Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

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the second strife
Religion as the Catalyst of the Crisis in
the 1980s and 1990s
Only that which never stops hurting stays in the memory.
Friedrich Nietzsche
After Tito’s death, ethnic nationalism was simmering in all
parts of the country, from Slovenia in the northwest to Kosovo
in southeast. The secular politics of the regime’s establishment involved factional
quarrels, and the activities of secular intellectual elites have been
analyzed at length in domestic and foreign literature. The religious scene,
where important things occurred, has remained obscure. Yet visible religious
symbols and movements were no less telling harbingers of what was to
happen in the 1990s.
The Clerical Offensive and the
Regime’s Last Stand, 1979–1987
In the 1980s, the regime’s experts for religious affairs sensed that the dynamic
religious institutions’ mobilization called for new policies and responses.
In 1984, Radovan Samardzˇić defined official policy as follows:
“struggle against abuses of religion, religious activity, and church service
for political purposes ...must be conducted through a free debate, education,
instruction, and persuasion, rather than by state repression.” 1 This
mirrors a continuity of the new religious politics inaugurated in the 1960s,
when church-state relations had relatively improved and religious liberties
had expanded. After 1966, the secret police abolished departments for “hostile
activities” of the clergy founded as early as 1944. Yet, after Tito’s crackdown
of ethnic nationalism in the republic and autonomous provinces in
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