Traditiona Value Patterns and the War in Ex-Yugoslavia (English)

The various national movements in the Southern Slavonic countries concerned themselves very thoroughly with their respective village cultures. In them, in a world of rapid modernization, they sought to find and detect their origins and to understand what characteristics their people and makes it special. This more often than not resulted in a romantic transfiguration and idealization of rural or village value patterns,as seen from an urban, intellectual perspective. These patterns,as it were, should be characteristic of the nation and serve as models. Furthermore, we seek to place some traditional value patterns into the context of the war in Croatia and Bosnia. The focus of these reflections will be on two regional areas which shall be discussed in greater detail later on