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What exactly do we mean when we think of research of and in the post-Yugoslav space, Southeast Europe, the Western Balkans, "the region (region)", the "former country (bivša država)", or "the neighbourhood (sus(j)edstvo)"? Since the breakup of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), the territory this country once occupied has been intensively labelled with multiple geographical, political and cultural significations. While a spatial turn has impacted the social sciences and humanities globally since the 1980s, there has been comparatively little attention paid to the role of space and geography in the research on identity and nation-building in former Yugoslavia. Therefore, although most of the post-'89 research dealing with Southeast European studies has concentrated on Yugoslav war/post-war studies and identity studies, said research has predominantly focused on political elites and institutions, leaving the agency of individuals and/or groups and their representation unproblematised. Therefore, a bottom-up approach is essential to grasp the other part of the spectrum of the ‘political’ – discursive acts that "involve power, or its inverse, resistance."
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Almost every year since 2001, on 13 January, a commemorative plaque dedicated to Mara Buneva is mounted and, on several occasions, demolished in the centre of Skopje. Buneva (1902-1928), who was affiliated with the rightist interwar Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (Vnatrešna Makedonska Revolucionerna Organizacija, VMRO), is famous for her assassination of Velimir Prelić (1883-1928), a high-ranking representative of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Kingdom SHS) on the territory of today’s North Macedonia, as well as her immediate suicide at the crime-scene. The present paper aims to trace the so-called mnemohistory of commemorations of Mara Buneva in Skopje by triangulating the historical and media discourses and political rhetoric over the commemorative events from 2001 to 2018. I argue that the discursive shift over Mara Buneva, as well as over the commemorations themselves, occurred after a set of groupist claims over a particular memory site.
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This paper is based on an ethnographic study carried out during the Zagreb Vukovar cycling marathon to the Remembrance Day commemoration. The commemoration of the fall of Vukovar, one of the key elements of the Croatian narrative of the Homeland War, attracts thousands of people from all over Croatia each year. I analyse the social production of the memory of the fall of Vukovar, a town which experienced some of the worst destruction during the 1991-1995 war. As a result, this paper assesses the interaction of various arenas of memory present in Vukovar, such as political and official discourse, commemoration, popular culture and historical narrative. Of particular interest is the relationship between individual and collective memory, belonging and space.
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Historical grievance can have deep roots in collective memory, and its representation continually appears in public monuments. In Hungary, national monuments have always been almost inseparable from the sacrifice made by the nation and the nation as a victim, over the past 150 years. The study examines the change in the concept of historical grievance and sacrifice, the duality of the idea of sacrifice and resurrection through public monuments, primarily in the Hungarian context. The various historical grievances seem to form a circular chain with no breaking point. The authorities could always combine the grievances according to their own memory politics, and could embed any traumatic event or national catastrophe in the existing chain. This chain of grievance takes now often the form of memorial parks.
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This article explores the clash of various narratives around the Gdańsk shipyard, one of the famous examples of a post-industrial heritage site with a significant political past, located in Poland. The analysis is placed within the larger context of contemporary debates on heritage and the specificity of post-industrial sites, showing how vulnerable and fragile foundations such sites may have, as well as how they are susceptible to various manipulations. This study explores the process of construction of heritage sites and their contradictory narratives by referring to one particular aspect of the Polish past and its institutional representation in the form of post-industrial heritage. First, it refers to the contemporary idea of heritage and briefly explains the relation between heritage and memory. It also describes the role of heritage in the tourism industry emphasizing various expectations and demands that are made for memory sites. Then it analyses the idea and specificity of post-industrial heritage as well as the paradox of its universality. Finally, it refers to the Gdańsk shipyard as an example of post-industrial heritage space which serves various demands and visions that reflect a multiplicity of narratives.
