Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States (Religion and Global Politics)

Rating:
Summary: The best account on church-state relations in former YU
Review: This is a masterfully written and extensively researched book that fills an important gap in the historical scholarship on the twentieth century southeastern Europe. The author carefully examines the political role and influence of religion and argues that none of the main ethnic religions, the Serbian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic "Church of the Croat People," and Yugoslav Islamic community, ever endorsed the idea of multiconfessional and multiethnic Yugoslav state. Powerful ethnoclericalism prevented full legitimization of both the inter-war Yugoslav monarchy and of the post-war socialist Yugoslavia. The author correctly argues that politically active clergy fused religious intolerance with nationalistic animosity to create "ethnic churches" in form and nationalistic parties in substance. The clergy departed from their original purpose and became hypernationalistic, antiliberal, and antisecular leaders who lacked the accountability of their secular counterparts.
I commend it highly.