Welcome back to The Voices of War. Across the world, we are witnessing overlapping crises in Gaza, Ukraine, and again in the Balkans, each seemingly distinct, yet all echoing a deeper systemic breakdown. Economies are fragmenting, alliances are hardening, and institutions built to preserve order from the UN to the EU appear increasingly paralysed. At the same time, nationalism has re-emerged as the defining force of our age, from Washington to Moscow, Jerusalem to Banja Luka, national identity has once again become the primary language of politics, mobilising populations, manufacturing loyalty, and at times justifying atrocities. But what if this isn’t a coincidence? What if, as some argue, capitalism and nationalism are not rivals but partners, two sides of the same system, each sustaining the other? What if the nation-state itself is the mechanism through which capitalism maintains control, redistributes anger, and legitimises inequality. To explore these questions and more, I’m joined by Professor Zlatko Hadžidedić, one of the Balkans’ most perceptive political thinkers and the founder of the Centre for Nationalism Studies in Sarajevo. He argues that nationalism is not a relic of a bygone era, but a structural necessity of modern capitalism, the very glue that holds societies together in prosperity and tears them apart in a crisis. This is not a conversation just about global events, but about the machinery beneath them—the hidden logic shaping our global disorder. Professor Hadžidedić is speaking to us from my birth city of Sarajevo. Thank you very much for joining me on The Voices of War.

Thank you very much for having me.

So, professor, I want to start by exploring your principal theory. You’ve argued that modern capitalism cannot function without nationalism—in other words, that the nation-state isn’t just historical but structural. Can we start by having you explain that framework for our audience and how it has shaped your worldview?

Well, in the first place, I would like to correct you. It’s not just modern capitalism. Capitalism by itself is modern, but it refers to all capitalism since its arrival in, let’s say, the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. It has been clearly associated with nationalism.

There is a structural problem with capitalism for which it requires some kind of intervention, which I believe is to be found in nationalism. The structural problem with capitalism is that it has a kind of self-destructive mechanism built into the very structure of the system. This mechanism is about creating an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor.

Capitalism is created in such a way as to promote a divisive social order in which the rich always gain more and the poor are getting poorer. It is something which is simply a structural necessity. In order to overcome this problem which makes the entire system… well, let’s say, not really self-sustainable—it is something which denies sustainability to the very system, because if you have an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, eventually you get some form of uprising among the poor, some form of instability. It becomes socially unsustainable.

And for that purpose—to overcome this unsustainability—capitalism needs something which you have already mentioned, needs some kind of social glue. This social glue is to be found in nationalism. Nationalism is an ideology which promotes the idea of equality of all the citizens despite the fact that some of them belong to the class of the rich and others to the class of the poor. But the very ideology of nationalism promotes the idea that they are all equal, that they all belong to the same group, that they all share the same interests, that they belong to the same nation.

And it’s a kind of social glue that actually creates an illusion among the masses that they have no division between those at the top and themselves at the bottom—that they all share indeed the same interests and can normally live together within a single unit labelled as the nation; that this nation is the bearer of sovereignty; that they are all bearers of sovereignty; that it is not simply granted to those at the top, that it belongs to all of them and that, as such, the nation has the right to constitute its own state. Moreover, I used the term “nation” on several occasions, but I will particularly promote it in one forthcoming article defining the nation through the Kantian lens. It’s called like that.

The nation is actually a social formation constituted and perpetuated by a myth of its inherent right to sovereignty. It means that this kind of social formation, in order to actually come into being, needs to claim sovereignty. So the myth that I was referring to is a founding idea; but on the other hand, in order to actually come into existence the nation needs to claim sovereignty, and this very belief in common sovereignty that belongs to all the citizens within a single nation is what constitutes a nation as such. And nationalism is an ideology that spreads this kind of belief among the population—and especially among the potentially rebellious masses—and prevents them from actually coming into any kind of state of rebellion or uprising against the system, no matter how poor they may become due to this divisive economic system which permanently widens the gap between the rich and the poor.

Some might—yeah, sorry.

Of course, nationalism also serves some other purposes. It serves as a geopolitical tool as well. It’s a kind of instrument to stabilise society from within, but it also creates a specific geopolitical order. It creates the world of nation-states. Prior to that—prior to modernity, prior to capitalism, to the arrival of capitalism—we had the world of empires, and empires had a very different concept of statehood which was basically based on the idea that all the subjects had to be loyal to the ruler rather than to some abstract system and that they just had to pay tax to the monarchy, to the empire, without any kind of relevant consideration concerning their identity—whether they were ethnically the same, religiously the same, and so on. There were empires which were based on religious domination, but nevertheless the idea was to have more territory and more subjects who would be paying taxes to the ruler.

So it was a completely different system from the system of nation-states. And eventually the nation-states practically fractured—or, to be more precise, national revolutions which created nation-states practically fractured—all the existing empires except for one: the British Empire. In my view it really implies that it was the English Empire, the British Empire, that was spreading the very idea of the nation and nationhood to the rest of the world in order to actually dissolve other empires without having to fight wars with them. In that way it served a particular geopolitical purpose.

Mm.

We have to know that the only empire which was not dissolved in national revolutions was the British Empire. It only contained one national revolution—that was the American Revolution—but otherwise the British Empire dissolved itself, unlike other empires which were dissolved by national revolutions and the creation of nation-states.

Mm.

So nation-states were a way to fracture competing empires. And it implies that the British Empire was actually spreading the very ideology of nationalism—but not overtly as nationalism, but rather implicitly under the cover or under the umbrella of another ideology, which is called liberalism. Historically liberalism served as an umbrella for the spread of nationalism into these absolutist empires which were competing with the British Empire. And we have to know that the first national revolution took place in England and that the very idea of the nation was created in the English Revolution in 1648. Then it spread to America—to the US—and the American Revolution, and then to the French Revolution, and so on, but it was practically globalised in the next two centuries. That’s why my book has the title Nations and Capital: The Missing Link in Global Expansion. That refers to the expansion of capitalism, but also to the expansion of nationalism under the umbrella of liberalism.

