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The present study examined how collective memories on a recent difficult past were formed among young people coming of age in a society transitioning from a totalitarian regime through an authoritarian state to a nascent democratic society. I used textual analysis to examine the presentations of the communist Yugoslavia institutionalized in the Cro...
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... As Yugonostalgia manifests across different generations (Palmberger, 2006, p. 14;Vučković Juroš, 2012), it seems that anti-Yugoslav mainstream discourses did not achieve their aims of full erasure of Yugoslav memories, or identity. ...
Embracing the social-constructivist concept of the past, this research takes an interdisciplinary approach to nostalgia, bringing together political science and cultural memory studies. In order to answer the main research question: What does Yugonostalgia mean for politically active last pioneers and how does it dialogue with their political identities?, I have taken up, as my primary object of research, the narratives of the generation of the last pioneers (born between 1974 and 1982), in three (post)Yugoslav countries: Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. Analyzing within the Constructivist Grounded Theory approach 62 interviews of political actors, conducted over the course of 2017 and 2018, I investigated how nostalgic memories turn into political reflections within one single narrative and how the cognitive dissonances translate into ambivalent nostalgic memory narratives and political conceptualizations of the Yugoslav past. On one hand, Yugoslavism develops as a counter-memory narrative, an anti-nationalist stance, but also a meta-national layer of multiple identities. On the other hand, Yugonostalgia, is primarily used as a discursive strategy of obscuring the Yugoslav past and any Yugoslav future. As a political intervention, Yugonostalgia gives voice to the silenced left-wing political articulations. While generational positionality strengthens Yugoslavism, and political positionality determines the use of Yugonostalgia for private or political purposes, this thesis explains the transformation of the Yugonostalgic memory narratives into resistance strategies of the last pioneers.
... Using the past for constructing and solidifying national identities has received a fair share of academic attention (Cerulo, 1997;Olick and Robbins, 1998;Zerubavel, 1997). However, for two young Croatian post-Yugoslav generations, the Yugoslav period -both in the negative re-evaluations in the official discourse (Vuckovic Juros, 2012) and in the positive frames available from the communicative sources -played a limited role in the construction of their Croatian national identity. For the post-communist generation, born after the Yugoslav break-up, Yugoslavia often seemed distant and irrelevant. ...
... However, while for the East German youth, celebration of the GDR childhood also meant adding value to the part of their heritage devalued in the public discourse (Clarke and Wölfel, 2011), the young Croats did not need to use the officially unrecognized frames for this identity-building purpose. The new value given to the Croatian identity was indeed one of the main motives behind the negative re-evaluations of Yugoslavia in the Croatian post-Yugoslav official discourse (Vuckovic Juros, 2012). It is likely for this reason that the institutionalized frames of the Croatian victimization and Yugoslav repression -legitimizing new Croatian nation-state -were more successful among young Croats than other negative political, economic and ethnic frames. ...
... The first two generations of young Croats coming of age or growing up in post-Yugoslav Croatian society dominantly appropriated the positive social frames of Yugoslavia, and the frame of good or better lives in particular, which were presented to them mostly by the communicative sources such as parents and other older people. These communicative frames of Yugoslavia can, in fact, be interpreted as the frames of resistance, as they were running counter to the dominant -mainly negative political, economic and ethnic -frames of Yugoslavia available from the textbooks and newspapers of the post-Yugoslav period (Vuckovic Juros, 2012). 6 The latter types of perspectives on Yugoslavia were notably less salient for most interviewed young people, and even completely absent from the repertoires of most vocationally educated young Croats. ...
How do new generations in a society negotiate different perspectives of a controversial past available from various sources? How do they use the past to make sense of their lives? Using in-depth interviews with 72 young members of the first two Croatian post-Yugoslav generations, this study analysed how these young people acquired elements of their repertoires on the recent Yugoslav past from family members, school and the media, how they assessed these elements in terms of plausibility and legitimacy, and how they appropriated or questioned them. The study’s findings suggest that the credibility of the socially mediated perspectives of the past was increased by the emotional bond with the sources who adopted the role of witnesses, and by the fit with the personal concerns of the meaning-making audience. As a result, the most successful were the frames transmitted by the communicative sources through social interaction, rather than by the institutionalized sources.
By the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in most parts of Eastern Europe, high expectations associated with postsocialist transition have been substituted by disillusionment. After 1990, Eastern Europe has been internationally treated with a low-interest acknowledgement of what was understood as a slow and erratic, but unquestionable process of integration in a Western-dominated world order. In the context of today’s geopolitical reorganization, East European examples of authoritarian politics once again become discussed as significant reference points for Western and global politics. This book represents a contribution to this debate from a distinctive East European perspective: that of new left scholars and activists from the region, whose lifetime largely corresponds to the transformations of the postsocialist period, and who came to develop an understanding of their environment in terms of its relations to global capitalist processes. A both theoretical and empirical contribution, the book provides essential insights on topics conventionally associated with East European transition from privatization to the politicized slogans of corruption or civil society, and analyzes their connection to the newest reconfigurations of postsocialist capitalist regimes. As a contribution to contemporary debates on the present global socio-political transformation, this collection does not only seek to debate analytical statements, but also to change the field where analytical stakes are set, by adding perspectives that think Eastern Europe’s global relations from within the regional context and its political stakes.
