Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans [1st ed.] 9783030546991, 9783030547004

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xix
Introduction: Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans (Ana Milošević, Tamara Trošt)....Pages 1-28
Building upon the European Union’s Anti-fascist Foundations: The Četniks and Serbia’s Memory Politics Between Europeanisation and Russia (Jelena Đureinović)....Pages 29-48
Erasing Yugoslavia, Ignoring Europe: The Perils of the Europeanisation Process in Contemporary Croatian Memory Politics (Taylor McConnell)....Pages 49-73
European Union Guidelines to Reconciliation in Mostar: How to Remember? What to Forget? (Aline Cateux)....Pages 75-95
Constructing a Usable Past: Changing Memory Politics in Jasenovac Memorial Museum (Alexandra Zaremba)....Pages 97-120
Effects of Europeanised Memory in “Artworks as Monuments” (Manca Bajec)....Pages 121-149
“Skopje 2014” Reappraised: Debating a Memory Project in North Macedonia (Naum Trajanovski)....Pages 151-176
Europeanising History to (Re)construct the Statehood Narrative: The Reinterpretation of World War One in Montenegro (Nikola Zečević)....Pages 177-204
Narratives of Gender, War Memory, and EU-Scepticism in the Movement Against the Ratification of the Istanbul Convention in Croatia (Dunja Obajdin, Slobodan Golušin)....Pages 205-230
Against Institutionalised Forgetting: Memory Politics from Below in Postwar Prijedor (Zoran Vučkovac)....Pages 231-262
Violence, War, and Gender: Collective Memory and Politics of Remembrance in Kosovo (Abit Hoxha, Kenneth Andresen)....Pages 263-283
Conclusion (Ana Milošević)....Pages 285-295
Back Matter ....Pages 297-303

Citation preview

MIGRATION, MEMORY POLITICS AND TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE DIASPORAS AND CITIZENSHIP

Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans Edited by Ana Milošević · Tamara Trošt

Memory Politics and Transitional Justice

Series Editors Jasna Dragovic-Soso Goldsmiths University of London London, UK Jelena Subotic Georgia State University Atlanta, GA, USA Tsveta Petrova Columbia University New York, NY, USA

The interdisciplinary fields of Memory Studies and Transitional Justice have largely developed in parallel to one another despite both focusing on efforts of societies to confront and (re—)appropriate their past. While scholars working on memory have come mostly from historical, literary, sociological, or anthropological traditions, transitional justice has attracted primarily scholarship from political science and the law. This series bridges this divide: it promotes work that combines a deep understanding of the contexts that have allowed for injustice to occur with an analysis of how legacies of such injustice in political and historical memory influence contemporary projects of redress, acknowledgment, or new cycles of denial. The titles in the series are of interest not only to academics and students but also practitioners in the related fields. The Memory Politics and Transitional Justice series promotes critical dialogue among different theoretical and methodological approaches and among scholarship on different regions. The editors welcome submissions from a variety of disciplines—including political science, history, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies—that confront critical questions at the intersection of memory politics and transitional justice in national, comparative, and global perspective. Memory Politics and Transitional Justice Book Series (Palgrave) Co-editors: Jasna Dragovic-Soso (Goldsmiths, University of London), Jelena Subotic (Georgia State University), Tsveta Petrova (Columbia University) Editorial Board Paige Arthur, New York University Center on International Cooperation Alejandro Baer, University of Minnesota Orli Fridman, Singidunum University Belgrade Carol Gluck, Columbia University Katherine Hite, Vassar College Alexander Karn, Colgate University Jan Kubik, Rutgers University and School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London Bronwyn Leebaw, University of California, Riverside Jan-Werner Mueller, Princeton University Jeffrey Olick, University of Virginia Kathy Powers, University of New Mexico Joanna R. Quinn, Western University Jeremy Sarkin, University of South Africa Leslie Vinjamuri, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Sarah Wagner, George Washington University

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14807

Ana Miloševi´c · Tamara Trošt Editors

Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans

Editors Ana Miloševi´c Leuven Institute for Criminology (LINC) KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium

Tamara Trošt School of Economics and Business University of Ljubljana Ljubljana, Slovenia

Memory Politics and Transitional Justice ISBN 978-3-030-54699-1 ISBN 978-3-030-54700-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Tenkorys/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

We want to thank all of the authors who generously contributed their time and patience to this volume. We have learned a great deal from their work, and we are hopeful that they have also benefited from the discussion and exchanges while working on the volume. During the preparation of the manuscript, we organised a mini symposium and a post-conference brainstorming session at the annual meeting of Memory Studies Association in Madrid (2019) and held a panel at the convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies in Zagreb (2019). We express our deepest appreciation to scholars who participated in our panels and meetings and shared their insights, as this book is also part of a much larger conversation with memory activists and academic researchers from a broad range of disciplines. Miloševi´c would also like to thank Heleen Touquet, Aline Sierp, Vjeran Pavlakovi´c, Todor Kulji´c, Peter Vermeersch, Steven Van Hecke, and Stephan Parmentier whose work, ideas, and comments have greatly inspired her work, in particular her Ph.D. thesis, which served as a theoretical underpinning to this volume. She extends her gratitude to Davide Denti and Philippe Perchoc, whose work and friendship continue to stimulate her scientific curiosity. Trošt would like to thank Siniša Maleševi´c, Jelena Suboti´c, Chana Teeger, Koen Slootmaeckers, Marko Kmezi´c, Jelena Džanki´c, and Jovana Mihajlovi´c Trbovc for their inspiring work on memory and identity, and for making this academic field a better place. She is especially grateful to v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Snježana Koren and Dubravka Stojanovi´c, both as the early pioneers of work on (re) constructions of memory through history textbooks, and for endless patience and help with drafts and manuscripts and acquiring primary material. Lastly, we express our deep affection and regard for our families and children, who once again offered both patience and understanding as the book devoured time and intruded into family life.

Praise for Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans

“This volume is an important contribution to debates about Europeanization. Through well researched case studies, it shows how European memory politics are appropriated and incorporated into local and national memory discourses. The contributions show how Europeanization has become a performance and is not transformative when it comes to memory politics. The insights of the chapters and coherent framework shed light not just on the Western Balkans, but contribute to a critical understanding of Europeanization more broadly.” —Florian Bieber, Jean Monnet Chair in the Europeanization of Southeastern Europe, Professor of Southeast European History and Politics, University of Graz, Austria “Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans is an impressive book. By presenting a set of highly readable case studies, Miloševi´c and Trošt demonstrate how crucial the study of memory politics is for a better understanding of European politics more generally. The focus is squarely on the countries of the former Yugoslavia, but the analysis, conclusions and ideas apply to a much larger area. The book also provides us with a complex understanding of Europeanization and shows how far-reaching the political effects can be of something as seemingly apolitical as ‘memories’. The Western Balkans form a rich field of study in their own right on this topic, but, as readers of this book will realize, they provide us also with a sharp lens through which we might see certain vii

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developments in the EU — and even elsewhere in the world — more clearly.” —Peter Vermeersch, Professor of Politics, Leuven International and European studies (LINES), KU Leuven, Belgium “This excellent and timely volume explores the processes and practices of Europeanisation on cultures of memory, sites of memory, and memory politics in South Eastern Europe. Through its interdisciplinary and innovative approach, the volume addresses truly transnational memory processes in the interplay between European institutions and memory entrepreneurs in new or prospective member states. Crucially, the chapters foreground the roles of local memory actors and elites in the promotion, actualization and sometimes appropriation of ‘Europeanized memories’ in the region, aspects that had received insufficient attention in the existing literature. This is a stimulating read and an important contribution to the research fields of memory politics, Europeanisation, and contemporary South Eastern Europe alike.” —Tea Sindbaek, Associate Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark “This book stands out for combining two fields that previously have not been combined: literature on Europeanisation and literature on Memory Politics. Especially the latter is still in its infancy and Miloševi´c’s and Trošt’s contribution adds an important dimension to a still underdeveloped research area. The combination of the two different sets of literature is innovative and allows the different authors of this edited volume to ask new questions that so far have not been addressed in a systematic way.” —Aline Sierp, co-founder and Co-President, Memory Studies Association & Assistant Professor, Maastricht University, The Netherlands “Memory issues are abundant in contemporary European societies and take many shapes. As an in-depth analysis of the impact of EU norms of remembrance on a crucial but often forgotten region, the Western Balkans, this book brings the literature on Europeanization of memory politics to a new dimension. Unlike many studies focused on the EastWest mnemonic divide, inspired empirical studies highlight the peculiarities of memory struggles in national contexts marked by the legacies of the Yugoslav wars, unresolved statehood issues and competing external influences. They provide a strong contribution to the study of the state and

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non-state actors involved in memorialization processes in post-socialist Europe, with their specific political agendas and strategies of legitimization in national and transnational arenas. This ambitious volume paints a complex picture of the power asymmetries at the core of contemporary memory battles, which account for diverging interpretations of Europe’s painful pasts.” —Laure Neumayer, Assistant Professor, University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, France, author of The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space after the Cold War “In this groundbreaking volume, Miloševi´c and Trošt explain how dealing with the past is a functional prerequisite for EU membership. In the Western Balkans there is still no common understanding of the roots, consequences and outcome of not only the most recent ethnic wars led throughout the territory of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but also with regard to the Second World War and its aftermath. Theoretically innovative and empirically rich, this book offers a comprehensive and comparative study of how politicizing memory affects not only relations between neighboring states in the region, but also their efforts vested in the EU accession processes.” —Marko Kmezi´c, Lecturer in Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz, Austria, author of EU Rule of Law Promotion: Judiciary Reform in the Western Balkans (Routledge, 2016), co-editor of Stagnation and Drift in the Western Balkans (Peter Lang, 2013) and The Europeanisation of the Western Balkans: A Failure of EU Conditionality? (Palgrave, 2019) “This dynamic collection of case studies on the Western Balkans builds upon the results of regional memory politics research over the past decade and adds a European level in analyzing transnational and supranational processes of memorialization. Comprehensive in its geographical scope and ambitious in its theoretical contributions to the field of memory studies, this volume is essential reading for scholars and policy makers seeking to understand bottom-up and top-down mnemonic strategies, actors, and relationships from the memory sites of Southeastern Europe to the institutions of the European Union.” —Vjeran Pavlakovi´c, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Rijeka, Croatia

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“The Old Bridge in Mostar, a masterpiece of Ottoman architecture, stood for 427 years before it was destroyed in 1993 during the war in Bosnia and Hercegovina. There was no military purpose for this, the overt intention was to erase whatever there was to remind of the existence of the foe’s historic memory. Much in the same manner, with the intention not only to annihilate its inhabitants but also to rub out their material cultural memory, the ancient Adriatic city of Dubrovnik was bombarded mercilessly for many days. The warlord who committed this barbaric act later unbelievably said: ‘We shall rebuild it, even older and more beautiful’. Who wants to understand the logic and the political goals of such lunacy, which is an intrinsic feature of identity politics and conflicts, is well advised to study the eleven chapters of this book. Only on the basis of understanding the purpose of the wars against memory, one can also understand why attempts, also explained in this book, to impose topdown memory norms fostered by the EU more often than not produce additional conflicts.” —Dušan Relji´c, SWP, German Institute for International and Security Affairs

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

Introduction: Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans Ana Miloševi´c and Tamara Trošt Building upon the European Union’s Anti-fascist ˇ Foundations: The Cetniks and Serbia’s Memory Politics Between Europeanisation and Russia Jelena Ðureinovi´c Erasing Yugoslavia, Ignoring Europe: The Perils of the Europeanisation Process in Contemporary Croatian Memory Politics Taylor McConnell

1

29

49

European Union Guidelines to Reconciliation in Mostar: How to Remember? What to Forget? Aline Cateux

75

Constructing a Usable Past: Changing Memory Politics in Jasenovac Memorial Museum Alexandra Zaremba

97

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CONTENTS

6

Effects of Europeanised Memory in “Artworks as Monuments” Manca Bajec

121

“Skopje 2014” Reappraised: Debating a Memory Project in North Macedonia Naum Trajanovski

151

7

8

9

10

11

12

Europeanising History to (Re)construct the Statehood Narrative: The Reinterpretation of World War One in Montenegro Nikola Zeˇcevi´c Narratives of Gender, War Memory, and EU-Scepticism in the Movement Against the Ratification of the Istanbul Convention in Croatia Dunja Obajdin and Slobodan Golušin

177

205

Against Institutionalised Forgetting: Memory Politics from Below in Postwar Prijedor Zoran Vuˇckovac

231

Violence, War, and Gender: Collective Memory and Politics of Remembrance in Kosovo Abit Hoxha and Kenneth Andresen

263

Conclusion Ana Miloševi´c

Index

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297

Notes on Contributors

Kenneth Andresen is a Professor at the Department of Nordic and Media Studies at the UiA, Norway. His areas of work include journalism, media studies, production studies in media and journalism, international media support, and global journalism; with a geographic focus on the Balkans and Kosovo. Through the EU-funded H2020 project RePAST, he is currently researching the relationship between journalism and dealing with the past. He holds a Ph.D. in Media Studies and Journalism from the University of Oslo (2015) and an M.A. in Communication from Wheaton College Graduate School (1994). In 2015 he published his dissertation with the title: Journalism Under Pressure: The Case of Kosovo. Manca Bajec is an artist and researcher whose interdisciplinary work is situated in the realm of socio-politics. She has presented her work internationally including at the Kaunas Biennial, ICA, Beside War Italy, WARM Sarajevo. Bajec also frequently publishes her work, most recently in the Theatrum Mundi publication, Uncommon Building: Collective Excavation of a Fictional Structure. Bajec is the Managing Editor of the Journal of Visual Culture, and has lectured worldwide including Columbia University, The New School, Goldsmiths, Royal College of Art (RCA), and Syracuse. In 2018 she completed her practice-led Ph.D. at the RCA in London. Bajec was born in Slovenia, grew up in Kuwait, and currently lives in London.

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Aline Cateux is a Ph.D. researcher in Social Anthropology at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Prospective, Catholic University of Louvain-laNeuve. Her research focuses on the city of Mostar and the transformation of interstitial spaces of social and political resistance in the last 15 years. She has been intermittently living and/or working in Bosnia and Herzegovina for more than 20 years. Jelena Ðureinovi´c is the scientific coordinator of the Research Platform for the Study of Transformations and Eastern Europe at the University of Vienna. She holds a Ph.D. in Modern and Contemporary History from the University of Giessen in Germany. Her research deals with the history and politics of memory of the Second World War in Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav space with a particular focus on the process of reinterpretation of the cˇetnik movement in Serbia. Her book The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution was published with Routledge in 2019. Slobodan Golušin holds a Master’s degree in psychology from the University of Novi Sad with the thesis “Two psychologies of culture: Epistemological, theoretical and methodological positions of cultural and cross-cultural psychology”. He has completed two semesters of an Erasmus Joint Master Program “Psychology of global mobility, inclusion and diversity in society”, in ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon and the University of Oslo. He is currently studying at the Department of Sociology and Social anthropology, Central European University and conducting research on the political economy of platform labour in Serbia. Abit Hoxha is a researcher at the Institute of Nordic and Media Studies at the University of Agder (UiA) in Norway working for RePAST. His research focuses on transitional journalism and the role of media in dealing with the troubled past. He is working on his Ph.D. in Conflict News Production at LMU Munich. He holds an M.Sc. in Defence, Development and Diplomacy from Durham University in the UK, as well as an M.A. in Journalism from the Kosovo Institute of Journalism and Communication, and a B.A. degree in Political Science from the University of Prishtina. He has worked on several research projects in relation to dealing with the past. Taylor McConnell is a Ph.D. Researcher in Sociology at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His dissertation project is titled “Još Hrvatska ni propala [Still Croatia Has Not

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Fallen]: Examining the Public Face of Memory in Croatia” and seeks to examine the role of the Croatian state, through its influence in the creation of cultural memory and politics of remembrance, in continuing to divide mnemonic communities in the regions once heavily populated by ethnic Serbs prior to 1995. His research interests include memory politics, Yugoslavia past and present, identity construction, violence, and transitional justice. Ana Miloševi´c is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Leuven Institute for Criminology (LINC), KU Leuven. She completed a Ph.D. on Europeanisation of memory politics in Croatia and Serbia, and has published extensively on collective memories, identities, and European Integration of post-conflict societies, with a special focus on coming to terms with the past. Her current research examines the roles assigned to memorialisation processes in relation to terrorism, with a view to critically assess their effectiveness for the victims, survivors, and societies at large. Dunja Obajdin holds a Master’s degree in international studies from ISCTE, Lisbon with the thesis “The United Nation’s discursive construction of time: a comparative analysis of the Chapter, the MDGs, and the SDGs”. She is currently working as a freelance journalist in Zagreb, focusing on the Croatian right and memory politics. Her interests include temporal politics, social movement theory, and Yugoslav post-socialism. Naum Trajanovski is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences. His Ph.D. project deals with the local memories of the 1963 Skopje earthquake and the post-earthquake reconstruction. He holds M.A. degrees in Southeastern European Studies (Graz–Belgrade–Skopje) and Nationalism Studies (Budapest). He was affiliated with the Warsaw-based European Network Remembrance and Solidarity as a project coordinator, the Faculty of Philosophy—Skopje as a researcher, and the international research network “COURAGE—Connecting Collections”, as an advisor and a proofreader. Tamara Trošt is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University and was previously a Fung Fellow at Princeton University (2015–2016) and a Visiting Professor at the University of Graz, Austria (2013–2014). She works on issues of

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nationalism, everyday identity, and history and memory, with a geographical focus on the Western Balkans and a focus on qualitative and mixed methods. Zoran Vuˇckovac is a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, working on entangled histories of labour and violence during the breakup of Yugoslavia. He holds an M.A. from the University of Alberta’s English and Film Studies program and has presented conference papers on memory politics and published articles on horizontal political decisionmaking and social activism. He worked as a researcher at the Centre for Democracy and Transitional Justice and was one of the founders of the Banja Luka Social Centre, an independent platform dealing with historical revisionism, social justice, and feminism. Alexandra Zaremba is a Ph.D. student in Modern European History at American University in Washington D.C. She completed her M.A. in Public History at Duquesne University and her B.A. in History at the University of South Florida. In 2019, Alexandra was a Summer Graduate Research Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. She was also a two-time awardee of Duquesne University’s Vardy International Research Grant. Alexandra’s research interests include museums, commemoration, nationalism, and memory in former Yugoslavia. Nikola Zeˇcevi´c is a teaching fellow and Ph.D. candidate at the Humanistic Studies Faculty at the University of Donja Gorica in Podgorica, Montenegro. His research focuses on history of the Balkans and nationalism studies. He is particularly interested in analysing the phenomenological correlation between nationalism and historical revisionism. He has published a number of research and professional papers related to his field of expertise and related topics.

List of Figures

Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.3

Fig. 6.4

Fig. 6.5

Fig. 6.6

Partisan monument (1968) behind monument to Domobranci (2014). Grahovo, Slovenia (Source Author’s archives, 2018) Commemoration ceremony for the victims of the concentration camp, located at the Omarska iron ore mine. Omarska, BiH (Source Author’s archives, 2014) “Notebook” Ink on paper, Series 1/400, 30 × 40 cm each, 2019. Image copyright Vladimir Miladinovi´c (Source Courtesy of the Artist) “Notebook” Ink on paper, Series 6/400, 30 × 40 cm each, 2019. Image copyright Vladimir Miladinovi´c (Source Courtesy of the Artist) Nebojša Šeri´c Shoba, Monument to the International Community by the Grateful Citizens of Sarajevo, 2007, Sarajevo BiH (Source Author’s archives, 2016) Braco Dimitrijevi´c, New Monuments, 2006, Sarajevo BiH (Source Author’s archives, 2016)

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List of Tables

Table 8.1

Table 11.1

Summary of changes in the interpretation of the First World War events in history textbooks for primary schools in Montenegro Demographic characteristics of focus group respondents

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans Ana Miloševi´c and Tamara Trošt

Abstract This chapter explores how the process of European integration has influenced collective memory in the countries of the Western Balkans. Whether it is coded as “reconciliation”, “good neighbourly relations”, or “cooperation with the ICTY”, dealing with the past remains a formal–informal condition for EU membership. However, divergent interpretations of history, including the Second World War and the Yugoslav wars, continue to trigger confrontations between neighbouring countries and hinder their EU perspective. We show that these “memory wars” also have a European dimension, and have become a tool to either support or oppose Europeanisation. Politics of memory is thus used not only to foster EU identity and endorse so-called EU values, but also to support nation- and state-building agendas. The tensions that derive from

A. Miloševi´c Leuven Institute for Criminology (LINC), KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] T. Trošt (B) School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Miloševi´c and T. Trošt (eds.), Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4_1

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the past, however, continue to persist even after achieving the strategic goal of entering the European Union. In this chapter, we take stock of the ways in which Europeanisation processes have interacted with memory politics in the region, and suggest new ways of capturing how and why memory is negotiated, exhibited, adjusted, or ignored in the process of Europeanisation. Keywords European Union · Memory politics · Europeanisation · Western Balkans

Over the last 20 years, the European Union and its member states have given steady support to the European perspective of the Western Balkans. The enlargement policy of the EU, however, has evolved from “a promise of a European future” (the Thessaloniki Summit) and “a credible perspective” (the Junker Commission) to the post-Brexit’s “firm, merit-based prospect of full membership”, dependent on the Union’s very own political, security, and economic interests. The key pillars of the Enlargement agenda for the Balkans, however, remain the same: democracy, the rule of law, and the respect for fundamental rights are seen as the main engines of economic integration and the essential anchor for fostering regional reconciliation and stability. Beyond examining the effects of EU integration processes on the countries in question, the Western Balkan countries are seen as a test case for the transformative power of Europe (Börzel 2013). Two decades ago, Europeanisation scholars and policymakers were focused on examining the transformative capacity of the European Union (EU) to induce change in candidate countries. The assumption of this early work was that the EU had the capacity to “export” good practices in democratisation, the rule of law, and various policies to candidate countries, and accordingly, research was focused on assessing the effects of these processes (the so-called “Europeanisation as enlargement” field of research) on three domains: domestic structures, public policy, and normative frames.1 The “domestic turn” in Europeanisation studies

1 Featherstone and Radaelli (2003) have advised analysing effects on political structures separately from the influence on values, norms, and discourses. While research has examined the influence of Europe on individual and collective identification, values, norms, and

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attempted to contextualise these impacts by examining how domestic factors affect or mitigate the success of rule transfer (Suboti´c 2011; Elbasani 2013), which, while still focused on institutions, importantly brought domestic conditions and actors in dialogue with broader EU processes. As the Western Balkan countries slowly progressed in the accession requirements, new research has begun examining the on-the-ground and unintended effects of Europeanisation in other fields, showing, for instance, how the EU visa liberalisation regime effectively further alienated the Roma population of the countries due to its reliance on biometric passports (Kacarska 2019), or the continued existence of segregated “two schools under one roof” in Bosnia as a consequence of OSCE intervention in the 1990s (Swimelar 2013). This research underlines the need for a better understanding of how EU processes interact with local actors and domestic conditions. In line with the new focus of Europeanisation research, an increasing number of studies from various disciplines have analysed the impact of Europeanisation on the collective memory of both EU member states and candidate countries (Mälksoo 2009; Gensburger and Lavabre 2012; Kucia 2016; Kowalski and Törnquist-Plewa 2017; Miloševi´c 2019). They have concluded that the EU’s politics of memory is based on the rejection of anti-Semitism, xenophobia and racism, respect for human rights, freedoms, and protection of minorities (Levy and Sznaider 2002; Assmann 2014; Leggewie 2008). Common heritage, memory, and shared attitudes towards the past serve as a source of self-legitimisation for the EU (Conwey and Patel 2010; Littoz-Monnet 2012; Calligaro 2013; Sierp 2014; Kaiser 2012; Neumayer 2018; Lähdesmäki 2017). They convey broadly defined European values and undergird the idea of a common future through the fostering of a European identity. The European Parliament (EP) has produced the “EU memory framework”—a number of soft law and decisions that delineate shared attitudes towards the Holocaust and rejection of all forms of non-democratic, totalitarian regimes. Although not legally binding for member states, this framework is selectively downloaded by (potential) members that seek to align with EU norms of remembrance and display their European identities. Yet, it has

discourses, the underlying assumption of these studies—of the EU as a teacher of (new) norms (Börzel and Risse 2012)—has been recently criticised (Kulpa 2014; Szulecka and Szulecki 2013; Slootmaeckers 2017).

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also provided a rationale to memory entrepreneurs to push nationalist sentiments forward (Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018). The Union has not yet succeeded in crafting a common European sense of “who we are” based on a narrative of a shared past. For many European elites, the Union remains an emphatic way of saying “never again” to the disastrous ways of the last century. Nevertheless, the EU has become both a memory arena and a political opportunity structure for the “uploading” of domestic preferences: national narratives about the past. In EU relations with candidate countries, not only do the EU’s ideas of the common European past affect local memory practices, but power asymmetries also become more visible. Countries with EU membership play an important part in coercing the candidate countries to redress the matters of the past (e.g. historical injustices, borders, or minority protection), issues that have proven to be very resilient to Europeanisation. These dynamics were particularly visible in the recent case of North Macedonia, whose EU accession process has been delayed because of the “name dispute” with neighbouring Greece. However, precisely because an overwhelming number of studies have questioned how (ethno)national memories have affected the process of EU integration of the countries, we ask a different question: we ask how Europeanisation affects collective memory in the Western Balkan countries. In addition to studying the results of such power asymmetries between the EU and the candidate countries, our volume explores the possibility that domestic elites and institutions can manipulate memory politics on the national and transnational levels. (Trans)national memory entrepreneurs use and abuse the EU memory framework to achieve a broad set of goals: seeking acknowledgement, recognition for their own narratives of the past, to pacify tensions, and support or even oppose Europeanisation. In this process, collective memory—knowledge and representation of the past—is constantly reinterpreted in the light of present political (individual or collective) needs. Since memory itself is a tension between what is remembered and what is forgotten, what is present and what is missing, memory actors (ab)use its inherent selectiveness to underpin their agendas and support their interests. What this volume clearly demonstrates is that EU memory politics is a doubleedged sword. On the one hand, lessons of the past serve as a promise of non-repetition, showing that European countries share a tragic past but have a future in togetherness. Adoption of EU norms of remembrance

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is instrumental for those who seek to politically signal so-called European values and identities. However, the quest for a shared past based on minimum common denominators is also producing unintended consequences. On the ground, deeply rooted national memories and narratives remain fundamentally unchallenged. This volume explores how the process of European integration influenced collective memory in the countries of the Western Balkans. Whether it is coded as “reconciliation”, “good neighbourly relations”, or “cooperation with the ICTY”, dealing with the past remains a formal–informal condition for EU membership (Touquet and Miloševi´c 2018; Kostovicova and Bicquelet 2018; Mihajlovi´c-Trbovc and Petrovi´c 2017). However, there is no common understanding of the past in the region: neither of the causes (and consequences) of the Yugoslav wars (Ramet 2002; Jovi´c 2017; Djoki´c and Ker-Lindsay 2010; Dragovi´c-Soso and Gordy 2010), nor of the Second World War, both which have created “ethnically confined” memory cultures (Kulji´c 2006). As such, divergent interpretations of history continue to trigger confrontations between neighbouring countries and hinder their EU perspective. We show that these “memory wars” also have a European dimension—they have become a tool to either support or oppose Europeanisation (Mink and Neumayer 2013; Dragovi´c-Soso 2012; Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018; Miloševi´c 2019; Suboti´c 2019). Politics of memory is thus used not only to foster EU identity and endorse so-called EU values but also to support nation- and state-building agendas. The tensions that derive from the past, however, continue to persist even after achieving the strategic goal of entering the European Union. The volume thus focuses on the following questions: How have EU integration processes affected memory politics in the countries of the Western Balkans? Can we as a result of Europeanisation observe the emergence of a consensual narrative about the past? Which internal/external (f)actors facilitate or constrain the change, and through which mechanisms? How do (non-) state actors support or resist Europeanisation at memorial sites, museums, commemorations, and production of soft memorial laws? What are the outcomes of Europeanisation through memory politics? The Europeanisation of memory invites more and different forms of analysis than historians and political scientists alone have provided. To enrich our understanding of the effects of Europeanisation on memory politics, we take a multidisciplinary approach to allow for linguistic,

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legal, cultural, historical, political, anthropological, and socio-economic perspectives. This approach allows us to capture how and why memory is renegotiated, exhibited, adjusted, or ignored in the process of Europeanisation. Across ten case studies, this volume looks at the ways in which official memory politics—state-acknowledged and state-promoted narratives about the past—are encoded and decoded in collective memory through the use of mnemonic tools and practices. While analysing the impact of Europeanisation on national memory politics, we collected data from commemorations and political speeches as one of the most dominant ways in which historical narratives are created and dispersed on the political and societal levels. We analysed hard and soft laws by the European and national parliaments, aesthetics and performativity of monuments, virtual mnemonic communities, and memory sites to uncover interests invested in, and meanings ascribed to them by a wide variety of actors. Authors across chapters have put significant effort into visiting hundreds of sites of memory across seven countries of the region in order to document and study symbolic rituals and (often conflictual) meanings attached to them by elites, political parties, institutions, survivors, and victims’ organisations. Throughout the volume, we show that domestic applications of European memory norms in the Western Balkan countries have been both selective and tactical. On the one hand, EU norms of remembrance serve as a normative model to emulate and adapt to domestic needs and purposes and hence signal the countries’ European identity and commitment to the process of Europeanisation. But EU memory politics and receptiveness of its norms and models by potential member states are problematic in the long term. The EU’s anti-totalitarian stance has been instrumental in downplaying and erasing Yugoslavia, the trans-ethnic liberation of the region during the Second World War, and 50 years of peaceful coexistence among former Yugoslav republics. The anti-fascist foundation of the EU and its unequivocal rejection of anti-Semitism are also fostered through timely and selective reactivation of Holocaust remembrance: memory politics remains in exclusive service of domestic needs and purposes of memory entrepreneurs to both support, or alternatively oppose Europeanisation. European memory adjustments have thus produced certain unintended consequences (Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018), providing a rationale to memory entrepreneurs to push nationalist sentiments and even historical revisionism forward (Vermeersch 2019; Pavlakovi´c and Paukovi´c 2019; Suboti´c 2019; Ðureinovi´c 2020).

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We also demonstrate the differences in the reach of Europeanisation in countries at various stages of the EU accession phase. The reach and grasp of Union’s memorial norms are lesser in the countries with an elusive perspective of becoming EU members, where the traditional narrative of EU integration has revolved around reconciliation and peacebuilding among former warring parties. A key role in these processes was given to political elites, as those who are to lead the change and demonstrate changed ways in dealing with the legacies of the conflict. Yet, many of these changes have been cosmetic and lack deeper on-theground resonance. Memory politics is being renegotiated continuously, but also contested by a wide variety of memory actors (e.g. survivors of wartime atrocities, NGOs, political elites) that seek to promote their own views of the past and hence, challenge official memory politics. Thus, the main contribution of this volume is that it provides a comprehensive understanding of how Europeanisation and memory politics interact. Avoiding a single-country case study and instead examining this interaction in the entire region of the Western Balkans (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia2 ), the volume is able to draw general conclusions about the effect of Europeanisation processes on memory politics across the region. Although this book examines the impact of Europeanisation on memory politics in the Western Balkans, our goal was to develop innovative theoretical approaches to studying Europeanisation of memory politics that can be applied to other countries. The systematic analysis of official memory politics, from fieldwork at the sites of memory to studying the role of museums and social networks in transmitting narratives, provides insight into the impact of Europeanisation on collective memory. Secondly, the volume documents the outcomes of EU integration processes in the arena of memory politics across the various stages of the process, documenting it in cases still far from accession (BosniaHerzegovina, Kosovo), during the accession process (Montenegro, 2 We consider our range of cases to be one of the strengths of the volume. However, a deliberate choice was made to focus only on the countries of the post-Yugoslav memory landscape. As former Yugoslav republics (and Kosovo—a former autonomous province) these countries effectively have a shared past: the experience of being part of the same political federation formed after the Second World War. This explains why Albania, in particular, has not been examined. We bring cases from all seven countries that emerged following the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Since Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina underwent very dramatic changes in memory politics, their central role in this volume is unsurprising.

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Serbia, North Macedonia), and after EU accession (Croatia, Slovenia). This allows us to draw insights on the varying pace of alignment with EU memorial norms and practices, dependent on a country’s advancement towards EU membership. Finally, the chapters capture the interplay between Europeanisation and memory from top-down (led by the EU and imposed by external actors), the co-option and manipulation of the EU memory framework by elites and memory entrepreneurs, as well as bottom-up (local and grassroots contestations of memory). We examine the interaction between these (f)actors via unique angles, such as examining how gender and memory politics interact, which has been largely neglected by similar studies.

Europeanisation and Its (Expected) Effects Traditional Europeanisation research viewed Europeanisation primarily as “the domestic adaptation to European regional integration” (Graziano and Vink 2007, p. 7). In this early research, focusing on the initial EU member states, the main questions concerned how European integration and everyday policymaking affect domestic structures, and how domestic structures adapt to European integration (Caporaso 2007). According to Risse et al.’s (2001) three-step model, (1) processes at the European level lead to pressures to adjust, wherein the extent of the pressure is determined by the “goodness of fit” or the congruence or incongruence between “Europe” and the domestic level; (2) the pressures are mediated by domestic-level factors, including mediating institutions, domestic structural and cultural conditions such as the type of party system, formal and informal institutions, veto groups, etc., which in turn lead to (3) outcomes, reflected in domestic structural change, which range from a straightforward “downloading” EU-level policies, symbolic change without substantive content, no change, or active attempts to subvert European policy (Caporaso 2007).3 With the “domestic turn” in the Europeanisation literature, scholars and policymakers began focusing more on the domestic factors affecting the EU’s ability to successfully transfer the rule of law (Elbasani 2013), importantly bringing domestic conditions and actors in dialogue with 3 In measuring the “success” of Europeanisation, however, scholars have called into question the measurement of outcomes, highlighting the “capability-expectations” gap of Europeanisation potential (see Nielsen 2013).

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broader EU processes. This work questioned the transformative capacity of Europe and of the EU accession processes in particular, to induce changes in the prospective countries. Here, the central question was centred on understanding why certain EU policies were more easily transferred into some countries more easily than others (Börzel and Risse 2003; Mastenbroek 2017), and which domestic factors served as obstacles for this transfer. Commonly categorised as “fit-misfit” models, these studies examined how certain domestic conditions mediated the EU’s effects and determined its success, including policies, economic conditions (gender inequality), ideational systems (like conceptions of citizenship), institutions, and constitutional orders (Caporaso 2007). This research also showed the possibility that “Europeanisation” was not a simple topdown process, but that elites could gain leverage by playing a double game—domestic and European (Moravcsik 1994). While the approaches to understanding these domestic factors include both rational choice institutionalist and sociological institutionalist perspectives (Featherstone and Radaelli 2003; Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005), they both operate under the “goodness-of-fit” model and assume that the EU has the capacity to “export” good practices in democratisation and the rule of law. Empirical studies of the effect of Europeanisation were, and continue to primarily be focused on, the level of policy. The effects of Europeanisation have been studied on environmental, immigration, transportation, and refugee policy in the initial EU member states (Jordan and Liefferink 2004; Knill 2001; Héritier et al. 2001; Lavenex 2001; Vink 2001; Toshkov 2007). In the Western Balkan states, studies have examined the effect of Europeanisation on the rule of law and judiciary reform (Kmezi´c 2017), environmental policy (Fagan and Sircar 2015), foreign policy (Bojinovi´c Fenko and Stahl 2019), minority policy (Koneska 2019; Sardeli´c 2018), education policy (Klemenˇciˇc 2013), citizenship policy (Kacarska 2012), corruption and regional policy (Vuˇckovi´c and Ðord-evi´c 2019), and migration and border security (Geddes et al. 2012), and entire volumes have been dedicated to studying the interaction between the EU enlargement process and domestic politics, taking Europeanisation both as the dependent and the independent variable (see Bieber 2013; Noutcheva 2012; Radelji´c 2013; Džanki´c et al. 2019; Ker-Lindsay et al. 2019). This led to new definitions of Europeanisation as the “processes of (a) construction, (b) diffusion, and (c) institutionalisation of formal and informal rules, procedures, policy paradigms, styles, ‘ways of doing

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things’, and shared beliefs and norms which are first defined and consolidated in the making of EU public policy and then incorporated in the logic of domestic discourse, identities, political structures, and public policies” (Radaelli 2003, p. 30). Newer literature has questioned the depth of some of the reforms, suggesting that many of the changes at the executive level were skin-deep and lacked deeper on-the-ground adoption (Slootmaeckers and O’Dwyer 2018; Trošt and Slootmaeckers 2016; Webb 2018; Mos 2020). The “Europeanisation as enlargement” literature thus assumes EU processes will induce change in prospective EU member states either via external incentives and conditionality (a cost-benefit calculation, primarily driven by elites, and reflected in the legal and executive sphere), or by socialisation, wherein the EU would act as a “teacher” of new norms (Börzel and Risse 2012). Both of these have been criticised; pointing to the problematic notion of the EU as a “teacher” of norms (Slootmaeckers 2017), and alerting to the effects and in some cases backlash against EU conditionality (Kmezi´c 2019; Zhelyazkova et al. 2019) as well as unintended consequences of the accession processes, such as the above-mentioned examples of Roma and biometric passports or Bosnia’s enduring two-schools-under-one-roof policy. The sphere of LGBT rights has particularly highlighted the complex and multifaceted nature of Europeanisation’s domestic effects (Slootmaeckers et al. 2016): in addition to the plethora of domestic conditions, such as the transnational embeddedness of domestic LGBT institutions that determine the effectiveness of policy diffusion across new and potential member states (Ayoub 2014), unintended on-the-ground effects had the ability to derail or strengthen the effect of these measures: in Serbia and Bosnia, despite the initial violent backlash against increased LGBT visibility—widely perceived in the public as “selling out” to the EU’s endless conditionality demands (Pavasovi´c Trošt and Kovaˇcevi´c 2013)—the antigay backlash seems to have led to an improvement in LGBT rights norms (Swimelar 2019). On the other hand, the recent regression in LGBT rights in Poland, an “old” EU member state that seemed to have already passed the EU test in terms of LGBT rights, shows the absence of long-lasting post-access changes in norms, suggesting that social learning might not be able to fill the gap following the removal of external incentives under particular domestic conditions (O’Dwyer 2010). At the same time, in their examination of the effects of Europeanisation on the Western Balkan countries, several studies have pointed to the

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areas where the EU accession process has contributed to marked improvement, particularly in the sphere of the visa liberation process, which acted as a significant stimulus in successful EU rule adoption (Kacarska 2012; Trauner 2011) and minority-related laws and citizenship policies (see Džanki´c et al. 2015). The backsliding in the rule of law over the past decade has mostly been attributed to the high number of domestic formal and informal gatekeeper elites that control the state, in addition to inefficient economies and several unresolved bilateral disputes and unfinished reconciliation processes of the 1990s wars (Džanki´c et al. 2019, pp. 2–3). Indeed, in addition to state capture across the region, not having adequately dealt with the 1990s conflicts is pointed to as one of the biggest threats to regional stability (Djolai and Nechev 2018). This volume thus specifically addresses how Europeanisation and memory interact, bringing attention to memory politics as an additional sphere affected by Europeanisation processes, inadequately addressed by the literature as of yet. Asking how EU integration processes have affected memory politics in the countries of the Western Balkans and examining the outcomes of Europeanisation through memory politics brings to the foreground an important dimension of the Europeanisation process in the Western Balkans. As Bieber (2019) has pointed out, there is an insufficient understanding of this interaction—the adaptation, transformation, and rejection in specific regional contexts—between European standards and institutions with the regional context: we need a better understanding of “the process of constructing relational spaces characterised by asymmetric relations in which ideas, rules and norms are constructed, transferred, adopted, implemented, transformed and rejected” (p. 245), that can only be achieved by more historically nuanced and socially complex examinations of this interaction.

The European Union and Memory The existence of shared memories and identities is one of the key elements of legitimacy building for both nation-states and the EU. Until recently, however, scholars have been mainly interested in the influence Europe has on society and patterns of individual and collective identification (e.g. Cowles et al. 2001; Checkel and Katzenstein 2009) which more recently has been absorbed by the wider discussion on European values, EU citizenship and the European public sphere (e.g. Foret and Calligaro 2018; Bauböck 2019; Risse 2015). Largely abandoned now, the literature

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on European identities overlooked the possibility that Europeanisation could affect collective memory. While the concept of collective memory now receives more attention in EU studies, there are still a number of theoretical and methodological challenges in its applicability. Traditionally, scholars of nationalism have subscribed to the belief that a nation seeks to establish continuity with the past by mobilising history and memory to legitimise itself and cement group cohesion. The “invented traditions” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) and “imagined communities” (Anderson 2006/1983) approaches both rely on the nation-state’s symbiosis with history, anchored in continuity with a “suitable” past. In stark contrast with the primacy of nation as a prism through which the past is observed, the European Union has been promoting a transnational view of history that advocates “discontinuity with the past” (Pakier and Stråth 2010; Mink and Neumayer 2013; Neumayer 2018). A European memory—a shared view of the past—therefore seeks to transcend the boundaries of nation-states by jointly “working through the past” in the name of shared universal principles, Europeanised practices (Müller 2010) and the construction and dissemination of “European canons” (Karlsson 2010). The past is interwoven in the foundational narrative of the Union: the EU emerged out of “the darkest hour of Europe” to break the pattern of millennial conflicts among European peoples (Müller 2010; Della Sala 2010). Former enemies, France and Germany, put aside their differences and worked together to build “a new Europe” (Guisan 2012). The birth of the Union is narrated as a “victory over history” and a mission to safeguard peace in post-1945 Europe. As such, peace, cohesion, and stability were the main objectives of the early European Community, enabled by economic integration and the German reckoning with the past. This telos of an upward movement from “war to peace” suggests that the European Union is a product of memory work (de Cesari and Kaya 2019), a measure of non-repetition, and a form of restorative justice that prevents recidivism. However, an EU policy on memory that put in focus dealing with the past emerged only after the end of the Cold War. Following the fall of communism in the Baltics, Central and Eastern Europe, new member states fostered ownership over the EU by seeking and obtaining acknowledgement and recognition of their own post-1945 totalitarian experiences (Mälksoo 2009; Onken 2007; Kattago 2009; Perchoc 2015). In Western Europe, the Holocaust was the cornerstone of European memory and

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identity before the memory of the communist crimes in Eastern Europe became an issue (Banke 2010; Kucia 2016; Kowalski and Törnquist-Plewa 2017; Neumayer 2018; Suboti´c 2019). After the fall of communism, these repressed and to a large extent invisible memories of the crimes and suffering behind the Iron Curtain came to the surface and triggered the discourses on “memory as a right” and a measure of transitional justice (Mink and Neumayer 2013; Bernhard and Kubik 2014; Belavusau and Gliszczynska-Grabias ´ 2017). The outcome of these processes is EU politics of memory—a shared, transnational representation of the past forged and validated by the members of the group (member states). The most commonly used mnemonic tools used to disseminate such a transnational memory politics are soft laws and days of remembrance installed by the European Parliament, creation of monuments, memorial plaques, organisation of European commemorations as well as heritage-making and museumisation (Manners 2011; Kaiser et al. 2014; Miloševi´c and Perchoc 2020).

Europeanisation of Memory The past decade has seen the rapid increase of literature examining “European memory”. Different scholars and different academic disciplines, however, disagree on where to locate and how to approach the impact of Europeanisation on collective memory. The main bulk of literature situates Europeanisation of memory between transnationalisation and “cosmopolitanisation” of domestic discourses and remembrance practices (Levy and Sznaider 2002; Assmann 2014; Mälksoo 2009; Conwey and Patel 2010; Pakier and Stråth 2010; Gensburger and Lavabre 2012; Sierp 2014; de Cesari and Rigney 2014; Kucia 2016; Kowalski and Törnquist-Plewa 2017; Miloševi´c 2019; de Cesari and Kaya 2019; Verovšek 2020). EU memory politics is, clearly, instrumental in defining what Europe is and what it stands for. The rejection of all totalitarianism (Stalinist– Communist and Nazi–Fascist on par), anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and racism, as well as respect for human rights, freedoms and protection of minorities, are at the core of the EU’s politics of memory (e.g. Neumayer 2018). The literature makes clear the causal relationship between the EU Enlargement policy and memory politics. The so-called Enlargement rounds leading towards the deepening and widening of the European

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Union are “critical junctures”4 in EU integration history able to account for the emergence of and (differential) changes in EU memory politics. Perhaps the most tangible result of this intense transnational political engagement with the past can be observed in the European Parliament (EP) with its mass production of soft laws that convey political positions on the past in the light of present (Miloševi´c and Perchoc 2020). As a result of more than 40 years of symbolic politics by the EP, the “EU Memory Framework” mentioned above emerged, consisting of a number of soft laws and decisions that delineate shared attitudes towards the past (Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018). Although not legally binding for member states, the EP invites states to align with EU norms of remembrance to display their European identities and commitment to the future in peace and togetherness (Dragovi´c-Soso 2012; Miloševi´c 2017). However, more habitually the EU as a memory arena is used by the member states to reaffirm national memory politics and pursue domestic political interests at the international scale. We explore the politics of European memory fostering by operationalising memory politics as an actor-centred and outcome-oriented approach to social remembering. We go beyond identity-based, constructivists’ interpretations of memory and remembrance as a part of societal cultural codes and myths, instead adopting a more nuanced perspective. Drawing from historical institutionalism, we link constructivists’ views with rational choice perspectives to explain not only how, but more importantly why, countries engage with the past. Accordingly, we deploy a broad definition of Europeanisation of memory politics, as: … the processes of construction, diffusion and institutionalisation of shared values, remembrance practices, policies, discourses, narratives, beliefs and norms associated with the past - which are first defined and consolidated in the EU policy process and then incorporated in the logic of domestic discourse, practices and public policies of member states and acceding countries. (Miloševi´c 2019, following Radaelli 2003)

4 The crisis in the 1970s, the Fall of Communism in 1989, structural transformations (big-bang Enlargements), the failure of the EU constitution (2005) as well as Brexit—all had an impact on the surge in the political use of memory by the EU institutions and within the EU territory. As historical institutionalists argue, these critical junctures charted a new path: memory politics became a tool to explain the new circumstances.

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This operationalisation of Europeanisation of memory enables us to observe the process of “uploading” (member states) and “downloading” ((potential) member states) values, remembrance practices, policies, discourses, narratives, beliefs, and norms associated with the past (Miloševi´c 2019). Uploading is a mechanism of Europeanisation typical for a symmetrical type of relation between the member states. Member states are active in projecting their own policy preferences, practices, and narratives to the EU (Miloševi´c 2017; see Olsen 2002; Börzel 2005) whereby memory entrepreneurs seek acknowledgement, endorsement, recognition, or alternatively the promotion of their own views and interests which are projected onto the past. Memories that get integrated into the EU memory framework become situated in a broader historical context receiving symbolic recognition. Downloading, on the other hand, concerns (as this volume shows) the selective and tactical transfer of rules, models, and ideas, associated with the past, which occurs at the level of member states and non-members, with an aim of socialising into a common commemorative culture and therefore building their loosely defined European identities. Downloading of the EU memory politics has been instrumental in mirroring the so-called European values upon which the EU—allegedly—has been founded. Countries seeking to join the EU are expected to condemn the Holocaust and embrace universal moral lessons derived from it to prevent future violence. The Holocaust serves as Europe’s most important moral lesson, a warning for the future, and a crucial part of its identity. Yet, as this volume shows, states can manipulate the existing Holocaust memory framework to rewrite their pasts and assist continued relativisation of past crimes and injustices. We examine the ways in which top-down memorialisation is organised and managed at both the EU and national levels, but also examine who are the main actors promoting, supporting, managing, or alternatively opposing the Europeanisation of memory. Broadly, we define “memory actors” as individuals, groups, and institutions that are acting as active conduits of collective memory. Narrowly, we analyse those actors who have the power to influence official memory politics. It is here that we situate “memory entrepreneurs” as those who, in a very pronounced way, “seek social recognition and political legitimacy (of their own) interpretation or narratives of the past” (Jelin 2003, pp. 33–34). Political elites, political parties, like-minded individuals, as well as institutions

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play a crucial role in (de)legitimising historical narratives. Their memorial activism springs out of the desire to shape, challenge, or obstruct a dominant view of the past.

A European Memory for the Western Balkans? The interaction between transnational and national dimensions of memory politics constitutes the environment in which actors, from social movements to political parties, navigate in making claims over what “European memory” is or is not. However, the existing accounts tend to focus on the East–West dichotomy as the main lens through which the enlarged EU memorial landscape is perceived and analysed. The regions and countries on the periphery of this East–West divide, such as the Western Balkans, have received scant attention in the research literature. Much uncertainty still exists about the impact of transnationalisation of discourses about the past at the EU level and their transposition in the process of EU Enlargement towards potential member states. However, the EU is not simply a newly available political opportunity structure to which domestic preferences are projected, but also an actor itself—with its distinct pluralistic identity and memory. The EU memory politics is comprised out of the uploaded historical material of its member states and serves jointly forged interests such as legitimacy building. It vests the EU with a specific historical fibre underpinning the objectives of EU identity politics, or the pacification of relations. But communitarian interests and the interests of member states may not always be compatible. Bilateral disputes over the matters of the past are particularly telling in this regard as they have proven to be very resilient to Europeanisation. The case of North Macedonia, whose EU accession process has been hijacked by the “name dispute” with neighbouring Greece, demonstrates how power asymmetry of membership in the group plays an important part in coercing the candidate countries to redress the matters of the past (Trajanovski, this volume). Our case studies show that the Europeanisation process in the field of memory politics has been more performative than fundamentally progressive. EU memory politics is legitimising nation-states’ claims to advance the process of Europeanisation and support their EU bid or alternatively to oppose it. On the one hand, EU membership remains a key driver for building peace in the Western Balkans. Fundamental elements of the EU’s accession criteria such as respect for the rule of law, minority protection,

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and accountable and mature political governance, can empower societies to resolve the legacies of the past and jumpstart the reconciliation process. In this sense, EU memory politics could serve as a form of a conflictresolution “know-how”—and not a prescribed template—to address (and make the amends for) previous injustices enacted upon marginalised or otherwise oppressed groups. On the other hand, the EU reports assessing progress in the advancement of a country positively evaluate national alignments with EU memory politics and endorse “the politics of regret” (Olick 2007). For instance, Serbian president Vuˇci´c was praised by the EU leaders for his attendance at the 2015 Srebrenica commemoration, despite the fact that Serbia still does not acknowledge the events as genocide (Touquet and Miloševi´c 2018). In this way, symbolic politics serves as a measurement tool and a test of the progress these countries make in dealing with the past, “reconciliation” and “good neighbourly relations”, and supports their advancement on the EU path. The concrete expectation of the EU in this regard is that political leaders must take ownership of the reconciliation processes and fully commit—in words and deeds— to overcoming the legacy of the past and solving open issues well before their accession to the EU. However, domestic applications of European memory norms in the Western Balkans have been both selective and tactical, as we demonstrate. In the context of their path towards EU membership, political elites, parties, institutions, as well as non-state actors advocated for a clear cut with the communist past as an aspect of their “return to Europe”. On the one hand, the EU’s anti-totalitarian stance has been instrumental in downplaying and erasing Yugoslavia, the trans-ethnic liberation of the region during the Second World War, and 50 years of peaceful coexistence among former Yugoslav republics (Ðureinovi´c, McConnell, Cateux, this volume). These shifts in memory politics are for instance reflected in legal and political attempts to silence or eliminate traces of Croatia’s Yugoslav past in urban spaces as well as in places directly affected by the Croatian War of Independence, officially known as the “Homeland War”, from 1991 to 1995 (McConnell, this volume), and in historical revisionism of the First World War as an attempt to reconstruct the new Montenegrin nationhood narrative—premised on distancing Montenegro from Serbia—as fundamentally European (Zeˇcevi´c, this volume). In a manner resembling other post-communist states in Europe, memory entrepreneurs deploy an anti-totalitarian narrative that often leads to the relative equalisation of national socialism and communism (Ðureinovi´c,

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this volume). The EU memory framework serves this aspect of reinterpretation of the Second World War and its aftermath in Yugoslavia. In Serbia, the appropriation of the anti-totalitarian discourse is used for the rehabilitation of the cˇetniks and recasting of their movement as anti-communist. In Croatia, the ustaša are represented as victims of communism, which leads towards the whitewashing of the country’s fascist history. Slovenia, an EU member state since the 2004 enlargement, has also adopted the European anti-totalitarian narrative, which has manifested itself in the construction of a monument to “Victims of All Wars” in the centre of Ljubljana, which, while depoliticising the deaths of those who died in the various wars of the twentieth century, avoids a condemnation of domestic actors like the Slovene Home Guard (Slovensko domobranstvo), which collaborated with the Axis powers in the Second World War (McConnell, this volume). Indeed, soft laws made by the European Parliament have assisted elites and political parties in their endeavour to co-opt those aspects of the Europeanisation process that fit their needs. The selectiveness in domestic applications of EU norms is most visible when comparing countries in different stages of EU accession. While EU memory politics are selectively applied in the pre-accession phase described above, the post-accession phase reveals the reversibility of the Europeanisation of memory. The post-accession phase contestation of the memory in the case of Croatia demonstrates a certain (un)dealing with the past and reinterpretation of Europeanness. Enacting the Holocaust canons of remembrance (Karlsson 2010) in Croatia’s Jasenovac Memorial, for instance, provided Croatia a way of signalling the EU-compliant moral lessons from the past, however, as Zaremba (this volume) shows, the motivations of memory entrepreneurs that supported the “Holocaustisation” of Jasenovac diverge. Her study provides an excellent example of how “cosmopolitan narratives” of Europe (Levy and Sznaider 2002) mean very little beyond elite-led and elite-practiced forms of remembrance. Our findings thus additionally suggest that apparent mnemonic consensus are frequently just a “dress up” by elites, lacking deep onthe-ground effects. As the chapters demonstrate, we cannot simply take for granted that the enactment of cosmopolitan and ethical models of remembrance and reconciliation are indeed producing the desired effect of learning from and dealing with the past. The Holocaust framework can assist in the continued relativisation of domestic crimes by state fascist regimes. Its application in the Croatian case shows that the rift between

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political processes and on-the-ground effects is very deep. Both Zaremba and McConnell (this volume) take the same example to illustrate this, by examining the evolution of the state-promoted commemoration in Jasenovac, which has been boycotted for several years by the human rights activists, victims’ associations and representatives of the Serb, Roma, and Jewish minorities in Croatia. While elites might strategically use prospective EU membership as a political tool, politically signalled commitment to the European project and its underlying values through the use of memory politics does not always resonate on the local, grassroots level. The events of the 1990s wars are still deeply entrenched in collective memory at the local level, where discourses on Europeanised memory and domestic political manipulations of the past are either rejected or countered. This is perhaps most visible in the rise of counter-memorial culture: State-sponsored memorials and performative commemorations have slowly been driven onto the side-lines, making place for grassroots memorials, artworks, artistic performances, and counter-monuments. The case of Prijedor, for instance, shows that in the absence of an EU perspective, the economic renewal of the city takes precedence over the “right to memory”. In a city where more than 3000 Bosnian Muslims and Croats went missing, were detained or killed in 1992, the places of their suffering are not a part of the official municipal commemoration. The lack of recognition and acknowledgement of the wartime suffering has given rise to a new set of counter-memorial practices led by the survivors, victims’ associations, and local artists (Bajec, this volume). The absence of the EU perspective in Bosnia-Herzegovina was also flagged by Moll (2013), who argues that the European Integration process was and remains unable to affect dominant nationalist memory narratives because of the lack of interest of dominant elites in accelerating the Integration process, combined with a hesitance of the EU to get involved in memory questions in BH. Vuˇckovac (this volume) similarly argues that the EU’s approach towards memory matters in Bosnia-Herzegovina so far has been tepid and reduced to genocide in Srebrenica (1995). Being both a memory activist and a researcher, Vuˇckovac gives as a critical assessment of the culture of denial and forgetting in Prijedor, concurring with Bajec that the Europeanisation of memory can still occur on the fringes of memorial practices. In this endeavour, memory activists fill in the void and give voice to voiceless: they are both agents and engines of change.

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The case of Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina shows that reinterpretation of the past, and its (initially assigned) symbols and values, can also be seen as a forceful intervention with the aim of engineering a Europeanised past in service of reconciliation. The new narrative of Mostar and its Stari most as a symbol of “bridging” aims to recondition the past from being “a curse” and a source of division, to “a model for the future”. The European reinterpretation of the past, as Cateux (this volume) shows, either leads to the erasure of “unsuitable” memory, or as a tool to ascribe novel meanings to the past. The renovation works of the communist-era Partisan cemetery and its use in the observance of May 9 (the Day of Europe) illustrate this, as symbols and locally grounded memories are divorced from their native context and meanings, to enable a display of so-called European values. The elite-led performance of Europeanness is rejected by the veterans of the Second World War and anti-fascist organisations as alien, the larger question being: to whom, then, does the anti-fascism belong in Mostar, if a Europeanised memory flattens the differences between Yugoslavia and the former communist countries in the East. Indeed, emulation of EU mnemonic norms and discourses with the aim of fostering European identity or receiving political advantages such as EU fast-tracking, can clash with the on the ground narratives of the past. This is the case with Mostar (described above) as well as with Skopje. North Macedonia’s “Skopje 2014 project” was envisioned to vest the capital city with an European identity and reaffirm national identity, yet its divisive potential was palpable both in the domestic and foreign political sphere. The set of ethnocentric, archaeological, linguistic, and mnemonic measures enacted since the mid-2000s launched the peculiar process of promoting the ethno-Macedonian national past as a top-scale political priority. It led to the so-called “name dispute”—a bilateral issue between the neighbouring North Macedonia and Greece on the official usage of the name “Macedonia”. The case presented by Trajanovski (this volume) illustrates how mnemonic entrepreneurship can not only trigger protests and inter-ethnic resentment, but also how mnemonic dissent between Athens and Skopje can hinder the EU Integration process. Longest standing in the EU queue, North Macedonia failed to get a date for the start of the EU accession talks until agreed consensus on the past was achieved. It resulted in the “renaming” of the country and erasure of contested memory in the North Macedonian capital.

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Similarly, we show that “historicizing strategies” (Mink and Neumayer 2013) can be an effective tool to persuade actors to reject norms, values, and freedoms endorsed by the EU. While analysing the social media discussions of opponents of the Istanbul Convention in Croatia, Obajdin and Golušin (this volume) reveal how non-state actors equal Europeanisation to “gender ideology”—a discourse that entails fears about traditional gender roles being undermined by third-wave feminism and LGBTQ + rights. In this view, “traditional values and culture” are “endangered” by Europeanisation, and Croatia is a victim of a forceful implementation of (gender) ideology—a “totalitarian”, “undemocratic”, “fascist”, “parasitic”, and “violent” Europeanisation. Similarly, Hoxha and Andresen (this volume) observe how local values can both oppose and clash with EU norms: through the lens of gender, they show that citizens in postconflict Kosovo perceive dealing with the past as being crucial for the early stage EU integration process. Both Kosovo-Serb and Kosovo-Albanian respondents in their focus groups see themselves as Europeans and believe that Europeanisation processes are an opportunity not only to overcome the troubled past, but to reconcile the male-dominating and womensuppressed war narratives in Kosovo. However, gendered memories can also be used as a tool for contestation of the EU, to persuade local actors to reject norms, values, and freedoms promoted by the EU and seen as incompatible with “traditional national values”, or, in Hoxha and Andresen’s case, to highlight the inconsistencies between perceived EU demands and on-the-ground felt effects of the EU integration process.

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CHAPTER 2

Building upon the European Union’s ˇ Anti-fascist Foundations: The Cetniks and Serbia’s Memory Politics Between Europeanisation and Russia Jelena Ðureinovi´c

Abstract The chapter examines the effects of Europeanisation and relations with Russia on memory politics about the Second World War and socialist Yugoslavia in Serbia. Focusing on the reinterpretation of the cˇetnik movement, the chapter discusses the intertwinement of international positionalities and memory politics, by focusing on the European Union and Russia as the most dominant external memory actors in post-Miloševi´c Serbia. Europeanisation discourses serve the purpose of justifying or criticising revisionist tendencies in Serbia: for many actors, the cˇetniks represent ideal companions of Serbia on its path towards the EU membership, while for others, their rehabilitation could jeopardise Serbia’s accession. Close relations with Russia mirror themselves in the revived state-sponsored celebrations of the partisans and more nationalist and militant commemorations of the cˇetniks from below. Positioning

J. Ðureinovi´c (B) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria © The Author(s) 2021 A. Miloševi´c and T. Trošt (eds.), Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4_2

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towards the West or East constitutes one of the key factors for the irreconcilable division within the cˇetnik memory community, and informs the image of the cˇetniks its fractions promote. ˇ Keywords Cetniks · Russia · Europeanisation · Memory politics · Post-socialism

Introduction Serbia will be truly recognised in Europe and the world only when it admits the truth to itself about General Mihailovi´c and Ravna Gora movement without shame. (Ravna Gora drugi deo 2005)

In 2005, around 15,000 people gathered on the mountain of Ravna Gora in central Serbia to commemorate the 1941 establishment of the cˇetniks , a royalist, predominantly Serbian, anti-communist, and eventually defeated movement of the Second World War in Yugoslavia. Since the early 1990s, the site where this commemoration takes place has grown into a memorial complex encompassing the statue of cˇetnik commander Dragoljub Mihailovi´c, a church, and a memorial home, attracting dozens of thousands of cˇetnik adherents with “cockades, šajkaˇca hats, flags, and miscellaneous fire arms” (Radeti´c 1992). It represents the central commemoration of the cˇetnik memory community in Serbia, bringing together the individual, small-group, and social levels of memory work (Conway 2010). In 2005, the Serbian government sponsored the Ravna Gora gathering for the first and only time, due to the influential position in the government and ministries of the Serbian Renewal Movement (Srpski pokret obnove, SPO), the political party that has been the main organiser of the commemoration since the beginning. As every year, party president and writer Vuk Draškovi´c held a speech, this time, however, also as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, while the flags of the Western Allies that decorated the site were swaying in the wind. Alluding to the process of Serbia’s accession to the European Union, Draškovi´c emphasised the direct link between the complete political rehabilitation and acceptance of the cˇetniks in Serbian society and the recognition of Serbia as European (Ravna Gora drugi deo 2005). According to such a stance, in order

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to return to Europe after decades of communism, Serbia would have to deal with its communist past and right the past wrongs inflicted upon the cˇetniks , a democratic, anti-fascist, and Yugoslav movement in the eyes of the SPO, their adherents, and dominant memory entrepreneurs (Jelin 2003). The Ravna Gora commemoration emerged in the early 1990s at the site where Dragoljub Mihailovi´c had arrived in 1941 and established the royalist armed forces, later officially entitled the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland. Nominally a resistance movement enjoying support of the Allies and the Yugoslav government in exile until 1943, the cˇetniks simultaneously collaborated with the occupation and collaborationist forces and their units committed numerous atrocities against civilians across Yugoslavia (Tomasevich 2001; Prusin 2017). The cˇetniks positioned themselves and fought against the occupation in the first months of the Second World War in Yugoslavia. Their position changed drastically in autumn 1941, after the outbreak of the conflict with the resistance movement led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, the partisans . Driven by staunch anti-communism, the cˇetniks dedicated most efforts to this war, which was also one of the main factors of their passive and nominal anti-occupation stance, and collaboration with the occupation forces. Nevertheless, the Yugoslav exiled government in London and the Allies supported the cˇetniks until 1943, when they decided to endorse ˇ the partisans instead. Cetnik commander Dragoljub Mihailovi´c faced a public trial in Belgrade in 1946, where he was sentenced to death and subsequently sentenced. In postwar Yugoslavia and its memory culture dominated by the glorification of the partisans , the cˇetniks represented war criminals, collaborators, and a Serbian counterpart to the Croatian ustaša movement (Sindbæk 2009).1 This dominant war narrative of socialist Yugoslavia faced serious challenges during the overall crisis in the 1980s, in parallel to the rise of nationalism in the public sphere. The critique of the Yugoslav memory culture and so-called partisan myth that came from intellectuals involved questioning of the socialist political order and the existence of the Yugoslav federation. The negative image of the cˇetniks started changing in the context of the increasing public articulation of anti-communist forces 1 The ustaša were a Croatian fascist movement that originated from the interwar period. During the Second World War, they ruled the Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet state that killed thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma.

