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SERBIA - RELIGION, POLITICS &
GENDER IN SERBIA:
THE RE-TRADITIONALIZATION OF GENDER
ROLES IN THE
CONTEXT OF NATION-STATE FORMATION
Author(s):
Rada Drezgić
Project Title: Religion,
Politics and Gender Equality
This
is the Final Research Report on Serbia in the Religion, Politics and Gender
Equality Project.
This paper argues that the intersection of national and religious identities
and ideologies in the context of nation-state formation in Serbia which started
in the 1990s made religion an integral part of the political process. The
Serbian Orthodox Church has been using this newly opened political space to
assert itself as the moral and spiritual arbiter and to impose its norms in all
areas of social life.
The abortion issue, that serves here as a case study, is an example of the
Church’s attempt to influence legal reforms and to impose patriarchal social
values. The analysis of the abortion debates and of the new legislation (passed
in 1995) shows that secular views on abortion remained basically unshaken and
that the Church failed to carry its views into the new legislation. At the same
time, it is argued that religious-cum-national(ist) discourses that shaped
nationalist politics of reproduction were more successful in destabilizing the
ideology of women’s emancipation and gender equality developed during state
socialism. By reducing womanhood to motherhood, religious-cum-nationalist
discourses placed women symbolically back into the private realm, reinforced
male dominance, and thereby reversed the small changes in the domestic realm
that the socialist era had brought about. At the same time, post-socialist
structural changes and economic collapse have rendered the domestic
realm—heavily dependent on women’s unpaid work—an important site of subsistence
production. This, it is argued, affected gender equality in multiple ways.
It is further argued that the abortion debates of the early 1990s are
illustrative of the nature of the political system and of the relationship
between religion and nation(alism) at the time: the pseudo-democratic
regime of Slobodan Milošević instrumentalised religion and the Church in
order to create a cohesive national body and to mobilize the population for its
own political aims (instrumental pious nationalism) while keeping the
Church and its leadership at arms length. The change of regime in 2000, which
marks the beginning of the democratization process, brought about a much
tighter connection between the church and the state. It is argued that as long
as the Kosovo issue is unresolved, the question of national borders remains
open and the project of nation-state formation unfinished; this creates fertile
ground for conservative national(ist) politics. As a consequence, conservative,
populist parties that have close ties with the Church have been able to use
their influence within volatile governing coalitions and their significant
presence in the Parliament to open up an expanding space for religious forces
and issues in politics. This in turn has made liberal political parties ever
more dependant on the Church for their political legitimization.
The new relationship between the Church and state has been sanctioned by the
Law on Religion and Religious Communities (2006) which follows the model of
“collaborative separation” between these two institutions. As a result, in
addition to cultural domination, Orthodoxy earned institutional recognition and
influence while the Church was able to register for itself greater political
and economic power. Any tangible consequences of this strengthening of the
Church and of religious forces for gender equality remain to be seen.
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