Moral Geography. Why is Srebrenica European Shame?
Moral Geography. Why is Srebrenica European Shame?

Summary/Abstract: The whole structure of this highly polemical text on the prepolitical, ethnic concept of the victim is based on two separated, but convergent, lines of argumentation. The first line is predominantly organized toward an extensive critique of the Eurocentric concept of Memory. The seemingly cosmopolitan mourning of the Holocaust must be deliberated and read quite in the opposite way, even against, the regulative idea of the European moral universalism. This means that our moral sensibility to the Holocaust, the extermination of European Jews, comes from European Cultural Particularism, from the fact that the unprecedented Nazi crime, mass murder, had happened in our home, at the ‘Heart of Europe’. In the second line of argumentation I try to follow the hidden process of the unavoidable assimilation of the ‘Srebrenica discourses’ to the Holocaust paradigm and its pseudocosmopolitan framework. The common rhythms of national and ethnic memories are recycled by Globalized Eurocentric memory in a form of world memory. By the 1990s the Holocaust paradigm has been reconfigured as a ‘Decontextualized Event’ in such a way that any local tragedy can share memories of the de-territorialized Holocaust as its own mnemonic destiny. In the other sections, I express a deep disagreement and extensive polemics with the state expropriation of the ethnic victims in Srebrenica. The whole article can be read as an open polemic with the Eurocentric Geography of nationalized memory, or nation-state centered memory, as calling into question the entire political ontology of victim discourse.

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