elite”. The theories went to the war first. (The sadism of intellectuals firing artillery shells on besieged Sarajevo inspired awe among those who expected their “heavenly nation” to get a pass into the other world – by means of precise sniper shots or random salvos of fire – killing in this world.)

The victory of the nationalist principle leads to the establishment of the “philosophy of nationalism”, and reduces different opinions to the level of apatridism outside the institutions, or just simply excludes them. (During the 1990s, departments of philosophy at the Belgrade and Zagreb universities were left without those who as were labeled as the Others, had to go to Other Places). When a philosopher, through his or her existence, does not honor the very basic lectures of his study of philosophy, he or she does not just violate some pathetic original meanings, but denies his or her own “ethical knowledge and messages.” Any reasonable, antiwar act was socially marginalized, which was expertly done by colleagues who were able to refer to the appropriate “truths” and thinkers. Lies articulated by intellectual elites are more devastating than those transmitted by raw political propaganda. A bullet is always fired easier with “historical justification”, and with that “justification” is easy to manipulate.

Eichmann was an extreme example of a mind that believed in the myth (Aryan) and the leader, and of incapability of individual thought: “… May 08, 1945, the official date of German defeat, for him (Eichmann, a remark by the author) was important, because,  above all, it had become clear to him that in future he would have to live and not be a member of this or that organization. ‘I felt that I would have to lead life without a leader, a difficult, individual life.’”[13]  Such lack of sense and such conviction in one’s own inability for initiative necessitate a search for a leader: “The more he talked, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely tied to his inability to think, more precisely, to think from the viewpoint of someone else. No communication with him was possible, not because he lied, but because he had been totally protected from words, even from the presence of others, and thus, from reality.”[14] Relieved from the burden of thought, man surrenders to the totalitarianism of the leader, the nation, the myth, everything that can protect him from the hell of life with himself and with the Other.

Politics and Philosophy without Ethics

Kant wishes the separation or even the opposing of ethics and politics (which took place in the modern age, especially with Machiavelli) to return to the path where to think politically does not imply thinking without morals; politicians, he claims, should be moral men, and not political moralists. The return to the paidea[15] in which ethics and politics would reunite would change the fashion of philosophy, politics, culture, art which have been left without ethics.

Today, many are guided by instinct for success and the wish to achieve popularity with the instinctive and not self-aware public. Working according to market performance means creating a public mood (even for war or truce, e.g.) and not public opinion. Thinking according to performance, e.g. in  a politically, financially or nationally desirable way, means adapting to the market, and vice versa, the mood of the market adapting to the idol, i.e. the authority it works for. “I think according to my efficiency to influence the public, therefore, I (successfully) exist”. This kind of performance often is irreversible.

The successful, as Nietzsche’s leveler of values, convince the masses of what is good, define what is beautiful, explain what is (their) greatest misfortune and fortune. They always win, as they are a few steps ahead of the masses and lead the game, set the rules and the conditions. They determine what is nationally good, beautiful and true – the three scholastic pillars which in the medieval spirit of the age were set by scholastic intellectuals (philosophers, theologians, rulers and behind-the- scenes politicians). But while those “truths” were once the privilege of only the learned “orders” today they are in public domain, and subject to public manipulation. “Even before we uttered them, our thoughts and realizations stopped being ours. Schpringer, who we had wanted to deprive of power, has deprived us.”[16] Similar to the “Super-Ego-Function of the Bild”, the Super-Ego the “built-up” Balkan politicians-warriors, media “thinkers” and intellectuals-models of the 1990s made their promotion in the area of the Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian wars.

Commercialization of “the national question” and public bidding of patriotic feelings demands seduction with style. The successful man is a stylist. A peacock has style and it is colorful. However, a war demagogue stylizes death. By crossing the idol of style with its erotic seductiveness, it makes the content and the motive of the message less important than the pleasure for the senses; the style addresses the senses more than the intellect, and this is why those seduced do not “check” the idea which it is promoting, just enjoy the sensation. Every war propaganda makes use of the formula “style for style’s sake” to easier incorporate thinking and “data”, arguments ad hominem and “holy ideas”, to hide in the blind spot of conscience in which makes it is easy to vote for someone else’s death. With the victory of that style in the area of FY, many lives were lost and many war volunteers and votes were won.

Political and Philosophical Manufacture of Death

Certain academic circles were the first to herald the last Balkan wars and the manufacture of death. They promoted its “justification”. Their role was important because the “philosophy” of media promotion of evil has all the attributes of science and demands managers who will present “the inevitability of violence” in the form most accessible to the (im)morality of the average man.

