RELIGIOUS WARS? : A short history of the Balkans.

After the commencement of the NATO bombing of Serbia, in April CNN (in my view tendentiously) aired an interview with the notorious Zeljko Raznjatovic-Arkan. As the leader of the paramilitary Serbian "Tigers," Arkan has been indicted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague for barbarities committed during the Bosnian war. For his "service" in Bosnia, Arkan was elected a deputy in the Yugoslavian parliament as a representative from Kosovo. Christiana Amanpour's report on Arkan's atrocities went on to show him making a cynical display of his alleged Orthodox faith. Before the cameras he pulled out a cross from under his shirt and kissed it, his wedding (his second wife is a Serbian pop star) was officiated at by numerous priests, and he was shown repeatedly crossing himself and in other ways demonstrating his loyalty to the Serbian Orthodox church. His display of religiosity was both a cruel hoax and a window into the nature of the "religious" character of much of the violence that has convulsed the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union for the past decade.

After the collapse of communism in 1989, several wars broke out pitting various religious groups against each other. In southwestern Asia, Armenian Christians fought Muslim Azeris for Nagorno-Karabakh. Serbs (who are Orthodox) waged war against Croats (who are Catholics). In Bosnia-Herzegovina the Croats and Serbs continued to fight each other while also fighting Muslim Boshnyaks. Now Orthodox Serbs are fighting or forcibly expelling Muslim Albanians from Kosovo. Everybody seems to be opposed to the Serbs except fellow Orthodox Greeks (including Greek Cypriots) and Russians. All of this may seem like evidence for a theory that links religious attachment to nationalistic efforts to cleanse ethnic "others," but things are somewhat more complicated than they appear.

As in Europe as a whole, powerful forces of secularization, whether in its Marxist atheist or its consumerist "Western" garb, have also been at work in the Balkans. Many of the region's religious leaders vehemently deny that religion (or at least their own religion) plays an important role in these conflicts. They point out how marginalized religion was under communism and how little actual power religious leaders and institutions have. This has a certain plausibility. We mustn't forget how the appeals of many prominent religious leaders-the pope, the patriarchs of Constantinople and Moscow, the World Council of Churches, etc.-have gone unheeded by NATO. Religious pleading usually has little influence in ending wars.

Still, a nuanced case can be made that religion plays an important, if not decisive, role in many of these conflicts. At the outset, however, we must not confuse these modern nationalistic and ethnic conflicts with the religious wars of old (although even the Crusades and the religious wars of the sixteenth century were not solely or primarily religious). In Bosnia, for instance, religion played a greater role than it does currently in Kosovo, although some of the same religious protagonists are involved. To determine to what degree religion is implicated, each case must be analyzed separately.

Broadly speaking, there are two major ways in which religion comes into play in these modern wars. The first is that religion played a historic role in defining social and individual identities. Consequently, in Eastern Europe ethnic and religious identity are often fused to such a degree that they form an ethnoreligious symbiosis. The volatile interplay of various ethnoreligious allegiances has long worked just below the political surface throughout the region. Like the earth's tectonic plates, these fundamental social realities are little noticed until they shift or collide.

The second important impact of religion is in shaping sympathies (friendships) or antipathies (fears) within and against groups. Three major religious groups, namely the Eastern Orthodox, the Roman (Western) Catholic, and the Muslims are in play in the Balkans. Protestants are seen as pesky evangelizers who tend to deny the authenticity of the religious orientation of the big religions and rob people of their national identity and traditional faith. Anti-Semitism persists, but largely in the absence of any Jews.

Most of the peoples of Eastern Europe were Christianized prior to the Great Schism of 1054, some by missionaries who looked either to Constantinople or to Rome. When the tensions between these two ancient patriarchal sees split "the one, true, apostolic, and universal church," it ripped Christendom apart, creating a visible cultural and political fault line that runs from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Each church feared that reconciliation would mean surrendering dearly held truths and selling out to those whose truth was no longer complete. For the next thousand years the two churches became fierce competitors. The impact on statecraft was enormous, since each side understood itself to be establishing God's rule among an entire people. When necessary, emperors used force to forge a single religious and national identity.

By the thirteenth century, however, Mongol Tartars occupied most of the Russian Orthodox lands while the Ottoman Turks in the fourteenth century captured large portions of the Christian Balkans. Both promoted their Muslim religion among various segments of the population. The Ottoman Empire's hold was longer and more successful, but under both conquerors an imperial Islam laid claim on many lives and all aspects of society. To this day the followers of Islam, very much like medieval Christians, see their religion as a comprehensive way of life. Converts to Islam changed not only religious practice but culture and civilization as well. As a consequence, Christian Balkan populations were repressed. Russians were under this "yoke," as they are fond of calling it, for two centuries; the Balkan peoples for five. The Russians gradually threw off the yoke and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries became an empire, successfully colonizing millions of non-Christians, most of them Muslims. As the tables turned, the Muslims resented their Russian (Orthodox) colonizers as much as the Russians had resented them. Similarly, when the Islamic colonization of the Balkans ended in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an enormous rage, fueled by nascent modern nationalism, erupted. Not only the Turks, but those locals whose ancestors had converted to the religion of the Turks, became the objects of retribution. The "never again" of the Balkan Christians is a "never again" to living under Islam.

