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Erasing Yugoslavia, Ignoring Europe: The Perils of the Europeanisation Process in Contemporary Croatian Memory Politics

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Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans

Part of the book series: Memory Politics and Transitional Justice ((MPTJ))

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Abstract

Following the 1990s wars, successor states of the former Yugoslavia committed to the Europeanisation process. Since Croatia’s accession to the EU in 2013, however, it has experienced a backsliding from democratic norms of memorialisation to an exclusionist, narrowly ethnic understanding of memory. These shifts in memory politics are reflected in monument construction and recent attempts to silence or eliminate traces of Croatia’s Yugoslav past in places directly affected by the Croatian War of Independence (“Homeland War”) from 1991 to 1995. In this chapter, I suggest that the European project of memory not only failed in Croatia, but additionally provoked a counter-effect that pushed nationalist sentiments forward. Using empirical evidence from speeches, monuments, museums and commemorative events, that is, the “public face” of memory, in Croatia, I seek to contextualise the failures or limitations of the Europeanisation project in Croatia in the periods immediately preceding and following the state’s accession to the EU.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Formally, the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties, the key coordinating body of Marxist-Leninist states in Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Initially headquartered in Belgrade, Cominform moved its seat to Bucharest after the Tito-Stalin split.

  2. 2.

    My quotation marks.

  3. 3.

    Moreover, there is even a need for further “monitoring” of the “Eastern Balkan” countries whose citizens (legally EU citizens as well) are often treated as third-class citizens, as demonstrated in the case of those Romanians (most of them Roma) recently expelled from France as illegal aliens.

  4. 4.

    My documentation of Croatian monuments has taken place in almost all counties of Croatia but has particularly focused on Zagreb, eastern Slavonia, Lika and Dalmatia, sites most relevant to the history of the Homeland War. This is part of a wider project to record the “public face of memory”, that is, the visible elements of Croatian cultural memory that are publicly accessible—monuments, museums, graffiti/street art, and commemorative events—which allows for an analysis of the social and political relationships present in the contemporary Croatian memory landscape.

  5. 5.

    Operation Storm (4–7 August 1995) saw the recapture of territory in Lika and Dalmatia claimed during the Homeland War by the breakaway Republika Srpska Krajina by Croatian armed forces. Though the final key lieu de mémoire in the Croatian narrative of the Homeland War, Storm remains a contentious point in the troubled shared history of Serbs and Croats in Croatia and abroad. While the territorial integrity of Croatia was re-established with the success of the Croatian armed forces, thousands of Serbs fled their homes towards the Republika Srpska or further into Serbia.

  6. 6.

    The relativising of the fascist past by the HDZ also mirrors recent actions by the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland, whose judicial reforms in the mid-to-late 2010s have seen a denial of Polish complicity in the Holocaust, punishing those who call into question the prescribed victim status of all Poles during the Second World War (Bucholc 2019). Despite threats of sanction by the European Union, little has been done at the transnational level to force a reversal of this pattern of erasure and denial.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Lea David for her contributions to earlier drafts of this chapter, as well as to Andy Aydın-Aitchison, Ross Bond, and our editors Ana Milošević and Tamara Trošt for their insightful comments throughout the writing process.

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  1. School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

    Taylor McConnell

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  1. Leuven Institute for Criminology (LINC), KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Ana Milošević

  2. School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Tamara Trošt

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McConnell, T. (2021). Erasing Yugoslavia, Ignoring Europe: The Perils of the Europeanisation Process in Contemporary Croatian Memory Politics. In: Milošević, A., Trošt, T. (eds) Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans. Memory Politics and Transitional Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4_3

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