Antagonistic Clericalization and Ethnicization of Sociopolitical Consciousness in the Balkans and the post-Yugoslav Religious Education

Year 2023, Volume: 4 Issue: 1, 1 - 22, 21.12.2023

Faruk Hadžić

Abstract

No considerable research focused on ethnopolitical behavior in Western Balkans related to observed phenomena. Thus, issues regarding the sociopolitical and educational processes of clerical-ethnonational exist. Furthermore, its social and psychological dimensions and peace stalemate are crucial points. Therefore, the paper will highlight several critical categorical concepts (ethnonationalism, clerical domination, segregation, education, conflict, and peace dynamics). Finally, by suggesting individualism over collectivism, the study points to ethical, sociopolitical, and psychological awareness as a totality of relations between autonomous citizens. I argue that clericalization and ethnicization are adopted by ethnonational political behavior, empowered by the Balkan connection to religious identities. Political behavior and clerical and ethnic ideologies strengthen support for religious antagonism, fascism, and historical revisionism, "dividing" peoples into ethnoreligious homogenous territories and adversely shaping new generations. Post-socialist Balkan societies are intensely marked by religion, specifically external manifest, associating religious identities and Clergy with political preferences. This entanglement is the groundwork of long-lasting despondency; religions are reduced principally to ethnicity-nation and subsequent power. All-binding inclusive ethnicization in Bosnia and Herzegovina-B&H infiltrates religious dimensions, including material and non-material cultures. The clerical education consequence points to the religious state of anti-secular internal disintegration of the genuine faith. Invoking man's ethnic-clerical consciousness entails unsatisfactory results due to Balkan's historical prevailing violence than would be obtained by the statutory prohibition of religious education. The B&H ethnoreligious-educational segregation reproduces ethnopolitical ideologists, preventing the next generation's socio-moral development and simulating the ethnoreligious hybrid conflicts. Nations cannot be clerical-political apparatus morally. The dominance and exclusivity of collectivist logics of ethnically and confessionally complex societies oppose the spirit of necessary susceptibility. Ethically, sociopolitically, and psychologically, one must gain society's self-awareness as a totality of relations between autonomous and equal individuals-citizens to generate clerical and ethnicization immunity.

Keywords

Clericalization & Ethnicization, Balkans & former Yugoslavia, Social consciousness, Religious education, Peace & Conflict

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