Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

venes, Muslims, Montenegrins, and Macedonians, recognized as ethnically
distinct groups, and overcame their differences in language and dialect, religion,
customs, mentality, and so forth. Tito’s nation did not inaugurate a
new supranational “Yugoslav” nationality (although an unofficial Yugoslavby-nationality
group did emerge in the 1970s—see hereafter). Tito’s Communist
Party of Yugoslavia was anti–Great Serbian and therefore against
any unitarian and “melting pot” approach to the national question. The
new national consciousness did not generate a new “national identity.” The
new “Yugoslavism” entailed the idea of the necessity as well as fruitfulness
of “fraternal” relations among several distinct groups. In contrast to the
Yugoslav kingdom’s ideology of “popular unity” (narodno jedinstvo), which
had aimed at fusing several distinct nations into a single Serbian-dominated
supernation, Tito and the communists emphasized the diversity and distinctiveness
of the nation’s ethnic groups but taught the people, through patriotic
education and rituals, that unity means freedom, pride, and prosperity
as opposed to ethnic strife, which brings all groups back into poverty and
humiliation. This kind of “national consciousness” (i.e., the ideology of
brotherhood and unity) basically made people conscious that disunity and
partition would be an insane, tragic blunder, among other things, because
the country’s core could not be partitioned without a genocide, as the World
War II experience had taught the people.
According to testimony by the American diplomat Averell Harriman, Tito
“firmly believed that the nation would remain united after him, because
every constituent nation of Yugoslavia has its own identity and distinct national
spirit, but there is also a “Yugoslav” spirit or soul emanating from
brotherhood and unity.” 54 In his 20 June 1978 address to the Eleventh Congress
of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, Tito expounded what
constitutes the strength of Yugoslavia (snaga Jugoslavije). The first point was,
in Tito’s words, “the unity of Yugoslavia’s nations and nationalities built on
the consciousness that this unity, in this world as it is, is the precondition
of not only our prosperity but of our very survival.” 55
Brotherhood and unity became the nation’s civil religion. The idea of
brotherhood and unity was conceived as a counterweight to ethnic nationalisms
that tore the country apart, incited hatred, and caused bloody massacres
while at the same time perpetuating people’s misery and foreign hegemony.
As brotherhood and unity was sanctioned by the state as the
highest patriotic value, the communists declared that the complex Yugoslav
National Question had been solved once and for all. “From an ethical viewpoint,”
Vladimir Dedijer wrote,
the brotherhood and unity idea gave a profoundly humane element to
Tito’s political program. In contrast to hatred (rooted in nationalist manipulations
with ethnicity and religion), Tito urged love among all Yugoslav
peoples. ...Wehaveeradicated hatred, turned it into dust and ashes,
we have eliminated the chauvinism incited and spread among our peoples
100 balkan idols