Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

nament in 2001, Yugoslav basketball players in the American NBA and European
leagues, numerous soccer players and coaches working for foreign
employers, and so forth. 91
While nationalist regimes labored at prolonging nationalist euphoria,
more and more people experienced nostalgia. A public opinion survey conducted
in 1997 by Croatian state Television showed that 70 percent of the
respondents perceived Tito as a great statesman, and in a sociological survey
conducted in Croatia in April 1998, respondents viewed Tito as a more
skillful and a reputable leader than the incumbent President Tudjman. 92 A
new social sentiment, termed by the press Yugonostalgia, spread among the
young and old generations of once much more free, proud, and prosperous
Yugoslavs. 93 In the second half of the 1990s, nostalgic overtones reverberated
in literature, music, film, media, sports arenas, and concert halls and
spread around the world via the internet. The 1996 Croatian feature film
Marsˇal (The Marshall) tells of a Medjugorje-styled “religious apparition” of
the communist icon Marshall Josip Broz Tito witnessed by a group of Partisan
veterans. 94 “Of course, I used to believe in all that patriotic stuff. I lived
in the country of world champions in many sports,” said the singersongwriter
Djordje Balasˇević in an interview. 95 The head coach of the Italian
basketball national team, Bogdan Tanjević, who used to coach the former
Yugoslavia’s national team, proposed in a 1999 interview a basketball league
among the successor states of former Yugoslavia, as part of the Balkan Peace
Process. His idea was financially supported by the international community,
and as a result the so-called Adriatic League, with several basketball teams
from Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Montenegro was begun in
2001 as an effort toward peacemaking and reconciliation through sports.
Yugonostalgia sites mushroomed in cyberspace. One website presented a
new country called “Cyber Yugoslavia.” It was a “virtual nation,” without
a territory, existing only in cyberspace and bringing together all those who
had left the country to live abroad or who had left but shared nostalgic
sentiments for the old times of brotherhood, unity, and dignity. 96
Presumably the most valuable outgrowth of Yugoslav socialism, Yugoslavia’s
human capital, saw no future in the successor states. According to a
survey, among the youth in former European communist countries, only
young Serbs and Croats preferred going overseas with no intention to return.
97 A proregime Croatian newspaper reported in 1999 that 130,000
young people left Croatia between 1991 and 1998 and were replaced by some
150,000 Catholic refugees, as well as members of the “new elite” from Bosnia
and Herzegovina. 98 Yet the relentlessly anti-Tudjman Feral Tribune weekly
from Split has revealed that more than 250,000 mostly young and educated
Croatians left their homeland during the last decade of the twentieth century.
99 If close to the truth, this sounds devastating for a country of four
million people. According to another report on demographic trends in successor
states, the young would rather go to foreign countries than return to
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