Right, and I want to get to some of those more geopolitical issues, certainly in the discussion, but I just want to bring it back to what you said at the start—that it’s by design self-destructive and that it’s ultimately a structural design. But some in the audience might say, yes, but capitalism has by any measure increased the welfare of the world writ large. In other words, that it’s come with prosperity despite the certainly evident now growing link between the haves and the have-nots. And some nations, perhaps Northern Europe, the Scandinavian countries, have fought against the kind of growing disparity, at least up to a couple of decades ago. And of course we fully well know the famous adage that capitalism is the worst system except for all the rest. So my question to you is then: is there anything positive in capitalism? And also, are there alternatives that we can turn to?

Well, I leave it to the capitalists, you know, to find positive aspects of capitalism. What you were referring to was actually something which belongs to the late phase of capitalism, not even to the main phase, which was in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century you didn’t have these social elements or socially constructive elements—especially not these interventions of state that you have in Scandinavian countries or in Germany or in some other countries in Europe. And it’s very questionable whether you might properly call them capitalist countries. For example, Norway is a country which I normally tend to refer to not as socialist but rather as communist, because that’s precisely what Karl Marx was describing as communism: that you work as much as you can and that you receive as much as you deserve. And that’s the principle on which Norway is based as a political system, as an economic system, and so on. So Sweden, of course, Finland, even Germany—I tend to call them socialist countries. It means that capitalism was gradually introducing a social element to the extent that we actually have countries and economies and systems which are no longer purely capitalist. Perhaps the only purely capitalist country these days is the United States of America, where you simply don’t have these interventions by the state on behalf of the entire population, where even when Obamacare became a huge issue, where healthcare as such is not being recognised as a human right, and things like that. That’s a kind of pure capitalism still.

But in the nineteenth century there were no such things. Capitalism was about taking by the rich from the poor as much as they possibly could and the creation of a system which would be able to extrapolate as much wealth as possible. So these kinds of social interventions, as I would call them, they all come after the Second World War with the existence of the Soviet Union as a competitive system.

The communist or socialist system in the Soviet Union required some form of Western intervention in their own societies to make people attracted to their own systems rather than to the Soviet one. So whenever people are talking about these elements in capitalism, I just warn them to talk about real capitalism.

Mm.

— which is the nineteenth-century capitalism. What you were referring to is the welfare state, the Keynesian welfare state; it was constructed precisely in order to actually balance the attractiveness of the Soviet communism, which was preaching equality for everyone, and there were many people who were attracted by this idea.

Hmm.

— regardless of the fact that they were living in the capitalist societies, or perhaps even more so because of that. So capitalist countries after the Second World War had to adapt to the fact that they had a competing system on the other side, and they adapted to it by introducing elements of social intervention.

Interesting. So is it fair to say therefore then that that was an adaptation of the capitalist system—to introduce the welfare state—in other words, to make the masses, as you rightly pointed out at the start, you know, the myth of the nation-state and the story, and I think you refer to in your work to Benedict Anderson or the imagined communities—as intended, that a flag all of a sudden represents this group of people and they start believing it. So is it therefore then that, as part of the competing system, the welfare state was introduced as a way to make the capitalist system more attractive? But then, of course, post-’91, as the Soviet Union dissolved and as it’s commonly referred to, communism was defeated by the West, that we see the gradual decline of this welfare state, which was of course needed to seduce the masses in a way. And now we’re seeing that has slowly been degraded.

Not even gradual—it was a real neoliberal revolution.

Right, right, right. Okay, so as in post-the fall of the Soviet Union, you mean it was the neoliberal revolution with the kind of globalist agenda and moving capital around the world to exploit, as many would say, labour in cheaper countries, therefore driving higher profits, which is something of course that people like Trump are trying to counter at least in the narrative, certainly not in reality, but it’s this whole idea that the world has opened up. And whilst the nation-state or those living in nation-states, certainly those making a profit will keep their money in the prosperous parts of the world, they will have their factories further afield where labour ultimately is much cheaper.

Yes. Sure, that’s a fair explanation. But I would point at the fact that capital was free for moving since the very beginning. The very beginning of capitalism meant that capital was free to move. And paradoxically, capitalism introduced nationalism, the notion of the nation and nation-state, in order to keep the masses at bay.

So the masses were kept in their places—both hierarchically but also spatially. They were kept in their places, whereas capital was moving freely. That’s the ultimate reason for the existence of nations, nationalism and nation-states: in order to have the system in which capital gains additional advantage over labour, where labour is blocked spatially and politically and legally, whereas capital is free to flow to any part of the world.

Borderless. Is the EU then an attempt to, at least in its original design, liberate that labour mobility? Because ultimately, once you’re in the EU, once you have an EU passport, you can work anywhere in the EU. Was that an attempt to try and open the borders to liberate the movement of labour, not just capital?

Perhaps. I’m not sure what they actually meant by the EU at the very beginning. In the very beginning actually it was about the movement of capital, and when it was totally free for capital, then labour got some degree of liberty to move. But even if you put that, the EU is just a huge gigantic nation-state by design. Again, you have the same relationship between labour and capital. You have instead of, let’s say, ten million people living in one political unit, you have several hundred million people living in a particular unit, but capital is also totally free to move beyond the borders of this very unit. So capital within the EU is not kept within the EU—it is still free to move wherever it wants to.

Right. So is there an alternative?