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of the Second World War as heroes, in parallel with the public discussions about the dark episodes of the partisans ’ struggle against occupation and for socialist revolution. Many protagonists of the 1980s debates got involved in the political parties that started forming in 1990 as the opposition to the regime of Slobodan Miloševi´c. Throughout the 1990s, commemorations of defeated Second World War forces and victims of communism took place within this sphere. A large turn happened only after the overthrow of Miloševi´c in 2000, when his political opposition came to power, politically very diverse but with anti-communism and the struggle for ousting Miloševi´c as its unifying factors. Immediately after 2000, the revision of Second World War collaboration and resistance surfaced as the central theme of statesponsored memory politics. Political and legal rehabilitation of the cˇetnik movement, now representing the ideal historical reference for the Serbian nation-state, developed into the crucial objective of the official mnemonic efforts, more broadly aiming at condemnation of Yugoslav state socialism and everything associated with it. In this way, the narratives that had thrived in the 1980s and 1990s transformed from the vernacular to hegemonic status, becoming the central pillar of state-sponsored memory politics. The Second World War constituted the main legitimacy source for socialist Yugoslavia. Its revision represents an important aspect of separation from Yugoslavia and its legacies. In addition to collaboration and resistance, the end of the war is a crucial object of revision where the previously celebrated liberation transformed into the stories of executions, trials, and political repression against the Serbian nation. Yugoslav communism becomes just another type of totalitarianism. In the Serbian context, the narrative of victimhood under communism involves the defeated armed forces of the Second World War merging into the newly constructed social category of victims of communism. In the context of Serbia’s path towards European Union membership, political elites, revisionist “militant historians” (Mink and Jacobs 2008, p. 478), and non-state actors narrate the victimhood under communism and making a clear cut with the communist past as an aspect of Serbia’s “return to Europe”. In the sphere of memory politics, as this chapter demonstrates on the example of the cˇetniks , discourses of Europeanisation often serve the purpose of justifying revisionist tendencies within Serbia. The most relevant reference is the anti-totalitarian paradigm that travels from the European Union to nation-states and back,

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constantly downloaded and uploaded (Erll 2011). In a manner resembling other post-socialist states, memory actors in post-Miloševi´c Serbia place emphasis on anti-totalitarian narrative that often leads to the relative equalisation of national socialism and communism (Molden 2014, p. 115). In addition to the anti-totalitarian position, for different actors, Europeanisation discourses serve different purposes, confirming Serbia’s anti-fascist orientation or endangering it. As opposed to settling accounts with the Yugoslav past that this chapter is predominantly interested in, the second decade after the overthrow of Slobodan Miloševi´c has been marked by another turning point in state-sanctioned politics of memory, “the revision of the revision” (Stojanovi´c 2011, p. 261). In juxtaposition to the anti-communist political consensus, state actors have revived the previously abolished Yugoslav era holidays such as the Day of the Uprising, the Victory Day, and the Day of the Liberation of Belgrade. Political elites utilise these occasions to highlight the historical alliance of Serbian and Russian people and states, celebrating the victory of the partisans , however, in a depoliticised and de-Yugoslavised manner. The purpose of the commemorations of these Second World War events is the promotion of the narrative that, throughout history, the Serbian nation has always stood on the right side.2 The dynamics summarised above illuminate implications of memory politics beyond nation-state borders, as the process of seeking legitimacy transpires at both the national and transnational level (Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018, p. 381). Even though they are oriented towards and based on the national context, politics of memory do not operate in isolation, but involve external mnemonic actors and influences and can also serve as a strategy of positioning in the international political order. The attitudes towards international actors can also inform politics of memory, as they do inform the images of the cˇetniks within Serbia. In the case of Serbia, it is the European Union and Russia that serve as the dominant international frameworks that actors of memory politics draw upon. In this chapter, I am interested in the heterogeneous nature of hegemonic narratives in relation to external actors. While the chapter predominantly focuses on the discourses of Europeanisation in relation to

2 The First World War memory is equally relevant in this period, see Sindbæk Andersen and Dedovi´c (2017).

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historical revisionism and reinterpretation of the cˇetnik movement as antifascists and victims of communism, I will also refer to Russia as the equally dominant external mnemonic actor in the Serbian political landscape. These relations are complex, intertwined, and linked to the different perceptions of international actors. Hence, as this chapter demonstrates, Europeanisation do not only imply an anti-totalitarian paradigm and the interpretation of the cˇetnik movement as pro-European and anti-fascist. The opposition to official memory politics also insists on the anti-fascist foundations of the European Union, fearing that the cˇetnik glorification might endanger Serbia’s accession.3 In the case of Russia as a framework of reference, the celebrations of the victory against fascism does not represent the only phenomenon, but some of the cˇetnik adherents also frame their commemorative practices as religiously charged celebrations of the Serbian–Russian relations. The intertwinement is evident in the parallel events celebrating Victory Day and the Day of Europe, symbolising the wider context of Serbia’s foreign policy. This chapter provides an overview of these issues and is based on a wider research project that involved a years-long observation of commemorative practices and public discourses in Serbia. This chapter examines the (re)interpretation of the cˇetniks in relation to Europeanisation discourses, because of their importance for Serbia’s memory politics after Miloševi´c. I argue that the cˇetniks represent an ideal historical reference that does not only fit the domestic politics and legitimacy claims of post-Miloševi´c political elites, but their reinterpretation is also easily narrated as an aspect of the European Union accession. The main argument that underlies the cˇetnik rehabilitation is their interpretation as anti-fascists who fought both totalitarianisms and ultimately ended up as victims of the communist one. On the other hand, the European Union memory framework serves this aspect of Second World War revision within Serbia because of the paradigm of suffering under totalitarian regimes that has become prominent with the accession of the post-socialist states (Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018, p. 382; Clarke 2014). The chapter additionally examines the effects of Europeanisation and close relations with the Russian Federation on memory politics about the 3 Official memory relates to the efforts at the level of nation-state, most notably evident in state-sponsored commemorations and other mechanisms of memory politics promoted by state actors and political elites. For differentiation between official and other forms of memory, see Popular Memory Group (1998) and Bodnar (1992).

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Second World War and socialist Yugoslavia in contemporary Serbia. The analysis is based on the study of public discourses and mechanisms of state-sponsored memory politics, in combination with the observation of commemorative practices at different levels of memory work and in-depth interviews with state and non-state actors. In the following sections, I first introduce the cˇetnik movement and their centrality to memory politics in Serbia after the overthrow of Slobodan Miloševi´c. Then, I move on to the analysis of the cˇetniks in relation to Europeanisation discourses. The chapter concludes in discussing how Serbia’s increasingly closer relations with Russia manifest themselves in the sphere of politics of memory, examining Russia as an external actor.

ˇ Cetniks as the Ideal Antecedents of Postsocialist Serbia The ambivalent nature of the cˇetnik movement makes them an ideal object of appropriation and adaptation to political objectives of political elites and other memory entrepreneurs. The ambivalence arises from their amalgamation of completely incompatible things: patriotism and betrayal, the narrative of striving for saving the Serbian nation while committing massive atrocities against the members of the very same nation, heroism and utter cowardice, the strict military discipline and total ferociousness, and the alliance with the anti-Hitler coalition in combination with the parallel collaboration with the Axis forces (Marjanovi´c 1979, p. 11). The complex and ambiguous nature of the cˇetnik movement has been one of the main reasons for the phenomenon of their diverse reinterpretations that has gained prominence since the 1980s (Sindbæk 2009).4 The narrative that reached the hegemonic status in Serbia in 2000 has foundations in anti-communism and it revolves around the interpretation of the cˇetniks as a national anti-fascist movement and victims of communism. Their central position within anti-communist memory politics at all levels is an outcome of the long process of construction of the cˇetnik myth and the parallel deconstruction of the partisan one. Although the largest part of the movement survived the war, the cˇetniks developed into a symbol of crimes of communism because of the

4 For a discussion on the beginning of this process in the 1980s, see Dragovi´c Soso (2002).

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1946 trial against Dragoljub Mihailovi´c that had led to his execution. Furthermore, the revival of Second World War collaborationist forces has a goal of recasting the value positions, rejecting anti-fascism and reducing it to communist crimes, with collaborators socially accepted as defenders of the nation (Milosavljevi´c 2013, p. 227). The communist-led partisans become perpetrators while their enemies transform into national heroes. As Jelena Suboti´c explains, dealing with the communist crimes in Serbia “was reduced to rehabilitation of cˇetniks and fascist collaborators as full-fledged patriots who fought the good fight against the onslaught of communist totalitarianism and for the preservation of the Serbian ‘golden era’, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia” (Suboti´c 2015, p. 202). The revaluation of anti-communist forces of the Second World War, with the cˇetniks in focus, has been the main objective of Serbia’s memory politics, narrated under the façade of the concern for innocent victims of communism, their rehabilitation and compensation, that are only rhetorical and symbolic tools. With their collaboration and crimes justified or denied and anti-fascism added instead, the cˇetniks turned into the ideal antecedents for the Serbian nation-state as the fighters for the national cause who found themselves on the defeated side only because of their naivety and honesty as well as the dirty games played by the Allies (Stojanovi´c 2011, p. 248). Subsequently, when observed through this lens, the communist-led partisans not only defeated the cˇetniks but also conquered the territory of Yugoslavia and imposed communism on the Serbian people who had been in favour of the cˇetniks and the monarchy. Since 2000, the Serbian authorities have employed numerous mechanisms of making this image of the war official. After a few years of purges of the references to Yugoslavia from the public sphere and the official calendar, the National Assembly passed the changes to the veteran legislation that recognised the cˇetniks as the veterans of the People’s Liberation War, formally equalising them with the partisans (Zakon o pravima boraca, vojnih invalida i njihovih porodica 2004). Although no cˇetnik veteran has ever fulfilled the veteran rights granted in the legislation, this law represents the official recognition of the cˇetnik movement as anti-fascist. It is an outcome of the aims of Serbian political elites to construct a new anti-fascist movement that would represent a positive reference to the Second World War but fit the current political context more than unsuitable communist and anti-nationalist partisans . Two years after the veteran law changes, the Serbian parliament passed the

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first Rehabilitation Law, introducing the possibility of legal rehabilitation for the people who had been killed, sentenced, or deprived of any rights for political and ideological reasons after 6 April 1941, the beginning of the Second World War in Yugoslavia (Zakon o rehabilitaciji 2006). In 2015, after a years-long court process that involved historians as expert witnesses and enormous public attention in Serbia and the post-Yugoslav space, Dragoljub Mihailovi´c was rehabilitated as a victim of an unfair trial. The centrality of the cˇetnik movement does not mean that there is homogeneity concerning their interpretation or memory entrepreneurs operating at multiple levels of memory work, that are as multifaceted as the nature of the cˇetniks itself. Pro-ˇcetnik actors in Serbia (as well as in Republika Srpska, Montenegro, and emigration) cherish different images of Dragoljub Mihailovi´c and his movement. One of the main points of division within this memory community in Serbia are the wars of the Yugoslav dissolution, with the attitude towards Serbia’s EU accession and relations with the Russian Federation operating as another dividing line. The most prominent example is the split between the already mentioned SPO and the Serbian Radical Party (Srpska radikalna stranka, SRS) in the early 1990s, when the SPO decided to oppose the Serbian participation in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. In the post-Miloševi´c period, the positions about the European Union and Russia respectively developed into another important demarcation line between these parties, whose parliament members have dedicated significant time to discussing who is a real or fake cˇetnik.5 This split is characteristic for the entire cˇetnik memory community that encompasses other political parties such as farright Dveri and the Movement for the Renewal of the Kingdom of Serbia (Pokret obnove Kraljevine Srbije, POKS), cˇetnik groups such as the Ravna Gora Movement (Ravnogorski pokret ) and the cˇetnik veteran association, and organised groups striving for total restitution or gathering victims of communism and their descendants, historians, and intellectuals. What is, however, common for all cˇetnik adherents such as the SPO and SRS is anti-communism, regardless of different international positionalities and political and party affiliations. Anti-communism is the root of the positive reframing of the defeated forces of the Second World War and the parallel negative reinterpretation of the partisans as communist perpetrators.

5 See, for instance Privremene stenografske beleške, šesta sednica drugog redovnog zasedanja (2004).

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ˇ Cetniks and Europeanisation In early 2016, Serbian tabloids reported that Dragoljub Mihailovi´c could get a statue in Brussels, “the heart of the European Union” (Evropa ceni cˇiˇca Dražu 2016). According to media reports, the official cˇetnik ˇ veteran association, led by Aleksandar Cotri´ c of the SPO and with chapters in Serbia and abroad, was behind the memorial initiative. Confirming that the veteran association would fight for the memorial if necessary and certain that the day would come when the memorial would stand ˇ in Brussels, Cotri´ c explained the logic behind the initiative: Draža is not only the greatest Serb, but the greatest European too, having fought for the European Union even before the European Union. He deserved to have a memorial erected in Brussels, the city of the Union headquarters, because he was the commander of the first anti-fascist guerilla in occupied Europe, he led the biggest action of rescuing Allied pilots in the Second World War, and he contributed significantly to the victory of the anti-Hitler coalition, which is why he was given medals by American president Harry Truman and French president Charles de Gaulle. (Ðondovi´c 2016)

ˇ According to Cotri´ c, Mihailovi´c had fought for the values the European Union was founded upon: democracy, human rights and freedoms, respect for national identity, and anti-fascism (Ðondovi´c 2016). This is the narrative common for nationalist political parties such as the SPO as well as diverse anti-communist non-state actors, who use the European Union’s anti-totalitarian resolutions for legitimising their arguments about the cˇetniks as positive historical references (Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018, p. 392). The SPO has lobbied for opening of state security files, resolutions on condemnation of crimes of totalitarianism, and establishment of a day of remembrance for victims of totalitarian regimes.6 Although without success, these initiatives demonstrate how domestic political actors utilise the EU memory politics, applying it to their aims at rehabilitating the cˇetniks. In their view, opening of the state security files “represents a very important test for the society, for all ruling structures,

6 See SPO ponovo traži otvaranje tajnih dosijea (2014, January 4).

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and is one of the mandatory conditions for the path of Serbia towards the EU”.7 The positive reinterpretation of the cˇetnik movement fits the international context of memory politics of the European Union and other post-socialist states. Namely, the actors of historical revisionism in Serbia look up to the condemnation of totalitarian ideologies and regimes in the European Union memory politics, promoting the idea that Serbia’s return to Europe must involve dealing with the communist past. Additionally, the recasting of the cˇetniks as the first anti-fascist guerrilla movement in occupied Europe fits the narrative of the anti-fascist foundations of the European Union and the cˇetniks as a logical part of it. Thus, not only do the cˇetniks represent the ideal reference for inward Europeanisation, but the international context such as memory politics of the European Union constitutes an equally ideal setting that enables and helps justifying their rehabilitation. As previously noted, the rehabilitation of the cˇetniks and other anti-communist military and political forces of the Second World War represents the main objective of memory politics for the majority of political elites in Serbia after 2000, represented as the concern for innocent victims of communism. In a similar manner, Europeanisation represents another façade and symbolic tool that helps justifying rehabilitation of Dragoljub Mihailovi´c and the cˇetnik movement. The rehabilitation of the cˇetniks and EU integration of Serbia are narrated as two intertwined processes that are linked with the EU memory politics and its anti-totalitarian dimension. The cˇetniks have surfaced as a fitting historical reference in these discourses because, according to the logic behind their revised image, they had fought against both totalitarian ideologies and systems, victimised by both, ending the war as victims of the communist one. As non-totalitarian anti-fascists, the cˇetniks should also fit the anti-fascist foundations of the European Union. For this narrative to function, the issue of extreme nationalism, collaboration, and crimes against civilians, often ethnically motivated, must be entirely left out, as well as all other facts that do not fit the positive interpretation of the cˇetnik movement. Instead, the cˇetnik proponents in favour of the EU accession exaggerate the contribution of the cˇetniks to the victory against fascism, creating the illusion that they had fought on the right side throughout the war and blurring the role of the partisans and the

7 Aleksandar Cotri´ ˇ c, in interview with the author, October 2016.

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position of Serbia at the war’s end. The medals Mihailovi´c had received from the United States and France are commonly used as evidence of the cˇetniks as the resistance guerrillas recognised by the West while everything else is a lie told by the Yugoslav communists.8 For many actors of memory politics, such as the SPO and revisionist historians, Dragoljub Mihailovi´c remains a Yugoslav-oriented democrat who admired Western democracies and the European Union, even before ˇ it existed. As Cotri´ c emphasised in his critique of commemorations that celebrate both the cˇetniks and Russia, “if General Mihailovi´c was alive today, he would without a doubt be for the European Union and strategic ˇ partnership with the United States of America” (Cotri´ c 2016). Hence, judicial rehabilitation of Mihailovi´c would not be an obstacle to the EU accession, but rather a condition for membership. This argument was presented in the rehabilitation process as well. Historian Kosta Nikoli´c, who testified as an expert witness in the court process, claimed that Mihailovi´c’s rehabilitation represents “our European obligation to face the consequences of the communist dictatorship” (Cviji´c 2012). Another phenomenon surfaced during the process of rehabilitation of Mihailovi´c. It became evident that Europeanisation discourses also surface within the opposition to state-sponsored memory politics on the Second World War and state socialism in contemporary Serbia. After Dragoljub Mihailovi´c was rehabilitated in May 2015, the organisations of liberal civil society in Serbia reacted negatively, perceiving it as an act of identification of Serbia with the defeated side of the Second World War. The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia issued a public statement, warning that, by rehabilitating Mihailovi´c, Serbia was sending “a clear message to the region and democratic Europe that it was giving up on its own anti-fascist heritage, that it did not give up the politics of conflict with neighbours and pretending on other territories” (Helsinški odbor: Srbija odustala od antifašizma 2015). For the liberal civil society, anti-fascism represents one of the core values of the European Union and, thus, the cˇetniks do not belong there, as collaborators and war criminals. The attitudes towards the European Union and Europeanisation often act as an important demarcation line between the leftist and liberal actors who oppose the hegemonic discourses. This phenomenon is very similar 8 Harry Truman posthumously awarded Mihailovi´c with the Order of the Legion of Honor in 1948, for the action of rescuing 500 American airmen in Pranjani in western Serbia. Charles de Gaulle decorated Mihailovi´c in 1943.

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to the already addressed divisions among the pro-ˇcetnik actors and reflects the significance of the EU accession as a discourse spanning different spheres of the Serbian society. On the political left, the European Union is generally perceived as responsible for not only validating but initiating the process of historical revisionism about the Second World War.9 On the other hand, a large part of the anti-revisionist opposition, evident in the organisations and groups of liberal civil society, expects the institutions of the European Union to react upon rehabilitation of the defeated Second World War forces, assuming that the revision of the Second World War could endanger Serbia’s path towards the EU membership. Therefore, frequent activities against the process of rehabilitation of Mihailovi´c involved open letters to the international community, claiming that the positive outcome of Mihailovi´c’s rehabilitation process would take Serbia further away from European values and the EU membership (Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia 2010).

Russia as an External Factor In addition to the Europeanisation discourses, relations with Russia resonate in the sphere of state-sponsored memory politics too, especially since the beginning of the second decade after the overthrow of Slobodan Miloševi´c. They represent a crucial factor for the revival of the holidays celebrated in Yugoslavia, such as the Victory Day and the Day of Liberation of Belgrade on 20 October. At the state level, the always increasingly closer relations with Russia contributed to the militarisation of commemorative practices that has taken place since 2014, involving the army showcasing the military strength and equipment on the occasions of the Victory Day or local liberation days. These commemorations are attended by the highest Russian officials. However, in addition to the turn to anti-fascist commemorations, Serbian–Russian relations are also evoked in the context of cˇetnik commemorations from below. As previously outlined, a large segment of pro-ˇcetnik mnemonic agents interprets them as Yugoslav democrats oriented towards and admiring Western democracies. However, many actors consider the idea of Stevan Moljevi´c’s Homogeneous Serbia as the most appealing dimension of the cˇetnik movement, understanding them as anti-Western and fighters for

9 See, for example: Pejovi´c (2019, August 31).

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the unification of all Serbs within Greater Serbia.10 The division within the cˇetnik memory community sparked by the conflicting positions about the 1990s wars and Serbia’s international political alliances resulted in a parallel cˇetnik memoryscape. As the SPO switched its position to being against the wars, insisting on the democratic, Yugoslav, and West-oriented nature of the cˇetnik movement, the alternative, more nationalist, and militant cˇetnik memory community emerged, with the SRS and Ravna Gora Movement as the most notable representatives. These groups do not avoid cˇetnik nationalism, but they celebrate it openly, including justifying the wars if they were aimed at uniting all Serbs within the borders of one ethnically homogeneous state. For these groups, the most important characteristic of the cˇetnik movement is that it was Serbian, as opposed to insisting on the Yugoslav nature of the movement that dominates the SPO-sponsored commemorations. Their memory politics is not statesupported but comes from below, is directly linked with the memory of the 1990s wars, and religiously charged. The commemorative practices, most notably the alternative Ravna Gora gathering that takes place just a few days before the SPO-orchestrated one, are directed against the perceived hegemony of pro-Western cˇetnik memory and their appropriation by the SPO. Finally, the memory work in this sphere encompasses celebrations of Serbian–Russian links as intertwined with commemorating the cˇetniks. New pro-ˇcetnik mnemonic agents emerged or grew larger in postMiloševi´c Serbia. The most recent example involves the fraction expelled from the SPO that established its own political party in 2017, entitled the Movement for the Renewal of the Kingdom of Serbia (Pokret obnove Kraljevine Srbije, POKS). The POKS represents a more radical wing of the SPO that promotes going back to the values and goals of the party of the early 1990s, namely the re-establishment of the monarchy in Serbia. The movement was established on the anniversary of the death of Dragoljub Mihailovi´c and commemorates the cˇetniks as “the King’s army”, promoting anti-communism through the organisation of lectures and other public events about the crimes of communism. Dragoljub Mihailovi´c’s grandson Vojislav Mihailovi´c is affiliated with them. Another 10 Homogeneous Serbia is the 1941 publication written by Stevan Moljevi´c, advocating the establishment of ethnically homogeneous greater Serbia within Yugoslavia, achieved through ethnic cleansing. During the Second World War, Moljevi´c was a political advisor of Mihailovi´c.

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group, closer to the SRS in the cˇetnik image they cherish, is the Ravna Gora Movement. This movement had been organising the Ravna Gora commemorations parallel to the SPO gathering already in the early 1990s, with support from prominent politically active intellectuals. In the postMiloševi´c period, they grew into a large militant movement, involving Serbian veterans of the 1990s wars, and with offices in both Serbia and Republika Srpska. Their image of the cˇetniks is intertwined with a very strong pro-Russian attitude. Members of this movement volunteered in Crimea after its annexation by Russia in 2014 and took part in the conflict in eastern Ukraine while wearing cˇetnik uniforms and symbols. Moreover, the annual commemorations of Mihailovi´c’s death involve the memorial service for Nikolai II and the Romanov family who were executed on the same date. The far-right political party Dveri organises religious memorial services for Mihailovi´c and the Romanovs as well. While the SPO and their adherents put up the flags of the western Allies of the Second World War, contemporary Russia represents the main ally for the Ravna Gora Movement, usually also commemorating the Romanovs, and having guests from Russia and eastern Ukraine speaking at commemorations. The parallel commemoration that used to be held in the village of Ba had gathered prominent intellectuals such as Nikola Miloševi´c and Vojislav Koštunica in the early 1990s, which is not the case anymore. Claiming that Mihailovi´c had established the cˇetnik movement on 8 May as opposed to the widely accepted date of 13 May, the Ravna Gora Movement chooses to organise their commemoration a few days before the SPO-affiliated one. The alternative gathering is not only smaller than the one organised by the SPO, but it is also more staunchly nationalist and militant. With uniforms, military hierarchy, line-ups, and marching in columns, the Ravna Gora Movement commemorations rather resemble a paramilitary exercise than a commemorative practice. Besides having a strict military codex, the Ravna Gora Movement also involves an official chaplain and nurtures close relations with the Serbian Orthodox Church. The two cˇetnik memory communities do not cooperate at any level. Even though they commemorate and strive for rehabilitation of the cˇetnik movement, interpreting them strictly positively, the narratives they promote are mutually exclusive. The same issue arises concerning the international positionalities of their memory politics that are equally incompatible and competitive. The competitiveness surfaces regarding

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the rightfulness of the interpretation of the nature of the cˇetnik movement, with both sides considering themselves as the right followers of the cˇetnik tradition and accusing others for appropriating the cˇetniks and Dragoljub Mihailovi´c for their political goals and popularity. Among the political parties, this conflict became particularly evident in parliamentary debates about condemnation of communism and rehabilitation of the cˇetnik movement, such as the 2004 changes of the veteran legislation.

Concluding Remarks As the case studies of cˇetnik memory communities in this chapter illuminate, balancing between the European Union and Russia resonates in the sphere of memory politics and serves as and reflects positional strategies in the international political order. Positionalities towards international actors inform the politics of memory, as the memory politics of the European Union or Russia informs memory work within Serbia. The heterogeneous nature of hegemonic narratives, namely the positive image of the cˇetniks, is closely related to external mnemonic agents, where the European Union and Russia constitute the dominant frames of reference. Europeanisation discourses are often based on the appropriation of the anti-totalitarian memory politics of the European Union, utilised for rehabilitation of the cˇetniks as innocent victims of communism. According to many cˇetnik proponents, recasting of the cˇetnik movement as anti-fascist fits the anti-fascist foundations of the EU. As anti-totalitarian anti-fascists, the cˇetniks are seen as both the ideal ancestors of the contemporary nation-state as well as the perfect companions of Serbia on its path towards the EU membership. However, not all cˇetnik adherents see the EU as the ideal international setting for Serbia, preferring Russia as the main ally and emphasising the cultural, religious, and historical relations between the two countries. The international positionalities towards the West and the East respectively, together with the incompatible stances about the wars of the Yugoslav dissolution, build the basis of the irreconcilable division between the two sections of the cˇetnik memory community. At the level of state-sanctioned memory politics, however, the cˇetniks as a pro-Western anti-fascist and democratic movement are a more desirable image of this movement, suiting the climate of strong historical revisionism that dominated the immediate post-Miloševi´c period and the aspirations towards the EU membership. At the same time, Serbian political elites and the government nurture close relations with

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Russia that mirror themselves in politics of memory in the form of revived celebrations of the partisans ’ victory against fascism, where the partisans are ethnicised as a Serbian movement and deprived of their communist ideology. Unlike the cˇetnik memory politics from below, where the celebrations of contemporary nationalism and brotherhood of the Serbian and Russian nation carefully avoid references to the partisans and the Red Army, the state-sponsored commemorations and military parade put an accent on them, celebrating the victory against fascism as an episode in the long history of the Serbian–Russian friendship. While the state governments exercise their friendship at military parades, the nationalist and militant actors from below also get together and commemorate their favourable past: the cˇetniks and the Romanov family. The equivocal nature of the cˇetnik movement makes them a convenient object of reinterpretation, based on a very selective approach to the Second World War and its aftermath. While the cˇetniks ’ ambiguity enables the positive reinterpretation and construction as an exclusively positive historical reference, it also generates diverse interpretations. As the divisions among the cˇetnik adherents in the 1990s demonstrate, there is more than one image of the cˇetnik movement. By the same token, each actor claiming continuity with Mihailovi´c’s cˇetniks or a proponent of their rehabilitation has their own version of Dragoljub Mihailovi´c. For the SPO and revisionist historians, “Draža” was a Yugoslav democrat with admiration for Western democracies, who would have equally admired the European Union if it had existed during his life. Others, such as the Serbian Radical Party led by Vojislav Šešelj or Ravna Gora Movement, celebrate the Serbian nature of the cˇetniks and find the plan of unification of the entire Serbian nation within borders of an ethnically homogeneous state particularly appealing. Inspired by this agenda, many of them fought in the 1990s wars of the Yugoslav succession. For this part of the cˇetnik memory community, contemporary Russia represents the most important political ally of Serbia. To conclude, the politics of memory of a nation-state at all its levels never takes place in isolation, even though the historical content it refers to and its main objectives are situated in the national context. In the case of post-Miloševi´c Serbia, the European Union and Russia represent the most dominant external mnemonic agents, intertwined with the broader discourses of Europeanisation and “Eurosianisation”. Because of the close

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links with international relations and imaginations of desirable international belonging and alliances, politics of memory is not only intertwined with the present, but, in parallel, it acts as politics of the future.

References Bodnar, J. E. (1992). Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Clarke, D. (2014). Communism and Memory Politics in the European Union. Central Europe, 12(1), 99–114. https://doi.org/10.1179/1479096314Z. 00000000018. Conway, B. (2010). Commemoration and Bloody Sunday: Pathways of Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ˇ Cotri´ c, A. (2016, December 13). Draža bi bio za Evropsku uniju. Danas. https://www.danas.rs/dijalog/licni-stavovi/draza-bi-bio-za-evropsku-uniju/. Accessed 28 January 2020. Cviji´c, V. (2012, November 22). Istoriˇcar: Rehabilitacija Mihailovi´ca evropska obaveza. Blic. https://www.blic.rs/vesti/drustvo/istoricar-rehabilitacija-mih ailovica-evropska-obaveza/4f6ws7c. Accessed 28 January 2020. Ðondovi´c, J. (2016, January 22). Dobija spomenik u srcu EU: Draža se seli u Brisel! Alo! http://www.alo.rs/vesti/aktuelno/draza-se-seli-u-brisel/30573/ vest. Accessed 28 January 2020. Dragovi´c Soso, J. (2002). Saviours of the Nation. Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism. London: Hurst & Company. Erll, A. (2011). Travelling Memory. Parallax, 17 (4), 4–18. Evropa ceni cˇ iˇca Dražu: Srpski ÐENERAL dobija spomenik u SRCU Evropske unije?! (2016). Telegraf . https://www.telegraf.rs/vesti/politika/1961728evropa-ceni-cica-drazu-srpski-djeneral-dobija-spomenik-u-srcu-evropske-unije. Accessed 28 January 2020. Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia. (2010). Rehabilitation of Draža Mihailovi´c Revises History. Press Release. https://www.helsinki.org.rs/ index_archiva_t31.html. Accessed 28 January 2020. Helsinški odbor: Srbija odustala od antifašizma. (2015, May 14). Blic. https:// www.blic.rs/vesti/politika/helsinski-odbor-srbija-odustala-od-antifasizma/ mdg96dx. Accessed 28 January 2020. Jelin, E. (2003). State Repression and the Labors of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marjanovi´c, J. (1979). Draža Mihailovi´c izmed-u Britanaca i Nemaca. Zagreb and Beograd: Globus, Narodna knjiga. Milosavljevi´c, O. (2013). Geschichtsrevisionismus und der Zweite Weltkrieg. In Ð. Tomi´c et al. (Ed.), Mythos Partizan. (Dis)Kontinuitäten der jugoslawischen

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Linken: Geschichte, Erinnerungen und Perspektiven (pp. 222–234). Münster: Unrast Verlag. Miloševi´c, A., & Touquet, H. (2018). Unintended Consequences: The EU Memory Framework and the Politics of Memory in Serbia and Croatia. Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 18(3), 381–399. Mink, G., & Jacobs, A. (2008). Between Reconciliation and the Reactivation of Past Conflicts in Europe: Rethinking Social Memory Paradigms. Sociologický ˇ Casopis/Czech Sociological Review, 44(3), 469–490. Molden, B. (2014). Mnemonic Hegemony? The Power Relations of Contemporary European Memory. In J. W. Boyer & B. Molden (Eds.), EUtROPEs: The Paradox of European Empire (pp. 104–131). Paris and Chicago: University of Chicago Center. Narodna skupština Republike Srbije. (2004). Privremene stenografske beleške, šesta sednica drugog redovnog zasedanja. http://www.otvoreniparlament.rs/transk ript/6170?tagId=60685. Accessed 14 February 2020. Pejovi´c, M. (2019, August 31). Radanovi´c: Glorifikaciju šovinizma i rasizma ne sankcionira ni Evropska Unija. Aljazeera Balkans. http://balkans.aljazeera. net/vijesti/radanovic-glorifikaciju-sovinizma-i-rasizma-ne-sankcionira-ni-evr opska-unija?fbclid=IwAR1aJcZ5ShwzSCmVA9dR0P3L2W5lsA78UuyR-JVD P6isQeNA853YRsQ75cQ. Accessed 14 February 2020. Popular Memory Group. (1998). Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method. In R. Perks & A. Thomson (Eds.), The Oral History Reader (pp. 75–87). London and New York: Routledge. Prusin, A. (2017). Serbia Under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Radeti´c, M. (1992, May 14). ‘Pre osve´cenja - rafali’. Veˇcernje novosti. Ravna Gora drugi deo. (2005, May 15). B92. https://www.b92.net/info/vesti/ index.php?yyyy=2005&mm=05&dd=15&nav_category=11&nav_id=168465. Accessed 13 February 2020. Sindbæk, T. (2009). The Fall and Rise of a National Hero: Interpretations of Draža Mihailovi´c and the Chetniks in Yugoslavia and Serbia Since 1945. Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 17 (1), 47–59. Sindbæk Andersen, T., & Dedovi´c, I. (2017). Answering Back to Presumed Accusations: Serbian First World Memories and the Question of Historical Responsibility. In T. Sindbæk Andersen & B. Törnquist-Plewa (Eds.), The Twentieth Century in European Memory: Transcultural Mediation and Reception (pp. 83–103). Leiden: Brill. SPO ponovo traži otvaranje tajnih dosijea. (2014, January 4). Blic. https:// www.blic.rs/vesti/politika/spo-ponovo-trazi-otvaranje-tajnih-dosijea/680 cgtk. Accessed 14 February 2020.

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Stojanovi´c, D. (2011). Revisions of the Second World War History in Serbia. In S. P. Ramet & O. Listhaug (Eds.), Serbia and the Serbs in World War Two (pp. 247–364). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Suboti´c, J. (2015). The Mythologizing of Communist Violence. In L. Stan & N. Nedelsky (Eds.), Post-communist Transitional Justice: Lessons from Twenty-Five Years of Experience (pp. 188–210). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomasevich, J. (2001). War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zakon o pravima boraca, vojnih invalida i njihovih porodica. (2004). Službeni glasnik Republike Srbije. Vol. 137/2004. Zakon o rehabilitaciji. (2006). Službeni glasnik Republike Srbije. Vol. 33/2006.

CHAPTER 3

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

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

T. McConnell (B) School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Miloševi´c and T. Trošt (eds.), Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4_3

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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. Keywords Croatia · Nationalism · Revisionism · War · Monuments

Introduction Following the series of wars of the 1990s, successor states of the former Yugoslavia formally committed to the Europeanisation process, culminating thus far with the accession of Slovenia and Croatia to the European Union in 2004 and 2013, respectively. Elsewhere in the region, North Macedonia (then the Republic of Macedonia) received candidate status in 2005, Montenegro in 2010 and Serbia in 2012, while BosniaHerzegovina applied for candidate status in 2016, and Kosovo remains a potential candidate, pending the outcome of ongoing dialogue between Pristina and Belgrade. Europeanisation “includes complex and strongly disputed processes” where the amalgamation of knowledge, attitudes and values is emphasized, often understood in terms of harmonisation with European Union standards (Karlsson 2010, p. 38). Each state’s entrance into the EU was conditioned upon, among other things, facing its criminal past of human rights abuses (Pavlakovi´c 2010; Suboti´c 2011). In the former Yugoslav countries, the contested elements of the past relate to the three major transitions these countries have undergone: from a post-war state to a peace-building state, from a post-socialist state to a liberal democracy, and from a post-Yugoslav federation to ethnic states. In addition to these complex processes, the process of memory construction also relates to the EU’s role as a change agent and must be analysed in relation to the existing balance of power systems, where the process of Europeanisation plays a key role. In this chapter, I present an empirical analysis of Croatia’s dynamic relationship with memory in the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of its accession to the European Union in July 2013. Croatia has experienced a backsliding from democratic norms of memorialisation since 2013 to an exclusionist, narrowly ethnic understanding of memory (McConnell 2019; Mileki´c 2016; Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018). These shifts in memory politics are reflected in monument construction and

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recent attempts to silence or eliminate traces of Croatia’s Yugoslav past in places directly affected by the Croatian War of Independence, officially known as the “Homeland War”, from 1991 to 1995. Croatia’s experiences are tied into wider dynamics of post-communist memory in Central and Eastern Europe, where similar regressions from European standards have developed in the preceding decade (Bucholc 2019). I suggest that not only did the European project of memory miserably fail in Croatia, but that it provoked a counter-effect that pushed nationalist sentiments forward. This means that, despite the presence and continual development of European norms of memorialisation throughout Croatia’s accession process and further since 2013, Croatia’s attempts to face the past have been co-opted by nationalist, exclusionary narratives that run counter to the multicultural perspectives offered at the European level (Suboti´c 2009). The European narrative of antitotalitarianism has been used, for example, to erase the history of socialist Yugoslavia from Croatia’s past, while the celebration of Yugoslav antifascism has been set aside through the continuing relativisation of the quisling Independent State of Croatia, responsible for ethnic cleansing and genocidal campaigns against Jews, Serbs, Roma and others during the Second World War (Pavlakovi´c et al. 2018). The demand by human rights advocates that Croatia address its historical wrongdoings has either fallen on deaf ears, as in the case of the controversial installation of a memorial plaque in Jasenovac dedicated to a paramilitary group active in the Croatian War of Independence, discussed below, or has been addressed tactically by nationalist politicians who sought to balance the requirements for EU accession with populist denial of war crimes committed in the name of the Croatian nation during the same period. This latter instance will be highlighted through the discussion of the reluctant handover of indicted Croatian generals to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the early to mid-2000s. The intertwining of transitional justice with the EU accession process—primarily through conditionality agreements over judicial reform and cooperation with the ICTY—proved to exacerbate post-war tensions in the region, most notably between Serbia and Croatia, whose membership in the Union has given it greater leverage over its neighbour to extract concessions over Serbia’s approach to its own complicated past. 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

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project in Croatia in the periods immediately preceding and following the state’s accession to the European Union, as well as to evaluate the responses, if any, of European officials to Croatia’s slipping away from their commitment to face their own human rights abuses.

Historical Background The Fall of Yugoslavia and the Post-communist Transition The dissolution of Yugoslavia left in its wake ruptured memories and fomented mnemonic tensions over the legacy of the federation that existed in various forms from 1918 to 1992. The nature of transition in the various successor states of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) was marked in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina above all by mass violence in wars that lasted for the greater part of the early 1990s. Like all other post-Yugoslav states, Croatia must now grapple with its transitions from a socialist into a democratic state, from war into peace and from a Yugoslav into a European identity, in doing so coming to terms with its multiple contested pasts. In Croatia, it is arguably the coming to terms with its socialist past, that is, its former Yugoslav legacy, that presents the most significant mnemonic rifts in Croatia throughout its transition from the European periphery to its core as a European Union member state. The post-Yugoslav transition is not simply a sum of the post-socialist and post-war transitions, with the political consequences of ethnicity in Yugoslavia being deeply embedded in the process. The violent ethnic nationalisms which replaced Yugoslavia’s communalist ethos of bratstvo i jedinstvo (brotherhood and unity) in 1991, when the SFRJ fragmented into its constitutive republics, took observers by surprise. The bloody ethnic warfare which continued to rage in the territories of the former Yugoslavia for the next decade has substituted trepidation for the enthusiasm with which most Europeans greeted the collapse of communist hegemony in Central and Eastern Europe. As it was the character of the ethnic nationalism prevalent in the former Yugoslavia that defined the nature of the conflict it is necessary to understand the various ethnic categories, the perceptions of them and the political processes through which they have been expressed. The post-communist resurgence of ethnic nationalism in the region was seen as springing from robust and deeply rooted national identities. These identities were sufficiently resilient to have survived decades

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of repression by ruthlessly anti-national communist regimes. In Slavic languages, the word “narod” means both “people” and “nation”. Thus the concept of a “nation-state” belonging to a specific “nation” or “people” is conceived as ethno-nationalism (Denich 2000, p. 24). Ethnonationalism proved crucial to the political elites, enabling them to take advantage of the symbolic power that ethnicity has to offer. It was used as a tool for pursuing territorial, political and economic objectives. Thus, it is important to understand Yugoslav ethnicity through the region’s specific political history, with this ethnicity being subject to political manipulation in the context of the collapse of the civil order (Hammel 2000, p. 30). There was an inherent ambiguity in how the communist leadership in Yugoslavia treated nationality. It is similarly relevant to note that, “while communist states preached proletarian internationalism on the normative level, ethno-nationalism was the cornerstone of their operative ideology and an important source of internal legitimacy” (Maleševi´c 2006, p. 399). In Yugoslavia under communist rule, sentiments were manipulated in the inauguration of a pan-Yugoslav national identity. The Titoist slogan “brotherhood and unity” was intended to mend the rifts and fratricidal relations between Yugoslavia’s ethnically defined “nations” during the Second World War. Ethno-nationalism, which generated the recent Yugoslav conflicts, was a dominant concept throughout the period of communist rule between 1941 and 1991 (Petrovi´c 2000, p. 165). Brubaker and Cooper (2000) ascribed this to the fact that strongly institutionalised ethno-national classification made certain categories readily and legitimately available for the representation of social reality, the framing of political claims, and the organisation of political action. Brubaker claimed that institutional definitions of nationhood “did not so much constrain action as constitute basic categories of political understanding, central parameters of political rhetoric, specific types of political interest and fundamental forms of political identity” (Brubaker 1994, p. 48). However, once communism as an ideological and political system was spent, the quest for political changes pressured the existing political elite into finding a new way to mobilise mass support (Petrovi´c 2000, p. 165). Nationalist ideologies were used as a means of transposing conflicting interests into emotionally charged ethnic grievances which had been strategically created and instrumentalised by the intellectual and political elite. While dismantling the federal state, the new governments encouraged a revival of national political identities by promoting interest in national history and culture. State-controlled media

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also adopted ethnic/cultural stereotyping (Proši´c-Dvorni´c 2000, p. 321). Memories of past conflicts were reactivated in order to construct seemingly insurmountable ethnic barriers. The idea that the collapse of communism enabled the “liberation” of private, national memories long suppressed under Tito must be regarded as highly dubious, not least because this was the way in which the new nationalist regimes themselves represented the situation (Jansen 2002). Thus, the reasons for the bloodshed should not be ascribed to “ancient hatreds” between various ethnic groups as suggested by a number of researchers (Cohen 1995; Anzulovi´c 1999), with causation of the war being more directly related to internal struggles for political power and economic gain, with the ethno-nationalist agenda having been artificially manipulated. According to Hayden (1996), extreme nationalism in the former Yugoslavia has not been a matter of imagining “primordial” communities, but rather of making existing heterogeneous ones unimaginable. In formal terms, he argues, the point has been to implement an essentialist definition of the nation and its state in regions where the intermingled population formed living disproof of its validity—the brutal negation of social reality in order to reconstruct it. Thus, it is this reconstruction that turns the imagination of community into a process that produces real victims (Hayden 1996). In the aftermath of the 1990s wars, all successor Yugoslav states suffered a delay in their transition to democracy and continued embracing and further institutionalising the ethno-nationalist category as the most important pattern for their national consolidation. Virtually all Yugoslav successor states chose the same pattern of memory politics, namely to embrace revisionist and anti-Yugoslav agendas. It was a triple-track process whereby all newly consolidated nation states (1) revived elements from their ancient histories in order to legitimise their distinctiveness and uniqueness from neighbouring nation-states, (2) revitalised their rightwing movements and (3) reframed the communist legacy and partisan struggle as oppressive. The emergent post-Yugoslav nation-states began almost instantly to declare their nationhood by occupying central public spaces and erecting monuments, promoting new national holidays and performing new commemorative practices. The deconstruction of the Yugoslav identity, ideology and legacy was omnipresent in all former Yugoslav states but was most extensive in Croatia and North Macedonia. During and after the wars of the 1990s, hundreds of Second World War monuments and memorial sites were destroyed and defaced. For example, the Alliance of

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Anti-Fascist Fighters of Croatia recorded 2964 monuments and memorial sites which were either “demolished or desecrated and removed” between 1990 and 2000 (Banjeglav 2012, p. 100). The replacement of the deconstructed Yugoslav legacy by newly nationalist sentiments was promoted by restoration of the legacies of right-wing nationalist movements, first and foremost the cˇetnik and ustaša movements. The legacies of these previously denigrated and vilified movements now impacted not only memory agendas but also nationhood policies in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia. These trends started at the beginning of the 1990s when memories of past atrocities started to emerge as part of Serbian and Croatian nationalist ideologies. The transition of this particular memory discourse from the intellectual domain into the arena of public politics together with the symbolic revival of genocide led to a “manipulation of symbols with polarizing emotional content” (Denich 1994, p. 369), an element of what I describe as “memory abuse” (McConnell 2019). While during the 1990s wars, memories of ustaša or cˇetnik movements, respectively Croatian and Serbian paramilitary collaborators with the fascist Axis powers during the Second World War, had been used to mobilise and recruit of fighters, after the wars those legacies were as least partially revitalised by Serbian and Croatian governments (see Ðureinovi´c in this volume). The most striking examples of such revisionism, where the ultranationalist movements were revived and officially supported are to be found in both Bleiburg, Austria, where partisans liquidated the political leadership of the ustaša regime along with thousands of soldiers and civilians during Second World War, and in Ravna Gora, Serbia, where Draža Mihailovi´c formed the cˇetnik resistance movement. While commemorations took place from the beginning of the 1990s in Bleiburg, from 2004 Croatian official representatives not only participated in these commemorations but the state also funded both the commemorations and the development of the memorial site (Banjeglav 2012). The ongoing tensions between the commemoration of Croatia’s history of fascism in the Second World War and the normative expectations of “Europeanising” Croatian memory politics since its accession to the EU will be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter.

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Croatian Memory Politics, “Anti-totalitarianism” and the Erasure of Yugoslavia The Europeanisation process as it has played out in the context of Croatian memory politics has provided Croatia leverage to reframe its national narratives in ways that are not only profitable to the powers in Brussels, but also to those in Zagreb who demand a singular, coherent vision of the state. Among the primary elements of contemporary Croatian cultural memory are the celebration of independence and praising of the defenders (“branitelji”), who fought for the “liberation of Croatia” from “Greater Serbian aggression” in the Homeland War (Sabor 2000), and the eradication of all things Yugoslav from the modern image of the Croatian state in the name of “anti-totalitarianism”. The most controversial element of Croatia’s accession process was the demanded handover of various Croatian military officials—that is, the “defenders”—to the ICTY to face criminal prosecution for crimes committed against the Serb civilian population and in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1990s conflict. However, the number of local, regional and national associations of defenders and their families exploded in the immediate aftermath of the conflict; their aims included moral, humanitarian and medical support, among others, but the overarching ambitions of these groups were political, namely in demanding rights for those who fought to defend Croatia’s independence (Fisher 2003, p. 72). Protests throughout the 2000s, even during periods of rule by the nationalist, conservative Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, HDZ), were publicly supported, as many involved the arrest and handover of Generals Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markaˇc, the chief planners of 1995’s Operations Storm and Flash, to the ICTY. Upon Gotovina’s subsequent arrest in the Canary Islands in 2005, initial guilty verdict in 2011 and sentencing to twenty-four years in prison, Croatian veterans mobilised to clear his name and to venerate him as a saviour of the fledgling Croatian state. When acquitted and released the following year, Gotovina received a hero’s welcome in Zagreb, not unlike the reception granted to radical Serbian politician Vojislav Šešelj upon his return to Belgrade on temporary medical release from the United Nations Detention Unit of Scheveningen prison in 2014. I still recall “Gotovina – Heroj [Hero]” posters depicting the general in full military uniform while travelling along the Adriatic coast from Zadar to Split in May 2013. Croatia’s conformity with the EU’s formal conditions for accession represent a superficial act

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of “dressing up”, as the celebratory welcome of disgraced military and political figures shows. Fisher (2003, p. 77) notes that, “in its discourse, HDZ representatives presented the veterans as national heroes, and the ruling party tried to halt discussion of war crimes committed by Croatian soldiers in the apparent belief that questioning the sanctity of Croatia’s war for independence and the dignity of its defenders would threaten its own political monopoly”. Acknowledging war crimes committed by ethnic Croats throughout the Homeland War and in the concurrent wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina, such as the destruction of the Old Bridge in Mostar, the killing of 120 Serb civilians in Gospi´c in 1991, or the operations of concentration camps like Dretelj in Herzegovina, invited death threats and further protest from groups associated with the defenders. To open a discussion of war crimes was to call into question the sanctity of the defenders as Croatia’s lifeline in the war. In a letter to the public written by Croatian generals involved in the Homeland War, such criticisms were framed as an “assault on the army and […] ‘criminalisation’ of the Homeland War” (ibid., p. 86). As a result of the continuous tensions and bouts of appeasement of the defenders’ demands, a Ministry of Croatian Veterans was established in 2003. War veterans also now enjoy some of the highest pensions in Croatia, already in 1999 nearly five times higher than that of the ordinary labourer (ibid., p. 79). While political shifts in the 2000s between HDZ and SPD (Social Democratic Party of Croatia/Socijaldemokratska partija Hrvatske) rule effected gradual cuts to such welfare provisions, the narrative role of the defenders in Croatian society, if not the political, remains intact. Here, the EU’s formal demands only worked to exacerbate nationalist resentments and further tensions between Croatia and Brussels as the accession process continued. The installation of the defenders as a central pillar of Croatia’s modern vision of its past has come at the cost of over forty years of Yugoslav history, which conservative forces now seek to erase or deny. Doing so advances nationalist narratives, as noted above including those that brush aside the historical role of fascism in Croatian independence, that create contradictions in the “anti-totalitarian” framework recent governments have adopted to appeal to European policymakers. To a great degree, the removal of Yugoslavia from the retelling of Croatia’s past enhances the narrative of Croatia’s “millennial dream” of an independent state, a constituent element of President Franjo Tud-man’s ideology in the 1990s. Croatian history is often traced to the establishment of the first Kingdom

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of Croatia under Tomislav I in 925 CE and further to the “White Croats” (“Beli Hrvati”), a Slavic tribe that migrated from Central Europe into what is now northern Croatia several centuries earlier. Despite the rule of Croatian territory moving between the Hungarians, Venetians, Austrians, Ottomans, the Serbian Karad-ord-evi´c dynasty, puppets of the Third Reich, and Tito’s communist forces through to independence in 1991, this narrative insists on the continuity of a united Croatian state. Croatia’s experience as a Yugoslav republic differs from that of many other Central or Eastern European states, as the Tito-Stalin split of 1948 and Yugoslavia’s dismissal from Cominform1 provided the country greater leeway in positioning itself as a space both between East and West and as a centre of the Non-Aligned Movement. Croatia’s tourism industry benefitted heavily from the lack of visa requirements for visitors to Yugoslavia, and along with Slovenia and Vojvodina, Croatia qualified as a “More Developed Region (MDR)” within Yugoslavia (Milanovi´c 1985). Yugoslav citizens had greater freedoms to travel and work abroad, with many participating in the Gastarbeiter programmes in Germany and Austria in the 1960s and 1970s (partly due to economic conditions in post-war Yugoslavia), and on the whole enjoyed a greater standard of living than citizens of the Warsaw Pact countries. Tito’s Yugoslavia, however, had little tolerance for nationalist sentiments, which challenged the central bratstvo i jedinstvo ideal promoted since the end of the Second World War. Nationalist agitators, and after 1948 Stalinists, were often imprisoned and served sentences in the labour camps on barren islands in the Adriatic, including the infamous “Naked Island” (Goli otok), near the Croatian island of Rab. Nationalism was treated as a form of “chauvinism” (Allcock 1989), and instances of attempted national uprisings, generally in the form of demands for greater autonomy as in Croatia and Kosovo, were repressed. The Croatian Spring movement, known locally as Masovni pokret (MASPOK)—Mass Movement, was among the most important events in post-war Yugoslav history, with protestors demanding the recognition of the Croatian language as distinct, greater civil rights and the right to remember national histories, among others. Though mass arrests in the early 1970s, including that of Franjo Tud-man, put an end to 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.

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the movement, the calls for greater autonomy ultimately were recognised in the revised 1974 federal constitution. The repression of the Croatian Spring and of Croatian national identity more widely during the Yugoslav period is framed today as a form of totalitarianism, and several conservative politicians have attempted to force equivalence between Yugoslav communism and fascist rule by the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) and the ustaša paramilitaries in the 1940s. New monuments across Croatia have been built to commemorate “victims of communism”, often in reference to NDH soldiers and their families killed by partisans in Bleiburg in May 1945 (HRT 2011; Rogoz-Šola 2009). During the 2016 commemoration in Knin of Operation Storm, which brought about the end of the Croatian War of Independence and remains a point of mnemonic contention between Serbia and Croatia, Ivica Glavota, a representative of the Defenders of the Homeland War, noted, “… we soldiers are anti-fascist contemporaries opposed to Greater Fascism, but we are certainly not members of the totalitarian communist regime condemned in contemporary Europe together with all other totalitarian ideologies and systems” (FRAMNAT 2016). Such commemorations on the one hand conform to the wider European narrative of anti-totalitarianism and the necessity of remembering mass crimes committed during the Second World War, but on the other hand they either passively or actively frame fascists and fascist sympathisers as the ultimate victims of the war. By engaging in the performative nature of European memory politics, Croatian leaders in recent years have enabled a revision of the Yugoslav past as a totalitarian one, overlooking the legacy of anti-fascism on which the partisan movement and ultimately Tito’s Yugoslav state was founded (Cipek 2017; Radoni´c 2010). This “anti-antifascism” (Kulji´c 2002), if unintentional, is a result of Croatian memory politics targeting a past in which Croatian national identity was undermined, and if intentional, it ultimately contradicts the European norm of anti-totalitarianism (Radoni´c 2013). Indeed, the last “independent” Croatian state to exist prior to Croatia’s declaration of independence from the SFRJ in 1991 was the NDH, a state premised on an anti-Serb and anti-Semitic ideology (Duli´c 2006).

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Memory Politics and Europeanisation These elements of Croatia’s transition away from the Yugoslav past towards a uniquely Croatian future highlight the contested nature of transition across time and space. The period of Europeanisation and harmonising soft memory laws in Croatia with norms determined at a supra-national level has given rise to fervent reconstruction and reframing of the Croatian collective conscience. The use of the European framework of memory at the national level represents a form of “downloading” values and memory content from a supranational, collective conscience, “as a means of aligning and confirming their EU values, and thus European identities” (Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018, p. 384). If the Balkans is perceived as the ultimate “Other” in the European memory sphere (Todorova 1994; Ðeri´c 2008), then Croatia’s gradual erasure of its Yugoslav past, through the destruction, repurposing or construction of monuments, museums and other memorial sites is an act of affirmation of its European identity (Radoni´c 2010). Conversely, as a new EU member state, Croatia may now “upload” its own memories to the mainstream European narrative (Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018, p. 384), in doing so challenging Serbia as a candidate country to accept its version of the history of 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, which will be discussed more closely below. Croatia, however, is not alone in transforming its memory politics to align with European expectations in ways that are merely performative but brush aside culpability in its more sinister past. Slovenia, an EU member state since the 2004 enlargement, has also adopted the European anti-totalitarian narrative, which has manifested in the construction of a monument to “Victims of All Wars” in the centre of Ljubljana, which, while depoliticising the deaths of those who died in the various wars of the twentieth century, avoids a condemnation of domestic actors like the Slovene Home Guard (Slovensko domobranstvo), who collaborated with the Axis powers in the Second World War. In his speech at the dedication of the monument in July 2017, Slovenian President Borut Pahor noted, With the creation of its own state, the Slovenian people established itself as a nation. With the unveiling of this central national memorial to all victims of wars and war-related violence, it now establishes itself as a mature nation. […] This memorial […] invites all of us, all Slovenian men and women, to pacification and reconciliation. (Pahor 2017)

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Serbia, too, dedicated a monument “to the victims of the wars and the defenders of the fatherland from 1990-1999” on Savski trg (Sava Square) outside the former central railway station of Belgrade in 2012, after a decade-long debate on the construction of a memorial to one of the most tumultuous periods in Serbia’s recent past. David (2014) notes the contested nature of the monument and how various groups, including survivors, victims’ families, veterans, local and national politicians vied to implement their views on the events of the 1990s as manifested in what ultimately became a rather lacklustre and neutered memorial space. The superficially reconciliatory nature of this art of commemoration belies the malleability of memory in the hands of “memory entrepreneurs” who present their memories as truth (Pollak 1993, p. 30). Jan Assmann has described the “reconstructivity” of cultural memory (Assmann and Hölscher 1988, p. 13), that is those shared memories common to a defined group, whether delineated by language, religion, nation or other. This “reconstructivity” provides those with the ability to form the content of a cultural (national), or further, collective (European), memory room to manipulate the meaning and relevance of a particular person, place or event commemorated (McConnell 2019). Thus, the twisting of the European anti-totalitarian narrative not only allows states like Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia to conform to the European memory framework of remembrance established by member states of the European Union, but also to reframe it in a way that supports nationalist ambitions at home. Here, power asymmetries between established and candidate member states and the East-West divide (not to say that post-Warsaw Pact and post-Yugoslav memory politics greatly overlap) come into play. David describes this phenomenon as a transaction located “in the power gap between local and political forces” (2017, p. 74), wherein Croatia (and, in related contexts, Serbia) treats its “memory content as a trade currency”, something that can be exchanged for personal or political gain. Several Croatian politicians, among them most notably former Minister of Culture Zlatko Hasanbegovi´c and current Mayor of Zagreb Milan Bandi´c, have undertaken the initiative to eradicate references to Tito throughout the country, and in 2017 successfully renamed one of Zagreb’s main squares, Marshall Tito Square (Trg maršala Tita), to the Republic of Croatia Square (Trg republike Hrvatske). In Karlovac, too, the square named in honour of Tito was renamed to the Square of Croatian Defenders, in line with the predominant narrative of the liberation of Croatia in the Homeland War by the Croatian defenders (branitelji) (Mileki´c 2017).

