Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

All things considered, it seems that, generally speaking, religious leaders
still pose a relatively less difficult problem than the nature of the religious
faiths, corrupted by ethnic nationalism, ethnoclericalism, antisecularism,
fundamentalism, and similar “isms,” combined with these faiths’ notorious
inability to coexist in multinational states or to accomplish any significant
breakthrough through interfaith dialogue on a either regional or global
scale. Serbian Orthodoxy, Croatian Catholicism, Bosnian Islam, and Macedonian
Orthodoxy may not even be considered faiths but ideologies and
nationalistic (i.e., political) organizations. As such, they may not qualify for
tax relief and international aid normally granted to religious institutions
and should not be viewed as a part of civil society but as components of
the state. Likewise, attacks on them would definitely not constitute “religious
persecution” but civic duty and a struggle for civil liberties. Small wonder
that many NGOs and democratic forces view these national churches as the
chief obstacles to a more efficient transition to democracy. However, I have
found that religious leaders’ responsibility concerns above all their ability to
make proper assessment of whether rival faiths and ethnic groups, new
ideologies, and other challenges constitute a “clear and present danger.” In
other words, religious leaders are in charge of the survival of their communities,
but one will never know when a challenge is real and dangerous
and when leaders are magnifying and dramatizing it so as to mobilize the
faithful and revitalize faith, whose chief enemies are indifference, monotony,
and decay.
An optimistic note is, of course, in order in the concluding paragraph.
Because we all must believe in something, let us pick up from the garden
of currently most appealing idols the one known as the new Europe, and
let us believe that that is what distinguishes the Balkan case from those of
the hopeless Palestine, Lebanon, Kashmir, Somalia, and so on. Europe must
be the key to the problem under consideration, because the peculiarity of
Balkan history has remained unchanged—that is, that the Balkan peoples
shed blood propelled by the desire to master their own destiny, only to realize
after each bloody cycle of local wars that the masters of their destiny are
outsiders. Finally, one really must be an arch-pessimist to say that the Europe
of the Congress of Berlin and that of the Maastricht Treaty are completely
the same.
The new Europe seems to be looking more self-confident than it was
during the Renaissance and the age of discoveries. Europe is bent on “absorbing,”
overcoming, and healing many formidable problems, from the Holocaust
to the legacies of communism and the Cold War, from Cyprus to
Catalonia, the Basque country, and Northern Ireland. The Balkans stand
halfway between Cyprus and Catalonia and cannot be skipped over. After
all, the EU, UN, and private groups or governments from many countries
have done much so far to help stabilization, recovery, and democratization
in the Balkans. The European Union, led by Germany as the major donor,
has provided a great deal of assistance for the region. Massive material and
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