International Media and Tourism Industry as the Facilitators of Socialist Legacy Heritagization in the CEE Region

Abstract

After the fall of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the socialist legacy became a matter of contested discourses, coming from the new national governments. However, with the recently awakening nostalgia for socialism and growing international interest for the socialist pasts, the approaches to its legacies began gradually to change. In this paper, the focus is on some recent international trends with regards to the socialist heritage for evaluating the share of their influences in the process of de-contestation occurring at the local/national levels. There are two processes standing in juxtaposition to be observed; on the one hand, official nation branding distances the state from socialist pasts to emphasize, often contrasting, post-socialist national identity. On the other hand, the development of communist heritage tourism attempts to reconsider and appropriate socialist legacies in the national frameworks for identity construction. Using the examples from Hungary, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia, the author demonstrates the role of international media and the tourism industry for meeting the objectives of economic development while maintaining post-socialist national identity senses, but also their potentials in reconsiderations of the contested history chapters.