Sure, there is an alternative—especially when we are talking about the current type of capitalism. It’s something which does not even resemble capitalism from the past. I prefer to call it hyper-capitalism, what we are living in. Because the exploitation is elevated to such an extent that this gap between the rich and the poor has widened to such an extent that it cannot even be controlled by common nationalism as it used to be—nationalism which may coincide with liberal-democratic principles. Therefore we have the rise not of populism, as people wrongly in my view label it—it’s not the rise of populism; populism is just a method of communication with the masses, it’s not a system—but we have the rise of authoritarian nationalism instead of the formerly democratic nationalism which characterised the previous form of capitalism. Let’s call it common capitalism, or past capitalism, whatever we want to. But the current one—hyper-capitalism—needs authoritarian nationalism because the gap between the rich and the poor is so big that it cannot be controlled by nationalism without an authoritarian regime. And therefore we have not only Donald Trump, but we have Modi in India, Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey. If you like, we may call Chinese and Russian leaders authoritarian nationalists as well—they are clearly authoritarian, that’s not the question; I would just put in question whether they belong to the same tide as these ones that I mentioned before. But at the end of the day, I believe that in the next 30 years the world will consist of authoritarian nationalisms and authoritarian nation-states, that we will no longer have democratic states whatsoever.

Precisely because of the fact that now we have hyper-capitalism rather than common capital. I just want to—that is quite nuanced and quite profound. And I’ve used the term hyper-capitalism myself in parlance, as jargon, quite often. I live in Australia, as you know, and I’m getting a sense more and more that this idea of capitalism is morphing indirectly, non-consciously in our daily lives. We all live on our phones; we’re glued to it. You know, that’s a—in a way, I don’t know if it’s by design or not, but it is a method of control because your phone, right. And coupled with that are the things like Amazon, streaming services—we don’t need to leave our house anymore to engage with the world around us. It almost feels to me that, and again, I’ll take your thoughts on this, about the design piece of it, or if it’s a natural evolution in some sense of the system that we’ve, I guess, embraced.

It’s a product of neoliberalism.

There’s a consumption—or hyper-consumption—of goods and services that can now all be done, certainly in a country like Australia, from our very homes. In other words, it seems to me that it’s profitable, beneficial for us to be kept in our little lane—stay at home, go to work, go to school, come back, engage as much as you can with consumption, whether it’s TV shows on Netflix or whether it’s buying anything you want within 24 hours on Amazon. Sydney is well known for this, certainly amongst people of my age, that pubs and bars are being completely essentially closed because there are so many restrictions and limitations on people engaging and meeting. And I wonder if this is—and in fact I want to then link that, because that’s what you’ve done so well—to the idea of nationalism. But where I don’t quite understand is how this system of capitalism, hyper-capitalism, you identified, how that transitions through populism—as you explained, is merely a wrong use of the term—but then morphs into nationalism. So in other words, we’ve got this global financial crisis all around the world, certainly in Australia we feel it every day, and that’s giving rise to what many describe as populism, and you don’t use that term. But is that what we see as the manufactured rise of nationalism, which then also gives birth to, of course, and we’re seeing it all across the West at least, the rise of authoritarian-light at the very least—at the beginning of leaders who then morph into much more power for the state to enforce, as we’re seeing in the US: use of military on home soil, etc.? Is that the kind of gradual transition and therefore one sustains the other? Forgive me if I didn’t make a lot of sense there, but I was trying to rationalise the thinking in my head.

Well, I got your point, but I would reply with something which I put as a subtitle within my book. Actually, the title of the second part of the book is No Capitalism Without Nationalism.

I think that capitalism cannot survive without nationalism precisely because of this self-destructive mechanism which is built into the very system, and that simply some kind of globalist projections that for some time were present within neoliberalism proved to be incorrect—that actually globalism could not create any kind of single state, single unit within which there would be full control of the population, of the tendencies among them, and so on. And that eventually this kind of hyper-capitalism which was either intentionally or unintentionally created—I believe intentionally, but let’s take it as unintentionally created—eventually proved that it cannot be supported by anything less than authoritarian nationalism.

That’s the point. When you have something which is so robust as present-day hyper-capitalism, it needs to be supported by something which will be as robust as it is—and that’s authoritarian nationalism. I think that’s a structural necessity. Donald Trump is a structural necessity. We can talk about the group of people behind him, whether they belong to this lobby or that lobby, whether they are gaining their influence and wealth over IT or AI or this kind of or that kind of wealth creation. But the point is that eventually this kind of hyper-exploitation that they have introduced into not only American society but into most of societies in the world requires a kind of mechanism that is going to adapt the population to such a system—to make the population positively responsive, so to speak, to such a system. Consumerism is not enough.

Hmm.

You can sell things to the people, they can enjoy spending their money on this and that and so on, but nationalism is something which puts them into a single unit, which promotes common interest. Let’s put it this way: consumerism creates separate individual interests, or separate individual interests are actually something which results in consumerism. But if you want to create any kind of illusion of common interest you need nationalism.

Hmm. Hmm.

And in order to create any kind of collective loyalty to the state, to the system, to the ruling elite, you need nationalism. And nationalism plays the role in classical capitalism, and now we have authoritarian nationalism that plays that role in hyper-capitalism.