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Transitional societies have to reinvent their national identities and often simultaneously to (re)position themselves in international arenas (Volˇciˇc 2005). This is often achieved through memory politics and the revision of the past, as this case study of Croatia’s relationship with its troubled history shows. Transitions, whether we are talking about post-war, post-socialist, post-dictatorship or other transitory stages, are described as times of instability, ambiguity and crisis when animosities become particularly strained and marked by increasing degrees of intolerance (Proši´c-Dvorni´c 2000). Further, transition is characterised by a constant development of simultaneous processes taking place at different speeds, in different intensities and along different pathways. Although it could be argued that all societies are in a constant state of flux with technological or cultural stasis being almost impossible to achieve, it is clear that some transitory eras are much more influential than others, irrespective of whether society is in a phase of expansion or contraction. For this reason, transitions are important theoretical frames as they encapsulate the dynamics, power relations and ambiguities of social processes. In order to understand the processes of meaning-making in transitional societies, such as Croatia in the aftermath of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the Croatian War of Independence (Homeland War) and its accession to the European Union in 2013, one must analyse how local values, practices and materialism, on one hand, and individuals, groups and organisations, on the other, produce new social categories. As noted above, the processes involved in Europeanisation emphasise the amalgamation of knowledge, attitudes and values (Karlsson 2010, p. 38). The meaning of this concept within the social sciences is both fashionable and contested. Börzel (1999, p. 574) defines it as “a process by which domestic policy areas become increasingly subject to European policy-making”. In line with other researchers (see Katzenstein 2006; Suboti´c 2011; Fink-Hafner 2007), I conceptualise Europeanisation using Radaelli’s definition of the term as the “processes of (a) construction, (b) diffusion, and (c) institutionalisation of formal and informal rules, procedures, policy paradigms, styles, ‘ways of doing things’, and shared beliefs and norms which are first defined and consolidated in the making of EU public policy and then incorporated in the logic of domestic discourse, identities, political structures, and public policies” (2003, p. 30). Europeanisation inevitably engenders an impact on national politics, domestic structures and local attitudes with these becoming an intrinsic part of

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the process. The European Union has been the most powerful political and economic agent in the post-socialist Balkans, Europe’s most varied political landscape. Through linking mechanisms of transitional justice to the EU accession process by imposing cooperation with the ICTY as a precondition for negotiations, Europeanisation is this particular form is enacted at a point of political transition from violence and repression to societal stability, and it is informed by a society’s desire to rebuild social trust, repair a fractured justice system, and build a democratic system of governance. For this purpose, memorialisation is meant to honour those who died during conflict or other atrocities, to examine the past, to address contemporary issues and show respect to victims, to prevent denial and help societies move forward. Thus, adjusting values and ideologies by changing the image of the past is an important part of the demands of the Europeanisation process. But Europeanisation also has its price. According to its 1993 Copenhagen policy, the EU is supposed to educate, discipline and punish while offering EU membership as the prize. In other words, the European Union’s superiority is built into this process and as being at the top of the hierarchical pyramid, the European Union dictates the conditions, tempo and the changing rules of the “game”.2 In reality, even when goals within the Europeanisation process were finally achieved, Europeanisation itself is not a finite process and can be reversed, in some cases quite easily. For example, all but three member states from “old” Europe immediately imposed labour restrictions on the free circulation of citizens of “new” Europe, creating unequal European citizenship.3 Thus, the European Union developed varied approaches to different countries: disciplining and punishing (Romania and Bulgaria), bilaterally negotiating membership (Croatia and Montenegro), punishing and rewarding (Serbia and Albania), managing (Bosnia-Herzegovina), governing (Kosovo) and finally, ignoring (North Macedonia’s accession talks were blocked in the name of its ongoing dispute with Greece) (Horvat and Štiks 2012). As this shows, demands for dealing with the past, together with other political, social and economic requests and conditions, place enormous 2 My quotation marks. 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.

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pressure on candidates and potential candidates and currently play a central role in the process of memory construction.

Ignoring Europe: Mnemonic Backsliding in Croatia Since EU Accession The rejection of Europe’s power over memory in Croatia by conservative actors in politics and society has become increasingly evident through post-accession commemorative practices, mostly stemming from nationalist narratives undermining the memory of the Homeland War. The gradual removal of all things Yugoslav from the Croatian retelling of its past highlights the power of partial remembrance and the performativity of transnational memory-making. Here, I analyse Croatian deviation from the European memory framework after its 2013 accession to the European Union and how the use of nominally European narratives has instead reinforced divisive, nationalist interpretations of the past. In the years leading up to and following its EU accession, Croatia has made efforts to conform to the European framework of Holocaust remembrance, joining the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2005, and, as illuminated above, celebrating the defeat of totalitarianism in Europe. However, conservative forces in Croatia, who have been in power for the greatest part since the first multiparty elections in 1990, have used the “European memory framework” in a way to advance their own narratives, which have gained wide currency since the end of the Homeland War in 1995 (see also Zaremba, Obajdin and Golusin in this volume). In many ways, the narratives that dominate are highly masculine, defender-centric and exclude the voices of women, victims and minorities—most notably Serbs. This begs the question, then: is the seemingly undemocratic nature of memory in Croatia inherently European? Or, how can Croatia both conform to and ignore the European standardisation of memory simultaneously? The primacy of the defenders (branitelji) in the post-war Croatian memory landscape is visible in the monuments and museums that recall the history of Croatia since 1991. Of 614 monuments documented in field visits conducted between May 2017 and September 2019, 136 were dedicated to the Homeland War, and of those 68 specifically to defenders

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and a further 23 to defenders and civilian victims.4 Ten recalled civilians only, and just one of the 130 monuments remembered elderly Serb villagers who died in the aftermath of Operation Storm.5 Serbs are rather handled as “enemies”, “terrorists” or “aggressors”, the primary descriptors used in a large museum exhibition on the Homeland War at the Imperial Fortress above Dubrovnik, reflecting the narrative established by the Croatian Sabor in the 2000 Declaration on the Homeland War and the 2006 Declaration on Operation Storm (Sabor 2000, 2006). Both statements claim the war as one of legitimate defence against “Greater Serbian aggression”, which, while reflecting the underlying ambitions of some Serb paramilitary groups active in the wars of the 1990s, brushes aside more nuanced portrayals of Serbs who lived in Croatia prior to the outbreak of conflict. The mnemonic tensions that exist between Serbia and Croatia (and more conservative Serbs and Croats) can be traced to the Second World War, driven primarily by the mass murder of Serb civilians by the ustaša paramilitaries and in NDH-run concentration camps in Croatia, BosniaHerzegovina and Serbia. The most notorious of these camps, Jasenovac, saw the murder of an untold number of Serbs, Jews, Roma and opponents of the NDH regime, the final tally of victims a source of conflict through present day. Croatian estimates tend to fall below 100,000 victims of the NDH regime, the vast majority among them Serbs, then equally Jews and Roma, followed by political dissidents of Croat or Muslim (Bosniak) background (Ciliga 1998). Serbian historians, however, have claimed that over one million individuals were murdered in Jasenovac and its sub-camps (Tomasevich 2001, pp. 725–726). The first president of post-Yugoslav 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 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.

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Croatia, Franjo Tud-man, himself a controversial historian, claimed an estimate of only 30,000–60,000 victims, including Serbs, Jews and Roma, further stoking the problematic relationship of Serbia and Croatia with their shared tragic past (Kolstø 2011, Tud-man 1989).6 Today, three commemorations mark the suffering that occurred in Jasenovac—one hosted by the Croatian government, one by the Serb National Council and anti-fascist organisations in Croatia, and one by the Jewish community in Croatia and Serbia. The latter two have emerged from a boycott of government-run events, which in recent years has funded research that challenges the historical understanding of Jasenovac as an NDH camp, instead seeking “evidence” of the camp’s continued operation by the Yugoslav government as a prison after the war, a fact that is not supported by contemporary research (Mileki´c 2018; Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018, p. 390). Again, this pattern of relativising Croatia’s tumultuous past by the Croatian government—headed once more by the Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, founded by Tud-man in 1989—fits the attempted “national reconciliation” narrative predominant in the 1990s that sought to rationalise the NDH/ustaša regime and demonise the Yugoslav partisans , the most successful resistance force in Europe during the Second World War. Instead of reconciling, however, the government’s support of counterfactual research in order to legitimise its own nationalist narrative contradicts the European standard of post-nationalism while simultaneously conforming to a wider condemnation of the communist era common in Central and Eastern European Union member states (Radoni´c 2014). The antagonism of Serbs in Croatia by the Croatian government perpetuates divisions that in the European Union are actively rebuked. However, Croatia, as an EU member state, now holds disproportionate leverage in Serbia’s accession negotiations and has been able to “upload” its version of the past to the European memory policymaking process, much as Slovenia had in forcing concessions from Croatia prior to its own accession in 2013.

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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A further problem that emerges in the contemporary Croatian commemorative process, particularly in memorial events held in remembrance of 1995s Operation Storm in Knin and the 1991 Siege of Vukovar, through the elevation of the defender narrative, is the acceptance and promotion of symbols adopted in the course of the Homeland War that recall imagery and slogans from the NDH. These include the chant “Ready for the Homeland” (“Za dom spremni”), and the white-andred chequerboard featuring a white square in the top-left. Both symbols featured predominantly on the insignia of the Croatian Defence Forces (HOS), a right-wing paramilitary that operated from 1991 to 1992 before merging into the fledgling Croatian Army, and can be seen at the two largest annual commemorations of the Homeland War in Knin and Vukovar. “HOS” was also the acronym of the post-1944 Croatian Armed Forces that existed during NDH rule, its revival during the Homeland War inviting continued controversy over the modern state’s relationship to its fascist past. In 2016, a memorial plaque featuring the HOS insignia was installed near a kindergarten in the town of Jasenovac, sparking immediate controversy among the Serb and Jewish communities (Mileki´c 2016). Though ultimately removed to the neighbouring city of Novska, the installation of the plaque and other instances where the “Za dom spremni” chant has been used, namely in football matches (Brentin 2016) and at the 2015 Knin commemoration of Operation Storm, set off a debate on the persistence of fascist symbols in Croatia. This phenomenon has been described as “tolerance of otherwise unconstitutional practices” by constitutional lawyer Sanja Bari´c (HINA 2018), a conclusion reached by the government’s “Council for Dealing with Consequences of the Rule of Non-Democratic Regimes”, established in response to the controversial plaque at Jasenovac. The Council’s work ended in February 2018, releasing a 29-page report on the constitutional limits (bans or tolerances) of various symbols of the Yugoslav monarchy, NDH and SFRJ (Kusi´c 2018). To date, no declaration has been made in the European Parliament or other major EU bodies that challenge the ongoing backsliding of memory politics in Croatia. By ignoring the ideals of the European project, Croatia and its “memory entrepreneurs” (Jelin 2003; Pollak 1993)—actors like Zlatko Hasanbegovi´c, Milan Bandi´c or Franjo Tud-man—have been free to “hijack”, in the words of Jelena Suboti´c (2009), the process of coming to terms with the country’s tumultuous past, whether in the judicial

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or legislative processes or in their roles in developing the visual culture of remembrance in post-war Croatia (Pavlakovi´c 2008, 2010). Thus, a performative duality emerges in which memory is made palatable for international display but ultimately satisfies nationalist narratives in ways that remain hidden from the international community, as the troubled balancing act of the commemoration(s) of the atrocities at Jasenovac and the remembrance politics around the Homeland War has shown.

Conclusion Does Europeanisation of memory politics strictly mean de-nationalising memory? In the case of Croatia, the answer is no. Any quasi-permanent changes in Croatia’s mnemonic landscape have come as a result of “dressing up” to appease the powerholders of the European memory project, but domestic applications of European memory norms have been selective and tactical. This has been demonstrated most clearly in recent attempts to relativise the fascist past in places where its consequences were most damaging—Jasenovac and Bleiburg. As well, government officials’ denial or reluctance to acknowledge crimes committed by Croatian forces during the 1991–1995 Homeland War, an event within the living memory of current EU policymakers, highlights the problematic relationship the Croatian state has with coming to terms with the past. Instead, conservative governments have adapted the Europeanisation of Croatian memory in ways that perpetuate nationalist and anti-reconciliatory narratives. In this chapter, I have argued that the Europeanisation process, as it has played out in Croatia, has been more superficial and performative than fundamentally progressive and transformative, and that despite external pressures to conform to standards of remembrance agreed upon in Brussels, these have been resisted at the domestic level by influential actors and institutions who have sought to create or revitalise nationalist narratives of the Croatian past. Beyond the many and varied contributions to this volume, further research should address the idiosyncrasies of the Croatian and other post-Yugoslav mnemonic communities as distinct from wider patterns of post-communist memory. This is particularly important given Yugoslavia’s status as a non-aligned state and that tensions that emerged and persisted during the Yugoslav era continue to play an influential role in the gradual integration of the Balkan periphery into the mainstream European memory landscape.

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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 Miloševi´c and Tamara Trošt for their insightful comments throughout the writing process.

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Pahor, B. (2017). Address by the President of the Republic of Slovenia Borut Pahor at the Ceremony Marking the Opening of the Monument to All Victims of Wars and War-Related Victims. http://www.up-rs.si/up-rs/ uprs-eng.nsf/pages/6D1CFA8DC4B8E89DC125815D00499AA9?OpenDo cument. Accessed 14 December 2018. Pavlakovi´c, V. (2008). Better the Grave than a Slave: Croatia and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. In S. Ramet, et al. (Eds.), Croatia Since Independence: War, Society, Politics, Foreign Relations (pp. 447–478). Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag. Pavlakovi´c, V. (2010). Croatia, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and General Gotovina as a Political Symbol. Europe-Asia Studies, 62(10), 1707–1740. Pavlakovi´c, V., Brentin, D., & Paukovi´c, D. (2018). The Controversial Commemoration: Transnational Approaches to Remembering Bleiburg. Croatian Political Science Review, 55(2), 7–32. Petrovi´c, E. (2000). Ethnonationalism and the Dissolution of Yugoslavia. In Y. Halpern & D. Kideckel (Eds.), Neighbors at War: Anthropological Perspectives on Yugoslav Ethnicity, Culture and History (pp. 164–176). University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Pollak, M. (1993). Une identité blessée: Études de sociologie et d’histoire. Paris: Editions Métailié. Proši´c-Dvorni´c, M. (2000). Serbia—The Inside Story. In Y. Halpern and D. Kideckel (Eds.), Neighbors at War: Anthropological Perspectives on Yugoslav Ethnicity, Culture and History (pp. 317–338). University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Radaelli, C. (2003). The Europeanization of Public Policy. In K. Featherstone & C. Radaelli (Eds.), The Politics of Europeanization (pp. 27–56). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Radoni´c, L. (2010). Krieg um die Erinnerung: Kroatische Vergangenheitspolitik zwischen Revisionismus und europäischen Standards. Frankfurt am Main: Campus-Verlag. Radoni´c, L. (2013). Transformation of Memory in Croatia: Removing Yugoslav Anti-fascism. In E. Langenbacher, et al. (Eds.), Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe (pp. 166–179). New York: Berghahn. Radoni´c, L. (2014). Slovak and Croatian Invocation of Europe: The Museum of the Slovak National Uprising and the Jasenovac Memorial Museum. Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, 42(3), 489–507. Rogoz-Šola, S. (2009, May 19). Otkriven spomenik žrtvama komunizma u d-akovaˇckoj župi Svih svetih – „Glava koja tone“ . Portal hrvatskog kulturnog vije´ca. http://www.hkv.hr/reportae/ostali-autori/4551-otkrivenspomenik-rtvama-komunizma-u-akovakoj-upi-svih-svetih–glava-koja-tone. html. Accessed 13 December 2018.

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Sabor. (2000). Deklaracija o Domovinskom ratu. Narodne novine. 102/2000. https://narodne-novine.nn.hr/clanci/sluzbeni/2000_10_102_1987.html. Accessed 16 December 2018. Sabor. (2006). Deklaracija o Oluji. Narodne novine. 76/2006. https:// narodne-novine.nn.hr/clanci/sluzbeni/2006_07_76_1787.html. Accessed 10 December 2018. Suboti´c, J. (2009). Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Suboti´c, J. (2011). Europe Is a State of Mind: Identity and Europeanization in the Balkans. International Studies Quarterly, 55, 309–330. Todorova, M. (1994). The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention. Slavic Review, 53(2), 453–482. Tomasevich, J. (2001). War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tud-man, F. (1989). Bespu´ca povijesne zbiljnosti (Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy). Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Matice hrvatske. Volˇciˇc, Z. (2005). The Notion of the “West”. European Journal in Cultural Studies, 8, 155–175.

CHAPTER 4

European Union Guidelines to Reconciliation in Mostar: How to Remember? What to Forget? Aline Cateux

Abstract This chapter examines two distinct processes of the Europeanisation of memory in Mostar as well as their social consequences. While analysing different phases of the reconstruction of Mostar directly handled by the European Union, this chapter firstly examines how the imposition of the reconciliation frame led to the rearrangement of the history of the city and more polarisation around a formerly common heritage. Secondly, this piece examines how local non-governmental actors framed the Partisan cemetery of Mostar into a European narrative, fitting the expectations of the Declaration on European Conscience and Totalitarianism, and how this process led to an ideological wash-out of the main anti-fascist symbol of Mostar. Keywords Mostar · Reconciliation · Memory · Heritage · Bosnia-Herzegovina

A. Cateux (B) Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Prospective, IACCHOS, Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium © The Author(s) 2021 A. Miloševi´c and T. Trošt (eds.), Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4_4

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Introduction Mostar, the fifth largest city of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), is one of the most studied, observed and commented cities of the country since the 1992–1995 conflict. The city was left divided by the war, ethnonationalists and the international community (IC). Its world-famous Ottoman bridge, Stari Most (The Old Bridge), the symbol of Mostar, was destroyed by Croat armed forces on November 9, 1993. The images of Stari Most falling into the Neretva river were broadcasted worldwide. Pictures of the damaged bridge often illustrate covers of books on the conflict, and it has become a metaphor for war and hatred. The bridge was then turned into a symbol of reconciliation by the European Union administrating Mostar and some local actors during the reunification process of Mostar. The reopening of Stari Most in 2004 had almost the same attention its destruction had, as the ceremony was, as well, broadcasted worldwide. As Mirsada, a mostarian architect and urban planner who was part of the reconstruction team of Stari Most puts it, in an half amused, half annoyed tone: “It was the first time in history that a renovated architecture piece of heritage had this attention and that this kind of ceremony was broadcasted, and watched! The bridge had become this huge reconciliation symbol, an icon, by which we were totally overwhelmed. It was rebuilt, the city was stitched back together”.1 The capital of Herzegovina has thus been amassing nicknames, often reducing it to stereotypes and clichés. From the rearrangement of its past by numerous local actors and international scholars into a postcard city where people nonchalantly lived by the “emerald green waters” of the Neretva river to the “deeply ethnically divided city”, it seems the symbolic value of Mostar has been successively used for different purposes in the hands of different actors: ethno-nationalists, the international administration in BiH and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The primary role assigned to the city revolved around being a role model for the rest of the country. Mostar had to show the way of peace after the Washington Agreement was signed (1994), giving birth to the Croat-Muslim Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and giving the city its Interim Statute. The European Administration of Mostar (EUAM) managed the city until 1996. It designed the territorial division of the city, but also had the task of reunifying it. After this dense immediate post-war 1 Interview in Mostar, 26 June 2019.

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period, the Office of the High Representative2 (OHR) directly administrated the city, a unique case in BiH, until Paddy Ashdown3 imposed its administrative reunification in March 2004. Handled by successive European administrations, the reconstruction of the city became a political tool to rearrange the history of Mostar and design a city fitting into the aspirations of the EU at that time: stability, security and a liberal economy (Malas 2013). Reconciliation, at the core of EU’s stability credo became a motto, a condition for further funding for reconstruction, an obligation. To a large extent, academic analyses mirrored the language of the IC, and fostered reconciliation as a central question, revealing superficial if any serious fieldwork and funding priorities (Jansen 2013). Mostar was scrutinised almost exclusively through ethnic partition lens, which led to a rigid representation of the city and obscured many of its subtleties and complexities (Djurasovi´c 2019). This led to the design of Mostar’s most enduring nickname: “The Special Case City”: a city where things do not seem to have a chance to change. Early academic works focused on urban destruction and the reconstruction of the city, institutions and infrastructures (Bing 2001; Bollens 2007; Calame and Paši´c 2009; Makaš 2007). It is only with the apparition of extensive fieldwork and meticulous ethnographies that the rendition of the city gained in depth: Mostarians were finally taken into consideration in academic attempts to explain Mostar. Taken into account, personal trajectories and memories helped inform many successive studies: Monika Palmberger (2013) shed light on how Mostarians navigate their city and its complex territorialisation, the work of Azra Hromadži´c (2013, 2015), articulated the many limits and asperities of ethnic citizenship, while Giulia Carabelli (2018) evidenced desires for social change in a city almost exclusively presented as apathetic. In other words, it is only when research detached itself from institutions and the IC, and made room for local memories and representations, that the reconciliation obsession turned obsolete, as it was made clear it had no root in Mostar’s residents preoccupation or vocabulary. This chapter analyses the process of Europeanisation of memory in Mostar on two different levels: top-down processes implemented from

2 Office of the High Representative in charge of the application of the civil chapters of the Dayton Peace Agreement. 3 Paddy Ashdown: High Representative in BiH from 2002 till 2006.

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the outside, and the local appropriation of the European Memory Framework (Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018) by local actors. First, I provide some background on the war and immediate post-war period in Mostar, arguing that the foundations for the process of the Europeanisation of memory were set early on. A wide variety of actors aided to solidify these foundations by adhering to the official imposed narrative of the war in the capital of Herzegovina. Secondly, I look at the top-down processes that led to the establishment of reconciliation as a relevant priority for Mostar by scrutinising the instrumentalisation of its best known symbol: Stari Most . Thirdly, I analyse how and why local actors adhere to the European Memory Framework and particularly the Declaration on European Conscience and Totalitarianism (European Parliament 2009) through the case of the last renovation of Partizansko Groblje (the Partisan Cemetery). This chapter draws on qualitative methodology. It relies on a combination of academic literature and documents analysis such as newspapers, flyers, social networks, an ethnographic research conducted in 2018 and 2019 during which I observed the use of space in Mostar in relation to the notions of interstices and everyday resistance and finally, two dozens of interviews conducted with Mostarians between 2016 and 2019 be it long time informants of my research or people met on various sites of my ethnography. All the names of informants have been anonymized.

Background: Mostar as “The Most Destroyed City in Bosnia and Herzegovina” The Two Wars on Mostar Mostar underwent two wars between 1992 and 1994. The 1992 conflict is generally treated, in the vast majority of academic works, as a preamble to what would be the real war, the war of 1993, even if the consequences of these two months of siege by the Yugoslav National Army (Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija or JNA) had already deeply crippled Mostar and emptied it of its Serb population.4 The first war started on April 3, 1992, when elements of the JNA started to shell the city after weeks of rising tensions in Herzegovina. 4 It is interesting to note when studying the war iconography of Mostar that a huge number of pictures used to illustrate the second war of 1993 are, in reality, images of the first war damage.

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Mostar was an important garrison town, the location of a crucial air base, and a railway link to Sarajevo (Bjelakovi´c and Strazzari 1999). For two months, the JNA hammered the city and severely damaged it. Various religious buildings, Saint Peter and Saint Paul Church, almost all of the mosques, part of the Old City’s Ottoman heritage were either destroyed or damaged. The infrastructure of the city was particularly targeted (Yarwood 1998): electric transformers, the dam on the Neretva. The industry surrounding the city was critically stricken and sometimes dismantled: SOKO, an aircraft factory and Aluminij, the aluminum combinate both biggest employers in Mostar, Hercegovina Auto and various firms like HEPOK (vineyards), Fabrika Duhana Mostar (tobacco and cigarettes), Žitopromet (cereals) were all shelled. When the JNA retreated in the beginning of June 1992, only one bridge was still standing: Stari Most , the symbol of Mostar. The entire Old City had been bombed, the bridge itself had suffered degradation but its broken arch was still over hanging the Neretva river. In June 1992, the first mass grave to be discovered in Bosnia and Herzegovina was located in Mostar’s North area after Vojislav Šešelj’s5 units had arrested and executed 114 Croat and Muslim inhabitants of the Zalik6 neighbourhood. Following this event, Serb citizens underwent violent repression, faced loss of their work, intimidation, detention and executions. In the end, the vast majority of the Serb population of Mostar left the city. After months of tensions building up between the Territorial Defense, Croatian Defence Forces (Hrvatske obrambene snage or HOS),7 The Croatian Defence Council, the regular croatian armed forces (Hrvatsko vije´ce obrane or HVO), the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Armija Bosne i Hercegovine or ARBiH), a conflict started in Central Bosnia between the ARBiH and the HVO and ultimately extended to Herzegovina where the second siege of Mostar started on the May 9, 1993. In the early morning of May 9, 1993, the HVO, already in command of the city since the summer 1992, launched the siege of the eastern

5 Vojislav Šešelj was the chief of the Radical Serb Party and war criminal accused of Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes. 6 Zalik is located at the North entrance of Mostar. 7 Croatian Defense Forces was the militia of the ultra-right croat “Party of Rights”. It

comprised Muslims, Croats, and foreign fighters. It was disbanded after the assassination of Blaž Kraljevi´c, its commandant, in August 1992.

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part of Mostar, mainly inhabited by a muslim population. An operation of systematic ethnic cleansing in the West part of Mostar inhabited by a majority of Croats started (Bjelakovi´c and Strazzari 1999). The non-Croat population was arrested, deported, executed or imprisoned in concentration camps managed by HVO and HOS, and which operated around Mostar, mostly in Western Herzegovina. In August 1993, the Croat Republic of Herceg-Bosna8 was proclaimed, and Mostar became its capital city. The frontline in Mostar was frozen for 10 months and divided the city into two parts: the eastern part and the western part of Mostar. In March 1994, a ceasefire was negotiated in Washington, which led to the end of the fighting between the ARBiH and HVO on the territory of BiH and the creation of the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (FBiH). Mostar was assessed as the city that had suffered the highest level of destruction during the conflict by the United Nations Development Programme (Yarwood 1998). In the Eastern part of the city, housing, infrastructure and heritage were in ruins, representing four-fifths of the heavy damages as measured by repair costs (Yarwood 1998). In the West, the damages were a lot less significant (Yarwood 1998) and mostly the result of the 1992 siege by the JNA. Added to the material destruction, Mostar also suffered from a massive displacement of its population. A large part of the non-Croat population had been expelled to the Eastern side, which was also sheltering refugees coming from Eastern and Southern Herzegovina. In the Western part of Mostar, emptied flats and houses were given to refugees mainly coming from Northern Herzegovina and Central Bosnia (Rolland-Traina 2004). The city was an assembly of refugees and Internally Displaced Persons—“refugees in their own city” as many of them would call themselves. Immediately after the war, more than 50% of the population of Mostar was born somewhere else, new to the territory, with no common local landmarks with the Mostar born population. This change in the population of the city fed the so-called urban-rural cleavage that has largely been commented in academic literature (Rolland-Traina 2004). However, additionally, the attachment of the Mostar newcomers to Mostar’s local heritage of any kind was lesser than the attachment of the Mostar born population to it (Wollentz 2017). Unfortunately, this new cleavage remained unaccounted for until very recently (Wollentz 2017). 8 Unrecognised and illegal proto-state which aimed at linking all territories where the majority of the population was Croatian and then join the Republic of Croatia.

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The European Union Administration of Mostar Mostar was the exclusive affair of the European Union, the city was dealt with directly by the EU in every post-war aspect possible: pacification, administration and what was going to become the central piece of the EU apparatus: the reconstruction. The mandate of the European Union Administration of Mostar (EUAM) was established by the Geneva Agreement in July 1994, a few months after the Washington Agreement had put the conflict between HVO and ARBiH to rest. The administrator of EUAM, Hans Koschnick9 became the supreme authority in Mostar (Yarwood 1998; Pagani 1996) and took over governance functions (Kappler 2012). The antagonistic dynamics of the EUAM mandate unfortunately set the tone of the EU action in Mostar: polarise by confirming the territorial division resulting from the war, while imposing reunification as the only possible horizon. The EU’s need for visibility, the focus on buildings and disinterest for processes and the need to spend donors’ money (Suri 2012) all combined and incarnated into the reconciliation stance, which was to be fully deployed through the reconstruction of Mostar and particularly the Old Bridge. The tasks of the EUAM as defined in the Memorandum of Understanding were immense: demilitarisation of the city, reinstallation of freedom of movement, return of refugees to their pre-war homes, organisation of local elections, reconstruction of the city and its reunification. The EUAM had to lead by example. Mostar was of huge importance to internationals who needed to promote the city as an “anchor of stability” (Greiff and Greiff 2014) in a country still at war when the EUAM took duty. From 1994, the focus in Mostar would henceforth be on fostering inter-ethnic relations (Greiff and Greiff 2014) by reconciling former warring parties. One of the many tasks of the EUAM was to finalise an administrative statute of the city which would allow elections to take place. EUAM had to formulate a strategy to reunify the city through the organisation of a united administration while crafting its territorial division (Bieber 2005). Mostar was divided into three zones, a Muslim municipality in the East of Mostar, a Croat municipality in the West of Mostar and in between

9 Former Mayor of Bremen.

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them, the Central Zone10 —destined to operate as the glue between the two sides of the city (Bollens 2007), but also as a buffer zone aiming at preventing inter-ethnic clashes. Divided along strict ethnic lines, Mostar became a “mosaic of ethnic enclaves” (Bieber 2005), giving total legitimacy to ethno-nationalist political parties ruling the city. The Central Zone was of particular importance in this plan as it was set to become a joint controlled space. EUAM put an immense effort into rebuilding infrastructure and housing. John Yarwood, the Director of Reconstruction for the EUAM, documented it and explained, among others, the efforts put together to set up a Joint Strategic Planning Team (Yarwood 1997) that would work on a coordinated strategy for the reconstruction of the city, gathering experts from both sides of Mostar. Progress was slow but existed. Unfortunately, as Yarwood explains (Yarwood 1997), the EU insisted it was not interested in recreating new urban management processes but building physical buildings. If the work of technicians, experts in reconstruction, demolition, infrastructure, seemed to progress, even slowly, the political process of dealing with territorial division and shared space was much more problematic and ultimately stumbled on the question of the Central Zone at the Rome Conference in February 1996. Local representatives of Mostar and of the EUAM being absent from the Conference,11 the question of the Central Zone was reopened by the HDZ dominated Croatian delegation, resulting in the International Community and the Bosnian government giving into its demands. The plan that EUAM had managed to craft was overridden, and Hans Koschnick quit his position of Administrator of the EUAM saying he couldn’t do his job. Croat nationalists had won this confrontation and would never sign another Agreement on Mostar.

10 Mostar was composed of 7 autonomous municipalities, 3 in the West, 3 in the East and the Central Zone, designated as neutral, which was destined to be jointly administrated by both sides of the city. 11 The participants of the Rome conference were state level participants: signatory countries of the Dayton Peace Agreement and an EU delegation.

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Top-Down Processes: Mostar as “a Model for the Future, Rather Than a Curse from the Past”12 After the end of the EUAM mandate, the OHR took over local governance in Mostar.13 The Interim Statute adopted in Rome in February 1996 allowed local elections to take place in June of the same year, the first elections in post-war BiH. These elections gave legitimacy to the administration of the city as designed by the EU. The political architecture of the city based on distribution of powers cemented the division (Bieber 2005), yet Mostarians were never consulted on the Statute of their city. The top-down logics piled up in Mostar: the design of the municipal administration but also the planning of the city and what was perceived as a priority or worth to be rebuilt (Grodach 2002; Malas 2013). As Mostar became a priority of the OHR mandate, the International Administration built its entire strategy for the reunification and the reconstruction of the city on the motto of “reconciliation”. It was clear that the reconstruction of Mostar—and more largely the reconstruction of Bosnia and Herzegovina—had to turn it into compatible territories with “EU values” (Kappler 2012). The EU chose its own interpretation of Mostar, of its history, and of its heritage, as a basis to the reconstruction process designed to turn Mostar into a stable, peaceful city dedicated to tourism. Articulated around multiculturalism and the ethnic mix of pre-war Mostar, the EU chose to interpret the symbol of the city, Stari Most , and to make of its rebuilding and reopening, the symbol of reconciliation and peace in the capital of Herzegovina. The residents of Mostar were never consulted regarding a possible common denomination they possibly shared and on which their future city could be rebuilt. At the turn of the years 2000s, Stari Grad (The Old City) became the focus point of the reconstruction almost seeming to be the solution to every problem encountered in post-war Mostar. The reconstruction of the historic core would restore not only tourism, revenues, jobs, but give back to the city the places of encounters that it lacked, and therefore achieve reconciliation. The rebuilding of Stari Most equalled the rebuilding of 12 Lord Ashdown conclusion to his television announcement of his decision to reunify Mostar. 13 This is the only example of OHR taking over the governance of a city in BiH.

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mostarian society (Ryan 2009). With Stari Most, the IC found the tool to shape a new memory of Mostar: what had to be remembered, how to remember it, but also what had to be forgotten (Malas 2013). Bridging, “the fashionable metaphor”, as John Yarwood (1998) calls it, would be the first step to a sustainable future as seen by the EU (Greiff and Greiff 2014). However, this Western narrative did not fit much in the local point of view nor history, as Stari Most , as many underlined, only bridges two parts of the same Muslim neighbourhood divided by Neretva. The process of rebuilding the historical core of Mostar was also not perceived as a local process but as a “foreigner’s thing”, with very few locals being employed on the building sites (Greiff and Greiff 2014). The “New Old Bridge”, as Mostarians named it, was taking shape in the Old City’s landscape, not bringing ease in the city. The rewriting of the history of Mostar, of its local representations and meaning, by defining Ottoman Heritage as what was worth being rebuilt (Grodach 2002), only accentuated polarisation and fed frustrations. This strategy was detrimental to other Mostarian heritage: Austro-Hungarian, socialist, industrial. Many in Mostar thought Stari Most was a Muslim site, not a shared one (Dodds 1998; Ryan 2009; Carabelli 2012), and that the historic core and tourism attached to it, now located in the Eastern part of the city, was going to benefit only one side. The EU strategy relied on incomplete representations of the local heritage. In 2003, Paddy Ashdown, the High Representative in BiH, designated the Mostar Commission in charge of formulating the definitive statute of the city, reforming it, and reunifying it as one municipality. The Commission was composed of local and international experts. It worked for months to generate the Statute of Mostar that would eventually abolish the six municipalities and the Central Zone and set a new unique administration for the city. After months of work, the Commission remained without an agreement, and Lord Ashdown decided to promulgate the Statute of the City of Mostar without the agreement of the local political parties and without any consultation of the Mostar citizens. In its television address to announce the reunification of Mostar, Ashdown stressed how much Mostar poisoned the politics of BiH and how the decision to reunify the city will become “the keystone for the bridge that will at last reunite this great city and give it a future” (Ashdown 2004). He further stated that as High Representative, he could “show the way” but that ultimately, it was only local politicians who could make the New Statute of Mostar work (Ashdown 2004). In 2004 Mostar was reunified

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by the new statute promulgated in March and symbolically by its “New Old Bridge” inaugurated in July of the same year. The frustration around the inauguration of Stari Most was very tangible in Mostar as Mostarians were forbidden to access the Bridge before politicians and dignitaries of the International Community. Quickly, jokes circulated among many Mostarians suggesting similarities between the surreal sight of Stari Most rebuilt, ready, empty, guarded by police who stopped anyone wanting to cross and the 1910 photographs of the visit of the Emperor Franz-Joseph which famously showed Stari Most covered with carpets so the Emperor wouldn’t slip on the Bridge. Many expressed anger in the fact that Mostarians wouldn’t be the first to set feet on their bridge and that the whole situation around the opening ceremony felt like being colonised again.14 In a huge contrast with the reality of the re-apparition of Stari Most in the Mostarian landscape, one can read on the UNESCO website: “With the renaissance of the Old Bridge and its surrounding, the symbolic power and meaning of the City of Mostar—as exceptional and universal symbol of coexistence of communities from diverse cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds—has been reinforced and strengthened, underlining the unlimited efforts of human solidarity for peace and powerful cooperation in the face of overwhelming catastrophes” (UNESCO 2004). Now fitting the EU standards developed since the beginning of EU administration of the city, Mostar was promoted as a stable city, reunified and ready for business, which was meant to be centred around tourism. In order to achieve this ideal Europeanised city, the EUAM and then the OHR bet on their own representations of Mostar and its past and rearranged the narrative around its main symbol, the Old Bridge. By doing so, the EU neglected many different factors that would stop their enterprise from being efficient. Firstly, the population shift since the war in Mostar: with more than 50% of its population now coming from other cities, Stari Most wasn’t everybody’s symbol in post-war Mostar. Secondly, solely thought as a sunny city devoted to tourism, the EU had neglected the strong industrial past of the city that expanded around its coal mine, its factories and its military academy and bases. It consequently erased from Mostar’s history its workers past instead of building on it and use it as an asset. The Austro-Hungarian, industrial and socialist heritage didn’t seem important

14 Personal observation, June–August 2004.

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enough to deserve attention either (Grodach 2002). The new Mostar designed to be “A model for the future, rather than a curse from the past” (Ashdown 2004) came to life amputated of a large part of its history.

Local Appropriation of the European Memory Framework: An Overlooked Heritage Mostar has a vast socialist and anti-fascist heritage spread all over its territory. It comprises various monuments, busts of National Heroes, plaques commemorating executions of partisans 15 and fountains. Although vastly damaged during the last war, this heritage was not included in the reconstruction process of the city. The choice of the EU to privilege Ottoman heritage highlighted one part of the history of the city but overshadowed others, among which was the socialist period. The main piece of this heritage is the iconic Partizansko Groblje (Partisans Cemetery), the masterpiece of Bogdan Bogdanovi´c. Before the war, “Partizansko” as Mostarians call it, was printed on many Mostar postcards (Lawler 2013) and was the second most visited place in the city after the Old Bridge. It is described as a space of socialisation, the destination of walks, picnics, gatherings, pilgrimage (Jouhanneau 2008; Cateux 2018). Very often, this is the first aspect that Mostarians will mention about Partizansko Groblje, before evoking its political function.16 When evoked by Mostarians I met in the cemetery,17 one quickly senses that the Cemetery gave prestige to the city and pride to its residents. After the last war, Partizansko Groblje found itself deep into the Western part of the city mainly inhabited by Croats. Inaugurated by Tito in 1965, Partizansko Groblje was classified as National Heritage of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2006. It is an example of the purest tradition of Yugoslav Socialist Monuments: celebrating the victory of the anti-fascist struggle, the promise of a better future—an embodiment of the “Brotherhood and Unity” narrative (Jaukovi´c 2014). It is also a testimony of the evolution that those monuments had in the 1960s as they tended to become park-monuments where people can

15 Communist and anti-fascist armed resistance movement led by Josip Broz Tito. 16 Interviews with visitors of the Cemetery and regular informants in Mostar 2016–

2019. 17 Ibid.

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gather, where schools can come to visit and where there is more room for commemoration (Kirn and Burghardt 2012). 816 partisans are buried on the five hectares surface of the cemetery, 614 of them being from the Mostar Battalion of the Partisans (Lawler 2013). However, since the 1990s wars the cemetery has been abandoned and vandalised, and its pre1990s meanings contested. The vegetation is invading its space along with trash. On numerous occasions, the site has been vandalised with graffiti glorifying Nazis, the Independent State of Croatia18 or insulting Tito. The tombstones have often been broken. The Cemetery has no gate that closes nor is it guarded. On its Southern side it borders with the Trimuša forest, has no wall. The commemoration of February 14, the anniversary of the Liberation of Mostar in 1945 by the partisans and organised by the Organisation of Anti-Fascists and Veterans of the National Liberation War (Udruženje antifašista i boraca narodno-oslobodilaˇckog rata or UABNOR), that usually takes place in Partizansko, has often been subjected to direct physical attacks by groups of young people throwing stones at the participants, or like in February 2014, setting the entrance of the cemetery on fire.19 In 2017, the Center for Peace and Multiethnic Cooperation (Centar za mir i multietniˇcku saradnju or CPMC), founded in 1997 by Safet Oruˇcevi´c,20 formed the “Council for the Support of the Renovation and Revitalization of the Partisan Monument” (Odbor za Podršku Obnovi Partizanskog Spomen). On CPMC’s website, one can read that the Center is in possession of an important archive of Mostar’s History. It also mentions that CPMC’s mission is to “prevent that the horrors that Mostar’s and Herzegovina’s citizens of all nations have gone through are forgotten and that the truth about the suffering of Mostar and Herzegovina be turned into unforgettable testimony and a warning for future 18 Nezavisna Država Hrvatska or NDH: Independent State of Croatia was selfproclaimed on a part of the territory of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941 after the invasion by the Axis Forces. It was an auxiliary fascist puppet state of the Nazi regime. Mostar was part of the NDH where the NDH regime installed the Office for Colonisation (“Zavod za kolonizaciju”) in charge of the relocation of Croatian displaced persons, as well as the distribution of agricultural land. 19 The author was present on site. 20 Safet Oruˇcevi´c was Mayor of Mostar from 1994 to 2001. He is now a businessman

and one of the biggest media owners in BiH. Oruˇcevi´c is a very controversial character in Mostar who said he retired from politics but is always very present on the local scene in various occasions.

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generations”.21 This Council fundraised a budget for renovation and proceeded to interventions on the National Monument. The vegetation was cut, graffiti erased, holes and cracks in the ground were filled with concrete, and the flag of BiH was hung on one of the downer walls of the monument. Partizansko Groblje was advertised as “renovated” and inaugurated on May 9, 2018, a symbolic date in Mostar: the Day of Victory over fascism, the Day of Europe, the date on which the second siege of Mostar started in 1993. The European dimension of the inauguration was central to the ceremony during which the European flag was projected on the biggest wall of the Cemetery while the “Ode to Joy”, the European Anthem was played. The Chief of the European Delegation in BiH gave a speech during which he stressed how this day was important in the post-war history of Mostar, a day spent celebrating values shared by Europeans. Overall, reactions to the work done on the monument and the ceremony itself were rather positive. The event was perceived as a return of the monument’s “former prestige” (“stari sjaj ”). However, many local residents were appalled by the link made with Europe and European values. Their main interrogation was “What does Europe have to do with Partizansko Groblje?”. Many stressed that the Committee that took over the renovation of the Cemetery had no legitimacy to do so, and no legal base to intervene on a National Monument. In addition, antifascist organisations of Mostar, who had been fighting since the war to preserve and renovate Partizansko, denounced these works on the monument citing many degradations, improper materials used in the so-called renovation, “that made more damage than anything else”(Klix.ba 2018) as the President of UABNOR stressed. The Ceremony itself was criticised by the Council of Anti-fascist organisations as well as by many Mostarians on social networks. As the main wall of the Monument was used as a screen to showcase logos of some NGOs part of this ceremony as well as donators, it was perceived as a lack of respect for the work of Bogdan Bogdanovi´c, the Monument, and the meaning of the Monument. Some Mostarians stressed on social media

21 “Zadatak Centra je sprijeˇciti da se zaboravi zlo kroz koje su prošli grad-ani Mostara i Hercegovine svih nacionalnosti, te da istina o stradanju Mostara i Hercegovine bude nezaboravno svjedoˇcanstvo i opomena budu´cim generacijama ove zemlje”. Translation by the author.

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that the EU delegation attended a ceremony celebrating an unlawful renovation. The event was badly received by Croatian politicians in Mostar. The Mayor of Mostar, Ljubo Bešli´c explained that they saw this renovation as a political manipulation, and insisted on the lack of transparency of the renovation process, since the Municipality had never been consulted (Deutsche Welle 2018). In the same article, two Croatian professors from the Mostar Croat University debated the following question: “To whom does anti-fascism belong in Mostar?”. On the one hand, Professor Slavo Kuki´c asked why Croats did not attend the February 14 commemoration marking the Liberation of Mostar in 1945. On the other hand, Professor Mile Lasi´c stressed how in the Bosnian public debate there are the “nonquestionable patriots” who are the Muslims, some Serbs and Croats who claim their love for BiH but how if “fascists” are discussed, it is implicit that they are Croats or Serbs who are systematically sent back to their actions during the Second World War and the last war. According to Lasi´c, this results in implying that there can’t be Croats or Serbs who are antifascists (Deutsche Welle 2018). In the following year, the Cemetery returned to its previous state: dirty, invaded by weeds; except for one aspect of its degradation: no graffiti reappeared on its walls. These graffiti, described for decades as contestation of anti-fascist values, Tito, the partisans and Yugoslavia, by a part of the Mostar Croat population, had not reappeared. While walking in the Cemetery with Ivan, a 50-year-old Mostarian born teacher and great connoisseur of Bogdanovi´c’s work, I asked him how come the walls had stayed intact. His explanation was that the graffiti were made by people who were paid to do it: football supporters, drug addicts, “little delinquents”—paid to vandalise the place and maintain it “as hostile as possible”.22 I think that there was a deal between those who said they renovated the cemetery and HDZ. Now it is all about European values. HDZ says they support these European values. And look what they did: they’re so good at social control … (he snapped his fingers) graffities stopped instantly. There is no other possible explanation than that the former degradations were ordered, not spontaneous.

22 Personal communication, 12 June 2019, Mostar.

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A further discussion about Partizansko Groblje and its current state informed me about another aspect linked to the absence of new graffiti. While talking about the “renovation” and how it resembled more a self-promotion action rather than a heritage-preservation, Tanja, a 40year-old Mostarian activist and cultural worker, told me: “The only thing that matters to me is that if there is no other new graffiti in Partizansko, it means that this monument is not a problem for anybody, that it doesn’t bother anybody to the point that they would come and degrade it”.23 These observations by Tanja and Ivan led me to the conclusion that the tensions around Partizansko are perceived as being forced rather than being genuine. The active degradation of the Cemetery is looked at as a strategy from one local political force, namely HDZ, rather than the expression of hostility from a part of the population that would actively participate in the degradation of the monument. There would rather be an indifference to Partizansko than hostility. People might not stand for the monument but would also not take part in its degradation. In 2019, the CPMC then took over the organisation of the Commemoration of February 14. The Ceremony gathered a political delegation from the Federation of BiH with its Prime Minister and the acting Representative of the Minister Council of BiH, representatives of the Jewish Community, of veterans’ organisations, former prisoners’ organisations,24 one religious leader25 and NATO. In a press statement (Centar za mir 2019), organisers stressed that the ceremony was not only dedicated to mostarian victims of Second World War, but to all the victims of barbarity. The statement also stressed that the ceremony was dedicated to all the innocent victims of the last war in BiH and in all the “exCommon State” (“širom bivše zajedniˇcke države”), indirectly referring to Yugoslavia. As one of my informants argued, it appeared that “some people are really ready to a lot of language acrobatics to not pronounce the word ‘Yugoslavia’”.26 The same statement also says that the antifascist fighters of 1945 had fought for multiethnic Mostar, “as it is the case of today” (Centar za mir 2019) and that during the last war, it was very well visible that fascism was not dead and was still alive in some

23 Personal communication, 22 June 2019, Mostar. 24 Prisoners of concentration camps in the Mostar area during the last war. 25 Radivoje Krulj, Orthodox Bishop of Mostar. 26 Fieldnotes, May, Mostar.

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groups. Through the statement that partisans had been fighting for a multicultural Mostar, there is an attempt to establish a link between the ARBiH fighting to defend Mostar against Croat armed forces during the last war and aiming at preserving the “multicultural tradition” of the city, and the partisans. Anti-fascism would then exclusively lay on the left bank of Neretva besieged by the HVO and defended by the ARBiH in 1993. Two days later, UABNOR organised a ceremony in the Partizansko Groblje in the frame of a larger event called “Dani Antifašizma” (Days of Anti-Fascism). Two thousand participants waving Yugoslav flags attended the ceremony in honour of the fallen anti-fascists who died in the defence of Mostar (Spagosmail 2019). The participants came from all the country and also from other ex-Yugoslav countries. When asked why he did not attend the ceremony on February 14, Sead Ðuli´c, the President of UABNOR, said that he did not wish to give legitimacy to “entrepreneurs of anti-fascism”, and manipulators who are only acting for themselves and chasing good grades from the IC. I discussed these two commemorations with Emir, a long time Mostarian informant of my research. He commented: Did you see they projected the European flag in Partizansko last May ? (…) And now, this ceremony… for all the victims of all the wars on February 14 …What is this? Do you know about this EU thing about the victims of Communism? Now, it puts what happened during NOB (Narodno oslobodilaˇcka borba or Struggle for the national liberation) on the same level than crimes committed by fascists during the Second World War. It is like saying partisans were the same as the Nazis” (…) So now local fascists can go on bragging about the “Yugoslav Communist terror”.27

The anti-totalitarian narrative of Europe’s past has become a central piece of the “EU memory framework”—the “collection of policies, resolutions and decisions by the European Parliament that reflect and guide collective moral and political attitudes towards the past” (Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018). The commemoration at Partizansko clearly shows how local actors are using anti-totalitarianism as a wash-out tool of a crucial date in the history of the city, as well as an opportunity to give a new meaning to Partizansko Groblje. It is an attempt to give it a new

27 Fieldnotes, 6 March 19, Mostar.

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“European” respectability, which would be emptied of traces of Communism and Socialism, and consequently would fit the conditions set by the EU Memory Framework. It is also a depoliticisation of the Monument, a trend deriving, among other things, from the Europeanisation of memory in Ex-Yugoslavia (Leboš 2019) and particularly from the Declaration on Totalitarianism (EP 2009). This flattens the differences between Yugoslavia and the communist countries, and erases the history of NonAlignment. Emir and Tanja largely commented on this aspect of “being put in the same bag as communist countries”28 and the erasure of the specificity of Yugoslavia.

Conclusion This chapter presented the conditions and main dynamics of Europeanisation of Memory in Mostar. My analysis relies on two processes. Firstly, the reconciliation frame imposed by the EU, with the complicity of local non-political actors: the case of the instrumentalisation of the reconstruction of Stari Most shows how the reconciliation frame imposed by the EU led to polarisation around the symbol of the city by reinterpretation of its former meaning. Secondly, the appropriation of the European Memory Framework by local non-governmental political actors: the case of Partizansko Groblje shows how the appropriation of the European Memory Frame by local actors highlights the ongoing process of obliteration of the Yugoslav socialist past and anti-fascist legacy of the city by contesting and rearranging the political meaning of the cemetery. The findings suggest that as a result, the process of Europeanisation of memory in Mostar has reinforced local divisions by relying on superficial assessments of different aspects of post-war Mostar and excluding the population from every process of reconstruction and reformulation of the city. These two dynamics illustrate how the Europeanisation of memory process in Mostar, and more largely in BiH, answers EU’s call for a liberal peace. Memory has to be emptied of any potential debate on the past in order to reach a consensus. Here, the erasure of socialist and anti-fascist legacies equals the neutralisation of their mobilising potential. Muting them is therefore a sine qua non condition for a sustainable future.

28 Fieldnotes, 22 June 2019, Mostar.

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Acknowledgements Many thanks to Heleen Touquet for her comments and advices, as well as to Taylor McConnell, and our editors Ana Miloševi´c and Tamara Trošt for their helpful feedbacks.

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CHAPTER 5

Constructing a Usable Past: Changing Memory Politics in Jasenovac Memorial Museum Alexandra Zaremba

Abstract This chapter shows how the Europeanisation of Holocaust memory enables contemporary Croatia to preserve and disseminate a long-held narrative of Jasenovac that rejects historical context, perpetrator responsibility, and national identity. By tracing changing memory politics at Jasenovac Memorial Museum (JMM) through its three permanent exhibitions (1968, 1988, and 2006), I show how political actors manipulated the same problematic narrative over time to escape historical responsibility. Most recently, in 2006, the new permanent exhibition of JMM presented a narrative of Jasenovac that divorced victims and perpetrators from their ethnic identities and ignored the concentration camp’s location specific context in favour of greater emphasis on the larger Holocaust narrative, relieving Croatia from negative association with the ustaša or responsibility for crimes committed by the regime. This article

A. Zaremba (B) History, American University, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Miloševi´c and T. Trošt (eds.), Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4_5

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shows how “European” memory standards do not necessarily result in the proclaimed aim of dealing with the past or act as a support to reconciliatory efforts. In some cases, these standards continue to assist former Nazi-collaborationist states, like Croatia, to relativise domestic crimes that occurred under state fascist regimes. Keywords Holocaust · Memory · Jasenovac · Ustaše · Croatia · Europeanisation

Introduction April 2019 marked the fourth year in a row that Serb, Jewish, Roma, and anti-fascist groups boycotted the official Croatian state commemoration of Jasenovac—a Second World War era concentration camp operated by the Croatian ustaše in the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska or NDH). Citing state tolerance for historical revisionism, the downplaying of crimes at Jasenovac, and a rise in fascist rhetoric, imagery, and symbols in Croatian public spaces, these groups held a separate commemoration to honour the numerous men, women, and children who were murdered at Jasenovac (Vladisavljevi´c 2019). For more than ten years, and particularly after its EU accession, Croatia has been repeatedly accused of historical negligence and a failure to fully confront its relationship to the ustaše and crimes committed in the NDH. This chapter traces the changing politics of memory exhibited in the Jasenovac Memorial Museum (JMM) to show how broader processes of the Europeanisation of Holocaust memory legitimise a long standing narrative of Jasenovac Concentration Camp. From 1968 to the present, the museum’s permanent exhibition—the main exhibition continuously on display meant to provide historical context and narrative of the Jasenovac camp and memorial site—underwent three major changes. The first permanent exhibition (1968) told the story of Jasenovac as a Yugoslav war narrative in order to legitimise communist authority and promote “brotherhood and unity”. The revised 1988 exhibition reflected growing instability in Yugoslavia and produced a narrative of Jasenovac that positioned Yugoslav communism and “brotherhood and unity” as the force preventing future bloodshed and repeated conflict. And in 2006, following the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the forced removal,

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transfer, and return of the Jasenovac collection to Jasenovac Memorial Museum, a new permanent exhibition, still on display, reopened. Conceived by an EU aspiring Croatia, this exhibition was used to demonstrate the state’s liberal democratic values and subsequent European identity by embracing international standards of Holocaust memory. While at first glance these exhibitions appear quite different in terms of presentation and content, a closer look identifies two continuous themes: (1) Crimes at Jasenovac and by ustaše in the NDH were the fault of Italian and German fascism and (2) Nationalism and national identity are not important to understand the crimes committed at Jasenovac or victim’s experiences there because they are really Nazi victims and not the victims of a unique localised fascist ideology. From these ideas, visitors are led to conclude that the ustaše were a fascist regime akin to, but controlled by, Nazi and Italian fascists, and that Nazi and Italian fascists are ultimately responsible for crimes committed at Jasenovac and elsewhere in the NDH. Finally, given the emphasis placed on Nazi and Italian fascism, it is also implied that Croatia bears little responsibility for crimes committed at the Jasenovac Concentration Camp and the victims who perished there do not belong in Croatian national memory. Rather, they belong within a vague framework of Holocaust memory. As scholars like Kucia (2016), Miloševi´c and Touquet (2018), and Radoni´c (2011) have observed, since the post-war era, the Holocaust has served as a kind of negative founding myth, anchoring “new Europe” in its unification project. For EU members and states seeking to join the EU, the Holocaust is meant to serve as a shared past, representative of common values and principles such as the rejection of anti-Semitism, racism, and xenophobia. Borrowing from Kucia (2016, p. 98), the “Europeanisation” of Holocaust memory is understood here as the “process of construction, institutionalization, and diffusion of beliefs regarding the Holocaust and the formal and informal norms and rules regarding Holocaust remembrance and education that have been first defined and consolidated at a European level and then incorporated into the practices of European countries”. The European Parliament (EP) and other international organisations, like the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), United Nations, and Council of Europe, act as agents of this process. They formally and informally require states to join the IHRA, establish state Holocaust memorialisation, research, and educational activities, preserve Holocaust sites, and recognise responsibility or

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involvement in Holocaust crimes and publicly apologise for them (Kucia 2016, p. 98).1 Within this framework, the Holocaust is commonly understood as the persecution of European Jews by Nazi Germany, its allies, and collaborators during Second World War.2 The destruction of the Shoah is placed over and above national memories of the Holocaust and is the essential narrative aspect of European Holocaust memory. Memory of crimes committed by Nazi-collaborationist regimes against domestic, non-Jewish populations, is noticeably absent, and there are no rules or guidelines requiring states to confront these kinds of crimes. While the systematic destruction of European Jews remained the Nazis’ highest priority, today’s European Holocaust narrative framework fails to account for victims of Nazi violence and native fascist crimes. Thus, when states go to remember, educate, research, preserve, or commemorate the Holocaust and its sites, there is no obligation to acknowledge or discuss non-Jewish victims, fully examine domestic collaborators, their ideology, and crimes. States can manipulate the existing Holocaust memory framework to rewrite their pasts and free themselves of official responsibility in the present. In 2015, the European Parliament passed a resolution on Roma victims of the Holocaust in a belated attempt to somewhat shrink this gap and acknowledge the Roma Genocide (EP 2015, International Roma Day). However, this effort too is neither fully inclusive nor does it undo processes of Europeanisation already undertaken. When Jasenovac Memorial Museum installed its new permanent exhibition in 2006, it quickly came under scrutiny by international Holocaust organisations and institutions for distancing the ustaše from their genocidal crimes, racial ideology, and largest victim group. Scholars generally attributed Croatia’s failure to confront its difficult past in this exhibition to the relativising effect Europeanisation has on local Holocaust memory (Radoni´c 2011, p. 362, 2014a, p. 490; Van Der Laarse 2013, p. 73). Although this reconfiguring of European memory has indeed seriously obscured location specific details, failure to fully address Croatia’s involvement in the Second World War, the Holocaust, and crimes against Serbs, Jews, Roma, and political prisoners during this era is not a new 1 The IHRA used to be previously known as the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research or, the ITF. 2 While Kucia (2016) observed that this narrative can vary by state, this narrative, initially developed by and for Western European states, continues to predominate.

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phenomenon in this region. Examining the exhibitions of JMM over the last fifty years shows rather, how the European Holocaust memory framework preserves an incomplete and contextually absent narrative of Jasenovac that has existed since the Yugoslav communist era. This chapter thus demonstrates how “European” memory standards do not necessarily result in the proclaimed aim of dealing with the past or as a support to reconciliatory efforts. In some cases, these standards assist former Nazi-collaborationist states, like Croatia, to relativise domestic crimes that occurred under state fascist regimes. The following analysis is based on archival materials and interviews gathered at Jasenovac Memorial Museum in 2016 and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in 2019. I look to the documents associated with the development of each exhibition to understand how they have changed or maintained continuity over time. I also consult correspondence, internal memos, and personally conducted interviews related to the USHMM’s role in the development of the new 2006 exhibition to examine the competing dynamics that influenced the most recent exhibit’s conceptualisation.

Background On April 6, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia. Shortly after, with the legitimising hand of Nazi Germany, the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was proclaimed by the ustaše and their poglavnik or führer Ante Paveli´c (Prusin 2017, pp. 23–24). The ustaše were a Croatian fascist, ultra-nationalist organisation with strong ties to the Catholic Church. They believed that all Croats were of Aryan descent, but that their blood had been compromised through mixed marriages and reproduction (Levy 2009, p. 814). A citizen of the NDH was defined as “an Aryan who was actively loyal to the NDH”. Jews and Roma were therefore not extended the rights and protections belonging to citizens and were considered a threat to the pure Croatian state Paveli´c intended to create. Legally speaking, Serbs were not strictly seen as non-Aryans, but rather as “politically incompatible elements and ‘perennial enemies’” (Odak and Benˇci´c 2016, pp. 807–809). They were to blame for the political and biological regression of the Croatian people and the loss of an independent Croatian state. This narrative was legitimised through the scholarship of militant Croatian scholars and memory entrepreneurs like Dr. Milan Sufflay—a Croatian historian and politician, who believed that Croatia was a pillar

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of Western civilisation for centuries before it was unified with Serbia under the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1918 (Jelin 2003, pp. 33–34). As an Axis satellite, the ustaše were extended almost unlimited freedom in crafting their internal policies. Their end goal was an ethnically pure Greater Croatia which would come to fruition by forcibility removing Serbs, Jews, and Roma people (Prusin 2017, p. 26). Beginning on April 11, 1941, laws were passed that effectively removed these groups from civil society and legalised on the spot executions, mass incarcerations, and the formation of concentration camps (Yeomans 2013, pp. 15–18). The ustaše are a rare example of a collaborationist regime that ran its own camps without instruction or aid from Nazi Germany. This attests to the level of autonomy Nazi Germany lent the regime and underscores Nazi ideological policy that viewed Slavs as subhuman and targeted them for enslavement, expulsion, and execution.3 The largest ustaše run camp was Jasenovac. Established in 1941 and located fifty-five miles southeast of Zagreb on the left-bank of the Sava River, the camp spanned more than 150 square miles, and was made up of several smaller camp units (“Jasenovac Concentration Camp” n.d.). It is widely known as “the Yugoslav Auschwitz”, or the “Auschwitz of the Balkans”. Like Nazi-run camps, Jasenovac prisoners were killed using gas chambers, burning, starvation, disease, and hard labour. But while Nazi concentration camps were characterised by the mechanical efficiency with which liquidations were carried out, this was not the case at Jasenovac. For prisoners of the ustaše run camp, violence was particularly gruesome and individualised. The Serbian, Jewish, Roma, anti-fascist, and communist prisoners of Jasenovac were subjected to death using mallets, maces, axes, machine guns, hatchets, wooden and iron hammers, hanging, and knives (Levy 2009, p. 18). Although Jews and Roma were incompatible to the ustaše ideal of a greater Croatia with a “pure” racial pedigree, Serbs were their primary targets due to the biological and political danger they posed to the nation. While the number of victims killed at the camp is still a highly contested matter, over 83,000 victims have been identified, with Serb victims in a large majority (“List of Individual Victims of Jasenovac Concentration Camp” n.d.). It is estimated that some 100,000 people, in total, were murdered at Jasenovac (Van Der Laarse 2013, p. 79). 3 While it cannot be said that Hitler or the Nazi apparatus ordered the execution of Serbs or other Slavs in the NDH, a general ambivalence towards their fate can be reasonably assumed. See Longerich (2012).

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Jasenovac in the Era of “Bratstvo and Jedinstvo ” (Brotherhood and Unity) Remembering Jasenovac was a challenge in post-war Yugoslavia and it was not until the latter half of the 1960s that a memorial site and museum were established. Following the end of the Second World War, Jasenovac went through almost two decades of official “forgetting” since the crimes committed there were incompatible with Yugoslav communist ideology. The narrative of “Bratstvo and Jedinstvo” (brotherhood and unity)— which essentially proclaimed that all national conflict and divisions were abolished in Yugoslavia—had answered the national question. As a space that strongly evoked national conflict, Jasenovac was in direct discord with such an idea. Despite the Yugoslav state’s desire to “forget” Jasenovac, public calls for memorialisation were significant. In 1960, after several years of lobbying the central government for a memorial, survivors, their families, and victims’ families, were promised a commemorative space to mourn and remember their dead (Karge 2009, pp. 54–58). Commemoration of Jasenovac, however, had to embody the Yugoslav communist narrative of the Second World War. Like other official memorialisation of the war in textbooks, museums, newspapers, monuments, and memorials, the site to Jasenovac had to perpetuate the “brotherhood and unity” narrative and present the war (including its domestic conflicts) as the triumphant self-liberation of the Yugoslav people; despite the enormous losses they suffered, they achieved a better future (Karge 2009, pp. 51–53). Since the official Yugoslav war narrative assigned guilt (collaboration with occupying forces) and glory (the partisan struggle) evenly across the Yugoslav nation, narratives of Jasenovac had to place the ustaše and their victims in “ethnic neutrality”. Meaning, no single ethnic or national group could be solely labelled as victim or perpetrator. The ustaše were thus labelled as “aggressors”, “occupying forces”, and “collaborators”, and were not associated with a particular national group. Their victims, likewise, were labelled as Yugoslav victims of fascism and their national or racial identities were not given much attention (Karge 2009, pp. 51–53).4

4 In addition, as Heike Karge has shown, due to the cost of erecting a memorial at Jasenovac, Yugoslav authorities considered the Jasenovac site a memorial space representative of all the former camp sites (Nazi, Ustaše, Italian etc.) in Yugoslavia and the victims who perished there—including those like Sajmište and Banjica. Yet another reason that a

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Jasenovac Memorial Site was thus erected to placate bottom-up calls for memorialisation but was designed to accommodate the Yugoslav communist narrative of the Second World War when it opened in 1966. The site featured a large monument dedicated to the victims of Jasenovac along with the memorial museum discussed here which opened in 1968. The Stone Flower monument—a massive sculpture of a lotus flower—served (and continues to serve) as the epicentre of the memorial space. It does not name or mourn victims or perpetrators of Jasenovac, but rather symbolises themes compatible with the Yugoslav war narrative like rebirth, overcoming suffering, eternal renewal, and forgiveness (“Jasenovac”, Spomenik Database n.d.). Since its opening in 1968, the Stone Flower has not been reinterpreted and is really the only physical area of the former concentration camp to be interpreted as a part of the larger memorial space, other than the memorial museum. The monument’s continued hegemonic physical presence underscores the idea that narratives of Jasenovac in Croatia have not undergone any major change since the fall of Yugoslav communism. Narrative continuity has been maintained in both Jasenovac Memorial Museum’s exhibitions and the memorial site’s landscape.

