The main tenet of the new patriotic ideology was the idea of “brotherhood and unity” (bratstvo i jedinstvo). This idea bound together Serbs, Croats, Slo-
venes, Muslims, Montenegrins, and Macedonians, recognized as ethnically distinct groups, and overcame their differences in language and dialect, re- ligion, customs, mentality, and so forth. Tito’s nation did not inaugurate a new supranational “Yugoslav” nationality (although an unofficial Yugoslav- by-nationality group did emerge in the 1970s—see hereafter). Tito’s Com- munist Party of Yugoslavia was anti–Great Serbian and therefore against any unitarian and “melting pot” approach to the national question. The new national consciousness did not generate a new “national identity.” The new “Yugoslavism” entailed the idea of the necessity as well as fruitfulness of “fraternal” relations among several distinct groups. In contrast to the Yugoslav kingdom’s ideology of “popular unity” (narodno jedinstvo), which had aimed at fusing several distinct nations into a single Serbian-dominated supernation, Tito and the communists emphasized the diversity and distinc- tiveness of the nation’s ethnic groups but taught the people, through patri- otic education and rituals, that unity means freedom, pride, and prosperity as opposed to ethnic strife, which brings all groups back into poverty and humiliation. This kind of “national consciousness” (i.e., the ideology of brotherhood and unity) basically made people conscious that disunity and partition would be an insane, tragic blunder, among other things, because the country’s core could not be partitioned without a genocide, as the World War II experience had taught the people.
According to testimony by the American diplomat Averell Harriman, Tito “firmly believed that the nation would remain united after him, because every constituent nation of Yugoslavia has its own identity and distinct na- tional spirit, but there is also a “Yugoslav” spirit or soul emanating from brotherhood and unity.”54In his 20 June 1978 address to the Eleventh Con-
gress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, Tito expounded what constitutes the strength of Yugoslavia (snaga Jugoslavije). The first point was, in Tito’s words, “the unity of Yugoslavia’s nations and nationalities built on the consciousness that this unity, in this world as it is, is the precondition of not only our prosperity but of our very survival.”55
Brotherhood and unity became the nation’s civil religion. The idea of brotherhood and unity was conceived as a counterweight to ethnic nation- alisms that tore the country apart, incited hatred, and caused bloody mas- sacres while at the same time perpetuating people’s misery and foreign he- gemony. As brotherhood and unity was sanctioned by the state as the highest patriotic value, the communists declared that the complex Yugoslav National Question had been solved once and for all. “From an ethical view- point,” Vladimir Dedijer wrote,
the brotherhood and unity idea gave a profoundly humane element to Tito’s political program. In contrast to hatred (rooted in nationalist ma- nipulations with ethnicity and religion), Tito urged love among all Yugo- slav peoples. . . . We have eradicated hatred, turned it into dust and ashes, we have eliminated the chauvinism incited and spread among our peoples
,
by various antipeople’s elements who have exploited the sensitive nation- ality problem whenever it suited them.56
The most famous quotation from Tito’s speeches on brotherhood and unity was the “apple of the eye” analogy. (“You must keep brotherhood and unity as the apple of your eye!”) To keep something as an apple of the eye was a popular adage in use by all Slavic peoples. The metaphor entered the political discourse of the Left in the 1930s and probably came from Russia. Both this metaphor and the phrase “brotherhood and unity,” which Tito made a key- stone of Yugoslav patriotism, are ordinarily used by Orthodox priests in lit- urgy and daily discourse.57
Without popular patriotic commitment, that is, faith in brotherhood and unity and the “Yugoslav spirit,” espoused by a large number of the people, the loose multiethnic Yugoslav federation of six republics might have not been possible. Tito’s country was not kept together by force. The Western analyst Harold Lydall noted this, and argued in his monograph on Yugoslav socialism that “a major reason for communist success was the party’s ad- vocacy of ‘brotherhood and unity.” . . . The outcome has been that Yugosla- via is the most genuinely federalized country in the world (not excluding Switzerland).58By contrast, most Western observers espoused a “realist” per-
spective on Yugoslav unity as maintained by the Party and Tito through force and manipulation. Thus Sabrina Petra Ramet downplayed brotherhood and unity and concluded that the country was maintained as a balance-of- power system with a key role for Tito.59
The faith in brotherhood and unity even facilitated the development of a new nationality, the so-called Yugoslavs by nationality. Many people, for various reasons (the most common being interethnic marriages), refused to accept or did not feel comfortable with the traditional ethnic labels. After the 1960s, censuses allowed the option “Yugoslav by nationality.” In 1981, in the aftermath of Tito’s spectacular burial, the number of Yugoslavs by nationality reached an all-time record high of 1,216,463.60The largest num-