Yeah, yeah—that nationalism and capitalism and authoritarianism and hyper-capitalism, I mean, they’re part of the same story. Ultimately it’s just, you escalate one and the other one matches, which also really rings true when I think about the idea, certainly in Western nations, of the American dream, the Canadian dream, the Australian dream, which is again a myth. You know, we know through research—and I think, I forget the author now, Michael Sandel—he put out a book about the illusion of meritocracy, which is part of that same myth, right? That we’re meant to believe that if you work hard, you can make it. But then he shows through research—I think in the US it takes six generations from memory; I might have to check my own quote on that—but it takes six generations to go from the lowest income bracket to the highest income bracket. In Australia I think it’s something like three or four, which is part of the idea that if you work hard, if you dedicate yourself in this system, you can make it. But then there’s also the reality that people objectively live higher quality lives in this system. In other words, the things that we use to measure the quality of a human life—life expectancy, child mortality, whatever the metrics that show us that the human animal is flourishing in a particular area—which is then why it makes it so difficult to really take capitalism and say, well no, capitalism is exploitative, we should change it. And I wonder whether you’ve—I’m sure you’ve wrestled with that question—but how do we cross that bridge, the cognitive leap that’s required to say to the people, to the masses, that, hold on, you are being exploited because you’re not getting your fair share and you’re working to enjoy a good life, you’re just working, you’re perpetually in debt with a bank and so on. How do we bridge that gap?

Well, that’s very difficult because, you know, they will immediately proclaim you a communist. And the problem is that things which preach or advocate equality are immediately, instantaneously called communism. Now we have under the authoritarian nationalism, as we have already experienced in the last couple of months in the US, we already have the case that all the people who require any kind of change—in the sense that, well, even if they require that the constitution of the US is to be respected, nothing else—they are treated as terrorists. Or there is some invented notion of “radical left.” There is nothing left. There is nothing left out of left here, you know, and these days they are inventing some radical left which does not exist in reality, but it doesn’t make any problem for people around Donald Trump to claim that there is radical left and therefore there should be a military intervention against them as domestic terrorists, as the enemy within, and so on. So yes, I mean, I don’t even know whether such things do exist in reality. They probably don’t. They are just marginal organisations which don’t really create any kind of relevant political influence.

Antifa, which is—yeah, yeah.

So now we live in the age of extreme authoritarianism, I would say. Because in the past, even in the ’30s, during fascism and Nazism, it’s not popular to compare the current systems with those ones. But I would say that the current ones are even more extreme in the sense that they do not require any kind of legitimacy for what they are claiming. They are simply claiming things and they simply create events out of their claims which don’t have to have any kind of foundation in reality. So you don’t have to have any left or Antifa as a real organisation in order to bring the military to the streets of the US. In the past, in the ’30s, you had to legitimise every move you made.

I mean, that’s right.

Even antisemitism had to be—even the Holocaust had to be—legitimised even by false reasons and false claims, but it was meant to be legitimised by pseudo-scientific arguments. These days you just say, well, those people who are against me, they are terrorists. Let’s bring the military to our streets and let’s eliminate them. That’s the world in which we live right now and that’s something which is expanding. It’s not something which is temporary, I have to warn. It’s not just the US; the whole world will probably be like that for the next 30 years.

Yeah, it’s interesting and I think we’re seeing—yeah, no, I totally—yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, yeah.

The US is just the most spectacular example, the most drastic example. But otherwise, that’s something which awaits us in any part of the world, wherever we go.

Hmm. And I also find it interesting in relation to the US. I mean, there’s obviously a huge split now between the right on the right side of politics as well, with the MAGA right having its own little split, certainly over Israel and Gaza in particular, which of course is putting a lot of political pressure on Trump. But it’s also, you know, making people like Netanyahu come out and call them the “Woke Reich,” which, you know, is slightly paradoxical because it’s just another enemy. It’s another enemy that’s undermining a particular position. And also I would like to turn here and pivot here to some of the more global events. How does this apply, the lens that you’ve elaborated on, how does it apply to a place like Israel and Gaza, West Bank, Palestine writ large?

What you see—the central issue at stake—is whether there will be a Palestinian state or not. The so-called two-state solution. And Netanyahu was quite explicit that there will be no two-state solution. And again, it is about the nation-state. Israel was conceived as a nation-state for Jews, but actually it is becoming a nation-state not even for Zionists but for Zionist extremists—or fascists or racists, if you like. Whatever you say about Netanyahu they will immediately say that you are antisemitic, despite the fact that Arabs are also Semites just as Jews, you know.

So I don’t see any gain in eliminating Arabs and supporting Jews and saying that something is antisemitic if you just put a question on whether Arabs should be eliminated altogether. But I would warn about one…

Which is the irony, especially given the fact that most of the Zionists are from Europe.

It is something which belongs again to the British Empire. The Balfour Declaration is something which clearly established Israel—that’s something which everyone knows. But on the other hand, there is something which not everyone knows or is aware of, and that’s the fact that the British actually promised the Arabs, the Palestinians, their own nation-state, provided that the Palestinians helped the British expel the Ottoman Empire from Palestine—which they did—but in exchange they have never got their nation-state.

So again, we have the story about nation-states, nations and nationalism. It is interesting even when you look at the Palestinians: they are almost the only Arabs who are actually not called Arabs; they are always called Palestinians. Why? Precisely because they have this kind of national identity, which is not a racial identity or ethnic identity belonging to all Arabs, but they have developed this kind of national identity. And on the other hand they have failed to achieve their own nation-state.

They were duped by the British—I have to use this word; I have no better one—and eventually they are still suffering from that very event that took place at the same time when the Zionists were promised the nation-state and eventually got it. So we still have the consequences of what the British Empire created there—again, this geopolitical game: who is going to serve better their purposes?

It is about having some kind of British branch within, or pro-British branch within, the Middle East, and they decided that the Zionists would play this role better than the Palestinians so far. Perhaps tomorrow they will decide they prefer Palestinians, and then you would see the opposite picture probably.

And that was handed over to the US then.

A huge support for Palestinians instead of the support for Zionists—but so far the Zionists were perceived as former Europeans who would promote European culture, European geopolitical way of thinking, and eventually British geopolitical interests within the Middle East, where we all know huge reserves of oil are present, and that’s why it is so important to control the area.

