engleski

Religious identities in Croatia and Serbia: Failure or advantage in building the European identity?

Founding discussion of this paper is centered on dominant religious identity in Croatia and Serbia and their interconnectedness with the European identity. Therefore, in Croatia through out history an „ante murale christianitatis“ attitude has been enforced according to which Croatia is the cradle of Christianity that defended Europe from the Ottoman threat. That attitude was the foundation of the Croatian identity in Yugoslavia that then shifted towards the level of the Federation as a whole. Later on, that same discourse became dominant during the 1990s or, after Croatia left the Yugoslav federation. Christian identity was presented as a foundation of Croatian national and European identity and independence as such as a return to Europe. The „Spirit of Nemanja“ on the other hand presents a permanent follower of the Serbian society and shaping of the new collective identity of the Serbs as it was centuries before. As opposite to the trends of de-traditionalism in societies of the late modernity, in the last two decades a process of re-traditionalism in Serbia has been going on. At the same time, Serbian Orthodox church presents an institution of the highest trust among the Serbian citizenship. Faithfulness to Orthodoxy was an unavoidable factor of the Serbia war folklore in tragic dissolution of the previous joint state at the end of millennium, the same as today presents one of the piers of the national homogenization whereas Serbian orthodox inheritance seems to be an inseparable ingredient of the cultural capital with which Serbia walks towards the European unification. This paper thus discusses interconnectedness of the religious and European identity in an attempt to answer on the following questions: has (if so, how) the religious identity influenced shaping of the European identity of Croatia and Serbia or, up to what extent has the „Christian tradition“ of the peoples of the western Balkans has been underlined and adjusted with the contemporary „European cultural and spiritual mosaic“?

Croatia; Serbia; religious identity; European identity; Christianity; Catholicism; Orthodoxy; EU

Hrvatski dio rada na temelju FP7 projekta 'Identities and modernities in Europe'