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For Slovenian society the turning point in 1989 meant many things: the making of a new state, a transition to a new political and economic system, but also a new dimension of remembrance. The democratization process that started in the late 1980s and continued in the 1990s was deeply interwoven with the reconfiguration of public remembrance and the legitimation of the nascent Slovenian state. This resulted in a long and still ongoing project of reconciliation (sprava), a process of surpassing the divisions in society caused by the injustices and crimes committed by the Communist leadership in the previous decades. Its goal seems simple: to reach a point where history will no longer be a source of division in politics and where a relative unity could be established within the society. As it moves away from the discussion of the disputed past itself, this article focuses on the history of the concept of reconciliation and the state’s subsequent memorial policy of the last three decades. The development of the concept entails changes in the understanding of the past after two major political shifts: after 1990, when Slovenia became an independent state; and again after 2004, when it joined the European Union (EU). The identification of these shifts is based on the changes in the content of political and public debates. I propose that the Slovenian reconciliation between 1990 and 2004 be regarded as a specific element of the period from the end of communism until the Slovenian accession to the EU (transition), during which the political system changed.
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This paper establishes a dialogue between populism studies, typologies of reconstruction of the past, and argumentative dialectics. The paper analyzes what types of argumentative strategies are employed in the context of the discussions regarding Spanish memory politics and how those strategies can be associated with typologies of re-elaboration of the past (Caramani and Manucci 2019). Building from argumentative dialectics (Van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004), the paper studies argumentation structures uttered after the endorsement of the 2007 Spanish Historical Memory Law and the proposal of the 2021 Draft Democratic Memory Law. Departing from the distinction between diverse strategies of re-elaboration of the past, namely, heroization and cancellation (Caramani and Manucci 2019), the paper questions if Spanish decision-makers’ rhetorical strategies and political decisions in the field of memory politics disclose the adoption of particular types of populist behavior. The paper claims that the argumentative tactics used, in the domain of memory politics, by Spanish left-wing leaders reveal the adoption of a heroization strategy. In contrast, the rhetoric of Spanish right-wing leaders favors a strategy of cancellation. The paper also claims that, in the Spanish case, mainly from 2018 onwards, the adoption by Spanish left-wing leaders of a heroization strategy had two consequences. First, it did not reduce the cultural opportunity structure for right-wing populism. Second, it fostered a cultural opportunity structure for the affirmation of left-wing populism. The paper selected argumentative dialectics as a methodological framework (Van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004). The paper discusses the scientific significance of analyzing memory politics through the lenses of populism studies.
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The interest in diplomacy, as well as memoirs of diplomats, has always existed at both scientists and the widest readership. This paper provides an overview of memoir literature of the Kingdom of Serbia from the XIX century until 1918, then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1945 and the new Yugoslavia from 1945 to 2000 and as well as the Republic of Serbia until 2014. Thus, in one place one can learn about the authors and their works, primarily books and monographs with the contents of diplomacy. So far, there has been no such review and record of above-mentioned works. These memoir works of diplomats, although often considered biased and in the most cases not the source of the law, are very significant and important not only for international relations, foreign policy, diplomatic history, but also for national history. In particular, they give many detailed descriptions of various events in which they participated or witnessed as well as various historical figures with whom they collaborated. When all these memoir works that are first class material for the further study of diplomacy, international relations and foreign policy substantiate with relevant documents and other relevant evidence, then we have first-rate historical sources.
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The trauma of the Armenian Genocide and the trauma of the Sèvres Syndrome in the Turkish society are interlinked. It is almost as if we could say that the Armenian Genocide is still haunting the Turkish society, making it to have geopolitical nightmares and, even though it is not the only cause, contributing to a significant state of paranoia in the society. And the Turkish elites have no desire to see the trauma of the Sèvres Syndrome heal, on the contrary: the narrative of the trauma has changed and adapted over the years to meet the ages, the expectations, interests and benefits of these elites. It has been a very important part of the Turkish education policies and Turkish public debates, thus passed on over generations, and instrumentalized for political, economical, religious capital. Thus, it is there to stay for a significant amount of time in the future, no matter the dominant political force, as it has become an important factor in the society.
