ABSTRACT
From Derry to Mostar, as the crow flies, is nearly 2,300 km, or just over 1,400 miles.1 West Ulster and Herzegovina, respectively dominated by these two cities, are sufficiently set apart not to have affected one another in the historical record. The same is true for the regional polities within which the cities now sit, Northern Ireland and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which have very different pasts of imperial subordination. Ireland has had just one great power as its subjugator, whereas Bosnia has been controlled by many. In classical antiquity, Ireland was never governed by the Romans, but from the twelfth century the English sought to subdue their neighbour. Irish resistance was eventually shattered after a second and more decisive colonisation in the seventeenth century. Three rebellions and re-conquests, marked by mass atrocities, put the island firmly under British Protestant control. Ireland’s national story is therefore one of imperial conqueror and re-conqueror, albeit under different dynastic houses, state names, and official religions: first Catholicism and later Anglicanism. The story is complicated by settler colonisation and the partition that accompanied partial decolonisation. Bosnia’s legacies, by contrast, flow from very different imperial regimes, led in turn from Rome-Byzantium, Istanbul, and ViennaBudapest. It has few Protestants: its population is mostly a trifecta of Roman Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims – and atheists generated by all three communities. The Roman and Byzantine empires governed what is now Bosnia for over a millennium – initially within the province of Illyricum, and later of Dalmatia. The Banate of Bosnia was a vassal polity of the kingdom of Hungary in medieval times, but by the late fourteenth century Bosnia began to be conquered, almost as slowly and incompletely as the initial English conquests of Ireland. Eventually, however, Ottoman rule established itself for centuries and did not end effectively until the Congress of Berlin of 1878, occasioned by the Russian empire’s defeat of the Turks. This was the first but not the last time that Bosnia and Herzegovina became the subject of an international conference. Its administration was handed over to the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. This transformed version of the Habsburg empire governed Bosnia, in a novel manner, as a condominium. Technically the congress upheld Ottoman sovereignty, but lingering respect terminated in 1908 when Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, shortly after the young Turks revolted against the Porte. Today’s
Bosnia is a condominium of the European Union’s 28 member states, and like their Austrian and Hungarian predecessors, they pretend to respect Bosnia’s formal sovereign. Determined investigation yields historical similarities between Ireland and Bosnia. The spilling of blood in war or in feuds, though not distinctive to either place, occurs to the unkind outsider. The locals have certainly historically excelled at producing soldiers. The Irish Protestant pacifist Hubert Butler noted that, ‘the Croats were known as great fighters and formed like the Irish Wild Geese a specially-devoted corps famous for their loyalty to the emperor of Austria-Hungary’.2 He quipped that,
The Yugoslavs are, like my own nation the Irish, among the least pacifist people in Europe and at the best of times it would not be easy to persuade them that liberty could be won or maintained except by fighting.
