Establishing a nation at the ethno-regional level is a recipe for all future conflicts, and unless a civilian model of the nation in the Western Balkans is accepted, conflict is inevitable, said international relations expert Zlatko Hadzidedic. Addressing the media ahead of the start of the session of the Association of Independent Intellectuals “Circle 99” on “Nation and Conflict in the Balkans”, Hadzidedic said that the concept of a nation in the Western Balkans was completely opposite to that of a nation in the rest of the world and that in the Balkans the nation was derived from religious identity.
He emphasized that the ethno-religious model of a nation necessarily leads to conflict, because a permanent division can never be established that will fence peoples based on ethnic characteristics and identities, because the interaction is always present.
“But if you view a nation as an identity derived from religious or ethnic identity, you must expel all members of other ethnic or religious identities in order to ‘create’ that nation,” Hadzidedic said.
He stressed that conflicts in the Balkans will never cease unless that existing form of the nation is overcome, Klix.ba news portal reports.