And eventually what you asked me was about how this refers to my theory, and I would simply say that I have already stated the main directions of how that refers to my theory by simply saying that we have oil there, that capital is interested in oil, that they have to control the area and the extraction of oil, that they have to have their own branch of power within the Middle East where this oil lies, and so on. And then you have the picture of something like Israel—no matter whether they are Jews or not. You have a geopolitical project which controls the Middle East. And it is branded as a nation-state; it is constructed as a nation-state with extreme nationalism as the main determinant.

So what do you make of the peace deal then—Trump’s alleged peace deal, 20-point peace deal—which, you know, let’s hope at least it stops the killing. That’s the first step. And today’s the 10th of October; it was signed yesterday by all parties, apparently. So let’s at least hope that it stops the killing. But afterwards, what are we seeing? And we’ve got Trump in charge of the—what is it—the peace… not the peace committee. And of course Tony Blair is going to be heading up this committee.

Yeah, that’s a caricature, really. You have a Viceroy. Right, like in India.

Hmm.

You have an Englishman controlling the area, which only proves what I just said—that it was initially and has remained to the present day a British project. Donald Trump tried to distance himself from Netanyahu, and that’s why he pressed for this kind of peace, but on the other hand he’s not a principled man, as we have seen. So he’s also trying to appease the British by installing Blair as the commander-in-chief. So he’s simply trying to—as far as I can see—he’s trying to distance himself from extreme Zionism and from those extremists in the US who have been pressing him to support Israel and Netanyahu without any reserves. So let’s see; perhaps it will succeed to some extent. The US is a strong power even under Donald Trump. But I still think it’s just a kind of, you know, cosmetic distance that is being made between Donald Trump and the Jewish community in the US. Or, if you like, the most extreme Zionists in the US. Some say there are Christian Zionists and there are Jewish Zionists in the US, and he’s been pressed by them to support Israel without any reserves, and he’s trying to make a distance. Whether this distance is really good enough for any kind of peace to become sustainable we shall see.

Hmm.

Personally I don’t believe in that. There is also another possibility—that they are both preparing to actually attack Iran, or for war with Iran, and that they need some kind of ostensible peace in Gaza for that matter in order to organise their infrastructure for the future war with Iran. So these two possibilities are at stake, I would say. I don’t see a third one. Perhaps they work together.

I recently interviewed Trita Parsi, who you might have come across, and yeah, he’s absolutely adamant that an attack on Iran is an absolute necessity because what Israel has achieved in June—in fact, they haven’t achieved what they wanted to achieve.

Quite the opposite—they were defeated.

Which is not what we hear generally in the mainstream discussions. Certainly not by the superlatives that Trump uses—that they’ve obliterated nuclear arsenals and so on. Just more on the—yeah, of course.

Actually, if I may intervene, I strongly believe that actually Trump cheated Netanyahu. Netanyahu tried to draw the US into an open, all-out war with Iran, and Trump did the opposite. He just bombed Iran for a single day without actually destroying anything, but created an atmosphere in which the cessation of the conflict would become possible—so as to please the Israelis. I don’t know what they promised to the Iranians, because if I were in the Iranian place I would definitely continue the war, because Iran destroyed almost half of the Israeli economy and many military sites. It would have taken them probably not more than ten days to entirely defeat Israel. So they must have been promised something by the US for having accepted that kind of agreement.

Well, I suppose the US would also—there’s enough support for Israel in the US that had Iran tried to pursue further destruction, that the US might have been compelled to enter that war in defence of Israel. As we know, I mean, it’s not publicly discussed, but Israel had run out of Iron Dome missiles. It was, as you said, another few days and the story would have looked very different, which perhaps would have then compelled and forced the US in many ways to then react, which ultimately is not what Iran wants either.

So it was a kind of fraud by Donald Trump, I would say.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

But it doesn’t mean that they will not be, you know, drawn into a new conflict a couple of months later.

Yeah, especially at the back of a peace in Gaza. But one thing that I want to pick up on—and perhaps others in the audience will pick up on this as well—you’ve said that the Palestine or the Israel project, I guess, continues to be a British project, which may come as a surprise; it certainly is to me to an extent, because I would have thought that project was transferred ultimately to the US, which has been an existential supporter of Israel financially, militarily, diplomatically, in every single way. Whereas, you know, the UK has recently also recognised Palestine, Palestinian statehood. So can you elaborate on that a little bit more?

I mean the series of recognitions of Palestine came at the point where Palestinians were on the brink of extermination. So I would say that it was rather cynical on the part of the European powers. As for the transfer to the US—of course many things have been transferred to the US, but rather in a physical sense. The US became a protector of Israel in military terms, protector of Israel in financial terms and in many other ways. But on the other hand, the British ideas, British geopolitical ideas about the control of the Middle East—they have remained British. Recently Jeffrey Sachs, a great economist, said something very interesting, and I agreed with him very much. He said, you know, the US has never tried anything else but to be a copy of the British Empire. That’s something which says much, you know, coming from an American.

Why is that? What is the copy? I mean, as in, you mentioned earlier that it was—yeah.

Geopolitical—in the sense of geopolitical logic—it is still the logic that was introduced by the British geographer Halford Mackinder in his famous or notorious, depends how you judge it, article The Geographical Pivot of History published in 1904. There you have the idea of the control of the Eurasian landmass through creation of permanent instability and so on. And the US has adopted a lot of those ideas from Mackinder’s article. The US has adopted the idea of control of the world’s seas in the first place and the idea of controlling the Eurasian landmass through creation of local conflicts. That is something which is primarily British, and the US has adopted these views, and this kind of geopolitical logic is still present.

It is only that the US has become really huge in the sense of weapons, in the sense of marketing, if you like, advertising—that people don’t really recognise what is behind, what kind of ideas lie behind. And the British have done their best to promote the US as the only global superpower—to hide themselves behind in whatever they do.