1968---Smrt Fasˇ izmu Sloboda Narodu (Death to Fascism, Victory to the People) The first exhibition at Jasenovac Memorial Museum opened in 1968 and was curated by Ksenija Deskovi´c. It sought to emphasise two major themes: (1) the destructive nature of fascism, and the suffering of all Yugoslav people under its rule and (2) the role of partisan forces in the liberation of Jasenovac and greater Yugoslavia (Deskovi´c 1967). The first theme served to indirectly legitimise communist rule, and erase, or at the very least minimise the ethnic identities of victims and perpetrators of the camp. It also drew a direct line between ustaše crimes and Nazi policy. This theme removed divisions, neutralised victims and perpetrators, upheld the Yugoslav war narrative, and “brotherhood and unity”. It decisively distanced the ustaše from responsibility for their crimes and

general, anti-fascist, partisan centered narrative of Second World War in Yugoslavia was presented in this space. See Karge (2012). This avoidance of ethnic group association is also characteristic of Yugoslav communist-era textbooks, see Pavasovi´c Trošt (2018).

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removed ethnic and racial divisions foundational to the formation of Jasenovac and the crimes committed there. The exhibition brief stated that: “In order to explain and comprehend all the tragedies that took place in the areas occupied by fascist armies during the Second World War, it is important to show consistently and systematically, the implementation of Nazi politics in the NDH” (Deskovi´c 1967, my emphasis). This suggests that the exhibition intended to highlight the destruction of Nazi German fascism (and to some extent fascism associated with Italy) as opposed to the unique and localised version of Croatian fascism that motivated the actions of the ustaše at Jasenovac and throughout the NDH (Deskovi´c 1967). Here, the ustaše are presented as little more than an intermediary force for Nazi conquest, making it difficult for visitors to associate any responsibility with the organisation itself or the Croatian state. The exhibition only associates the ustaše with Croats in two excerpts of speeches given by Paveli´c. The most important being the speech he gave on the NDH’s relationship with Hitler and Mussolini and their role as “defenders of the NDH” (Deskovi´c 1967, p. 1).5 Furthermore, any description of the ustaše military action is only present in panels or exhibit labels that also mention Italian or German forces as well (Deskovi´c 1967, pp. 1, 3, 13). Thus, while the exhibition mentions the ustaše’s largely Croatian identity, it also negates it. This is further supported within the document, which refers to ustaše doctrines as “analogous with Hitler’s principle of a higher race” (Deskovi´c 1967, p. 1). Visitors are led to believe that the ustaše merely adopted Nazi racial and ideological beliefs and remain ignorant of the ideological policy they developed and imposed in the NDH independent of it. This interpretation suggests that Jasenovac victims are victims of fascism, or even Nazi victims, rather than victims of the Croatian ustaše. Their role in the Yugoslav memory framework is reduced to that of martyrs necessary for partisan victory. The second major theme presented in the exhibition featured the singular power of foreign oppressors in order to legitimise communist rule. As the exhibition brief noted: “With the coming of Paveli´c, and

5 It is interesting to note that the other time Croatians are directly linked to the ustaše in this exhibition is in an excerpt taken from a rather violent anti-Serb speech given by a Catholic priest. This presumably is present in the exhibit due to the anti-religious nature of communist Yugoslavia. Perhaps this suggests that blame for such atrocities also lies with religion.

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with the help of Mussolini and Hitler, the most difficult terror was introduced on the Croatian people, and all of its anti-fascist, democratic, and progressive forces. Among these forces was the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, whose members were captured, put in jail, killed as hostages, and sent for liquidation to camps…” (Deskovi´c 1967, p. 1). Invoking the names of Hitler and Mussolini again shows that this constructed narrative leaned on the greater role of Axis fascism during the war. It additionally illustrates how the exhibit favoured a narrative that demonstrated communist suffering, rather than the major victim groups killed at Jasenovac. Emphasising communist martyrdom elevated the partisan struggle for liberation, and legitimised communist rule. This occurred in the exhibit in several instances where individual and collective suffering of communists was highlighted. Images of ustaše soldiers gathered after executing partisans are among those featured along with a mass grave of partisans , and information regarding the execution of an entire partisan camp. One text panel in particular served to elevate communist victimhood at Jasenovac (Deskovi´c 1967, pp. 2, 3, 10, 11, 17). It contained an excerpt from a speech given by ustaše poglavnik Paveli´c, where he criticised Karl Marx and communism and called it “the downfall of humanity…” further stating that communists would “not be removed (from the homeland) but carried out with bayonets” (Deskovi´c 1967, pp. 4–5). Similarly, the partisan effort to aid prisoners at Jasenovac is highlighted as well, granting them a dual identity of “martyr” and “hero”. This is not to say that violence against Serbs, Jews, and Roma in the NDH and Jasenovac was totally absent from the exhibit, but it gave undue attention to communist suffering. It attempted to not only equate their experiences with that of Serbs, Jews, and Roma but to elevate them as well. In transforming Jasenovac into a site of communist suffering, it further divorced the unique role of race, religion, and national identity from ustaše ideology and the crimes committed as a result. Removing these categories of identification allowed for any Yugoslav to occupy the “victim” role in this space, including Croats, placing all Yugoslavs in ethnic neutrality. This narrative would shift slightly in the next permanent exhibition at JMM installed in 1988 but would retain many of the same basic elements.

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1988---Brotherhood and Unity Challenged From 1968 to 1988, support for communist rule began to gradually, and later rapidly, decline. In the 1960s, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (Savez Komunista Jugoslavije) experienced a break in unity at the top of the party hierarchy and was divided into two factions (Hauge 2015, pp. 163–194). The liberal faction emphasised sovereignty, the rights of the republic, and nationality as innate to human character. Meanwhile, the conservative faction viewed Yugoslavism as a communist movement that would supersede national belonging. This division gave local and regional leaders an opportunity to strengthen their influence and was the beginning of a significant challenge to Tito’s “brotherhood and unity” (Hauge 2015, p. 165). Following Tito’s death in 1980, communist Yugoslavia was increasingly unstable and marked by financial crisis and protest. The national question Tito claimed to have solved through “brotherhood and unity” took centre stage (Hauge 2015, pp. 305–348). Nationalism and nationalist rhetoric became increasingly present among the Yugoslav republics and an unsettling feeling of conflict pervaded the region. It is within this context that the 1988 exhibition of Jasenovac Memorial Museum must be understood. The 1988 exhibition upheld many aspects of the narrative found in the 1968 exhibition, but carried a retrospective quality not seen before. Preserving the state-crafted narrative of the Second World War, it also emphasised the partisan struggle, the destructive role of fascism, and the suffering of all Yugoslav people, but to a heightened degree. The new 1988 exhibit used more aggressive rhetoric, imagery, and images to show the violent nature of fascism and the heroic role of the partisans. Confronting the rise of national conflict among the Yugoslav republics, the exhibit produced the underlying message that without Yugoslav communism and “brotherhood and unity”, Yugoslavia would again experience horrific violence. It suggested that the public should realign themselves with the SKJ and “Yugoslav” values.6 6 It is interesting to note that this retrospective narrative that drew on Yugoslav commu-

nism as a force of unity preventing conflict, appears unique to the Jasenovac Memorial Museum. As Tamara Pavasovi´c Trost has shown, in the late 1980s, narratives of Jasenovac in Serbian and Croatian textbooks had already taken a sharp ethno-national turn. While an exact reason for this discontinuity is difficult to provide, it is likely attributed to the funding sources. Until roughly 1990, Jasenovac Memorial Museum appears to have been

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This idea is present in the 1988 document Basic Components and Content for the Exhibition Plan of Concentration Camp Jasenovac 1941– 1945. The document outlines technological upgrades as one reason for the reconceptualisation of the exhibit, but its true purpose was the need to utilise the museum as a “powerful education tool”. It argued that the previous exhibit “did not provide the necessary degree of the authentic lived experience of the great tragedy of Jasenovac” (Jasenovac Memorial Museum 1987a, p. 1). Since visitors to the museum were most often students and children, “they must have the opportunity to see, realize, and understand throughout their entire lives how this land was established and won for all her people” (Jasenovac Memorial Museum 1987a, p. 1). Although these excerpts from the document allude to a need to instil the “tragedy of Jasenovac” into Yugoslav youth for political purposes, the following excerpt demonstrates that purpose was also more than likely deeply embedded in contemporary national hostilities. The ultimate goal of the new exhibition was that: All the young who see this exhibition must understand the true facts of discord that these people crushed in the past, to understand how our patriotic brothers in unity can always give new strength and successfully resist the forces of darkness and all those who still look to turn back the wheel of history and again bring their bloody hatred between nationalities. This lesson from the past can guarantee that this will not happen again. (Jasenovac Memorial Museum 1987a, pp. 1–2, my emphasis)

This text indicates that a major purpose of the 1988 exhibition of Jasenovac Memorial Museum was to present communist rule as the only force that could subvert potential violent warfare. The retrospective quality that appears in the 1988 exhibition is further evidenced in its effort to cling to the KPJ as a governing authority. It necessitates further communist governance to restore “brotherhood and unity” by calling on its success as a force against fascism and national conflict in post-war Yugoslavia. Exhibition content in 1988 named partisans victorious in the “final win of antifascist strength” in the National Liberation War (another name for the Second World War in Yugoslavia) (Jasenovac Memorial Museum 1987b, p. 1). The KPJ is additionally

funded centrally through Belgrade while textbooks were generally funded and developed directly within each republic. See Pavasovi´c Trost (2013, 2018).

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named the only party who “fought fascism to the end”, and a group of inmates who attempted to break out of Jasenovac just before the camp’s liberation singing songs of “Tito and freedom” are featured. The communist party is likewise described as building “a new free land rampart against fascism” on the graves of victims and heroic fighters. Though called on for a different reason in 1988, this element of the museum’s narrative motivated visitors to again consider communist rule as a necessity for the resistance of fascism and the return of the “honoured past” (Jasenovac Memorial Museum 1987b, p. 10). Although the 1988 exhibition was repurposed to meet the state’s changing social and political needs, the main themes exhibited in the 1968 exhibition were maintained. The Ideological Concept for the Permanent Exhibition Jasenovac emphasised that the tragedy of Jasenovac was not to be blamed on individuals but as a product of the “monstrosity of fascism” carried out by the ustaše in the NDH. Once again, this attempt to place guilt and responsibility on foreign fascism rather than Croatian fascism in the NDH is maintained by leaning on Nazi Germany and Italy. Paveli´c and the ustaše are referred to as “servants” of German and Italian fascists. It is further stated that Paveli´c planned his programme ten years prior in Italy and was “brought forward with the advice of German and Italian fascism” leading to the destruction of Serbs, Jews, communists, and anti-fascist elements (Jasenovac Memorial Museum 1987b, pp. 1–4). Similarly, much like the earlier exhibit in 1968, Serbs, Jews, Roma, partisans , and other political prisoners are named as victims at Jasenovac. The illusion of “ethnic neutrality” is generally upheld, and no information on ustaše ideology is present. However, the major way the 1988 exhibition differs from the previous, is its use of graphic images and accounts of the violence that occurred. Although the earlier exhibition also provided images and text about the suffering of victims, it was not to this extent. In the 1988 exhibit visitors could find descriptions of the weapons used for killing victims, images of ustaše soldiers stepping on the bodies of recently killed internees, images of soldiers beheading victims, the sexual abuse of women, the suffocation of internees, and other extremely graphic and violent photos and text panels (Jasenovac Memorial Museum 1987a, pp. 10, 13–14, 16, 18–19, 23, 26). This aspect of the museum’s aesthetics changed given rising discontent among the Yugoslav republics. The violence of Jasenovac was emphasised in this exhibit to frighten visitors. It sent the message that without communist rule and “brotherhood and unity”, forces of darkness, i.e.

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fascism and national conflict, would return to Yugoslavia and result in the mass death toll and suffering witnessed at Jasenovac. Despite sending this message, the exhibit again maintained most of the previous narrative installed by the state. It did not explicitly express what “darkness” was overcome that again threatened the nation and relied on the same narrative of Jasenovac that designates fascism as the force responsible for conflict. By resisting the reality of national politics within Yugoslavia during this period, the exhibit ignored the role of internal conflict and maintained the illusion that solely external forces threatened the state both in 1941 and the late 1980s. This further institutionalised memory of Jasenovac as a space where foreign fascist ideology, rather than ustaše ideology specific to the Independent State of Croatia, led to the death of Serbian, Jewish, Roma, and other victims.

1991–2006: Reconceptualising Jasenovac and “Europeanisation” The Jasenovac Memorial Site and Museum was seriously affected by the conflict that erupted between Serbia and Croatia following Croatia’s secession from Yugoslavia in 1990. The space was occupied by the Yugoslav army and damaged by warfare. In 1991, the Jasenovac Memorial Museum collection was taken to a municipal archive in Banja Luka, a city in the Serb majority political entity Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It remained there until 2000 when the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) brokered an agreement between authorities in Croatia and Republika Srpska. The USHMM took custody of the collection for one year from November 2000, during which time it catalogued, photographed, and preserved roughly 900 kilograms of artefacts, photos, documents, and other items (USHMM n.d.a). The USHMM returned the collection to Croatia in November 2001, but maintained a close relationship with Jasenovac Memorial Museum. Between 2001 and 2006, the museums continued a mentorship through the International Partnership Among Museums or IPAM (a programme funded though the American Alliance of Museums ). Staff from the USHMM travelled to Croatia to provide guidance on the storage, preservation, and conservation of the JMM collection, and staff from JMM travelled to Washington D.C. to meet with USHMM experts and learn more about Holocaust education and exhibition interpretation (USHMM n.d.b; USHMM n.d.c). Simultaneously, post-Yugoslav Croatia set its

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sights on Europe and began the EU Accession process. As new activities were underway at JMM, the Croatian Ministry of Education and Sports established The Day of Remembrance on the Holocaust and the Prevention of Crimes Against Humanity in 2003. Croatia was accepted as a liaison member of the International Task Force for Holocaust Remembrance that year as well, and formally joined the ITF in 2005 (“Croatia”, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance n.d.). With the help of the USHMM, JMM also held a seminar for Croatian educators on teaching the Holocaust in 2004. The Croatian Minister of Culture and Croatian Ambassador to the United States along with other Croatian state representatives likewise visited the USHMM during this five year period (USHMM n.d.a; USHMM n.d.c). While these activities were important to Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Croatia’s Europeanisation, they stand alongside broader official efforts to memorialise the Holocaust and the anti-fascist struggle since the end of the 1990s. These include the Croatian Parliament’s passage of a Declaration on Anti-fascism in 2005, its 2011 adoption of the 23rd of August as the European Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, as well as its 2014 resolution for International Day for Remembrance of Roma in the Holocaust (Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018, pp. 387–390). These memory laws, along with Croatia’s post-1990s tradition of having its president attend annual commemoration ceremonies, have helped to transform Jasenovac Memorial Site from a space of commemoration to a stage for Croatian European politics. The exhibition at JMM itself was a part of that transformation and served as a means to acknowledge the shared narrative of the Holocaust recognised across the EU and to demonstrate the kind of liberal democratic values shared by EU states. Although memory of the ustaše, the NDH, and Jasenovac was mobilised by both Serbs and Croats during 1990s warfare, it was not until the early 2000s that post-Yugoslav Croatia began to reconfigure its narrative. In cooperation with the USHMM, IPAM, and ITF, an international “Jasenovac Task Force” was created in 2003. Made up of staff from the USHMM and individuals from other Holocaust memorial sites/museums like the Imperial War Museum, Auschwitz Birkenau Museum, Anne Frank House, and others,

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the committee was tasked with providing guidance and insight on the development of a new permanent exhibition at JMM.7 While that Task Force only formally met twice, one of their major recommendations, repeatedly made by the USHMM from as early as 2000, was the creation of an international committee consisting of Jasenovac survivors or their families, and representatives of each victim group and organisation from outside of Croatia (much like the one at Auschwitz Birkenau) (USHMM n.d.b). Such a committee would also provide input and oversee the development of the exhibition and ongoing activities at Jasenovac Memorial Site and Museum. Despite this repeated recommendation, such a council was never organised likely due to state political pressures felt by JMM staff (USHMM n.d.c).8 Moreover, when the new permanent exhibition opened at Jasenovac Memorial Museum in 2006, the International Jasenovac Task Force had never seen substantive mark ups or reports on exactly what the exhibition would look like, what narrative of the camp would be displayed, and what historical context of the Holocaust and Independent State of Croatia would be provided to visitors.9 Funded by the Croatian Ministry of Culture, the new 2006 exhibition sought to tell victim’s stories with the help of a few objects (2014, p. 499). Wanting to be a part of the contemporary European education and museum system, former Jasenovac Memorial Museum director, Nataša Joviˇci´c, intended that the exhibition be a “site of life” and share an affirmative “message of light to the site of crime” (Joviˇci´c et al. 2006). The narrative of Jasenovac would be told by presenting victim’s “individual stories” to give them dignity and “inspire visitors to understand the crime committed” (Joviˇci´c et al. 2006). To that end, the names of all Jasenovac victims were presented throughout the museum and excerpts from oral history interviews served as an integral component (USHMM n.d.c). Joviˇci´c did not want the exhibit to be used for propagandistic purposes as she argues earlier exhibits were (Radoni´c 2011, pp. 362–364). The 2006 exhibition, “Victim as Individual”, thus does not show corpses 7 This committee was formed as a result of a second IPAM grand awarded to the USHMM and JMM in 2003; Greg Naranjo, Interview by Alexandra Zaremba, July 30, 2019. 8 Greg Naranjo, Interview by Alexandra Zaremba, July 30, 2019; Diane Saltzman, Interview by Alexandra Zaremba, July 25, 2019. 9 Greg Naranjo, Interview by Alexandra Zaremba, July 30, 2019.

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or weapons used in the killing of detainees, nor does it place much focus on the ustaše, their ideology, or victim’s national identity (Radoni´c 2014a, b, p. 181). However, it was not intended that crimes be presented in such a way that they could be “lessened” by anyone—visitors would “work out” their own attitudes “towards the monstrous ustaše crimes that took place in that location” (USHMM n.d.c). “Victim as individual” initially received popular acclaim. Joviˇci´c was awarded the Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 2006. The museum was likewise awarded the International Carlo Scarpa award for the best planned memorial area in Europe for 2007 along with other international prizes (“Awards and Recognitions for Jasenovac Memorial Site”, Jasenovac Memorial Site n.d.; “Jasenovac Memorial Site”, International Carlo Scarpa Prize, 2007, Van Der Laarse 2013, p. 82). But the exhibition quickly fell under scrutiny. Critics faulted the exhibit for failing to show that a majority of the ustaše were ethnic Croats that Serbs suffered the biggest losses, and the brutal methods people were killed by (Radoni´c 2014a, b, p. 181). The International Task Force for Holocaust Remembrance (ITF) condemned the exhibition and its individualisation of victims in the museum while the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem described it as “post-modern fog” (Van Der Laarse 2013, p. 82). The exhibition additionally attracted the attention of scholars who argued that the Europeanisation of Holocaust memory was the cause of the exhibit’s shortcomings (Radoni´c 2011, 2014; Van Der Laarse 2013). They found that while the exhibit provided general context on the Holocaust in Europe—the European narrative of the persecution of European Jews by Nazi Germany, its allies, and collaborators—it failed to highlight important information on the unique circumstances and ideology that brought the ustaše to target and execute Serbs specifically, along with Jews, Roma, communists, and anti-fascists. Victims’ identities and stories were only vaguely represented, and the reason why they were taken to Jasenovac was unclear. While this exhibition and the narrative it disseminates might appear to be a negative result of a European memory framework and Croatia’s desire to affirm its anti-fascist identity in the EU accession process, this is only partly the case. Rather than being the cause of such a narrative, Europeanisation is an instrument used in Croatia to preserve a consistent, long-held narrative, rejecting historical context, perpetrator responsibility, and national identity. By tracing evolving memory politics

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in earlier exhibitions and the political contexts in which they were created, we find that for Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Europeanisation maintains the status quo when it comes to the Second World War and Holocaust memory in the former Yugoslavia and contemporary Croatia. By utilising the European Holocaust memory framework, the 2006 exhibition at JMM accepts EU narratives of the Holocaust and some responsibility for crimes committed against European Jews, without acknowledging the ustaše’s ideologies and domestic crimes that the NDH’s “non-Aryan”, or “non-Croatian” citizens and “enemies” suffered under at Jasenovac and elsewhere. One major section of the museum, for example tells visitors about the establishment of the NDH and states that the ustaše movement was entirely reliant on the politics of the Third Reich and (initially) fascist Italy. This text panel tells visitors that “Paveli´c and his closest associates” were subject to the domination and total influence of Germany and Italy (Joviˇci´c et al. 2006, p. 7). Another major panel displays a photo of the first official meeting of Ante Paveli´c and Hitler. The associated text tells us that Hitler gave his full support to Paveli´c’s genocidal policy against Serbs. As we have seen in exhibits before, these panels do not provide much, if any information, regarding the ustaše as a collaborationist regime that established independent ideology and operated its own death camps. Rather, they imply that blame should be placed on Hitler, the Nazi state, and fascism generally (Radoni´c 2011, p. 362). The images and text that appear within these panels are among the first visitors see. They strongly influence the context by which the rest of the exhibit should be understood. It essentially communicates that the ustaše were totally reliant on Nazi Germany and Italy for their political ideology and policies. It blurs the nature of their actual ideological beliefs and practices and builds a framework that suggests that those killed by the ustaše at Jasenovac are no different than those killed in Nazi concentration and death camps. Indeed, it implies that the Nazis (not the ustaše) are singularly to blame. In addition to these panels, few others in the museum discuss the ustaše or explain their ideology and political policy. The exhibition names “ustaše authorities”, “ustaše movement”, “ustaše in power”, or “Paveli´c and his collaborators”, as perpetrators, but only rarely and not in sections dealing with mass murder (Joviˇci´c et al. 2006, pp. 21–29; Radoni´c 2011, p. 501). In a section discussing legal regulations, legalisation of crimes, and racial laws, the text panel tells visitors that laws were passed that followed the ideological beliefs of Nazi German and Italian fascists with emphasis on

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Croatian national and state particularities. It gives detailed information on the racial grounds for laws against Jews and Roma but only causally mentions in the same paragraph that discriminatory laws were also passed regarding Serbian citizens (Joviˇci´c et al. 2006, p. 8). Only in one subsection of the museum are Serbs referred to as belonging to an “ethnically less desirable people” (Joviˇci´c et al. 2006, p. 21). Thus, Croatian “state and national particularities” are not explained and a huge disconnect is created throughout the exhibit. It at once tells us that Nazi and Italian fascism is the fascism of the ustaše and is to blame for laws and crimes carried out but tells us nothing about why Serbs were targeted in the NDH. Visitors thus have no real direction in understanding who and what the ustaše were and what they believed. In creating this distance, visitors are encouraged to subconsciously detach the events that took place at Jasenovac from the ustaše. Since the museum is the only interpretive space on the former concentration camp ground, it further divorces the physical space from the crimes committed and presents a narrative that places Jasenovac in an abstract space that falls under the larger umbrella of the Holocaust. This is reinforced in the exhibition’s use of objects to tell the stories of individual victims and again reveals the incomplete and contextually absent nature of the 2006 narrative. These include clothing, letters, a canvas purse, recipe books, a songbook, notebooks, and children’s drawings, among other things. The descriptions belonging to each respective item typically reference the owner of the object, what the object was used for, where the owner of the object was killed, or how the owner came to leave the camp. Many labels omit the ethnicity of the victim who owned the object and the way they were killed. One example is the display of a notebook with “theory of spelling, literature, and music”. Its label reads, “Belonged to inmate Danica Mili´c. She left the camp as a part of a prisoner exchange” (Joviˇci´c et al. 2006, p. 42). Nothing about the object or its label indicates the ethnicity of Danica Mili´c or why she was interned at Jasenovac. This is found consistently throughout the exhibit. It is a trend characteristic of contemporary Holocaust museums across Europe and the U.S. that seem to focus on individual stories. While this may work for some Holocaust spaces, a museum found on the physical site of a former concentration and death camp that actively separate the individual from their ethnic or racial identity is highly problematic. More often than not, ethnic and racial identities were the main reason prisoners were killed or interned at Jasenovac (Van Der Laarse 2013, p. 82). By creating distance

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between victim identities and their experience at Jasenovac, the idea previously discussed with other text panels is reinforced—that there is nothing different about these victims compared to other Holocaust camps and that the same fascist ideology placed them there. As in previous exhibits, we do see some naming of Serbs, Jews, and Roma, but this is typically present in sections that talk about victims generally and is almost never highlighted in the victims’ stories the exhibit aims to feature. The visitor then knows that Serbs, Jews, and Roma were victims at Jasenovac, and it is implied in a graph that Serbs were the majority victim group at Jasenovac. However, the exhibit doesn’t differentiate why, unlike other concentration and death camps of this era, Serbs were in the victim majority and not Jews. It portrays Serbs as one of many national and social groups murdered at Jasenovac by fascist perpetrators. Coupled with a failure to talk about the specifics of ustaše ideology and an emphasis on the role of Nazi Germany and Italy, this again leans into the idea that fascists outside of Croatia hold primarily responsibility, and Jasenovac should be seen within those contexts.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the three permanent exhibitions found at Jasenovac Memorial Museum from its opening in 1968 to its most recent exhibit in 2006. This analysis shows how the Europeanisation of Holocaust Memory legitimises a long standing narrative of Jasenovac Concentration Camp that is contextually absent and incomplete. Despite the varying appearances of each exhibition, this chapter demonstrates that in each exhibit the greater fascist powers of Nazi Germany and Italy were relied on as the parties responsible for ustaše crimes at Jasenovac. This minimised responsibility that can be placed on the ustaše regime itself and implied that individuals killed at Jasenovac are really Nazi victims and not the victims of a unique localised fascist ideology. Likewise, national and ethnic identities are downplayed in each exhibition and are not presented as elements of the site’s narrative crucial for understanding perpetrator’s perspectives or victim’s experiences. Examining the long term development of Jasenovac Memorial Museum’s exhibitions shows how European memory standards work to bolster contextually absent and incomplete narratives of the former concentration camp. Agents of European Holocaust memory standards like the European Parliament, IHRA, and others, construct, institutionalise, and

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diffuse norms, rules, and laws for Holocaust remembrance and education. The narrative of the Holocaust they perpetuate, and encourage European states to preserve, places non-Jewish victims of Nazi violence and Nazicollaborationist regimes on the outer margins of Holocaust remembrance, vulnerable to revisionism and forgetting. Such was the case in postYugoslav EU aspirant Croatia where a brand-new exhibit for Jasenovac opened in 2006. It failed to show who the ustaše were, what they believed in, that Serbs suffered the biggest losses, and the brutal nature of executions. But by focusing on Nazi influence and the Shoah, it fulfilled the educational, ideological, and physical expectations of European Holocaust memory standards. The latest exhibition at Jasenovac Memorial Museum is but one of several mnemonic tools used to reaffirm this narrative of Jasenovac Concentration Camp and Croatia’s “Europeanisation”. It works hand in hand with history books, commemorations, remembrance days, and more to demonstrate Croatia’s membership to the European community through its application of European memory standards to official remembrances. Using Jasenovac Memorial Museum as a case study, we see, however, that those European memory standards don’t necessarily result in the proclaimed aim of dealing with the past or as a support to reconciliatory efforts. Examining the 2006 exhibition alongside the previous two permanent exhibits at JMM, shows that through the creation of a hegemonic history and shared identity, the trend of placing perpetrators, their ideologies, and their victims on the margins of Jasenovac has been reinforced as an integral part of the exhibition since the Yugoslav communist era. Thus in states like Croatia, European memory standards can and do assist former Nazi-collaborationist states, in the continued relativisation of domestic crimes by state fascist regimes. Acknowledgements This chapter was made possible thanks to the author’s tenure as a Graduate Research Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as well as Vardy International Research Grant funding from Duquesne University.

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References Awards and Recognition for Jasenovac Memorial Site. http://www.jusp-jaseno vac.hr/Default.aspx?sid=7737. Accessed December 12, 2018. Croatia. Member Countries, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. https://2015.holocaustremembrance.com/member-countries/holocaust-edu cation-remembrance-and-research-croatia. Accessed August 3, 2019. Deskovi´c, K. (1967). Idejna Koncepcija za Postav Muzeja u Jasenovac. In Unsorted Documents, Courtesy of Jasenovac Memorial Site Archive (JMSA). European Parliament. (2015). International Roma Day. http://www. europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-8-2015-0095_EN.html. Accessed November 7, 2019. Hauge, K. H. (2015). Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia: Tito, Communist Leadership and the National Question. New York: I.B. Tauris. Jasenovac Memorial Museum. 1987a. Osnove Komponente Sadržaja za Izradu Tematsko-Ekspozicionog Plana Nova Muzejske Postavke: Koncentracioni Logor Jasenovac 1941–1945. In Unsorted Documents, Courtesy of Jasenovac Memorial Museum, author unknown. Jasenovac Memorial Museum. 1987b. Idejna Koncepcija Stalne Izložbe Muzeja u Jasenovcu. In Unsorted Documents, Courtesy of Jasenovac Memorial Museum, author unknown. Jasenovac Memorial Site. Retrieved from http://www.jusp-jasenovac.hr/Default. aspx?sid=7737. Accessed December 12, 2018. Jasenovac Memorial Site. List of Individual Victims of Jasenovac Concentration Camp. http://www.jusp-jasenovac.hr/Default.aspx?sid=7737. Accessed December 12, 2018. Jelin, E. (2003). State Repression and the Labors of Memory. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Joviˇci´c, N. (2006). Jasenovac Memorial Museum’s Permanent Exhibition—The Victim as Individual. Review of Croatian History, 2(1), 295–299. Joviˇci´c, N., Matuši´c, N., Ratkovˇci´c R., Smekra, J., & Skiljan, F. (2006). Scenarij Novog Stalnog Postava Memorijalnog Muzeja Jasenovac. In Unsorted Documents, Courtesy of Jasenovac Memorial Museum. Karge, H. (2009). Mediated Remembrance: Local Practices of Remembering the Second World War in Tito’s Yugoslavia. European Review of History, 16(1), 49–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350748080265539. Karge, H. (2012). Sajmište, Jasenovac, and the Social Frames of Remembering and Forgetting. Filozofija i Drustvo, 23(4), 106–118. https://doi.org/10. 2298/FID1204106K. Kucia, M. (2016). The Europeanization of Holocaust Memory and Eastern Europe. Eastern European Politics and Societies and Culture, 30(1), 97–119. https://doi.org/10.1177/0888325415599195.

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Longerich, P. (2012). Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. New York: Oxford University Press. Levy, M. F. (2009). The Last Bullet for the Last Serb: The Ustaša Genocide Against the Serbs 1941–1945. Nationalities Papers, 37 (6), 807–837. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00905990903239174. Miloševi´c, A., & Touquet, H. (2018). Unintended Consequences: The EU Memory Framework and the Politics of Memory in Serbia and Croatia. Southeast European and Blackseas Studies, 18(3), 381–399. https://doi.org/10. 1080/14683857.2018.1489614. Odak, S., & Benˇci´c, A. (2016). Jasenovac—A Past That Does Not Pass: The Presence of Jasenovac in Croatian and Serbian Collective Memory Conflict. Eastern European Politics, Societies, and Cultures, 30(4), 805–829. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0888325416653657. Pavasovi´c Trošt, T. (2013). War Crimes as Political Tools: Bleiberg and Jasenovac in History Textbooks. In S. Jovanovic (Ed.), History and Politics in the Western Balkans: Changes at the Turn of the Millennium (pp. 13–42). Serbia: Center for Good Governance Studies. Pavasovi´c Trošt, T. (2018). Ruptures and Continuities in Nationhood Narratives: Reconstructing the Nation Through History Textbooks in Serbia and Croatia. Nations and Nationalism, 24(3), 716–740. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana. 12433. Prusin, A. (2017). Serbia Under the Swastika. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Radoni´c, L. (2011). Croatia—Exhibiting Memory and History at the “Shores of Europe”. Culture Unbound, 3, 355–367. Radoni´c, L. (2014a). Slovak and Croatian Invocation of Europe: The Museum of the Slovak National Uprising and the Jasenovac Memorial Museum. Nationalities Papers, 42(3), 489–507. https://doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2013. 867935. Radoni´c, L. (2014b). Transnational European Memory vs. New Post-Communist National Narratives After 1989. In O. Gyarfosova and K. Liebhart (Eds.), Constructing and Communication Europe (pp. 171–186). Switzerland: Lit Verlag. Spomenik Database. Jasenovac. https://www.spomenikdatabase.org/jasenovec. Accessed August 5 2019. The International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens, Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche. (2007). Jasenovac Memorial Site. http://www.fbsr.it/en/landsc ape/the-international-carlo-scarpa-prize-for-gardens/sites-awarded/jaseno vac-memorial-site. Accessed December 10, 2018.

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United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Institutional Archive. (n.d.a). ASC 2010.076 External Affairs Director, ‘Country’ Correspondence Files with Foreign Governments, 2001–2005, Box 1, Folder 17: Croatia-Jasenovac, Main Title. Washington, DC. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Institutional Archive. (n.d.b). ASC 2010.076 External Affairs Director, ‘Country’ Correspondence Files with Foreign Governments, 2001–2005, Box 1 Folder 21: Jasenovac IPAM. Washington, DC. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Institutional Archive. (n.d.c). ASC 2015.94 Collections Director, Records Relating to USHMM Efforts to Rescue the Collection at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Croatia, 2000/2005, Box 1, Folder 6: IPAM Jasenovac 2003/2005. Washington, DC. Van Der Laarse, R. (2013). Beyond Auschwitz? Europe’s Terrorscapes in the Age of Post-Memory. In M. Silberman & F. Vatan (Eds.), Memory and PostWar Memorials: Confronting the Violence of the Past (pp. 71–92). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vladisavljevic, A. (2019, April 12). Jasenovac Camp Victims Commemorated Separately Again. Balkan Insight. https://balkaninsight.com/2019/04/12/jas enovac-camp-victims-commemorated-separately-again/. Accessed August 15, 2019. Yeomans, R. (2013). Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–1945. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

CHAPTER 6

Effects of Europeanised Memory in “Artworks as Monuments” Manca Bajec

Abstract There has been a significant shift of artistic interest in “dealing” with socio-political dilemmas. In the schematic field that is exploring how art can examine some of the injustices that are occurring worldwide, an overwhelming number of symposia, conferences, projects, research, exhibitions, and books pair up the term “art” with words such as “conflict”, “reconciliation”, “justice”, “politics”, and others. This chapter proposes to examine how the role of artistic practice as a form of monument building can present itself as a relevant format for understanding political and historical shifts occurring in the region of former Yugoslavia. Highlighting the uses of counter-memorial aesthetics as a valid reference to understanding why artworks can be presented as monuments, the chapter provides insight into how these works can offer a new perspective on how the effect of Europeanisation on history and memory is being critically observed by artists.

M. Bajec (B) Independent Scholar and Artist, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Miloševi´c and T. Trošt (eds.), Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4_6

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Keywords Monument · Counter-monumental aesthetics · Europeanised memory · Collective memory · Former Yugoslavia · Contemporary art

Introduction Can art really provide a much-needed format for discussing difficult pasts and conflicts? Artistic practices that delve into the realm of the political have in recent decades posed the question of their “role”, their position as instigators of social change, as agitators (or whistle-blowers), or those revealing conspiracies, truths, myths, and forgotten histories, but how do these practices really affect politics and memory politics? We are confronted by artworks that are “spectacular” and confronting, leaving audiences on opposing sides of debates regarding their “true purpose” and the supporting ideologies. Many such artworks have been referred to as being “monuments” or of a monumental nature. This chapter proposes to examine how the monument—as a form that I consider, not only as being representative of the narrative of identity of a nation-state but equally have the potential of presenting fractures within that identity—has slowly been driven onto the side-lines as artworks have become representative of a new mode of monument building. The process will allow me to observe the artwork (or monument) as a point of critical discourse of the Europeanisation of memory in former Yugoslavia. Initially, through a broader observation of the shifting role of the monument and counter-monument, the chapter deciphers how counter-monumental aesthetics have created the possibility for the monument to be assessed as artwork or rather for certain artworks to be considered as monuments and why this is important for the discussion of a Europeanised memory. By closely examining the structures of countermonumental aesthetics and their position in the history of monument building in the region, I will deliberate on how this is connected to the formation of a shared Europeanised memory as being one of the desired outcomes of Europeanisation. The claim of positioning the artwork as a monument first and foremost highlights the process of the validity of narratives that are presented, questioned or rather their interpretation while also and equally providing a potential space for certain truths, which may otherwise remain unseen, to be observed by a broader audience.

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Such artworks are impacted by the spaces in which they appear and this can, in turn, provide insightful ideas about the effects or impacts of Europeanised memory in the Balkans. I will argue that EU integration, particularly the process of creating shared values, histories, and memories has presented itself as an opportunity for artists to voice their critique of what a shared moral and political template might indeed be feared to do, namely highlight certain moments and disregard others. Europeanisation is defined and regarded in different formulations according to various scholars. Europeanisation consists of a) construction, b) diffusion and c) institutionalisation of formal and informal rules, procedures, policy paradigms, styles, ‘ways of doing things’ and shared beliefs and norms which are first defined and consolidated in the EU policy process and then incorporated in the logic of domestic (national and subnational) discourse, political structures and public policies. (Radaelli 2004)

The first two sections of this chapter will provide a brief encounter with counter-monumentality and its roots in post-Second World War Europe as well as examining how the monument as a form has been influenced by the aesthetics of Holocaust memorialisation. The continuing section will elaborate on the development of the monument in Yugoslavia, in order to understand how the former Yugoslav region can be regarded as an interesting case for observing how the effects of a Europeanised memory may be viewed and its connection to the counter-monument. The final section will focus on the artworks I am treating as monuments and their interaction with Europeanised memory. The chapter’s artistic reference will span across a series of works but will more closely look at the work of Vladimir Miladinovi´c, as well as the work of Four Faces of Omarska, which is discussed in greater detail by Vuˇckovac (this volume). The range of artistic endeavours will prove to show that it is across both more commercial artistic practices (in the case of Miladinovi´c’s ink drawings) and grassroots practices that may not identify as artistic at all (as in the case of Four Faces of Omarska) that we can notice a resistance or critique of the idea of shared memory, that is often set in place through a top-down template and is a reaction to the region’s past or how the national identity building process has been developed since the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

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Counter-Monumentality: Shifts and Perceptions In the past decade, the discussions surrounding monument building and removal have shifted. We have become accustomed to seeing these situations being debated about in the public realm, for example; the public selection of designs for the Holocaust Memorial1 in the UK and government investment of £50 million2 towards the building of the memorial, as well as the #RhodesMustFall (Kamanzi 2015) movement and the branch in Oxford demanding the removal of the Rhodes monument, which was declined by the University.3 These debates or competitions over which historical narratives can and should be occupying public space have flooded not only the UK and South Africa but America as well, with protests against Confederate monuments that represent figures of questionable historical heroism.4 Destruction or removal of monuments is not a unique phenomenon, as such acts have been a part of many historic and recent wars,5 including the ISIS led destruction of sites in Syria and Iraq, as well as cultural heritage destruction in the Balkan region (Walasek et al. 2015; Herscher and Weizman 2011). In order to understand how these shifts in monument building have affected the Western Balkan region, which is the focus of this essay, it would be pertinent to begin with what I would define as the most relevant movement in the field that has significantly created an impact, the counter-monument. There is a materiality associated with the notion of the monument, as a physical object in the public space, which is related to our observations of it as an art-form. James E. Young’s writing on the counter-monument, which began to reposition the importance of the monument as a figure

1 Victoria and Albert Museum, “Holocaust Memorial International Design Competition Display” (2017). 2 UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation and Cabinet Office, “Adjaye Associates and Ron Arad Architects win UK Holocaust Memorial International Design Competition” (2017). 3 Rhodes Must Fall Oxford Wordpress. 4 There are of course many other examples of forceful removal of monuments in order

to change the political landscape and enabling a new national identity namely after regime changes. 5 Iconoclasm or the deliberate removal or destruction of monuments, images or cultural heritage sites is not a recent occurrence but has been a part of history dating back to ancient times when it appeared first as religious iconoclasm, an attack on religiously significant figures and places.

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that is beyond that of a mnemonic tool in the hands of the nationstate and rather initiated thought into its importance as artistic object. Young’s notion of the counter-monument, as one of the most intriguing results of Germany’s memorial conundrum, has been the advent of memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premise of the monument. Young explains that this resistance against the conventional form of the monument emerged among artists because of resistance against, …the possibility that memory of events so grave might be reduced to exhibitions of public craftsmanship or cheap pathos remains intolerable. They contemptuously reject the traditional forms and reasons for public memorial art, those spaces that either console viewers or redeem tragic events, or indulge in a facile kind of Wiedergutmachung, or purport to mend the memory of a murdered people. Instead of searing memory into public consciousness, conventional memorials, they fear, conventional monuments seal memory off from awareness altogether. For these artists such an evasion would be the ultimate abuse of art, whose primary function to their minds is to jar viewers from complacency, to challenge and denaturalize the viewers’ assumptions. (Young 1993, p. 28)

The counter-monument, as proposed by Young, “has deeply shaped discourses of contemporary art and memory”, explains Veronica Tello, who positions Young’s counter-monument notion as needing “…to be both associated with and differentiated from Foucault’s theory of countermemory” (Tello 2016, p. 16). Both Foucault’s counter-memory and Young’s counter-monument can be traced to Nietzsche’s ideas in The Use and Abuse of History for Life, which according to Tello relates to Young in their common “homogenous and essentialist renderings of identity and history…” (Tello 2016, p. 18). Young’s notion is rooted in many veins of the history of this character. The monument, for example often also appears as an ornamental figure, extrapolating from the idea of it appearing within architecture, as a form of experience that remains in the background of relevance, as decoration (Vattimo 1991). In this way, its non-present presence or lack of reinforced/evident presence is exactly what allows for it to continue existing. It appears harmless and void of any kind of overly politicised statement. This somewhat relates to notions that Young presents through his idea of the counter-monument; the counter-monument sheds itself of its monumental form in order to critique its predecessor, the conventional

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monument. These shifts of understanding what the monument stands for and related thoughts, present a key framework of this chapter. One of the central ideas of the counter-monument relates to the absence of the monument in its conventional form. Furthermore, it is neither just the object, in its representation of absence nor the absence of the object, which is central to the idea of the counter-monument but rather what that the monument can no longer exist without the burden of its own history. The many descriptions and frameworks for analysis surrounding the term and attempts to understand it, shed light on the dilemma of creating stable definitions, measures, or guidelines of what its purpose is today and how its visual representation relates to its role. In this way, its state of incommensurability relates very much to certain contemporary art practices and their need for development outside the schemes presented by institutions and nation-states.6 These observations are made through assessments of the monument as it has developed into an artwork.7 But how does this development from monument to artwork occur? In spaces of uncertainty when memory work has yet to become a part of social understanding of the past, monuments represent a source of a coming to terms with the past. As it is void of actual witnessing, the monument, argues for its right of existence through diverse modes of theatricality or performativity, in its reassertions of Young’s idea of the counter-monument, as absence continuously attempting to create a presence. The concept of the counter-monument appeared as a theory surrounding a method or style of building monuments in a moment when “traditional” or rather conventional methods of monument building

6 For example, the work of Dutch artist Jonas Staal, whose politically activated work borders between political activism, performance, and visual art. Another example, from former Yugoslavia, could be the group Four Faces of Omarska, who are mentioned in greater detail later in the chapter. The group also collaborated with London based Research Centre Forensic Architecture, that was recently nominated for the Turner Prize in 2018, perhaps the most prestigious prize given to a British artist or collective for exceptional presentation of their work. With such a nomination and a win by the collective Assemble in 2015, we can see that institutions have significantly shifted their views of how contemporary art is assessed and defined, broadening and erasing the rigid boundaries. 7 I use the term monument as a way of commenting on what the artwork is attempting to do, critique the state of monument building and the forms of prioritising victimhood.

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seemed to have lost its purpose (Young). It arose almost as an act of rebellion against models of remembrance that created a possibility of collective forgetting8 (Connerton 2008) through the instating of the responsibility of remembrance onto the object, the monument, rather than proposing that the memory of the events is to the be remembered by the people (Young 1993). This concept very much relates to the development of grassroots movements dealing with commemoration that have become of greater importance in spaces such as post-war societies where certain narratives of conflict are not part of the collective memory, as in former Yugoslav states, and this relates not only to the recent wars but also to the memory of the Second World War. In the post-Second World War, post-Vietnam, the era of the second memory boom, German artists returned to ideas of the monument in a desire to contradict and re-appropriate the idea of traditional monument building, removing it from the symbolism connected to the history of the Third Reich (Young 1993). In a moment when boundaries between the East-West divide started breaking and the memory boom was already in place, a group of German artists started exploring this “method” or perhaps “movement” that desired to interrupt a potential forgetting of the dangerous past. The movement, according to Young, necessitated a move away from aestheticised objects as representations. In some way, through questioning the potential of representation of violence, pain, and conflict, these objects became present in their stylistic decisions of the portrayal of absence (Young 1993). This appropriation of the idea of the present-absence became a leading concept of the movement.9 This conceptual duality of the monument both standing as a place of remembrance while equally being a statement of critique was also seen in the work of the German counter-monumentalists. There was an inability or confusion of how to represent the massive amount of deaths that were strapped as a weight of guilt on the shoulders of generations that had lived through the war and the generations that felt the consequences for years to follow. 8 Paul Connerton’s division of seven different types of forgetting gives the broadest and clearest presentation of how the act of forgetting is used as mode of manipulation but also as a form of allowing for society to survive a difficult past. 9 Ideas and concepts around the present absence had already at this time appeared in the arts, for example Bruce Nauman’s work A Cast of the Space under My Chair from 1965 and was followed by artists like Rachel Whiteread.

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Through an analysis of the monument as a structure that appears as a visual marker of “the politics of regret” (Olick 2007), typically presented in the public sphere by a government body, we can observe how, what, and if there is a significant visual shift that occurs compared to the counter-monument. The counter-monument in its relation to Michel Foucault’s counter-memory could be said, “has come to be deployed as means by which to frame the construction of histories for the disenfranchised” (Tello 2016, p. 12). These, in theory, are meant to be spaces of reflection that step away from the conventional forms of monument building that Western culture had been accustomed to, and therefore presenting themselves as critiques of society and nation-state. However, some of the examples proposed by Young remain physically very similar to the forms we had been used to regarding as conventional monuments. For example, Jochen Gerz, one of the German artists well-known for being representative of the movement, created the Monument against Fascism, which was meant to reflect an anti-fascist society.10 A 12-metre-tall lead column was placed on a platform in Hamburg-Harburg. Citizens of the city were invited to engrave and sign their names on the column. The column was clean of any marks when installed but with time it became covered with signatures, graffiti, scratches, comments, traces, swastikas, etc. It was slowly lowered into the ground so that a new blank space became available. This act was repeated over the next 7 years until the column completely submerged into the ground in 1993. It was lowered into the ground with about 70,000 contributions. What remains is the invitation in the place where the column vanished, an underground shaft with a viewing window, and a text describing the event of the monument; We invite the citizens of Harburg, and visitors to the town, to add their names here to ours. In doing so we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12-metre-high lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day it will have disappeared completely and the site of the Harburg monument against fascism will be empty. In the long run, it is only we ourselves who can stand up against injustice.11

10 Monument Against Fascism was unveiled in 1986 in Hamburg-Harburg and created by Esther Shalev Gerz and Jochen Gerz. 11 Ester Shalev and Jochen Gerz.

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The column, which was buried into the ground, initially looked very much like a conventional monument and it is only the act of the artist who positioned the audience at the centre of the work, which in fact became the truly invisible and counter-monumental part of the work. These counter-monuments remained in their form, of the absent presence relatively similar in the following years, continuing with Horst Hoheisel’s Ashrott Brunnen fountain in Kassel, where the artist created an inversion into the ground of the original structure, a fountain that was destroyed. Other work appearing from Renata Stih and Friedrich Schnock, such as the proposal for the competition for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Bushaltestelle, initiated a significant turn away from the monumental object.12 Their memorial took the form of a bus stand and buses that would take people to locations where persecution of Jews took place. They did not win the competition, but their proposal remains among the most interesting examples of counter-monuments. Perhaps one example that stands out in particular, from the group of monuments that are typically described as being representative of the movement, also appeared as a proposal for the Memorial to Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Horst Hoheisel proposed the blowing up of the Brandenburg Gate and produced a mock image of what he imaged the space would look like afterward. This image is more often presented as an artwork rather than as an example of a monument because it remains significantly removed from its potential physical manifestation. This example draws the most parallels with the idea of the monument needing to become something completely different. By removing the potential monument from the system, as its solution is so extreme, it is providing an additional layer of critique of the nation-state and society, and a real move away from monumentality. Such a critique proposes that no monument can undo what had occurred and no number of

12 The competition for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Berlin had a number of interesting proposals that were closer in style and concept to a counter-monument than a monument. The competition lasted longer than expected, beginning in 1994 with a winning proposal that was not well received by the government and followed by a second competition in 1997 which was won by the architect Peter Eisenmann, who had initially worked with the artist Richard Serra on the design, but Serra later pulled out of the competition because of creative differences. James Young describes (in a lecture given on April 29, 2007, a keynote speech for the Witnessing Genocide Symposium) these creative differences as being due to the fact that Eisenmann wanted to make the structure friendlier to the public.

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monuments will ever truly create a space of reconciliation. In this way, I propose that a new form of critique, which presents more possibilities, can appear in the monument that exists as an artwork. Therefore, the artwork becomes yet another shift in monument development. In this way, it can exist out of the structure that sets limits and boundaries that are moved according to which powers are in command.

Memory Politics and Representations of Conflict The field of memory studies has grown and developed to encompass so many different questions, including some key problematics facing ideas of national identity politics. I will be interacting and addressing only those concepts, within the very broad field, which directly engage with ideas of the Europeanisation of memory and its reflections in artistic practices in the region. Looking at the field of memory politics within the EU, the key focus lies in the shared memory of the Holocaust and Second World War and within those views the shared memory of resistance against totalitarianism. As described above, if Europeanisation is understood as a process of integration, which includes defining a shared memory politics, in the case of former Yugoslavia this would prove to be a more complicated process. One of the key concepts within memory politics that clearly outlines some of the problems in the former states is competitive memory. Two or more memories competing for one space of existence. Rothberg (2009) makes an argument for the fact that a multidirectionality is possible, which allows for many memories to exist in one space; however, the existence of competitive memory is undeniable. The memorialisation of one conflict can, in fact, create a denial of another, which points to the problem of prioritising one form of victimhood over another, one cultural identity over another (Obradovi´c 2016). The validation of one commemoration over the other creates tensions and deep-rooted politicisation of the hierarchical structures existing within national identity and society. With this, he points to the questionable nature of memory in its representation of identity. Rothberg’s analysis of the borrowing or adaptation of memory can also be identified in Olick’s observations (2007). Olick clearly defines the root of politics of regret as being a result of the post-Second World War. The legacy of the Holocaust has created a field that epitomises dealing with mass tragedy and trauma, and this has extended into the visual sphere as well, especially in terms of monument building, but also

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Fig. 6.1 Partisan monument (1968) behind monument to Domobranci (2014). Grahovo, Slovenia (Source Author’s archives, 2018)

through representations of violence, war, and trauma in art. Similarly, we could address how this phenomenon has appeared in the building of monuments across former Yugoslavia, whether we are referring to the Slovenian battle between the Domobranci and the Partisans 13 (Fig. 6.1) for monumental representation within the national identity or the debates occurring around the representation of the 1990s Balkan Wars. In both of these cases, we are confronted with forms of competitive memory that enable further aggression and inhibit a visual landscape of national identity to develop. The politics of regret are rooted within the conceptual framework that lies in the interactions occurring between cultural memory and national identities. We can see the lineage of these theoretical frames 13 An example of this can be seen in the small town of Grahovo in Slovenia, which was the site of a Second World War battle between the two mentioned groups. A Partisan monument (obelisk with red star) was built to the victims of Nazism, built in 1968, while the other, unveiled in 2014 to commemorate the deaths of Domobranci, is a stone wall built in front of the obelisk partially obstructing the view.

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which attempt to, in essence, create a dialogue for the understanding of the past. A politics of regret (Olick 2007) is based on the groundwork of social memory studies and the scholars that defined the main ideas of memory work that are used today.14 These are all situated in the frame of the question of how humanity can deal with mass trauma, in which the case of the Holocaust, a central focus of EU memory politics, has become central and a globally transferable representation of absolute horror and the epitome of humanity’s decline. With the occurrence of the 1990s mass killings in Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the Holocaust became a focal point of discussions that led the need for an understanding and examining of methods of representation, of not only the victimhood, trauma, and violence, but also the guilt, blame, and responsibility. One could claim that the memory of the Holocaust provided a first shared idea of a Europeanised memory by providing a linear perpetrator-victim narrative and the desire for peaceful co-existence on the continent. However, in the case of BiH and other former Yugoslav states, neither the Second World War nor the 1990s wars have resulted in these states agreeing upon a shared memory of the events. The complexities of the Second World War only erupted again in the 1990s wars since the period of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was firmly focused in creating a shared memory based on one narrative and building a new identity as part of that through the building of memorials, which will be described in further detail. As stated above much of the contemporary field of study surrounding memory and historical dialogue stems from the German case or looking at how Germany dealt with its post-war situation. As Tony Judt (2000) explains in The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe, the period between 1945 and1948 became a moment not only for reconstruction of Europe but, “the period during which Europe’s post-war memory was molded”. It was during this period that “the absolute German guilt” was formed. This was agreed upon by all the allies and

14 In the introduction of Politics of Regret, Olick describes his path of understanding

of the two main scholars of collective memory, Halbwachs and Durkheim but in his text with Joyce Robbins Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices, he describes the use of collective memory already in the beginning of the century by Hugo von Hoffsmanstahl, who was referring to ancestral lineage of memory.

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certain responsible parties, and nations revised the history of their position during the war. This post-war period also saw a number of atrocities but all these, along with any blame other than that directed towards the Germans, quietly disappeared into the background, with German guilt appearing as the only possible historical narrative. Any other blame was often regarded as a myth or explained as a guise of resistance against the government. This post-war period saw an emergence of artistic shifts but perhaps the most famous thought relating to post-Holocaust culture is Theodor Adorno’s statement that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”. This statement has been reworded so often and used in so many different contexts that too often it is understood as meaning that aesthetic representations or arts in the post-Auschwitz era are immoral. Anthony Rowland (1997) provides a precise analysis of the statement and commentaries surrounding it, in terms of semiotics relating to the translations but also the use of the term “barbaric”. According to Rowland (1997), Adorno was not relating as much to the moral impossibility of the existence of arts after the Holocaust but rather designating that, “aesthetics of post-Holocaust poetry are of a particular ‘barbaric’ character” (Rowland 1997, p. 58). Claiming that the use of the word barbaric is purposely “stylistically and thematically awkward”, as it asserts “the need for ‘suffering’ to express itself: ‘it is now virtually in art alone that (it) can still find its own voice, consolidation’” (Rowland 1997, p. 67). These discussions surrounding representations of suffering and violence, but also how these are to be represented within a national identity increasingly tainted the realm of monument building which was already a sensitive area taking into consideration the scale at which monuments as structures but also art and culture had been used either as a tool of propaganda or as a way of suppressing those that were different. In this way, this rejection or need for rejection of culture in light of the scale of inhumanity that existed is not surprising. Further development or re-establishment on the nature of countermonumental artwork presents itself through a re-examining of the idea of witnessing. The notion of witnessing can be explored through the idea of the artist as witness, an idea that has for long been discussed as a mode of understanding of the artist’s intention. The artist has often been described as witness to history or witness to society, but in this case, we are observing a very specific form of witnessing. Giorgio Agamben delves into the idea of witnessing as experience of the Holocaust, looking at the

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work of Emmanuel Levinas and Primo Levi, both survivors of the Holocaust (Agamben 1999). Agamben describes the nature of Levi’s position as a witness and how witnessing freed him from the so-called survivor’s guilt. Levi wrote because he had to, he became the witness as a mode of survival. Levi was said to have repeated the story of his experience in Auschwitz to anyone that would listen (Tager 1993). He felt his position as a witness helped him find some form of comfort; “I am at peace with myself because I bore witness ” (Agamben 1999, p. 17). The Second World War instead saw a great artistic reaction that began to position the relation to representations of pain, conflict, and violence but also saw the beginning of the question of the artist in the role of the narrator of a story. The wars that followed saw this aspect of the narrator shifting as wars became better documented and gave even the people very far removed the sense of being “part” of the experience. This in turn created a new artistic form which has only in the past years become openly criticised. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed, positions the role of pain in the divide that occurs between the Western observer and the Other in pain. The Westerner creates a relationship in which they become the centre of the pain, “we feel sad about their suffering, an ‘aboutness’ that ensures that they remain the object of ‘our feeling’” (Ahmed 2014, p. 21). As she describes we feel a point of empowerment once we are able to associate a story of the overcoming of pain with “our work, our support”, turning our sadness into a sense of accomplishment. The relationship between the Westerner, who is unaware that they are in fact the cause of that pain, come to alleviate their own “guilt” through the sense of accomplishment when we share stories of an overcoming of pain and suffering by the Other. This relationship is of particular interest in terms of how it presents itself in the political realm, when pain and suffering become identity (Ahmed 2014). In the realm of artistic production, these two cases become very distinct, that of the witness and victim (Agamben, Levi) and the observer (Ahmed). The unjust double standards that occur in current politics definitely taint discussions around memorialisation, commemoration, the building of monuments, and reflections of those built in the past. Examining some key issues surrounding the problematic state of memorialisation in certain former Yugoslav states also instigates a broader questioning of how accepting we are of injustices occurring in different spaces. Ahmed (2014, p. 102) asserts that, “shame becomes not only a mode of recognition of injustices committed against others, but also a form of nation building.

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It is shame that allows us ‘to assert our identity as a nation’”. In the case of a Europeanisation of memory, an assertion that a shared memory is a desired for integration may create more possibilities for certain injustices to be disregarded in the creation of a new European identity.

Monuments and Artworks in the Former Yugoslavia In order to understand how this shift from monument to artwork occurred it might be most pertinent to start with the history of monument building in Yugoslavia as it has recently been portrayed through the photographs that appeared in Jan Kempenaer’s book Spomenik (2010). These photographs provided a mainstream outlet to instigate a dialogue that had previously not existed in the West surrounding these architectural structures. Its interpretation laid them out as modernist brutalist abstractions that have an outer-space-futuristic aesthetic. These monuments, in fact, celebrate the heroes that fought against the Nazi and Fascist regimes that occupied most of the Yugoslavian territory during the Second World War and were meant to portray unity and evoke the rebuilding of identity for the newly constructed Socialist State. During the 1990s wars many of these monuments became the sights of contestation and were attacked, while in the period after the wars they were reactivated for their importance of connecting to a shared memory with Europe, and the Second World War in particular. This style which remains a fascination still today, referred by Gal Kirn as “socialist modernism”, appeared across Yugoslavia between the 1960s and 1980s.15 Kirn emphasises the emergence of symbols such as 15 Gal Kirn (2014). In his essay, Kirn points out that memorialisation in Yugoslavia started with transnational monuments, which can be divided into three aesthetic types. The third type developed in 1960s when Yugoslavia began to feel the first effects of liberalism, such as didn’t exist before and were not meant to be part of the socialism that was being practiced. With growing gaps in social classes, and unemployment, these artists faced the task of creating monuments that were meant to speak of a future of unity, not solely based on the victimisation of the past but rather evoke a thought in the audience of a bright future. Kirn claims that with these monuments, which explored a more socialist modernist aesthetic, many of which were built on the exact sites of the events, which they commemorated, and were larger than life in size, some expanding into whole parks, spaces for people to gather became the true first counter-monuments, which later on James E. Young described in his observation of developments of memorialisation in Germany.

