Marko Attila Hoare's newest publication, The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War, is the final part of a kind of trilogy of his current studies. To complete this book he visited a plenitude of archives (where he was not always well received) and interviewed survivors of World War II. The book aims to contribute to a more differentiated view of Bosnia-Herzegovina during World War II and to fill the gaps in the historiography regarding Yugoslavia in this period. Hoare demonstrates how the Bosnian Muslims contributed to Tito's partisans, and he succeeds in explaining the occasionally very complex interferences and overlaps between Bosnian Muslims and both the partisan movement and quisling forces. Even if Serbia was the dominant country of pre-war Yugoslavia, Bosnia-Herzegovina was the headquarters of the Tito partisans from 1941 to 1944 (with only a short interruption). Twenty-three of the ninety-seven partisan brigades were built of Bosnians, including Muslim Bosnians. Even if the early partisan movement in Bosnia consisted mostly of Bosnian Serbs, for its further existence the Muslims played a vital role.

One of the most important aspects of the newer historiographical research on Southeastern Europe during World War II, as Hoare points out, is the fact that there were not clearly defined camps of Ustashas, Chetniks, and partisans. Even among the partisan groups in Bosnia, there were three principal domestic factions that were not rigidly distinct, and it often happened that someone served in different camps during the entire war and that family members were spread over all three. Hoare states, “The historian is faced with the conceptual dilemma in writing about the resistance among Muslims and Croats, for whereas, in one sense, the Muslim and Croat experiences were closely linked to each other and to that of the Serbs, in another sense each was specific” (27).

Furthermore, Hoare claims that the Yugoslavian revolution was not a top-down process but a genuine revolution from below. This circumstance is what the book wants to explain: that the revolution embraced the whole of Bosnia. It cannot be seen as a homogenous Communist-led resistance movement; the Ustasha faced dual resistance movements. When the Axis powers occupied Yugoslavia in April 1941, Muslims were not really included in the new Croatian-led state, the Nezavisna Država Hrvatska (NDH). The occupation forces instrumentalized the ethnically motivated hatred between the different inhabitants of Bosnia-Herzegovina, whereas the Communist Party—aware of that intention—called upon all the peoples of Bosnia-Herzegovina to end the fighting among them. However, with a memorandum to Hitler, which contained traditional Muslim autonomist demands, and with the setup of the 13th SS “Handžar”-Division, Muslims became part of the quisling forces. In 1943 the German military leaders committed the mistake of sending the “Handžar” recruits to France for training, leaving the Muslim people prone to the attacks of other ethnic groups.

For the postwar period, Hoare analyzes the problem of how a country could be governed when the new leaders, the Communists, had only limited support of the population or were even actively opposed by Bosnian anti-Communist gangs. Furthermore, he illustrates the growing problems of the new political elite in dealing with ethnic and religious minorities such as the Poles or the Ukrainians. After the order to intern NCOs and military officials of quisling units—Home Guard, Ustashas, militias, and Chetniks—in POW camps on 1 August 1945, even the former symbiotic relationship between those units and the Yugoslav Army eventually came to an end.

The example of Bosnia-Herzegovina demonstrates the complexity of the system of building and breaking alliances in World War II, and Hoare highlights this complexity with a multitude of examples. He ends with the recognition of Muslims as the sixth Yugoslav constituent nation in 1968 and with Bosnian Serbs' beginning hostilities against them until the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s. He concludes his book with the statement that the Communist leadership was indeed able to build up a Bosnian nation-state for more than forty years, but not a Bosnian nation.

As promised in the introduction, Hoare does offer a different view of Bosnia's past during World War II, illustrating convincingly the highly delicate situation in which the Bosnian Muslims found themselves and setting the path that would eventually lead to the 1990s. All in all, Hoare's book is a well-researched study, offering a plenitude of new insights into the complex history of Bosnia-Herzegovina in World War II.