Through the lens of the identification of the pre-war Sarajevo with the Foucauldian heterotopia, the paper traces the eighteenth-century birth of the ambiguously revolutionary idea of nation and its overlap with that of the territorial-national-state, focusing on the roots of ethnonationalism with its related construction of the enemy, in the wake of Carl Schmitt, as a fundamental and consubstantial category of the "political". After questioning how liberal democracies are not exempt, but rather rely on these dynamics, the recent history of Bosnia and Herzegovina is then traced. In the light of it, the theses of multiculturalism promoted by Will Kymlicka and Joseph Raz, and that of constitutional patriotism outlined by Jürgen Habermas are finally reread. These attempts to overcome the conflicts arising between the so-called ethnic, or cultural, or national differences, are examined with respect to the fundamental question of how such differences are constructed and used.