Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

88.8 percent never attended church, and 86.2 percent never prayed. 63 However,
Yugoslavs by nationality declared a relatively greater affinity for attendance
at official patriotic rituals (e.g., state holidays, the Youth Relay) and
more interest in participating in various social activities than groups that
showed relatively high commitment to traditional religiosity and church attendance
(e.g., Croats). 64 In other words, these “ethnic Yugoslavs” were believers
in the Yugoslav civil religion. 65 According to a 1986 survey of the
values and orientations of Yugoslav Youth, Yugoslavs by nationality demonstrated
the lowest degree of ethnocentrism and national exclusiveness, in
contrast to ethnic Albanians, who manifested the relatively highest degree
of ethnocentrism and national exclusiveness of all Yugoslav ethnic groups,
as well as a high degree of traditional religious affiliation. 66 The survey
director, Srdjan Vrcan, said that Yugoslavs by nationality were “the most
secularized section of contemporary Yugoslav youth” and concluded that “it
seems that the refusal to identify oneself in traditional national terms and
the refusal to identify oneself religiously go hand in hand and mutually
reinforce each other. It could be even argued that both arise from the same
historical experience.” 67
Finally, although brotherhood and unity was not the same as the
nineteenth-century ideology of Slavic brotherhood, it could be, at least hypothetically,
perceived as a current in Pan-Slavism as, for instance, Titoist
nationalism was identified by Hans Kohn. 68 Titoist Yugoslavism indeed manifested
Pan-Slavic characteristics. In 1944, on the occasion of a soccer match
between Tito’s army and British troops on the isle of Vis in the Adriatic, the
new Yugoslavia adopted as the nation’s anthem a modified version of one
of hallmarks of the nineteenth-century Pan-Slavism, the Slovak song “Ej
Slovane” (Hey, Slavs!). The original hymn was written in 1834 by Samuel
Tomasˇik and performed for the first time at the 1848 Pan-Slavic Congress
at Prague. The hymn appeared in many versions (for awhile reflecting the
growing Slav-Teuton strife, i.e., Slavo-German rivalry) and became, as the
historian of Pan-Slavism Hans Kohn wrote, “a demonstrative assertion of
Slav national vitality and eternity.” 69 The hymn invokes a “Slavic spirit”
(duch Slovanski). After the first phase of Pan-Slavism (and Slavo-German
tensions), World War II, as Kohn pointed out, “gave a new impulse to the
stalling Pan-Slavism,” and this time again the old anti-Germanism was
awakened. 70 After 1945, modified versions of “Ej Slovane” became national
anthems of Poland and Yugoslavia, two Slavic nations that then shared the
same communist system (but, as I showed in chapter 4, the anticommunist
Catholic opposition in Yugoslavia and Poland was constructing an alternative,
Polish-Croatian “brotherhood and unity” based on common Catholic
faith and anticommunist ideology). After Tito’s successful struggle with Stalin,
Hans Kohn concluded in 1953, Titoism represented a shift toward the
Western variant of Pan-Slavism, as opposed to the old Russian messianism
and post–World War II Eastern Pan-Slavism that was revived by Stalin and
102balkan idols