Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

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the twilight of balkan idols
In this part of the world a man has no chance to be born and
buried in the same country.
Macedonian rock performer Vlatko Stefanovski
After the Eastern European revolutions of 1989, Eastern Europe
ceased to exist as a geopolitical unit and cultural concept and
was replaced by “Central Europe” and “the Balkans”. The successor states
of the one-time open and proud Yugoslavia became “the Balkans,” mired
again in ethnic bloodshed. From the 1950s through the 1980s, Yugoslavia
was, in spite of its official “Third World” (nonaligned) course, de facto part
of the West. After the collapse of communism, Yugoslavia’s successor states,
except Slovenia, were despised by the West and, in the case of Serbia and
Croatia, came into conflict with the West, while Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo,
and Macedonia became Western protectorates. The Yugoslav peoples became
again what nineteenth-century western European statesmen termed “bits
and refuse” of nations. 1 Local ethnic nationalist revolutions ended in failure.
New regimes that emerged during the wars of the 1900s were labeled
“Mafia-states” by an Italian analyst of world affairs. 2 Each post-Yugoslav
“successor state” went down its own path of degradation. And only the
growing influence of myth and religion helped some people to believe that
the new was better than the old.
The Catholic Church and Croatia’s
Return to the West
At least twice in the modern era, the Croatian branch of the Catholic
Church got the opportunity to decisively influence political transformations
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