Austrian administration in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The most pervasive processes that shaped the society and history in that period were:

• --the definite re-inclusion of Bosnia-Herzegovina into the European cultural and political milieu. Since 1878. BiH and its nations are a part of the European order, their destiny tied to European ideologies, conflicts and geopolitical designs.
• --the final crystallization of Bosnian-Herzegovinian Croats and Serbs, from ethnical/religious to modern political entities, or from peoples to nations, integrated into the national corpus together with their compatriots outside of BiH. Considering that the most nations of the Middle, North and East Europe have undergone this process in the post-Napoleonic period (the most intensely around 1850., with the exception of Scandinavian nations, Finns and Norwegians, whose national renaissance has had the apex in the second half of the19th century), the Croats and the Serbs of Bosnia-Herzegovina were "latecomers", with the delay of circa 50 years. However, once initiated, the process of national crystallization and homogenization turned out to be irreversible. Anguished over the separation from the Ottoman empire and faced with an alien, Christian and Western, imperial authority, the Bosnian Muslims reacted in two ways:

a) a part of them (according to some estimates, circa 100,000 people) moved to Turkey for good

b) the rest of them have reluctantly acknowledged the Austrian suzerainty and tried to get along with it, either by insisting on the preservation of the status quo (the majority of Muslim gentry), or by accepting/succumbing to the Western-style modernization

• --during that period, three national ideologies (among which two of them turned out to be quasi-national) "struggled for the souls" of the Croats, Serbs and Bosnian Muslims:

a) the first was the ideology of the already established nations, the Croats and the Serbs. Along with massive lining up of the BH Croats and Serbs into their respective "national encampments", the Bosnian Muslims have set out on the trek (one might say a trudge) for self-identity: the major part of educated classes accepted the Croatian national ideology; the lesser part conformed to Serbian national mythology, while the rest of the intelligentsia and the majority of the common people stayed aside, feeling in their bones the unbridgeable separateness and distance from both Croats and Serbs, but nevertheless unready to transform their budding aspirations into articulate political and national programme of modern type (although they have succeeded in creating a separate political party as a sign of their permanent (but semi-conscious) desire for actualized national identity).

b) since 1882., the Austro-Hungarian administrator of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Hungarian historian Benjamin Kallay, was attempting through a methodical policy to enforce the term "Bosnian", which would, supposedly, have "covered" all the BiH inhabitants and served as the crucial catalyst in creating the Bosnian "nation". Practically, this was manifested in funding the pro-Bosnian publications, as well as in interdicting or suppressing the Croatian and Serbian national associations. However, this "nation-making" project, operated in an administrative manner, with Muslim aristocracy as the head office of the entire enterprise, was doomed to failure from the outset-- all attempts to negate and uncreate the already established nations (Croatian and Serbian) in Bosnia-Herzegovina, resulted only in heightened tensions. The 1910. elections, which turned into the "enrolment" of people into their respective national camps/parties, have only confirmed the failure of the Bosnian quasi-national programme. Historically, it is an interesting phenomenon that ideology identical to Kallayism resurfaced as a Bosnian Muslim ultra-nationalist option at the end of the 20th and the beginning of 21st centuries. This shows that bizarre political schemes/ghosts come back to life in altered circumstances when, according to all rationalist criteria, the ideological scrap is buried together with its creator, in this case the Habsburg Monarchy.

c) the ideology of Yugoslavism, or the South Slavs unity, originating primarily in the circles of Croatian intelligentsia (bishop Strossmayer, historian Franjo Racki et al.), has passed through many mutations. From romantic idea of linguistic-cultural communion of the South Slavs, encompassing the national lands of the Slovenes and spanning to the Bulgarian soil, through the Realpolitik strategy of the Croatian politicians at the beginning of the 20th century (Supilo, Trumbic), to the smokescreen of the megaserb expansionist territorial drive (similar to the idea of Pan-Slavism as a Trojan horse of the Russian czarist imperialism)- Yugoslav ideology became dominant among a tiny fraction of the Croatian, Serbian and Muslim younger intellectuals. However, what was lacking in numbers has been amply compensated with feverish activity. The vision of a future happy and harmonious Yugoslav state which will have naturally absorbed all of the existing "Yugoslav" nations, and liberate the "tribes" of the Croats, Serbs, Slovenes and still fuzzily defined Bosnian Muslims from the hated Austrian yoke has become: (one, numerically insignificant but historically decisive, branch) the guiding ideal of the fledgling activists, who have speedily accustomed to the assassins and terrorists role, and (another, more pragmatic branch) a contradictory political programme of the Croatian and Serbian politicians in the Habsburg Monarchy.

• --the moderate modernization of Bosnia-Herzegovina (the beginnings of industrialization, reforms of the school system and social relations,..), intended for keeping BiH as a separate, self-sustainable administrative unit within the frame of Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, but without radical measures which could break the balance of relations in the Habsburg Empire. The general backwardness (less than 15% of urban inhabitants, social and national antagonisms (from the tally of 85,000 serf families, about 60,000 of them were Serbian, and 25,000 Croatian. The number of Muslim serfs was negligible)) had been blocking the implementation of even reluctant reforms. The Habsburg Monarchy had not dared to carry out the agrarian reform (which would mean taking away much of the fertile soil from the Muslim aristocracy, which has in the course of time, (ab)using the pragmatism and opportunism of the Vienna Court, evolved from an adversary of Austro-Hungarian Monarchy into one of the pillars of Austrian administration).
• --the strenghtening of the Serbian kingdom, especially after successes in the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), as a client-state of the Russian Empire fuelled the antagonisms between great European powers. Also, Serbia's financial support of rapidly radicalized pro-Yugoslav secret society "Mlada Bosna" ("Young Bosnia") and the assassination of the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo, have resulted in World War I and the collapse of Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.
  
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