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THE ROLE OF RELIGION AND THE CULTURE OF IDENTITY IN THE PUBLIC POLICY: THE BALKANS CASE
Stevo M. Lapcevic
Faculty of Political Sciences (Belgrade, Serbia)
«Prior to the discovery of the New World, America and Australia, people were familiar with only three landmasses (continents) — Europe, Asia and Africa. All three old landmasses were mutually connected by the Balkan Peninsula. Up until the most recent geological age, the Balkan Peninsula was connected with Asia by a land bridge, of which numerous larger or smaller islands had survived on the sea surface, the islands that have for thousands of years kept the Balkans directly connected with Asia, the largest, most populous and for the history of mankind most important continent. With the African landmass the Balkans was connected by short seaways over the important Mediterranean Sea that includes, as some sort of gulfs, the Balkan seas, Adriatic, Ionian and Aegean. On the northern side, the Balkan Peninsula is by a wide area connected and coalesced with Europe»1.
This unique geographical and geopolitical position granted the Balkans an important and fateful role in the history of the world. It is a point at which three continents meet, and this fact is the reason why it was frequently called «catena mundi», i.e. «the buckle of the world». Consequently, it is the place where a wide array of cultures and civilizations interweaves, shaping, each in its own way, the political destiny and identity of the area.
«The Balkans is something more than the southeast of Europe. It is the buckle of the world. This buckle has a greater responsibility
and a graver duty than Europe. The Balkans is not only Christian like the rest of Europe. The Balkans is a real coexistence of races and peoples, religions and classes, all bound by one fate, stronger than religious afiliations and social prejudice. The Balkans is therefore something unique in the group of the old continents — neither Europe nor Asia. There are some that think of the Balkans as «the Nearer East» or Asia and refer to it in that way. Such references are the best proof that the Balkans is neither the European East nor the Asian West, but a separate area with distinctive characteristics and a special task»1.
According to Vladimir Dvorinkovic, one of the most prominent Yugoslav philosophers and ethno-psychologists and the author of the well-known Yugoslav Characterology, history in the Balkans, in all its contents, falls into separate series of events, an entire chain of fractions and tendencies that most often clashed with all their might and destroyed each other. More than anywhere else in Europe, Balkan history used to be (and still is) conditioned by cultural and traditional patterns, that have been intertwining in the Balkans since the earliest times of its historical existence.
Culture, (geo)politics and history of the Balkans are a cross section of European and Asian cultures, (geo)politics and histories, in a word — of Eurasian expanses. Jovan Cvijic, a renowned Serbian geographer and scientist, thought that precisely this Eurasian heritage of the Balkans had inluenced to a larger or smaller degree the establishment of political and cultural models of all the peoples in the peninsula.
Cultural and Political Influences in the Balkans
Several cultural and political inluences are discernible on the Balkan ground.
During the classical antiquity Hellenistic culture exerted its inluence, and owing to its connection with Persia, even before the time of Alexander the Great this culture had certain Eurasian characteristics. Through his activities, Alexander managed to unify
the entire Southern Balkans and to take it to the East, to the land of his grandfather. Thus the Balkan men became the irst Europeans to comprehend the full scope of the true East, and Alexander was the irst man who succeeded in gathering around him both marine and land forces of the Balkans.
«Owing to Alexander and his Balkan shepherds, Greek drama reached the luxurious palaces of the rich maharajas, and India along with the Far East and the newly-founded cities all across the Middle East became culturally and commercially connected with Europe»13
With the Hellenes as mediators, cultural patterns of the Middle East, the cradle of the oldest civilizations, had a strong inluence on the Balkan Peninsula. «It is known that, under the inluence of Phoenicia and Egypt, the oldest civilization not only in the Balkans but in the whole of Europe was created in the Greek archipelago»2.
After Hellenic and Eurasian inluences, the Balkans fell under Roman, mostly continental, European inluence that, as Jovan Cvijic put it, 'cleansed' this area from Eurasian traits. However, the arrival of the Slavs, especially the Bulgarians, as well as the Hungarians, to the Balkan area will almost completely neutralize this cultural conversion.
