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.