Politike povijesti: pregled razvoja discipline u Hrvatskoj i Slovačkoj
POLITICS OF HISTORY: AN OVERVIEW OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DISCIPLINE IN CROATIA AND SLOVAKIA

Summary/Abstract: The paper gives a comparative overview of the politics of history that were characteristic for the HDZ’s government in Croatia and HZDS’s government in Slovakia (during the 1990s). Those politics worked to overcome the democratic deficit of the two regimes. Firstly an overview of the discipline is given, with subsequent emphasis on the importance of the comparative perspective, especially with respect to the role of the politics of history in legitimizing the political regimes of Central and Southeast European. The comparison of the Croatian and Slovakian cases is in the focus since both countries share similar history, and hence a similar structure of the national collective memory. The discourse analyses show that both regimes used very similar self-legitimating historical discourse: the myth of the thousand-year uninterrupted statehood finally accomplished in the 1990s, and the twentieth century nations’ victimization by Serb/Czech hegemony, contested by the partial rehabilitation of the Croat and Slovak World War II states. Moreover, the analyses show differences originating from the different historical experience during the period of the common Hungarian rule, as well as the different experience of the Yugoslav and the Czechoslovak federation, with final differences of the role of the political actors in the two countries. The author points to a gap in the relevant research of the nexus between historical narratives and political power.

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