Traditional Value Patterns and the Crisis in the Former Yugoslavia

It is of considerable significance that various nationalist movements with a populist orientation and especially that of the South Slavs, have turned to village cultures in attempting to understand what has made them, as a people, distinctive in a modernizing world. This has been partly romantic in the sense that rural values have been idealized from urban perspective. Partly, too, it is a substantial acknowledgment that the processes of industrialization and urbanization do not represent simply a one-way influence of urban values on the village. Hostility between town and village, which increased economically and socially as the state developed, did not in any way diminish the importance of the rural subculture in shaping the nation. The prewar ideals of the peasant parties have not been realized after the World War Two in the context of a socialist state, but they always have been an important factor in these societies. Especially since in the countries of former Yugoslavia national movements began to gain in power these values have been propagated in the campaigns of the national parties together with the national history and the the national threat of the own people . Following we want to present some features of this traditional values and why the persistence of these values can be seen in a number of ways and why this overwhelming tradition seems to be so strong in the current war