In the Balkans the conversion to Islam was most successful among Albanians. About 70 percent of Albanians have an Islamic identity (among the Kosovars the figure is close to 100 percent). Former Orthodox and Catholic Bosnians also converted to Islam, to the tune of a third of the population. In Bulgaria a significant minority of Turks and converted Slavs (Pomaks) complicated the picture. After the collapse of the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires in 1918, most of the newly reestablished nation-states in the Balkans-Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania (all Orthodox), and Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Croatia, and Slovenia (Catholic)-defined themselves in distinctly anti-Islamic ways. Suspicion and discord, however, also continued to run along the fault line of the Great Schism.

This somewhat oversimplified scheme seemed to lose much of its relevance after World War II when all of these countries (except Greece) fell under Communist domination. Ardent efforts were made to suppress all religion. Even under communism, however, there was a distinct cultural and civilizational awareness of religious heritage and identity. There was also a particular resentment by those who were nominally Christian toward the burgeoning Muslim population. Adding to these divisions was the fact that the Eastern Orthodox, and even more so the Muslim population, were less willing to adapt to industrialization and modernization. In many quarters, these groups were seen as obstacles to economic development.

With the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, its leveling of social and ethnic hierarchies dissipated and the underlying resentments and fears rose to the surface where nationalistic leaders like Slobodan Milosevic could exploit them. As the Muslim population started to demand greater rights, including the right to self- determination, Serb resistance hardened. Dark, exaggerated fears of Islamic fundamentalism and a return to a Shariate legal system that would subjugate Christians flourished. As seen in the Bosnian war, inordinate bloodshed, forced migrations, partition, and other calamities quickly followed.

Religion usually nurtures a special feeling for co-religionists. Familial terms such as "brothers" and "sisters" are commonly used not only for co-religionists we know but also in addressing and thinking about the larger religious community. Religion allows disparate peoples to share the same symbols, external signs, and internal values. In times of calm people rejoice when they encounter co-religionists; such meetings are a sign, after all, that our religion is successful, that there are others with values like ours. In times of crisis and threat, these links become even more important. We feel that those who threaten our co-religionists may threaten us. If we do not come to the assistance of our fellow Muslims or Orthodox, who will? From this perspective it is natural that Turks or Iranians will support embattled Bosnian or Albanian Muslims (in Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, or Macedonia), Greeks support Serbs as do Russians, and that Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, and Italians supported the Catholic Croats and Slovenes. Many Europeans (East and West) have an uneasy feeling that Muslims are making unwanted inroads into Europe, and that their physical presence and high birth rate will be followed by territorial demands. Muslims, undoubtedly, harbor similar fears of "Christians," even when they are motivated by nationalist or capitalist, rather than religious, interests.

Obviously such religious affiliations do not work automatically or universally. Bulgarians are somewhat ambivalent about the Serbs because of their rivalry over Macedonia. A Bulgarian Orthodox spokesperson sharply condemned Milosevic's policies in the Balkans. The Ukrainians do not show the same ardor toward Serbs as do Russians, if for no other reason than their apprehensions about Russian hegemony among Orthodox Slavs. Americans sided with Albanians who are predominantly Muslims, seemingly driven by TV pictures and sensing that something must be done about the flow of refugees. We are also driven, I think, by a delayed sense of remorse over how little was done to stop the Nazi extermination of European Jews.

The religious factor is real enough in the Balkans, and plays a smaller or greater role depending on the specific context. In Kosovo both the Serbs and the Albanians have exploited religious themes. But another factor is also in play. In the Balkans there has been much talk about "living space" and limited resources. Hitler, of course, used precisely these fears to justify his wars, but he was by no means the only modern European politician to do so. As the sometimes sharp increase in population allegedly outstrips the ability of a region to support it, especially in impoverished areas like the Balkans, political conflict increasingly gets cast in the language of life or death. Obviously such extreme rhetoric lends itself to radical or "final" solutions.

American politicians and media are fond of claiming that we are a naive and innocent nation that somehow keeps falling prey to more sinister forces. However, we should not be naive enough to think that by bombing a country into submission or placing an international military force on the ground, we can settle intractable ethnoreligious conflicts. Trying to fix distant conflicts by force before learning how those involved see themselves and their adversaries often only compounds the problem.