Agnes Gagyi works on East European politics and social movements from the perspective of the region’s long-term global integration. She is researcher on East European social movements at the University of Gothenburg, and member of the Working Group for Public Sociology “Helyzet” in Budapest.
Ondřej Slačálek is a political scientist and journalist, he focuses on East European politics, nationalism and social movements. He works at Charles University, Prague. He is a regular collaborator of Czech new left journal A2/A2larm.
Thirty years have passed since the fall of socialism. However, the boundary between capitalism and socialism in the Serbian context is not so clear. Some authors postpone the period of capitalist restoration after the fall of Slobodan Milošević’s regime. Although this period was indeed marked by an accelerated economic transformation, characterized by mass privatization and market liberalization, it is still the question whether it is possible to make a clear cut between the socialist past and the capitalist present. Instead of looking at the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia or the post-Milošević era, we investigate the market reforms that marked the economy of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, and analyze socialism as a system ridden with internal contradictions. Following the analytical framework set by Michael Lebowitz in his book “The Contradictions of ‘Real Socialism’: The Conductor and the Conducted” (2012), and applying it to the analysis of Yugoslav socialism, we point out that the boundary between socialism and capitalism is much more blurred. Thus the question when does the transition to capitalism begin proves to be much more complex.
This chapter analyses the causes of the crisis of democracy in the Czech Republic and the possibilities of a chronological analysis of the transformation decades. The crisis of democracy is manifested in the Czech Republic above all by mass disillusionment with democratic politics, and by the open access of oligarchs to political power. Unlike approaches that see this turn as a discontinuity, the chapter describes it as one of the possible and logical results of the whole transformation process. This process is reconstructed as a competition between two capitalist factions and respective political projects: neoliberal nationalism and liberal globalism. The chapter presents a chronological analysis of the three post-communist decades based on the three periods of rule of various factions (1992–1998 neoliberal nationalist rule, 2002–2010 globalist rule, 2013–? oligarchic rule), and three interregna (1990–1992, 1997–2002, 2008–2013). The chapter describes the interests and composition of the factions which competed for power in the transformation decades, analyses the main problems they dealt with during the interregna (economic transformation, democracy, economic dependence) and then looks at the characteristics of the main competing discourses (the naturalness and morality of the market, civil society, democratic majoritarianism, discourse of colony, discourse of corruption).
The concluding chapter discusses five nodes of postsocialist ideological struggles that the book’s authors addressed: anticommunism, Westernism, nationalism, irrationalism and antipolitics (through its three aspects of anti-corruption, civil society and technocratism). Slačálek characterizes these as discourses that are applied to obscure real social conflicts, but which at the same time rely on elements of real experience which can be critically reconstructed, and which can contribute to left-wing analyses and programs. He addresses anticommunism’s paralyzing effect on the local left together with the traps Ostalgia presents for new left politics; speaks of nationalist ideology as a means of autocratic and xenophobic politics, yet also a prism through which essential global power relationships become visible in popular politics; and investigates irrationalism as a powerful tool of neoliberal and neonationalist politics, yet also a ground of conflict that makes visible the political usages of reason and the need for the Left to develop a dialectical and self-critical rationality as a basis for its politics.
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.
This book provides a profound insight into post-war Mostar, and the memories of three generations of this Bosnian-Herzegovinian city. Drawing on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, it offers a vivid account of how personal and collective memories are utterly intertwined, and how memories across the generations are reimagined and ‘rewritten’ following great socio-political change. Focusing on both Bosniak-dominated East Mostar and Croat-dominated West Mostar, it demonstrates that, even in this ethno-nationally divided city with its two divergent national historiographies, generation-specific experiences are crucial in how people ascribe meaning to past events. It argues that the dramatic and often brutal transformations that Bosnia and Herzegovina has witnessed have led to alterations in memory politics, not to mention disparities in the life situations faced by the different generations in present-day post-war Mostar. This in turn has created variations in memories along generational lines, which affect how individuals narrate and position themselves in relation to the country's history. This detailed and engaging work will appeal to students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, political science, history and oral history, particularly those with an interest in memory, post-socialist Europe and conflict studies.
This chapter focuses on the divided education system in post-war Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and on the ways divided education institutionalises ethno-national divisions. Based primarily on material gathered at the Bosniak- and the Croat-dominated universities in Mostar, it shows how Bosniak and Croat historians create divergent historiographies of the local past. The analysis of the ethnographic data reveals key representations found in the dominant Bosniak and Croat public history discourses. At the same time it shows how historians on both sides draw on similar discursive strategies when narrating their respective national histories. Particular attention is drawn to the historians’ discursive strategies to nationalise, legitimise and objectify the respective national historiographies.