Some people who were witnessing what was being done in Ukraine, for example, they say also that the British intelligence and the British military were playing the main role in the creation of conflict and in pushing the Ukrainians into a war with Russia—a proxy war with Russia—that the US was only a supporting power in the whole game. And there were many places like that where you clearly see that there is a British influence, but they are doing their best to actually put it behind, to hide it, to actually promote the US as the only power. And eventually it gives results: people do believe that it is only the US which governs the world. But I have to warn that the British Empire controlled the entire world for 300 years or so and that they didn’t disappear just like that—they simply transformed the form of their power into something else. And they transformed their own overt military presence into something else, into American military presence, but otherwise they are mostly the ones who have some decisive influence on the US foreign policy about what is to be done in particular parts of the world.

There is an entire generation of people—I mean several generations—of American politicians and diplomats and people from intelligence who are trained to think in a way that was originally British. And that’s something which people from these professions, some of them are aware of, but the people who just read the news or watch the news are rarely aware of this relationship—of this, let’s call it, cultural influence. It might be called differently, but let’s call it cultural.

Yeah. Well, it’s also known as more formally as the Five Eyes community. You know, as I might’ve alluded to in my intro, I was an intelligence officer in one of those in the Australian Defence Force. That speaks a lot of truth to me in the sense of the common worldview—certainly not to the depth that you described it, and that’s certainly not the dominant narrative or even part of the thinking within a place like the Australian Defence Force, certainly not at, you know, the kind of mid-ranking levels where I was. I just want to turn back to one question on Gaza. Given what we’ve talked about—nationalism and capitalism and the link—why has that not encouraged the creation of a Palestinian state? Because ultimately, you know, by the theory and the thinking, it will be more beneficial to have it as a nation-state and therefore a capitalist nation-state and so on. So there must be a counterweight; there must have been the alternative, which is not having a state, is for some reason preferred. What would be that preference?

Because not having a state actually means instability. And instability is the key factor in British geopolitics that I have already mentioned.

Okay. Has its own benefits. Yeah. Yeah.

If they had two states, they would have had, you know, a stable situation more or less. And Israel would not be what it is—the leverage which helps the Anglo-American axis to control the Middle East.

And I mean, I think we—yeah.

So stability is not something that is desired, to say the least.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, we’ve seen it for years, but again, it kind of pops in and out of any kind of mainstream discussions—you know, the plan to attack seven nations by the US after the September 11 attacks and so on, all of which have been attacked and dismantled. And the last one remaining is Iran. I think it was General Wesley Clark that was the first one to put that out in the public domain. But again, it hasn’t really caught much attention. But it’s quite obvious if you actually look at the kind of progress of how that’s occurred, whilst many will still cast it out as a conspiracy theory. But that’s the kind of world we live in. I’m conscious of our time, and I really do appreciate yours, but there are two more themes that I don’t want to miss. And you’ve already alluded to Ukraine and Russia. But my question here really is at a geopolitical level: is Russia a threat to Europe? Because we’re seeing Europe—I mean, if you listen to European leaders in Germany, in many parts, in Poland, in many parts of Europe—they’re at war. And of course European Union leaders as well are saying that, I think the statement was, we are not at peace with Russia, which therefore means that we’re certainly at war or something very close to war.

Well, that means that they are a threat to Russia. That’s what they claim. Not me. Not me, you know. The point is, of course, there is a degree of Russophobia which has developed. But on the other hand—

Explain. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah—which is part of keeping that tension alive, right? That you mentioned before—you know, it’s important to have an enemy, to create your national sense of self, you’ve got to have an “other” to exist against.

Yes, sure. Especially right now when the US is withdrawing into the Western Hemisphere. And as it is doing so, then Europe needs to become a new geopolitical factor fighting Russia. And now they are becoming the factor that is proclaiming itself an enemy of Russia or someone or something exposed to the threat by Russia, and so on. So this kind of enmity or hostilities being created in order to promote new conflicts—they are clearly needed.

Why? Why are they needed? Because the risk is to all.

The whole industry—that is capitalism. The best business is war. Perhaps finance and financial speculation is more efficient than war itself, but still probably you can still earn a lot on war. And if you take these two things—if you take the military industry as a branch of industry—you see that people earn enormous amounts of money precisely on war or even just talking about war. You don’t even have to have a real war like in the Cold War, for example. We never had a real war during the Cold War; they were just talking about the possible war and the military production was flourishing and some people were gaining a lot from that.

Now that makes absolute sense. I mean, yeah, from the narrative of war is strong enough oftentimes to induce exuberant spending on weapons and weaponisation. And I see that in my own experience from a lot of my peers—the relationship between the military and the military-industrial complex is incredible. I mean, it’s not even a revolving door anymore, it’s just next door. You know, and—but I also understand the incentives of my peers who’ve served in the military for 15, 20 years, and, you know, with that comes a certain lifestyle, one that’s quite challenging on the family. You’re moving every couple of years, you’re deployed, you’re overseas, etc. Whereas you can double your income oftentimes, perhaps even more in some instances, and stay in the one city, just work for a company that supplies weapons or builds weapons or does analysis or whatever it might be. So the incentive I completely understand, which is absolutely part of the system, which is the same incentive why it’s easier for me to pick up my phone and order Amazon—because it’s easy, it’s there. And again, it fuels the same part of the system. The penny’s landed for me as far as the dangers and the risks and the underlying key foundations and assumptions of capitalism, you know—that it kind of feeds itself, and nationalism basically gives it a boundary and makes you want to fight and ultimately die for it, as some of my peers.

And gives it fuel for fight.

