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Chapter 4 • Nicola Mai
also, there is no attempt to analyse the reasons for this political regime’s
potential appeal to Serbs, nor the ways in which some form of consensus
for such a regime must have been libidinally and thus culturally sustainable
in Serbia.
Another important aspect found in the analysis of the emergence of
Serbhood from the Yugoslav identity is that, although most refugees tend
to refer to Serbia and Yugoslavia indistinctly, the two concepts bear a different
tone. In particular, Serb identity is distinguished from Yugoslav
identity by underlining the existence of a different relationship with “tradition
and religion”, Yugoslavia being more often related to the experience
of the Communist past. When asked to decide between the two, however,
most refugees chose “Serbian” as their national identity. When analysing
the way different attitudes to religion were seen as marking off affiliation
to the Serb rather than to the Yugoslav identity, it became apparent that
most refugees perceived these differences as central in framing the difference
both between Yugoslav and Serb and between Kosovar Serb and Serb
identities.
Many refugees have emphasized how, unlike Serbs from Serbia, they
never actually severed their ties with religion, which they kept on practising
privately in times of communism. This is a major element of perceived
difference between Serbs from Kosovo and those from Serbia proper. It is
one of the main arguments, along with the presence in Kosovo of the most
important Serb Orthodox monasteries, mobilized to sustain the idea that
Kosovo is the cradle of Serb civilisation. Most of the refugees actually
seemed to hold this image of Kosovo, and believed that the many values
and practices related to Serbhood had been preserved intact only in the
region. The Serbs of rump Yugoslavia, on the other hand, are seen as having
moved away from the practices, values and traditions central to maintaining
Serbian identity. Their fall away from tradition is sometimes
blamed for the country’s moral decay, and particularly for the events that
led to the war and fragmentation of Yugoslavia. Especially criticized is the
pragmatic attitude that many people had developed toward religion after
the “end” of Communism, in both Kosovo and the rest of Yugoslavia. The
renewed post-communist devotion and interest in the Orthodox Church
was also often seen as instrumental and exterior. To many, this new surge
of spirituality in fact disguised a desire to be seen as breaking away from
Communism and to embrace a new nationalist and greedy configuration of
Serbhood. Again, this lack of spirituality was usually considered to be at
the basis of the moral and material fragmentation and decay of Serbia and
Yugoslavia, to a varying extent.
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