Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States / Edition 1

by Vjekoslav Perica

Overview

Reporting from the heartland of Yugoslavia in the 1970s, Washington Post correspondent Dusko Doder described "a landscape of Gothic spires, Islamic mosques, and Byzantine domes." A quarter century later, this landscape lay in ruins. In addition to claiming tens of thousands of lives, the former Yugoslavia's four wars ravaged over a thousand religious buildings, many purposefully destroyed by Serbs, Albanians, and Croats alike, providing an apt architectural metaphor for the region's recent history.

Rarely has the human impulse toward monocausality--the need for a single explanation--been in greater evidence than in Western attempts to make sense of the country's bloody dissolution. From Robert Kaplan's controversial Balkan Ghosts, which identified entrenched ethnic hatreds as the driving force behind Yugoslavia's demise to NATO's dogged pursuit and arrest of Slobodan Milosevic, the quest for easy answers has frequently served to obscure the Balkans' complex history. Perhaps most surprisingly, no book has focused explicitly on the role religion has played in the conflicts that continue to torment southeastern Europe.

Based on a wide range of South Slav sources and previously unpublished, often confidential documents from communist state archives, as well as on the author's own on-the-ground experience, Balkan Idols explores the political role and influence of Serbian Orthodox, Croatian Catholic, and Yugoslav Muslim religious organizations over the course of the last century. Vjekoslav Perica emphatically rejects the notion that a "clash of civilizations" has played a central role in fomenting aggression. He finds no compelling evidence of an upsurge in religious fervor among the general population. Rather, he concludes, the primary religious players in the conflicts have been activist clergy. This activism, Perica argues, allowed the clergy to assume political power without the accountability faced by democratically-elected officials.

What emerges from Perica's account is a deeply nuanced understanding of the history and troubled future of one of Europes most volatile regions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195174298
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/26/2004
Series:	Religion and Global Politics
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 5.70(h) x 0.90(d)
Lexile:	1720L (what's this?)

About the Author

A former reporter for the Croatian weekly Nedjeljna Dalmacija and Research Fellow at The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and The United States Institute of Peace, Vjekoslav Perica is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of History at Brigham Young University. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Minnesota.

Editorial Reviews

This is the first political history of the three principal organized religions in postwar Yugoslavia and its successor states: the Croatian Catholic Church, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and the Islamic community. Perica carefully explores the relationships of each to Tito's Yugoslavia, to one another, to the wars, and to the new states. The Serbian and Croatian churches, in particular, have long arrogated the definition of nationhood to themselves. Because ecumenical moments in Yugoslavia were few, empathy for those of another faith was limited, and commitment to an open-armed, united Yugoslavia was weak, the link between religion and nationalism was neither liberal in the communist period nor benevolent during communism's collapse. All too often, the role of the churches — at times the leadership, at other times the clergy — has been to enlarge the sense of victimhood and to justify revenge.

Foreign Affairs

"This is the first political history of the three principal organized religions in postwar Yugoslavia and its successor states: the Croatian Catholic Church, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and the Islamic community. Perica carefully explores the relationships of each to Tito's Yugoslavia, to one another, to the wars, and to the new states. The Serbian and Croatian churches, in particular, have long arrogated the definition of nationhood to themselves. Because ecumenical moments in Yugoslavia were few, empathy for those of another faith was limited, and commitment to an open-armed, united Yugoslavia was weak, the link between religion and nationalism was neither liberal in the communist period nor benevolent during communism's collapse. All too often, the role of the churches—at times the leadership, at other times the clergy—has been to enlarge the sense of victimhood and to justify revenge."—Foreign Affairs

"The book presents both new sources and an original argument, which is indeed (as Dusko Doder said in an advance praise) 'shockingly provocative'... It is an exciting, well-researched and enormously useful contribution to the—by now already very large—body of literature on the roots of the problems which resulted in the disintegration of Yugoslavia."—Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans

"The book makes two major contributions. It provides a detailed reconstruction of the roles of Serbian Orthodox, Croation Catholic, and Bosnian Muslim churches in providing a religious base for nationalist thought and movements in the past century, and uses this evidence in the author's argument that a link exists among religious institutions, symbols, and practices in state-formation and state-deconstruction. Highly recommended."—Choice

From the Publisher