Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

206 balkan idols
Orphans of Brotherhood and Unity
Some analysts of Balkan affairs rushed to announce that Yugoslavia’s fall
was “inevitable.” 77 Thus, General Brent Scowcroft, a high U.S. official in
charge of the Balkans during the Cold War, said in a December 1999 interview
that “the entire Yugoslav experiment may have been a mistake committed
in good faith by President Wilson and other statesmen at Paris 1919”
and that the United States “could never properly understand those distant
peoples and mentalities.” 78 In a similar vein, the U.S. representative to the
United Nations and the chief negotiator at the Dayton Peace Conference,
Richard Holbrooke, revived the theory of Woodrow Wilson’s well-meaning
Balkan mistake that resulted in US support of an “artificial country.” 79 Such
historical assessments are neither surprising nor new. “Every enterprise that
does not succeed is a mistake,” said one of the prominent participants in
the 1919. Paris conference, Eleutherios Venizelos, the premier of Greece. In
a similar vein, the historian E. H. Carr pointed out in his study entitled The
Twenty Years Crisis, 1919–1939, that men are generally prepared to accept
the judgment of history by praising success and condemning failure.
However, as Reinhold Niebuhr has pointed out, nations are held together
largely by force and by emotion. In the midst of the crisis of the 1980s,
millions loved the united Yugoslavia and thought it would survive. When
Slovene and Croatian delegates were walking out from the session of the
last, fourteenth congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in
January 1990, they did not shout hateful ethnic slogans but shed tears. From
the 1950s, a new pan-Yugoslav elite had been taking shape in Yugoslavia’s
towns and cities. Yet this generation was fragile and needed more time and
better circumstances to salvage their country. This generation was well educated,
multicultural, and worldly in outlook and by all means capable of
securing a peaceful transition toward democracy and restructuring the
country’s pattern of development. When the federation began to crumble
in the 1980s, the country was defended by emotions alone and by the fragile
lost generation alone. Yugoslav civil religion, sports urban youth culture,
pop and rock music and humor and satire unsuccessfully tried to save the
country from the looming disaster. The Tito funeral, the last Tito’s Relay,
the Sarajevo Olympics, and the trophies and victories of the Yugoslav national
team in international sport arenas propelled the last wave of Yugoslav
patriotism. The remarkable youth press, Yugoslav film, and satire, such as
the Sarajevo-based Television show Top lista nadrealista (“The Surrealists’
Chart”), served the cause of democratization and, while still developing a
critical view on communism, tried to water down nationalistic passions by
ridiculing nationalists and nationalistic myths. In a similar vein, integrative
currents in youth culture proliferated during the whole decade until the
catastrophe of 1991–92 when the war began. Pop, rock, and folk singers
and bands voiced pro unity more often than ethnic nationalist sentiments. 80
Artists defended the country that inspired them. In a 1991 interview with