When presidential elections in three republics of a secularized federation are won by a former Communist general turned founder of a political party with Catholic principles, a former Handschar Waffen-SS volunteer and author of the Islamic Declaration, and a Communist apparatchik turned banker invoking Orthodox national myths, one wonders if churches succeeded in impregnating politics beyond what had been thought possible, and whether a Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” may materialize within a relatively small country.
The Balkan Wars of the 1990s have been studied and explained in different ways and from various perspectives, including as ethnic and wars of religious intolerance or fundamentalism. But few have delved into the details of how exactly religion became highly politicized and, inversely, how politics became sacralized and permeated with religious myth. In turn, how did both phenomena contribute to popular mobilization for war?
Politicization of Religion, the Power of Symbolism sets out to answer just these questions. The nine essays in this volume cover the politicization of religion in its historical, political, and theoretical aspects, through gender and media studies, architectural review, and even theological contemplation. As Keith Tester writes in his Foreword, discounting Anthony Giddens's fundamentalist explanation, “[t]hey … go into detail and show the processes and contradictions of religion when it is implicated in a conflict” (xv).
The scope of the studies is more limited in conflict space than time. While the destruction of former Yugoslavia included political and ethno-religious clashes in all six republics, the authors concentrate on the religious symbolism and consequences of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The mobilizing power of all three dominant faiths, Serbian Orthodoxy, the Croatian branch of the Catholic Church, and the Bosnian flavor of Islam, is scrutinized. The authors also investigate the ways politics embraced and utilized religious myths in neighboring Serbia and Croatia, with special attention to the sacralization of Kosovo's territory for achieving Serbian unity and to the “Catholic Pledge” in Croatian identity. One of the strengths of the volume is that it does not limit itself to the violent conflict but also discusses postwar relationships between church, state, and society.
Given the variety of approaches, the chapters necessarily operate on different levels. Some utilize existing theories in describing the actions of church authorities and political actors: “Ethno-religious Mimicry in the War in Bosnia-Herzegovina” by Marjan Smrke and “Kosovo as Serbia's Sacred Space: Governmentality, Pastoral Power, and Sacralization of Territories,” in which Filip Ejdus and Jelena Subotić apply Foucauldian analysis. Other chapters reach back into the centuries of Ottoman Turkish occupation of the Balkans that gave rise to ethnoreligious symbiosis (Gorana Ognjenović problematizes the false identification of ethnicity and religion in “Quo Vadis Vlachs? Project Čarnojević into the Twenty-First Century”) and even into the remote past of the Roman Empire (Adam Lindhagen's “Political Control and Religious Life at Narona: A Case Study from Antiquity”) to find patterns of religion being put in the service of politics of identity, memory, aggression, and resistance.
Two chapters stand out in assessing the conflict's long-term effects. Nena Močnik's “Religious Symbolism and Mythology in Sexual Violence and Rape during the Balkan Conflict, 1992–1995” analyzes religion's patriarchal role in weaponizing sexual violence to “slowly destroy the culture and values, and to humiliate the entire group” (62). Amra Hadžimuhamedović's “Three Receptions of Bosnian Identity as Reflected in Religious Architecture” reviews the dramatic changes in the (re)built environment. While Orthodox genocide and Catholic intolerance did not succeed in eliminating the Muslim Other in Bosnia, they mostly managed to destroy the organic cohabitation of the three faiths as shaped by centuries of tolerant neighborly life. While religious buildings of all three communities have mushroomed since the war, the Christian churches and the foreign-imposed Turkish, Saudi, and Iranian-style mosques “are designed to […] turn their backs on each other […] with constant tension between them […] turning the Bosnian cultural landscape into a warscape” (147).
The editors hold a negative view of the outcome of the wars of succession: “Today, 23 years later, well into the twenty-first century, all ex-Yugoslav successor states are more or less bankrupt. People are miserable, and religious institutions, despite certain signs of decline and internal decay, have never had more power and control over the lives of the individual” (xix). The editors also anticipate further discussions about the religious aspects of the conflict and postwar developments. Their volume is indeed joined by two others, one almost simultaneously and the other a year later, that try to fill the same gap in research devoted to the Balkans of the 1990s. Sabrina P. Ramet's (ed.) Religion and Politics in Post-Socialist Central and Southeastern Europe, in the same series, offers a geographically wider panorama. The essays in Religion in the Post-Yugoslav Context, edited by Branislav Radeljić and Martina Topić, however, paint a more complete picture of how organized religion played a critical role in the political developments across the entire former Yugoslavia, but the book does not dig into specific phenomena as deep as Politicization of Religion. There is one aspect that the latter ignores while the former emphasizes: Unsuccessful conciliatory attempts on the highest levels of the rival churches.
The editors of Politicization of Religion disagree with others who saw the Balkan conflicts as religious wars, and specify that they ask a different question: “How well counterfeited was — and, unfortunately, still is — the religious symbolism?” (2). While that question is well researched in the essays, by meticulously demonstrating how politicized religion was/is, and how religiously imbued politics in the region had become, they leave the rejected characterization somewhat plausible. This is especially so when the economic aspect of the wars, referred to both in the Introduction and the Conclusion, remains almost entirely missing.