On the front lines, pacifists are always the most photogenic and favorite target. The most that today’s no-longer-a-war in the area of FY, can do for pacifism is to turn a blind eye. This does not mean that peace is not spoken of publicly, but that is mostly for economic, pragmatic, and foreign policy reasons…, for lack of ammunition; peace is still not needed as faith in peace and life.

Nations, as well as individuals, are prey to manipulations with miracles. Kant says that “thinking men” in their practical affairs do not concern themselves with miracles; they could be a matter of their faith, but not their business. Authorities, however, are very ambiguous with regard miracles: if it is necessary to believe in a nationally useful miracle (e.g. being a chosen people) it will proclaim, bring about, legalize possibility of it; but if the miracle were to benefit its opponent, it would be declared as something long ago impossible and illegal, an appeal for a revolution: “For this reasons wise governments have always granted the proposition, and indeed legally recorded it among the public doctrines of religion, that miracles occurred of old, but they not tolerated new miracles.”[17] Or, maybe, “small”, easy, plain, and non mobilizing miracles are permitted, but not “large” ones, ones difficult to perform, attractive for the masses and dangerous for the authorities. They do not take into consideration that “…for God no distinction of easy and difficult is to be thought of.”[18] State nationalism uses the myth of the miracle of the chosen people for its own purposes. For the poor, the unemployed, the isolated, being “chosen” is their riches. Asceticism (even involuntary one) makes for a good predisposition to spiritual calling.

“In all Western pioneer states founded on nationalism one the same, quite natural phenomenon can be observed – they are all based on the Judeo-Christian tradition. (…) The four Old Testament elements can be observed everywhere. First of all is the adapted idea of the ‘chosen people’ – each nation should be certain in the promise of salvation. This is then followed by the idea of the ‘promised’ and ‘holy land’ as the primordial homeland.”[19]

“The thinking elite” which produces the missionary omnipotence of one person and one authority, in the end, makes even itself obsolete, but this superfluity, as well as its own exceptionality, is maybe something to be masochistically enjoyed. However, the problem is not in its redundancy, to which, in the end, it reduces itself,[20] but in the reduction to obsoleteness of all others who do not belong to the regime. That is, they belong only in their obsoleteness. If God is one and only through his omnipotence which makes all other gods redundant, says Arendt, the omnipotent man becomes the only one, through the redundancy of all other men.

Mystification of one’s own past leads to a loss of national history. The obvious incompetence in these matters “deprives” the people of the right to write for themselves, and so this will be done by foreigners. “Regeneration (…) of the state with the help of geography,”[21] profane censure of any spiritual, legal, cultural and aesthetic content of the state, are equivalent to the “geographical religion” (Kierkegaard) which, according to the Danish philosopher, has stripped away from faith its spiritual foundation. Many have their “holy land” which is not within  their present “geography”; however, the sanctity of land can never be a valid reason for denying the sanctity of life.

Nationalism in Language and Aesthetics

Nationalism in its “mission” abuses language, aesthetics and the theory of love.

Language: An necessary instrument of any ideology of collective sentiment is false language. In war, hate language becomes principle ammunition of nationalism. It then proceeds to constantly give new meanings to the mother tongue and falsify words. Falsifying of meanings, this verbal substitution of photo-editing, influences those who are not “brave” enough to say what they are willing to shout in a crowd.

The period of culmination of nationalism in a society is the period of the greatest falsity of the mother tongue. Society then becomes “the fifth column” of its own language, and those, defending from the Other all that is national, dominate. No one else (not another nationalist, enslaver, globalist) can so expertly falsify someone else’s mother tongue and with sophist rhetoric change its etymology in the way that its archetypal, local user, can. Only someone with a good knowledge of the language can speak in a way so that a misdeed “becomes” a deed praised as a “national good” – as it first has to be reinterpreted into something acceptable. If the right to naming is the linguistic side of conquest conducted by the colonizers,[22] the right to re-name in one’s own language is a betrayal which colonizes it. The person who changes their own language for the sake of current political interests, will be difficult to stop in his other intention. Only hermeneutical objectivity saves language from every interest including the nationalist interest. Because language defects affect the entire ethnical, intellectual and general system of thought, and values of a people.

You cannot have notions of good and evil, says Kant, unless you previously determine the morality (moral laws and principles). Nationalism says the opposite: the notions of good and evil are determined nationally, depending on national needs. This is why from the pluralism of nationalism stems the (inter)national relativisation of the notions of good and evil, the ethical contradictio in adjecto. In its highest ideological registers of seduction this is the rhetoric which argues under the false name of patriotism.