Yeah, yeah, which makes absolute sense. The final theme I want to cover is of course my very own country, your country where you’re living now—Bosnia and the Balkans more broadly. What is the situation there now? And how does the—dare I say—the Balkanisation of the Balkans feed into, I guess, your overall theory, as well as the broader geopolitical machinations? I mean, the way I perceive Bosnia in particular is just a vent whenever necessary to elevate crises to an extent. I mean, we see Russia playing a key role in support of Dodik and Republika Srpska, which is continuously talking about secession and breaking apart of Bosnia and so on. But perhaps I’ll throw the floor over to you, also asking you to not assume many of the terms—even Republika Srpska, for many of the audiences—but perhaps to just take the extra second to explain what we’re actually talking about. Because many, certainly in the West, will not understand the intricacies and the nuances and the complexities of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Well, I would put it simply: the problem of Bosnia-Herzegovina is the fact that it has never created its own nation and its own nation-state. As such, it cannot survive within the world of nation-states. That is why some people, again from London, came with the ideas of the country’s ethnic partition. At the Lisbon conference in 1992, prior to the war, Lord Carrington, former British Secretary of State, Minister of Foreign Affairs, came with the idea to partition the country and with the maps of how to actually do so—to take Christian and Muslim population separately, to actually homogenise these communities and to actually territorialise their presence in three separate units, ethnically homogeneous units. And that’s something which happened before the war. If you ask me, that’s what triggered the war.

That’s why people started looking at where they actually belonged—to which territory they were; they started counting each other’s numbers, who is dominant where, and so on. That created tensions, and very soon you had preconditions for war. But the war itself was an implementation of the maps from Lisbon.

Hmm, interesting.

That’s something which is rarely mentioned, but that’s the sole truth, I swear, because I was an eyewitness of many things from those times. I was already involved with politics to such an extent as to know those things. So simply, they were negotiating how to partition the country, and the militaries during the conflict actually occupied the territories which were given to three ethnic groups at the Lisbon Conference. So the entire war was actually an implementation of these maps which were pre-negotiated.

And of course, war stopped once the maps—

To partition the country—ethnically partition the country—allegedly in order to prevent the conflict where we didn’t have any conflicts for centuries, except for the Second World War which was fought along some other lines; it was not an ethnic conflict.

And I mean, there were tensions, obviously, between the different ethnic groups. But I think you rightly pointed out—I mean, many will say that Tito, during Yugoslavia, managed to suppress that.

But you see, tensions did not exist prior to this pattern—prior to the introduction of this pattern. I was alive and well in the socialist times of socialist Yugoslavia, and people were living just normally—they didn’t pay attention to nationalism.

Of the nation-state? Which pattern? The nation-state? Yeah. Mm. Mm. Well, Yugoslav nationalism. Which is what? Which is the creation—

Even Yugoslav nationalism was something very flexible, if you like. You could have been a Serb, a Croat, a Bosnian, a Macedonian, and a Yugoslav as well. It was a socialist concept of a state, not a capitalist one again, where nation-state was not a must. As soon as Yugoslavia introduced capitalism as a system, we got nationalism automatically. That’s what actually helped me think about the whole concept of capitalism and nationalism and so on. Of course, Gellner and Anderson were linking capitalism and nationalism to some extent, but they were saying that nationalism was a kind of by-product of capitalism, not something deliberately created. I tried to change this perception in my book and to show that actually it was a deliberate creation.

And during the breakup and dissolution of Yugoslavia, with the introduction of capitalism, we immediately or instantaneously got nationalisms. All of a sudden national identity became relevant. Prior to that I did not really witness this kind of identity as relevant. People say, well, nationalisms were sleeping, you know—that is a popular phrase—but no, they cannot sleep; either you have them or you don’t. It was not a part of the public discourse. It was important to belong to the working class, not to a particular ethnic or national group. So that was something which dominated in socialist Yugoslavia. But with the influx of capitalism we got nationalist identities as the single most important thing. And given the fact that Bosnia didn’t establish its own national identity in the nineteenth century or afterwards—that it allowed nationalisms from Serbia and Croatia to be imported into Bosnia so as to transform Bosnian Orthodox Christians into Serbs and Bosnian Catholics into Croats, eventually Bosnian Muslims into so-called Bosniaks—eventually we got a situation in which a partition of the country became legitimate, so to speak. But still it was introduced from the outside; it’s not something which came from within. It is something which was introduced at the Lisbon Conference as a solution. Why solution? Well, obviously we didn’t have a nation-state—that was the problem of Bosnia.

As a solution to a problem that hasn’t happened yet.

It was an anomaly in the world of nation-states. Not being a nation-state in the world of nation-states is something which automatically eliminates you as a desirable factor. That’s why Bosnia had to be partitioned and simply ceded—I mean its part had to be ceded—to Serbia and Croatia, with the remaining part for Muslims. So that was the idea from Lisbon. And eventually we are still dealing with these problems—they are still present.

So what role does Bosnia play today?

If the country does not survive—and I truly believe that it can only survive with the rise or creation, if you like, of the Bosnian nation, so as to have all sovereignty concentrated in a single national identity—I believe that without the creation of the Bosnian nation this country cannot survive. Whatever the thoughts of the American policymakers who prevented its ultimate partition, who opposed the ideas from London—I have to say, the Americans were mostly opposing the ideas which were coming from London to totally partition the country. They didn’t care much what was happening within the country, but they were against the violation of the outside borders of the country. So basically the Americans were the ones who advocated the country’s survival to the present moment. But now, with their withdrawal from Europe, it’s very questionable what’s going to happen. We still have the same forces—be that in London or in Brussels—but we have them both, which actually simply want a form of partition of Bosnia as a kind of possible solution in their minds, because they have no courage to think—or I mean, in Brussels they have no courage, and in London they have long cooperated with Greater Serbian projects and so on, and Greater Croatian projects—so they don’t have a need to think about the creation of the Bosnian nation. The problem is that eventually the country will fall apart, and it is even more worsened by the fact that most of the people within the country are not actually aware of these dangers. They just simply think that it’s not really relevant what they are speaking, what the politicians are doing—let’s just consume as much as we can and that’s it. But nationalism is doing its role, and we have what we have. These ethno-religious nationalisms are doing their job. Serbia is becoming more aggressive, Croatia is becoming more aggressive, and Bosnia is not building its own nation. So that’s the basic problem. To such an extent, Bosnia is an anomaly in the world of nation-states, and that’s why many prefer to see it partitioned.