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flowers, fists, stars, as well as more fantastical abstract forms. Many of these monuments are also found in nature, away from urban life. “The monuments are staged within the beautiful landscape, while they in turn become ‘agents’ that stage the landscape surrounding them, making it more grandiose. Nature and the sculptural object enter into a dialogue, raising questions about the relationship between humans and the environment” (Kirn 2014, p. 318). Furthermore, Kirn refers to how the idea of the counter-monument already appeared with these types of monuments: […] they represented a productive upgrade in late Modernism that experimented with form while also inscribing the emancipatory promise of the partisan past in less visible ways into their composition. For this reason, these monuments cannot be separated from their historical context as mere exemplars of the international style of ‘pure’ artworks; even less can we read them as anti-systemic or anti-communist artistic gestures. I would suggest instead an alternative way of describing their radicality; they were modernist counter-monuments of and to Revolution. These modernist counter-monuments celebrated something that was won by partisans in the past, but only on condition that this process continue to exert its emancipatory universalist promise in the future. (Kirn 2014, p. 325)

These developments of the monument in the period of SFRY indicate that there were significant advancements in memory politics. These shifts in the form of the monument may have predicted that a fascination with memory and national identity would remain a consistent point of discussion among artists and intellectuals in the region, particularly following the collapse of the East-West divide and the deconstruction of Yugoslavia when the loss of a national identity created a void that needed to be filled, politically and culturally. The memory of the Holocaust and Second World War was an important part of identity in SFRY, as much as it was the focus of memory politics for the rest of the continent. There was however, a need for a shared identity in the often described second Yugoslavia, or Tito’s Yugoslavia, which instigated a freezing of certain memories of the Second World War. By doing so inter-ethnical and political divides that were present during the War only began reappearing after the death of Tito and subsequently during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s (Karge 2009). The dissolution of SFRY led to destruction and partial destruction of many of these monuments and a resurfacing of political divisions. The divide of

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Yugoslavia induced the need for a new memory politics, for nation and state-building purposes. The construction of new entities in the region, saw some of the states (Slovenia, followed by Croatia) begin the EU integration process. This integration process impacted memory politics in the entire region. A reactivation of the Holocaust remembrance saw reinterpretations of Second World War experiences in light of new political situations. To align with the EU means also aligning with what are seen as common struggles against totalitarianism, which may not have been as clearly defined in respect to the 1990s wars and their reactivation of Second World War divisions. This process of Europeanisation of memory affected how these spomeniki are being employed to interact with Second World War memory in the region and have become a representational image of the region. This interaction with the monument as a structure has also affected the relationship and interest in commemoration and memorialisation of the events of the 1990s wars, which remain complex and unresolved in many spaces leading to creative solutions in thinking about memory and its position in the development of nation and state identity.

Artworks as Monuments: How Artistic Practices Inform Us About the Europeanisation of Memory This section of the essay will examine how the rich history of monument building and collective memory in the region, led many artists and artistic collectives (particularly focusing on groups in BiH and Serbia) to interact with highly contested spaces and instigate discussions surrounding new national identities, and by doing so presenting potential “ruptures” that a Europeanisation of memory may cause. The artworks that will be addressed pose questions of communication, interpretation, and contextualisation of certain events and also refer to the hierarchy that occurs in memory work, which extends into cultural spaces. The artists or collectives, adapting artistic methodologies, clearly point to fear or uncertainty about control of the narratives and their interpretation. Should we fear that a Europeanisation of memory will enable the disappearance or reinterpretation narratives that have complex memory politics? This section will point towards how the selected practices have considered the complexities of these memory politics by employing methodologies that I refer to as being of a counter-monumental nature, and how this in effect is highlighting why a Europeanisation of memory may be a particularly complicated or beneficial process.

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One of the first collectives closely interacting with the topic of the monument and addressing the complexities of dealing with memory politics in the region was Grupa Spomenik. Grupa Spomenik (Monument Group), which was conceived in 2002 as a discussion group that focused on questioning forms of memorialisation in former Yugoslavia and whether the state can take on the responsibility of building monuments that can represent the victims while also presenting insight into their own role in the violence.16 In this way, the group also worked on mapping out relations of power. It was an attempt to further understand how to build a culture of collective memorialisation and instigate methods of implementing a unified but multivocal history, which in itself could be considered as among the leading ideas of the counter-monument. One of the founding members, Milica Tomi´c, also went on to develop another initiative that may have appeared as a form of activism rather than an artistic endeavour. Four Faces of Omarska is a collective that observes the lack of support for regional memorialisation of the former concentration camp Omarska in north-western Bosnia and Herzegovina, the region of Republika Srpska.17 The region was the location of numerous other camps in the early 1990s and remains a contested area regarding memory politics. The group Four Faces of Omarska, although not defining themselves as an art collective, apply artistic strategies in order to implement their ideas. The Group are adamant that their role in these spaces was always and remains only to assist local initiatives in the presentation and realisation of their work. Coming into these spaces as outsiders from Serbia, which is often viewed as a positive figure in Republika Srpska, the members initially had certain privileges. In this way, they were able to perform a role that others could not. In this way, they were able to create some shifts in power dynamics. Four Faces of Omarska continue to work in the area of Prijedor and its members attend the commemoration ceremony which takes place each year on August 6 in the former iron mine [in Omarska] that was used as a concentration camp during the war and was later bought by steel giant ArcelorMittal. ArcelorMittal had initially committed to erecting a memorial but as none has been built, hundreds of people gather every

16 Grupa Spomenik (Monument Group) functioned between 2002–2010. 17 See Vuˇckovac (this volume) for a detailed discussion of this case.

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year on the designated commemoration day and become a mass of bodies forming a monument.18 The performative action is created by the gathering and formation of a critical mass that has come to commemorate and make its presence noticeable in the only way possible. Although not regarded as an artistic intervention, the specific visual formation, recalling other performative actions can hardly be dismissed as not being of an artistic nature. This “monument” by placing discourse as the focus in its mode of functioning, implies to its counter-monumental nature. The counter-monumentality is also further instated through resistance against a forgetting that is supported by regional politics. Since the politics of forgetting are being employed rather than the multifocal narration of the past, we are being confronted with a situation in which local initiatives and artists become conduits for a multifocal memory. This type of instability in memory politics may benefit from the process of the Europeanisation of memory, in which an “outside” actor will be creating discourse and aiding in a stable resolution that will assist the community that is unable to commemorate in the public space (Fig. 6.2). Artists and groups of artists or collectives have in fact employed many different strategies to question and challenge the official memory politics and knowledge on the past. Some of these address the issue through an activist approach as is seen with Four Faces of Omarska, others have done this through subtle implications (Miladinovi´c) or humour (Shoba) as will be seen later in this section. This act of challenging memory politics in the artistic realm indicates that there is an unquestionable interest for memory politics to remain a focus of discussions between government and civilian population rather than seeing an authoritarian top-down approach to implementing positions. These different artistic practices also, some more implicitly than others, address how Europeanisation may affect memory politics in the region. One of the remaining members of Four Faces of Omarska, Vladimir Miladinovi´c, observes historical shifts and moments of contestation through engagement with archives and employs his practice as a tool for questioning ways in which memory politics are considered in the region. His practice approaches the intricate redrawing of specific archives and documents as a laborious performative gesture in which the artist creates 18 The notion of the mass of bodies forming an annual monument was a notion that came out of a discussion between myself and Four Faces of Omarska member Srd-an Hercigonja in an interview, 19 March 2017.

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Fig. 6.2 Commemoration ceremony for the victims of the concentration camp, located at the Omarska iron ore mine. Omarska, BiH (Source Author’s archives, 2014)

a document of the archive and prevents its erasure but also becomes the witness. Miladinovi´c’s selection of archives and historical research leads him to recreate stories that are forgotten and suppressed, giving them a new perspective. His most recent work involves engagement with diaries of war criminal Ratko Mladi´c. These conversations were analysed by prosecutors at the International Court Tribunal of Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. Miladinovi´c, though not explicitly, points to ICTY and its questionable position as a “fair” legal system. The Trials are often viewed as not being capable of producing a desired outcome since as Theodor Meron, President of the Hague Tribunals, pointed out, albeit in a positive sense, they address the individualisation of guilt (Baši´c 2007).19 This was recognised as one of the problems of the trials; individual guilt was to stand in place of collective guilt. Miladinovi´c’s project also addresses

19 Theodor Meron, quoted in Baši´c.

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the perception of these trials in Serbia and within Europe. As full cooperation of Serbia in the ICTY Trials was part of the EU’s conditionality policy, it created significant political instabilities among those in support of defending the criminals and those supporting their extradition. The artist’s work began in Belgrade but with an invitation to work with Henry Redwood, a member of the research group Art & Reconciliation based across three prestigious London Universities, the artist began exploring the archives in a collaborative manner. Jointly selecting the form of interaction with the pages of the diary, the duo addressed the topics of ICTY and its effectiveness, the remaining unaddressed issues of political corruption in Serbia, and suppression of the crimes that were committed. The artwork titled Undiscernible has Miladinovi´c intricately copying by drawing the bureaucratic documents that originate from the archives. In a performative action, he has spent months analysing these documents and archives to delicately create a mass of beautifully constructed drawings. The artist has spoken of the need for a particular presentation of the work but more importantly the relevance of what he hopes the work will accomplish, breaking the boundaries that are created by institutions, nation-states, and International Tribunals, whereas people are not given the opportunity to partake in engaging with these documents of history. Miladinovi´c’s practice considers the problematics of memory work, shaping the more complex nuances of the historical narrative and presents these across different fields, opening debates in both International Relations, contemporary art, and current politics.20 These two different examples while both should be considered as monumentartworks function in different modes, one bringing the audience to the location and creating context in that way and the other taking out a segment of the narrative in different aesthetic and a singular voice (Figs. 6.3 and 6.4). In the next paragraphs, I focus on ideas of raising awareness about the past in all of its nuances and how these have pointed to other effects of Europeanised memory politics. Some of these other initiatives work somewhat in between the spaces of activism and art (similarly to Grupa Spomenik and Four Faces of Omarska), and are primarily focused on observing memories that are on the brink of being forgotten. One such group is Jer me se ti c´ e (Because it concerns me), some of whose members

20 This information was extracted from an interview with Miladinovi´c, 3 October 2018.

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Fig. 6.3 “Notebook” Ink on paper, Series 1/400, 30 × 40 cm each, 2019. Image copyright Vladimir Miladinovi´c (Source Courtesy of the Artist)

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Fig. 6.4 “Notebook” Ink on paper, Series 6/400, 30 × 40 cm each, 2019. Image copyright Vladimir Miladinovi´c (Source Courtesy of the Artist)

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I met in Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina. One of the members Emir Hodž i´c, also a member of Stop Genocide Denial (SGD), prepared what some described to me as an “unforgettable performance” which I might refer to as being of counter-monumental aesthetics. It was the 20th anniversary since the beginning of the dissolution of the camps in the area that Hodži´c prepared a performance where he re-enacted a scene from what a situation in the camp was like. Dressed up as a soldier he asked former prisoners to re-enact their roles of the prisoners they had been 20 years before that. The performance was emotional for everyone. Hodž i´c, along with activist group Jer Me Se Ti c´ e, was also involved in a project where a concrete monument was illegally placed in cities where no monuments exist to the victims of the Balkan wars.21 This monumentartwork was removed by the police and eventually, the group retrieved their monument only to place it in another town. As Hodž i´c described, the monument had the words “To all the victims of the war” inscribed on it, recalling the work of conceptual artist Braco Dimitrijevi´c. Dimitrijevi´c’s New Monuments, stands next to the History Museum in Sarajevo and alongside the ICAR Canned Beef Monument by Nebojša Šeri´c Shoba. Dimitrijevi´c’s work, a stone plinth with an inscription on all four sides in different languages “UNDER THIS STONE THERE IS A MONUMENT TO THE VICTIMS OF THE WAR AND COLD WAR”. Shoba’s monument some metres away is an oversized replica of a food can similar to those that were brought by soldiers into Sarajevo during the siege. The inscription reads, “Monument to the International Community from the grateful citizens of Sarajevo”, and is meant to be an ironic response to the fact that many of the cans that were given to people were expired; some even dating back to the Vietnam War, therefore people weren’t actually able to eat them.22 With these examples we notice distinctly different modes of approaching a complex memory structure that exists in the region which assesses: who should be delegating what is to be remembered and how this should be done. Shoba’s ICAR monument is a good example of some of the memory dilemmas a Europeanisation encounter, many narratives that different local communities desire to remember are complex and contested (Figs. 6.5 and 6.6).

21 I never found an image of this monument, but it was described to me during a conversation with Hodži´c in 2014 in Prijedor. 22 Reuters Online (April 26, 2007).

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Fig. 6.5 Nebojša Šeri´c Shoba, Monument to the International Community by the Grateful Citizens of Sarajevo, 2007, Sarajevo BiH (Source Author’s archives, 2016)

The Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA), along with other organisations, has been one of the primary sites for discussions of monument building since the war. One such project that looked at the development of the monument in the post-Balkan War era was the De/ construction of Monument by SCCA. The project was composed of discussions and lectures but also commissioned artworks. The projects culminated in four monuments or rather monument-artworks, two of them are mentioned above. The third monument placed in Sarajevo plays on a similar note to Dimitrijevi´c’s. It is a stone cube, by artists, Nermina Omerbegovi´c and Aida Paši´c with the inscription: “I THINK, I HEAR, I SEE, I TALK”. Perhaps recalling Descartes famous phrase: “I think therefore I am”. The fourth monument placed in Mostar differentiates itself in

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Fig. 6.6 Braco Dimitrijevi´c, New Monuments, 2006, Sarajevo BiH (Source Author’s archives, 2016)

that it more literally touches on the topic of a lack of collective memories regarding the war. The monument was a solution and commentary on the fact that the villains and heroes in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina changed from one to the other just as quickly as one passed from one entity to the next, when going through the country. In light of that, Ivan Fioli´c decided that building a monument to Bruce Lee would embody the problematics of the monument building culture, building a universal character of power that was recognisable to all and represented the figure of a hero to everyone regardless their ethnicity. Bruce Lee became one of many popular culture figures that were placed throughout the region. This artwork-monument solution, more than any others, speaks to the effects of a Europeanisation of memory in the region. As the complexity of memory politics in the region is so overwhelming, attempts to create

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a shared memory may, in fact, result in the suppression of many other memories.

Conclusion: European Memory as an Inclusive-Multidirectional Memory This chapter observed how memory politics in the region of former Yugoslavia are affected by EU integration, in particular the Europeanisation of memory. This aspect was initially observed by looking back at the history of memory politics in the region, in order to present their relevance and point out how they are being addressed and assessed by different artistic practices which have taken over the role of the monument. The main finding in the chapter is that alternative modes to “the monument”, which I have presented as appearing in the form of different artistic interventions, primarily focus on two complexities within the memory politics of the region: the inability of identifying a unified narrative, and regional implementation of the politics of forgetting. It is particularly the memorialisation of the events of the 1990s wars and Second World War which are being addressed by artists because certain narratives continue to remain contested. This aspect of contestation and politics of forgetting allows me to also introduce the idea of the countermonument-artwork as being a representative form of dealing with this particular topic in the region. Through the mode of adapting the idea of the counter-monument as a practice of enabling discourse surrounding memory, the artworks and practices mentioned, create a dialogue which addresses what a shared Europeanised memory should not dismiss and the process that it should involve. The position of the artist undeniably remains that of a witness which speaks a language that is for the most part trans-global however not in the case of the histories and stories that remain mostly excluded from the Europeanised memory (or other Western memory formations). In this way, these monument-artworks continue creating new paths for communication through shifts of the language enabling engagement that attempts to avoid a forceful unity that might exclude certain narratives. Instead, they create potential space for voices that would otherwise remain silenced. The monument-artwork, by remaining outside of boundaries of official memory work, is capable of critically examining the problems that are not being addressed by the national and international

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bodies responsible, as is the case in Omarska or the remaining war crimes that remain unresolved. Counter-monumental aesthetics which are based on the premise of discourse and positioning of the viewer as the “carrier” and interpreter, allow for a multidirectionality to exist (Rothberg). A Europeanised memory seen as multicultural space, that allows for critical observation, analysis, and assessment of history, draws from fluidity.

References Adjaye Associates and Ron Arad Architects win UK Holocaust Memorial International Design Competition. (2017). UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation and Cabinet Office. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/adjaye-associ ates-and-ron-arad-architexts-win-uk-holocaust-memorial-international-designcompetition. Accessed 12 September 2018. Agamben, G. (1999). Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). New York: Zone Books. Ahmed, S. (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Baši´c, S. (2007). Bosnian Society on the Path to Justice, Truth, and Reconciliation. In M. Fischer (Ed.), Peacebuilding and Civil Society in BosniaHerzegovina—Ten Years After Dayton (pp. 357–385). Munster: Lit Verlag. Connerton, P. (2008). Seven Types of Forgetting. Memory Studies, 59. http:// mss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/59. Accessed 12 September 2018. Herscher, A., & Weizman, E. (2011). Architecture, Violence, Evidence. Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism, 8, 111–123. Holocaust Memorial International Design Competition Display. (2017). Victoria and Albert Museum.https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/91J6rY1m/holocaustmemorial-international-design-competition-display. https://www.vam.ac.uk/ event/5qj6yYq3/holocaust-memorial-design-competition-september-2017. Accessed 12 September 2018. Judt, T. (2000). The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe. In I. Deák, J. T. Gross, & T. Judt (Eds.), The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (pp. 293–325). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kamanzi, B. (2015). The Postcolonialist. “Rhodes Must Fall”—Decolonisation Symbolism—What Is Happening at UCT, South Africa? The Postcolonialist. Karge‚ H. (2009). Mediated Remembrance: Local Practices of Remembering the Second World War in Tito’s Yugoslavia. European Review of History-Revue

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Europeenne D Histoire, 16, 49–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/135074808026 55394. Kempenaers, J. (2010). Spomenik. Amsterdam: Roma Publication. Kirn, G. (2014). Transnationalism in Reverse: From Yugoslav to Post-Yugoslav Memorial Sites. In C. De Cesari & A. Rigney (Eds.), Transnational Memory (pp. 313–338). Berlin: De Gruyter. Nietzsche, F. (2005). The Use and Abuse of History. New York: Cosimo (Originally published by Liberal Arts Press Book in 1873). Obradovi´c, S. (2016). Don’t Forget to Remember: Collective Memory of the Yugoslav Wars in Present-Day Serbia. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 22(1), 12–18. Olick, J. K. (2007). The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility. New York: Routledge. Radaelli, C. (2004). Europeanisation: Solution or Problem? European Integration Online Papers, 8(16), 3. http://eiop.or.at/eiop/texte/2004-016a.htm. Accessed 20 February 2020. Reuters. (2007, April 6). Bosnians Raise Monument to Canned Beef. Reuters Online. https://uk.reuters.com/article/oukoe-uk-bosnia-mon ument-can/bosnians-raise-monument-to-canned-beef-idUKL0657786020 070406. Accessed 12 September 2018. Rhodes Must Fall Oxford Wordpress. https://rmfoxford.wordpress.com/ about/. Accessed 12 September 2018. Rothberg, M. (2009). Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rowland, A. (1997). Re-reading “Impossibility” and “Barbarism”: Adorno and Post-Holocaust Poetics. Critical Survey, 9, 57–69. https://www.jstor.org/sta ble/41556053?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. Accessed 11 September 2018. Shalev, E., & Gerz, J. (1986). Das Harburger Mahnmal Gegen Faschismus/The Harburg Monument Against Fascism. Shalev Gerz. http://www.shalev-gerz. net/?portfolio=monument-against-fascism. Accessed 11 September 2018. Tager, M. (1993). Primo Levi and the Language of Witness. Criticism: Fin de Siecle Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Literature, 35, 265–288. Tello, V. (2016). Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art. London: Bloomsbury. Vattimo, G. (1991). End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Walasek, H., Carlton, R., Hadzimuhamedovic, A., Perry, V., & Wik, T. (2015). Bosnia and Destruction of Cultural Heritage. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing. Young, J. E. (1993). The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meanings. New Haven: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 7

“Skopje 2014” Reappraised: Debating a Memory Project in North Macedonia Naum Trajanovski

Abstract The “Skopje 2014 project”, an umbrella term covering the 137 memorial objects erected in North Macedonia’s capital city of Skopje in the course of the last decade, has provoked a massive debate within the domestic public. While envisioned to mirror the country’s Euro-Atlantic integrational agenda, the “project” was predominantly recognised as a fragmentation manifesto in inter- and intra-ethnic terms. This chapter examines the Macedonian public debate over the “project”, mapping three particular phases of the discursive development : (1) before, (2) after the 2016–2017 governmental change and (3) in the wake of the recent Greco-Macedonian and Bulgarian–Macedonian bilateral agreements. The chapter reviews the corpus of written materials on “Skopje 2014”, tracing the scopes of the public debates, the major discursive agents, as well as the critical loci of contestations and politicisation.

N. Trajanovski (B) Graduate School for Social Research, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland © The Author(s) 2021 A. Miloševi´c and T. Trošt (eds.), Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4_7

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Keywords “Skopje 2014” · Skopje · North Macedonia · Memory politics

Introduction The former southernmost Yugoslav state, today’s Republic of North Macedonia, was unarguably successful in encircling the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and establishing state-institutions after the declared independence in September 1991.1 The “fragile inter-ethnic balance” (Spaskovska 2010, p. 2) and the regional political contestations in the course of the 1990s, however, led to a nine-month armed conflict between the Macedonian forces and the ethnic-Albanian radicals in 2001. The insurgence was settled with the so-called Ohrid Framework Agreement, a peace treaty which contributed to institutionalising state’s multicultural and multiconfessional reality. Elsewhere I argued that the sociopolitical developments during the 1990s and early 2000s pushed aside the public and expert debates on the official memory politics in post-Yugoslav Macedonia (Trajanovski 2020). As a brief illustration, the first Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation—Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (IMRO-DPMNU) [mk. Vnatrešna makedonska revolucionerna organizacija—Demokratska partija za makedonsko nacionalno edinstvo]-led government (1998–2002), even so holding a historical revisionist agenda as a political party, failed in translating it as a re-invisioned post-Communist memory policy. On the contrary, its second, ten-year rule (2006–2016), will be mostly identified with takeovers in the cultural and memory landscape. The present chapter thus looks at the most noted takeover of such kind, the so-called “project Skopje 2014” and its multidirectionality in the Macedonian public discourse. “Skopje 2014”, an umbrella term, stands for DPMNU’s political initiative of erecting 137 memorial objects in Skopje during the 2010s. It was announced with great pomp on 4 February 2010, as a short video on the public broadcaster and since that point, appeared as a focal point and a critical

1 The state name, as well as the subsequent ethnic and national adjectives, is brought in accordance with the 2018 Final Agreement for the Settlement on the Name Issue (2018).

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locus of contestation in the Macedonian public discourse on state’s international prospects, official memory, identity politics and public finance management. While the “project” envisioned to vest the capital city with European identity and reaffirming the national identity, its divisive potentials were immediately recognised by the domestic and foreign observers. In brief, the erstwhile North Macedonia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, DPMNU’s Antonio Milošoski, stressed that “Skopje 2014” reaffirms the Macedonian identity (Popovska 2015, p. 97), while the “project’s” aesthetic arrangements were depicted with a reference to the vernacular architectural style (Šulovik´ 2018) and as a national attachment to the global trend of “exasˇ peration from the modernism” (Cauševski 2014). In one of the earliest accounts on the political incentive for “Skopje 2014”, DPMNU’s Nikola Gruevski, the former Prime Minister of North Macedonia, claimed that the initial idea for establishing the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle for Independence, one of the focal objects of the “project”, came while touring Belgium in the late 2000s when given a leaflet on the initiative to establish a “museum of the victims of the communist in Brussels” (2012). On the other hand, the initial scholarly reactions highlighted “project’s” tendency to fragment the inter-ethnic core and aggravate North Macedonia’s international relations (Koteska 2011; Janev 2011; McEvoy 2011; Vangeli 2011; Pajaziti 2012; Dimova 2013; Majewski 2013; Sadiku and Kolozova 2013; Angelovska‚ D. 2014; Mattioli 2014a, b; Koziura 2014). Most recently, the expert discourses shifted to “Skopje 2014” latent functions, such as the backlash of the nation-building process (Popovska 2015; Graan 2016; Janev 2016; Majewski 2016; Risteski 2017; Véron 2017), its ongoing mobilising potentials (Clapp 2016; Milevska 2016; Takovski 2016; Stefoska and Stojanov 2017; Grcheva 2018; Trajanovski 2018) and its position within the Skopje’s urbanscape (Spaskovska 2014; Cvitkovi´c ˇ and Kline 2017; Janev 2017; Pojani 2017; Dimova 2018; Camprag 2 2018). 2 The rediscovery of Skopje’s post-earthquake (1963) modernism also signals certain exasperation from “Skopje 2014” within the foreign discourse. Herein, a recent series of exhibition, starting with “Skopje – Macedonian architecture in context” (organised by the Viennese Ringturm Galerie from 12 October to 17 November 2017), MoMA’s “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980” (set on 15 July 2018–13 January 2019) and “Skopje – The City of Solidarity”, which was displayed in Krakówbased International Cultural Centre from 2 July 2019 to 20 October 2019, have the city’s post-earthquake reconstruction in its primary focus. On a different note, “Skopje 2014” is

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The present chapter builds upon this critical discourse and aims at mapping the Macedonian public debate on “Skopje 2014”—an aspect which was identified to be missing in the scholarship. Since its inception, “Skopje 2014” and the objects affiliated with the “project” were often instrumentalised for political purposes, provoking, as well, a set of formal initiatives and informal practices in the public space. Herein, I identify three particular phases of the Macedonian public debate’s discursive development over “Skopje 2014”—(1) before-, (2) after the 2016– 2017 governmental change and (3) in the wake of the recent GrecoMacedonian and Bulgarian–Macedonian bilateral agreements (discussed in the next section). I argue that this tripartite model of assessing the public debate on the “project” contributes to a better understanding of the scope and the major agents of the debate, as well as the critical loci of discursive polarisation. I employ multimodal critical discourse analysis (Machin 2013) on the source materials related to the case study and narrative policy framework analysis (Gray and Jones 2016) for defining the policy measures’ narrativity regarding “Skopje 2014” from the early 2010s until nowadays. In addition, I approach this span, from the official launch of “Skopje 2014” up until the most recent bilateral agreements and the 2020 parliamentary elections as a defined period of time, anticipative, as it will be argued in the final part, for the “project’s” future.3 The public debate on “Skopje 2014” is to be collocated with the state’s EU accession process, as I aim to position the case study within the emerging debate on European memory (for an overview of the debate, see Macdonald 2013; Bond et al. 2017).4 The next section provides a still subject of deconstructive curatorial readings—inter alia, the Macedonian entry to the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture, “Freeingspace” (Velevska and Velevski 2018), the Warsaw-based “Alexander” (Siarek 2018) and “Pomnik” (Matyjanka 2019) exhibitions, as ˇ well as the most recent Skopje-based art project, “Vision Skopje” (Causidis 2019). 3 The given time period is also defined by the ministerial tenure of Robert Alag‘ ozovski— an independent publisher and a technocratic governmental solution—from May 2017 to May 2018. Asaf Ademi replaced Alag‘ ozovski on the ministerial position and slightly after his appointment in June 2018, announced that the Ministry will remain on the same course regarding “Skopje 2014” as its predecessors (Nova Makedonija 2018). In June 2019, Husni Ismaili was appointed as a new Minister of Culture. 4 An aspect which was not mentioned in the most recent policy papers on North Macedonia in its post-DPMNU constellation (see Bandovic 2018; Bechev 2018; Markovikj and Nechev 2018, the 2018 Policy Memo by the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities Skopje and Armakolas et al. 2019). The EU integrational framework is thus understood as a political mean of “uploading, disseminating and formation of collective memories and

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brief overview of the major events regarding “Skopje 2014”—starting from the most recent ones—which will be followed with an analysis of the public debate.

A Joke---Revised: Background and Contexts ´ One can easily note that the removal of Andon Lazov Janev—Koseto’s monument (22 February 2018) has harked back a viral joke from the early 2010s, depicting the almost twelve dozen objects related to “Skopje 2014” as part of a temporal exhibition which is to be allocated within the ´ territory of North Macedonia in the forthcoming period. Koseto’s monument, even so just one of the “Skopje 2014” tagged monuments, can be seen as paradigmatic in terms of the historical narrative promoted by the second DPMNU government.5 The monument, portraying one of the most protuberant MRO’s assassinators “in action” in front of the Skopje’s Primary Court, was replaced with a Ginko tree, the symbol of human rights, and despite the public announcements, the early morning removal ´ occurred without any groupist reaction (Kerimi 2018).6 The “Panoramic Wheel” and its supporting bridge over the Vardar River, as well as the Mother Teresa’s Memorial, on the other hand, while denounced to be

identities”, facilitated by the EU institutions, “that reflect and guide collective moral and political attitudes towards the past” (Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018). 5 MRO was established in Salonika (November 1893) by six members of the Macedonian intelligentsia, who opted for an armed struggle and resistance against the Ottoman rule on the Macedonian territory. What is today known as IMRO–DPMNU is a political organisation envisioned by the Macedonian political diaspora, with its main ideological matrix moulded around the anti-regime sentiments of the first-generation refugees from the post-Second World War Balkans. Herein, the party was recognised as “anti-communist as it is nationalist” in the first years of the Macedonian independence (Poulton 1995, p. 207). 6 Several other objects affiliated with “Skopje 2014” had faced the Koseto’s ´ monument fate—few were removed in the course of 2018 and 2019, as inter alia, the Carousels from the central square of “Macedonia” (Antevska 2018c), the Boris Sarafov monument, which was reported to be “vanished” (Antevska 2018b) and the metal fence which was dismantled from the front of the Macedonian governmental building (Muratov 2019), or stopped from further construction, as the so-called “Spanish Steps” (Fokus 2018b).

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halted, are projected to be finalised in the forthcoming period.7 Furthermore, the “Warrior on a horse” monument was withdrawn but only from the Skopje International Airport in the course of the intensified negotiations with the neighbouring Republic of Greece, alongside the airport’s name and the name of the highway connecting the two states (both previously titled “Alexander the Great”). The renaming initiative was recounted as “concrete measures” of the Macedonian government on its “intentions to resolve the major bilateral disputes and open the path for EU and NATO perspectives” (Maricik and Armakolas 2018, p. 6), with the EU’s integration revalidated as one of North Macedonia’s “major strategic goals” (Trajanovski et al. 2013, p. 109).8 Despite sounding anticipatory, the “iconoclastic” joke is clearly out of its primary context—the set of ethnocentric archaeological, linguistic and mnemonic measures from the mid-2000s, which alongside the Greek veto over North Macedonia’s full-NATO-membership (April 2008), launched the peculiar process of promoting the ethno-Macedonian national past as a top-scale political priority—with “Skopje 2014” as its particular finale.9 In this context, “Skopje 2014” can be perceived as a reproach to the Greek veto for North Macedonia’s Euro-Atlantic prospective and a direct reaction to the so-called “name dispute”—a bilateral issue between the neighbouring North Macedonia and Greece on the official usage of the 7 The bridge was announced to be finished without any set of “baroque elements” (Antevska 2018e)—one of the “project’s” major differentia specificae. On a different note, even so the Mother Teresa’s Memorial was pinpointed by the “Skopje 2014 Commission”, discussed below in the text, as an object which should be demolished due to its interference with “a series of laws, legal system and the rule of law”, the new mandataries have announced a public competition for its “transformation” in mid-February 2019. The announcement was followed by a resignation of Martin Panovski, one of the members of the “Skopje 2014 Commission”, further stating that the “new government did intend to undo the damage” of “Skopje 2014” (Antevska 2019; Trpkovski 2019). 8 In a similar manner, the Skopje City Stadium was renamed “Telekom Arena” in 2016, replacing the “Arena Phillip the Second of Macedonia” name—official for a decade. In 2017, the name “National Arena Phillip the Second of Macedonia” [mk. Nacionalna Arena Filip Vtori Makedonski] was returned after the termination of the agreement with “Macedonian Telekom”, while in April 2019, the stadium was finally renamed as Toše Proeski Arena, after the Macedonian pop musician (Fazlagic 2019). 9 Since 2006, and up until 2008, under the banner of a “Macedonian Revival” [mk. Makedonska prerodba], the reformed DPMNU had put the cultural politics high on the political agenda. The process was initialised with the reconstruction of the pre-earthquake National Theatre, as well as the construction of a Mother Theresa Memorial House and a new building of the Macedonian Philharmonic Orchestra (Graan 2010; Risteski 2016).

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name “Macedonia”. Its pre-history can be traced back to the early twentieth century, while it was reignited after the Yugoslav dissolution and the formation of the Republic of Macedonia in 1991. The “politically motivated infrastructure project” of “Skopje 2014” was thus traced as a major rationale for the resistance of granting international loans to North Macedonia in the early and the mid-2010s (Armakolas et al. 2019, p. 9). Moreover, the “project” was recognised as a “trigger for protests and inter-ethnic resentment” in the European Commission’s 2010 Progress Report for erstwhile former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (EC 2010, p. 21), while the “irregularities” with the public contracts granting in regards to the “Skopje 2014” were also mapped by the 2014 Progress Report (EC 2014, p. 25). Notwithstanding, after the acquisition of an accession candidate status in 2005, North Macedonia was successful in attaining positive general evaluations by the EC, yet, failing to get a date for the start of the EU accession talks. Most recently, the governmental change from 2016, the landslide local elections victory (October 2017) and the presidential elections win (May 2019), established the centre-left SDUM as a main political factor in the ethnic-Macedonian political camp.10 One of the major assets of the change was the very treatment of “Skopje 2014 project” itself, with SDUM taking a hard line against the “project” during the long episodes of campaigning in both 2016 and 2017 (Vojnovska 2018). The initial SDSM’s governing period was also designated with the set of proactive bilateral policies, resulting in the Bulgarian–Macedonian Friendship Treaty (BMFT) from August 2017, and further on, the Greco-Macedonian Name Agreement (GMNA) from June 2018. Both the accords, amidst the focus on the bilateral partnerships, seek to enhance the neighbouring cooperation by a joint revision of history textbooks (BMFT & GMNA) and public memorials (GMNA). From a present perspective, one can argue that the “Skopje 2014 project” went far beyond the meaning of its constitutive elements. The undertaking has arguably “left” the territorial area of Skopje in multiform fashions, has almost nothing to do with the referral year when it was supposed to be finished—2014, and finally, has been questioned as

10 The Social-Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDUM) emerged from the Communist Alliance–Party for Democratic Changes (SKM-PDP) in the early 1990s, superseding the League of Communists of Macedonia (1943–1990).

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a single project in various occasions. It is a commonplace that the “project” was never legally defined as such, the author(s) remain unclear, as well as its final cost (Grˇceva 2013; Angelovska‚ B. 2014). In addition, the construction activities were far from ceased in 2014—a local investigative news network counted a total number of 137 objects associated with the project up until 2017, while later that year, the new city major, Petre Šilegov, has announced the suspension of constructing 95 baroque facades in the central area (Fokus 2018a). Moreover, a depth of 2.4 million Macedonian Denars (approximately 40,000 Euro) linked to the construction of “Skopje 2014” was identified on a press conference by the Macedonian Ministry of Finances in July 2017, while the partially made “Officers’ Hall”, a restored object at the very city square, the “Panoramic Wheel Bridge”, the new building of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts and the “new classicist palazzo” of JSC “Macedonian Power Plants” (ELEM) are to be finished by the new mandataries (Antevska 2018e; Build 2018). The “project’s” most protruding memorial undertakings are also functioning as discursive centres for dissemination of the assigned historical narratives—a certain function which extends beyond the city’s administration. The aforementioned Museum of the Macedonian Struggle is significant in this manner, as it set a criterion for the forthcoming constructing trend of IMRO-centred narrative museums across the state.11 The thematic structure of “Skopje 2014” was also reflected in a state-sponsored project of documentary series, launched in the early 2010s and active until the governmental change.12 Finally, the political initiative to “secure a new face of the town” (Popovska 2015, p. 97), as phrased by the former 11 A museum of the “Activists of VMRO from Štip and the Štip region (1893–1934)”

[Muzej na dejcite na VMRO od Štip i Štipsko] was opened in 2014, located in Novo Selo, Štip. The museum is displaying VMRO activists from the region, holds a permanent exhibition of 11 wax figures, while “photographs, authentic items, documents, military equipment and weapons” are presented in seven exhibition rooms. Further on, a memorial house dedicated to the Tatarˇcev family was opened in Resen in 2016. The memorial site has Hristo Tatarˇcev, a Macedonian revolutionary and one of the “founding fathers” of VMRO in its primary narrative focus. Similarly to the Museum of the “Activists of VMRO from Štip and the Štip region”, this “Resen’s temple of the Macedonian disobedience”, exhibits eight wax figures, realist paintings, as well as original showpieces from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 12 The films were produced by the Ministry of Culture and the public broadcaster—the Macedonian Radio Television. Furthermore, the documentary series were the basis for the introduction of the book edition “Macedonian Temptations” [mk. Makedonski Iskušenija]. Published by the Ministry of Culture, the edition consists of 22 books holding same titles

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´ even so not manifesting in the full, major of Skopje, Vladimir Todorovik, Skopje-like shape, occurred as a set of newly constructed memorial objects across the state (Dimova 2013; Reef 2018), as well as a “chronic neglect and a silent destruction” of the socialist heritage, which at the present point, is “largely unprotected and forgotten” (Janev 2017, p. 160).

Phase I: “Scholasticism” The earliest attempts to instigate a debate, as well as the first counterpoints to “Skopje 2014” are observable during the late DPMNU rule. Counter-intuitively enough, the critical discourse was prevailing in the immediate aftermath of announcing “Skopje 2014”—the two citizens’ initiatives (First Archi-Brigade and Freedom Square),13 the ten-books edition “The City” [mk. Gradot ] (Gelevski 2010a, b, c), the feuilletonlike “Dossier Skopje 2014”, brought out by Templum’s webzine Okno (both launched in 2010), as well as a series of public discussions and academic events, are just a portion of the widespread attempt to grasp the defining features of the announced “project”. Notwithstanding, the efforts failed to impact the constructing process or juxtapose the sporadic affirmative voices—the oppositional stances were either neglected or misinterpreted, while the “Skopje 2014” was promoted as a popular demand antithetical to the elitist approach of the city and moreover, as potential economic attainment (Muhi´c and Takovski 2014; Graan 2016). Herein, it was Nikola Gelevski, the Templum’s editor-in-chief, who described the state-of-the-art in the early 2010s debate over “Skopje 2014” as “scholasticism” (Makfaks 2010), namely, beyond any factual capacity to interfere the policy process and closed within a local, expert

as the documentary films (25 books are planned to be published), while CD with the corresponding film is attached to the cover of every book. 13 “First Archi-Brigade” [mk. Prva Arhi-Brigada], a self-organised group of students of architecture, created in 2009, as a response to the urban changes and occupation of public space in the central core of Skopje. The initiative opted to provoke an “open debate on the new urban imaginary of Skopje” (Mojanchevska 2018). “Freedom Square” [mk. Ploštad Sloboda] is another self-organised group which aimed at establishing a public debate on the “Skopje 2014”. The two activist groups have organised the First Architectural Uprising [mk. Prvo Arhitektonsko Vostanie] on 28 March 2009. More on the local activism in regards to “Skopje 2014” in Nedelkovska (2012), Markovi´c (2013), Poposki and Todorova (2016), Véron (2016), Dimitrova (2017), Trajanovski (2018), and Mojanchevska (2018).

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community. The “scholastic period” however, in the very tradition of the medieval scholars, brought some of the seminal miniatures on the “project”—the aforementioned book edition, Jasna Koteska’a take on the politics of memory “Troubles with History” (2011), Katarina Urbanek and Milan Mijalkovic’s book “Skopje. The World’s Bastard” (2011), Nebojša Vili´c’s 2011 paper “SK_014: The instrumentalisation of ideologised post-memory” (2011), as well as the Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities Skopje’s research and policy brief conducted in early 2013 (Lechevska 2014).14 It was the very access to the “project’s” institutional evidence which put the administrative procedures in the forefront of the critical discourse, highlighting the encirclement of various legal means and mechanisms when inaugurating the memorial objects. What appears as a key event in these regards is the governmental change of Skopje’s Municipality of Centre, an administrative unit hosting the majority of objects affiliated with “Skopje 2014”, as a final result of the contested 2013 local elections (Grozdanovska Dimishkovska 2014). The frontrunner of the oppositional coalition “Union for the Future” and afterwards, a municipal major, Andrej Žernovski’s announced revision on the “project” resulted into two expert reports (August and November 2013), both stressing financial malpractices. Interestingly enough, the former major of the Municipality of Centre, alongside the erstwhile Minister of Culture, both affiliated with DPMNU, have organised a joint press conference just one day after the final electoral results, where the updated cost of “Skopje 2014” were announced for the first time after 2010 (Gadžovska Spasovska 2013; Georgievski 2013). The “preliminary revision” of “Skopje 2014”, as conducted by the Municipality of Centre’s expert commission, was publicly announced just a few days after a demolishment of a local park in the very Municipality (Stojanˇcov 2013). The demolishment occurred in the night hours, with a single rationale of opening up space for the construction of two, “Skopje 2014-like” edifices (Tumanovska 2013), was denounced by Žernovski and instigated a set of citizens’ protests. The period after 2013 elections brought two additional events which further reshaped the public debate on the “project”—the “I Love GTC” initiative, active from June 2013, as well as the “Colorful Revolution”, occurring in April 2016 and active up until

14 The OPA Foundation’s “ZaUm” digital archive of the contemporary Macedonian art hosts the most extensive database on the initial critical discourses over the “Skopje 2014”.

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June 2016. The first initiative opted to “integrate all the struggle against the Skopje 2014” (Radio MOF 2015), constructing a trans-ethnic front against the political usurpation of public space, while the “Colorful Revolution’s” clear scapegoating and colour-bombing of the “Skopje 2014’s” objects manifested the resentment to the elite’s corruption (Milevska 2016, 2019; Hopkins 2016). Thus, if the first initiative helped to articulate the public claims for commons and established a communicative platform for future civic activism, then the second one signaled the citizens’ definite reproach on the “project”. In the words of Filip Jovanovski, a local activist, “the Colorful Revolution de-aestheticized the regime, which previously appropriated aesthetics through the urban renewal of the capital” (Vale 2017).

Phase II: De-Elitisation The relative success of both the initiatives, namely, the final preservation of the City Trade Centre (GTC) [mk. Gradski Trgovski Centar] from “baroquization”, and the withdrawal of the presidential amnesty of several political figures linked with the wiretapping scandal, have raised the bar of public expectations regarding “Skopje 2014”. The governmental change from 2016 to 2017, has also added on the new phase of the “project’s” public treatment. Thus, the novel wave of scholarly literature on the “project”, the architectural guild’s and activists’ appeals for revisions, alongside the newly published datasets and investigative journalists’ efforts, have had contributed to de-eliticising the public stances regarding the “project”.15 In a similar manner, the political extension to the debate is to be traced as an attempt to follow these bottom-up claims, having the institutional approach on the “project’s” history, as well as a certain proactive mnemonic engagement high on the political agenda. The discursive strategy as such can be read as multifunctional—not only recreating SDSM’s ideological and political credo, but also creating a visible distinction with the historical narrative and the unpopular way the “project” was established (along these lines, see the arguments of

15 See “Skopje 2014 Uncovered”, a joint effort by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network—Macedonia and the USAID Programme for Strengthening Independent Media in Macedonia. The platform aims at developing an “official database of buildings, new facades, sculptures, monuments, fountains and other structures which are components of Skopje’s makeover financed by public funds”.

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Marušik´ [2014] and Popovski [2017]). Starting from the latter, one can present the reopening of the Memorial room of the partisans ’ underground weaponry from the Second World War [mk. Memorijalen muzej na ilegalnite rabotnici za izrabotka na oružje za vreme na NOV (1941– 1944)] as a governmental response to “Skopje 2014”—the local site of memory in the very city-centre, established in 1981, was not functioning for several decades and most recently, was surrounded with the “Skopje 2014” memorial objects.16 The removal of the memorial objects noted in ´ the introductory note, such as, inter alia, Koseto’s and Sarafov’s monuments and the metal fence from the governmental building can be also read with the same key. The political narrative of the new governing coalition was thus accenting the legal measures which will further shape and deliver the “project’s” future.17 In these regards, a “Working group on “Skopje 2014” (“Skopje 2014 Commission”) was established within the Ministry of Culture in July 2017, composed of several prominent members of the local architectural guild and activist groups, in order to reassess the legal and aesthetic values of the undertaking (Plusinfo 2018). To date, the group has produced more than fifteen reports targeting the status of six objects, while the city’s central municipality announced a separate investigation in 2017 (Alon 2017). Moreover, the Special Public Prosecution Office, a body created in late 2015 to further investigate the eventual crimes from the illegal wiretapping scandal earlier that year, announced in March 2018 that there is an ongoing work on mapping all the involved parties and places regarding money laundering activities and corruption related to “Skopje 2014” (Civilmedia 2018). An interinstitutional body which is to summarise the findings of the separate investigations is in formation, while the reports by the expert commissions from the previous mandate of the Municipality of Centre from 2013 are yet to be incorporated within the final research format. The initiative to map 16 The Memorial room was reported to be “neglected” and “in the shadow of the tall

columns of the newly-established Archaeological Museum” (Marušik´ 2014). After a slight delay with the project of reconditioning the Memorial room (Blaževski 2017), the object was opened for public in January 2018 (Antevska 2018a). 17 Herein, illustrative enough is the initiative by the present PM to mount an electronic counter [mk. brojˇcanik] at the top of the “Porta Macedonia” Triumphal Arch, one of the most emblematic objects of “Skopje 2014”, which is to signal “how much from the stolen money are returned to the budget” (Trpenoski 2018). The counter was announced in 2016, as part of the SDSM’s electoral campaign, and mounted in September 2018.

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the “project’s” basic features and pre-history, thus, addresses the various modalities and extensions of “Skopje 2014”, and is expected to contribute towards a legal definition of the “project”, its dramatis personae and final expenses. The approach as such culminated with a conference in June 2018, where a joint body of governmental and non-governmental actors depicted the “project” as not only an “illustration of the captured state”, but “a product and an embodiment of the very concept of captured state” (Makedonska Informativna Agencija 2018).

Phase III: The “Corrective Action” The gap however, appeared with the protracted revision of the “Skopje 2014” and the disproportionality of the political claims over the “project’s” future. A large portion of critical voices argued against the “project’s” prolonged revision, which in turn results with a social internalisation, normalisation or silent endorsement, rather than the announced juncture with “Skopje 2014”. The two tropes used by the former Minister of Culture, Alag‘ ozovski, further hint the abovementioned trajectory of a “delayed delivery”. In the wake of the governmental change, the “project” was described as a “Pandora’s box” which “should be immediately stopped”, referring on the way “kitschy monuments, sculptures, passages and colonnades” are appearing “out of nowhere”, encircling the legal procedures as well as the public debate (Georgievski 2017). More recently though, he depicted the “Skopje 2014” as an “isolated virus”, which even though presents a clear attack on—and degradation of “the good taste, the public spaces, the science, the art, the history and the environment”, is yet to be re-imagined and restructured within the present cityscape (Nikolovska-Rizvanovik´ 2017). The “project” was further instrumentalised in two divergent manners—on the one hand, it was frequently briefed as expensive to be intervened on, thus, hinting the governmental position on the public expenditure and the new reform agenda.18 On the 18 The objects affiliated with the “Skopje 2014” are briefed as expensive to be administered, and not rarely, dysfunctional. The National Archive is illustrative in this context, since the “shoddy construction” of the new building put into danger of rotting a large portion of valuable historical documents after a rainy period in February 2018 (Marusic 2018). Moreover, the critical voices have noted the new Major’s announcement that “the monuments and the objects from the Skopje 2014 project will be replaced with Skopje’s true values”, manifested only as an official decision to stop providing “Skopje 2014-themed” souvenirs and promotional materials to foreign delegations visiting the city

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other hand, it was in the aftermath of the governmental change when the second phase of the “Skanderbeg Square” was implemented, a public square within a kilometre of the main city square. The central mural at the “Skanderbeg Square” square displays an ethno-Albanian national martyrology, mirroring the aesthetic mode and the ethnocentric fashion of the “Skopje 2014”. As such, the mural was recognised as yet another portrayal of the state’s fragmented memory regime across ethnic lines, a societal issue which is certainly crosscutting the current political cleavages (more on the fragmented Macedonian memory regime in Ragaru [2008] and Reef [2018]). The critical debate on “Skopje 2014” in the aftermath of the governmental change in North Macedonia was instigated by a paper published by a senior professor at the Faculty of Architecture—Skopje, Minas Bakalˇcev, in ResPublica (2017), arguing in favour of “creative re-envisioning of Skopje 2014”, or in other words, claiming that the “project” should become a “productive basis for reconceptualizing the city”. Bakalˇcev’s initial argument can be traced back to a paper published in 2014 (Bakalˇcev and Tasi´c 2014). The affirmative voices, beside Bakalˇcev, highlighted as well the urge to “revisit the project’s constructing, architectural, legal, political and historical aspects” (for an overview, see Stojanova 2017). Herein, one can also point to the project “Freeingspace” which represented North Macedonia at the 2018 Venice Biennale Architettura. The project aimed at “reclaiming public space” by reimagining four “Skopje 2014” objects—the Macedonian Opera and Ballet’s plateau alongside the Vardar River’s quay, the building of the Government of North Macedonia, the Macedonian Post and Telecommunication Centre, as well as the Shopping Mall at the “Macedonia Square” (NAMA) (Velevska and Velevski 2018; Kantardžieva-Dimkov 2018). On a different note, the critical voices to this argument claimed that the city needs “more than a creative re-envisioning” of “Skopje 2014” (Šulovik´ 2018; Kolbe 2019), or a wider consortium of domestic and international experts which are to polemicise the “project’s” future (Vasilevska 2017; Ozimec 2017). Popovski, along these lines, argued that “Skopje 2014 should not be left aside under amnesty or hibernation”, as it undermines the democratic reproach against the project (2017). Finally, Teodosievski (Antevska 2018d). In a similar vein, the two multistory car parks, “Macedonian Phalanx” and “Todor Aleksandrov”, built in the course of “Skopje 2014”, were renamed as “July 26th” [mk. 26-ti juli] and “Beko” by the new mandataries.

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observed that the protracted revision of the “project” leads to a particular “revitalization of the kitsch” (2018), while Mickovski argued that the city’s novel construction ought to be “metaphorical”—juxtaposing the constructing manner of “Skopje 2014” (2018). However, it is a medical commonplace that if not treated in due time, the virus can develop a resistance towards the antiviral drug. The debate over “Skopje 2014” has experienced a particular twist, a game changer, in the newly signed Greco-Macedonian Name Agreement. According to the Agreement’s Article 7(4), “the Parties note that the official language and other attributes of the Second Party (Republic of North Macedonia, author’s note) are not related to the ancient Hellenic civilization, history, culture and heritage of the northern region of the First Party” (2018). Therefore, it is arranged that the monuments built within the “project” and representing the Hellenistic period are to be renamed, and not removed, thus, endorsing the new interstate friendship and promoting the historical period as a world cultural heritage. Illustratively enough, the original “Warrior on the horse” monument from the main city square is expected to get its intended name—“Alexander the Great” and a conventional descriptive plaque (Boˇcvaroska 2018). The complete Article 8(2) reads: Within six months following the entry into force of this Agreement, the Second Party (Republic of North Macedonia, author’s note) shall review the status of monuments, public buildings and infrastructures on its territory, and insofar as they refer in any way to ancient Hellenic history and civilization constituting an integral component of the historic or cultural patrimony of the First Party (Republic of Greece, author’s note), shall take appropriate corrective action to effectively address the issue and ensure respect for the said patrimony.

Thus, it can be argued that the contemporary debate has experienced a peculiar turnaround from the already occupied domains of the public resentment—the end solution was never communicated within the Macedonian public domain and moreover, the expertise over “project’s” constituents, referring to the Hellenistic period, is likely to be neglected. Illustratively enough, it was the president of the “Working group on ‘Skopje 2014’” inspecting the Skopje’s central and most dominant monument, which suggested a “removal (of the ‘Warrior on a horse’

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monument, author’s note) and bringing the public space in the original state” (Trajkov 2018).

Concluding Remarks The state-of-the-art Macedonian public debate on “Skopje 2014” can be approached as threefold. On the one hand, the institutional approaches on the project manifested as a series of legal efforts to grasp the “project’s” constitutive features and constructing history. The approach was recognised by the European Commission, which encouraged the legal process in the latest Commission Staff Working Document on North Macedonia (EC 2018). On the other hand, the bilateral developments, with BMFT and GMNA as reference points, have contributed to a novel envisioning of the memorial scenery in Skopje. The agreements are, arguably enough, contributing to a transnational reading of the national-historical canon, which will reveal as the aforementioned “corrective action” in regards to the monuments referring to the Hellenic history, and a platform for common-state commemorations, a practice set in the course of signing the BMFT, regarding the memorial objects claimed by both the Bulgarian and the Macedonian historiographies. The initiatives thus recreate the “maximalist approach” of the “European reconcilement narrative”—“presupposing the existence of a shared narrative of the past”, rather than a distinct mode of nation-centred remembrance (Rosoux 2017, p. 327). The 2017 commemorations of Tsar Samuel (Car Samuil ) is illustrative in this manner, as it hinted the trajectory of the aforementioned process—the Bulgarian and the Macedonian PMs have commemorated the medieval Tsar in Sofia as an “act of commemorating the common history” (Blits 2017), contrary to the mnemonic contestations occurring in the course of the last decade–the Tsar Samuel monument built within the “Skopje 2014” being a significant part of the quarrel. Moreover, the 2017 commemorative narrations are to be traced as recreating the EU integrative framework, with the Bulgarian PM, Borisov, stressing that the common-state commemorations “will show that we are not just Balkan peoples, but also Europeans” (Aliti 2017). In general, one can anticipate a reshuffling of the regional dynamism, both Macedonian-Greek and Macedonian–Bulgarian, on a higher, European, level, or in Bechev’s words, accommodation of the “bilateral disputes” as “multilateral issues within the EU” (2018, p. 9)—even so

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certain deflections from this agenda can be mapped in the last years. Finally, the third extension of the debate is to be presented as encircling the mode of policy (legal approach) and politics (bilateral dynamism)— focusing on the political narration of “Skopje 2014” in the aftermath of both the governmental change and the two aforementioned neighbouring agreements. On the one hand, the novel tendency to speak “less energetically” (Smailovik´ 2018) about “Skopje 2014” was recognised and further discussed as a particular counterpoint to the legal efforts to map the constitutive features of the “project”. The most recent symbolic nostrification of “Skopje 2014”—being a platform for organising state-sponsored events—was also recognised as such in the wake of the HC Vardar Skopje’s victory in the final of the 2019 Champions League (Geroski 2019). On a different note, one should expect a certain effort to re-narrate the “Skopje 2014” in its post-DPMNE future. In these regards, the initial set of revisionist projects appeared as bottom-up initiatives, creative civic engagements and artistic efforts, while an official, top-down approach is yet to be traced.

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CHAPTER 8

Europeanising History to (Re)construct the Statehood Narrative: The Reinterpretation of World War One in Montenegro Nikola Zeˇcevi´c

Abstract This chapter analyses how the reinterpretation of the First World War (partly) served to create the contemporary Montenegrin statehood narrative, in which WWI has ascribed an emancipatory role and allowed elites to Europeanise the politics of memory in Montenegro. Through this reinterpretation of WWI, a new historical narrative was created, in which Montenegro is represented as a former member of the “European family of nations” that lost its status of an independent country after WWI and became a part of the political and economic periphery in the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. By analysing dominant political discourses and practices in the media, promoted by high-ranking state officials and historians, the chapter shows how the historical events that took place between 1914 and 1918 (e.g. the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Battle of Mojkovac and the Podgorica Assembly) were reinterpreted prior to and more intensively

N. Zeˇcevi´c (B) University of Donja Gorica, Podgorica, Montenegro e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Miloševi´c and T. Trošt (eds.), Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4_8

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after the Montenegrin independence referendum (2006), for political purposes of the emancipation and Europeanisation of Montenegro. Keywords Montenegro · Statehood narrative · World War One · Memory politics

Introduction Historical events in the collective memory of a nation are most often used for the reproduction of multilayered representations that shape the contemporary understanding of its identity and its connection to the past (Roudometof 2002). Collective memory strengthens group identity and is a key point in the formation of contemporary national identities and nation states (Anderson 1983). Because memories represent a large part of a culture’s “meaning-making apparatus” (Schwartz 2000, p. 17), history and memory are particularly susceptible to reinterpretation by elites, especially in times of rapid political and social transformation. Political elites are frequently those who create the public space and define and present the dominant narratives of thinking about the past, playing the role of the so-called memory entrepreneurs (Messenger 2020). In the case of the former Yugoslavia, the utilisation of memory by elites to fuel ethnic animosity has been extensively documented in the literature (Dragovi´c-Soso 2002; Sindbaek 2012; Roksandi´c 2013). Although in the meantime the European Parliament has itself become a significant memory entrepreneur in the post-Yugoslav countries (Miloševi´c 2017), political elites have been the major players in the process of “politicizing ethnic historical memories” (Arfi 2005, p. 141). While the Europeanisation of Montenegro was only superficially mentioned during Socialist times in the context of the Europeanisation of culture (Mijovi´c 1987) or the Europeanisation of literature (Brkovi´c 1987) Europeanisation became a dominant part of Montenegrin social and political discourse after 1997. On a formal level, Montenegro entered EU negotiations on stabilisation and association in 2005, and signed the Stability and Association Agreement (SAA) in 2007, which entered into force in 2010. In the 2005 Declaration of the Parliament of the Republic of Montenegro, pro-European support was unanimous, as all parliamentary parties signed their “readiness and resolution of parliament

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to do everything in its power to accelerate the process of joining EuroAtlantic integration” (Komar and Vujovi´c 2007, p. 59). Its pro-European stance was assumed, both at the political level—the pro-European political stream gained predominance in parliament as early as 1997—as well as among the general Montenegrin public—public opinion polls from the early 2000s consistently showed majority support of EU integration, despite an otherwise high distrust of international organisations (FinkHafner 2007). In fact, Džanki´c (2014b) demonstrates the significant role played by the EU in the statehood and democratisation of Montenegro through two interrelated processes: via mediation of its statehood issue, contributing to state-building, and by forcing consensus among domestic actors. In 2012, Montenegro started EU negotiations, with a European Commission (EC) suggested accession date of 2025, and in 2017 it joined NATO. Of all of the current prospective EU member states in the Balkans, Montenegro is considered to be on the fastest track in the EU accession process, and its future in the EU almost unanimously accepted by elites and the public (Vuˇckovi´c 2019). Although most studies show relative political consensus regarding European integration, scholars have largely explained it as political pragmatism, and pointed to the questionable translation of this political support into actual acceptance of values (Komar and Vujovi´c 2007). In Montenegro as a contested state (Džanki´c and Keil 2018), the Europeanisation process was largely co-opted by elites focused on using EU accession processes as political leverage. Research has noted that the ruling elites have used EU policies and institutions “to ensure survival of current governing elites, to promote their own party programs, and to satisfy voters in order to remain in power” (Vuˇckovi´c 2019, p. 152). Nonetheless, even if only “skin deep” regarding the actual transformation of institutions, norms and values, Montenegro has spent the last two decades advocating a firmly European path, and identity: along with the EU accession process at the political level, the adjectives “European” and “Mediterranean” also took the mainstage: to become part of the European Union meant to return to its natural, Mediterranean civilisation circle. After signing the Declaration of Independence, formally separating from Serbia in 2006, the Montenegrin political sphere split more deeply into pro-Montenegrin and pro-Serbian elites, with the proMontenegrin elites even further emphasising belonging to Europe and Europeanisation as a way of distancing itself from Serbia (elaborated in

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detail below). Europeanisation—and “returning” to a European past— thus provided political elites with the tools necessary to craft a new historical narrative, disassociated with Serbia. Instead of being directed towards the rule of law, constitutional reform, citizenship policies, etc.; the ruling structures used the Europeanisation process as political ammunition to create new political divisions. The reconstruction of new statehood narratives following the 1990s wars occurred in all of the post-Yugoslav republics (see Pavasovi´c Trošt 2018), when the newly independent states needed to adapt previous historical interpretations in order to provide legitimacy to the new political establishment. The interpretation of history in Montenegro thus changed from the communist interpretation (1945–1991, with slight changes after the 1974 Constitution) into a new nationalist interpretation (1992–1997), a product of the Yugoslav wars and a kind of synthesis ˇ of nationalism and communism (Kneževi´c and Cagorovi´ c 2020, p. 53). After 1997, the historical narrative gradually changed, as the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) slowly took over key ideas from the Liberal Alliance of Montenegro. The idea of restoring Montenegro’s independence (after the 1990s wars, it remained in a union with Serbia, first in a new “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia” and later in the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro) in the early 2000s required the introduction of a new concept of Montenegrin identity, which meant breaking traditional ties with Serbian identity. The reinterpretation of the First World War (WWI) events was necessary because the epilogue of that war was the disappearance of an independent Montenegrin kingdom. This reinterpretation at the same time demonstrated the declarative political intention of ruling elites to correct the historical consequences of the First World War. The new concept of Montenegrin identity became a state-sponsored project, but it also triggered an escalation of new political cleavage, with ethno-national and ideological prerogatives (Montenegrins vs. Montenegrin Serbs). After the 2006 independence referendum, this new reinterpretation gained in intensity, on the pretext of further strengthening Montenegrin statehood and independence. This was especially evident during the anniversaries of important WWI events, in the speeches of Montenegrin officials who described the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand (1914) as a terrorist act, the Battle of Mojkovac (1916) as unnecessary suffering due to other national interests and the Podgorica Assembly (1918) as an illegitimate and illegal act which erased Montenegro, as an independent

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state, from the political and cultural map of Europe. The function of such a narrative was distancing from Serbian nationalism as anti-Western (proRussian) and anti-European, which negated the Montenegrin (state and national) identity. That is why the creation of the Mediterranean image of Montenegro and its Europeanisation were emphasised as imperative. Thus, for the purposes of the (re)construction of the statehood narrative in Montenegro, a reinterpretation of the events from the First World War was initiated. This reinterpretation took place in public discourse (especially in media), history textbooks, memorials, during the celebration of state holidays, etc. In the public, it was accepted in accordance with the already established political dichotomy: attitudes towards these historical events by Montenegrin citizens often correlated with their political orientation—either pro-Montenegrin independence or for a political union with Serbia—but also with their ethno-national orientation, because, in Jelena Džanki´c’s words, “being a ‘Montenegrin’ became associated with the restoration of Montenegro’s sovereignty, whereas being a ‘Serb’ (in Montenegro) became related to the preservation of the common state with Serbia” (Džanki´c 2014a, p. 115). In order to show how history was manipulated for the political purposes, this chapter examines the re-writing of the First World War in contemporary Montenegro, in dominant political discourses and practices in the media promoted by high-ranking state officials and historians, as well as in history textbooks. This chapter focuses on changes in the description of three of the most relevant events of this period: (1) the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1914), as a pretext for starting the war; (2) the Battle of Mojkovac (1916) as the key reason for the surrender of the Montenegrin army and its dissolution; and (3) the Podgorica Assembly (1918), as the final act of the abolition of the independent Montenegrin state. It analyses primary and secondary history textbooks from the 1960s until contemporary times, carefully analysing how the description and normative evaluation of the war changed over time, through the gradual changes in the elites’ political needs. Content analysis of history textbooks reveals marked changes to the representations of the three events across the socialist, wartime and contemporary era; these interpretations mirror changes in the public sphere. In the sections below, I first provide a brief background of the analysed events, second, I provide a discussion of the reinterpretation of history by elites and in the public sphere, and third, I provide the main empirical findings from changes in history textbooks over time. The chapter concludes

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with brief remarks regarding the overlapping processes of emancipatory nation-building, memory politics and Europeanisation.

