‘Things were good during Tito’s times, my parents say’: How young Croatian generations negotiated the socially mediated frames of the recent Yugoslav past

Abstract

How do new generations in a society negotiate different perspectives of a controversial past available from various sources? How do they use the past to make sense of their lives? Using in-depth interviews with 72 young members of the first two Croatian post-Yugoslav generations, this study analysed how these young people acquired elements of their repertoires on the recent Yugoslav past from family members, school and the media, how they assessed these elements in terms of plausibility and legitimacy, and how they appropriated or questioned them. The study’s findings suggest that the credibility of the socially mediated perspectives of the past was increased by the emotional bond with the sources who adopted the role of witnesses, and by the fit with the personal concerns of the meaning-making audience. As a result, the most successful were the frames transmitted by the communicative sources through social interaction, rather than by the institutionalized sources.

Organized memory and popular remembering: The encounter of Yugonostalgia theories with socialism

“…Table 1 shows that contemporary economic processes strongly influence individuals’ attitudes (the collapse of the positive attitude towards capitalism and the surge of the positive attitude towards socialism in 2011 and 2013, the years of economic crisis in Slovenia), while official memorial engineering does not (the inverted trends of the attitudes, generally in favour of socialism, and the relatively stable value of the ‘neutral’ attitude). Table 1 also suggests that the arrival of new generations does not inflect the general picture, which concurs with the findings in Croatia where the family seems to be the major influence on the memory of the younger generations (Vuckovic Juros, 2018). Concerning socialist past, communicative memory seems to prevail over cultural memory (Assmann, 1995), and the coming of generations with no direct experience has so far not affected the survey data (as it still may over a longer period; see Schwartz and Schuman, 2005).…”

“…A number of researchers (Bošković, 2013;Maksimović, 2017;Palmberger, 2008Palmberger, , 2016Petrović, 2010aPetrović, , 2013Petrović, , 2016Spasić, 2012;Todorova, 2010aTodorova, , 2010bTodorova et al, 2014;Todorova and Gille, 2010;Velikonja, 2008Velikonja, , 2013Velikonja, , 2017Velikonja, , 2019Volčič, 2007;Vuckovic Juros, 2018) deal with the manifestations of alleged post-socialist nostalgias which, as they argue, overcome ideological blockades posed by official history-making policies. Their attention was captured by the revival of socialist past at the time when official politics adhered to strict anti-communist interpretations, and they were even more intrigued by the form of those nostalgic expressions.…”

“…An exit from this trap has been to look for the source of ‘nostalgia’ in the disappointment over the restoration of capitalism (Maksimović, 2017; Palmberger, 2016; Spasić, 2012; Velikonja, 2008; Vuckovic Juros, 2018, etc.) and to bring to the fore the contrasting features of the socialist past.…”

Towards the Interpretative Approach to Political Culture

“…popularnu kulturu u Jugoslaviji (Pavasović Trošt, 2019), kao i socijalne dimenzije pozitivnih elemenata jugoslavenskog društva, koje pak opstaju u kolektivnim sjećanjima prenesenim sa starijih generacija na mlađe (Vuckovic Juros, 2020). No, nakon sljedećega analitičkog koraka, u kojem se glavni frejmovi više ne gledaju nezavisno jedni od drugih, već se tumače iz perspektive međusobnog povezivanja unutar teksta, vidi se također da ih predominantno povezuje interpretativni okvir koji nazivam perspektivom hrvatske etničke viktimizacije.…”