Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

Multinational States and
Legitimacy by Religion
At least since Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), in which this political
thinker expressed concern over the “sectarian threat,” religion has been a
hindrance to successful modern state-building. In multiethnic and multiconfessional
states, religious organizations have found it hard both to accommodate
to pluralist-minded secular regimes and maintain interfaith cooperation.
With one notable exception—the United States of America—all
multiconfessional states have experienced crises of religious legitimacy, and
none has accomplished a noteworthy breakthrough in interfaith cooperation.
This is not to say that the United States will be permanently immune
and safe from some kind of a Yugoslav-type crisis. In a number of cases,
religion has played a part in serious conflicts and civil wars (e.g., India and
Pakistan, Lebanon, Palestine, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia,
Northern Ireland, and so forth). While the quintessential religious ideal is
harmony, the historical reality is conflict. Religious scholars are well aware
of what Scott R. Appleby termed “the ambivalence of the sacred.” 1 In a
similar vein, Peter Berger has admitted that “religion much more often fosters
war, both between and within nations, rather than peace although
occasionally, religious institutions do try to resist warlike policies or to mediate
between conflicting parties.” 2
Multiconfessional and multiethnic Yugoslav states have suffered from the
lack of religious legitimation from the onset of Yugoslavism. Many regime
types were tested and none pleased all of the country’s faiths at the same
time. Was this so because Yugoslav states never discovered an ideal regime
type for such a complex setting? What would be the ideal form of political
organization in this part of the Balkans? During the World War I debate on
the final phase of the so-called “Eastern Question” and nation-formation in
the Balkans, one of the Western scholars cognizant of all relevant factors
and then most popular nation-building models, the British diplomatic historian
J. A. R. Marriott, published in 1918 a proposal for the new political
order in southeastern Europe. Marriott argued as follows:
It will always be difficult to maintain in the Balkans a single centralized
state....Unification is prohibited alike by geography and by ethnography.
Even federalism presupposes the existence of unifying forces which have
not as yet manifested themselves in this region. Things being as they are,
a Staatenbund would therefore be preferable to a Bundesstaat: Switzerland
is a model more appropriate to the Balkans than Germany. ...Eventhis
measure of union is unattainable without a thorough territorial readjustment.
No confederation, however loose in structure, could be expected to
endure for six months, unless a fairly satisfactory settlement of outstanding
difficulties can be previously effected. And that settlement must come
from within. The Treaties of London and Bucharest (May and August
conclusions 213