Background: The Kingdom of Montenegro and the First World War Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, Montenegro condemned the act. The official newspaper Glas Crnogorca stated that the assassination was carried out by “reckless and exalted young men” and that it was a “terrorist act of lonely dreamers” (Glas Crnogorca 1914, p. 2). However, as Horace Delaroche-Vernet notes, King Nikola (regardless of his official stance) “does not approve the way, but is happy with the result”, primarily due to the fact that Archduke Ferdinand was one of the biggest opponents of the annexation of Shkodra to Montenegro (Živojinovi´c 2011, p. 129). Additionally, King Nikola and his government were secretly protecting Muhamed Mehmedbaši´c, one of the protagonists of the assassination in Sarajevo, who fled to Montenegro (Danilovgrad) and whose extradition the official Vienna persistently and unsuccessfully demanded from Cetinje. Following the assassination in Sarajevo and the delivery of an AustroHungarian ultimatum to Serbia, Russia mobilised its army. However, the Russian ambassador in Rome Mikhail Nikolayevich von Giers recommended to the Montenegrin king not to get involved in the conflict (Živojinovi´c 2011, pp. 122–123). The neutral position of Montenegro was demanded by France, Austria-Hungary and Italy as well. However, the king’s decision to declare an act of mobilisation, apart from the Serbian request for help,1 was largely influenced by the telegram of his son-in-law, the Grand Duke of Russia Nicholas Nikolaevich Romanov, who recommended him to mobilise the army.2

1 On 23 September 1912, the Kingdom of Montenegro and the Kingdom of Serbia signed the Political Convention, which obliged both states that in the case of an attack on one country, the other undertakes to assist in its defence, in full capacity (Škerovi´c 2004, p. 10). 2 Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Count Leopold von Brethold was surprised by the Montenegrin decision to mobilise the army. On the other hand, Petar Plamenac told the Austro-Hugarian deputy Otto that Montenegro could remain neutral only if Serbia asks so: “If there were no other ties between Serbians and us, blood kinship is stronger than everything. There is no force which will prevent Montenegrins and Serbians from

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In the declaration of war, King Nikola called the Montenegrins to join “a holy war for the freedom of Serbdom and Yugoslavism”. The Montenegrin Supreme Command was formed in August 1914. King Nikola named Serbian General Božidar Jankovi´c as its head. The Kingdom of Montenegro had territorial aspirations towards Bay of Kotor, Herzegovina and Dubrovnik, but could not achieve them because of a request by the Serbian military command to deploy its army to Bosnia (Rakoˇcevi´c 1969, p. 61). Tensions between the Montenegrin and Serbian armies became obvious on the Bosnian front, where they quarrelled over which army first entered which town, and it was apparent that both armies in wanted to mark new borders of their own countries. Montenegrin military activities during the war irritated the Allied powers, especially Italy, after the occupation of Shkodra, San Giovanni di Medua and Lezhë, when it was clear that Montenegrin actions threatened Italian interests in Albania. The result of this conflict was the Italian embargo on food and military material on Montenegro. This attitude of Italy towards Montenegro greatly accelerated its military downfall. On the other hand, the Allies developed a distrustful attitude towards the Montenegrin king and his family, because of (unfounded) accusations that Montenegro was secretly negotiating with Austria-Hungary.3 During this period, King Nikola was assuring Nikola Paši´c and Italian deputy in Montenegro Camillo Romano Avezzana that Montenegro will remain at war, but that an essential condition for this was the help in food and war material. The Montenegrin king also appealed for help to Russian Tsar Nikolai II Romanov, with the message that Montenegrin soldiers “pray only for bread and ammunition” (Luburi´c 1938, p. 32) The Russian Tsar

fighting side by side”. For a neutral position, Otto offered to the Montenegrin officials: the correction of the Albanian border and the annexation of Shkodra and Sandžak for the benefit of Montenegro, and a loan of six million Swiss francs. However, Montenegro eventually solidified with Serbia, ended diplomatic relations with Austria-Hungary, and declared the war (Živojinovi´c 2011, pp. 126, 131). 3 The first to claim that Montenegro was conducting secret negotiations with AustriaHungary, in mid-1915, was Serbian General Božidar Jankovi´c (Živojinovi´c 2011, p. 181) Serbian historian Dragoljub Živojinovi´c described this anti-Montenegrin propaganda among allies as follows: “The situation was paradoxical given the fact that the governments of the Allies did not have any written evidence or other agreement between Montenegro and Austria-Hungary. Nevertheless, everyone spoke openly about the existence of such an agreement. Its existence was pure fiction, arising out of suspicion and distrust of King Nikola, not only during the war but also from before” (Živojinovi´c 2011, pp. 144–145).

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demanded assistance in this sense from the Allied forces (primarily Italy), but official Rome remained blind4 to these pleas from Montenegro. The Austro-Hungarian attack on Montenegro soon began. While the Serbian army was withdrawing via Montenegro during December 1915, the Montenegrin army defended its retreatment. However, the Serbian army started arriving in Shkodra in mid-December 1915, and by the end of the year a large number of Serbian soldiers were already in Albania.5 In the Battle of Mojkovac, which took place on 6–7 January 1916, Montenegro defeated the superior Austro-Hungarian army—for this reason, the Battle was celebrated as glorious and heroic during the Communist era. However, the mountain Lov´cen was occupied soon after, representing the occupation of the Montenegrin capital. King Nikola and his government immediately left Cetinje and moved to Podgorica. After the fall of Lov´cen, King Nikola sent a despatch to Emperor Franz Joseph I with a peace offer, after which peace negotiations began. Eventually the king, the royal family and the government headed for Italy and boarded in the port of Brindisi and eventually began their political activities in exile.6 On behalf of the Kingdom of Montenegro, Brigadier Jovo Be´cir and Major Petar Lompar signed the provisions of surrendering the weapons on 25 January 1916, which was treated as an act of capitulation. However, King Nikola and the government of Lazar Mijuškovi´c distanced themselves from this act, stating that the Montenegrin royal government had nothing to do with it. This suggested that the Montenegrin capitulation was a tactical fraud, which would allow the remnants of the Montenegrin army to start withdrawing through Shkodra. But the allies’ relationship with Montenegro and its king was filled with mistrust and hidden intentions. Such views were certainly reinforced by a memorandum of the Foreign Office (1916), which concluded that Montenegro as a state “will not have any useful purpose; in the future, as it was in the past, Montenegro will not be able to maintain itself and will live on the mercy of the great powers. Therefore, its annexation to Serbia should be encouraged” (Živojinovi´c 2011, p. 172). All further 4 Italy (by no means) did not want to risk the sinking of its ships for the sake of supplying Montenegro. 5 See, for example: Jeleni´c (1923), Terzi´c (1954), and Rakoˇcevi´c (1969). 6 The royal family was temporarily stationed in one castle in the vicinity of Bordeaux,

and afterwards was moved to Neuilly (periphery of Paris).

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steps by the Allied Powers on this matter, with the exception of Italy, were aimed at one single goal—to annex Montenegro to the Kingdom of Serbia. At the same time, the movement of Komits 7 in Montenegro was intensively strengthening and increasingly gaining a political dimension. According to the report from the occupation General Governorate (September 1918), the movement was marked as “Greater Serbian”.8 In October and November 1918, Komits liberated the largest number of Montenegrin towns. After the end of war (1918), Montenegro was affiliated with Serbia through decisions of the Great National Assembly of the Serb People in Montenegro (commonly known as the Podgorica Assembly) and thus became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Kingdom of Yugoslavia). The Podgorica Assembly was not official, but an ad hoc assembly, unrecognised by the Montenegrin constitutional system, though organised with technical support of the Serbian Army. By its decisions, King Nikola and his dynasty were dethroned. With this, and without consulting its official and legal institutions, Montenegro disappeared from the political map of Europe. During the common Yugoslav state after WWII, the official historical narrative in all of the republics was a pro-Yugoslav one, and the interpretation of WWI events were treated accordingly: the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was an act of resistance against foreign occupation, the Battle of Mojkovac represented a glorious victory over a numerically superior Austro-Hungarian army, and the Podgorica Assembly was a step in Montenegro’s joining to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

7 Komits of Montenegro were actually remains of the Montenegrin army or individuals who did not want to surrender their weapons, and who hid to hardly accessible places (mountains, forests, etc.) and carried out diversions and attacks against the Austro-Hungarian occupying forces. 8 In the area of Kolašin, Podgorica, Cetinje and Nikši´c, only 180 komits voted against the unification (Rakoˇcevi´c 1969, p. 455).

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The (Re)construction of Montenegro’s Statehood Narrative After the fall of Slobodan Miloševi´c in 2000, the authorities of Montenegro announced their intention to take the country to independence and leave the union with Serbia. However, the path to independence also brought a new concept of Montenegrin identity, which implied breaking traditional ties with Serbian identity. The milestone in the actualisation of a new concept of Montenegrin identity and reinterpretation of the First World War was the period of the early 1990s and the formation of the Liberal Alliance of Montenegro (a political party) and Matica crnogorska (a non-governmental cultural institution), two organisations that were the main promoters of the new interpretation. Since the establishment of the Liberal Alliance of Montenegro, its leader Slavko Perovi´c insisted on the concept of a Mediterranean and European Montenegro, where the term Mediterranean was mostly synonymous with the term European, but at the same time had an emancipatory and distinctive function in relation to Serbia, as Serbia (geographically) does not belong to the Mediterranean region. In a famous TV duel with Zoran Ðind-i´c in June 1994, he clarified his views: In Montenegro we want to be a part of the European tradition, of European culture, of who we were. (…) When we look at Belgrade, we realize that this is a fascist space. Contaminated with nationalism and nationalchauvinism. And that contamination will last at least a few decades. We want to get out of that space. To be preserved (…) as a Mediterranean, European, relatively rich, democratic (etc.) country.9 (RTS 1994)

After 1997, such a concept of Montenegrin identity became a statesponsored project. In this project, WWI received special attention because of perceived injustices towards Montenegro, and especially towards Montenegro’s autocephalous church. Two parallel institutions were supported for the purposes of this endeavour. The first parallel institution was the Montenegrin Orthodox Church, opposing the Orthodox Church in Montenegro (part of the Serbian Orthodox Church).10 Second, the

9 The speech is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC_3t8P-WoM. 10 The Orthodox Church in Montenegro was a part of the Serbian Orthodox Church since

1920; previously, it was de facto autocephalous (called the Metropolitanate of Cetinje). In

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Doclean Academy of Sciences and Arts (DANU), which was established parallel to the official national Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts, (CANU). The first president of the newly founded DANU Jevrem Brkovi´c emphasised the European and Mediterranean nature of Montenegro: Montenegro, although only partially independent, is more present in major European and world events than ever before. That is the very same Mediterranean country that changed its name three times in its thousandyear history, like a snake its suit, but the essence of its being remained the same - Mediterranean! (Vojiˇci´c 1999)

These actions sparked resentment among the Montenegrin public, increasing political cleavages and giving them and an ethno-national character: From 1991 to 2003, the number of people declaring as Serbs increased from 9.3 to 32%, and the number of people declaring themselves as Montenegrins decreased from 61.9 to 43.2%. Effectively, cleavages became ethno-national: Montenegrins vs. Montenegrin Serbs: as Ba´ca (2018) explains, “Even though the split between Montenegrins and Serbs had begun as political/ideological (rather than ethnic), by 2006 the main ethnopolitical cleavage in Montenegro was (re)articulated in an unusual formula: Montenegrins plus ethnic minorities minus ‘political Serbs’” (p. 130). Historical revisionism of WWI was thus necessary to fit this new state narrative. One of the prominent representatives of the Liberal Alliance of Montenegro, publicist Radoslav Rotkovi´c, in his 2001 book The Great Conspiracy Against Montenegro (Velika zavjera protiv Crne Gore), argues that Montenegro entered a “war against itself” during the First World War: Montenegro had nothing to do with the assassination in Sarajevo. (…) Montenegro, however, had to enter the war, not under some pressure from the outside, but from the inside. Especially since Serbia asked Montenegro to decide whether it wanted to help or not. No one was dared to think to say: ‘We will not do it!’ And all of this for reasons that were not rational. (p. 410)

the 1990s, a religious organisation—the Montenegrin Orthodox Church—was established, but is not canonical and has a very low number of members.

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Rotkovi´c additionally raised the question of the necessity of the Battle of Mojkovac, concluding that mentioned battle was unnecessary, and that its futile causalities prevented the Montenegrin army from withdrawing via Shkodra along with the Serbian army.11 In addition to the historical “corrections” of the Sarajevo assassination and the Mojkovac battle, in his previously published book Montenegro and Dušan’s Empire (Crna Gora i Dušanovo carstvo), when considering the issue of cultural belonging of the valuable medieval manuscript Miroslav’s Gospel,12 he emphasised Montenegro’s traditional Mediterranean affiliation versus Serbia’s cultural (historical) “inferiority”: “At the same time, Serbs were writing their gospels in caves, no joke: it is clear that Miroslav’s Gospel belongs to the Mediterranean Duklja, which was culturally superior to Raška”13 (Rotkovi´c 1997). Here, Rotkovi´c draws on a nationalist construction that suggests that Montenegrin and Serbian cultural “incompatibility” dates back to the twelfth century. It is interesting to mention that the Ministry of Culture of Montenegro exempted Rotkovi´c’s publications of the general tax on product sales, and awarded him the status of a prominent cultural author in 2011. In 2010, Rotkovi´c also received the most prestigious national recognition—the July Thirteenth Award. Later, the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) slowly began taking over key ideas from the Liberal Alliance of Montenegro including “insisting on an independent, Mediterranean, multicultural Montenegro, which is aspiring to become Member of the EU, and Atlantic integration” (Goati 2013, p. 172). In light of this, shifts in the interpretation of certain historical events began appearing in the speeches of Montenegro’s Prime

11 Rotkovi´c states: “Therefore, this battle was staged only to keep the Montenegrin army away from Shkodra (…) The last Serbs left Shkodra on 4 January. (…) And the great battle was on Christmas Eve and Christmas, January 6-7 (…) The fighters were fooled that Serbian army was retreating behind their backs” (Rotkovi´c 2001, pp. 499, 512). 12 Miroslav’s Gospel is a manuscript book from twelfth century and one of the most significant Cyrillic monuments of South Slavic literacy. This document was protected by UNESCO in 2005. 13 Duklja was a medieval South Slavic state which existed from the ninth (or tenth) to

the twelfth century in the area of today’s south-eastern Montenegro and northern Albania; while Raška existed during eleventh and twelfth century in the area of today’s southwestern Serbia, north-eastern Montenegro and eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. Duklja and Raška are romanticised as the state predecessors of modern Montenegro and Serbia respectively.

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Minister and later President Milo Ðukanovi´c between 2014 and 2016. For instance, in a speech at the ceremonial academy on the occasion of 100 years since the beginning of World War One, he clearly refers to the Archduke’s assassination as a negative event: Montenegro has its own special reasons to evoke memories of participation in that war. Just as there had not been a major war in history by that time, which was called the Great War, so there was no greater tragedy for Montenegro and its people. (…) Let’s recall: Montenegro entered World War One as a devastated and impoverished country, less than a year after it ended its participation in the Balkan Wars. (…) It is a historical fact that Montenegro did not support the act of terrorism that was pretext to the war. (BOJ 2014)

Two years later, at a ceremonial academy regarding the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Mojkovac, he stated: With the conviction and determination that we will not repeat the mistakes that have cost us so much throughout history, Montenegro sends a message today to everyone who buried it at the end of World War One, and to those who denied it decades later: Montenegro is alive, never more European, never more educated, never more stable and prosperous, respected by its neighbours and the entire democratic world. From today’s perspective, we can superiorly analyse Montenegrin misconceptions and mistakes (…) While going a whole century back to the past, all the nobility of the Montenegrin devotion in Mojkovac appears to us. But also the magnitude of the disaster that hit us afterwards. We have lost our freedom and our state, we have experienced persecution and humiliation. (SOJ 2016a)

In the same year, at the central celebration of the tenth anniversary of the restoration of Montenegro’s independence, Ðukanovi´c again emphasised this new interpretation of the Battle of Mojkovac: “Montenegro grew up enough to oppose the undermining of its national foundations, and mature enough to ensure that Mojkovac of 1916, or especially Dubrovnik of 1991, will never happen again” (SOJ 2016b). While many of these statements by Ðukanovi´c provoked negative reactions in part of the Montenegrin and regional public space (predominantly in Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina), the most prominent Montenegrin historian Živko Andrijaševi´c (who was shortly advisor of

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the same Prime Minister) said that Ðukanovi´c had simply stated historical facts: “And this is completely true: official Montenegro has condemned the murder of the Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince and his wife in Sarajevo” (RTCG 2014). In other words, Andrijaševi´c referred to the assassination as deserving condemnation and regret. It is important to note that he is also co-author of the history textbook for the fourth (final) grade of high school that covers the period of the First World War. The function of this new narrative was to distance itself from Serbian nationalism, which was an integral part of Montenegrin state ideology during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The need for such distancing is reflected in the view that contemporary Serbian nationalism is a political ideology that is essentially anti-Western (pro-Russian) and anti-European, and which negates all forms of Montenegrin (national and state) particularities. The starting point of the narrative is that the main culprit for the disappearance of the Montenegrin state, after World War One, is precisely Serbian nationalism. This is why the assassination in Sarajevo is unacceptable for this narrative: in addition to marking the murder of the Austro-Hungarian archduke as a barbaric and terrorist act, it is an association with the escalation of Serbian (or at least Srbocentric Yugoslav) nationalism, at the beginning of the last century, and therefore cannot fit into the contemporary discourse of Montenegrin officials and official historiography. Interestingly, official Montenegrin historiography still relies on basic elements of Communist historiography in terms of the Second World War (Mihajlovi´c Trbovc and Pavasovi´c Trošt 2017), but the approach to events of the First World War had evidently changed. It is worth mentioning that Communist historiography had previously glorified the historical role of Young Bosnia, primarily because of its revolutionary and pro-Yugoslav orientation.14 At the same time, traditional (communist, but nationalist as well) historiography had attributed to the battle of Mojkovac the characteristics of a war epopee, in which the Montenegrin army saved the fraternal Serbian army as it withdrew to Albania. In this context, prominent novels (such as ´ Camil Sijari´c’s The Battle of Mojkovac) and hyperbolic poetic dedications (such as Radovan Be´cirovi´c Trebješki) were devoted to this topic. After 1997, the new narrative marked the Battle of Mojkovac as a symbol of the unnecessary sacrifice of Montenegrin national interests for the sake

14 See, for example: Masleša (1945), Ljubibrati´c (1964), and Dedijer (1966).

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of Serbia, suggesting that Montenegrin and Serbian interests are separate, rather than common, as the previous narrative implied.15 Accordingly, for the mentioned narrative, the Podgorica Assembly became a symbol of the destruction of Montenegrin statehood and independence. The current Montenegrin Prime Minister Duško Markovi´c, in his appeal on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One, estimated that the disappearance of the Montenegrin state was a political idea of the allies, which was implemented by the Kingdom of Serbia: It took almost nine decades for Montenegro to correct the state and national catastrophe that happened at the end of World War One. Today, in Paris, a hundred years later, in the same place where there was no room for the Montenegrin sovereign or the Montenegrin flag in 1918 - essentially and symbolically, Montenegro has returned to where it belongs. (SOJ 2018)

This narrative implies that the restoration of Montenegrin state independence and the elimination of the decisions of Podgorica Assembly16 represent a symbolic and practical return of Montenegro to the Europe and the European system of values. This was complemented by a statement of President Ðukanovi´c in 2019 that the existing government has “turned the wheel of history on the other side and paved the way for Montenegro’s independence and Europeanisation. Especially if we take into account its eternal gaze to the opposite direction” (Portal Analitika 2019). Thus, the historical orientation of Montenegro towards Serbia and Russia, for Ðukanovi´c (and therefore for the Montenegrin government), did not symbolise Europeanisation and modernisation, but the peripheralisation and inferiority of Montenegrin political space. Therefore, the need for discontinuity with such a policy and the reinterpretation of certain historical processes was emphasised. 15 At the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Mojkovac, Ðukanovi´c also said: “Why and how did the opponents of Montenegro try and succeed in presenting and imposing misconceptions as a tradition and guiding ideas, while blurring our national responsibility and interest with accusations of insufficient concern for Serbdom, Orthodoxy and AllSlavism? Why was our self-respect necessarily qualified as a betrayal of someone else; why were even the most senseless war casualties glorified as patriotism?” (SOJ 2016a). 16 At the end of 2018, the Montenegrin Parliament adopted a resolution on the annulment of the decisions of the Podgorica Assembly.

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In addition to highlighting the “return to Europe”, the Mediterranean identity of the country was also emphasised by the president of the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts, Dragan K. Vukˇcevi´c, who insisted on a historical balance between the two orientations of Montenegro (Continental and Mediterranean), favouring the Mediterranean in its contemporary context: For a long time, we had an orientation that was almost exclusively continental. That is why it seems to me that it is very important for Montenegro to restore the Mediterranean to its collective being, memory and mentality. (…) Emphasizing the need to bring the Mediterranean story to life, the opinion and mentality of Montenegro, among other things, is a pointing out the historical fact that we once belonged to Europe, through the Mediterranean. (Laki´cevi´c 2018)

The (Re)interpretation of the First World War in History Textbooks Historical textbooks in socialist Montenegro, and the rest of Yugoslavia, thematically relied on historical textbooks from the USSR, but after the Tito—Stalin split (1948), the state initiated the process of creating its own textbooks. During the 1950s and 1960s, historical textbooks were rarely published in Montenegro, while Montenegrin students mostly learned history from textbooks whose publishers were from Belgrade or Novi Sad. From 1948 to 1974, history textbooks reflected the ideological views of the Communist Party, with equitable distribution of the history of all Yugoslav nations, taking into account the general Yugoslav context. Following the adoption of the new Yugoslav constitution in 1974 and an increase of power of the federal units (republics), there was a tendency of increasing of the number of topics from Montenegrin national history. From that period, textbooks were more frequently published in Montenegro. After the escalation of the wars in Yugoslavia and the dissolution of the country in the 1990s, history textbooks needed to be adapted to the political situation: this revision was “predicated on an illogical but politically successful synthesis of nationalism and communism” (Kneževi´c ˇ and Cagorovi´ c 2020, p. 53). The change of the political narrative after 1997 also led to the change in the interpretation of certain historical facts in the new series of reformed textbooks. A stronger emphasis was

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placed on Montenegrin history, with the presentation of new historical facts, which historian Šerbo Rastoder referred to as the “hidden side of history” (Rastoder 1997). Although the content and form of new history textbooks were adapted to the recommendations of Council of Europe (2001), they were above all adjusted to the new Montenegrin political narrative. The period of the First World War was most often studied in the seventh, eighth or ninth grade of primary school, and in the second or most often fourth (final) grade of secondary school. As it would be impossible to analyse the contents of all history textbooks which were in use since 1945 due to their large number (Vukovi´c 2015), this chapter focuses on the most relevant history textbooks, in widest and longest use in Montenegrin schools since the 1960s. Over the past six decades, textbooks in Montenegro (similarly as in the other post-Yugoslav countries) can be said to have progressed through several distinct “eras” (Pavasovi´c Trošt 2013): 1. Socialist-era textbooks exemplifying the Communist–Socialist ProYugoslav narrative of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (with slight changes after 1974); 2. Wartime and transition era ethno-nationalist textbooks, containing the emerging ethno-nationalist narrative of the 1990s. 3. Contemporary textbooks containing the new, mostly solidified nationhood narrative, from 2001 until today. Socialist-Era Textbooks In the textbook for the eighth grade of primary school used during the 1960s, published in Serbia, the members of Young Bosnia are referred as “pro-Yugoslav oriented youth”; and it is emphasised that the Battle of Mojkovac “enabled the withdrawal of the Serbian army” (Grubaˇc 1962, pp. 13,14, 24, 32). In the textbook for the fourth grade of secondary school, Young Bosnia is similarly designated as a “national-revolutionary organization”, whereas in Mojkovac, the Montenegrin army “provided the last significant resistance” (Smiljevi´c and Kneževi´c 1962, pp. 6, 8, 19). In the textbook for the seventh grade of primary school in use during the 1970s and 1980s and published in Montenegro, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand is mentioned only in a factographical way; the Battle

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of Mojkovac is described as a “glorious” and heroic: by “maintaining fronts, the Montenegrin army facilitated the retreat of the Serbian army towards the Albanian coast” (Strugar and Perovi´c 1986, pp. 172, 181, 183). The textbook for the second grade of secondary school, published in Montenegro, emphasises the liberating and pro-Yugoslav dimension of Young Bosnia; the Battle of Mojkovac is described as a “battle of honour” that unfortunately “could not save Montenegro” (Strugar 1980, pp. 13, 16, 19, 20. In both textbooks the Podgorica Assembly is treated in a neutral way, while only describing its decisions and the process of unification.17 1990s/Transition Textbooks In the textbook for the eighth grade of primary school, which was published in Montenegro and used in the 1990s, Young Bosnia is labelled a patriotic-revolutionary organisation; the performance of the Montenegrin army during the Battle of Mojkovac is still described as heroic; the author explains that it contributed to the safety of the Serbian army during its withdrawing through Albania, but also to the overall victory of the Allies. Importantly, there is now a different interpretation of the Podgorica Assembly compared to the previous textbooks: “This was not an equal unification, but a simple annexation of Montenegro to Serbia, without any conditions. In this way, Montenegro lost its state and legal individuality” (Živkovi´c and Mladenovi´c-Maksimovi´c 1997, pp. 8, 21, 31). Conversely, the fourth grade of secondary school textbook, from the same period and also published in Montenegro, retains the Socialist-era description of the battle of Mojkovac similarly (it “thwarted the intention of the enemy to cut off the retreat to the Serbian army and prevent it from withdrawing”), but it also partly retains the Socialist-era interpretation of the Podgorica Assembly: the Assembly is said to have been organised by the bourgeoisie who were not satisfied with the system of economic relations established by King Nikola; with (not anymore 17 Slight changes in the Socialist narrative occurred after 1974, following the new Yugoslav Constitution, and as textbooks slowly began to be published in Montenegro. Minor changes were noted with regard to giving more space to certain historical events (the Battle of Mojkovac), while the role of Young Bosnia was subtly affirmed, and this continued throughout the 1980s.

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neutral) add that due to the historical and national closeness between Montenegrins and Serbians, it was “natural for the brothers to unite and build a common home in this neuralgic Balkan area, so that they could more easily defend themselves against various enemies and build their futures more successfully”. According to the authors, the Podgorica Assembly gained authority and legitimacy at the international level, with its democratic dimension, because it included representatives from all parts of Montenegro (Ga´ceša et al. 1993, pp. 106, 117–118). These inconsistencies between the interpretation of the Podgorica Assembly in the eight grade textbook (highly negative) and in the 12th grade textbook (smoothly positive) show that (in the 1990s) students, during their final years of primary and secondary education, studied about these issues in different ways, so it could happen that a student in the eighth grade of primary school acquires historical knowledge in one way, and four years later in a completely different way. Contemporary Textbooks In the post-2000 textbooks, marked changes are visible. From 2001, Montenegrin students began to study from a new textbook for the eighth (and later the ninth) grade of primary school, which (with some changes regarding new events) is still in force as the official textbook for the final year of the primary schools. Interestingly, most the other Yugoslav republics opened their markets to alternative publishers in this period, with up to eight different both public and private publishers offering different textbook versions every year, while Montenegro still (centrally) approves only one textbook per grade, like in Socialist times. In these “new” nationhood version textbooks, where the Sarajevo assassination is concerned, the 2003 history textbook for the fourth grade of secondary schools for the first time mentions the ethnicity of the assassin (“executed by Serb Gavrilo Princip”), and Young Bosnia is reported to be an organisation that advocated Yugoslav unification, but its assistance and protection from nationalist organisations in Serbia is highlighted (Rastoder et al. 2003, p. 37). In the textbook for the fourth grade of secondary school (gymnasium) from 2016, Young Bosnia is labelled as a revolutionary organisation (Š´ceki´c et al. 2016, p. 14)—where the label “revolutionary” after 2001 has a negative connotation. Where the Battle of Mojkovac is concerned, the 2001 textbook for the eighth/ninth grade avoids its glorification, instead merely describing the

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battle and the events that preceded (Burzanovi´c et al. 2016, p. 41). In the 2003 textbook for the fourth grade of secondary school, the Battle of Mojkovac is explained as the final phase of the Mojkovac operation, which played a role of strategic protection of the Serbian army (Rastoder et al. 2003, pp. 57, 69). In the textbook for the fourth grade of secondary school (gymnasium) from 2016, the Battle of Mojkovac is described as a victory of Montenegrin army, which prevented the Austro-Hungarian army “from penetrating into central Montenegro” (Š´ceki´c et al. 2016, p. 54). Thus, we can see the new interpretation of the Battle of Mojkovac, where this event is no longer linked to the rescue of the Serbian army by the Montenegrin army, especially not in a manner of fraternal sacrifice, as it was suggested by an earlier narrative. In post-2000 textbooks, the Podgorica Assembly is unanimously labelled as unconstitutional and illegal (Burzanovi´c et al. 2016, p. 47); it is similarly labelled as illegal and illegitimate in the 2003 textbook for secondary school (Rastoder et al. 2003, p. 69), and as an illegal and illegitimate political act, which had the effect of abolition of the Montenegrin Church and its annexation to the restored Serbian Orthodox Church, in the new 2016 textbook for the fourth grade of secondary school (Š´ceki´c et al. 2016, p. 59). This corresponded with the official view that the Podgorica Assembly was an attempt of destruction of Montenegrin national, cultural and religious identity. The culprit for this is the historical orientation towards Serbia and Russia, which transformed Montenegro into political periphery after 1918. These changes can be understood in light of the statement given by the non-governmental cultural organisation Matica crnogorska 18 in March 2001, which urged textbooks to include less “non-critical” content from Serbian history, and more content on Montenegrin identity and especially its Mediterranean character: Current programs and history (…) textbooks for primary and secondary schools in Montenegro are burdened with non-critical content, glorification, myths of Kosovo and Saint Sava (…) The past of Montenegro, its overall linguistic, literary, historical, cultural and civilizational experience and specificity in relation to others, especially South Slavic nations, is not

18 In 2008 this organisation was transformed into independent cultural institution, protected by special law, by Parliament of Montenegro.

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only inadequately treated in textbooks, but the national and cultural identity of Montenegrins and members of other nations who have lived in Montenegro for centuries is often annulled (…) There is no awareness in the textbooks that Montenegro, as an area on the crossroads of civilizations, inherits the substrates of different cultures and synthesizes these experiences. The Mediterranean character of culture, as a common heritage and practice of all Montenegrin citizens, is bypassed or not emphasized in curriculums and textbooks. (Matica 2001, pp. 255–256)

The special issue of magazine Matica, published by Matica crnogorska, printed articles and analyses on this topic from prominent Montenegrin historians: Šerbo Rastoder, Živko Andrijaševi´c, Slavko Burzanovi´c, Zvezdan Foli´c, etc. Most of them would later turn out to be future authors of contemporary-era history textbooks. From Table 8.1 we can conclude that these three events were represented differently in different eras. In the socialist era, events concerning the Podgorica Assembly were evaluated in a neutral way, while the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the Battle of Mojkovac were mostly described positively. In the transition era, until 1997, these three events were described mainly positively, and after 1997, the Podgorica Assembly began to get a negative connotation. In the new contemporary era, there have been obvious changes. In contemporary textbooks, the description of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand is now described as neutral to negative, the Battle of Mojkovac completely neutral, and the Podgorica Assembly in a markedly negative way. An examination of how the new official interpretation of history was perceived by ordinary Montenegrins had unsurprising results: a survey from 2011 showed that this new official representation of history—which highlights a uniquely Montenegrin identity and a marked distancing from the previous Yugoslav narrative—is supported by significantly more people who identify as Montenegrin than Serb: “68 percent of those who identify as ‘Montenegrin’ support the official representation of the country’s history, as opposed to an almost equal number of those who identify as ‘Serb’ who object to it” (Džanki´c 2014a, p. 123).

Živkovi´c and Mladenovi´c—Maksimovi´c Burzanovi´c and Ðord-evi´c

Montenegro

Source Author’s creation

2000s Montenegro 2010s History Textbooks in Secondary Schools 1960s Serbia Smiljevi´c and Kneževi´c 1970s 1970s Montenegro Strugar 1980s 1990s Montenegro Ga´ceša, Živkovi´c and Radovi´c 2000s Montenegro Rastoder, Pajovi´c and Foli´c 2010s Montenegro Š´ceki´c, Andrijaševi´c and Vukovi´c

Grubaˇc Strugar and Perovi´c

Serbia Montenegro

1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s

Textbook authors

Country of publication

Period

History Textbooks in Primary Schools

Neutral

Neutral Neutral Positive Neutral Neutral

Neutral Positive Neutral Neutral/Negative Negative

Positive

Positive Positive

Battle of Mojkovac (1916)

Neutral

Positive

Positive Neutral

Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand (1914)

Negative Negative

Positive

Neutral

Neutral

Negative

Negative

Neutral Neutral

Podgorica Assembly (1918)

Table 8.1 Summary of changes in the interpretation of the First World War events in history textbooks for primary schools in Montenegro

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Conclusion In this chapter, I have examined how historical events can be manipulated for political purposes, and how the instrumentalisation of history by elites and intellectuals interacted with Europeanisation processes in Montenegro. The process of distancing from Serbia necessitated changes to certain historical narratives, and the narrative of the First World War in particular. As elites needed to emphasise Montenegro’s Mediterranean and pro-European character, elements from Communist-era historiography that did not fit this narrative were accordingly adapted and reinterpreted, both in the public sphere by political elites and prominent historians, but in history textbooks as well. As the analysis of the interpretation of three First World War events— the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Battle of Mojkovac and the Podgorica Assembly—shows, after 1997, the shift from the Communist-era interpretation of these three WWI events is apparent in political speeches of leading political figures and historians. Because of its association with the escalation of Serbian nationalism, the assassination of the Archduke is recast as a terrorist act, a marked shift from the previous Communist-era interpretation of Young Bosnia as a revolutionary and pro-Yugoslav group. The Battle of Mojkovac is also accordingly recast from its previous interpretation as a glorious moment when the Montenegrin army saved the fraternal Serbian army into a symbol of the unnecessary sacrifice of Montenegrin national interests for the sake of Serbia. Most importantly, changes of the interpretation of the Podgorica Assembly are explicitly labelled by Ðukanovi´c as the “turn of the wheel of history” away from its previous historical orientation towards Serbia and Russia (which are equalled to the peripheralisation and inferiority of Montenegrin political space), and represent a symbolic and practical return of Montenegro to Europe and the European system of values (Portal Analitika 2019). Content analysis of history textbooks from the 1960s through contemporary times reflect the above-described changes in the public sphere. I show the gradual and bumpy changes in the interpretation of these three events over time: during the socialist era in the 1960s and 1970s, events concerning the Podgorica Assembly were evaluated in a neutral way because they were not overly relevant to the wider Yugoslav context, while the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the Battle of Mojkovac were mostly described positively, as they fit into the pro-Yugoslav and

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pro-revolutionary narrative. After 1974, as textbooks slowly began to be published in Montenegro, and through the 1980s, the role of the Battle of Mojkovac and Young Bosnia was mostly affirmed, and these three events were described mainly positively. However, in the transition era, after 1997 the Podgorica Assembly began to get a negative connotation, gradually moving to the “new” statehood narrative, in which the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand is described as a negative event, the Battle of Mojkovac is stripped of its glorious character and reduced to historical detail, and the Podgorica Assembly receives a markedly negative light. The reinterpretation of the three events from the time of the First World War is only a small segment of a wider reinterpretation of events from the history of Montenegro, which is to this day a daily occurrence in the Montenegrin public. From this case, we can conclude that the dominant political narrative in Montenegro, in every era, has decisively influenced the shaping of the politics of memory. Whereas Montenegro’s turn to Europe and apparent full commitment to EU accession processes is lauded by many, Europeanisation as a political and social process is predicated upon inclusivity and common values, whereas the chapter above demonstrates the way in which it can be used to fuel ethnic divisions.

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CHAPTER 9

Narratives of Gender, War Memory, and EU-Scepticism in the Movement Against the Ratification of the Istanbul Convention in Croatia Dunja Obajdin and Slobodan Golušin

Abstract The chapter analyses how the movement against the Istanbul Convention in Croatia used historical memory to frame the Convention and argue against gender and sex-based equality. It begins with the assumption of a mutually shaping relationship between memory agents and memory regimes to explore how the movement’s discourses emerged from post-accession shifts in Croatia’s discursive opportunity structures. To map the ties between the movement’s discourses and pre-existing nationalist discourses, we use Van Leeuwen’s theory of recontextualisation. We argue that post-accession, EU membership could no

D. Obajdin (B) Zagreb, Croatia S. Golušin Central European University, Budapest, Hungary e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Miloševi´c and T. Trošt (eds.), Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4_9

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longer legitimise policy choices, leading to a re-emergence of nationalism. Entrepreneurial agents capitalised on post-accession shifts and forged an alliance with institutionalised powers, acting as civil society members. They drew on Europeanised remembrance frameworks and centred “democracy”, reframed as the majority’s right to decide, to connect “Croatian identity” with a biopolitical vision of the nation which marginalises LGBTQ+ people and women. Keywords Memory · EU-scepticism · Gender · Istanbul convention · Croatia

Introduction Upon its entry into the EU, Croatia was characterised as “euroindifferent” (Vilovi´c 2017). In the process leading up to EU accession, Croatian citizens saw accession as inevitable and dependent on the whims of the international community (ibid.). During this process, memory frameworks were shifted to align with EU frameworks and accession was used to legitimise most political programmes and platforms (Perkovi´c 2013). Following accession, discursive opportunity structures shifted, and memory issues, previously ameliorated by the promise of a better, European future, came to the fore (Paukovi´c 2015). Capitalising on unresolved memory issues, illiberal groups have been able to form alliances with institutionalised powers and embed themselves into “mainstream” memory politics. By blaming “EU liberal elites” for “attacking Croatian tradition”, they have bolstered the re-emergence of nationalism and historical revisionism (Odak et al. 2018). One instance where the EU was seen as imposing a foreign agenda onto Croatia was the ratification of the Council of Europe’s (CoE) Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (the Istanbul Convention) in 2017. Announcements of the ratification of the Convention led to a backlash as 24 conservative NGOs1 formed the Istina o Istanbulskoj (Truth about the Istanbul Convention, IoI) citizen’s initiative. The initiative and its sympathisers 1 The initiative’s webpage lists 24 core NGOs. More than half are religious, the rest focus on “traditional values”, including religion (IoI 2017a).

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drew on national mythology to uphold a biopolitical vision of the nation. By selectively reinterpreting history, they equated “European liberal elites” with “Yugoslav communism” and constructed a set of “patriotic” values (patriarchal gender norms, heteronormativity, nationalism, and Roman-Catholicism) which marginalise women and LGBTQ+ people. This became increasingly evident in March when ratification became imminent.2 From October 2017 to March 2018, IoI held workshops across the country, gave out fliers, and engaged in a sustained media campaign, quickly gaining support from prominent religious (HBK 2018), academic (Narod.hr 2017a), and cultural (matica.hr 2018) institutions.3 In March, it began organising protests and collecting signatures for a referendum on ratifying the Convention.4 Protests were organised by 1990s veteran widows’ organisations,5 with veterans and their families as key speakers, bringing the initiative’s historical discourses to the foreground. The veterans’ role in the protests was linked to their contribution in the 1990s war for independence and protection of “Croatian values”. By invoking Yugoslavia and the War for Succession from Yugoslavia, the sympathisers of the Convention were attributed the role of the “enemy” and the Convention was presented as an instrument of foreign oppression. As Mustapi´c and Balbani´c (2018) note, in Croatian memory politics Yugoslavia often symbolises the past and Balkan backwardness while Europe, by contrast, symbolises progress (Jeffrey 2008; Jones and Suboti´c 2011; Hofman 2014). These discourses date back to Tud-man’s regime (1991/94–1999) when Croatia’s “European roots” were emphasised to distance it from the Balkans (Kameda 2010; MacDonald 2002), coupled with scepticism towards “big states” (Ognyanova-Krivoshieva 2018). The

2 See HRT (2018). 3 Croatian Bishop’s Conference, the Science Council of the Croatian Academy of Science

and Art, and Croatia’s oldest cultural institution respectively. Additionally, talks were organised in church-owned spaces (slobodnadalmacija.hr 2017; sibenskiportal.rtl.hr 2018). 4 On its official webpage, we see it began on 20 October 2017. Media appearances are mentioned immediately afterward and links to workshops and talks are available from December 2017 to March 2018. A letter to the president calling for a referendum and a letter to parliamentary representatives are linked in March 2018, followed by calls for protests and volunteers to organise a referendum (IoI 2017a). 5 Protests were organised in Zagreb and Split, technically by a new initiative. The new initiative was headed by the Association of Widows of Croatian Homeland War Fighters, listed as one of the 25 core NGOs of IoI (IoI 2018a).

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core myth propagated by Tud-man was that of Croatian centuries longsuffering under foreign hands (Bellamy 2003), which culminated in the 1990s wars against a Serbian other (Uzelak 1998; Horelt and Renner ˇ 2008; Banjeglav 2012; Jovi´c 2012; Colovi´ c and Opaˇci´c 2017) and the establishment of an independent Croatian state. Yugoslavia, interchangeable with “Serbian aggression” in narratives about the War of Yugoslav Succession, narrated as the Homeland War, was disavowed (this volume, McConnell). Yugoslav names and symbols disappeared from public spaces (Rihtman-Auguštin 2000; Lebhaft 2013), educational and cultural institutions were overhauled (Bingula 2012; Koren 2015), and new public holidays instituted (Rihtman-Auguštin 2000). Yugoslavian anti-fascism was replaced with a lenient attitude towards NDH (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska: Independent State of Croatia, this volume Zaremba) symbols6 (Pavlakovi´c 2008a; Radoni´c 2013). NDH was re-interpreted as an era of “independence”, as opposed to Yugoslav “oppression”, while new monuments and nomenclature revived figures from the distant past (Rihtman-Auguštin 2000; Grgin 2007). This fostered strong ethnic nationalism (Irvine 1997; Massey et al. 2003; Maleševi´c 2003) which defined the national sense of Croatianness as patriotic, i.e. supportive of Tud-man’s regime, and Roman-Catholic (Mojzes 1993; Brkljaˇci´c 2001). ˇ The “other”, mainly Serbs (Uzelak 1998; Maleševi´c 2003; Colovi´ c and Opaˇci´c 2017), was presented as aggressive, dangerous, and male (Schaeuble 2009). Women, who Ceribaši´c (2000) argues were erased from public space, served as symbols of the nation in need of protection from aggressive male others (Schaeuble 2009). As Topi´c (2009) shows, tying patriarchal gender norms to national identity pre-supposes a biopolitical view of the nation which equivocates biological and cultural reproduction. A shift from ethnic to civic nationalism is noted after Tud-man (Bellamy 2001; Jovi´c and Lamont 2010), and attributed to EU influence. According to Mesi´c (2003), this led to greater pluralism and limited improvements in minority rights, including ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities, rights. Mainly, the NDH period was reluctantly recognised as fascist (Cviji´c 2008) and accused war criminals were extradited to the Hague (Lamont 2010; Perkovi´c 2013), causing widespread protests 6 Tud-man attempted to retain and reconcile Yugoslav anti-fascism with nationalism, but his ultranationalist allies exploited the contradiction between his pro and anti-Yugoslav positions and pushed pro-NDH narratives (Ðuraškovic 2016).

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across the country (Peskin and Boduszynski 2003; Pavlakovi´c 2010). Since EU membership held more political currency at the time, these protests were renounced by the established left and the established right7 (Perkovi´c 2013) and were concentrated around fairly marginal parties ˇ like the Hrvatska Cista Stranka Prava (Croatian Pure Party of Rights ˇ or HCSP) (Lamont 2004). Mainstream politicians instead incorporated elements of EU remembrance frameworks (Paukovi´c 2015) and emphasised Croatia’s “European roots”, imagined as cosmopolitan and liberal (Kameda 2010; Zambelli 2010). Anti-fascism was revived with a “European” face based on liberal values, Western Ally victory, and Jewish victimhood (Radoni´c 2011; Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018). According to Radoni´c (2011), this led to equivocating Yugoslavia with communist regimes elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and downplaying the slaughter of non-Jewish Holocaust victims like Roma and Serbs—the primary victims of Croatian fascism. The 1990s war was addressed under the framework of transitional justice, “regional dialogue and cooperation” and “reconciliation” (Bejakovi´c 2002; Banjeglav 2013). Ðuraškovi´c (2016) argues that “reconciliation” entailed a mix of remembering (re-examining Croatia’s role in the conflict) and forgetting (dislodging it from its position as a national myth) which created ambiguity over how to remember the war. As we will argue, this laid the ground for post-accession revisionism. In the following chapter, we tackle the following research questions: 1. Which features of Croatia’s political opportunity structures enabled the emergence of the anti-Istanbul Convention movement? Specifically: Which effects of Europeanisation on Croatian post-accession memory politics enabled the emergence of the anti-Istanbul Convention movement? 2. How are the movement’s discourses affecting Croatia’s discursive opportunity structures? Specifically: How is the movement’s use of historical memory reshaping ideas about nationhood and gender?

7 As Tud-man’s party, oppositional for the first time since its founding, HDZ (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica: Croatian Democratic Community) opposed cooperation in 2000 (Peskin and Bodsuzynski 2003). It re-took office in 2003 as a reformed moderate-right option prioritising EU membership and extradited general Gotovina in 2005 (Pavlakovi´c 2010).

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To answer these research questions, we focused on “recontextualization” (Van Leeuwen 2008): the changing meanings occurring when practices are decontextualised from one and recontextualised into another context. Discourses can be recontextualised when they move to different contexts or are combined with other discourses (Van Leeuwen, ibid.). Historical memory, in our case, can be drawn from nationalist narratives, used to define gender norms, and gain new connotations. We conducted a thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke’s8 (2006) model to trace the anti-Istanbul Convention movement’s recontextualisation practices and locate its collective action frames. Data consisted of all articles and videos from IoI’s official webpage and its two Facebook pages between October 2017 and June 2018. We analysed connections between collective action frames to map IoI’s vision of itself and its place in Croatian politics. Texts referencing history explicitly were focused on to analyse how they derive and add meanings to collective action frames. We were especially interested in how history was used to represent nationalism, gender, and Europeanisation. In the following sections, we first review the literature on memory politics, nationalism, and gender, setting up the concepts utilised in our analysis. We focus on the dynamic between “historicising strategies” used by mnemonic agents struggling for power and “discursive opportunity structures” which constitute the environment these agents navigate. This is followed by an analysis of IoI’s collective action frames and its selective reinterpretation of history.

Reversing Europeanisation? Nationalism, Gender, and Memory Looking at the influence of Europeanisation via Enlargement, we need to distinguish between Europeanisation and EU conditionality. Conditionality is the EU’s ability to make demands by promising future membership (Schimmelfennig and Scholtz 2008). It is coercive, shaping candidates’ policies through an asymmetric power relationship, and relies

8 They suggest a seven-step strategy: (1) rereading data to become familiar with it, (2) isolating segments relevant to the research, (3) reviewing segments to generate initial codes, (4) locating patterns in codes to generate initial themes, (5) reviewing initial themes for consistency and distinctiveness, (6) reviewing codes, (7) generating final themes.

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on candidates’ aspirational attempts at building Europeanised policy environments9 (Glupker 2013). Europeanisation is broader, encompassing socialisation, policy and norm-transfer, conditionality, and European integration processes (Featherstone 2003). It can be thought of as a dialogue between the EU and candidate countries where both sides incorporate elements of the other’s normative frameworks, including remembrance frameworks. Domestic agents have a wide variety of paths to choose from when negotiating memory at the EU level. They can campaign to have their memories recognised (Miloševi´c 2017), incorporate elements of EU remembrance frameworks and translate them into domestic contexts (Miloševi´c and Touquet 2018), or contest them (Vermeersch 2019). Underpinning the EU level, agents operate in complex local contexts woven from inherited institutional arrangements (Börzel 2011), structures of needs and interests (Suboti´c 2011), and situated struggles (Mladenov and Stahl 2014). The interaction between EU and local politics constitutes the environment which actors, from social movements to political parties, navigate in making claims over what being “European” means, whether it’s desirable, and how to go about it. Their claims intersect with other discourses, in our case, memory, nationalism, and gender. The intersection of nationalism and gender has been addressed by feminist scholars. Yuval-Davis and Anthias (1989) argue women’s inclusion into the nation operates through their reproductive roles as “mothers of the nation”, or as symbols of unity, strength, and purity that motivate men to defend their nation from foreign men. The nation is imagined as a semi-biological entity reproduced through the birth of new members10 (Stella and Nartova 2016). LGBTQ+ people, excluded from heterosexual gender roles which are imagined as the basis of reproduction, find themselves excluded from the nation as well (Stella and Nartova 2016). In our 9 The commonly used term is “compliance” analysed through candidates’ political opportunity structures which enable or constrain pro and anti-EU agents (Wunsch 2016). The idea of aspirational role-building better fits our understanding of Europeanisation as a process of identity formation, where agents construct their positions depending on environmental incentives. 10 Kuhar (2015) and Jovanovi´c (2018) locate the Church and “satellite” NGOs (including NGOs discussed in this chapter) as purveyors of anti-LGBTQ+ discourses in Croatia. They map a mutually beneficial relationship between conservative nationalism and religion: the former uses the Church’s influence to consolidate power, the latter gain access to politics.

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case, IoI utilised such a biopolitical view by equating “tradition” with demographics. The intersection of nationalism and memory has been studied by Hobsbawm (1991), Gellner (1983), and Anderson (1983), among others. They claim a common national identity is established by cherrypicking or imagining a series of events that create the illusion of continuity. These events function as “foundational myths”. They are disseminated through socialisation from everyday “banal nationalism” (Billing 1995) to official ceremonies (Breuilly 1993), and have immense mobilisation potential (Levinger and Lyte 2003; Hutchinson 2009). By defining what makes the nation “distinct” and “limited” (Anderson 1983), foundational myths delineate between who is included and excluded from it. They order multiple modes of inclusion/exclusion from gender, sexuality, religion, to ethnicity. With multiple modes of inclusion and exclusion, come different structures of needs and different memories and countermemories. To unpack them, we deploy the notions of “memory regimes”, “memory games”, and “memory agents”. Memory regimes are officially sanctioned configurations of dominant memories. They are historically contingent, yet function as “sacred knowledge” (Langenbacher 2003, 2008). A wide variety of actors transform, reproduce, contest, or add new elements to memory regimes, making official memory fragmented, plural, and fluid. Mink and Neumayer (2013) argue fractures in memory regimes open up space for agents to engage in “memory games”, a power struggle where agents deploy “historicising strategies” if they believe it will be beneficial. Agents can take any number of positions, depending on their needs, goals, and positions in broader structures. They can act as “memory entrepreneurs” (Miloševi´c 2017), adding new elements or pioneering new understandings of agreed-upon memories. They can campaign for a rigid vision of history (mnemonic warriors), acknowledge plural readings (mnemonic pluralists), or disengage from memory politics (mnemonic abnegators) (Bernhard and Kubik 2014). In our case, IoI is best described as a “mnemonic warrior”, but it is somewhat unique in that it had little interest in history, instead using pre-existing nationalist myths to re-define gender. IoI’s relationship to memory illuminates two key aspects of it: as a collective undertaking of meaning-making (Halbwachs 1980), and as a symbolic resource used in political struggles (Mink and Neumayer 2013). Focusing on the second, we pre-suppose a mutually shaping relationship between agents and

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structures. We see the construction of memory as a process of interaction where agents, positioning themselves relative to each other (tactical power, Wolf 1990), also position themselves relative to their structural environment (strategic power, Wolf 1990). This allows us to read novel historicising strategies as reflective of shifts in memory regimes. In our case, we will argue that accession altered Croatia’s “discursive opportunity structures” (Koopmans and Statham 1999). The notion of discursive opportunity structures comes from social movement theory, and combines “collective action frames” (Snow 2004) with “political opportunity structures” (Eisinger 1973). Collective action frames are the narratives social movements use to create meaning, order reality, and plan activities. Political opportunity structures are features of the external environment that constrain or enable social movements. Discursive opportunity structures are features of a movement’s external environment that constrain or enable the use of discourses, for example, the use of historical memory. When we refer to a shift in discursive opportunity structures, we propose memory regimes shifted to enable the emergence of new memory agents using novel historicising strategies.

IoI’s Collective Action Frames “Gender ideology”11 was presented as a secret agenda behind the Istanbul Convention, antithetical to Croatian values and traditions, healthy families, science, and morality. Opposite to “gender ideology” stood “family values”, the moral and demographic core of society. Family values connected all of IoI’s arguments: concerns about children, demographic decline, parent’s rights, religion, “science”, “Croatian identity and tradition”, sovereignty, democracy, and budgetary concerns. They tied identity with demographics, suggesting Croatian culture hinges on the reproduction of ethnic Croatians, itself dependent on upholding “correct” values. In later stages, politicians and feminist NGOs were blamed for destroying “correct values” and historical memories served to recreate them as (Serbian) cˇetniks and Yugoslavs.

11 Most texts focus on “gender ideology”, a shorthand for fears about third-wave feminism and LBGTQ+ rights undermining traditional gender roles (Kuhar and Patternote 2017).

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Data created up to March 2018 makes no reference to historical memory. Analysed texts highlight the importance of “gender ideology”, framed with (negative) examples from “liberal Western” countries. The first text to appear on the “Truth About the Istanbul Convention” Facebook page was about a Canadian man who left his family to live as a five-year-old girl (Dailymail 2015). Other texts were about a transgender athlete injuring a cis-female athlete in mixed martial arts (zadravstevniodgoj 2015a), children in Norway undergoing “sex change” (zdravstveniodgoj 2015b), or of a man using plastic surgery to look “genderless” (veˇcernji.hr 2017). These texts dominated IoI’s first Facebook page until March 2018 (when the second page was created). However, they were not linked to particular arguments or proposals. Instead, transphobic stereotypes served to frame “gender ideology” as alien and dangerous. Women and children were painted as weak and “targets” of gender ideology. “I think it’s precisely women (…) who get hurt because, imagine, a colleague of yours who is 190 cm tall and weighs 90 kilos comes up to you and plays handball with you or, God forbid, a martial arts sport” (smn.hr 2018). In particular, children and young adults were a starting point for many discussions. They were connected with parents’ rights, seen as a matter of constitutional sovereignty. “Children would be indoctrinated since an early age (…) and parents would lose their constitutional right to freely raise their children” (IoI 2017b). Children’s “psychosocial well-being” was connected with demographic decline: “They enter sexual relations earlier and act promiscuously, spread STDs, marry less, divorce more, have fewer children (demographic breakdown) etc.”. (IoI 2017c, second parentheses in original). “By accepting the Istanbul Convention the blood of our society and values would change” (Varaždinska Biskupija 2017). As the cited paragraph explains, society would be destroyed by attacking “family values”: “Gradually, family and family values are undermined, and so is society as a whole, because family is the cornerstone of society” (Varaždinska Biskupija 2017). Family values were expressed as a binary “male-female view of humanity, family, and marriage which are in accordance with nature (…) and supported by all world cultures and religions” (IoI 2017d). Connecting religious “tradition”, the basis of identity, with “family values” suggests maintaining “Croatian identity” necessitates upholding the movement’s values, and sustaining Croatia’s current demographics.

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“Family values” overlapped with “Croatian identity”: “It’s unacceptable that (the Istanbul Convention) defines gender as a social construct and a variable independent from biological reality. This is a fight for our identity. For the Croatian nation” (Varaždinska Biskupija 2017). Subtler framings cited the 80% of public debate participants opposing ratification and worries about incompatible definitions of gender in the Convention and the Croatian Constitution (IoI 2017d). LGBTQ+ people, unwilling to accept “family values” and procreate, were IoI’s primary antagonists. They were dehumanised, seen as deviant, unhealthy, and dangerous. “People who change their sex have psychological problems with accepting themselves and society” and: “someone else will change their sex, but these others will influence society and change values and our children will look up to them” (Varaždinska Biskupija 2017). Usually, “gender ideology” stood in for LGBTQ+ people. Contrasted with “family values”, it connected IoI’s narratives into an overarching “family versus gender” frame. Family values were natural, godly, pro-Croatian, child-friendly, and “gender ideology” and LGBTQ + people were the opposite. To frame its view of sex and gender as natural and moral, IoI and its sympathisers invoked religious and scientific arguments. “Differences between the male and female brain (…) are a result of a natural hormonal differences”, (slobodnadalmacija.hr 2017) and “In biblical texts (…) we recognize God’s design” (slobodnadalmacija.hr, ibid.). Claiming “gender is determined at conception” (smn.hr 2018) used “natural differences” to legitimise anti-abortion sentiments. Claiming that “sex change is impossible because (sex) is genetically inscribed” (sibenskiportal.rtl.hr 2018) endorsed transphobia. In March, six months after the start of the initiative, the output of all three webpages increased and new elements appeared. “Losing sovereignty” was fused with budgetary concerns aimed against feminist NGOs. “Since the Convention forces gender, we expect its implementation will go to left-liberal associations from Platform 112, who already get disproportionately large funds from the state and from foreign governments and funds” (kamenjar.hr 2018). “GREVIO (oversees) the implementation of the Istanbul convention (and is placed) above the state they oversee, (their expenses) are covered by the states which have ratified (the Convention)” (totalno.hr 2018). Democracy, equated with “the people” also appeared: “We believe no one will be able to stop the people from speaking their minds” (IoI 2018b). A narrative of “common people versus corrupt elites” emerged: “Demochristians (from

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HDZ) are offering believers, during lent, 30 pieces of silver for betrayal” (Risti´c 2018). “There is no public interest in ratifying the Convention - only benefits for politicians appeasing Bruxelles and para-political organizations who will get massive funds” (Narod.hr 2018a). IoI identified three main groups of enemies: politicians and NGOs, LBGTQ+ people, and “the West”. Attitudes towards “the West” are most ambivalent, illustrated by the following quotes. “(Gender ideology) is being globally imposed, especially in Western countries which treasure Christian spiritual and social values” (IoI 2018c), implying Croatia’s “Christian heritage” makes it “Western”. “In our country, charlatanism of any sort is obviously welcomed, so long as it’s imported, Western” (bitno.net 2012), implying the liberal West is poisoning Croatia. IoI and its sympathisers were unwilling to renounce Croatia’s “Western heritage”, even while arguing: “if we’re a sovereign country, we should be able to make and implement quality laws to prevent violence on our own” and “if Croatia has that kind of money (referring to the budget for GREVIO) we can finance women’s shelters and everything else necessary for their protection without the Istanbul Convention and spend the rest of the money on, for example, pro-natality measures” (kamenjar.hr 2018). This ambivalence mirrors overlapping “internal” and “external” enemies present in Croatian nationalism (Blanuša 2013) and in IoI’s relationship with “Western-funded” NGOs who are “conserving the heritage of (Yugoslavian) communism12 ”. Enemies being Balkan and “true Croatians” being European can be traced to Tud-man-era nationalism, but the addition of “democracy” as a framework stems from pre-accession Europeanisation (Zambelli 2010). Mainly, in 2000, the EU pressured “reformed” moderate-right HDZ to pass anti-discrimination laws (Vuleti´c 2013). Local LGBTQ+ NGOs quickly adopted the frame of “Europeanization as equality” (Kuhar 2011). Their opponents used an imagined “EU-gay alliance” to otherwise LGBTQ+ people as “Western agents” (Moss 2014; Kahlina 2015). Walking a tight rope between placating their more hard-line allies and appeasing the EU, the government argued that “Croatian, traditional, and family values” are incompatible with

12 “Internal enemies”, remnants of Yugoslavia, allying with “external enemies”, “big states” who want to oppress Croatia, was a trope used during Tud-man (Bellamy 2003) to explain why “European” Croatia is under attack from Europe.

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equal rights (Vuleti´c 2013). Anti-LGBT activist built on the government’s discourses and appropriated narratives of “democracy” from EUframeworks, imagined as “the majority’s right” to decide (Kuhar 2011). Framing “democracy” as a fight between “the people” and “corrupt elites” side-steps the dissonance of opposing the EU based on “European” identity. By tying “democracy”, “Croatian identity”, and “family values” IoI constructed a narrative of “gender ideology”, a code-word for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, as antithetical to Croatia’s Christian and European heritage. It built heavily on the legacy of the 2013 same-sex marriage referendum, which is illustrative of post-accession changes in Croatian memory politics. In 2013, anti-gender NGOs gained support from thenoppositional HDZ and the Church (Slootmaeckers and Sircar 2018) to constitutionally define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The main agents of the anti-Istanbul Convention movement first entered the political arena during this time. The political party Hrvatski Rast (Croatian Growth or HRAST), the only party supporting the movement (Narod.hr 2017b), was formed by anti-gay marriage activists (h-rast.hr 2018). HRAST’s current head, Ladislav Ilˇci´c, led the NGO Glas Roditelja za Djecu (Voice of Parents for Children or GROZD) at the time (hrast.hr 2018), while GROZD’s current head, Kristina Pavlovi´c, became the de facto spokeswoman on the anti-Istanbul Convention movement (Kovaˇcevi´c Bariši´c 2018). After winning subsequent elections, HDZ entered into a coalition with HRAST (HRT 2015), cementing the ties between mainstream politics and anti-gender NGOs.