ber of these Yugoslavs was recorded by the census of 1991 in Bosnia- Herzegovina (5.5 percent of the population). According to a 1992 study, around 4.5 million persons were uncertain about their ethnic identities ac- tually seeing themselves as Yugoslavs by nationality.61
The negative attitude of Yugoslavs by nationality toward the traditional Yugoslav mainstream religions was a response to the traditional conjunction between religious and ethnonational identities. According to several surveys of religiosity and nationality conducted in the late 1970s through the first half of the 1980s, the Yugoslavs by nationality despised both traditional identities, ethnic as well as religious, and opted for the Yugoslav label as a nationality, while declaring no religious affiliation.62A survey of religiosity
in the Zagreb region completed in 1984 indicated that disapproval of tra- ditional religiosity among Yugoslavs by nationality was striking: 55.2 percent declared no religious affiliation; 45.2 percent declared themselves atheists;
88.8 percent never attended church, and 86.2 percent never prayed.63How-
ever, Yugoslavs by nationality declared a relatively greater affinity for atten- dance at official patriotic rituals (e.g., state holidays, the Youth Relay) and more interest in participating in various social activities than groups that showed relatively high commitment to traditional religiosity and church at- tendance (e.g., Croats).64In other words, these “ethnic Yugoslavs” were be-
lievers in the Yugoslav civil religion.65According to a 1986 survey of the
values and orientations of Yugoslav Youth, Yugoslavs by nationality dem- onstrated the lowest degree of ethnocentrism and national exclusiveness, in contrast to ethnic Albanians, who manifested the relatively highest degree of ethnocentrism and national exclusiveness of all Yugoslav ethnic groups, as well as a high degree of traditional religious affiliation.66 The survey
director, Srdjan Vrcan, said that Yugoslavs by nationality were “the most secularized section of contemporary Yugoslav youth” and concluded that “it seems that the refusal to identify oneself in traditional national terms and the refusal to identify oneself religiously go hand in hand and mutually reinforce each other. It could be even argued that both arise from the same historical experience.”67
Finally, although brotherhood and unity was not the same as the nineteenth-century ideology of Slavic brotherhood, it could be, at least hy- pothetically, perceived as a current in Pan-Slavism as, for instance, Titoist nationalism was identified by Hans Kohn.68Titoist Yugoslavism indeed man-
ifested Pan-Slavic characteristics. In 1944, on the occasion of a soccer match between Tito’s army and British troops on the isle of Vis in the Adriatic, the new Yugoslavia adopted as the nation’s anthem a modified version of one of hallmarks of the nineteenth-century Pan-Slavism, the Slovak song “Ej Slovane” (Hey, Slavs!). The original hymn was written in 1834 by Samuel Tomasˇik and performed for the first time at the 1848 Pan-Slavic Congress at Prague. The hymn appeared in many versions (for awhile reflecting the growing Slav-Teuton strife, i.e., Slavo-German rivalry) and became, as the historian of Pan-Slavism Hans Kohn wrote, “a demonstrative assertion of Slav national vitality and eternity.”69 The hymn invokes a “Slavic spirit”
(duch Slovanski). After the first phase of Pan-Slavism (and Slavo-German tensions), World War II, as Kohn pointed out, “gave a new impulse to the stalling Pan-Slavism,” and this time again the old anti-Germanism was awakened.70After 1945, modified versions of “Ej Slovane” became national
anthems of Poland and Yugoslavia, two Slavic nations that then shared the same communist system (but, as I showed in chapter 4, the anticommunist Catholic opposition in Yugoslavia and Poland was constructing an alterna- tive, Polish-Croatian “brotherhood and unity” based on common Catholic faith and anticommunist ideology). After Tito’s successful struggle with Sta- lin, Hans Kohn concluded in 1953, Titoism represented a shift toward the Western variant of Pan-Slavism, as opposed to the old Russian messianism and post–World War II Eastern Pan-Slavism that was revived by Stalin and
,
advanced in the communist bloc of Eastern Europe under the aegis of the Soviet Union.71
The alloy of Pan-Slavism and the mythology of the Partisan war with brotherhood and unity as the country’s civil religion created an effective nationalist ideology without repeating the flaws of the interwar kingdom that had sought to devise some kind of a new supranationality. The civil religion of brotherhood and unity was an important source of legitimacy for the communist regime. The system and the idea were inextricably linked. It was taken for granted that any struggle against communist rule in Yu- goslavia would involve the destruction of brotherhood and unity, with the risk of another ethnic war.