Aesthetics: The similarity between morality and esthetical power of judgment is usually overlooked. But: “…moral feelings, the ability to determine the subject, I say, is still so similar to the aesthetical power of judgment and its formal conditions, that it can serve to present the legitimacy of the act which stems from duty as at the same time aesthetic, i.e. as sublime, or also beautiful, while not losing anything of its purity…”[23] Ugliness dressed up in kitsch, propaganda-wise, advertisement-wise attains the greatest glory in times of the greatest social crises, far from the kalokagatia as the initial similarity of moral feelings and esthetic sensitivity.

“Social relations can be aesthetic relations because they share a common root. This common origin lies in the child’s experience of play. Play is not an art, but it is a kind of preparation for a kind of esthetic actions, the kind which is realized in society, if certain conditions are met. (…) Losing the ability to play means losing the sense that situations in the world can be shaped.”[24] Among its state interests, state policy must include those that are moral-esthetic. It has no will for that because as Kant himself had realized, beauty is what is liked without any interest, while interest for good exists in the moral feeling, but not even that is done “out of interest” (even of the state).

Can the placing of its moral-esthetic image before the post-war multinational the area of FY change or dramatize the fact that the Nation, personified in the national state, has departed both from both the ethical and the aesthetic conscience, and that there is no universally acceptable (civil) ideal and utopia for which the people would want to live? Would the citizens of the “poleis” of today’s, postwar Balkans feel the need for recovery of morality and imagination (except for the material and psychological); the need for the ethic-esthetic imperative which would change the nationalistic transformation of patriotism into a humanism of co-existence? In regard to the dramatic question of the conscience, the majority is still silent. When there is no shame, regret, responsibility, and justice, there are no ideals. And without ideals, postwar peace is just the result of an accidental event, a tiredness of the warriors or simply a (involuntarily) signed peace agreement. An ideal, actually, should become a political category par excellence as something “not real, but the basis of haw the reality should be judged” – Fichte.

“The unawareness” of the committed crime is unconscientiousness. It is a moral choice to be uninformed about crimes that are happening anywhere, especially in one’s own yard. In the era of mass-media “not being informed” is hypocritical. The esthetics and ethics of the 1990s, the ugly (caricature, kitsch, making-up like a clown) and crimes denied state, political and in the end human life in the area of Former Yugoslavia. While false myths wrote the “ethics” of nationalism, the popular rise of such an ethics created its “esthetics”. Passion towards kitsch kills physically the first time, and the second time by “cultural indifference” towards the victims.

Theory of Love: Nationalism finds it difficult to accept that the Other has a different “national love”. And: “Only one mistake in the theory of love is sufficient to reverse the entire establishment of civilized policy and morality,”[25] says Furie. When nationalism fulfills this sufficient condition for error, then love leads it to theories and territories of hate.

While the uneasy conscience of Europe, through its most profound and most deeply conscientious minds, questions itself, it reexamines the “European Humanity” (H.G. Gadamer). Nationalism, however, is not interested in ethical self-reflection. In the consciousness which views itself as an absolute, there is no place for the Other and his absolute individuality. In fact, the nationalist is a par excellence war profiteer, profiting in peace from fear of war, and in war from the very fact and drama of it. He is someone who is a parasite on his universal enemy, the Other. And whoever builds his animosity on nationalism, also has no other reason for friendships. His creation of enemies and friends always comes with territorial pretensions.

The relation between patriotism and nationalism is characterized by Johann Huizinga as a relation between love and hate. Patriotism is an emotional and spiritual state, passion and sentiment. Accountability preserves it from hate towards the other Nation and the public, distasteful proclamations of “love”. But the more evident and resolute is the nationalism in a society, the more misused is its patriotism. “If true love is characterized by the fact that it takes more than it gives, then the true patriot tests his/her own sentiment. (…) Just by fulfilling their patriotic duties citizens do not express love. Only when the homeland is in danger, giving becomes sacrifice, servitude – endurance, and loyalty – love. The world is again, and in a touching way reminded of what a true, well thought out, determined patriotism is capable of.”[26] Today it seems even more disturbing to what the false, reckless “patriotism” born from the spirit of nationalism is capable.

The Murder of Socrates in the Balkans

The first escape of thought from the “mindlessness of politics”, Hannah Arendt sees in Plato’s despair because of the death sentence which the Athenian polis imposed on Socrates. There are, however, times when opposite things happen, when, besides the politicians, ideologists, nationalists, the philosophers and “intellectuals” themselves condemn Socrates. Socrates and the Socrates’ amongst themselves. This happened in the area of FY. Philosophy was officially promoted by those who had condemned it in advance, by condemning the freedom of thought, especially pacifist thought.

