The past that does not happen: Short-circuits in the politics of memory in Croatia

Abstract

The Mila Orlić article discusses the case of Croatia, whose memory has been deeply reshaped by the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the experience of the 1991-1995 war against Serbia. In the process of building the new national state, the memory policies developed in the Nineties by initiative, especially of President TuÄ‘man, sought to build a new purely Croatian identity referring, on the one hand, to the experience of the so-called “Independent Croatian State” of 1941- 1945, that is to say of the Ustacha inheritance and, on the other hand, seeking to remove the Yugoslav past. Appealing to the concept of national repacification, bringing together the descendants of the Ustacha and the partisans, the politics of the memory of the Nineties were founded, contemporaneously and contradictorily, on two historically opposed entities: antifascism and the Ustacha experience, creating with ihis a short circuit in public memories. The reference to the Second World War was permanent and the same war of the Nineties was seen as an extension of that experience. After the death of TuÄ‘man (1999), there has been a reorientation of memory politics in Croatia, with a progressive distancing in relation to the Ustacha inheritance.