A few years ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Marc Benioff, one of today’s most important business innovators, asserted that every country serious about its development should have a ministry of the future. That he wasn’t exaggerating much is confirmed by the practices and policy tools applied by today’s most developed countries, from strategic forecasting models, developing different scenarios, anticipating various development models, ex-ante analyses, all to create long-term development strategies.
Of course, this probably doesn’t sound like reinventing the wheel to anyone, as scientific and technological discoveries and their spread have never occurred at a faster pace in history, which clearly has enormous and immediate impacts on modern social communities.
Meanwhile, in our region, over the past decades, there has been much talk and attempts to deal with the past. This is undoubtedly very important given the recent tragic history of these areas. How successful this has been is a topic in itself, but the focus here is on the disproportion in relation to how much attention has been or is still being paid to facing the future. It’s as if the future has been forgotten. Someone summed up this situation well by noting that in the Balkans, the past is more uncertain than the future. This actually implies that the past is, paradoxically, a very changeable category that shifts and adapts to the needs of ruling elites.
That the past is alive and present even in daily political discourse is easy to verify for the average media consumer. And this includes even the distant past, while the recent past is actually the present we’re living in, as in Tanović’s brilliant film “No Man’s Land” – when they discuss who started the war. One of the recent examples showing that even the distant past isn’t distant enough to avoid being misused, and if you will, even sullied, is the dispute over whether Tvrtko was a Serbian or Bosnian king, which was followed by a competition between Sarajevo and Banja Luka over who would build the more faithful and authentic monument to him (with or without a building permit, irrelevant).
Of course, it’s pointless to explain to anyone who has read any serious historical literature that it’s completely meaningless to talk about nations and states in the current sense of these terms and project them into the Middle Ages. But this naturally didn’t prevent a months-long debate between prominent ethno-political entrepreneurs, who hold important public offices, on this topic. Can anyone imagine, for instance, a discussion between political office holders in European countries on such topics? Neither can I.
Or another example, it’s enough to look at any ethno-nationally conscious media outlet to see that in the news, almost every day, the most important place is occupied by news from the past, namely commemorations of battles, sufferings, crimes, and so on… attended, of course, by the highest political authorities, ad nauseam.
And then there’s education and history textbooks, what tragic and irreparable damage they do to those most vulnerable – children, about which Dubravka Stojanović recently published an excellent book – “The Past is Coming.”
So, thanks for asking, here the past is more alive than ever, and not only that, here the past is ideology, the dominant narrative, the source of legitimacy for ruling oligarchies, of course a better past, both glorious and heroic and sublime, and the present is what it is because others were out to get us, and only by constantly returning to the past can and should we oppose them. Not even the most temporally distant battles are far enough away that we couldn’t fight them again with even greater fervor.
For such ideology and source of legitimacy, democracy isn’t the happiest solution or is at best a necessary evil. Because democracy as a system is oriented toward the future with deep foundations in liberalism, individual rights and freedoms, while here we need an imagined tradition and collective imagination of some past golden age, which truly never existed but that doesn’t prevent us from continuously “mantrating” about it.
Such an approach to reality, of course, has its extremely high price for society and the majority of citizens, and enormous benefits for the chieftains and shamans of ethno-national groups.
The ancient Greeks came to the realization summed up in the phrase panta rei, meaning that everywhere and always the only certainty is change, which can be counted on without a shred of uncertainty.
Related to this is another very important thing: if you don’t deal with changes or lose sight of the inevitability of change, that doesn’t mean change won’t deal with you, or that its effects will bypass you. But what will happen in that case, with a high degree of certainty, is that you will be mere objects of changes, which sometimes appear in the form of whirlwinds or torrents, and sometimes gradually, almost imperceptibly, until their effects become too obvious to ignore.
For illustration, it’s enough to look at our relationship with climate change or the environment; perhaps it’s too ambitious to talk about digitalization or artificial intelligence.
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s society is a very good example of what happens when you keep your head in the sand. Completely trapped in the past, without social awareness that in the past thirty years of our involution, the world and our surroundings have dramatically changed, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s society has become a living petrified monument to social narrow-mindedness and general backwardness.
Now, at least we in this region know the truth of that saying that things are never so bad that they can’t get worse. Unfortunately, when we look at trends, such as how we treat natural resources and environmental protection, or the speed at which the depopulation process of these areas is occurring, then this saying has an even more ominous ring to it.
But as the poet once said, “if we have fallen, we were prone to falling” into a better past or future, of course it’s always up to us.
