Protecting the Past and Shielding the Future: Political Memory in the Former Yugoslavia

Abstract

The dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation (comprising Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia [including Kosovo] and Slovenia) in 1991–1992 initiated a series of armed conflicts over ‘stateness’, boundaries and national identities (Oberschall 2007: 103). The fragmentation of Yugoslavia was particularly bloody, violent and pitched neighbour against neighbour, ethnic group against ethnic group. This battleground brewed in the vibrant mix of populations that existed in Tito’s Yugoslavia. The ethnic fusion under Tito became increasingly toxic and potent after Tito’s death. Glenny (1996: 70) argues that after 1945, Tito’s strategy, faced with a complex ethnic mosaic of Slavs and non-Slavs, Catholics, Muslims and Orthodox Christians, in which ‘each national group believe[d] its experience of oppression to be more intense than any other’ was ‘to throw the hatred into history’s deep freeze by enforcing communal life’ (Glenny 1996: 148). The tactic was fatally flawed ‘because when the resentments were taken out of the historical deep freeze, the memory of hatred proved to be as fresh as ever after it thawed’ (Glenny 1996: 148). While Slovenia escaped relatively unscathed (with war lasting ten days), Croatia’s secession from Yugoslavia in 1991 precipitated almost four years of ethnic wars which killed about 250,000 people and displaced millions through ethnic cleansing.