Why was it partitioned in the first place? In support of what interest was it even partitioned in Lisbon and ultimately rubber-stamped in Dayton? Whose interest does that serve to have such a state where, you know, ethno-religious political parties are the only ones that exist—the moderates and whatever, I mean, they’re marginal when push comes to shove.

They have been marginalised gradually.

Yeah. So what interest does that homogenous entities serve if they want to have it homogenised, separate, the Greater Serbia, Greater Croatia? Why not just do that? Why haven’t they done that from the start? As in, what is the purpose of keeping the tension?

Well, they were trying to do that. They were trying to do that. But during the war in Bosnia, the population here was really fighting for, you know, for a single state. If you like, for a single Bosnian identity, for a single Bosnian nation—it is only that it was not conceptualised like that.

Mm, mm, yeah. And all ethnicities, yeah, all ethnicities, yeah.

That’s a problem. We didn’t have the elite that was capable of conceptualising those things in such a way as to use the struggle of the Bosnian people as something which was a pretext or introduction to the creation of the Bosnian nation. And people resisted the creation of Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia to a great extent, and on the other hand, as I already mentioned, there was the US which opposed the idea of the ultimate partition. So we had a strange situation in which you had several opposing elements within the same game, so that eventually there was no clear outcome. We still have a struggle between these elements, and it has yet to be determined.

Who benefits from the tensions in Bosnia? And how?

Well, generally speaking, tensions are something which belongs to this kind of geopolitics that I have already described as British—that was introduced by Mackinder. It is always about the creation of unstable areas within Eurasia. I have to say that the principle that was used at the Lisbon Conference is exactly the same. The principle of partition is exactly the same principle that was used at the partition of post-colonial India.

Hmm.

Those parts with Hindu population, 51% and more, they became India, and those with 51% or more Muslims became Pakistan. At the Lisbon Conference, Lord Carrington came with exactly the same plan—for those areas with 51% or more Muslims to become a Muslim part, with 51% or more Orthodox Christian or Serb to become their part, 51% or more Catholic or Croatian to become their part. So practically they introduced the very same principle, and it never leads to stability. We know from the example of India that it never leads to stability—it leads to permanent conflicts and wars.

It’s interesting. Interesting that it was sold as Switzerland—you know, the Cantonal idea of Switzerland—that Bosnia could be the next Switzerland, with all these cantons and—

Yeah, why not? But then we would have, you know, a single nation like the Swiss. They are all Swiss.

Rather than the entities and OHR of course, the Office of the High Representative, which, you know, is—

The difference is that we don’t have a Bosnian nation, and they have the Swiss nation.

How worried are you about—God forbid—return of war to the Balkans?

That’s the thing. Well, it’s quite possible. Not because people here want it, but because there will be foreign powers who want to transfer the conflict from Ukraine to the Balkans, and things like that. You know, the conflict in Ukraine is very similar to the one in Bosnia in terms of who launched it, who started the whole thing, but also in terms of ethnic and ethno-religious differences, which were the basis of conflict in Ukraine. You had Orthodox Christians, who turned out to be clearly pro-Russian at some point—although probably in the past they were Ukrainians, just like everyone else, but under pressure they became clearly pro-Russian. Then you had so-called Unites and Catholics, which became strong Ukrainian nationalists, but all of that was happening under the pressure from the outside to actually, you know, put Ukraine into NATO to make Ukraine an enemy of Russia and things like that. So all these tensions were also artificially created as they were in Bosnia, I’m afraid.

Which is why Bosnia is just a pressure valve that can be used by whoever.

And now we may well have a transfer from the very same conflict from Ukraine to Bosnia, just as it was once transferred from Bosnia to Ukraine.

My last question, well actually last one question with two questions in it. What gives you hope? Is there anything that still gives you hope about the world at large? And perhaps the more pressing question is what do you lose sleep over at night? Choose which one you wanna answer first.

Well, I don’t know really. Frankly speaking, I don’t see any development other than the one that I have already described in the next 30 years. And it is about authoritarian nationalism. It will be very uncomfortable to live in such a world, but we cannot escape from that.

I’m afraid that’s the problem. And what gives me some hope? Well, I don’t really have a hope that this will not happen. I only have a hope that it will eventually end.

I don’t know if I’m going to be alive at that point but at some point it will probably end.

But we shall see what kind of global order it will create. The current world order is clearly falling apart and we shall see what kind of new order we will have. Whether the Chinese and Russians can create new Euro-Asian or pan global order that will really be an alternative to the previous Western hegemony.

It’s very difficult to say, but neither have polite ways of solving things and running politics. So, it’s very difficult to be optimistic about any of these options.

Yeah, no, I see that.  And on that sombre note, rather sombre note, ⁓ one which I tend to agree with,  unfortunately, that’s the reality, that’s the world we live in. I want to give you a special thanks, Professor Hadžidedic it’s a remarkable one and a half hours. I’m very grateful for your time, very grateful for how open and candid  you speak, but also how articulate you are.

You’re welcome.

It was a pleasure speaking about these things openly with you.

I just wanted to say how articulate you are in linking quite conceptual topics and theories to our day-to-day lived experience. I think that’s a unique skill.  And I thank you for the work that you do and for speaking publicly on this. Until next time, maybe in Sarajevo.

Thank you very much. Until next time! See you in Sarajevo!