Youth and History in Contemporary Bosnia

In November and December 1999, I visited about 40 schools all over Bosnia and Herzegovina. The aim was to collect a sample in which the three groups were equally represented, as their separation is the present reality. Moreover, the inclusion of each group provided an additional analysis level within the Bosnian country sample. Thus, the sample can be characterised as an "intelligent convenience sample" using the terminology of the Youth and History research project of the mid-1990s (Magne Angvik and Bodo von Borries, eds., Youth and History: A Comparative European Survey on Historical Consciousness and Political Attitudes among Adolescents, 1997). Different sets of strata were also used, such as ethnic criteria, socio-historical and geographical criteria, in other words, the schools were chosen using the background information about the wartime events in the area and about the current social standing of the area. Thus, the sample would include as many socio-historical faces of Bosnia and Herzegovina as possible. For these reasons, the sample can also be characterised as a stratified sample. The portion of my study presented here focuses upon pupils' ideas regarding 'nations' and `national states,' and the table below reflects the types of questions that were asked. The first three items are definitions of nations while the other three deal with the role of a nation in the past and in the future. Such questions are more complicated in the Bosnian case since the pupils are likely not to think that a nation equals a state based on the reality of their home country. While some of the items conflict with one another, none clearly contradicts one another