Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

scholarship of Bertrand Russell, Glenn Vernon, and Robert Bellah, the Croatian
sociologist Nikola Dugandzˇija expressed the hope that the coming period
of democratization in Yugoslavia would involve “demystification” of the
excessive forms of state-sponsored secular religiosity, concurrently with
curbing similar excesses, myths, and exaggerations on the part of ethnic
nationalists. 95 Many disillusioned Yugoslav communists who found an “exit”
in becoming radical ethnic nationalists in the late 1960s and thereafter
viewed the Titoist brotherhood and unity as a diabolic trap in which their
respective ethnic nations got caught. One of those, the Croatian nationalist
historian Franjo Tudjman, discovered behind Titoism the continuity of the
same great Serbian nationalism that had tormented the first Yugoslav state.
For the Serbian nationalist author Dobrica Ćosić, who, in 1989, published
a novel with the telling title “The Believer,” both Marxism and Titoism were
false religions that stole the souls of millions of Serbs while their ethnic
enemies, such as Albanians, Muslims, Croats, and others, benefited at the
expense of the Serb capability to fight heroically and believe faithfully. An
artistic account presented by the Sarajevo-born film director Emir Kusturica
in his motion picture Underground (the winner of the “Golden Palm” at the
1995 Cannes Film Festival) also explores the question of true and false faiths,
reality, myth, and deception within the Yugoslav historical context from
1941 to 1993. There is an interesting thesis in this motion picture, perhaps
best epitomized in Goran Bregović’s music and lyrics: “Something is shining
from the Heavens but nobody really knows what it is.” The “shining light”
of Tito’s Yugoslavia moved the people momentarily, but eventually, the mass
disillusionment came when the people unmasked the deception, when they
learned the truth about the world “above,” about their leaders’ real lives
and character, and so forth. As one of Kusturica’s characters, a German
psychiatrist, puts it, “communism was an underground force, a large cellar,”
but, he went on to explain, sometimes it seems that the whole world might
have been built on the dichotomy epitomized in a large underground cellar
and the section above (the Earth’s surface and Heaven), and many choose
or are forced to live in this under-world.
At any rate, while forms of ideology, myth, and religion vary, they also
produce various historical outcomes, which still does not help to “solve” the
general question of “true and false faiths.” Concerning the civil religion of
the Yugoslav communist period, in spite of its defects and ultimate tragic
failure, a blueprint for a viable multiethnic nation of considerable potential
was outlined, and the civil religion of brotherhood and unity was its important
building block. The Yugoslav “antifascist nationalism” and the civil
religion of brotherhood and unity could have outlived communism. Neither
of the two was in conflict with democracy. The mixed “market socialist”
economy based on workers’ cooperatives could have adjusted to the capitalism
of the 1980s and 1990s more easily than Soviet-style regimes. The
Tito cult, as an antifascist and anti-Stalinist movement and unifier of diverse
and often adverse ethnic groups, could have survived and even been cele-
united we stand, divided we fall 107