Bosnia

The breakup of socialist Yugoslavia clearly provided a spur to the writing of English-language histories of Bosnia. Of the three volumes being discussed here, two – those by Noel Malcolm and by the team of Robert Donia and John Fine – were published more or less simultaneously, while the volume by Mitja Velikonja was published nearly a decade later, and lists the two aforementioned works in its bibliography. The volumes by Malcolm and Velikonja include full bibliographies, while the volume by Donia and Fine includes a set of recommended readings in English.

No doubt Donia and Fine had been driven to the brink of despair by the constant repetition in the press of the inane notion that the peoples of Bosnia had been hating each other for thousands of years, i.e., even before they came to Bosnia, because they make a point, early in the book, of stating, ‘despite its ad nauseam repetition in the international press, nowhere do we find evidence of the alleged centuries of hatred (whether religious or ethnic) among various Bosnian groups that has supposedly permeated their history’. They drive home their point by asserting further that the peoples inhabiting Bosnia never went to war against each other until 1941, though they concede that there was some religious persecution in the final five years of the medieval state.