Recontextualising History From March 2018 onward, historical memory was used to frame “the people versus corrupt elites” narrative and legitimise IoI’s definition of “Croatian identity”. IoI drew from pre-existing nationalist narratives. Croatia’s “suffering” under foreign rule (MacDonald 2002, Kolsto 2010) was retold, connecting “gender ideology” and political ideologies of the past: “Since the end of the Second World War, Croatia has been held by the neck by ‘great-Serbian’ and ‘Yugo-communist’ ideology. Their phrases became tired, myths worn out, ideologues deflated, so they modernized with a new, gender ideology, which they will use to smother the people in this century” (Piskaˇc 2018). Present experiences and events were linked to the past, creating a past-present continuum. In this view “gender

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ideology” is oppression, undemocratic, and anti-Croatian. Past ideologies, especially Yugoslavian communism, framed as foreign (Serbian), were mirrored onto the Istanbul Convention, a “Western” invention: This looks like the time before the Homeland War, when our people in my Zovik near Brˇcko (a village in Herceg-Bosnia, today part of Bosnia and Herzegovina) were jailed whenever (…) [a] communist functionary came to town because they were, allegedly, enemies of the communist system and that was because, the communists explained, they celebrated Saint Ante yearly. Back then, we consoled ourselves that it was (…) representatives of another nation but today our own don’t let us speak. (Pranjki´c 2018a)

Why “our own don’t let us speak” in the name of a “foreign” document was not explained and the focus shifted to conspiracies about “internal enemies”. Feminist and LGBTQ+ NGOs were the primary target described as Yugo-communists and foreign agents: “Upon ratification, the Croatian parliament would put a whole network of left-liberal associations, nominally concerned with the protection of various rights, which have actually been working, for the two and a half decades, on undermining the state from Yugoslav political positions, prolonging the biological and conserving the mental heritage of communism, on the same rank as state institutions” (Starešina 2018). From our analysis it emerges that “internal” and “external” enemies, both essentially antiCroatian, overlap. In contrast, Croatia possesses “true” values, acquired through the Homeland War (Croatian name for the War of Yugoslav Succession): “Let’s give ourselves the right to clearly and loudly protect the heritage of the Homeland War and true human rights, not something imposed by those who fight violence with violence. Let them advocate for that in their countries (and) leave Croatia alone” (Pranjki´c 2018b). IoI sometimes projected its declared values into historical narratives directly. Narratives about religion in the War of Yugoslav Succession13 were particularly common, and served to reaffirm IoI’s religious underpinnings: “These people remind me of the 1990s, when we ran towards evil with guns in our hands and rosaries around our necks” (Pranjki´c 2018c). Narratives of wartime heroism (Horelt and Renner 2008; Jovi´c 13 Croatian mythologisation of the War of Yugoslavian Succession constructs Catholicism as a source of inspiration, nourishment, and encouragement for Croat fighters. This myth is used to de-legitimise Yugoslavia as anti-religious, and legitimise an alliance between Church and state powers (Perica 2006).

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2012) were used to frame IoI’s opponents as enemies, while its sympathisers were positioned to succeed veterans and protect Croatian identity: “We were not afraid of tanks, machine guns, crazy looks. We were not afraid of inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda. Today, we’re not afraid of local oligarchs and functionaries” (Pranjki´c 2018c). Veterans, keepers of “the heritage of the Homeland War”, played an important symbolic role in legitimising IoI’s narratives. Personifying the myth of independence and war, they narrated their war experience at the protests (Narod.hr 2018b) to mobilise support: “We never have and never will submit to anyone but Croatian culture, customs, and religion. We died for it and we’ll die for it” (Narod.hr 2018c). Veterans’ simultaneous victimisation and heroism were combined with IoI’s vision of “Croatian values” (religion, nationalism, and patriarchal gender roles): “Let’s clearly show them we care about our victims of the Homeland War, our tradition, and the teachings of the Catholic Church” (Pranjki´c 2018b). Political figures key to the Homeland narrative, such as Franjo Tud-man, were invoked as ideal leaders and contrasted with “cowardly elites”. As a veteran from Split explains: “On this very spot, the late president Tud-man, after Oluja, promised the Croatian people eastern Slavonia’s return to constitutional-legal order, and then fulfilled his promise. Today, many politicians invoke the late president’s legacy but (…) they work contrary to what, under the late president’s leadership, we fought for and won, and that is an independent Croatia” (Narod.hr 2018b). Tud-man embodies a mythological “golden age” (Bellamy 2003) where independence was established by expelling the Serbian other, which IoI sought to recreate by expelling contemporary others, LGBTQ+ people, from public life. To illustrate Croatia’s victimisation during the war the country was compared to a raped woman. Marija Siliškovi´c, the head of the Foundation for victims of the war crime of rape “Sunˇcica”, states: “I am well aware of the apathy of our politicians and state institutions towards women, victims of war crimes of sexual assault in the Homeland War” and “Everyone who is so loud and persistent today in seeking immediate ratification of the Istanbul Convention was completely uninterested to legislate protections for victims of sexual assault” (hkv 2018). Statements like these discredited politicians pushing for ratification and reframed cis-women’s alleged victimisation at the hands of trans women through women’s wartime victimisation at the hands of (Serbian) enemies. The

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coupling of “brave war veterans” and “women victims” mirrors nationalist narratives about female victimhood inspiring male aggression.

Conclusion The Istanbul convention was targeted primarily as a means of marginalising LGBTQ+ people and women’s rights. Its “Western” origins were alternatively emphasised or de-emphasised, depending on how “European” IoI wanted to appear. An alliance between “internal” and “external” enemies was posited and framed as “undemocratic” to discredit the EU. IoI drew partially on pre-accession and partially on Tud-man-era discourses, but its composition and goals show it embodies a new14 type of right-wing NGO which emerged after accession. According to Kameda (2010) and Ðuraškovi´c (2016), pre-accession “reconciliation with the past” entailed forgetting to look ahead towards a European future.15 Croatian war crimes and their place in nationalist narratives were not addressed beyond reluctantly extraditing war criminals to the Hague (Peskin and Boduszynski 2003; Pavlakovi´c 2010). This created an ambivalence between questioning and renouncing nationalist war narratives and celebrating and commemorating them as foundational myths (Cvijanovi´c 2018). The dual strategy of forgetting and remembering, in turn, facilitated the use of memory as a stand-in for other issues (Jovi´c 2015; Mustapi´c and Balbani´c 2018). The Croatian right, in particular, kept old animosities alive by equating any attempt at questioning the official “Homeland War” narrative with treason (Peskin and Boduszynski 2003; Jovi´c 2012) and accusing the perpetrators of “communism” (Blanuša 2014; Cipek, 2017). Prior to EU accession, a deep cleavage was already evident in Croatian memory politics (Horelt and Renner 2008; Blanuša 2013). Following accession, the disillusionment with the slow pace of changes spreading, nationalism filled the vacuum left by failed and incomplete reforms (Jovi´c 2012, 2015). Historical narratives of wartime heroism 14 The predecessors of these NGOs are veteran groups who led protest during the Hague trials (Fisher 2003). We refer to them as “new” because they forged a permanent alliance with institutionalised power. 15 Forgetting Croatian war crimes was a feature of Tud-man-era memory regimes (Bellamy 2003). Europeanisation reframed Tud-man-era stories of Croatia’s European

heritage around democracy (Zambelli 2010), but the war narrative remained the same.

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and suffering, strengthened by the perceived injustice of the Hague trials (Pavlakovi´c 2008b), were central to the re-emerging nationalism. The EU, no longer a goal to aspire to, was placed into the “enemy” role and reframed by memory entrepreneurs as a tool to dismantle Croatian identity (Blanuša 2014). With the re-emergence of nationalism, LGBTQ+ people were used as symbols of foreign incursion on Croatian identity (Moss 2014) and anti-gender NGOs embedded themselves into civil society (Petrušic et al. 2017).

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CHAPTER 10

Against Institutionalised Forgetting: Memory Politics from Below in Postwar Prijedor Zoran Vuˇckovac

Abstract Ever since Prijedor came to international attention in mid-1992 for housing three concentration camps for non-Serbs, municipal authorities have been adamant in denying any responsibility for the torture and death of thousands of people. While ethnic communities freely developed their commemorative practices, the official municipal memory politics remain reserved exclusively for victims of Serb ethnic background. Faced with an ambivalent role of international courts and almost non-existent EU influence (Moll in Nationalities Papers 41(6): 910–935, 2013), local actors, activists and artists took charge of memory making on the ground. This chapter analyses the responses of activists and artists to institutionalised forgetting and the passive presence of the international community on the Bosnian memory landscape, providing a critical perspective on the current commemorative practices in Prijedor. I offer an analysis of interventions by artists and activists that evoke collective recollection of

Z. Vuˇckovac (B) University of Giessen, Giessen, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Miloševi´c and T. Trošt (eds.), Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4_10

231

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ˇ Z. VUCKOVAC

wartime events and expose the shortcomings of the post-war model of commemorative politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Keywords Prijedor · Commemoration · Bosnia-Herzegovina · Grassroots memory

Introduction and Background1 Ever since the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) ended in the mid1990s, the European Union (EU) has had a commanding influence over the country’s memoryscape with the powers to condition and pace the process of accession through conditionality and Europeanisation.2 But unlike with other Eastern European states where the Europeanisation of memory meant defining its relation to the Holocaust (Kucia 2016), in B&H it entailed a loosely defined reconciliation process (Touquet and Vermeersch 2016). This process is mostly mirrored in obligatory cooperation with ICTY,3 but also in the EU Parliament’s non-binding vote on Srebrenica Commemoration4 and the EU Commission’s support of

1 The short version of the paper was initially presented at the Marxist Literary Group (MLG) conference in 2014 and then reworked for a talk at the University of Florida in 2016 under the title “The political life of exported steel”. 2 Europeanisation is here meant as a larger process of EU integration and a main source of tracking progress of the candidate countries through conditionality framed as economic reforms, fight against corruption, privatisation, acquis communautaire, cooperation with international courts, etc. The state-building project was imposed by civilian and military international actors with a top-down approach (Aybet and Bieber 2011) making BiH look more like an international protectorate than a fully sovereign state. The diffusion of three general EU enlargement norms of democratic governance, the market economy and human rights (Radaelli in Featherstone and Radaelli 2003) often meant changing of conditions to a ubiquitous permanent “crisis” of state-building (Rossiter 2002). 3 ICTY stands for “International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia” and it is important to add here that the EU has altered its enlargement process through chapter 23 to include rule of law and human rights protection, covering the issues of reform of the judiciary, preventing and combating corruption, human rights protection, political rights, national minority and returnee rights, processing war crimes and cooperation with the ICTY. 4 Voted in 2015, this is a third resolution of the EU parliament on Srebrenica, although this one unfortunately came as a response to the rising tide of denial of genocide in

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civil society initiatives.5 However, on the local level, the effects of Europeanisation on memory lost steam, as I will show on the case of Prijedor, where ethno-nationalist discourse on memory is coupled with international capital in denying commemorative practices for minority groups. Here, it is the local actors that took charge of memory making on the ground. This chapter analyses the responses of activists and artists to institutionalised forgetting and the passive presence of the international community, providing a critical perspective on the current commemorative practices in Prijedor. I offer an analysis of interventions by artists and activists that evoke collective recollection of wartime events and expose the shortcomings of the post-war model of commemorative politics in B&H. This chapter presents the case of Prijedor, a small city in the northwest of B&H, covering its violent history of the early 1990s and an ongoing struggle by the victims’ families, survivors, artists and activists to publicly remember. Official memory politics in B&H is as fragmented as the state itself (Moll 2013), without an agreement on a single memory issue for almost three decades after the war, from the character of the war to state holidays. Prijedor is no different in that respect. For the past two decades, the municipality of Prijedor has funded a number of memorials, commemorations, overhauled the entire Second World War history of the region, and very much displaced “the socialist experience from becoming an object of serious discussion or catalyst for social change” (Gilbert 2006, p. 18). On the one hand, official memorial sites and institutions paint a picture of exclusively Serb history and suffering, while memory of the ethnicised Other is allowed in semi-private arrangements in local communities where Bosniaks and Croats are a majority (Franovi´c and Vukosavljevi´c 2016). On the other hand, the socialist experience of Yugoslavia and the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle (NOB) ranges from its

Srebrenica that culminated in establishment of a Commission on Srebrenica and Sarajevo by the Republika Srpska’s government. 5 Their support is most directly reflected in their support for REKOM, but one that has not yet become a part of the accession conditions. RECOM stands for “Regional Commission Tasked with Establishing the Facts about All Victims of War Crimes and Other Serious Human Rights Violations Committed on the Territory of the Former SFRJ”.

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appropriation as an entirely Serb endeavour6 to being ignored and overwritten in public spaces (Šušnica 2015). Though authors like Nicolas Moll (2013) call for a Europeanisation of memory in B&H through a creation of a “shared Bosnian memory space”, in what follows I show that memory politics plays no significant role for the process of accession to the European Union (EU). In the face of absence of the EU, international capital has instead played a significant role in commemoration practices. It has done so through complicity with local nationalists, legitimising local efforts to sweep the difficult past under the carpet. In this chapter, I contextualise Prijedor, discuss the methodological and theoretical approach, and give several examples of local responses that go beyond politics of forgetting and deal with the difficult past in creative ways. Prijedor received international attention in the mid-1992 when ITN7 journalists Penny Marshal and Ed Vulliamy filmed and wrote about the imprisoned local population in Omarska and Trnopolje camps (ICTY 2012).8 Earlier that year, and with the help of the local police forces, the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) seized control over the municipality of Prijedor via coup. The SDS toppled many noncompliant Croatian and Bosniak/Bosnian Muslim individuals from public positions to which they had been appointed after the first elections in B&H, right before the breakup of Yugoslavia. Around 30,000 people of non-Serb origin from Prijedor and its surroundings ended up in one of the three camps, including the Omarska mining complex, Keraterm tile factory and a social centre in Trnopolje.9 Omarska was transformed into what Bosnian Serb officials called a “collective centre”, where according to Human Right Watch’s report “more than 6.000 informative interviews were held”.10 Over 3000 Bosnian Muslims and Croats from Prijedor went missing

6 One of myriad examples is the speech of Milorad Dodik, the then president of Republika Srpska, during the commemoration of the Kozara battle from the Second World War in July 2015 (Udruženje Kozarˇcana u Beogradu 2015). 7 ITN stands for “Independent Television News”. 8 Their footage has been used in several court proceedings at the ICTY, but there had

been reports of violence from the very opening of the camp via people who managed to escape to Zagreb. 9 The Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution (1992). 10 See the letter of the then Secretary-General to the UN Security Council President available on International Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia.

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or were killed during 1992. At least half of the people “interviewed” remained imprisoned in the camp, while 700–800 were killed and 37 female detainees repeatedly raped and tortured. Over 600 men, women and children from the Prijedor region are still missing.11 None of the above-mentioned locations are part of the official municipal commemoration, even though Prijedor is the only site besides Srebrenica in B&H where annual collective burials still occur (Halilovich 2017). When it comes to self-organised commemorative practices, Keraterm bears a memorial plaque as of 2003 without municipal approval, several mass graves across the municipality bear privately erected memorials, while Omarska mine (former camp) and Kori´canske stijene (the site of execution of Omarska prisoners) both have mobile plaques that are temporarily installed during the yearly commemorative visits (Franovi´c and Vukosavljevi´c 2016). The memory of the other is thus ousted from the public sphere and have become a matter of private individuals and initiatives, regardless of the media coverage and pressures by the nongovernmental sector. Out of the three sites, Omarska stands out as for a number of reasons, but primarily because the mine’s privatisation in 2004 brought about the first commemoration initiative mediated by a UK-based organisation called Soul of Europe. The initiative was to show corporate responsibility in action but, according to Sivac-Bryant, the “set up of the project suggests that they were more interested in creating a showpiece reconciliation project than a memorial” (2014, p. 172). Moreover, the mine used to employ around 5000 workers before the war and thus was a major factor in the regional economy, and continues to be important with around a thousand employed today. As Arcelor Mittal Prijedor is a joint venture with the state-owned mining company, local politicians in various company boards have a say in matters of both public and corporate relevance, ultimately aligning their interests. Therefore, due to its social and economic relevance, political economy of war and privatisation, the bracketed history of socialism (Gilbert 2006) and the politics of amnesia put forward by the post-war nationalist governments, it is at 11 According to International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP) report from 2014 there are 788 persons missing from the Prijedor region. The report does not differentiate nationalities. In Adis Hukanovi´c’s book Dogad-aji, narativi i interpretacija narativa 1992 godine: sluˇcaj Prijedora (2015), the number of missing Bosniaks and Croat ranges from is 644 to 693, with 12 partially identified bodies (p. 16). For more details on the number of people killed and still missing during the war in Prijedor check Ni krivi ni duzni (2012).

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the Omarska mining site where the processes of remembering and forgetting, implementation of official nation-building narratives and counter narratives by independent civil initiatives are rendered most visible. My approach aims to put forward local initiatives to remember in order to provide an analysis that goes beyond what Antonia Majaˇca calls “the product of the complex management of memory, of political directing, and finally the monumentalisation of nationalist nostalgia” set forth by the transitional and post-conflict memorial cultures (2012, p. 7). These local memory politics have occurred against the backdrop of the post-war reconciliation process led by the international community, and later negotiations for joining the EU. In this context, local memory initiatives have occurred simultaneously with Europeanisation processes. Europeanisation of memory generally implies upholding certain political and moral norms while dealing with “profoundly different pasts” (Müller 2012, p. 27) and represents a part of the third, cultural wave of Europeanisation (Karlsson 2010). For Karlsson, the first, economic wave of Europeanisation ended in early 1970s with the economic crisis and the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system. This gave rise to the second, political wave of Europeanisation that defined the union but resulted mostly in nationalisation of history. In what he calls the cultural wave, the European memory canon revolves around the Holocaust as its foundational negative myth and furthers dismantling of a heroic past in order to attune the public for the discussion of unresolved issues from its history. When “politics of regret” (Olick and Coughlin 2003) spawned out of regime change throughout Eastern Europe, B&H was in midst of an almost four year war. As the country slowly paces towards EU membership, the struggle over memory rarely means keeping up with vague EU standards of dealing with the past, even though references to the Holocaust emerge in Prijedor as well, tapping into its authority to expose injustices sealed in the politics of forgetting. Despite the EU’s common memory framework, its involvement in memory politics in Prijedor has been almost non-existent (Moll 2013). To give an example of how much EU focuses on memory issues in B&H, one should only look at the latest document12 the European Commission issued on the state of the country’s progress towards membership. The document touches upon memory practices in two paragraphs, citing 12 Commission Staff Working Document: Analytical Report was issued on the 25th of May 2019, European Commission (2019).

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genocide denial and heavy historical revisionism as malpractices, but without recommendations or guidelines for potential changes. It critically refers to the establishment of an international committee in Republika Srpska13 on revising the circumstances that led to genocide in Srebrenica14 and heavy historical revisionism by main political actors in the country.15 Of course, B&H’s application to join European Union is primarily hindered by its constitutional design, and with ICTY as one of the axes of pressure for candidate countries (Miloševi´c 2017) entering into its residual phase, memory practices will too often be backgrounded in the process. The two paragraphs in an almost 200-page document showcase the EU’s approach to memory matters in B&H, which is mostly focused, not to say reduced, to genocide in Srebrenica. Therefore, the EU, both in terms of standards and criticism, will unlikely become a “real driving force for overcoming the domination of nationalist memory cultures in BiH” (Moll 2013, p. 20). Tepid warnings about the negative effects of such developments in memory culture aside, the rest of the B&H’s memoryscape seems to be exonerated of criticism for their commemorative practices altogether. One such locality is certainly the city of Prijedor which, in terms of court proceedings, remains on top of the list with over 50 verdicts for crimes against humanity, breaches of the Geneva Conventions, violations of customs of war, etc. Regardless of how problematic the situation or the extents of pressures from below to change the situation in Prijedor are, as I show below, it remains obvious the EU does not have a strategy or policy regarding public commemorations in a potential EU member country. At the same time, the international community heavily affected local memory politics via a different conduit: privatisation and capital, which 13 Bosnia and Herzegovina is divided into two entities, Federacija Bosne i Hercegovine (made up of ten cantons), Republika Srpska and a district, with their separate parliaments and governments in charge of commemorative practices. 14 The controversial commission will be led by Prof. Gideon Greif. For more see The Times of Israel (2019). 15 There are examples of historical revisionism and rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, starting from streets named by prominent cˇetniks and ustašas and other Nazi sympathisers, to erection of monuments and renaming schools in their honour. The case of Rade Radi´c’s street and monument in and around Banja Luka, the street of Mile Budak in Mostar and the case of naming a school in Sarajevo by Mustafa Busuladži´c are just cases in point. Further examples are the celebrations of convicted war criminals.

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played a crucial role in denying victims the right to remember. In the following sections, I analyse this relationship using the model of dissent as developed by Milena Dragiˇcevi´c Šeši´c (2011). After a discussion of my approach, I first examine the role of the privatisation of the Omarska mine and its effect on remembering/forgetting. I then turn to the analysis of the on-the-ground actors, including three mini case studies: (1) the work of art-theory group Four Faces of Omarska that acted as a platform for discussion and knowledge production on complexities of socialist history and capitalist transition, attempting to expose the way in which nationalist politics of amnesia functions; (2) civil society initiative Jer me se tiˇce (Because it concerns me) for their attempt to occupy squares and virtual public spaces with direct interventions and memory campaigns stressing the need to see matters of memory a society wide issue, not exclusivity of a particular ethnic group; (3) finally, through an overview and a brief analysis of his poetry and public presence in general, I turn to Darko Cvijeti´c for his poetic social history of suffering, discussion of memory and a novel language enabling us to better understand the individual and social trauma in the aftermath of war. Even though the case studies offered here rarely overlap in strategic goals, spaces of intervention and modes of knowledge production, their interventions show acute awareness of the militant structure of peace in B&H, dominance of ethno-capitalist elites and erasure of histories of cooperation and dialogue not brokered by the post-war ethic order in their work on memory. I then turn to a few discussion points and conclude my musings on the Prijedor memorial landscape.

Methods My involvement with the memory landscape in B&H is manifold, but I primarily write this as a locally-based activist and a researcher. I originally come from the region and have been interested in the history of violence and the veil of silence inscribed in the post-war social contract between the local Serb population and its political representatives for well over a decade. As shown in the introduction, little or no objects in public sphere throughout Republika Srpska give away the war drama that played out at the beginning of the war. Long before this academic contribution, I attended one of the first public meetings by the art-theory group Four

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Faces of Omarska, whose work I present here.16 The meeting was a part of the second edition of the biennial exhibition Spa Port, as the second part of a two-year project “Where Everything is Yet to Happen”, held in Banja Luka in 2010 (Bago and Majaˇca 2010), and since then I attended several of their public meetings. As one of the founding members of Banja Luka social center “BASOC”, since 2015 I worked on creating a platform for activists, artists and theoreticians from countries of former Yugoslavia organised around three pillars: historical revisionism, social justice and feminism. For little over a year I worked as a researcher at the Centre for Democracy and Transitional Justice (CDTJ) in Banja Luka on mapping detention centres during the war in B&H.17 I also attended several “White Armband Day” walks in Prijedor and gave a short speech in 2015, supporting parents’ request for a monument.18 The data presented in the research of unresolved memory issues in Prijedor is collected through a combination of an ethnographic participant observation (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007) and action research (Greenwood and Levin 2006). The examples were chosen for analysis with the help of theoretical framework put forward by Milena Dragiˇcevi´c Šeši´c (2011). In an article on monument building in Southeastern Europe, Dragiˇcevi´c Šeši´c traces the cultural and policy practices in transitional societies and recognises three distinct “models of strategy and monument policy …in postsocialist transition” crucial in the building (or reinscribing) of national identities into the history of twentieth century (2011, p. 33). Dragiˇcevi´c Šešiˇc distinguishes three models that mark the newly formed states’ relationship to the culture of remembering. Those are the model of anti-culture, the model of “culturalisation” and the model of dissent. The anti-culture model, for example, includes annihilation and appropriation strategies—the former mostly concerns the destruction of monuments and relicts of the past while the latter their reappropriation within

16 I also gave an interview for a publication on memory published by the collective, for

more see Dragosavljevi´c et al. (2016). 17 Centre for Democracy and Transitional Justice is a part of a network of NGO’s that work around unresolved war issues from missing persons, former prisoners of war, torture, etc. The project I was a part of was funded by EC and the leading organisation was the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre. 18 BIJELE TRAKE PRIJEDOR 2015 (Zoran VuˇckovacOmarska) (2015).

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the new national narrative.19 The model of culturalisation, however seldom employed in post-Yugoslav countries, aims to celebrate the ethnic other through policies of respect and includes strategies such as monument building in compliance with new identity politics, organising festivals, musealisation and the so-called gratitude strategy. But, as suggested earlier, I’m interested in the model of dissent, tracing innumerable attempts by victims, artists and activists to amend the lack of comprehensive memory policy that would incorporate sites of former suffering of the wartime “Other” pointing to some of the shortcomings as well as the advantages considering the political environment in which they operate. In order to understand local Prijedor memory initiatives through the lens of the model of dissent, I analyse several examples: (1) the work of an art-theory collective titled “Working Group Four Faces of Omarska”, (2) actions by the initiative “Jer me se tiˇce -Because it concerns me”, and (3) snippets from the body of work by a Prijedor-based writer and theatre director Darko Cvijeti´c. All of the examples deal with the sites of suffering in different ways, but all stress the need to contextualise the war properly, bringing forward the nuanced history of the mnemonic sites as well as the changing social and relations of production. At the same time, they open up a discussion on memory to a wider audience, acting as a platform and a social forum rather than prescribing the way Prijedor should commemorate the victims of war. Four Faces of Omarska had used the format of public work meetings and reading groups, striving to politicise the issue of memory but bring forward no direct change to the memory landscape.20 Jer me se tiˇce initiative, on the other hand, avoids the theoretical and historical discussions and aims at re-humanising the civilian victims by claiming they should not be politicised.21 Their main request is a centrally located monument for 102 children and 266 women and girls killed during the war (Mihajlovi´c Trbovc 2014). The last example, that of Darko Cvijeti´c, differs from the previous two as it is a literary

19 For examples of the anti-culture model in the Prijedor region see Gilbert (2006) and Brenner (2014). 20 The indirect impact is definitely present as seen in the publication funded by Forum ZFD and comprised of the transcripts and interviews with multiple individuals dealing with commemorative practices in Prijedor (Dragosavljevic et al. 2016). 21 See Arnautovi´c (2012).

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voice, but is an important cultural adhesive to the formally divided theoretical approaches and memory practices in Prijedor of the two previous examples.

Privatisation as Forgetting: The Role of International Capital The Omarska mine was shortlisted for privatisation immediately after the war, with the highest government officials of Republika Srpska attempting to arrange international financial backing for the mine’s reopening. The two high-ranking politicians, Biljana Plavši´c and Simo Drljaˇca, attempted to arrange an iron-for-oil exchange with a Croatian public company only months after the Dayton Peace Accords was signed, officially ending the four years long conflict between the two countries (Lovrenovi´c and Lasi´c 2005). Plavši´c was sentenced to 11 years in prison and was released after serving two-thirds of her sentence in 2009 while Drljaˇca was killed while resisting arrest in 1997.22 Twelve years after the camp was closed, in 2004, Lakshmi Mittal bought 51% of the Ljubija mine shares, a year before merging with Arcelor Steel asserting him as the biggest steel producer in the world and the richest citizen of the United Kingdom. Mittal is a well-known “turnaround specialist” who made his fortune by “buying cheap clapped-out plants and disused mines making them stupendously successful” (Rashmee 2004, para. 5). Although ArcelorMittal management had initially agreed to help Bosniaks mark the site for commemorative purposes, they withdrew their support claiming that several factions of survivor’s groups disagreed on the scope and form of the potential monument, while it never received support by the local Serb authorities. Furthermore, in 2008 Mittal introduced rigorous control measures for all future visitors who, in order to visit the site, now have to register weeks in advance, thus evoking once again the site’s inglorious history.23 Bulk of the mine’s mechanisation,

22 Maja Lovrenovi´c and Igor Lasi´c co-wrote two articles for Croatian newspapers Feral Tribune several months after the privatisation of the mine, tracing down the two failed attempts of Bosnian Serbs to privatise and hinder its bloody history. See also Lovrenovi´c (2013). 23 For a detailed overview of the history of Omarska memorial initiative and the discussions around it see Brenner (2011).

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which was almost fully overhauled during Mittal’s restoration of extraction activities, found its wartime purpose in the process of removal of the bodies and their placement to more than thirty mass graves in the region. Closest to the mine is a mass grave Kevljani, only around two miles northwest from the extraction site where 456 bodies were excavated months prior to mine’s privatisation.24 Furthermore, the workforce along with the managing structures have been almost completely ethnically cleansed, with legalising powers of global capital only being the last instance in a decade long and extremely violent Bosnian Serb national project of accumulation by dispossession.25 Government expropriation of once workers’ owned property along with other system reforms in Bosnia was according to anthropologist Stef Jansen somehow always represented as natural and de-ideologised process of well-intentioned project of post-war reconstruction (Jansen 2006). In the same vein, ArcelorMittal’s reinforcement of extreme nationalist politics was often backgrounded to their capacity to “do business” and is often given as an example of successful direct investment succeeding among several other companies “to triple or quadruple its total turnover, ˇ export and income in only five years” (Cauševi´ c 2012, p. 17). Therefore, implications for Mittal’s extraction might be ethically problematic, but by securing a substantial margin of profit, and what Schuppli (2012) calls a “chain of associations”, their responsibility becomes directly material and at the same time politicises both the extraction operation as well as commemoration attempts.

24 Several local newspapers reported about the discovery of 420 bodies in mass grave Kevljani in 2004, hardly any made it to the headlines of major national papers months prior to Mittal’s purchase of the mine. 25 An interesting account on the poetics of labour and labour of death can be found in Sabrina Peri´c’s work that goes beyond the ethno-national optics so often invoked by local and international researchers even when acknowledging the insufficiencies of the ethno-nationalism’s operational logics.

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Memory Politics from Below: The Many Faces of Omarska This brings us to the interventions by the “Working Group Four Faces ˇ ˇ of Omarska” (Cetiri lica Omarske or CLO), a Belgrade-based art-theory group dealing mostly with struggle over memory in Omarska.26 The group breaks the site’s history into three epochs and observes its shifting use through four different lenses, the “four faces” of Omarska. The periods are more or less obvious (socialism, war, restoration of capitalism) and the four faces stand for different forms of production taking place at the site: 1. The mine was initially owned by the workers with mode of production, labour relations and conditions specific to the Yugoslav socialism; 2. Its use as a detention camp came around with series of legal, political and social implications; 3. Its transformation to the site of capitalist extraction and legitimisation of the ethnically cleansed governing structures; and, finally, 4. Site of cultural production in the form of Serbian blockbuster movie St. Georges Slays the Dragon by Srd-an Dragojevi´c who, similarly to Mittal’s extraction, obfuscates the site’s violent legacy by producing a film that praises Serbian role in the First World War. The group developed their conceptual premises out of Ranciere’s ignorant schoolmaster, attempting to avoid hierarchies in producing and distributing knowledge. Their aim was to comprise an extensive archive of documents, video and audio material in order to historicise the site but also render visible the attempts to deny and negate the existence of the detention camp. In their methodological musings, they claim solidarity, 26 The group is engaged in another project that follows the same trait; the project is entitled “Living Death Camp” and it explores the ways in which former death camps (Omarska after the turbulent 1990s in B&H and Staro Sajmište after the Second World War in Serbia) are continuously being appropriated and exploited, and examples of memory occlusion in cases when certain historical aspects of the Balkan atrocities are in discord with the official national narrative. The group presented these issues manifesting aggressive historical revisionism and politics of denial within the 54th October Saloon entitled “No one belongs here more than you”. The group also organised a public debate on the subject (54th October Salon Public Discussion “Living Death Camp” 2013).

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equality and the creation of commons through the artistic knowledge production to be their ethical and aesthetical guidelines.27 The group cites as their “unequivocal political declaration” the free distribution of curated knowledge and re-appropriation of the mine’s emancipatory capacities taken hostage by nationalist politics and international capitalist agenda. Thinking through the concept of archive as an open-ended process of destabilisation of hegemonic knowledge, the group describes the project as a social sculpture, or an attempt to (re)create a network of social relations through participatory artwork.28 As sculptural practice, their work invites us to take on multiple social perspectives, that is employ a kind of “sculptural thinking” in order to “construct” a socially and politically engaging work of art. Very much in line with sculptural thinking, the group was a part of a public intervention to rename the relict of Olympic Games in London known as the Orbit. The Group, along with former inmates of the Omarska wartime camp and several graduate students and professors from Goldsmiths’ Centre for Research Architecture raised concerns about the politics of this public art piece and Mittal’s hypocritical responses to the victims’ perennial outcries for a memorial within the iron ore mine of Omarska, 51% of which is owned by ArcelorMittal. At a public roundtable, the group reclaimed the sculpture as The Omarska Memorial in Exile, Orbits of Responsibility.29 As one of the largest pieces of public art in Britain, sculptor Anish Kapoor and engineer Cecil Balmond’s Orbit is a relic of London’s hosting of the Olympic and Paralympics Games in 2012. The sculpture’s official website reads that it rises to the soaring height of 115 metres with over 2000 tons of steel stretching to 560 metres, vistas of 20 miles into the distance, and an overall price-tag of £22.7 million, £19.6 million of which was provided by ArcelorMittal. The small prints read that symbolic amounts of steel have been transported from every site where Mittal runs

27 For more info check Portal za kulturu jugoistoˇcne Evrope (2010). 28 Without directly referencing, the concept of social sculpture goes back to the German

artist Joseph Beuyes, who sought to bring together social behaviour and the principles of building a sculpture aiming to shape human interaction as one would potentially a sculptural mass (Kupp et al. 2009). 29 Video recording of the press release was published on the Vimeo page of the Forensic Architecture project, funded by European Research Council and hosted by the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London (Forensic Architecture 2012).

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businesses and were fully donated by the steel company. ArcelorMittal explicates on the use of steel for the sculpture, marketing it as the fabric of life, a necessary prerequisite for the infrastructure we so often take for granted. Using over 60% of recycled steel shipped from around 20 countries, the sculpture was at the same time both an expensive ArcelorMittal ad and a “byword for design innovation and playful invention”. Milica Tomi´c of Four Faces of Omarska said to the gathered crowd: Following the path of the material and that of corporate responsibility is what brought us to London. As long as Omarska is denied its request to become a site of memory, as long as denial is performed materially, discursively and socially, and ArcelorMittal fails to face its responsibilities, London Olympic tower is hereby renamed Omarska Memorial in Exile.

Grounds for this attempt to appropriate the sculptural tribute to Olympic Games were given by Omarska mine’s CEO, Mladen Jelaˇca, who confirmed to the local press that a symbolic amount of iron from Omarska had been used in the steel provided for the construction of the Orbit. For the British public there exists a need to question the political economy of the sculpture (Schuppli 2012) and to test Arcellor Mittal’s dedication not only to “economic value, but social, environmental and innovative value”. For B&H public, however, this counter-monument (Herscher 2014) tells a story of the company’s complicity in legitimising the privatisation ushered by ethnic cleansing, the smooth cooperation of global capital and local nationalism in which the victims once detained in the camp are now denied the right to remember. Though it is hardly crucial to determine a material link between a lack of public relict in Omarska and the corporeal presence of Kapoor’s Orbit, the argument can be made that the former, public/social sculpture draws its physicality from critical social relations while the latter’s existence could surely be traced back to labour relations and the extraction of surplus value. In fact, as Damir Arsenijevi´c suggested, wartime and post-war economic crimes should be treated as the continuation of war crimes, for they extract direct benefit out of genocidal violence that Bosnian society as a whole was subject to.30 Interventions by the Four Faces of Omarska and their public interventions are important as they have the potential to release the memory from the shackles of the privatised trauma and render it ready for “future 30 In a private exchange with Dr. Damir Arsenijevi´c.

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inscription into history” (Scribner 2003, p. 38). Their work is situated in “prememorial era” (Simpson and Corbridge 2006), where spontaneous monuments and communal commemorative practices mark the beginning of the memorialisation process (Miloševi´c 2017), but their contribution, like the other two examples put forward here, is more interesting for the way it opens up the discussion on memory in B&H rather than the potential results of the commemorative process itself.

ˇ ---Because It Concerns Me Jer Me Se Tice The second example is also embedded in a narrative of dissent, in this case of an activist and artist whose public intervention at the Prijedor main square in May 2012 grew into a collectivised mnemonic effort to mark sites of suffering of the 1992–1995 war and commemorate those left out of the official commemorative programmes. The intervention quickly evolved into a country-wide initiative known as “Jer me se tiˇce - Because it concerns me” turning into a platform for similar direct interventions throughout the country. Namely, after the municipality officials denied local women’s association “Izvor” access to the main square for a commemorative gathering and a performance,31 Emir Hodži´c decided to stand alone wearing a white armband around his hand, something that later gained traction and became probably the most successful grassroots commemorative initiative in Bosnia, galvanising support both on the ground and virtually (Paul 2018). This performance, along with the virtual campaign that ensued is the closest to the Europeanisation of memory we have seen on the B&H memory scene, calling for a universal treatment of victims through evocations of Holocaust and comparisons between violent campaigns of prosecution of Jews with the ethnic cleansing campaigns in Prijedor. Namely, several witnesses in the ICTY case against Duško Tadi´c said that, in May 1992, local radio announced the decision by the newly-established SDS regime that every non-Serb house should mark its windows with white sheets while individuals should wear white armbands when in public as a sign of compliance

31 The association “Izvor” asked for a permission to stage a performance on the main square with 266 body-bags for women and girls killed during the war. The official response by the authorities stated that the gatherings would not be allowed as different emotions of national belonging could be stirred and potentially cause violence against people and property. See Padalovi´c (2012).

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with the authorities.32 Several days after Emir Hodži´c’s performance, on 31st of May 2012, a group of activists joined in support in order to re-politicise the public sphere by problematising and foregrounding the twenty year old atrocities and insisting on public remembering. At the same time, Hodži´c visited the unmarked detention camps throughout the county in an attempt to show how communities throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina suffer a similar form of amnesia towards the suffering of the wartime “Other”.33 An interview with the artist on Radio Free Europe was supplemented with a document showing photos of Hodži´c wearing the armband in front of former detention camps with quotes of former detainees instead of captions or explanations, replacing the victims’ ethnic tag with their horrid experience within the camp. In preparation for their trip Hodži´c, along with Arnautovi´c and Zatega, mapped out the detention camps from northwest Bosnia to the coastline, showing how the simplest of routes taken by thousands of people every year represent an uncharted geography of wartime violence.34 The initiative started a social media campaign “Stop Genocide Denial” as a support platform for what they dubbed the “International White Armband Day”,35 encouraging people to post photos with a white armband on May 31 in solidarity with the Prijedor victims and their families. Their main request was a centrally located monument for the 102 children killed during 1992 in Prijedor, but the initiative also intervened in a number of cities, most notably with a series of plaques in three different cities.36 These temporary memorials, or what the group

32 ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) (1997). 33 See an article on ICTJ web portal regarding the initiative here Bosnia and

Herzegovina (2013). 34 Arnautovi´c (2012). 35 Atlas Corps (2018). 36 Members of the initiative organised a coordinated action to instal three plaques commemorating victims of different ethnic background in Konjic, Bugojno and Foˇca, all of which were expediently taken down by the municipal authorities. For more info see Sito-Suˇcic (2013).

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called “guerrilla monuments”,37 are examples of the only commemoration of civilian casualties without an ethnic marker since the 1990s war, just as the plaques erected are the only ones bearing inscriptions in both Latin and Cyrillic script. Since its founding, the initiative attracted thousands of people to Prijedor, garnered support in virtual communities, pushed for numerous offshoot initiatives and mobilised networks of activ ists throughout the post-Yugoslav space. Though comprised of individuals from the civil sector, the initiative never formally registered, continuing to exist as a platform for promoting culture of remembering and commemorating the civil victims of war. Similarly to Four Faces of Omarska, it acted as an informal memorial space for discussions on memory. Furthermore, the public gatherings on May 31 also provided a physical space for a number of make-shift monuments that brought about different aspects of the silenced memory, from a lego-style temporary installation to the one with 102 pairs of shoes imprinted in boxes of plaster.38 The main difference is that instead of building an archive, the initiative functioned more as a depository of ideas which were then promptly materialised through campaigns, performances or guerrilla actions seeking to shake the petrified narratives of the B&H conflict. Their goal-oriented approach did not result in a monument yet, but in 2018, for the first time since the war, the local weekly papers published obituaries for the killed children and opened the victims’ families the path to the negotiation table with the authorities. Another important development was the subsequent rise of an online commemoration, becoming a transnational initiative with people from 46 countries contributing and over 30,000 visits to the initiative’s website in the days following Hodži´c’s intervention.39 To put it differently, where international pressure, dozens of convicted individuals both in The Hague and in Bosnia, and victims’ outcries failed to bring about change, these two separate initiatives opened up the Prijedor public sphere for a heated mnemonic discussion locally and internationally.

37 Guerrilla memorials definitely differ from Alan Rice’s concept of “guerrilla memorialisation” which he developed in regards to legacy of slavery, though it bears similarity in terms of artistic interventions to politically induced amnesia. For more see Rice (2010). 38 See Refik Hodži´c (2015). 39 Data taken from a conference presentation by Katarina Risti´c (2019) at Memory

Studies Association Conference in June 2019.

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´ Mass Postcards Darko Cvijetic’s It would be difficult a task to present here the opus of a poet that has a dozen poetry books, a book of essays and a novel as of 2018, on top of being the backbone of Prijedor’s theatrical scene where he writes screenplays, directs and acts at the same time. And it would prove even more difficult a task to place Cvijeti´c’s work on the same plane as the art-theory group Four Faces of Omarska and a civil society initiative Jer me se tiˇce, as his public appearance and commitment not to comment on everyday politics hardly give the impression of a publicly engaged intellectual.40 But his work has indeed sparked interest outside purely literary circles as a unique poetic voice that writes about the inability to mourn, paradoxes of the survived life in Prijedor, the phenomenon of secondary and tertiary mass graves that render precise and scientific language of forensics inapt and insufficient for both the victims and survivors (Arsenijevi´c 2011). Damir Arsenijevi´c calls this process “gendering the bone”, which is in stark opposition to the language of trauma management and ethno-nationalist biopolitical regimes (2011). But what does bring him in conversation with the other two examples given here is his commitment to themes of historical revisionism, layering of public history in discord with the socialist heritage (cases of historical revisionism) and the fact that in B&H society, or at least in parts of it, victims of the 1990s were not rehumanised, let alone commemorated. His ongoing engagement with war themes is of political and social importance in the light of ongoing politics of forgetting that attempts to silence Prijedor’s ethnic cleansing of the early 1990s—as I showed previously in this article. Cvijeti´c’s work seems to do away with the “staggered cultural production” Adrian Parr invokes, as he has been extremely productive. His work breaks the cultural and political silence and renders complicit all those unable or unwilling to address the one-sided commemorative practices and ethno-justice ushered by the war.41

40 Though he engages with histories of violence, Cvijeti´c never discusses an individual faces of violent politics of the 1990s or their counterparts in contemporary B&H political scenes. See for example: Agi´c (2017). 41 In days after Tomašica mass grave was discovered, the biggest one in B&H, a video poll with citizens of Prijedor circulated in the press showing complete lack of empathy for victims and survivors and disbelief about the facts. For most citizens of Prijedor remnants of 600 hundred bodies are overblown and it is all a plot to win elections. See Biscaniba (2013).

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It is important to note that Cvijeti´c is a part of a wider front of Bosnian poets who deal with themes of remembering equally well, like the work of Šejla Šehabovi´c, Tanja Stupar-Trifunovi´c, Adisa Baši´c, Ferida Durakovi´c, Marko Vešovi´c, Dijala Hasanbegovi´c and others (Arsenijevi´c 2010). As for critical reception, I can single out Kos-Lajtman (2019) who gives an account of Cvijeti´c’s usage of avant-garde writing techniques like defamiliarisation, the technique of montage, narrative inversions, Wittgensteinian silences and breaks that point to the inability to represent the paradoxes of death via a neutral national language.42 Cvijeti´c’s neo-avangardism notwithstanding, Kos-Lajtman contextualises his body of work within the larger framework of post-war revaluation of fighting causes and its innocent victims (2019), which does not entirely encompass the post-war situation in B&H but provides a potential lens for reading his work. Other critics have mostly contextually and descriptively discussed his work without examining thoroughly his poetics,43 but the recent Croatian “Fritz” literary prize for the short novel Šindlerov lift (2018) and the nomination for the Polish “European Poet of Freedom” prize that will see his poetry collection Ježene kožice (2017)44 give Cvijeti´c a long overdue recognition. Doing memory politics in Bosnia today resembles Cvijeti´c’s antiAntigone from his poem “Thebes”, who, though not less tragic, franticly exhumes mass graves throughout Bosnia, signalling the permanent outof-joint condition of post-war Bosnian society. Quite aware that his work is seen as redundant in the small town of Prijedor, the play “Phoenician women” places a little boy in a cage, canning rifle shells while calling out his dead friends. In a directors’ diary he calls the phenomenon imenozimnica, a neologism I could best translate as namecanning.45 Though

42 Cvijeti´c argues that we will have to learn anew the language taken hostage by the nationalist violence put forward in the nineties. See Kožul (2014). 43 With the exception of a critical review of another poet and translator, Alan Pejkovi´c, of his poetry book Konopci sa otiskom vrata Ropes With a Neckmark (Cvijeti´c 2013) which was included in the book itself. 44 Šindlerov lift (2018) also won the Koˇci´cevo pero award and opened his entire oeuvre up to the broader public. Even though his work in theatre and the newly published novel are more accessible than his poetry books, the acknowledgement also came for his poetic voice in the form of the nomination for the European Poet of Freedom that will result in Goosebumps being translated to Polish. 45 Cvijeti´c (2014).

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it was extremely difficult to select representative poems from Cvijeti´c’s productive oeuvre, I reproduce the poem “Argonautska” below as it represents a poetic history of the iron ore mine in question, as well as the symbolical interweaving of ore, bones, and capital melted into another piece of art—that of the Orbit. Furthermore, Cvijeti´c’s Argonauts do not neglect the counter-revolutionary process that occurred in the nineties while being acutely aware of the often discarded socialist past in his poetic history of the war: “The Argonaut Poem”46 I was grade eight in 1982 When I wrote a story for “Tito’s paths of revolution” competition About three brothers- Omar, Toma, and Ljuba I named them after the three iron mines Omar after Omarska Toma after Tomašica Ljuba after Ljubija The prize was a trip to the Adriatic coastal town of Medulin Ten years later Mass graves had been created Twenty years later, They were searched for In Omarska, Tomašica, Ljubija Ljuba killed Omars while Toma buried the bodies in mining pits I wrote a story On Argonauts And golden-fleeced ribs Found in the iron ore And melted into steel That a ship was built of 46 Author’s translation. Original title of the poem is “Argonautska” (Cvijeti´c 2015).

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My prize was To captain the ship Sailing back across the revolutionary path.

This seemingly simple narrative poem sketches in broad strokes the centrality of industrial mining for the region of Prijedor and its prominence in social and cultural life. Here the mines are brought to life just as they provided livelihood for the entire community. At the same time Cvijeti´c’s poem speaks to capitalist realism of privatisation and ore exploitation in the post-war Prijedor in which potential human remains trapped in ore travel across socialist infrastructures from Omarska to Zenica, only to finally settle in a London vista. In what follows I showcase snippets of his work that directly take on Prijedor’s memorial landscape, writing about the topoi of suffering and geography of asymmetric monument-building practices for the twentieth century wars. In terms of his engagement with historical figures and epochs that reverberate with the work of Four Faces of Omarska, I will point out two poems. First is the prosaic poem “Vitez, hrast, mirisvafla (na 72. godišnjicu pogubljenja Mire Cikote)” (“Knight, Oak, Smell of Waffles (on the 72nd anniversary of Mira Cikota’s execution)”) from Mali ekshumatorski eseji (Cvijeti´c 2015), that showcases his engagement with Prijedor’s memorial landscape and layers of socialist memory expelled from public history after the war. Cvijeti´c here recounts the story of a partisan heroine hanged by the ustaša judge on an oak tree, where he himself was hanged after the Second World War. The oak was then cut down to make room for a monumental six-metres-high cross for the fallen Serbian fighters after the latest war. This singled out poem shows Cvijeti´c’s conversation with the socialist past, but also hints at his situatedness in Yugoslav literary heritage, being one of the poets and writers who writes on the Second World War, showing the universality of violence and the double standards victims receive in the reign of national identities. He gives a kind of postsocialist life to poem “Stojanka majka knežopoljka” (Stojanka, Mother from Knežpolje) by a Bosnian Muslim revolutionary Second World War poet, Skender Kulenovi´c.47 In Kulenovi´c’s poem, Stojanka is mourning the loss of her three sons killed during the historic siege of Kozara in 1943, whereas in Cvijeti´c’s homage to the revolutionary he addresses 47 For a thorough analysis of Kulenovi´c’s work see Batini´c (2015).

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another historic person, Hava Tatarevi´c—who lost her husband and six sons during the latest war. Hava found her family after 22 years in the Tomašica mass grave, another site that was a part of the same mining complex as Omarska but was not included in the privatisation deal. Cvijeti´c addresses her in a narrative poem: I am writing to you Hava of Trnopolje, the mother of six skulls, twelve eyes, twelve arms There, as Knešpolje, Briševo, Zecovi and Mrakovica darken with night It’s me, Stojanka’s aged daughter, who’s writing to you48

In what follows, Stojanka instructs his son the poet, who changes gender halfway through the poem (as male children never survive the war), to cut down their plum orchard and offer the planks to mother Hava for tabute (coffins) and nišane (tombstones) for her “scattered” children. Here Cvijeti´c invokes the theme of surviving mothers, but also speaks to the role of the poet in a post-war society, crafting a poetic monument to those for whom compassion, along with commemoration, is denied by the ethno-nationalist regime. Though it is questionable whether memorials heal wounds (Miloševi´c 2019), the fact that Prijedor bears no mark for the violence of the 1990s produced a decades-long societal rift along ethnic lines. In his work on the 1990s war, Cvijeti´c seems to draw inspiration from this post-war deadlock. As the rift runs deeper than an unfulfilled quest for a monument, Cvijeti´c’s poems equip us with a language that enables experience of individual trauma better than any monumental form of representation. His poetry deepens the discussion on commemorative practices by exposing the violence permeating the contemporary social reality of Prijedor. To further illustrate the point, we can turn to his poem “Zakopavanje sestre” (Burying of a Sister), where Cvijeti´c writes about an encounter with a school friend, Aida, whose brother has been found in three different mass graves over the course of ten years.49 The sister asks the poet what is she to do if they find more remnants of her brother “now that my 48 Author’s translation, Cvijeti´c (2015). 49 Here Cvijeti´c reminds us of the hardly digestible patrimony of the war in B&H,

that is the secondary and tertiary mass graves. They were the result of an attempted cover-up of the atrocities by the Republika Srpska Army where they moved the initial mass graves several times over which often meant that a single person’s remains could be found in several mass graves. For family and relatives this caused a lot of distress and

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mezar is full”.50 It is because of this poem, in which Cvijeti´c shows how the survivor falls prey to the “gradated mass graves” (Agi´c 2017), that Jergovi´c portrays him as the most important poet of “the unburied and unburiable world” ultimately calling him the Redeemer.51 The famous Croatian writer thus rightly places Cvijeti´c alongside Boris Dežulovi´c in the anthology of Balkan war poetry which, according to Jergovi´c, is comprised only of the two.52 Twenty odd years after it ended, the war still figures prominently not only because it brought about destruction and violence, but because the process of public mourning has never occurred. As Zlatko Pakovi´c recently said in an interview on his play thematising Srebrenica genocide, the social structure of our peace is warlike.53 If remembering the Holocaust is at the core of Europeanisation of memory, Darko Cvijeti´c reminds us of the continuity of Auschwitz; its ability to coexist with the Never agains —thus postponing the death of poetry.54 This glimpse into Darko Cvijeti´c’s work shows its dissenting character while the combination of poetry and criticism exhibit his understanding of the long duree of the militant organisation of our society, stretching throughout the past century. Therefore, his literary contribution not only broadens the discussion on post-war memory but acts as a corrective to attempts to anchor trauma and traumatic memory in a material form.

a painful process of excavating the grave over and over again. While forensics offered a scientific solution to identification of victims, it proved incapable of preventing posthumous meddling with the victims’ identity both by the state and religious institutions. In most cases forensics only reinforced it. For more on the role of forensics in this process see Jakovljevi´c (2011). 50 Mezar is Arab for “grave”. Cvijeti´c (2015). 51 Miljenko Jergovi´c (2015) praised Cvijeti´c’s work several times on his blog site and

in Croatian dailies. 52 Boris Dežulovi´c, much before Darko Cvijeti´c was “discovered”, wrote a book of poetry titled Pjesme iz Lore—Poems from Lora (2005), on the war camp Lora in Split. 53 Kožul (2019). 54 Remarks on Adorno’s famous claim that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbarity

in an interview for KontraPress, where Cvijeti´c claims Auschwitz never stopped occurring Komarˇcevi´c (2013).

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Discussion In his commentary about the symbolic act of renaming the Orbit, Andrew Hersher in fact speaks to all three examples, as they represent “a refusal to recognize the given partition of post-war ‘peace’ from wartime violence; a refusal to receive the given politics of oblivion scripted as post-war ‘reconciliation’; a refusal to acknowledge the given interpretation of the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower as an Olympic symbol; and a refusal to accept the given denial of the commemoration of a site of mass violence. With these refusals, the survivors of Omarska became political subjects of memory as opposed to victims of memory politics” (Herscher 2014, p. 467). Though wartime trauma, to paraphrase Parr, can cause cultural stuttering, the analysed cases position Prijedor on a regional map in terms of innovative approaches to cultural memory and commemorative practice (Parr 2008, p. 4). They enrich Bosnia’s mnemonic landscape and represent a strong reference point, if not a stumbling stone, for state sponsored commemorative practices on the one hand, and posit high standards for the artist/activist interventions on the other. The question of materiality looms large over all three examples, as the struggle for future monuments is at the core of Prijedor’s commemorative initiatives. However, it is dissenting from the mainstream cultures of memory, especially in relation to iron ore/detention camp Omarska. Although theoretically appealing, it seemed unfit to me to call them counter-monuments (Young), for even though they “challenge the very premise of the monument” (2000, p. 69), Young’s concept is developed as a kind of negative space, invisibility that reminds us of the monument that used to be there (Majaˇca 2012). Through very diverse practices, the three example show how productive a lack of monument can be for commemorative cultures. Therefore, the work of two collectives and the poetic voice of Darko Cvijeti´c function as a symptom of a changing mnemonic landscape in Prijedor, a social sculpture reminding us that it is a community that creates and sustains a memory. The three examples also seem to answer Andrew Parr’s question, who ponders whether memorial culture is capable to interrupt the process of reification by “putting the productive power of trauma, its social energies and affects to work differently” (Parr 2008, p. 11). Though one risks perpetuating the logic of denial and politics of amnesia, by continuing the economic production in a fairly unchanged physical setting of Omarska mine ArcellorMittal involuntarily gives rise to ever more creative commemorative

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initiatives, artistic and activist interventions.55 In other words, it keeps the mnemonic discussion alive and safe from the potentially corrosive effects of a traditionally crafted monument.

Conclusion In the three examples, I have shown that Europeanisation of memory in Prijedor occurs on the fringes of memorial practices, through evocations of the Holocaust and appeals to international and local communities to see the common humanity in victims of the Bosnian war—that they are not just vessels for inscription of particular ethnic history. International presence, however, is more visible through capital than via any comprehensive political pressure from the EU. The example of Four Faces of Omarska and their “reclaiming” of the Orbit show how international capital and local nationalism are complicit in denying the victims their right to remember. They further contextualise the mine, its productive properties and its changing social and economic role in both socialist and post-socialist period. Jer me se tiˇce, with its numerous initiatives and activist interventions, opens up the public space for discussion and offers a commemorative platform that rehumanises victims. They show that corporate responsibility means little when ethics is set against profit. Finally, in discussing Darko Cvijeti´c’s work, my aim was to bring about social paradoxes of memorialisation that are almost never addressed in national or transnational contexts. Though he does not speak to Europeanisation of memory directly, Cvijeti´c is an authentic poetic voice and his work is a cultural response to the aforementioned deadlock ushered by the war. To conclude, I will briefly bring us back to privatisation of the Omarska mine, and the role it plays in attempts to commemorate the Omarska camp. The privatisation here works on two levels, exposing the memory-as-property, as theorised by Allen (2014). Unlike the term of prosthetic memory (Landsberg 2004) where objects of memory circulate as commodity form, the privatisation of Omarska mine reduces all of the commemorative practices at the site to an issue of private property management. Therefore, it conceals memory as an issue of importance to the wider public. Secondly, the privatisation cements ethnically cleansed

55 See an interview with Igor Sovilj in Dragosavljevic et al. (2016), pp. 118–128.

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labour structure rendering the commemorations at the mine a non-issue for those working at the site. Privatisation of the mine then is the final nail in the coffin of ethno-national divisions that commenced with the war, layering this place of memory into three interconnected levels: property management as memory management by foreign capital, ethnically marked labour relations striped of empathy for their lost colleagues and, finally, the various attempts to start a commemoration process that is in seemingly direct opposition to the previous two.

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CHAPTER 11

Violence, War, and Gender: Collective Memory and Politics of Remembrance in Kosovo Abit Hoxha and Kenneth Andresen

Abstract This chapter examines the politics memory and remembrance by focusing on the perceptions of citizens regarding the framework of Europeanisation and dealing with the troubled past. Although Kosovo signed the Stabilisation and Accession Agreement (SAA) with the EU, the country struggles to deal with its past in the framework of EU integration. This chapter examines the extent to which Europeanisation acts as a tool for dealing with the troubled past, or is just a superficial framework imposed from top-down policies of the EU. From six focus groups with 51 participants, both men and women and representing the main ethnic communities in Kosovo, we examine three main frameworks in the narratives about war: the framework of conflict, memory, and gender, which looks at how the conflict is represented in gendered debates about the war; memories and Europeanisation, which questions the role of the EU and Europeanisation in Kosovo’s politics of memory; and the framework

A. Hoxha (B) · K. Andresen University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Miloševi´c and T. Trošt (eds.), Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4_11

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of living in a risk society, which examines how collective memory informs current debates on the role of gender in a post-conflict society. Keywords Memory politics · Gendered narratives · Europeanisation · Kosovo

Introduction: Dealing with Troubled Pasts---A Tool of Europeanisation? As a part of the Europeanisation process, dealing with troubled pasts has become an increasingly pressing issue in the Balkans, both through the process of EU integration, but also as conflict resolution efforts of the EU for Kosovo and Serbia. In recent formal international negotiations, potential new EU member states have been required to deal with such issues, both internally and between nations. On the formal side, the Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) agreement, signed in 2015 between the Republic of Kosovo and European Union1 maps the general areas that relate to the post-conflict heritage of Kosovo and emphasise the importance of “good neighbourly relations” and “regional cooperation” with Serbia. Section (g) mentions, “to foster regional cooperation in all the fields covered by this Agreement”, while article 13 Section 2 specifies that “Kosovo commits to continued engagement towards a visible and sustainable improvement in relations with Serbia”. Although this is a very superficial look at the 570page document, it is not difficult to see that this document is less focused on conflict, and instead on addressing economic and political relations of Kosovo and the EU, and in relation to Serbia. How can Europeanisation assist in dealing with the past? In the preparation of the Horizon 2020 project RePAST , the consortium discussed

1 Republic of Kosovo and European Union signed the Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) on 27 October 2015, in Strasbourg and was ratified by the Assembly of Kosovo on 2 November 2015, by the adoption of the Law No. 05/L-069 on Ratification of the Stabilisation and Association Agreement between the Republic of Kosovo, of the one part, and the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community, of the other part (MEI 2015). Article 1 of the SAA maps the areas covered by this first ever formal document signed between Kosovo and EU.

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the fact that research has shown that a reverse argument can be used: the failure to Europeanise can hurt the process of dealing with memories. Memory is a process, not a thing (Steiner and Zelizer 1995); neither is it a static vessel that carries the past into the present. Following Olick and Robbins (1998), we approach memory through four key concepts: identity, contestation, malleability, and persistence. Social identities are constituted mainly through memory processes. When troubled pasts are concerned, how national, ethnic and civic identities are constructed through memory is a core question of the project. At the same time, the constitution of identity is almost always situated within cultural struggles: “different stories vie for a place in history” (Sturken 1997), while “people and groups fight hard for their stories” (Olick and Robbins 1998). This suggests that contestation is at the very centre of the study of the past. Passerini (2017) remarks that the twentieth century has been, for the most part, a time of cancellation of memory, also on the subject of Europe. In the last three decades, public interest in memory has grown considerably. Kammen (1995) explains it in terms of the rise of multiculturalism: the study of memory-challenged historiography as a source of cultural domination and dominant historical narratives in the name of repressed groups. Another factor was the fall of Communism, which brought a cataclysmic reinterpretation of the past in Eastern and Western Europe. The Holocaust, as an integral part of European experience and an integral part of European identity, contributed to a radical re-evaluation of the Second World War as a shared European fight against fascism. Last but not least, within the frame of postmodernity, postmodernists (Huyssen 2012; Nora 1989) deconstructed the conceptual underpinnings of linear historicity, truth and identity, raising interest in the linking between history, memory, and power. The politics of memory highlight issues of popular memory, memory contestation and instrumentalisation of the past. Public debates on historical issues such as the Holocaust, civil wars, authoritarian regimes and dictatorships, communism or colonial past are less about historiography than about contemporary political identities. The core European values of freedom, equality, respect of human rights, democracy, tolerance and solidarity form the backbone of European integration (European Commission and Directorate-General for Communication 2012). Much effort is made through European policies to create a “European historical memory” to legitimise the European project and foster the European identity (Prutsch 2017).

