Maybe Robin Okey should put a question mark at the end of the title of his monograph about the Habsburg administration of Bosnia from 1878 to 1914. In many ways, the Habsburg efforts were successful. The Bosnian economy grew, the infrastructure—especially railroads—improved, colonial-style electoral politics arrived, an increasing number of schools opened, and European administrative structures replaced Ottoman usages. On the technical level, this was pretty much what the Habsburgs had hoped to accomplish through the civilizing mission they undertook when they occupied Bosnia. And yet, as Okey shows, the Habsburg concept of modernization was deeply, if understandably, flawed.

During the age of imperialism, Habsburg officials posited, as did European elites elsewhere, that the imposition of a stable, bureaucratic regime in their Bosnia would bring backward ethnic groups together as loyal subjects of the efficient realm. However, when an increasingly confident nationalism emerged in Serbia and political activism engaged Croats in Hungary, many Bosnian subjects came to believe that nationalism was a more powerful modernizing device than Habsburg bureaucracy. Therefore, Okey sees the main thrust of the Habsburg experience in Bosnia not as taming nationalism, but rather as failing to do so. He does not make explicit comparisons to Tito's idea that Yugoslavs could maintain their ethnic traditions as long as they remained loyal to Socialism or to the recent efforts at tutelage of the European Union, but few readers will miss the relevance of the Habsburg experience in Bosnia to other periods.

Okey does not depart far from earlier interpretations of the occupation and annexation, except in his emphasis on cultural affairs. Basing his work on admirable archival research in many languages and in many archives, and demonstrating a wide knowledge of an extensive secondary literature, Okey chronicles how Benjamin Kállay and István Burián tried to domesticate the three main Bosnian peoples. As a secular Hungarian noble, Kállay did not want to recognize the Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims as nations; rather, he tried to treat them as rather backward religious communities. How then to deal with religious schools? Could they be replaced with state-sponsored multiethnic schools? What if the communities did not accept them? Okey chronicles the ins and outs of these and related issues in detail. In the end, he gives Kállay a mixed review, sometimes seeing him as farsighted but also criticizing him for using informers to excess. On the other hand, Okey would like to improve the reputation of Burián, who, despite his not exactly ebullient personality, pursued a more flexible policy that provided the Bosnian communities modestly increased autonomy.

Sometimes Okey bogs down in detail, and readers like me who are a bit shaky on just what a Civil Adlatus, a Reis, or a medžlis might be could profit from looking at Peter Sugar's or Robert Donia's books prior to cracking this one. But this is an excellent monograph with significant strengths. Among them is Okey's nuanced discussion of Bosnia just prior to World War I. He argues that the drama of Gavrilo Princip's act and General Oskar Potiorek's passion for destroying Serbia have obscured how difficult were the choices confronting Bosnians in the years preceding the Great War. In this section, he focuses on three men, the Serb Vladimir Ćorović, the Croat Tugomir Alaupović, and the Muslim Džemaludin Čaušević.

Ćorović, who was born in Mostar and became a “voluminous and fearsomely scholarly contributor” (231) to journals, for which he spent eight years in jail, ended up as a respected professor in Belgrade. He had the easiest choice to make; Serbia already existed as a state, and Ćorović could believe that Bosnia's salvation lay in Belgrade-centered Yugoslavism. Alaupović, originally from Travnik, became the first native-born Bosnian to become a professor at a gymnasium. Oriented toward the locally popular Franciscans rather than the secular clergy supported by Archbishop Josip Stadler, who had been installed by Vienna, Alaupović sympathized with the South Slav movement but anguished over whether a Catholic Bosnian should be “loyal to a Croat identity within a civic Bosnia, or [to] integral Croatian nationalism” (238). Čaušević, who was educated in Turkey and eventually became the head of the Muslim faith in Bosnia, did not have the benefit of an external state or people in which to invest one's hopes. Just what nation did the Muslims belong to? Okey skillfully uses these three individuals to underline the impossible difficulties modern nationalism posed—and continues to pose—for multiethnic Bosnia.