MISUSE OF ETHNIC IDENTITIES IN THE BALKANS AS A POTENTIAL FOR EXTREMIST EXPRESSION

Abstract

Most of the conflicts in modern world represent a product of identity confrontations based on issues of ethnicity, religion and culture. After getting an adequate stimulus, identity conscience present within one group of people easily transforms into a powerful weapon for brutal treating another group. The former SFR Yugoslavia met the end of eight decade of 20th century as a mostly atheist or agnostic society. At the same time, it was inhabited by ethnicities which used to build their identity particularly holding on religious affiliation. Such circumstances, along with weakening of the state in second half of eighties, caused a rapid rise of nationalism, which often used to be expressed through instrumentalization of religious sentiments. Serbian political elites used to identify their national interest with the space inhabited by numerous believers of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Croatian elites advocated an ideology of defending Catholicism while the Bosnian ones used to build their identity on the basis of belonging to the Islamic religious community. A policy of intolerance, as well as of untouchable ethnic and religious identities contributed to the outbreak of the civil war and to maintenance of the illusion that the war was inevitable. Besides elaboration of the phenomenon, this work aims to answer the question: whether identity-based differences in terms of ethnicity and religion represent an inconclusive cause of confrontation or conflicts in the Balkans are a product of conscious manipulation over those identity marks, performed by political factors. Also the work highlights ambivalent, often even incestuous attitude of political establishments in countries of so called western democracy. Namely, Western Europeans are inclined to observe events in Balkans as relicts of archaic ages and products of uncivilized barbarians. Europe with the corp of its established democratic values is yet not (and must not be) alienated from what happens in the Balkans. „Problems induced in so called weak states spill over the region with unbealivable easiness, and increasingly reach even states thousands of kilometеrs away which are considered as developed democracies“ (Milenković, Subotić, 2017: 57). Exactly the interweaving of ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic elements makes the Balkans an paradigm in which intra-European conflicts for statehood, language, ethnicity and even religion meet, reaching an accentuated and distorted form.