3.3 Nationalism vs. Globalism
Post-communist societies are quite polarised between traditionalists and modernists. Traditionalists look to the past, to ethnicity and to religion as sources of their identity, while modernists oppose these as outdated and look ahead to modern globalist concepts to define who they are, or rather, who they have to become. In line with their internationalist perspective, communist leaders kept the nationalistic passions of the people under their authority under strict control. Yet this proved to be no solution to the ‘problem of different nationalities’. This was evidenced by the violent explosion of nationalistic passions that led to recent wars in the Balkans and in the former Soviet Union.
The root of this problem is that after the fall of communism the artificially constructed identity of the ethnic groups that had been part of the communist states entered a major crisis. Not knowing for certain if the fall of communism was irreversible, or what the future would look like, people were confronted with a critical need to define a new identity. In this, evidently, ethnicity came to play a central role.
Another aspect that further complicates matters is the religious dimension of people’s identity, a dimension whose importance was rediscovered after atheistic propaganda stopped exercising its control over society. And when people’s identity was redefined through the merging of ethnicity and religion (which is technically called philetism, a heresy that was condemned by a Christian council in the nineteenth century), the combination became truly explosive. Thus, in former Yugoslavia, from a philetist perspective, to be a Serb is to be an Eastern Orthodox, to be a Croat is to be a Catholic and to be a Bosnian is to be a Muslim. When such sharply defined identities came into collision the result was a terrible was that caused tens of thousands of deaths.
At the other end of the spectrum, in post-communist societies we also find those who argue that looking to the past as a source of individual and corporate identity would be detrimental to the establishment of a modern, developed society. These people are usually strong believers in the alleged virtues of secularism (the radical separation of religion from the public sphere) and globalisation (the present-day tendency towards the creation of cultural and economic uniformity across the whole world).
It is again obvious that such polarisation of the public arena has a negative effect on the social cohesion of post-communist societies and slows down the process of transition to democracy.
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