In a discussion on religion as a form of group coherence (my personal view of its development and survival), a sci-blogger from that region gives an excellent history of how, after the death of Tito, it all fell apart. The history lesson starts about halfway through, after some words and links to "Crackergate" (Catholics, don't follow those links, you'll just get pissed off...)
A Blog Around The Clock : When religion goes berserk!:
Also, the education that combined promotion of Yugoslav supremacy, "brotherhood and unity", "imagine there's no countries", multiculturalism, europeanism, internationalism, atheism and yes, science, resulted in new generations of people (including myself) completely identifying with Yugoslavia. The words "Serbia", "Croatia", "Bosnia", etc. had no emotional meaning to us - those were just place-names for some administrative sub-divisions of the country. We were born into the Yugoslav religion. No need for God or church when we had Tito and the Party.
In rural places, where it is likely that all people were of the same ethnicity, nationalism could survive under the surface. Due to weaker education, some level of religiosity (as in "God belief", not just group cohesion) could survive as well.
Then Tito died in 1980. The inerrant leader was gone. What he left behind was a governing system designed to prevent a rise of another dictator - an eight-member collective Presidency that had to rule by consensus. The eight idiots on the Presidency could not agree on anything, so nothing ever got done.
Gdansk happened in 1980 as well. Reagan got elected in 1980 as well, with his Red Scare rhetoric. Europe was in the incipient and very painful stages of unification. Brezhnev, Tchernenko and Andropov died one after another and then this new guy, Gorbachov, came in with some weird new ideas. Everyone was nervous - the world was starting to lose stability it had for decades.
And there was no Tito with his charisma to go around the world making friends for us. The World Bank started asking for some repayment of the old debts. As a result, the economy started sinking. With the economy sinking, with no Tito, with no obvious love coming from other countries (and some critical words as well), the feeling of Yugoslav superiority crumbled. Insecurity breeds a need for belonging to a group, yet the main group everyone belonged to was getting weaker by the day. What to do, where to go? To church, of course. Suddenly, the churches were over-flowing with young people!
Yet, those young people were atheists in the sense they did not believe in God or Bible or miracles or any of that supernatural stuff. They did not go to church to find God, they went for the sense of community and security. The churches knew that and, instead of pushing God too strongly (thus alienating all those new kids), they emphasized community. But, here's a catch - that community was also the ethnic community.
Add in corrupt leadership and power-hungry dictators, newly-unified German economic plans (and needs), a little ignorance on the part of the Clinton administration, and stir.
BTW, There's reasons Bono and others want the big powers to just blanket-forgive any WW2-era debts - they've contributed to the bulk of economic instability throughout the second and third world for the last 20 years.
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