Introduction: Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans

Milošević, Ana; Trošt, Tamara Pavasović

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4_1

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…With the involvement of Documenta, the rather local debate surrounding the memorialization of Goli Otok entered a second phase, corresponding to the Europeanization of memory in the former Yugoslavia. 115 As an organization, Documenta itself mirrors this process, as particularly after Croatia's accession to the European Union in 2013, it relied more on EU funding, which reflected an emphasis on the dual authoritarianism memory model advocated by CEE countries. Documenta was previously focused on the crimes of the 1990s, highlighting crimes against the Serbian minority by Croat forcesthus a voice of difference in a Croatian memory landscape focused on the trope of Serbian aggression and a double narrative of Croat victimhood and heroism.…”

Section: VImentioning

confidence: 99%

Difficult Heritage in Southeastern Europe: Local and Transnational Entanglements in Memorializing Political Prisons after Socialism

Bădescu

2023

Journal of Contemporary History

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Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, various governments supported the creation of memorial museums of political violence during state socialism. While much scholarly attention has been given to Hungary’s House of Terror and the Baltic museums of occupations, this article examines the contrasting situation in Southeastern Europe, where state actors were generally absent and which witnessed relatively belated and overwhelmingly bottom-up processes. The article analyses the particularity of political prisons as ‘difficult heritage’. It scrutinizes the commonalities and entanglements between the memorialization of political prisons in three Southeastern European countries marked by distinctive trajectories both during and after communism: Albania (Spaç), Romania (Sighet and Piteşti), and Croatia (Goli Otok). The article shows how in the absence of state-level policies to address transitional justice, activism surrounding difficult heritage memorialization has aimed to fill the gap. It also argues that the relationship between site memorialization in Southeastern Europe and the wider European models is doubly constitutive: first, the memorialization of Sighet in 1990s Romania borrowed approaches from Western European Holocaust memorialization, then shaped a European wide set of best practices; second, a wave of new memorial initiatives after 2010 in Southeastern Europe was connected to the Europeanization of memory and transnational engagements.

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Section: VImentioning

confidence: 99%

Difficult Heritage in Southeastern Europe: Local and Transnational Entanglements in Memorializing Political Prisons after Socialism

Bădescu

2023

Journal of Contemporary History

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“…By adhering to these decisions, the candidate countries signal their alignment with EU norms of remembrance, and indicate their European identity. 40 This means, for instance, that the endorsement of the European Parliament's resolution on Srebrenica conditions Serbia to also adopt a similar resolution within its parliament. 41 At the bottom-up level, the accession process has allowed elites to co-opt the EU framework to pursue their own national agendas: as discussed above, in Croatia, this is reflected in its subsuming of Jasenovac into a broader European memory framework, what Milošević and Trošt have called an "EU washing" of injustices committed by Croats.…”

Section: Selective Memory Of the 1990s Wars And Transitional Justice ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Renationalizing Memory in the Post-Yugoslav Region

Trošt¹,

David²

2023

Patriotic History and the (Re)Nationalization of Memory

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The post-Yugoslav region is frequently taken as a textbook example of how states can harness the past as a tool for the needs of the present. Extensive research has documented the usage of history in mobilizing ethnic conflicts in the region, and particularly how the memory of World War II (WWII) was harnessed to rally ethnic animosities during the 1990s wars. 1 Up until Yugoslavia's breakup in 1990, the member states had shared an official history based on socialism, Yugoslavism, "brotherhood and unity" of the national groups, and the common, anti-fascist partisan victory against the Axis powers in WWII. This shared history began fracturing in the late 1980s, and disintegrated in the 1990s, as each new post-Yugoslav state embarked on a process of national "rediscovery," which involved re-writing history from a new, national, standpoint. The process of national redefinition, and harnessing fragments of history that support this new national vision, continued (and continues) from the 1990s through the consolidation of statehood in the post-Yugoslav states until today.In this piece, we demonstrate that strengthening the myth of nationhood was the primary function of the massive U-turn shaping historical revisionism in the post-Yugoslav countries, purposely obliterating the shared common past and disconnecting it from the Yugoslav legacy. 2 The process of affirming statehood, nation-building, and "rediscovering" a new national history necessarily meant revising all facets of history to support and confirm this new narrative. While this process unravelled in different ways in each of the post-Yugoslav countries, several trends are observable across the region: the "rediscovery" of state roots in the middle ages that allowed the nations to assert their antiquity, descent, and territory, typically accompanied by a "golden age" signalling its past glory and presenting a continuous, uninterrupted historical existence; the reinterpretation of

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“…However, the effect of the West on memory politics in the region is much more complex. As Ana Milošević has extensively argued (Milošević 2017;Milošević 2019;Milošević and Trošt 2021), the relationship between European actors and East-Central European countries has both a top-down dimension, where memory politics are imposed by the EU via European Parliament and Council of Europe resolutions, soft laws, and pressure on governments of EU candidate countries that want to signal their alignment with EU norms of remembrance, and a bottom-up dimension, where states and memory entrepreneurs strategically use the EU framework as a political tool to pursue their own interests, leading to regional power imbalances between countries already in the EU and those still aspiring for membership. This intricate power play between the EU and local actors and the complexities of the different actors involved gets somewhat brushed aside for the sake of generalization of the "West" as a unified memory actor.…”

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confidence: 99%

Appropriating Memory in the Name of the State

Trošt

2023

Nationalities Papers

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Jelena Subotić’s Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism has already received such broad recognition and numerous awards that its invaluable contribution to memory studies likely does not need repeating. It is not only a study of Holocaust remembrance in particular, but contributes broadly to our understanding of memory appropriation by the state, through a careful and vivid analysis of its transformation over time in several Eastern and Central European countries. Subotić provides a study of how memory can serve as a strategic tool for reinforcing state interests. The central argument of the book is that the states in question – Croatia, Lithuania, and Serbia – engage in memory appropriation in order to qualify their ontological insecurities (14). The strategies include “memory inversion,” appropriating the Holocaust to emphasize crimes against them (primarily in Serbia), “memory divergence,” placing blame for the genocide on German Nazis (Croatia), or “memory conflation,” wherein Holocaust memory is combined and equated with Communist crimes (Lithuania, 15). These appropriation strategies, which overlap and are combined in the various states, allow states to paint themselves as the ultimate victims, absolving them of responsibility for their role in Holocaust crimes. The danger, of course, is that this not only set ups the false equivalence between victims of Communism and of the Holocaust, allowing for the relativization of Nazi collaboration as anti-Communist resistance, but also because it banalizes and trivializes the specific suffering of the Jewish population.

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Introduction: Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans

Cited by 6 publications

References 65 publications

Difficult Heritage in Southeastern Europe: Local and Transnational Entanglements in Memorializing Political Prisons after Socialism

Difficult Heritage in Southeastern Europe: Local and Transnational Entanglements in Memorializing Political Prisons after Socialism

Renationalizing Memory in the Post-Yugoslav Region

Appropriating Memory in the Name of the State

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