Serbian Jerusalem: Religious Nationalism, Globalization and the Invention of a Holy Land in Europe's Periphery, 1985-2017

Abstract

According to beliefs of religious nationalism, a nation is a community of ancestors and descendants, dead and living, past and present. As such, it incorporates within its territory all past and present markers of nationhood, notably historic religious monuments as the physical evidence of the perennial existence of the religious and ethnic community that is, in the nationalist imagination, of the nation. Thus, the history of the shrines and monuments, as told in religious tales and preserved in the rituals, is the history of the nation. In many parts of the world, contesting claims to consecrated territories clash. The struggles evolve into holy wars between good and evil and angels and demons. The enmity cemented by religion does not end until demythologization of history or until one side or the other has been destroyed. At the same time, in a globalized world, narratives of ethnic and religious nationalisms are no longer isolated from each other as they used to be. In recent decades, they have observed each other and borrowed and influenced one another. The case under consideration comparatively observes the conflicts in Kosovo in the Balkan and in Israel-Palestine in order to critically examine the nationalist and religious politics behind the nationalist discourses on history and religion, the past and the present, and the sacred and the secular.

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