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The centenary of the First World War is the occasion for the mass propaganda that will have its political goals in the contemporary Europe. It may be another occasion to portray Serbia as guilty of causing a major European havoc and destruction. Western authors, most notably English speaking ones, are using non-scientific methods in order to fulfil political aims of their respective governments tending to put blame on Serbia and Russia. Serbia should act immediately in order to prevent what may be an additional argument for further disintegration of Serbia, this time to the north part and possible the Raska oblast.
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This study presents the perspective of Czechoslovak diplomacy on the events of the Yom Kippur War (1973) in the context Czechoslovak foreign policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict in early 1970s. The research is based on so far rather underexplored archival sources. Despite Czechoslovakia's declared unequivocal support for the Arab side of the conflict, Czechoslovak Middle Eastern policy since the mid-1950s was not entirely unconditional in relation to the Arab countries. Internal documents of Czechoslovak government occasionally revealed criticisms of Arab representatives. The Yom Kippur War represented a significant moment in this regard, as it was a military confrontation initiated not by Israel but by the Arab coalition, posing a challenge for Czechoslovak propaganda. Simultaneously, this armed conflict presented an opportunity for Communist Czechoslovakia to further deepen its relations with its Arab allies.
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Less than a decade after the proclamation of “the end of history”, the anxieties about “the end of utopia” are gaining ground in the intellectual field all over the world, in the context of both “the crisis of the future” and the haunting of the present by the painful pasts. The latter two are the main consequences of the fracture in the contemporary temporal order – occurred in the ‘70s and deepened after the fall of the Iron Curtain – which defines the “presentist regime of historicity”. These dynamics are counterbalanced, in the same period, by a “global epidemic of nostalgia”, including the commodified forms of “retromania”, that reveals the presentist “faces of utopianism”, from the non-instrumental “retrospective utopias” – as poles of “existential” types of reflective nostalgic practices – to the instrumental “retrotopias” based on the “restorative nostalgia”, which were mobillized in the contemporary memory wars, starting from the ‘80s. Reflecting the tensions between the fixation on the traumatic legacy of the “age of extremes” and the apprehensions about “the future of nostalgia”, the presentist dynamics of multidirectional memory discloses conflictual landscapes (social, cultural, and political), from the mnemonic turn of the ’70s and the ‘80s – which has arisen against the background of the decline of both welfare state and the nation-states, and of the global economic crisis – to the post–Cold War contests around “the divised memories” of “Europe’s Europes”, coexisting with the clashes of contradictory “faces” of nostalgia and utopia.
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This paper intends to illustrate an often neglected, yet relevant aspect of the collective memory construction in communist Romania. In addition to other forms of collective remembrance, cinematic representations of the recent past have played a significant role for both the political regime and the Romanian society by providing political legitimacy as well as entertainment. The communist resistance was one of the most recurrent topos of collective memory, whereas underground party supporters – the so called “illegalists”- often had to be presented as figures of identification. The cinema permitted, however, a negotiation of the recent past on different levels. Starting from these considerations and focusing on the film production „Duminică la ora 6“(Sunday at Six, Lucian Pintilie, 1966), the paper brings into discussion the communist resistance discourse during the liberalization period.
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By counterbalancing the instrumentalization of the ethno-nationalist restorative nostalgia – which was not only the affective and imaginary fuel of the mnemonic wars fought, starting from the 80s, on the territory of “the country that no longer exists”, but also that of both the subsequent tragedies and cultural-political polarizations –, Yugonostalgia emerged in the painful 90s as a privileged form of post-Yugoslav mnemonic imagination. Against the background of the persistent mnemonic conflicts within the region, the multidirectional/ agonistic Yugonostalgic memory appears nowadays as a catalyst of the emotional and ethical commitment with the recent past, particularly able to inspire “visions of a better future”.
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