Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

y various antipeople’s elements who have exploited the sensitive nationality
problem whenever it suited them. 56
The most famous quotation from Tito’s speeches on brotherhood and unity
was the “apple of the eye” analogy. (“You must keep brotherhood and unity
as the apple of your eye!”) To keep something as an apple of the eye was a
popular adage in use by all Slavic peoples. The metaphor entered the political
discourse of the Left in the 1930s and probably came from Russia. Both this
metaphor and the phrase “brotherhood and unity,” which Tito made a keystone
of Yugoslav patriotism, are ordinarily used by Orthodox priests in liturgy
and daily discourse. 57
Without popular patriotic commitment, that is, faith in brotherhood and
unity and the “Yugoslav spirit,” espoused by a large number of the people,
the loose multiethnic Yugoslav federation of six republics might have not
been possible. Tito’s country was not kept together by force. The Western
analyst Harold Lydall noted this, and argued in his monograph on Yugoslav
socialism that “a major reason for communist success was the party’s advocacy
of ‘brotherhood and unity.” ...Theoutcome has been that Yugoslavia
is the most genuinely federalized country in the world (not excluding
Switzerland). 58 By contrast, most Western observers espoused a “realist” perspective
on Yugoslav unity as maintained by the Party and Tito through
force and manipulation. Thus Sabrina Petra Ramet downplayed brotherhood
and unity and concluded that the country was maintained as a balance-ofpower
system with a key role for Tito. 59
The faith in brotherhood and unity even facilitated the development of
a new nationality, the so-called Yugoslavs by nationality. Many people, for
various reasons (the most common being interethnic marriages), refused to
accept or did not feel comfortable with the traditional ethnic labels. After
the 1960s, censuses allowed the option “Yugoslav by nationality.” In 1981,
in the aftermath of Tito’s spectacular burial, the number of Yugoslavs by
nationality reached an all-time record high of 1,216,463. 60 The largest number
of these Yugoslavs was recorded by the census of 1991 in Bosnia-
Herzegovina (5.5 percent of the population). According to a 1992 study,
around 4.5 million persons were uncertain about their ethnic identities actually
seeing themselves as Yugoslavs by nationality. 61
The negative attitude of Yugoslavs by nationality toward the traditional
Yugoslav mainstream religions was a response to the traditional conjunction
between religious and ethnonational identities. According to several surveys
of religiosity and nationality conducted in the late 1970s through the first
half of the 1980s, the Yugoslavs by nationality despised both traditional
identities, ethnic as well as religious, and opted for the Yugoslav label as a
nationality, while declaring no religious affiliation. 62 A survey of religiosity
in the Zagreb region completed in 1984 indicated that disapproval of traditional
religiosity among Yugoslavs by nationality was striking: 55.2 percent
declared no religious affiliation; 45.2 percent declared themselves atheists;
united we stand, divided we fall 101