On behalf of their Nation, certain philosophers, ethicists, aestheticists of the FY, had lobbied, all of them with reputation for interpreting “European Values”; everyone had his promoters of “ethics” and “aesthetics” of war, which resembled a moral-intellectual “squaring of the circle”; the naïve persuasion that everyone is worthy of his understanding, and that the knowledge of good automatically implies one’s own abstinence from evil, and that a (good) ethicist must be a good man. It seems morally self-evident that an ethicist, under no (national) conditions, can call for terrorism.[27] This belief in the innocence of reason brings us back to Socrates’ misconception that virtue can be learnt. Unfortunately, virtue can be un-learnt. There is an acquired ignorance, such as, for example, the acquired moral ignorance (un-knowledge), explainable only by a voluntary personal decision. For example the intention to morally argument the “inevitability of just this one more war”. An ordinary man, who has schooled his virtue on his own – learning that the difference between good and bad is just like the difference between his left and right hand (Kant), sometimes faces the (historical) situation to defend from the terror of the learned and to uphold his moral feeling in front of the quasi-philosophically based “war ethics”, which is definitive proof that not everyone is worthy of his knowledge.

After Kant’s categorical imperative, there is Adorno’s one: “Thoughts and actions should be determined in such as way, that Auschwitz or anything similar to it can never happen again” became another cornerstone of humanity. The culpability of crimes is ontological proof of the existence of the only moral being on earth. But while the media space of the FY was brimming with kitsch and indifference, Auschwitz was repeated Balkan style as tolerating crime become almost totally acceptable.

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Describing the circumstances in London and Paris in the mid 19th century, Richard Sennett writes how, out of fear of public discourse and rebellions, authorities had passed laws forbidding communication between workers in public areas; so they began to get drunk, either for real or pretending, in city pubs. “Among the workers in the 1840s there was an expression boire un litre (‘to drink a liter’ of wine); spoken out loud before an employer, it meant that the lads were going to cover up with a drink in the pub. There is no reason for concern from the socializing; drink will make them incapable of talking.”[28] Speaking about the situation in the Balkans at the beginning of the 21st century, Nerzuk Ćurak notice the forced abstinence from the decade-long drunkenness. Syntagmas such as “greater Serbia”, “greater Croatia”, “greater Albania”, “greater Bulgaria”, etc. “fortunately have no important geopolitical and geostrategic content (anymore, remarked by the author). This is why only the would-be-strategists at local pubs may deal with these questions, because ‘futurist constructions can be verified only in a world where nothing important happens’ (H. Arendt).”[29] The danger to the nations of the area of FY comes first and foremost from themselves, and not from the international community which, even with all the mistakes it made, cannot supply such an alibi. Certainly not with the theories, philosophies, memoranda and outbursts of intellectualized nationalism. A dictatorship of nationalism of the FY has lead to anatomical geographical fragmentation whose consequences will have greater sway over the souls, attitudes, sorrows and biographies of citizens of each of the newly created states carved out from the one that has disappeared, than any government ever could. And these, at the same time are the consequences of the intellectualization of dictatorships and nationalisms.

Literature:

Arendt, Hannah, Ajhman u Jerusalimu (Eichmann in Jerusalem), Samizdat Free B92, Belgrade, 2000

Ćurak, Nerzuk, Geopolitika kao sudbina – Slučaj Bosna: postmodernistički ogled o perifernoj zemlji (Geopolitics as Destiny – The Case of Bosnia: Postmodern Essay on Peripheral Country), Faculty of Political Science, Sarajevo, 2002

De Rugemont, Denis, Budućnost je naša stvar (Future is Our Issue), Književne novine, Biblioteka Kristali, Belgrade, 1989

Encensberger, Hans Magnus, Flamanski prozor (Flamanian Window), Lapis, Belgrade, 1994

Encensberger, Hans Magnus, Ogledi (Essays), Svetovi, Novi Sad, 1994

Huizinga, Johan, Patriotizam i nacionalizam u Evropskoj istoriji do kraja devetnaestog veka (Patriotism and nationalism in European History by the End of 19th Century), Prometej, Novi Sad – Tersit, Belgrade, 1996

Hobsbawm, Eric, Ranger Terence (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 1983, translated into Serbian by Slobodanka Glišić and Mladena Prelić, Biblioteka XX vek, Belgrade, 2002

Jaspers, Karl, Pitanje krivice (Question of Guilt), Samizdat Free B 92, Belgrade, 1999

Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man, Faber and Faber Limited, London 1986, transleted into Croatian by Srđan Dvornik, Naprijed, Zagreb, 1989

Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, Nacionalizam (Nationalism), Svetovi, Novi Sad, 2002

Alexandria, 27.03.2007.

Peščanik.net, 07.11.2009.

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