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The Second World War has a major role in European memory. It is a dominant site of victimhood and atrocity in Europe that triggered the need for European integration. Habermas et al. (2003) claim that contemporary Europe is the result of the experience of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and through the Holocaust. In view of this, what is the likelihood of a common European culture of memory? Is it destined to be a fragmented field by definition? What does it mean for Europeans, in Kosovo, to familiarise themselves with the memories of “the Other”, the Other being Western or Eastern Europe after 1989, the Muslim refugees in Europe today, the Balkan neighbours, former victims and oppressors, etc.? The general conviction informing RePAST is that any integration or peaceful cohabitation in Europe will be impossible if the past is not dealt with. The troubled past cannot be worked through if the collective subject (the “we”) is trapped in a repetition of forms of discourse and already established discursive and subject positions. In addition to general discussions about dealing with the past, one important missing aspect of these discussions is gender. The war narrative, in popular discussions as well as in scientific research, has largely been male dominated, which is visible also in everyday life, celebrations and commemorations of the past. The stories of women are suppressed in public narratives, and their role in society is contested. For example, the application for recognising the status of a survivor of sexual violence increased drastically after the television interview by Vasfije Krasniqi Goodman about her case of being raped during the war (RTK 2018). Furthermore, the social capital of war is male dominated, although many women fought side by side with their male comrades in the war in 1999. This chapter draws insight from preliminary results of focus groups conducted in Kosovo twenty years after the end of the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia in response to the humanitarian crisis. The primary questions the article tackles include: How do narratives play between memory politics and the Europeanisation through EU politics? How do gender narratives differ between men and women in their perception of experiences of conflict and war in Kosovo? Further questions are linked to divided narratives on the basis of gender and conflict, as well as in continuation of risk for women in dealing with the past. In the following sections, we first provide a brief review of research on the Kosovo conflict, followed by a discussion of the importance of gender and the continuation of risks in a post-conflict society. Further, we turn to the methodology of the focus groups and findings of the study and

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conclude with three main conclusions from narratives deriving from the focus group materials.

Previous Research on the Conflict in Kosovo Kosovo has a long history of conflicts. The Battle of Kosovo (1389) marks one of the long-standing conflicts that extends to this date in public narratives (Kammen 1995; Di Lellio 2009), and is a contested event that has been misused to regenerate myths (Mertus 1999). The 600-year commemoration of the Battle of Kosovo (in 1989), characterised by Slobodan Miloševi´c’s speech, marked the beginning of another wave of conflict in Yugoslavia, which started specifically in Kosovo (BozicRoberson 2004; Morus 2007). The more contemporary literature on Kosovo and collective memory is mostly focused on the war in 1999. Clark (2000), for instance, focuses on the civil resistance in Kosovo during the 1990s, and how Kosovo Albanians organised a non-violent movement under Serbian oppression, whereas Kostovicova’s work (2005) looked at the politics of identity and space in the Kosovar parallel life in the 1990s (Kostovicova and Bojiˇci´c-Dželilovi´c 2006). Ignatieff‘s work on Kosovo includes nation-building research that starts in the 1990s, identity causes of conflict, and the role of media during the war in Kosovo (Ignatieff 2001, 2003). Other research looks at the reasons that led to the war in Kosovo (Judah 2000, 2008; Mertus 1999; Ramet 2005; Vickers and Fraser 1998). One common thread among research focusing on the 1990s and 2000s is that most of it examines the causes of conflict and possible conflict resolution within the framework of a political solution for Kosovo. The literature however significantly lacks the grassroots dimension on collective memory, and its intersection with violence, gender, education, and above all dealing with the troubled past within the framework of Europeanisation. In the official historical context, the narratives of conflict are similar among both sides in Kosovo. The Albanians (in Kosovo) and Serbs (both in Kosovo and Serbia) have developed discourses for decades blaming “the other” for the troubles (Gashi 2016, p. 201; Ramet et al. 2015). In the new official “national memory” (Young 1993), the post-communist period in Kosovo is characterised by the rewriting of collective memory through commemoration related to the 1998–1999 war (Gashi 2016; Lellio and Schwanader-Sievers 2006). Research on history textbooks in Kosovo and Serbia has shown that official versions of history in history

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books are often ignored in teaching at schools (Di Lellio et al. 2017). Besides research on official history books and conflict narratives, more work has been done in the last decade on the subject of sexual violence in Kosovo. Di Lellio et al. (2019) looked at the art and activism against the stigma of sexual violence through analysis of the political impact of artistic installation “Mendoj per ty - Thinking of You”, which is dedicated to fight stigma against the survivors of sexual violence in Kosovo during 1998–1999 war. Di Lellio’s later work explores the silence and voices of wartime sexual violence survivors (Di Lellio 2019). More recent work on Kosovo and collective memory comes from nongovernmental and non-academic work. The Oral History Kosovo2 is an initiative that looks at the various themes of dealing with the past, brings histories through interviews into the debate. This project includes an overview of the Second World War, women’s protests during the 1990s for access to education and rights, but their protests opposing violence. Other non-state actors, such as “Integra”3 in Kosovo, work with the memory projects mainly focusing on missing persons and the troubled past. Through interviews, their publication “I Want to be Heard” (2009) gives voice to the families of missing persons with a rare glimpse of the stories of families and violence of the conflict. Similarly, one of the wellknown regional NGOs, the Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC)4 in Kosovo works on the politics of memory, commemorations of victims of war in the former Yugoslavia, and legal aspects of transitional justice. The work of the HLC and the “Memory Book” with the names of all victims in Kosovo are rare examples of the inter-ethnic commemoration of victims of war in Kosovo. Most of the research on memory politics in Kosovo has focused on history textbooks as the traditional official representation of history. However, textbooks and history teaching have been extensively criticised for their lack of an evidence-based and scientific approach (Di Lellio et al. 2017). A regional attempt to produce joint history books for the Balkans was launched in 1999 through the Centre for Democracy and Reconciliation in Southeast Europe and funded by the EU, in an effort to change the way history is taught in schools across the Balkans (CDRSEE

2 https://oralhistorykosovo.org/. 3 http://www.ngo-integra.org/. 4 https://www.hlc-kosovo.org/.

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2016). However, little has been achieved in the region to include these books even as an alternative addition to the literature. In Kosovo, these efforts have also been criticised for letting important events out, and even altering historical evidence at the expense of Kosovo’s history (Gashi 2019). How can narratives other than those in history books aid in the understanding of past events? It can be argued that official history sources in Kosovo cover only parts of the story, and this is a problem with historiography in general. Textbooks are evidently crucial sources of history through their use in educational institutions such as high schools; however, in Kosovo, oral traditions have a very strong position and have a heavy influence on the narratives of the war in Kosovo. In a report on how history is taught in both Serbian and Albanian secondary schools in Kosovo, Di Lellio et al. (2017) demonstrated that the oral history tradition often competes with the official versions written in history books about the Second World War. The same can be said regarding the issues of dealing with the past where there is a competition between oral history and official historical narratives.

Conflict, Memory, and Gender Accounts of suffering are to a great extent gendered and often produce concepts about men and women and their respective roles within society (Monk 1992). In particular, commemorative landscapes that evoke memories of troubled pasts are among the most gendered. It can be argued that the primary reason for this is that troubled pasts including events, such as war, genocide, and trauma, largely document and reproduce the narratives and experiences of men (Muzaini and Yeoh 2005). Therefore, interpretations of women are often excluded, blurred, disrupted, and obscured (McDowell 2008). Some authors argue that women are largely underrepresented in most sectors—such as the media, and remain on the peripheries of the political landscape, which often sets the landscape of memorisation (McDowell 2008; McDowell and Braniff 2014; Young 1993). In the area of media representation then, this becomes a privilege of male interpretations (McDowell 2008). Thus, the conflict experiences of men and women during conflicts have consequences for life after the conflict, and it influences much of what society remembers in public spaces. The outcome is in most cases a male

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narrative, which disrupts many conflicting interpretations of others (e.g. women) who were also caught up in the conflict (McDowell 2008). Besides dealing with the male-dominated view in accounts of violence, the literature also focuses on the dynamics of troubled pasts from the perspective of women and gender relations (Nash and Tavera 2003). Women are often remembered as suffering figures of motherhood, while men are recalled through their loss and sacrifices. “In this representation, the women have become symbols not only of tragedy and suffering but also of a particular kind of female survivor, one who personifies the norms of patriarchy in which women represent traditional maternal values of family and domesticity” (Jacobs 2010). In other words, there are specific roles and stereotypes for the remembrance of female roles during troubled pasts. They are primarily viewed as fragile victims rather than agents (DelZotto and Jones 2002; Tickner 1996). Moreover, the media uses a gendered construction of the enemy—especially when reporting on sexual violence such as rape (Banjeglav 2011). Women are remembered “as the stereotypical fragile victims of what was essentially a male conflict, suffering the painful war-induced dislocation of stable family lives while the men took up the cudgels of heroic resistance” (Jafa 2002, p. 82). This again reproduces traditional gender roles and thus denies women the agency and vulnerability of men (Žarkov 2007). In the Kosovar case, women who have been subjects of sexual violence were stigmatised and also not free to speak up about their experiences. Only after immense public pressure from the survivors of sexual violence during the war in 1999 and non-state actors in Kosovo, the focus on violence against women in the conflicts started receiving more attention in victim commemorations. The case of Vasfije Krasniqi Goodman, who decided to speak in public on the issue of rape, is one of the significant moments when narratives of war started to shift towards giving more attention to women in particular. Post-war Kosovo narratives about the 1999 war have mainly focused on suffering and violence, such as killings of the civilian population (Spagat 2014), where events are organised annually under the patronage of the state to commemorate the fallen. Over the last few years, sexual violence related to conflict is very much a part of the commemorative actions, and include initiatives such as building the Heroinat (“Heroines”) monument, made out of 20,000 medallions to memorialise of the same number of women affected by sexual violence. A similar global campaign Mendoj per ty (“Thinking of you”) took place in support of women survivors of sexual violence. These

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initiatives are a part of the contested war remembrance narratives resulting from the lack of political will to deal with Kosovo’s troubled past (Baliqi 2018).

Methodology Our research on the topic of representation of conflicts in Kosovo means entering a place with a specific history. Representing the population of Kosovo is a challenge on its own. The majority of the population is younger than the average European population and is divided between Albanian, Serb, and other minority populations (Geoba 2018). For the purpose of research on the conflict, we looked at Albanian–Serbian relations without focusing on other minorities specifically. Focus group discussions were held in several Kosovar communities during the spring of 2019. The division of focus groups was in Albanian and Serbian. In the Albanian groups, there was a couple of non-Albanian minorities such as Roma, but without a significant impact on the overall findings. The Serbian focus group was held in northern Kosovo, where the majority of the population is of Serb ethnicity. They make up an estimate of about 5% of the Kosovo population.5 Five other focus groups were held in other Kosovo regions to represent the Kosovo Albanian population. The Albanian population makes up more than 92.9% of the population of Kosovo according to the Kosovo Agency of Statistics (KAS 2017). Focus groups were organised through our already existing network of researchers and through previous experience with non-governmental organisations, including Kosovo youth centres. Such centres provide a space for Kosovar youngsters to discuss and work on small projects that will influence their own community and further. The participants were familiar with the environment, making the focus groups outside their work environment although not too official. Discussions were developed in a conversational manner, where the participants could speak and interact, as is suggested by researchers who promote focus group research (Gibbs 1997; Kamberelis and Dimitriadis 2013; Lunt and Livingstone 1996; Marková et al. 2007; Morgan 1996, 2019). 5 Kosovo Agency of Statistics estimates Serbian population between 1.5 and 5%. Serbpopulated municipalities in the northern part of Kosovo did not partake in the 2011 population census.

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Table 11.1 Demographic characteristics of focus group respondents

Number

Gender

Age

7 3 8 16 10 7 TOTAL: 51

3 Female 4 Male 3 Male 4 Female 4 Male 6 Female 10 Male 5 Female 5 Male 3 Female 4 Male 21 Female 30 Male

30–45 30–45 19–27 19–33 19–35 20–30

(Source Author’s creation)

The focus group participants, presented in Table 11.1, were aged 18 years and older, though most of them were made up of high school pupils and students. Some of the management and staff at the youth centres were older and participated on two occasions. The rest of the focus groups were held at the youth centre premises and organised by them. The focus group organised within the Serbian minority in northern Kosovo was slightly different. It included an older population, which also reflects the overall Serbian population in Kosovo. It was held in a community centre, conducted in Serbian and translated into English. The focus groups were designed to represent an even distribution of gender, as gender was the criteria for the selection of participants along with age, social status, and education. We consider 21 female and 30 male participants to be a satisfactory balance, considering the stagnation in gender equality and practice in the entire Balkans region. Similarly, the age of the participants reflects the Kosovar population, and the focus groups represent the young population of Kosovo. Participation was fully voluntary, and no payments were given for participating in discussions.

Findings In the sections below, we outline the three main frameworks we find in the narratives about the troubled past in Kosovo. First, the framework of Europeanisation in Kosovo’s politics of memory shows how bottomup attitudes and values collide with European policies and integration process. Second, the framework of conflict, memory, and gender illuminates how the conflict is represented in gendered fragments in debates about the war. Finally, the framework of living in a risk society sets out the

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different perspectives of men and women and how they inform current debates on the role of gender in a post-conflict society. The Troubled Past, Memory, and Europeanisation In light of the individual and collective memories from the war in Kosovo, focus group members confirm that being a part of the European family with the resources within will help men and women deal with the past. There is a general agreement among them that European integration is the way forward to deal with the past. The EU has particular expectations for Kosovo and Serbia to reconcile under the auspices of Europeanisation, according to an EU Parliament briefing (Russell 2019). Citizens share a similar view of being pro-Europe (KDI 2018a, b), and most public polls and research confirm this. In 2017, in a Gallup poll, 84% of Kosovars responded that Kosovo would benefit from EU integrations in general. This is supported by the focus group findings as well, where there was no clear opposition to EU integration and EU values. However, most of the respondents agreed that there is a need to deal with the troubled past and find out what happened during the war before joining the EU. One of the respondents illustrates the general stand on dealing with the past in the European framework: Europe also has its benefits with the fact that different projects are foundations of development and this is very important for our state. But I don’t think Europe is the solution to the problems that we have in Kosovo. Many problems within Kosovo, we need to fix before we get into Europe.

Generally, the EU is linked to the economy and political stabilisation, but not as much to the peaceful solution of the conflict. Neither Kosovo Albanian respondents nor Kosovo Serb respondents thought of SAA as a document by which one can utilise European integration to deal with the past. Similarly, the EU is linked to free trade and free movement of goods which represents economic progress, along with visa liberalisation for the Kosovo citizens who cannot travel visa-free in the EU. Kosovo Albanians are frustrated with visa liberalisation for all other surrounding nations except Kosovo, and this can be described in a response from one of the respondents, “We are part of Europe, but it is unfortunate that we are separated from the European Union. That division is what I do not like

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very much”. Similarly, Kosovo Serbs are frustrated that despite having Serbian documents, they are still unable to travel visa-free. Overall, many in Kosovo, including Kosovo Serbs, are pro-European to the extent that they see EU as the only alternative for development and progress. As mentioned before, Kosovo scores as the highest proEuropean country in the region (Ritter and Zapryanova 2017) and our focus group respondents confirm this. As an illustration, one of the Serbian respondents illustrates that “we aim to achieve Europe” in the form of a challenge that is going to be achieved by fulfilling conditions. Similarly, a Kosovo Albanian youngster says that: “we are part of Europe. There are many different institutional forms or mechanisms that make us - European”. For this particular finding, it is important to stress that we did not document a raise of euroscepticism among our respondents, likely because the whole region sees the EU and Europeanisation in practical terms: for better health services, possibilities, and freedom of movement. Above all, this finding reflects back into security, which is seen as a European value. Overall, there is a general consensus among the respondents regarding the European future and European integrations. There is a sense of belonging and a felt EU identity, but this coexists with the view of not being treated fairly by European institutions in specific issues such as freedom of movement. Also, dealing with the past as a framework is seen as a very important part of the European integration process but it is also seen as a process that should be led by local actors in a bottom-up initiative. Thus far, the EU showed no success in the process of enabling dealing with the past. Conflict and Gendered Narratives In our focus groups, participants criticised the Kosovo official representation of history. They claimed it is unsatisfactory for all sides, both on the official history level and in popular media narratives. Most respondents think that the media underrepresents some groups in society and is doing little to represent suffering and victimhood. In particular, the most marginalised narratives of conflict are those of the vulnerable segments of society, such as women and children, and there is little media attention to it. When asked about the difference in narratives in families between men and women, the first finding in focus groups was that most participants

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were surprised to a certain degree, because they never thought of the stories along those lines. When asked, they realised the difference. To illustrate the conversation, a young respondent said that: “I never thought about it and now that you asked, you made me think and there is a difference in my mother and father’s talk about the war. But my mother and father did not stay together during the war and they do not have the same events”. The same person describes almost a mutual understanding of his parents when speaking about the narrative of conflict during the end of the 1990s in Kosovo. He says: “In some cases, they have agreed with men in how they describe the situation of war, but in some cases, women have become more tragic, and perhaps men are trying to appear more manly. This does not tell how it was in reality”. He continues to explain that some things might have been forgotten during the 20 post-war period years, while some other things might have been magnified for the purpose of storytelling. Again, his case represents the majority of Albanian youngsters who speak about the conflict in their homes, confirming that the stories are different among men and women. These stories are not only different, but one side of the story is more exaggerated than the other because men speak more about their heroic stories of either contributing to the liberation of the country or generally showing their experience during the war. The same person explains that his father’s story is less credible: “I think that women are more realistic in this direction, starting with my mom”. The general impression in the focus groups was that male heroic figures dominate narratives. However, one participant counters the abovementioned explanation by saying that her case is different: “We were 5 children and my mother was supposed to stay with us. My father was a soldier and had to leave us behind”. In her view, everyone was in their role as they were supposed to be. The attribution of heroic stories to men is present also in the cases when men were afraid of their wives and daughters. The roles of the protector are assigned almost automatically to the father figure, even though they left the women alone in most cases, in fears of being shot. One of the participants explains his version of this narrative by saying, “I noticed during the war talk that men were scared of murders of women by rape”. In one of the focus groups, a female participant supported this statement by saying that despite the fact she was a child during the war and understood very little about it, she hears her family speaking mostly in relation to the fear from being raped; a conversation supported both by men and women.

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These conversations lead to an overall understanding of narratives of the conflict in a typical Kosovar setting: families do not specifically discuss the differences between stories told by men and women, nor reasons for these narratives being different. In cases of women speaking about their experiences and trauma of war, it is often the men who decide whether it classifies “victimhood” or not. Just like in cases of men being afraid of being killed and being afraid for their women being raped, men decide on the qualifications of such narrative. It is perceived that men struggle to explain what has happened during the war more often than women. One of the participants describes this situation by explaining his parents’ situation. “My father did not fight but stayed here [in Kosovo], while mom with the rest of the children fled as a refugee to Albania. While being deported as a refugee in Albania, they had bad situations because they were alone with some other children”. He continues to explain the reasons why his father speaks less about his experience. “My father did not fight, maybe he was disappointed why he did not fight and is shy to talk, while his mother tells more about the war”. The father does not speak much about the past because he is not very proud that he did not fight, and he was unable to protect his family and be with them while they were heaving the difficulty of their lives. But, the mother is also very reluctant to speak about the experience because she perceived her role was not to fight but to look after the children. This particular finding sheds light on the divided narratives of men and women in Kosovo and how perceptions of violence experience created a war interpretation. Living in a Risk Society: Being Dead Among the Living The memories of past conflicts influence people’s life prospects in Kosovo. Despite the fact that the war in Kosovo ended 20 years ago, the focus group discussions reveal that the narrative still suffers from the threat of risk and fears. The society functions on the basis of what Ulrich Beck’s calls “reflexive biography” (Beck 1992), where individuals remember and think about the risks involved in daily life including dealing with the past but also concerning their future. In this regard, women, in particular, are found in the position of living in the risk of permanently challenged narrative because they are not able to express their experience of war and the challenge of stigma continued after the war.

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Risks and fears are mostly related to the past, but in the cases of women being subjected to any type of violence, includes the risk of their future. The stigma that followed women who were the subject of sexual violence is immense, and hence, out of the estimated 20.000 women who were subjects of sexual violence during the war in Kosovo, only a handful have come forward with their stories. Faced with the lack of support from husbands, families, and social conditions, other women suppressed their narratives as well. A focus group participant explained how women perceived speaking about the violence in the past: “I heard one woman say when we were dead among the living, and that I think it has affected women much more emotionally”. The matter of separation during the war also has affected the relations between men and women in Kosovo, the focus group discussions reveal. The situation during the war in 1999 was that Kosovar Albanian men were very often physically separated from their families by Serbian forces, and were also mistreated with violence. The accounts of such practice are present throughout many cases of stories of war survivors. Women on their part faced the situation of dealing with the children on their own. Most respondents in the focus groups used this as a central point of the difference in the narratives of war, but also to explain the threat that women experienced during and after the war. One of the participants explained that this is where the stories between men and women start to differentiate, with the fact that men left the women alone during the war, regardless of the reasons for it. She says: “the way women and men talk about war differs, but this can be because there have been times when men have left [their families], and women have been left alone with their children”. Because of this, men also attributed the label of victims more to the women’s stories than to men’s. Stories about men victims in this capacity are rarely heard when discussing the war in the present day. The practice of “reflexive biography” also relates to the present-day risk for women which is in the form of their past experience. One example is the stigma of victims of sexual violence. To explain this, one of the participants illustrates the relationship between men and women by placing it very directly in the ranking of threats during the war, and how that threat extended after the war. There is a greater sense of injustice among women, according to her. She says that: “men have been killed and women have been raped and there is still no justice for those women who have lived through this horror”. In addition to a lack of justice for the victims of

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sexual violence, women are reluctant to share stories that would jeopardise their position in society. Threats and risks from the war are extended and changed, but women and men are still trapped in that victimhood of sexual violence of 1999. For these reasons, many women and men carry their war stories in silence in Kosovo today.

Conclusions In narratives about the war, there is a clear difference between the narratives of men and women in Kosovo. Men see themselves as more heroic and active participants in the conflict, whereas the perspective of women is often suppressed and neglected from the public, besides when it comes to sexual violence as a weapon of war and rape in particular. Concerns and views of Albanian respondents and Serb respondents in Kosovo are similar, both regarding how the conflict and dealing with the troubled past are perceived and vis-à-vis Europeanisation and European Integration process. The narratives of war are different and there is a dominating side and suppressed side of the narratives of war in Kosovo. The dominating narrative is one of the men being heroic and suffering, whereas the suppressed narrative is of women suffering and being victims. Fear of something happening also differs between men and women. Women were afraid of being raped or sexually assaulted and men were afraid that something will happen to the women. The multidimensionality of fear is also evident in the stories of women who were additionally afraid because most men were separated from them when violence broke out, which in turn is another reason for men to struggle explaining stories about the war and conflict. Importantly, for most men, the war narratives have to a large degree ended, and the stories they tell are mostly safe, reflected in the framework of contributions for the cause. For women the struggle continues, with the extension of the risk of telling their wartime stories. Women who suffered during the war still cannot express freely their stories due to the stigma and shame of being a victim of war. This is also reflected in the stories of sexual violence in Kosovo, where it is estimated that some 20,000 women have been subject to sexual violence, and only a few hundred have come forward with the applications for the status of victim recognition by the state commission. In the narratives of conflict and wars, the label of “victim” is mostly given to women, whereas men

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have passed that burden via the heroisation of their suffering and a capitalisation of that heroisation as a contribution to the war cause. On the other hand, the suffering of women retains its victim label and continues to be underrepresented in the narratives of conflict and war in Kosovo. The European sentiment in relation to dealing with the troubled past among our respondents was somewhat divided between a shared European identity and the feeling of the inability of the EU to meet the expectations in Kosovo. Respondents have an idealistic interpretation of what the EU stands for and what the values of Europeanisation are. Because dealing with the troubled past is in the early stages, the truth, reparations, and retributions as values are attributed to Europeanisation and EU institutions before the dialogue with Serbia. The EU is often personified as the EU mission in Kosovo, and there is also no clear knowledge of EU institutions and functions among the youth in particular. Although there are support and high trust in the EU in both ethnic communities, the lack of bottom-up approaches to dealing with the troubled past in the European framework and disappointment that the EU accession process does not do more to facilitate dealing with the troubled past, is seen as a weakness of Europeanisation. This can be seen in the general agreement in the belief that Kosovo should deal with its troubled past before joining the European Union.

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CHAPTER 12

Conclusion Ana Miloševi´c

Abstract This chapter argues that the Europeanisation process in the field of memory politics has been more performative than fundamentally progressive. Summarising the findings of the ten empirical studies, this chapter suggests that the EU memory framework can be manipulated by elites and political parties in their endeavour to co-opt those aspects of Europeanisation process that fit their needs. In the Western Balkans, Europeanisation in the field of memory politics is an ongoing process enacted by state and non-state actors, political parties, institutions as well as like-minded individuals and groups. What characterizes these developments is not only the level of engagement these memory actors and entrepreneurs vest in the process, but also the multiplicity of interests they assign to Europeanisation—as way to challenge, reframe, reinterpret, support, oppose or rehabilitate certain views, narratives, values and meanings projected onto the past. The application of European memorial norms in the Western Balkans suggests that the past can serve as a useful commodity and effective tool to attain symbolic capital, political advantages and benefits on both national and transnational level. However,

A. Miloševi´c (B) Leuven Institute for Criminology (LINC), KU Leuven, Louvain, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Miloševi´c and T. Trošt (eds.), Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4_12

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on the ground, historical narratives about the past remain fundamentally unchallenged by the process of Europeanisation. Keywords European union · Memory politics · Europeanisation · Western balkans

Memory has acquired an important symbolic value in EU politics. However, a European memory, this book argues, exists only in plural. EU’s memory politics is a product of continuous negotiation about what Europe was, what Europe is and what it aspires to become. It is shaped by historical experiences, identities and political interests of its member states. In this volume we asked what the positive and negative consequences are of alignment with EU memory politics or lack thereof. Across ten empirical chapters, we analysed the ways in which Europeanisation impacts memory politics and mnemonic practices in the region of Western Balkans, documenting it in cases still far from accession (BosniaHerzegovina, Kosovo) during the accession process (Montenegro, Serbia, North Macedonia) and after the EU accession (Slovenia, Croatia). The chapters in this book when reviewed as a whole represent the first in-depth analysis of the impact Europeanisation of memory has on a region. As discussed in Chapter 1, there have been several attempts at comparative analysis of the impact of Europeanisation on Holocaust, heritage and memory, or criminalisation of communism, yet this volume provides unique insight on these processes in seven countries. In addition to being engaged in the EU Integration process and part of the same region, the countries of the Western Balkans have effectively shared past (in war and in peace) as members of another Union—Yugoslavia. Given the complexity of each case and the entanglement of histories and memories in the region, our analysis highlights the main issues involved in the alignment with EU memory politics treating the beginning on the EU Accession process as a ‘critical juncture’ in their national history. Thus, the value of our exercise is not only to gain further insight into the historical experiences of these countries, but to determine the extent to which our findings could assist and inform broader discussions on Europeanisation of memory. Memory as politics is extremely malleable: the meanings and roles assigned to collective memory bend to the purposes and objectives of

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a wide variety of actors on both the national and transnational level. Our volume observed memory politics both as a cognitive device and a political instrument providing individuals and institutions with power to pursue their distinct interests. In particular, we captured the interplay between Europeanisation and memory from top-down (led by the EU and imposed by external actors), the co-option and manipulation of the EU memory framework by elites and other memory entrepreneurs, as well as bottom-up (local and grassroots contestation of memory). The findings suggest that the Europeanisation process in the field of memory politics has been more performative that fundamentally progressive. While the EU memory framework developed incrementally without ‘a grand design’, as the fruit of anniversaries and opportunities, now it represents the cornerstone of EU memory politics that delineates joint attitudes towards the past. Overall, the results reported in our empirical chapters suggest that EU memory framework can be manipulated by elites and political parties in their endeavour to co-opt those aspects of Europeanisation process that fit their needs. In the pre-accession process, countries selectively and tactfully ‘download’ the contents of EU memory framework to demonstrate their place in the European family of nations, but also to pursue symbolic and political objectives. In the Western Balkans, Europeanisation in the field of memory politics is an ongoing process enacted by state and non-state actors, political parties, institutions, as well as like-minded individuals and groups. What characterises these developments is not only the level of engagement these memory actors and entrepreneurs vest in the process, but also the multiplicity of interests they assign to Europeanisation. What emerges from this volume is that mnemonic actors and entrepreneurs use Europeanisation of memory as way to challenge, reframe, reinterpret, support, oppose or rehabilitate certain views, narratives, values and meanings projected onto the past. Broadly, Europeanisation of memory is applied as a tool to deal with and navigate through the past of the Second World War, co-existence in Yugoslavia, wars in the 1990s and their aftermath. On the one hand, broader processes of Europeanisation of memory provide rationale to groups and individuals to push forward marginalised narratives about the past and incorporate them into national or European memory politics. To Europeanise memory is perceived as an attempt at pacifying tensions, providing acknowledgement, making amends for and dealing with the past by bridging differences, embracing multi-perspectivity in telling one’s

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one history, and, hence, inducing reconciliation. On the other hand, a Europeanised memory based on minimum common denominators creates a myriad of unintended consequences, as rewriting and reinterpreting of locally owned experiences through an external memory framework tends to erase, suppress or rewrite the specific context of what is otherwise locally grounded memory. While a wide variety of actors interprets Europeanisation of memory differently and consequently assign to it different meanings and interests, our volume shows that only decision-makers (political elites, institutions and political parties) have the power to shape or reconfigure official memory politics. Their memory entrepreneurship supports or opposes Europeanisation of memory and often clashes with and is contested by non-state memory actors. In addition, the evidence suggests that Europeanisation of memory is not only selective and tactical but also a reversable process that can lead towards (un)dealing with the past and a reinterpretation of Europeanness. As new members project domestic discourses onto the transnational level, they might use the power asymmetry to pursue a pragmatic foreign policy towards non-members those who are (in)directly threatening their own views of the past. This suggests that once locally and regionally fought ‘memory wars’ tend to escalate into ‘European memory wars’. In this endeavour, the EU serves both as a memory arena and a political opportunity structure for the uploading of domestic preferences, that is, national narratives about the past. With this in mind, key findings from this volume are summarised below.

Un-Transformative Europeanisation: Discussion and Conclusion In this summary of the findings from this volume it is clear that collective memory at national level is a unique experience that is context-dependent and intrinsically linked to the complexities of the time at which occurs. To politicise memory by ways of adding new layers to otherwise locally owned historical experiences is a process of extracting a suitable past to placate the needs and challenges of the present. The findings of this research suggest that there is a stark difference between Europeanisation as a normative reality and its on-the-ground effects. Countries, both members and acceding states, are navigating through that gap. Symbolic politics is actively used by all interested parties—EU, member states, candidate and potential candidate countries, to communicate stances,

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viewpoints and expectations—beyond legally prescribed rules and conditions. As such, Europeanised memory can be actively manipulated for the sake of appearances, and for the attainment of symbolic and political gains. Europeanisation of memory in the Western Balkans has been more performative that fundamentally progressive. In order to support their EU bid, countries of the Western Balkans use memory politics to display their Europeanness and hence their place in the family of European peoples. As discussed across chapters, the Europeanisation process shows evidence of manipulation and instrumentalisation of historical events by elites, intellectuals, political parties and institutions. Each country, drawing from its own specific historical background, sculptures a ‘usable past’ to reinforce and adduce the most dominant traits of their Europeanness by reinterpreting its own history. In Montenegro, as seen in Chapter 8 by Nikola Zeˇcevi´c, the process of distancing from Serbia necessitated changes to certain historical narratives, and the narrative of the First World War in particular. As elites needed to emphasise Montenegro’s Mediterranean and pro-European character, elements from Communist-era historiography that did not fit this narrative were accordingly adapted and reinterpreted, both in the public sphere by political elites and prominent historians, but in history textbooks as well. However, the process of Europeanisation of national memory, from the pre-accession stage to EU membership, is not only a quest for one’s own Europeanness in history. Rather, Europeanisation of memory via Enlargement can be described as an amalgam of cosmopolitan and revisionist views of the past, that have the ability to reinforce preexistent (ethno)national narratives of nation and state building. In the pre-accession phase in Croatia, Holocaust memorials were restored, new museums open and their exhibits reinterpreted to emulate cosmopolitan forms of remembrance. Memorials and commemorations at the place of memory were used as public display of ‘dealing with the past’ by fostering inclusive remembrance, respect for Holocaust and consequently endorsement of ‘European values’—rejection of anti-Semitism, xenophobia and racism. However, these expected effects of Europeanisation of memory tend to wear off after EU Accession. The post-accession is marked by an important decrease in political interest for and distancing from previously enacted symbolic politics. It is also about uploading one’s own nation and state foundational myths onto the transnational level. Europeanisation of memory in the Western Balkans is not only performative and tactical as our findings suggest, but also a reversable

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process. Europeanised memory, it would seem, fails to generate a longterm transformative impact on the ground and lacks sustainability. In Croatia, this is exemplified by the boycott of Holocaust commemorations by victims’ groups and organisations. The analysis of the exhibitions presented in Jasenovac over the last fifty years (Chapter 5, by Alexandra Zaremba) shows how the adopted European Holocaust framework perpetuates an incomplete and contextually absent narrative of Jasenovac, in contrast with the proclaimed aim of dealing with the past and support to reconciliatory efforts. This reconfiguring of European memory obscures location-specific details, and it points out to the failure to fully address Croatia’s involvement in the Second World War, the Holocaust, and crimes against Serbs, Jews, Roma and political prisoners. Chapter 3 by Taylor McConnell similarly shows how initial changes in Croatia’s mnemonic landscape took place a result of ‘dressing up’ to appease the EU in the pre-accession phase. Once the effects of the pressure to achieve the strategic goal of EU membership wore off, the attempts to relativise the fascist past multiplied, especially in places where its consequences were most damaging—Jasenovac and Bleiburg. Following the EU Accession, the goals assigned to Europeanisation of memory shifted: conservative governments used it in ways that perpetuate nationalist and anti-reconciliatory narratives. Taken together, these results suggest that there is an association between the attainment of EU membership and reversal of the expected effects of Europeanisation of memory, leading towards more polarisation on the ground. Downloading of the second pillar of the EU memory framework, its anti-totalitarian stance, serves memory entrepreneurs to reinterpret the struggle for liberation of Nazi-Fascism and consequently leads towards the rebuttal of Yugoslavia portraying it as a totalitarian state. Alignment with EU memory norms in this regard equally means alignment with dictatorial and totalitarian experiences of countries who were once behind the Iron Curtain. Not only does it suggest that the Yugoslav political system was totalitarian, but it depicts former anti-fascists and Yugoslav era communists as oppressors, and defeated ideologies of the Second World War as ‘victims of communism’—of a ‘Red Holocaust’. Although to a different degree, the tendency to narrate Yugoslavia though EU’s antitotalitarian narrative can be traced across the whole region. Slovenia, as the first Western Balkans’ EU member state, endorsed the consolidation of an anti-totalitarian interpretation of its past in 2009. The Slovenian anti-totalitarian stance translated into national memory politics with the

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construction of a monument to ‘Victims of All Wars’. The monument, in the centre of Ljubljana, illustrates this overarching interpretation of the national past. In the context of Serbia’s path towards EU membership, political elites, revisionist historians and non-state actors advocate for a clear cut with the communist past as an aspect of Serbia’s ‘return to Europe’. As discussed in Chapter 2 by Jelena Ðureinovi´c, the most relevant reference for legal and symbolic rehabilitation of the cˇetniks and justification for revisionist tendencies within Serbia is precisely the antitotalitarian paradigm that travels from the European Union to nationstates and back. As anti-totalitarian anti-fascists, the cˇetniks are seen as both the ideal ancestors of the contemporary nation-state as well as the perfect companions of Serbia on its path towards the EU membership. The downloading of Europeanised forms of remembrance is selective—meaning that memory actors and entrepreneurs canvas through the EU memory framework and choose narratives, views and values associated with the past that fit their ideas and interests on the national level. But downloading also works as a direct projection of the EU’s own memory framework to other countries. For instance, EP resolutions on the Srebrenica genocide directly in the adopted text invite the Western Balkan countries—and in particular Serbia—to acknowledge the wartime atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Although not legally binding, and not part of the official requirement for the EU accession, the resolution exerts soft pressure on Serbia to deal with the past. In addition, the resolution also prescribes the required response: to adopt and assimilate similar resolution in the national parliament and subsequently in remembrance practices. While Srebrenica remains a singular historical experience of the Western Balkans that made it to the EU memory framework, it also shows that the EU and in particular EP can use soft laws to induce a desired outcome (dealing with the past, recognition and acknowledgement) beyond the EU Acquis. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a crucial case to demonstrate how a Europeanised reconciliation frame can be imposed by the EU with the complicity of local non-political actors. Chapter 4, by Aline Cateux, draws on an extensive range of sources to analyse instrumentalisation of the Stari Most reconstruction in Mostar. It shows how the reconciliation frame imposed by the EU led to polarisation on the ground around the symbol of the city and reinterpretation of its native meanings. Reinterpretation and appropriation, through EU memory frame, is also visible in the case

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of Partizansko Groblje. The findings suggest that the process of Europeanisation of memory in Mostar has reinforced rather than ‘bridged’ local divisions by relying on superficial assessments of different aspects of post-war Mostar and excluding the population from every process of reconstruction and reformulation of the city. While elites might strategically use memory politics to politically signal commitment to the European project and its underlying values, Europeanised discourses of the past do not always resonate on the local, grassroots level. Europeanisation of memory can be perceived as forceful and alien independently from the on-the-ground level of support for the EU Integration. The case of Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina suggests that the engineered Europeanised past of the city, engineered by the EU and elites, is seen as appropriation of locally grounded memories of the antifascist struggle. It also erases the ‘unusable’ past, flattening differences between Yugoslavia and its cross-ethnic struggle for liberation, and the former communist countries elsewhere in Europe, with their own specific memories of the war and its aftermath. Chapter 6, by Manca Bajec, shows how the clash between the topdown and bottom-up narratives of the past is being countered. The inability of identifying a unified narrative, and regional implementation of the politics of forgetting, is giving rise to the counter-memorial culture led and practised by artists, memory activists, various non-state actors, victims’ groups. In particular, the memorialisation of the events of the wars of the 1990s and Second World War are being addressed by artists, leading towards the conclusion that counter-monument-artwork is a representative form of dealing with the past. Through the mode of adapting the idea of the counter-monument as a practice of enabling discourse surrounding memory, the artworks and practices create a dialogue on what a shared Europeanised memory should not dismiss, and the process that it should involve. The position of the artist undeniably remains that of a witness— speaking a language that is for the most part ‘cosmopolitan’, however not in the case of the histories and stories that remain mostly excluded from the Europeanised memory. The monument-artwork, by remaining outside of boundaries of official memory work, is capable of critically examining the problems that are not being addressed by the national and international bodies responsible, as is the case in Omarska or the remaining unresolved war crimes. Counter-monumental aesthetics which

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are based on the premise of discourse and positioning of the viewer as the ‘carrier’ and interpreter, allow for a multi-directionality to exist. Europeanisation of memory can occur on the fringes of memorial practices, as Zoran Vuˇckovac shows in Chapter 10. Prijedor is a very instructive case of how memory actors, through evocations of the Holocaust, appeal to international and local communities to see the common humanity in victims of the Bosnian war—and not just vessels for the inscription of a particular ethnic history. The main carriers of this process are non-state actors, victims’ groups, survivors and artists, that contest complicity between international capital and local nationalism in denying the victims their right to remember. The privatisation of the Omarska mine reduced all of the commemorative practices at the site to an issue of private property management, concealing the memory from the wider public. Europeanised narratives manifest themselves in memory politics and practices, and can be challenged not only internally but also externally. In Chapter 7 by Naum Trajanovski, we observed (North) Macedonia’s EU accession process through the reinterpretation of the memorial scenery in Skopje: from contestation, via externally imposed corrective action, to consensus making. In EU relations with candidate countries, not only do the EU’s ideas of the common European past affect local memory practices, but power asymmetries also become more visible. In line with the previous research on this topic, our findings depict bilateral disputes over the past as fundamentally resilient to Europeanisation. Countries with EU membership play an important part in coercing the candidate countries to redress the matters of the past (e.g. historical injustices, border issues, protection of minorities). However, even when there is support for and high trust in the EU, the lack of clear mechanisms on how to deal with the past is seen as a weakness of the EU Accession process. Analysing the grassroots’ understanding of the Europeanisation of memory, Chapter 11 by Abit Hoxha and Kenneth Andresen reports consensus among citizens on the need for Kosovo to deal with its troubled past before joining the European Union. Concerns and views of Albanian respondents and Serb respondents in Kosovo are similar, and do not differ neither in the way the conflict and dealing with the troubled past is perceived, nor vis-à-vis Europeanisation and European Integration process. The European sentiment in relation to dealing with the troubled past among respondents is somewhat divided between a shared

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European identity and the feeling of the EU’s inability to meet the grassroots’ expectations. These findings suggest that the right to memory, right to truth and restorative justice measures are proof of European values—much more than discourses about dialogue, tolerance and human rights. To Europeanise the memory of Kosovo would mean not only reconciling different ethno-national narratives about the past, but also establishing communication between male-dominating (a suffering hero) and female-suppressed (a suffering victim) narratives. Gendered memories, however, can serve as a tool to oppose Europeanisation, as Chapter 9 by Dunja Obajdin and Slobodan Golušin shows on the process of adopting the Istanbul Convention in Croatia. Seen primarily as a means of marginalising LGBTQ+ people and women’s rights, its ‘western’ origins were alternatively emphasised or de-emphasised, depending on how ‘European’ its opponents wanted to appear. An alliance between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ enemies was posited and framed as ‘undemocratic’ to discredit the EU. This case opens a debate on the success of translating ‘dealing with the past’ via courtrooms into a public discourse on war crimes and their place in nationalist narratives. Narratives of wartime heroism and suffering coupled with reluctance to extradite and prosecute war criminals to the Hague are perceived as injustice in the region and play a central role in the re-emergence of nationalism. Memory entrepreneurs therefore see the EU as an enemy that threatens the national foundational narrative and dismantles Croatian identity. In this process, the EU and LGBTQ+ people were used as symbols of foreign incursion on Croatian identity. Finally, the EU memory framework characterised by its East-West dichotomy and lack of memory in relation to the Western Balkans history is not the only mnemonic frame of reference in the region. Russia too resonates in the sphere of memory politics and reflects positional strategies in the international political order. In Serbia, as argued in Chapter 2 by Jelena Ðureinovi´c, the heterogeneous nature of hegemonic narratives, namely the positive image of the cˇetniks , is closely related to external mnemonic agents. Both the European Union and Russia constitute the dominant frames of reference. The international positionalities towards the West and East, respectively, together with the incompatible stances about the wars of the Yugoslav dissolution contribute to the deepening of the rift between different mnemonic communities. It is apparent from the contributions of the chapters in this volume that the dual strategy of forgetting and remembering facilitates the use

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of memory as a stand-in for other issues. Linking the top-down and bottom-up strategies of Europeanisation of memory builds a story that weaves the complex realities of the role of collective memory in politics and in the EU Integration process itself. The application of European memorial norms in the Western Balkans suggests that the past can serve as a useful commodity and effective tool to attain symbolic capital, political advantages and benefits, on both the national and transnational level. However, on the ground, historical narratives about the past remain fundamentally unchallenged by the process of Europeanisation.

Index

A accession, 3, 4, 7, 9–11, 16–18, 20, 30, 34, 37, 39–41, 50–52, 55–57, 62–64, 66, 98, 111, 113, 154, 157, 179, 200, 206, 213, 220, 232–234, 279, 286, 290, 291, 293 Agamben, Giorgio, 133, 134 Ahmed, Sara, 134 Albanian, 183, 267, 269, 271, 275, 278, 293 Andrijaševi´c, Živko, 189, 197, 198 anti-communism, 31, 32, 35, 37, 42 anti-fascism, 20, 36, 38, 40, 51, 59, 89, 91, 111, 208, 209 anti-Semitism, 3, 6, 13, 99, 289 anti-totalitarianism, 51, 56, 59, 91 anti-Yugoslav, 54, 208 appropriation, 18, 35, 42, 44, 78, 92, 127, 234, 239, 291, 292 ArcelorMittal, 138, 241, 242, 244, 245

archive, 87, 110, 131, 139–141, 145, 146, 160, 243, 244, 248 artwork, 19, 122, 123, 126, 129, 130, 133, 135–137, 141, 144, 145, 147, 244, 292 Aryan, 101 Athens, 20 Auschwitz, 102, 133, 134, 254 Axis, 18, 35, 55, 60, 102, 106

B Battle of Kosovo, 267 Battle of Mojkovac, 180, 181, 184, 185, 188–191, 193–200 Bleiburg, 55, 59, 68, 290 Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), 76, 77, 79, 83, 84, 86–90, 92, 110, 132, 137, 138, 140, 144–146, 188, 189, 218, 232–239, 243, 245–247, 249, 250, 253 Bosniaks, 65, 233, 235, 241 branitelji, 56, 61, 64

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Miloševi´c and T. Trošt (eds.), Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4

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298

INDEX

brotherhood and unity, 52, 53, 86, 98, 103, 104, 107–109 Bulgarian-Macedonian Friendship Treaty (BMFT), 157, 166 C candidate countries, 2–4, 16, 60, 211, 232, 237, 288, 293 Central Europe, 58 Cetinje, 182, 184, 185 cˇetniks , 18, 30–45, 55, 213, 237, 291, 294 church, 30, 43, 79, 101, 186, 196, 211, 217–219 citizenship, 9, 11, 63, 77, 180 co-existence, 6, 17, 132, 287 collaboration, 31, 32, 35, 36, 39, 103 collective memory, 3–7, 12, 13, 15, 19, 127, 132, 137, 146, 154, 178, 267, 268, 273, 286, 288, 295 Colorful Revolution, 161 commemoration, 5, 6, 13, 17, 19, 30–34, 40–43, 45, 55, 59, 61, 66–68, 87, 89–91, 98, 103, 111, 117, 127, 130, 134, 137, 138, 140, 166, 233–235, 237, 242, 248, 253, 255, 257, 266–268, 270, 289, 290 communism, 12–14, 17, 18, 31–37, 39, 42, 44, 53, 54, 59, 92, 98, 104, 106, 107, 180, 192, 207, 216, 218, 220, 265, 286, 290 community, 6, 12, 30, 37, 41–45, 54, 66–68, 85, 139, 144, 160, 233, 247, 248, 255, 256, 271, 272, 279, 293, 294 competitive memory, 130, 131 concentration camp, 57, 65, 80, 90, 98, 102, 104, 115, 116, 138 conflict, 7, 11, 12, 21, 31, 40, 43, 44, 52–54, 56, 63, 65, 76, 78–81,

98, 103, 107, 108, 110, 127, 130, 134, 152, 182, 183, 209, 241, 264, 266–276, 278, 279, 293 continuity, 12, 45, 58, 101, 104, 212, 254 Council of Europe (CoE), 99, 193, 206 counter-monument, 19, 122–126, 128, 129, 135, 136, 138, 147, 245, 255, 292 Croatia, 7, 8, 18, 19, 21, 31, 37, 50–52, 54–68, 80, 87, 99–102, 104, 110–114, 116, 117, 137, 206, 207, 209, 211, 213, 214, 216–219, 286, 290, 294 Cvijeti´c, Darko, 238, 240, 249–256 D democracy, 2, 38, 40, 41, 45, 50, 54, 213, 215–217, 220, 239, 265 Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (DPMNU), 152, 155, 156, 159, 160 democratisation, 2, 9, 179 Deskovi´c, Ksenija, 104–106 discontinuity, 12, 107, 191 dissolution, 7, 37, 44, 52, 62, 136, 144, 157, 181, 192, 294 downloading, 8, 15, 60, 290, 291 E Eastern Europe, 12, 51, 52, 58, 209, 236, 266 emigration, 37 enemies, 12, 36, 65, 101, 114, 194, 195, 207, 216, 218–221, 270, 294 enlargement, 2, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 18, 60, 210, 232, 289 equality, 216, 244, 265, 272

INDEX

ethnic cleansing, 42, 51, 80, 245, 246, 249 ethno-nationalism, 53, 242 Europe, 2, 8, 9, 11–13, 15, 17, 18, 20, 30–32, 34, 38–40, 59, 63, 64, 66, 88, 91, 99, 111, 113, 115, 132, 135, 141, 179, 181, 185, 191, 192, 199, 200, 207, 216, 235, 265, 266, 273, 274, 286, 291, 292 Europeanisation, 2–16, 18, 19, 21, 32–35, 39–41, 44, 45, 50, 51, 56, 60, 62, 63, 68, 77, 78, 92, 98–100, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 122, 130, 135, 137, 139, 144, 146, 147, 178–182, 191, 199, 200, 209–211, 216, 220, 232–234, 236, 246, 254, 256, 264, 266, 267, 272–274, 278, 279, 286–290, 292–295 European Memory Framework, 61, 64, 78, 92, 113 European Parliament (EP), 3, 13, 14, 18, 67, 78, 91, 92, 99, 100, 116, 178, 291 European Union Administration of Mostar (EUAM), 76, 81–83, 85 European Union (EU), 2–21, 30, 32–34, 37–41, 44, 45, 50–52, 55–57, 60–64, 66–68, 76, 77, 81–86, 89, 92, 98, 99, 111, 113, 114, 117, 123, 132, 137, 141, 154, 156, 157, 166, 178, 179, 188, 200, 206, 209–211, 216, 217, 220, 221, 232, 234, 236, 237, 256, 264, 266, 268, 273, 274, 279, 286–288, 290, 291, 293, 294 F family, 43, 45, 56, 59, 61, 103, 112, 158, 183, 184, 207, 213–215,

299

233, 247, 248, 253, 268, 270, 273, 275–277, 287, 289 fascism, 34, 39, 45, 55, 57, 59, 88, 90, 99, 103–110, 114, 115, 128, 209, 265 Ferdinand, Franz, 180–182, 185, 193, 197–200 First World War (WWI), 17, 33, 180, 181, 185–187, 190, 193, 198–200, 243, 289 forgetting, 19, 103, 117, 127, 139, 147, 209, 220, 233, 234, 236, 249, 292, 294 Foucault, Michel, 125, 128 Four Faces of Omarska, 123, 126, 138, 139, 141, 238–240, 245, 248, 249, 252, 256 France, 12, 40, 63, 182

G gender, 8, 9, 21, 207, 208, 210–215, 219, 253, 266, 267, 270, 272, 273 Geneva Convention, 237 genocide, 17, 19, 55, 232, 237, 254, 269, 291 Germany, 12, 58, 114, 132, 135 Glas Crnogorca, 182 Gotovina, Ante, 56, 209 government, 30, 31, 44, 45, 53, 55, 57, 66–68, 82, 103, 124, 128, 129, 133, 139, 152, 155, 156, 182–184, 191, 215, 216, 233, 235, 237, 241, 242, 290 Greco-Macedonian Name Agreement (GMNA), 157, 165, 166 Greece, 4, 16, 20, 63, 156, 165 Grupa Spomenik, 138, 141

300

INDEX

H Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, 40, 41 heritage, 3, 40, 76, 79, 80, 83–86, 124, 159, 165, 197, 216–220, 249, 252, 264, 286 historical revisionism, 6, 17, 34, 39, 41, 44, 98, 206, 237, 239, 243, 249 Hodž i´c, Emir, 144, 246–248 Holocaust, 3, 6, 12, 15, 18, 64, 66, 98–101, 110–117, 123, 130, 132, 133, 136, 137, 209, 232, 236, 246, 254, 256, 265, 266, 286, 289, 290, 293 Homeland War, 17, 51, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 218–220 human rights, 3, 13, 19, 38, 50–52, 155, 218, 232, 265, 294

I ICTY, 5, 51, 56, 63, 140, 141, 232, 234, 237, 246, 247 identity, 3, 5, 6, 10–16, 20, 38, 52–54, 59, 60, 62, 99, 103–106, 113, 115–117, 122–125, 130– 137, 153, 155, 178–181, 186, 192, 196, 197, 208, 211–215, 217, 219, 221, 239, 240, 252, 254, 265, 267, 274, 279, 286, 294 Independent State of Croatia (NDH), 51, 59, 65–67, 87, 98, 99, 101, 102, 105, 106, 109–112, 114, 115, 208 integration, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 20, 21, 39, 68, 123, 130, 135, 137, 147, 156, 179, 188, 211, 232, 264–266, 272–274, 278, 286, 292, 295

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), 64, 99, 100, 111, 116 Iron Curtain, 13, 290 Istanbul Convention, 21, 206, 213–216, 218–220, 294 Italy, 105, 109, 114, 116, 182–185

J Jankovi´c, Božidar, 183 Jasenovac, 18, 19, 51, 65–68, 98, 99, 101–107, 109–117, 290 Jer me se tiˇce, 238, 240, 246, 249, 256 Jews, 31, 51, 65, 66, 100–102, 106, 109, 113–116, 129, 246, 290 Joviˇci´c, Nataša, 112–115

K Karad-ord-evi´c, 58 Keraterm, 234, 235 Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, 185 King Nikola, 182–185, 194 Kirn, Gal, 87, 135, 136 Knin, 59, 67 Komits , 185 Kosovo, 7, 21, 50, 58, 63, 196, 264, 266–279, 286, 293, 294 Krasniqi Goodman, Vasfije, 266, 270

L legitimacy, 11, 15, 16, 32–34, 53, 82, 83, 88, 91, 180, 195 Levinas, Emmanuel, 134 Levi, Primo, 134 LGBT, 10 liberation, 6, 11, 17, 32, 41, 54, 91, 104, 106, 109, 275, 290, 292 Ljubljana, 18, 60, 291

INDEX

M Martyr, 105, 106 Matica crnogorska, 186, 196, 197 membership, 2, 4, 5, 8, 16, 17, 19, 32, 40, 41, 44, 51, 63, 117, 209, 210, 236, 289–291, 293 memorial site, 5, 54, 55, 60, 98, 103, 104, 233 memory actors, 4, 7, 15, 33, 287, 288, 291, 293 memory culture, 5, 31, 237 memory entrepreneur, 4, 6, 8, 15, 17, 18, 31, 35, 37, 61, 67, 101, 178, 212, 221, 287, 290, 294 memory politics, 4–8, 11, 13–19, 32–36, 38–45, 50, 54–56, 59–62, 67, 68, 113, 130, 132, 136–139, 141, 146, 147, 152, 182, 206, 207, 209, 210, 212, 217, 220, 233, 234, 236, 237, 250, 255, 266, 268, 286–290, 292–294 Mihailovi´c, Dragoljub, 30, 31, 36–45 Miladinovi´c, Vladimir, 123, 139–143 Miloševi´c, Slobodan, 32, 33, 35, 41, 186, 267 minority, 3, 4, 9, 13, 16, 19, 64, 187, 232, 233, 271, 272, 293 mnemonic tool, 6, 13, 117, 125 monarchy, 36, 42, 67 Montenegro, 7, 17, 37, 50, 63, 178–196, 198–200, 286, 289 monument, 6, 13, 18, 50, 51, 54, 55, 59–61, 64, 65, 86, 88, 90, 92, 103, 104, 122–131, 133–139, 144–147, 155, 156, 161–163, 165, 166, 188, 208, 237, 239–241, 246–248, 253, 255, 256, 270, 291 Mostar, 20, 57, 76–92, 145, 237, 291, 292 Movement for the Renewal of the Kingdom of Serbia, 37, 42

301

multicultural, 51, 91, 148, 152, 188 multidisciplinary, 5 museum, 5, 7, 51, 60, 64, 65, 98, 103, 104, 108–110, 112–115, 153, 158, 289 myth, 14, 31, 35, 99, 122, 133, 208, 209, 212, 217–220, 267, 289

N nationalism, 12, 31, 39, 42, 45, 52, 54, 58, 99, 107, 180, 181, 190, 192, 199, 206–208, 210–212, 216, 219–221, 245, 256, 293, 294 national socialism, 17, 33 nationhood, 17, 53–55, 195, 209 NATO, 90, 156, 179, 266 Non-governmental organizations (NGO), 7, 76, 88, 206, 207, 211, 213, 215–218, 220, 221, 239, 268, 271 North Macedonia, 4, 8, 16, 20, 50, 54, 63, 152–157, 164–166, 286

O Omarska, 138, 140, 148, 234–236, 238, 240, 241, 243–245, 253, 255, 256, 292, 293 Operation Storm, 59, 65, 67 oral tradition, 269 Ottoman, 58, 76, 79, 84, 86, 155

P partisans , 31–33, 35–37, 39, 45, 55, 59, 66, 86, 87, 89, 91, 103–107, 109, 131, 162 Partizansko Groblje (Partisans Cemetery), 78, 86, 88, 90–92, 292 Paši´c, Nikola, 183

302

INDEX

Paveli´c, Ante, 101, 105, 106, 109, 114 Podgorica Assembly, 180, 181, 185, 191, 194–200 post-socialist, 33, 34, 39, 50, 62, 63, 252, 256 post-war, 50–52, 58, 62, 64, 68, 76, 78, 81, 83, 85, 88, 92, 99, 103, 108, 127, 132, 133, 146, 233, 235, 236, 238, 242, 250, 253–255, 275, 292 Prijedor, 19, 138, 144, 233–241, 246–250, 252, 253, 255, 256, 293 Pristina, 50 R racism, 3, 13, 99, 289 rape, 219, 270, 278 Ravna Gora, 30, 31, 42, 55 reconciliation, 2, 5, 7, 11, 17, 18, 20, 66, 76–78, 81, 83, 92, 130, 209, 220, 232, 235, 236, 255, 288, 291 reflexive biography, 276, 277 refugee, 9, 80, 81, 155, 266, 276 rehabilitation, 18, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37, 39–41, 43–45, 237, 291 reinterpretation, 18, 20, 34, 35, 37, 39, 45, 92, 137, 178, 180, 181, 186, 191, 200, 210, 265, 288, 291, 293 repression, 32, 53, 59, 63, 79 Republika Srpska, 37, 43, 65, 110, 138, 233, 234, 237, 238, 241 resistance, 31, 32, 40, 55, 66, 78, 86, 109, 123, 125, 130, 133, 139, 155, 157, 165, 185, 193, 267, 270 respondent, 21, 272–275, 277–279, 293 revisionism, 55, 117, 209

right-wing, 54, 55, 67, 220 Roma, 3, 10, 19, 31, 51, 63, 65, 66, 98, 100–102, 106, 109–111, 113, 115, 116, 209, 271, 290 Romanov, 43, 45, 182, 183 Russia, 33–35, 37, 40, 41, 43–45, 182, 191, 196, 199, 294

S Sarajevo, 79, 144, 145, 182, 188, 190, 195, 233, 237 Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA), 145 Second World War (WWII), 5–7, 17, 18, 20, 30–37, 39–43, 45, 51, 53–55, 58–60, 65, 66, 89–91, 98, 100, 103–105, 107, 108, 114, 123, 127, 130–132, 134–137, 147, 155, 162, 185, 190, 217, 233, 234, 243, 252, 265, 266, 268, 269, 287, 290, 292 self-legitimisation, 3 separation, 32, 277 Serbia, 7, 8, 10, 17, 18, 30, 32–45, 50, 51, 55, 59–61, 63, 65, 66, 102, 110, 137, 138, 141, 179–183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 191, 193–196, 198, 199, 243, 264, 267, 273, 279, 286, 289, 291, 294 Serbian Radical Party, 37, 45 Serbian Renewal Movement, 30 Šešelj, Vojislav, 45, 56, 79 Shkodra, 182–184, 188 Shoah, 100, 117 Skopje, 20, 152–167, 293 Slovene Home Guard, 18, 60 Slovenia, 7, 8, 18, 50, 58, 60, 61, 66, 131, 137, 286, 290 Socialism, 32, 40, 92, 135, 235, 243

INDEX

Srebrenica, 17, 19, 232, 235, 237, 254, 291 Stabilisation and Accession Agreement (SAA), 178, 264, 273 Stari Most , 20, 76, 78, 79, 83–85, 92 statehood narrative, 180, 181, 200

T textbooks, 103, 104, 107, 157, 181, 190, 192–200, 267–269, 289 Tito, Josip Broz, 54, 58, 61, 86, 87, 89, 107, 136, 192 totalitarianism, 13, 32, 34, 36, 38, 59, 64, 78, 130, 137 transition, 50, 52, 54, 55, 60, 62, 63, 193, 197, 200, 238, 239 transnational, 4, 10, 12–14, 16, 33, 64, 66, 135, 166, 248, 256, 287–289, 295 Tud-man, Franjo, 57, 58, 66, 67, 207–209, 216, 219

U UNESCO, 85, 188 United Nations (UN), 99 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), 101, 110–113, 117 uploading, 4, 15, 154, 289 ustaše, 98–106, 109–111, 113–117

303

V veteran, 20, 36–38, 43, 44, 56, 57, 61, 87, 90, 207, 219, 220 victimhood, 32, 106, 126, 130, 132, 209, 220, 266, 274, 276, 278 Vukovar, 67 W Western Allies, 30, 43 Western Balkans, 2–7, 9–11, 16, 17, 124, 286, 287, 289, 291, 294, 295 Western Europe, 12, 265 X xenophobia, 3, 13, 99, 289 Y Yugoslav federation, 31, 50 Yugoslavia, 6, 7, 17, 18, 20, 30–32, 35–37, 41, 42, 50–54, 57, 58, 60, 62, 68, 87, 89, 90, 92, 98, 101–108, 110, 114, 122, 123, 126, 130–132, 135–138, 147, 153, 178, 180, 185, 192, 207–209, 216, 218, 233, 234, 239, 247, 266–268, 286, 287, 290, 292 Yugoslav National Army (JNA), 78–80 Z Zagreb, 56, 61, 65, 102, 207, 234