Mitja Velikonja has written a comprehensive survey that examines
how religion has interacted with other aspects of Bosnia-
Herzegovina's history. Velikonja sees the former Ottoman
borderland as a distinct cultural and religious entity where three
major faiths—Islam, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy—managed
to coexist in relative peace. It is only during the past century that
competing nationalisms have led to persecution, ethnic cleansing,
and mass murder.
	
    Emphasizing the importance of religion to nationalism as a
symbol of collective identity that strengthens national identity,
Velikonja notes that religious groups have a tendency to become
isolated from one another. He believes Bosnia-Herzegovina was
unique in its šarlikost, or diversity, because while religion defined
ethnic communities there and kept them separate, it did not create a
culture of intolerance. Rather than suppressing one another, the
region's ethno-religious groups learned to cooperate and mediate
their differences—useful behavior in an area that served as
buffer between East and West for most of its history.

    Velikonja believes that Bosnians went beyond tolerance to
embrace synthetic, eclectic religious norms, with each religious
group often borrowing customs and rituals from its rivals. Rather
than the extreme orthodoxy evident elsewhere in Europe, Bosnia
became the home of heterodoxy. Sadly, nationalism changed all
that, and the area became the scene of systematic persecution,
forced conversion, and mass slaughter.

    Velikonja considers the misfortunes suffered by the Bosnians
during the 1990s as largely the result of actions by their neighbors
and local militants and inaction by the international community.
But he also sees the tragedy that unfolded as the result of the
exploitation of ethno-religious differences and myths by Serbian
chauvinists and Croatian nationalists.

    Despite the tragedy that overwhelmed Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Velikonja believes that the region can find its way back to religious
tolerance by separating religion from ethnicity and by establishing
firm boundaries between church and state.

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MITJA VELIKONJA is currently an assistant professor of
sociology at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has written
several articles and two monographs on myth and religion in
Eastern Europe.

Number Twenty: Eastern European Studies