Table Of ContentInterdisziplinäre Studien
zum östlichen Europa
Schriftenreihe des Gießener Zentrums Östliches Europa
(GiZo)
Herausgegeben von
Thomas Daiber, Andrea Gawrich,
Peter Haslinger, Reinhard Ibler, Stefan Rohdewald
und Monika Wingender
Band 4
2017
.
Harrassowitz Verlag Wiesbaden
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Dino Mujadžević
Asserting Turkey in Bosnia
Turkish Foreign Policy and Pro-Turkish Activism
in Bosnia
Actors, Discourses and Textual Corpora
(2002–2014)
2017
Harrassowitz Verlag . Wiesbaden
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The research for this book and its publication was made possible
by the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung.
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ISSN 2364-7892
ISBN 978-3-447-10871-3
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It is great to have a rediscovery of the great Ottoman traditions, but one should avoid the
temptation to define the foreign policies of contemporary states in terms of civilizations and
mythologies. We are all modern states in a highly interdependent world, and we have to work
together.
Timothy Garton Ash, Hurriyet Daily News, 5th April 2012.
The hidden power of media discourse and the capacity of ... power-holders to exercise this
power depend on systematic tendencies in news reporting and other media activities. A sin-
gle text on its own is quite insigificant: the effects of media power are cumulative, working
through the repetition of particular ways of positioning the reader, and so forth.
Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (London: Longman, 1989), p. 54.
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Contents
Introduction ........................................................... 9
Preliminary remarks ................................................... 9
Research topic ........................................................ 12
Previous research ...................................................... 13
Theoretical framework ................................................. 21
Other major research concepts .......................................... 25
Historical Context of Turco-Bosnian (Muslim) Relations ..................... 28
Ottoman Empire and Bosnia ........................................... 28
Post-Ottoman Bosnia .................................................. 34
Kemalist Turkey ...................................................... 46
Bosnian and Sandžak Muslims in Turkey ................................. 51
Turkey and the Bosnian war (1992-95) .................................... 53
Actors Promoting Turco-Bosnian Relations in Turkey ........................ 63
Socio-political role of Islam in Turkey: an overview ........................ 63
The Islamic political movement ......................................... 67
Sufi groups ........................................................... 76
Pro-Turkish actors in Bosnia .............................................. 86
Overview ............................................................ 86
The Turkish state ..................................................... 88
Economy ............................................................ 94
Bosnian Muslim conservative political scene .............................. 99
Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina (ICBH) ................... 107
Sufi groups .......................................................... 116
The Hizmet movement in Bosnia ........................................ 123
Education ........................................................... 127
Media ............................................................... 129
Bosnia in Turkish Foreign Policy Discourse ................................. 132
Ideological transformation of Turkish foreign policy discourse (1980-2002) .... 132
The AKP foreign policy discourse ....................................... 137
Bosnia in Turkish foreign policy discourse: 1992-2014. ...................... 150
Pro-Turkish Discourses
of the Bosnian Muslim Conservative Scene ................................. 165
Overview ............................................................ 165
“Preporod” (2003-2014) ................................................ 169
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8 Contents
Turkish and Bosnian perspectives: the Menzil and Hadžimejlići ............. 199
The Hizmet movement in Bosnia ........................................ 206
Pro-Turkish Discourses
in the Mainstream Bosnian Printed Media.................................. 210
Research procedure .................................................... 210
Sources .............................................................. 213
Quantitative analysis .................................................. 214
Qualitative analysis ................................................... 215
Turko-Bosnian diplomatic relations ...................................... 217
Conclusion ............................................................. 239
Sources ................................................................ 245
Bibliography ........................................................... 247
Abbreviations .......................................................... 262
Index .................................................................. 263
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Introduction
Preliminary remarks
Turkish foreign policy under the AKP (2002 – 2014) has shown a great deal of interest in
Bosnia and Herzegovina and has managed to establish its influence in this Balkan coun-
try. Turkey’s official and unofficial foreign policy activities pertaining to Bosnia have
been heavily influenced by the presence of a large Muslim population (almost 50%) and
by the Ottoman cultural heritage in the country, as well as by perceptions of the 1992-
1995 Bosnian war. The Islamic conservative political scene in Turkey, from which the
AKP emerged, has long used Bosnia for its own purposes, primarily as a potent symbol
of Muslim persecution and the destruction of the Ottoman heritage, often employed for
mobilizing support among Turkish conservatives. The government has ever since it came
to power in 2002 been striving to acquire the role of Bosnia’s protector and to forge spe-
cial relations with Bosnia. Nevertheless, available data show that the supposed Turkish
special interest in Bosnia stays limited within the space of classical diplomatic efforts
and public diplomacy projects, mainly in the area of culture, with economic cooperation
lagging hugely behind. 1 On the other hand, a large part of the Bosnian Muslim popula-
tion and elite, worn out by the war and the post-war economic stagnation, have eagerly
accepted and supported the notion of special relations with Turkey, in which they saw
a possibility for the affirmation of the Bosnian Muslim identity, as well as for political
security and economic prosperity. For example, the statistics of meetings of members of
the Bosnian state presidency, which represents the three major ethnic groups equally,
show that its Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) members met with Turkish representatives
disproportionately more than their Serb or Croat counterparts. 2 The enhanced activities
of Turkish governmental and non-governmental actors in Bosnia aroused a considerable
level of controversy in some regional circles and started a great deal of, often very wild
and politically motivated, speculation on the nature and extent of the Turkish presence
in this country. 3 Media interest in and academic research on recent Turkish foreign
policy and conservative cultural trends has increased in the past years as a reaction to
the remarkable economic growth and very active, influential and visible Turkish involve-
ment on the world stage, mostly in the Balkans and the Middle East. Researchers have
1 Politička romansa: odnosi između Turske i Bosne i Hercegovine (Sarajevo: Think Thank Populari
2014), available at http://www.populari.org/files/docs/410.pdf, accessed on March 10, 2016.