The Middle Ages brought Eurasianism back into focus, only now in the form of Orthodoxy. The Byzantine Empire became the irst cultural and political uniier of the Balkan peoples. This great heir of Hellenistic ideas inally laid the foundation for the consequent Balkan fondness for Orient culture, owing to which a uniied Slavic-Mongolian-Hellenic culture was created in the Balkans at the very beginning of the Middle Ages, i.e. after the arrival of the Slavs, the Bulgarians and the Hungarians.
«Entering history, the South Slavs had, taking over religion from the Byzantines, also accepted education and many elements of social and state structure; a similar case was with the Romanians. Byzantine culture was widely spread; it covered the entire peninsula, going even across the Sava and the Danube. The influence of the
West was for some time spread over an even larger area, but it was later reduced mostly to the narrow Adriatic coastal area, crushing against the high bulwarks of the Dinaric Alps and only partially intruding deeper into the peninsula mainland by the river valleys of the tributaries of the Adriatic sea»Apart from Constantinople, Balkan politics and culture were developed in Salonika, which was a real meeting point of Eurasian Byzantine and Slavic culture, a town in which the brothers Cyril and Methodius, the creators of Slavic literacy, were born. While Salonika connected the Slavs with Constantinople, Constantinople was the connection of the Balkans with Anatolia, and over it with Northern Africa and Asia.
The strongest Byzantinization of the Slavs in the Balkans happened, above all, among the Bulgarians, who were the irst to abandon their old social and religious system. After the Bulgarians, Byzantine culture was accepted and developed by the Serbs, and only then the Romanians, among whom this culture was mixed with Hungarian cultural inluence.
The penetration of the Ottoman Turks into Europe over the Balkans enabled, it seems paradoxically, a shift of the old Byzantine Orthodox Eurasian inluence from the east of the peninsula to the west and north, where it was driven like a peg into Central European cultural background over the Sava and the Danube and into the Western, Venetian background over Dalmatia, where it was held by a natural border — the Adriatic Sea.
The inluence of the Turkish Eastern cultural patterns became stronger with further Ottoman advances, especially due to the fact that for a considerable number of centuries the Islamic inluence geographically followed the spread of Byzantine culture. Turkish cultural inluence directly affected a change in the social life of the Balkan nations. Owing to the Turks, these nations broke loose from the rigid class, almost cast-like social structure. Turkey enabled noblemen and soldiers and peasants alike to, in accordance with their
abilities, climb in the hierarchy, which will also become the need of the Balkan states created after the nineteenth-century revolutions.
Apart from these three inluences, doubtless the strongest, that unified the Balkans culturally but unfortunately not (geo)politically, the inluences of Western and Central Europe are noticeable in the Balkans from the Middle Ages to the present day.
«The inluence of the Western culture is also noticeable. Reaching the Adriatic coast by the transversal roads that led through the mountains, it left the strongest traces of its inluence in the Adriatic area. Due to the centuries-long inluence of the Romans, Balkan population was Romanized to a great degree. One part of the Balkan population was completely Romanized, the other part was Slavenized, while only the smallest part was preserved to the present day. Therefore, the Western culture also caused certain ethnic changes in the Balkans. Today this inluence is in the strongest way exerted through the church»The increase of the influence of the Western European culture is strongly connected with the later East-West Schism, after which the western parts of the Balkans and a part of the Adriatic coast came under the inluence of Rome.
When we talk about the influence of the Central European culture, we should stress that it is the youngest, that it is colonial in character, and that it comes over the Sava and the Danube. It was transplanted into the Balkans by Austria-Hungary and its influence is the weakest today since, owing to the Hungarians forsaking their own Asian identity, it almost completely withdrew facing the Western, Austrian, i.e. German cultural advances. Here as well religion played the most important role in the process of assimilation.
Consequences
Unfortunately, the nations of the Balkans never managed to connect into a single geo(political) block. They did not succeed in making a customs union, let alone a stable political alliance. Such