>I've lived in a country where the religions were marginalized (except that you could get into jail for "insulting religious feelings of believers"), and the people were still polite, friendly and merry. Actually, even more merry, because the old "you can't marry him, he's a {insert the other denomination here}" didn't apply anymore. The crime rate was low, there were no homeless people (each municipality owned some housing for the neediest).
>
>Difficult to respond without sounding harsh. Lets just say that the country you describe will go down in the history of the 20th Century as the country where the UN failed to prevent ethnic cleansing by former citizens at each others' throats. It's hardly a poster child to hold up against your new home.

Yugoslavia was not 'poster child', but was defenetely different child
then the rest of the kids in that *block*. At times that Dragan (and me to) fondly remembers it really looked good for menu people.
Education, healt care, housing was accessible to wide range of people
provided of course that you were not 'heretic' to new *religion* that
replaced all other religions. That was of course communist ideology.

So I wld disagree with Dragan that religion was marginalised, it was at all times hight, in sheep/beast taming activity, just different in symbols.
[ Unless you are taking specifically about established religion dispensing corporations such as catholic or ortodox church etc. ]
And it worked in terms of taming.
That 'setup' worked fine for period of time, keeping *truce* between nations/religion groups which were contained within, and even looked/advertised as progressive at the time.

Country (Kingdom SHS - 1918) was however built on dangerousely false foundations (brotherhood of slavs !!!) then second floor built by Tito's communists regime (on western loans) aldough looked nice, had menu structural problems and after being heavily abused by tenants (dirt,separations,alterations etc) eventually colapsed on everybody's head.
(With a little help of our friends)

Even with all that, that house was still The Home , if I ever had one. It had unimagineable atmosphere, charm , beauty and warmt, so it is really hard not to be nostaligic and sad about it.
Growing up in such home as trully freeminded youth, we were discussing almost everything all the time. Complaining about lack of political freedom, democracy, opportunities yadada...
Mind you - living in country where mind was controled, people ideologically opressed and yadadada ... (all truth btw !)

Back then, USA/West was 'poster child', an ideal for me and menu others. With all freedoms, equal opportunity (American Dream?), opennes to new ideas, democracy, progressivnes, high education and yadadada...
(Was that truth btw ?)

But that was America/West of 70ies and 80ies.

In the meanwhile, I grew up and my dream catcher no longer works for me.
'Poster child' i had on my wall, kind of grew up into something completely different.
[not to be harsh ] Defenetely not what I expected.

So who is poster child today? No such thing. (Aldough I like EU)
We are all bunch of *adults*, living in a meterial world.