Searching for Bosnia’s Carnegie

During his lifetime, the Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) is estimated to have given away approximately $350 million of his money, some 90% of his total fortune. In today’s dollars, that is around $11 billion. With that money, he funded the construction of more than 2,500 libraries around the English-speaking world and endowed numerous universities, museums, research centers, and performing arts venues. Preaching what he called “The Gospel of Wealth,” Carnegie argued the wealthy – especially the super-wealthy like he and his family – had a responsibility to use their fortunes to provide material relief to the poor and less fortunate. In particular, he believed in investing in institutions which would lift people out of poverty and create generational change within communities. Today, that sentiment remains the mission of the Carnegie Corporation, the chief charitable administrator of Carnegie’s trust, which continues to the fund countless educational and civic initiatives around the U.S. (and beyond) with its $4.1 billion endowment.

Such a remarkable commitment to charity is not unfamiliar in Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the heart of Sarajevo, of course, sits the Baščaršija, the proverbial cultural heart of Bosnian and perhaps especially Bosniak culture, the most significant portions of which remain the waqf of Gazi Husrev Bey. This includes his eponymous library, which is still today the most significant historical archive of Oriental and Ottoman literature in the whole of Southeastern Europe. And of course, Gazi Husrev Bey’s donations themselves built on the initiatives undertaken by his predecessor, Isa Bey Ishaković, who laid the foundations of modern-day Sarajevo, Novi Pazar, and Skopje through his own waqf.  

Despite being woven into the very fiber of contemporary Sarajevo, and Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole, such commitments to charity, especially socially conscious charity, are largely alien to today’s Bosnian titans of industry and their other super-wealthy associates. Of whom there are significant numbers, to be clear.

In 2014, there were thought to be some 90 multi-millionaires in Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to the American research firm Wealth X. By 2024, there were 110 companies registered just in the town of Živinice with an annual income of over 1 million BAM. In January, Forbes claimed that Bosnian firms had collectively realized more than 10 billion BAM in international exports in just the first eight months of the preceding marketing year. And the fortunes of just the five wealthiest families in the country likely amounts to at least €3.5 billion.

So, Bosnia and Herzegovina clearly has its own multi-millionaires and even multi-billionaires. And they are not completely miserly. Nearly every major firm in the country has in recent years begun donating small portions of its proceeds to various charitable initiatives. These have included the donation of computer labs for public schools and assorted educational and media grants, the provision of housing and transportation for the destitute, and financial support for the country’s young athletes. All of these are commendable actions and those who have undertaken them deserve to be lauded.

But it is, frankly, not enough. At least not if we are going to have a serious debate about the welfare of Bosnia and Herzegovina, its people, and the preservation of its culture and identity.

It is a thankless task to advise other people what to do with their money. Alas, it is evidently a needed intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Because as the country has (thankfully!) increasingly moved towards the embrace of free market economics, the chief beneficiaries of that transformation have not committed themselves to Carnegie’s Gospel with the fervor needed to achieve a broader social transformation in the country. A social transformation which is possible now, not through the charity of foreign donors and foreign governments, but the social vision of its own innovators and entrepreneurs.

Imagine, for example, the generational changes which could be achieved if every municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina were provided with a brand-new public library, youth center, sports hall, or performing arts venue. What talent and innovation might be unlocked if scholarships were provided for the five or ten best high school students in Bosnia and Herzegovina every year to continue their studies at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, or MIT? Or what if any one of those world-class universities – or their peers in continental Europe – were provided with an endowed chair in Bosnian Studies? The University of St. Louis, for example, already has a Center for Bosnian Studies. But the seed money for the same came not from any wealthy Bosnian financier but from the American National Endowment for the Humanities.

What if there were a program to bring the children of the Bosnian diaspora to their homeland for two or four-week visits, during which they could learn about their culture, their language, and their history – and were gently nudged towards the idea of resettlement in the country? Or what if there were programs to encourage children from within Bosnia and Herzegovina to travel to all parts of the country, to meet their peers from the Krajina or the Podrinje, and learn about coding, debating, investing, or the creation of a youth symphony orchestra? What if some enlightened Bosnian financier, recognizing the critical importance of early childhood education, and made a donation to the Sesame Street Workshop in exchange for a limited-run of Sesame Street episodes geared specifically at the Bosnian market? What if there were prizes for girls and boys who succeeded in patenting an invention before the age of eighteen? What if the city of Zenica or Tuzla or Bihać became home to the first purpose-built research center in the Western Balkans for teaching independent life skills to children and young adults with developmental disabilities, and that the same featured a clinical campus for further medical research into these fields?  

The possible initiatives are legion, as are, I know, the reasons not to do any version of the above. Governments should do it, someone else will do it, the Europeans will do it, maybe some American widow will donate instead.

There is no point in arguing with those inclined to such sophistry. Those who do not understand how a new playground or library in a decimated former factory town can result, in ten years’ time, in the creation of a revolutionary new product, which might lift that town and all its residents out of poverty, are not serious people. They might be wealthy, but they are bankrupt in every human sense of the term.

Those who, however, understand the plea offered herein should recall only Carnegie’s own instructions for how to proceed: “consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the man of wealth thus becoming the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.”

Dr. Jasmin Mujanović is a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the New Lines Institute and the author of the books “Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans” and “The Bosniaks: Nationhood after Genocide”.