2 Politička romansa, pp. 28-29.
3 See the account of previous research within this chapter.
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10 Introd uction
shown much interest in the concept of so-called Neo-Ottomanism, which is widely used
to describe the new cultural and foreign policy paradigm of the ruling establishment in
Turkey and emphasizes the Ottoman and Islamic heritage as one of the cornerstones
of policies in these fields. These aspects of Turkish foreign policy have received much
attention from researchers, albeit predominantly within the political science approach,
aiming at an analysis of day-to-day politics. The systematic study of the discourse driv-
ing Turkish official and non-official foreign policy coordinated by the ruling AKP es-
tablishment is still in its early stages, especially when it comes to discourse analysis,
network analysis or similar theoretical frameworks. These theoretical approaches are
increasingly gaining ground in the fields of contemporary history and political science,
to which this research project belongs. This book will be the first attempt to study the
discourse of Turkish state and non-state actors and its adaption by local actors in Bosnia
within the field of contemporary history. Besides adding to the analysis of this discourse
and the actors producing them, this study will contribute to the analysis of the cultur-
al dynamics among Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose ongoing processes of
ethnic identity formation seem to be impacted by contemporary Turkish influences. In
this book, I suggest an approach to Turkish foreign policy and pro-Turkish activism in
Bosnia and Herzegovina that transcends the limits of these definitions and avoids the
essentializations implicit in the term “Neo-Ottomanism”. Instead of viewing Bosnian
Muslims as merely the objects and consumers of Turkish discourse and politics, as well
as minor players in the network disseminating them, I will rather look into their agency
potential in this non-Turkish context and their reactions and local adaptations of the
originally Turkish discourse, extending the original network by various autonomous
sub-networks of local pro-Turkish actors. Furthermore, I will consider the interaction
of foreign and local discourses and their role in the current constructions of cultural
identity formations of Bosnian Muslims by identifying the local actors of the discourse
along with Turkish state and non-state actors.
The study of discourse legitimizing Turkish foreign policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina
has a special meaning in the context of relations among EU countries, the Republic
and Turkey, as well as between the EU and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Current Turkish
foreign policy is usually seen as a reaction of the Turkish conservative political and in-
tellectual elite after the rejection of Turkey’s EU bid, but also as a product of a cultural
transformation within the Turkish elite that led to the greater acceptance of the Islamic
and the Ottoman cultural heritage. After gaining power with massive popular support
in 2002, the AKP elite was able gradually to create and impose an alternative foreign
policy. As a former Ottoman territory, Bosnia and Herzegovina, war-torn, politically
fragmented, economically unstable, far away from the EU accession process (according
to local self-perception “forgotten by Europe”), and inhabited to a large part by Bosnian
Muslims, is naturally open to Turkish influence. The discourses of both the Bosnian and
the Turkish conservative scenes, the main actors in this rapprochement, heavily rely on
the Ottoman legacy, which provided the general framework of communication. This re-
search could add to the understanding of the inner dynamics, mechanisms and contents
of this discursive phenomenon and its actors, all of which could potentially affect the fu-
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Preliminary remarks 11
ture attitudes towards the EU in Turkey and in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In addition to
purely political and economic influence, the Turkish presence among Bosnian Muslims
and other Muslim groups displays strong cultural, educational and religious features.
This book is the final outcome of a postdoctoral project funded by the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation, which was hosted at the Chair for the Ottoman and Turkish
History of Ruhr University (Lehrstuhl für die Geschichte des Osmanischen Reichs und
der Türkei an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum) combined with a three-month research
residence at the Institute for History in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and two
months at the CASS at the Lancaster University. The Humboldt fellowship provided me
with an excellent research environment and funding, without which this book would
not have been possible. During my stay at the Historical Institute of Ruhr University
Bochum, I developed the necessary knowledge on critical discourse analysis and the
corpus approach. Additionally, during the related field-work in Bosnia I gained crucial
insights into the so-called Neo-Ottoman tendencies in Turkish foreign policy, as well
as into the overall Turkish conservative discourse and the power structure behind it. At
the CASS of Lancaster University, the leading research institution in this field, I learned
a lot about the application of the corpus methodology - especially the related software
tools – for the purposes of historiographic research. As a result of my growing interest
in the corpus-assisted approach, I embarked upon convening the first-ever academic
event on digital (data-driven) historical research into Southeast European and Turkish
history, which took place in June 2015 at the Centre for Mediterranean Studies of the
Ruhr University Bochum and was funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
This was the first occasion I presented my corpus-assisted research results on main-
stream printed media in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 4 Also, it is worth mentioning that
I was enabled to conduct this study by a command of languages as well as other relat-
ed knowledge. I can use primary and secondary sources and communicate in English,
German, French, and, most importantly, Turkish. As I undertook research and spent a
significant amount of time in Turkey, I am familiar with the cultural environment and
political situation in that country. During my fieldwork in Bosnia and previous research
stays in Turkey and elsewhere, I have developed contacts with Turkish and international
scholars of contemporary Turkish history, as well as some representatives of the Turkish
conservative scene.
I would like to thank my host in Bochum Markus Koller as well as my hosts in
Lancaster and Sarajevo, respectively, Tony McEnery and Husnija Kamberović. Special
thanks go to Armina Omerika, Maurus Renkowski and Ivo Banac.
4 For conference see http://www.zms.rub.de/mittelmeerstudien/mam/downloads/program_data_
driven_research.pdf, accessed on March 10, 2016.
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